CoMMuNiTy oRGaNiZiNG aCTiViSM

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HuMaNiZiNG CoMMuNiTY oRGaNiZiNG & aCTiViSM

Community Organizing & Activism: Involving, educating, and mobilizing individual or collective action to influence or persuade others

Community organizing is inherently relational, and effective activism also relies on community relationships whether in the form of collective action or through the communication of advocacy that is accessible to community members. This might look like protesting in the streets, creating socially provocative art, or advocating for vulnerable communities using social media. Often, community organizing and activism spaces provide safety and sanctuary for groups experiencing oppression. Due to the sensitive issues being combatted, intentional relational strategy is needed to continually humanize community organizing and activism.

An example of this type of intentional strategy includes the Chicana student newspaper Venceremos. Venceremos - which means “we shall overcome” - started at the University of Utah in 1993, and aims to “challenge all forms of oppression and counter dehumanizing narratives about Latinas/Latinos in mainstream media, largely by incorporating Chicana/Chicano history, voices of Chicana/Chicano community members, and accounts of marginalization.” Drawing on the influence of Chicana activist Delores Huerta, Venceremos uses specific rhetorical tactics to assert humanity in Chicana/o/e issues. Rhetoric is the art of persuasion via discourse, and is used to tell stories or convey messaging that produces specific emotion in an audience. Venceremos implements rhetoric known as plática (talk/conversation), which allows for sharing communal experiences of minoritized identity and disenfranchisement,

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in order to build shared narrative, trust, reciprocity, and compassion among community members. Similarly Venceremos uses testimonio (testimony), or personal stories, as a form of powerful rhetoric. One of the editors of the newspaper explained the importance of testimonio by stating, “You want to honor people’s voices and put your personal opinions aside…I wanted to empower everyone in who they were and how they grow.”

Dolores Huerta, a labor union leader and civil rights activist who, with Cesar Chavez, co-founded the National Farmworkers Association (now known as United Farm Workers), also utilized strategic rhetoric in order to produce relationality and engender emotion for the humanity of vulnerable communities. One way Chicana activists did this was by haciendo caras (making face/making soul), which was a way of intentional communication via emotional facial expression and body language used to gain the attention of audiences. Huerta intentionally used expressions of passion and tears to demonstrate her commitment to the work, to encourage empathy, and to challenge power constructs. In these examples, plática, testimonio, and haciendo caras humanize community organizing and activism by allowing for people with lived experience to share experiences in safe communal circumstances, tell their personal stories, and authentically express their feelings. When social impact work includes such practice, it creates genuine and compassionate relationality, and allows for maintaining humanity for others and self. We will continue the further humanization of community organizing and activism as social change tools that allow for vulnerable rhetoric and communal sharing.

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