Storytelling and Listening Healing Circles in the Latina(x) Community: A Collaboration with California Latinas for Reproductive Justice

Markstein 107

“Storytelling Circles and California Latinas for Reproductive Justice (CLRJ)” was initiated through a Women’s Studies civic engagement and social responsibility course that bridges academia and the local Latina/x, largely Mexican and Chicana/x, South Bay region of San Diego, CA. This community engaged research uses oral and digital storytelling healing methodologies and an intersectional feminist lens, as taught in Professor Irene Lara’s course. It also applies a “CuranderaScholarActivist” praxis in using communication and story-gathering skills to create brave sacred space opportunities for often marginalized storytellers to be attentively listened to in an effort to be culturally proficient scholars and activists who are also cultivating the possibility for individual and community holistic healing as signified by a “curandera” positionality. The racialized and gendered bodies, sexualities, and families of Latinas/xs are often not honored in dominant society. Latina/x experiences and needs related to reproductive justice, reproductive oppression, and health in general across their diversity (e.g. race, ethnicity, social class, gender identity, sexuality, immigration status, religion, language, region, ability, age, size) are often misrepresented or not documented in their own words. This presentation will specifically discuss my community engaged research collaboration with CLRJ’s “Speaking Story” digital archive project, which addresses the need for Latina/xs to tell their own stories of struggle and dignity on their own terms and with support. Doing so is a way to resist dehumanizing discourses and participate in “a cultural shift to bring new meanings to reproductive justice, document our experiences and those of our communities, and fight for Latinas/xs “rights to self-determination for ourselves and our families” (CLRJ’s “Story Collection Toolkit”). Presentation to include findings about complexities within subcategories (generational, academic, support nets and the lack of), limitations within collaborative work (power dynamics to include college educated vs. non college educated and undocumented vs. documented) and uneasiness felt by academia.