COMPUTER SCREENS glow during a Photoshop tutorial at the Jóvenes Latinos Cuentan Digital Storytelling Workshop at Columbia Gorge Community College Friday. From left, Yesenia Castro, Kelsey Contreras and Nubia Contreras, all of Hood River, contemplate the work that will prepare them to tell their life stories in digital form. Ed Cox photos

Young Latinos learn digital ways to tell stories of their roots
Workshop at CGCC is part of multi-state Main Street Project

By ED COX
of The Chronicle

     The family of 11-year-old Cristobal Castro of Hood River has multiple beautiful houses in Mexico.
     He’s seen them and has pictures of them, but they don’t live in any of them.      Instead, they share a tenant’s existence on the floor below the man his father works for supervising orchards in the land of Cristobal’s birth.
     On the surface, Cristobal’s tale would seem to blend in with those of the other young Latinos of the Mid-Columbia as they participate in the “Jóvenes Latinos Cuentan (Young Latinos Tell)” Digital Storytelling Workshop at Columbia Gorge Community College this past weekend.
     Like him, they’re young, and they share the experience of being from two places at once, which can lead to problematic definitions of home and identity.
     But this is Cristobal’s story, his view, and that’s precisely the point. The CGCC-hosted workshop — a joint undertaking of the gorge’s Next Door, Inc. and the Main Street Project, itself a collaboration between the Raices Project and the Oakland, Calif. media center Third World Majority — strives to give local youth the digital tools they need to tell their stories in their words and images.
     That includes a tutorial on how to process one’s own photos or those grabbed from the Internet in Adobe Photoshop. It also includes instruction in how to record a voice-over, incorporate video and put everything together in the editing software Final Cut Pro.
     Yesenia Castro, Cristobal’s 17-year-old sister, works with Next Door, Inc. doing drug and alcohol prevention. She says that “getting a story out and getting it on video was just an awesome opportunity for me.”
     Her project tells the story of how her father came to the U.S. from Zacatecas, Mex., “a long time ago” and started a family after losing his own dad.
     “It’s about how he struggled to get here,” she says, adding that the whole story is “kind of like a letter to him from me.”
     Yesenia also plans to interview her father and use some of that audio in her voice-over.
     That’s unusual, says workshop trainer Ana Nájera Mendoza of Minnesota, one of four states — alongside Iowa, Idaho and Oregon — the Raices Project operates in.
     More typically, the story-teller does the voice-over him or herself, though one other workshop participant is using different voices to illustrate stereotypes of women.
     While most of the workshop participants at CGCC’s The Dalles campus are from Hood River, Parkdale or Odell, there is also one Mosier student, 15-year-old Rocío López.
     She’s not sure but says she wants to do something about having a worker’s permit available, so that migrant workers can come and go more freely.
     Most youth come in with a pretty good idea of their story — if not a written script, says Theeba Soundararajan of Third World Majority.
     Still, the first two days of the workshop are the hardest, she says, as they work to break down internalized assumptions and flesh out rather general stories with good details.
     Like just how many houses the Castro family owns in Mexico. Cristobal’s written script, which he shares with me, says it’s two, but that’s a typo. In fact, it’s three.