Our team, Mujeres con Ánimo, is rooted in a majority Latinx immigrant community. For our project this year, we wanted to build the passion we developed last year to address stereotypes and injustices faced by women in our community, particularly immigrant women. May people fail to acknowledge the intersectional challenges immigrant women face -- the discrimination of being an immigrant, but also the dismissal and degradation so often associated with womanhood. We want to educate people on the disadvantages they face when it comes to social and political aspects in our country, but also to uplift and highlight stories about the many ways that immigrant women survive and thrive in our communities. Our team wants to open the eyes of many, not only to show the struggles of being an immigrant woman, but also to celebrate how they persevere and prove their resilience.
Through a documentary that gives an insight into the lives of women with experiences with immigration in our community, and by volunteering to support immigrant communities in the LA area, our team will uplift the voices of immigrant women in our community, engage the hearts and minds of people from all backgrounds in and around our community, and do all of this with the goal of shaping LA into an environment that empowers women and values the strength, power, and labor of immigrant women. A collection of interviews and testimonies from women in our community will encourage others to participate and become active in our project. By screening our evocative documentary, we hope to arouse a sense of understanding and knowledge within the people in our community, helping them become aware of the immense value women have always had within them. We also plan to build in testimonies of our own experiences exploring and engaging with the immigrant rights landscape in LA (by volunteering at events, attending marches, registering voters in and around our school, hosting monthly informational events at our school, etc.) to build interest and engagement within our small Lennox community that will hopefully bring our community members into the larger LA community.