About me
I am a story doula. I work with individuals and communities to cultivate the power of what stories can do. I grew up en la linea, the Tijuana-San Diego border region. My consciousness of the need for people to share our own stories in our own words and images began here. My first teachers were community elders across a spectrum of alliances, languages, racial and cultural identities, citizenships, traumas, and access to power systems. Our time together at kitchen tables were some of the most joyful, wise places I have experienced. This taught me responsibility to co-hold spaces where people deeply listen to each other. This listening was not just love it was survival. The difference between just sitting and justice sitting. Sometimes this requires an interruption of dominant narratives through an act of archival theatre. Now, as Executive Director of the Elma Lewis Center in the Social Justice Collaborative at Emerson College, I co-weave multimedia story work with diverse communities, including the Growing Up Roxbury Project; youth programs; The Social Justice Solidarity Circles; Proyecto Carrito; and FIREWATER Poetics (MCed and curated by Letta Neely). My earlier work as a human rights journalist in three continents inspired me to dedicate my story work through neighborhood and K-University collaborations. We explore intergenerational estuary practices by co-navigating ancestral and youth knowledges and experiences. For the last 17 years I have been collaborating with the Universidad Nacional and community leaders in Colombia, who, displaced by violence, built their own neighborhoods with their own hands. I have a Ph.D. in Latin American History (systems of abolition and liberation in the Americas); a Master's Degree in Communications and Latin American Studies from the University of California, San Diego. I was a Mellon Fellow Post Doc Faculty in the Writing Program at Duke University.
