This is what I learned and did in my 18 months of doing an M.A. in Engagement Journalism
I worked for 18 months with the feminist community. I wanted to understand how the media is covering issues around feminism, if there’s enough and dignified coverage on femicide, and how the women in this community feel about media. My most important goal was to know how I could help the feminist movement using my journalistic skills.
At the time I had to choose a community for my M.A. program I was living in Mexico City. Since the beginning of 2019, the Mexican feminist movement felt renovated, it was on every news outlet, and you could see its growing presence on the streets. Protests, abortion, and the #metoo movement were on the cover of the media. American media and international media like The Guardian had the topic in its regular coverage. It felt like a new feminist wave was born in Latin American.
So, it was natural for me to decide to work with this community. I knew this community was constantly on the news, but I was more interested in knowing how they felt about the coverage or if they felt something had to change since everyone was talking about feminism.
I care about this topic because I consider myself a feminist. I want all women around the globe to live a more secure and fair life, with the same opportunities as men. I get inspired by all the women who are out on the streets fighting for this every day. I am also a second-generation survivor of domestic violence and I got to experience some of this horrible situation myself.
I already knew some of the people involved in the movement in Mexico, so I started making interviews; I talked to lawyers, activists, police officers, experts, journalists, and mothers of victims. We talked about many different topics around feminism: abortion, sexism, patriarchy, pay gap, lack of opportunities and so many more.
There were many different paths to take during my next semesters, but there was one topic that came over and over in my interviews: femicides. These are the most extreme form of gender-based violence and it is defined by the U.N. as “the intentional killing of women or girls because they are female.”
In Mexico, 10 women are killed every day, that’s one of the main reasons why feminists are on the streets protesting. The U.S. is not that far behind, every day there are 3 women killed, and this data is from years ago.
When I moved to New York City, I found a community of Latinxs women who are also fighting to stop femicides. I met them on Women’s International Day while they held a demonstration where they sang, recite poetry, and performed the feminist anthem “Un violador en tu camino” (“A rapist in your way”).
As I was thinking of doing something around this topic, we were working with THE CITY in the project “Missing Them”, a memorial for New Yorkers that died of COVID-19. One of my teachers recommended me to work on something similar for my community, with victims of femicides. I thought it was a great idea and after talking to some members of my community we agreed it was a necessary project. That’s how my final project for this program was born: I was going to do a digital memorial for victims of femicide hopefully in both countries, Mexico and the U.S.
Femicide is such a minimized topic — we don’t know how big and urgent this problem is, especially in the U.S., because we don’t have data. To be honest, this is a hard topic for me. I know it matters but I also I knew it was going to take a toll on me and it did. Like the time I started dreaming of that while investigating how women were killed or when I had to take some time off after interviewing some survivors of dating violence. I knew it was going to be hard, but I also knew femicides were one of the most important — if not the most important — issues in the feminist community.
I researched different memorials around the world and took ideas from there. I wanted to build a website where the most important element would be the story of the victims of femicide. Showing their pictures and being able to expand on their story was also fundamental. I experimented with different templates and even platforms but decided for something very clean on Squarespace.
For this website, I relied on my previous reporting in Mexico City and New York City. I also trusted in the project Women Count USA. This is a femicide accountability project created by Dawn Wilcox, a nurse in Texas who is donating her time to collect data on women & girls murdered by men in the U.S. Something that doesn’t exist in official records. Wilcox gathers information about these women that can be found on local newspapers and organizes them on her website where she keeps tables of different years. That’s how I found the story of Solei Spears, a 20-years old student who was killed in her house in New York by her mother’s ex-partner.
Another characteristic of doing the digital memorial for victims of femicide that I was really excited about is that in Mexico there aren’t really memorials or websites for obituaries and there are always spaces needed to remember loved ones and especially victims of crimes.
When asking my community if they saw a benefit and a need to do this project, the feedback was very positive. Some said:
“I think it (the memorial) will be very helpful because you’re introducing the women as who they were so they’ll be memorialized, and their lives will be remembered.” — Suzy Torres, who attended the Bride’s March
“This (femicide) is something that you see but you don’t see, so this (the memorial) might stop something. Because this has to stop.” — Shekebea Wright during Bride’s March
During these 18 months, I’ve had some impact doing this work. For example, one of the first things I did after interviewing my community wrote a 2500-word explainer about what was happening with the feminist movement in Mexico City. It was published in ROAR Magazine under the title: Mexican feminists raise their voices against patriarchy. It was my first long-form piece in English.
I wrote about Mexico’s gender violence crisis, I did a multimedia piece about the conflict between activists and police officers in Mexico City, a slideshow profiling one active member of my community and I used my new data skills to make a map that explains how 2020 was one of the deadliest years for women in Mexico
Later this year, I attended the Bride’s March, it’s a walk that goes from Washington Heights to the Bronx to remember Gladys Ricart, a woman who has killed on her wedding day by her ex-boyfriend. I interviewed ~10 attendees, in total we were around 100 people marching. Organizers were giving away information about domestic violence and people receiving flyers would almost always stop and ask about the walk. In 2020 it was online due to the pandemic, but this year was again in person, and you can really see the impact of these people marching and chanting on the streets. I asked if the number of people was similar to what they had received before the pandemic and they said it seemed very similar and that they grow year by year.
One of my biggest obstacles was trying to connect and build trust with my community by zoom due to the pandemic. Even though, I am still grateful I got to organize and attend some in-person events later in the year. Thanks to that I received a lot of feedback and I realized how people were thankful they were to see a journalist caring about the feminist movement.
I had some obstacles but because of that, I am really proud of the job I made for the last out of the issues my community (and other underserved communities) face in the U.S. and I did all of that in a second language. It wasn’t perfect but every time I failed or did something wrong, I had the opportunity to learn a new lesson or to help someone from my community who had been through the same; whether it was because of a language issue or a cultural reference we were missing. Without that I wouldn’t be here today grateful for all the lessons I’m taking with me, thinking everything I went through this year was hard but all worth it.
Takeaways:
- Choosing a community I really care about made all the difference. I could see the progress in every assignment, and it made the work more enjoyable.
- Working with a specific community and being able to explain why you care about that makes a different connection with your sources. People are really grateful that someone cares about them and there’s almost an immediate trust.
- Don’ take that trust for granted. Keep in contact with your community, get in touch with them, try to make sure they know how you’re using quotes and don’t be shy to brag about your work.
- Engagement journalism should be another tool in traditional reporting instead of a different program. Reporting from within a community gave me more tools that I could imagine. It made me rethink in how we do journalism and what we should expect from journalism. The type of engagement you get should be in everyday stories, not only in special ones.
- One of the most important learnings I had from this program was the discussions we had as a cohort. Addressing topics like objectivity, activism, racism and sexism in the industry, sustainability and monetization were the type of discussions I was really looking forward to.
- Engagement journalism is for everybody and for every story — let’s use it more.
