Youth Representations and Responses: Intergenerational dialogues across youth, race, and community

2008 – 2010

We are concerned with the ways that young people of color are represented as violent, criminal, drop outs, gangsters, and sluts. These stereotypes do a violence to us, and creates insecurity and fear in our community. We are sometimes afraid of each other and ourselves. The media tells us what we can and can’t be and this affects us in our daily lives and who we become. Our goal is to challenge the media and tell our own stories and bring to life the truth that the media refuses to acknowledge.

We presented a series of intergenerational bilingual public forums focused on creating a space to dialogue about representations of communities and youth of color. The free events, entitled “LABELED: A film & dialogue about media representations of youth of color,” were presented in Salt Lake City, Ogden and Orem Utah to diverse audiences in 2010. The community forums provided a space for screening the documentary Labeled created by the Mestizo Arts & Activism youth researchers as a way of raising questions about how representations affect young people of color in their daily lives and how young people of color respond to and challenge these representations.

Labeled Postcard English
Labeled Postcard Spanish