Context  of  cases  studies

Latinitas

According to the website laslatinitas.com, Latinitas is a non-profit organization that has aimed to “empower young Latinas through the teaching of media and technology” (Latinitas website) since 2002, when it was founded. Before going further, it is important to say that I use “empowerment” in this dissertation in the very strict sense of the word provided by the Oxford dictionary of Human geography: “A permanent increase in the capacities of relatively poor or marginalized individuals, households, and communities to shape their own live” (Castree, Rogers,

& Kitchin, 2013, p. 126). Empowerment is usually associated with community development, giving control to vulnerable groups in society and shifting power from service providers to service users (Taylor, 1999). In this study, “empowerment”

means the training of disadvantaged communities to produce locative stories and geotag them.

Unlike RCYF, Latinitas is not neighborhood-based and operates in different parts of Austin, its outskirts, as well as in other cities in Texas. The organization became well known as a citizen journalism project in the Austin community.

Cunningham, Custard, Straubhaar, Spence, Graber & Letalien (2009) say that one of the goals of Latinitas is to address the low level of representation of Latinos/as in position power in newsrooms. Moreover, among other goals, the organization aims to

provide a creative outlet for girls to express themselves, learn about their culture and discover their voice.

Latinitas provides journalism and digital media production skills to young Latinas aged from 9 to 18. It also offers a range of community-based services for this demographic group, including after-school clubs, mentoring, and summer camps.

Girls receive training in a range of journalism skills, such as interviewing and writing, and are encouraged to provide content for the online magazine, Latinitas, which is targeted toward Latina youth and published in both Spanish and English.

The first after-school program, called Club Latinitas, was started at Martin Middle School located in East Austin in 2003. Since 2003, Club Latinitas has expanded to high schools and elementary schools in the greater Austin area, and has expanded beyond Austin to El Paso and the Rio Grande Valley. While girls, in general, face a loss of self-esteem during adolescence (see Nolen-Hoeksena & Girgus, 1994), Latinitas focuses on the particular struggle that Latina youth face in adolescence. As stated in their website, young Latinas are the largest group of minority girls and represent the fastest growing youth population; alarming trends show they have the highest high school dropout rate (see Zambrana & Zoppi, 2002), attempted suicide rate and teen pregnancy rate. By creating an online space dedicated for Latina youth and providing them with mentors and role models, Latinitas aims to increase their confidence and abilities. Also, by providing the girls with journalism skills and training, they have options to pursue career opportunities.

Taking into account the goals of this organization and also their willingness to partner with this research by providing facilities, context (a summer camp with selected participants), and devices (computers and scanners), I wanted to work with Latinitas to have an opportunity to study how the girls might use locative media to produce locative stories.

River City Youth Foundation (Among Latinos)

One of the case studies was conducted in partnership with the non-profit organization called River City Youth Foundation (RCYF), which is based in Dove Springs, a neighborhood in Southeast Austin. According to a report written by RCYF,

this non-profit serves only the population of the zip code 78744, which was estimated between 2008-2012 to have 43,452 residents, of which 14,170 were children and youth between the ages of 0-17. According to the same written report (River City Youth Foundation, 2015), based on data from American Community Survey (ACS) of 2008-2012, of the total 43,452 population of Dove Springs, 76.7% were Hispanics of any race. Of the total 43,452 persons, 29.6% were foreign born, with 97.3% of the foreign born from Latin and Central America (includes Mexico) (see also The Austin Chronicle webpage⁶, April, 11, 2015).

The Dove Springs area is one of the lower income areas in Austin. A study by the University of Texas School of Architecture showed that the overall median income in the Dove Springs area was $43,375 (from the 2000 Census), which was well below the city average of $54,091 (McCray, Bedford, Calhoun, 2010). The area with the lowest median family income ($30,174) was in the wedge between Pleasant Valley Road and Nuckols Crossing. That area has 67-98% of its occupants as renters.

The next lowest area ($30,714 - $37,127) was in a central triangle just south of Stassney Lane and east of Pleasant Valley Road.

Parents and guardians in low-income areas usually have a lower education level than parents in middle and high-income levels. Of 24,183 adults 25 years of age and over, 20.85% reached less than the 9th grade level, 15.84% reached high school grades between 9-12 but did not graduate, states the report written by RCYF based on data from American Community Survey (ACS) of 2008-2012. Lower educated parents are not able to prepare their children to be ready for school when they enter pre-kindergarten (pre-K) or kindergarten. Consequently, those children fall behind in their academic levels (River City Youth Foundation, 2015). Some pre-kindergarten Hispanic children have not learned English well enough to communicate with English monolingual teachers, and this makes their learning progress more difficult. Another challenge is the fact that many students in the area of Austin move between schools in the middle of the school year, as their parents move to another part of the city because they can’t find affordable housing or because they lose their jobs. In addition to the problem of minority children being ill prepared to enter their formal elementary education, there is a problem of overcrowded schools in the Dove Springs área (River City Youth Foundation, 2015).

6 http://www.austinchronicle.com/news/2014-04-11/dove-springs-a-demographic-snapshot/

In the Texas Education Agency’s 2014 Accountability ratings, Mendez Middle School, the only middle school in Southeast Austin and third in Austin in terms of most students enrolled, did not meet the standards required by the state, being rated

“Improvement Required.” At Mendez, 36.2% of the students are ELL (English Language Learners), which shows the difficulties of many Hispanic students to cope with the language learning and to grasp with content at the same time (River City Youth Foundation, 2015).

TechComunidad

In 2012, RCYF created the program TechComunidad with the goal of empowering parents through digital technology. The general goal of TechComunidad is to close an educational gap in Dove Springs by empowering parents in this community who lack technology access and the basic computer skills to guide their children’s education from pre-K to college and career. Oné Musel-Gilley, founder of TechComunidad, states that the ultimate goals of this digital inclusion program is 1) for parents to have complete mastery of email and 2) for parents to know how to utilize search engines. Musel-Gilley realized that RCYF needed to educate parents about technology. It was particularly important for her to target those families that didn’t know how to turn on a computer. Musel-Gilley’s priority is to build children’s education for increased skills. Parents can partake in this program by either coming to sessions in the morming or in the evenings for 2 hours each week. These sessions may last about 6 weeks or 8 weeks, as the time frame contingent on many factors such as weather, holidays, and the learning curve.

At the end of the training, parents have to take a final exam, indicating that they have mastery over basic technology skills, which includes using an online search engine, utilizing an email account, and using the cloud to store files. The parents are required to attend a graduation ceremony where they are given a computing device with Internet access capability. In the past years it was a tablet, and since 2014. It has been a Samsumg Chromebook, a computer based on an operating system by Google that works only with Internet connection and is based on the concept of cloud computing.

To partake in the program, parents need to be selected and approved through a two-step process: the completion of an application and a face-to-face interview. The criteria to be selected are to be a resident in the 78744 zipcode and to be a parent of children from 5 to 17. There is an exception for grandparents who live together with their grandchildren and are their caregivers. They cannot have a computer at home.

However, the majorities of these parents have smartphones and use Internet on their mobile devices. Most of these parents have email and Facebook on their smartphones, although several might not remember their passwords and are unable to access their emails in computers.

TechComunidad program is a suitable context for the conduct of research on mobile and locative media, because this group of parents is very mobile phone-oriented. For example, throughout the classes, several parents said they had never seen a Facebook page on the computer. One parent wanted to see the Facebook icon on her desktop area, because she is used to seeing it on her smartphone screen. She was told then that Facebook page on the computer was a website and not an actual application. This example illustrates how this group of users is using Internet and social media on mobiles without really grasping the differences of basic concepts that are necessary for computer use. Several other parents acquired smartphones or tablets as they were taking TechComunidad training.

Mapping Latino Culture in East Austin (About Latinos)

This case study was undertaken in the context of Joseph Straubhaar’s undergraduate Radio-Television-Film course Mapping Latino Culture in East Austin at the University of Texas in the Spring 2014. The class had the total of 28 students enrolled, from which half of students were Latinos/as (14 students). The course had as a goal to provide the students with a better understanding of media issues about traditional, ethnic and digital media use, social inclusion efforts in Austin, and migration from Latin America, Asia and elsewhere to the US in both theoretical and concrete local terms. I worked on this case study with Professor Straubhaar, who was planning on discussing the history of segregation in Austin through maps and was looking for innovative ways to map aspects of Latino culture in Austin.