Favianna Rodrigues. A Voice To Be Heard

Daughter of Peruvian migrants to the United States in the late 60s, Favianna Rodriguez, born in 1978, is an artist, activist, and a force to be reckoned with. Raised in East Oakland, California, after graduating from Hunters Lane High School in 1996, she received numerous scholarships and studied at the Berkeley University of California. Favianna’s earliest mentors were artists and movement leaders in the Chicano and Black Arts Movement. She uses her perspective as a child of migrant workers growing up in a high-crime area to forge her identity as a feminist and activist. While growing, not having witnessed positive images of women of colour in the media, later inspired her to work around issues of equality, race, interdependence, youth activism, and sexuality. When Rodrigues is not making art, she directs CultureStrike, a national arts organisation that engages artists, writers and performers in migrant rights. In 2009, she co-founded Presente.org, a national online organizing network dedicated to the political empowerment of Latino communities. In 2012, she was featured in a documentary series by Pharrell Williams Migration is Beautiful, which addressed how artists responded to failed immigrant policy in the United States. She currently lives and works from Oakland, California. Favianna Rodriguez shares her journey with us.

- John Hay

My family migrated from Perú and I am first generation here. At a young age, I was a translator for my parents and encountered a lot of racism directed towards them. It made me feel we were outsiders. I had curly hair, I was different, I never felt I belonged.

It was in high school that I started organising talks around Latino issues. Racism was discussed and how young Latinos were viewed as gangsters. The narrative about my fellow peers was always very negative. Then I started learning about the Mayas, the Aztecs, and the contributions of so many Latinos to the United States. That led to organising a Latino Students Day and I founded the first Latino club in my high school. This was also at the time of Proposition 187, the first time that a state had introduced an anti-migrant piece of legislation. It was horrible. I began to understand systemic racism, and it changed my whole worldview.