Story Academy
Julie Weise
Producer
Erik Valera
Producer
Elaine Utin
Producer
Axel Herrera
Producer & Editor
Community– It’s Nuestro South, con el mismo sazón, but some new voices. Join our new storytellers from across the US south as they explore how and where they found comunidad while growing up in the US South.
This next stage of Nuestro South expands beyond the experiences of our initial hosts and brings in the perspectives of storytellers from rural NC, urban and suburban Georgia, and northwest Arkansas. Our new storytellers Tania, Jonathan, Allison, & Nancy invite you to share in a rich conversation about growing up Latina/o/x in the South. You know the flavor. Check out some of the new voices from Nuestro South!
Bryan Mejia
Producer
Dorian Gomez
Producer
Keyla Ferretiz
Social Media & Marketing
Maria Pulido
LatinxEd Staff
Perla Guerrero
Scholar
Jonathan Perreza Campos
Storyteller
Nancy Garcia Villa
Storyteller
Yami Rodriguez
Scholar
Allison Delgado
Storyteller
Tania Dominguez
Storyteller
Yuri Ramirez
Scholar
Karina Moreno Bueno
Storyteller
Vicky Garcia
Storyteller
Regional– Let’s zoom out a bit and have some charlas con Southern Compañia. We know that our lived experience in the south is multigenerational– sabemos que no es ayer que llegamos and many of our roots started decades ago. También sabemos that where you set up roots in the South also matters. Tune in as we explore the Latinx Southern experience from Arkansas, to Georgia, to North Carolina and beyond!
When we say that “we control the narrative,” we mean it! Our history is no longer just being told about us by outsiders. We now have wonderful scholars exploring a history and experience that is also their own as southerners or children of immigrants. En estas charlas, each of our scholars Dr. Perla Guerrero, Dr. Yami Rodriguez, and Dr. Yuri Ramirez guide our storytellers on exploring how our southern communities formed within a particularly racialized southern landscape, how we find leisure and joy within the pressure of being mostly just tolerated as labor, and how our transnational immigrant identities also intersect with indigenous heritage, identity, and culture.
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The Nuestro South Story Academy played the role of exploring HOW TO SCALE. By the time we launched this project it had been a few years since the first season of Nuestro South and our grassroots collaborative efforts wouldn’t always be able to maintain the platform and storytelling forever. We were fortunate that there are many scholars exploring this history already and we knew some amazing ones that had participated in our Loud & Proud sessions. Some of our storytellers had transitioned after the NS Refried season so we looked into what it could look like to train new storytellers given all the lessons learned we picked up along the way.
We were able to bring in 3 scholars and 6 storytellers as part of the Nuestro South Story Academy to explore their own southern histories, engage with Research on the Latinx South, train them on media production, and help us scale our storytelling capacity.
As part of the Story Academy, our team was able to compile our shared learnings from the various projects into a digestible curriculum for participants. We continued to amplify the exceptional scholars leading the way in their respective fields, and we scaled to more content across more platforms. We hosted Instagram Lives, and posted 7 additional audio episodes along with various short form videos as part of our promotion.
The Story Academy was our proof of concept that there is a need as well as the capacity to staff up a program like Nuestro South that tells the story of nuestra gente through authentic voices that can say “this is for us y’all.”
