Diana Mauricio (2014)
Nuestras Vidas Importan: A Bilingual Community Engagement Program for Madres
“I want the freedom to carve and chisel my own face, to staunch he bleeding with ashes, to fashion my own gods out of my entrails… with my own lumber, my own bricks, and mortar and my own feminist architecture.” –Gloria E. Anzaldua
Nuestras Vidas Importan: A Bilingual Community Engagement Program for Madres, will create a space for immigrant and U.S Born Latina mothers to come together intergenerationally to explore and expand their understandings around their identities. Nuetsra Vidas Importan is a workshop-based bilingual community engagement program striving to build awareness of societal positionality, oppression, and privileges through self-education, empowerment, and solidarity building across racial, class, and gender identities. As an educational, resource, and skill sharing space, Nuestras Vidas Importan will help mothers learn how to navigate social and public institutions as well as career development. Nuestras Vidas Importanis a bridge, a translation from the theoretical concepts and frameworks of critical gender and race studies to action in the community. It will allow Latina madres to explore themselves not only as mothers but also as women with a history, a present and a future. It will provide a space for madres to “chisel” their “faces” and to “carve” a place in society that often forgets them.
Letters Home
Biography
Dee grew up in the San Fernando Valley in Los Angeles C.A with her Guatemalan grandmother in a small but close knit community. At UC Berkeley Dee majored in Ethnic Studies, her honor’s thesis was titled, “Haciendo, Teniendo Sentido de la Violencia: Oral Testimonies and Hxtsories of GuateMaya Survivors of the Civil War and Genocide.” Other than academics at Cal, Dee dedicated her time and emotional energy to spaces such as the Multicultural Community Center (MCC), the Gender Equity Resource Center (GenEq) and the FemSex de-cal. She has done most of her organizing on and off campus around the intersection of gender, sexuality, and race– predominately through facilitation and community building across differences. Dee is dedicated and committed to her communities and when she is not facilitating; typing away at the MCC or GenEq she is probably dancing or doing yoga.
