Hey y’all!

I’m Natalí, a current junior at Wellesley College. I am a cinema and media studies major with a concentration on production, so I really love movies and different forms of media! Homework keeps me pretty busy but outside of class I am heavily involved with Mezcla, Wellesley’s largest Latinx org, as Vice President. I also take violin lessons and like to play music in my free time. This is my first time taking a course at MIT and I am excited to get started and know everyone! I’m hoping this course will expose me to different forms of media that I am unfamiliar with and how to utilize them to make a positive change with everything going on around us.

As a queer Latina, I know how frustrating it can be to never find diverse representation of people like me in popular media. Mainstream storylines often feature predominantly white voices which can be discouraging for people of color who wish to identify with protagonists and see themselves on screen or on paper. One young activist that I find inspiring is Marley Dias who started the #1000BlackGirlBooks campaign. Marley was tired of reading books that featured “white boys and dogs” so she started the campaign as a way to collect the titles of books that featured young black girls such as herself. With the help of her mom and attention from local news, Marley’s campaign took off and currently has a collection of over 7,000 titles.

You can learn more about the campaign here: http://grassrootscommunityfoundation.org/1000-black-girl-books-resource-guide/