Materials include digital video, photographic, and text files for the project "Videos by Latina Women: New Visions of the Globalizing South," created as part of Nancy Kalow's Rockefeller Residency Fellowship. The 12 MOV video files are the documentaries produced during the year by the projects collaborators, including eight recently-arrived Latina immigrant women and the videographers who served as their mentors. The 17 TIFF photograph files are portraits of the creators and shots of them working. The 11 PDF text files include fieldnotes kept by the mentors, interview transcripts, correspondence, release forms, and papers, presentations, and conclusions about the project.
In April of 2003, UNC selected Nancy Kalow as a 2003-2004 Fellow in their Rockefeller Residency Fellowship Program, "Reimagining Civil Society in an Era of Globalization: the American South in Applied Humanities Perspectives." Kalow's project, done in partnership with the Center for Documentary Studies, was titled "Videos by Latina Women: New Visions of the Globalizing South." The resulting set of documentary videos explored Latina culture, traditions, community concerns, folklife, music, family, and more. The project goals, as Clemencia Rodriguez said in her essay on Latin American women producing video stories, included "personal and group empowerment, demystification of mainstream media, reversal of power roles, and increasing collective strength." A measure of the project's impact is in the fact that the Latina women continued to produce video work after the class ended. For example, they wrote and produced a video Public Service Announcement about the hazards of drunk driving; this PSA was played extensively on Univision.
The project taught video production to eight recently-arrived Latina immigrant women with the mentoring of six local videographers, all women. The Latina women were Ana Maria Silva, Antonia Monroy, Maria de Lourdes Ruiz Loera, Rocio Callejas Angeles, Marisol Marquez, Hilda Badillo, Alicia Garcia Solis, and Tana Hoffman. The mentors were Nancy Kalow, Duke student Jennifer Hasvold, UNC student Rebecca O'Doherty, and three CDS Continuing Studies students, Phoebe Brush, Erika Simon, and Lisa Croucher. The group of 14 women met weekly during the fall of 2003 on Saturday mornings; Kalow taught her "Visual Storytelling" documentary videography class entirely in Spanish with the assistance of Phoebe Brush and Erika Simon. The Latina participants had complete control of content, production, and editing.
The Rockefeller Fellowship provided free instruction for the course as well as funding eight camcorders and tripods, transportation and babysitting, access to editing, and other technical requirements. Classroom space was provided by CDS, and the final public presentations were made at Duke and UNC. A series of additional public presentations allowed for meaningful cultural exchange, with sharing of the documentary videos accompanied by discussion with audiences.
