A Feminist Lens on Memory: Griselda Pollock on Art, Trauma, and Representation

25 July 202525 July 2025Gökhan Çolak Leave a comment

Interview Series: “Memory, Representation and Resistance: Thinking Alternative Media Cinematically through Academic Perspectives.”

I. Feminist Art History and Representation

In Differencing the Canon, you propose a feminist re-reading of Western art history. How does this approach challenge traditional ideas about “greatness” and the exclusion of women artists? > [Reference: Differencing the Canon (1999)]

This is a slight misreading of the purpose of my book Differencing the Canon. A canon is the official version of knowledge, and it is official story of Western art that I am challenging Not only does this official story exclude almost all women artists, but it does also so because the issue is structural. The canon is formed to achieve a particular purpose: to establish a mythology of masculine creativity, that is further shaped by racial and geopolitical hierarchies, sexual normativity, and a hierarchy of materials and processes favouring the chosen media used in Western art ( painting and sculpture versus ceramics and cloth).

Firstly, I had to establish what a canon is: a body of accepted knowledge and method for making this knowledge appear to be an unquestioned truth. So, we have to show how the official story of art is constructed both by what it excludes and makes unthinkable and by what it presents as being transparently the sole truth. The title of the book identifies such selectivity, suppression and exclusion as an active ideological process.

Feminist deconstruction of the canon is neither offering an alternative nor trying to include what was systematically excluded. It has to reveal the power systems and their ideologies which naturalize a version one version of knowledge making invisible the ‘politics’ that produce these systematic exclusions and hierarchies of value. Another version of this idea is from British literary critic Raymond Williams who proposed an idea of a ‘selective tradition’ created by scholars that favours the dominant class, and I add, gender and socio-geo-political nations. dominant religions and normative sexualities.

Differencing is a grammatical form— a gerund—of a verb that does not exist in English. To differ is to disagree. To be different is the condition of variety. To difference is my invention of a word that enables me to create a feminist concept. It is drawn from the work of French philosopher Jacques Derrida and his theory of deconstruction, and also indirectly from Michel Foucault. Derrida’s deconstruction is a process that reveals how the ‘the selective tradition’ is created and suppresses certain knowledge and produces a smooth surface that makes any alternative unimaginable. Foucault , writing about the formation of the archive, taught us, however, that what has been made to become invisible has not disappeared. Rather it is folded out of sight. We can open the fold and find that history that was suppressed. So, we are not adding women back into art history. My book exposed how actual history is suppressed through folding some knowledge out of sight or by suppressing historical and social conditions of production or denying the role of ideology: systems of belief and ideas that favour the dominant social groups.

Knowledge of women as artists was folded out of sight, given the massive documentation in history of their constant presence, for the purpose of creating a mythology about the individualism of each artist ( personality, intellect, interests, desires expressed in art: the expressionist thesis of art) in a society in which individualism was granted only to men of certain privileged classes. To exclude artists as women can only happen in societies in which their social and ideological systems have already created a hierarchy amongst human beings on the basis of gender. Gender divisions are no more natural than class divisions or religious divisions.

These are created divisions, and the word woman signifies not a just a person of one type or another. Woman means not-man and the term functions as a negative through which Man comes to signify the only pure type of the human. The canonical denial of artistic and intellectual creativity to women is necessary for men to claim that they alone are the pure human with intellect and creativity. We have to deconstruct the process by which man and woman are not two equal forms of humanity but are an opposition of plus and minus. This is why however many times we put on exhibitions or write books about women artists, we make almost no change, no progress. For 50 years I have watched this happen over and over again and every new exhibition gathers women artists together as ‘rediscoveries’. Differencing the Canon was an analysis of the ideological structure that has in effect defeated our feminist attempts to normalize the creativity of both women and men. Greatness like genius has also been stolen by men for men alone. From a feminist deconstructionist perspective, we are not wanting to select some women for ‘greatness’. We have to develop as curators and art historians and critics ways of seeing their art, ways of interpreting what women in all their diversity and singularity are creating, not because women all share some essential femininity. Each artist-woman is unique as an artist but also is living in a patriarchal, racist, often religiously fundamentalist, capitalist and sexist and heteronormative world. Artists challenge us to see the world differently and from many perspectives. The issue is what art does, what it reveals, what we learn. The art market is not interested in art. It buys and sells brands. Contemporary art world is based on names of artists that become brands for a massive speculative investment market.

Your early work in Vision and Difference critiques how women have historically been portrayed in art. In what ways do these gendered visual patterns continue to influence today’s cultural and visual practices? > [Reference: Vision and Difference (1988)]

Let me make another small correction. Vision & Difference is a collection of ‘essays’ addressed to Art History, the academic discipline that studies art while the essays challenge the story that Art History has made canonical: the only authorized version of art and its histories. The essays are also about studying art as representation: that means not as the individual expression of one artist’s imagination. Representation means that all artists participate in a cultural activity in which there are traditions of visual representation and also patterns of ideological meanings that these representations have affirmed or sometimes contested and even changed.

Whose interests have the visual arts served? What visions of the world and how it is ordered have the visual arts produced by means of signs, materials, media, scales, locations. Whose vision of world has dominated, become normal? We know in the past the powerful rulers, religious leaders, ruling classes commissioned artists to make works for the purposes of confirming the vision of the world of the powerful. This is why the central essay in this book is ‘Modernity and the Spaces of Femininity’ which was my feminist conversation with and challenge to the social historian of art, T J Clark, who had transformed my understanding of 19th century French art by focusing on the significance the new metropolis and its new urban culture.

My question was: what does the modern city mean for women of different classes. The bourgeois women do not work but can go to the park, go shopping, drive around in carriages, or go to the theatre. Working class women are exposed in their often-visible work to predatory sexual exploitation by the men of the leisured classes. So, I analysed which spaces of the city the men and women involved in creating Impressionism, an egalitarian independent art society with both women and men artists involved in its creation, chose to paint and how.

I then asked myself if I can discern a difference in the space they chose and the way they represented women in these spaces. Thus, I introduced the idea of the gaze, developed in film theory. Who is looking at whom? Who is being subjected to a sexualizing gaze? How did Mary Cassatt and Berthe Morisot not only reveal the pressure of the masculine heterosexual gaze in public places but also represent the mutual gazing between women, or between adults and children? This is another earlier example of differencing the canon of Impressionist painting and revealing that the division between what artist-men and artist-women represented was not public space versus private space, but between those parts of the city where men and women of all classes moved about and those spaces where bourgeois men looked at or purchased working class women for sexual reasons.

Does this still happen? In the West, the sexualization of women is even more rampant and normalized in certain cultures overtly or secretly. Why do we think we have made any progress at all when we look at the major platforms of representation today: social media. It reflects back to us a picture of the dominant imagination. People believe that progress will happen. Being a structuralist feminist, I do not hope. I analyse the systems of representation and the social systems and their ideologies. We appear to have forgotten these terms and these modes of deconstructive analysis. Representation of women has deteriorated and with social media, and beyond on the dark web, the brutalization and dehumanizing sexual abuse of women is beyond horror. Given that one woman is killed every 40 minutes world-wide by a partner or family member, we must stop believing childishly in automatic progress and start naming patriarchal and phallocentric systems that produce ‘men’ as beings who believe they have rights—including to life—over women and ‘women’ who accept that this is normal. I see very little evidence of any real or systematic change in the representation of women because we have made so little progress to changing this system.

II. Trauma, Memory, and Feminist Aesthetics

In After-affects / After-images, you explore how trauma shapes the experience of art. How can visual art provide a space for processing or representing traumatic experiences? [Reference: After-affects / After-images (2013)]

My argument in this book is not that traumatic experiences are processed or represented. Neither is possible. The core conclusion of that book is that artists, who have endured horrendous experiences such as famine, near death in genocide, sexual abuse, bereavement, exile and survival of extreme suffering may spend a lifetime of making art to create a formal framework for a possible ‘encounter’ with the trauma which is then transformed aesthetically. This is not about cure or relief. It is about the relations between forms, colours, processes, time, spaces and the potential for this encounter with trauma that was a missed encounter: an event that overwhelmed the psyche’s capacity to process it and left the artist possessed or haunted by a shapeless pressure of an unknown ‘thing’ that occupies her or his psyche without she or he being able to grasp it .

In all the case-studies in the book, I noted that the processing of this shapeless, unknowable pressure of the trauma was not a cathartic event but a matter of a lifetime of creating an aesthetic procedure or structure for a transformation through aesthesis: colour, mark, form, process: some painting, some film making, some sculpture, some video and installation. Each case study needed the most rigorous formal, material, structural analysis of how each artwork did its work. Work in German is Arbeit and Freud chose that word for what the psyche does in processing life events: in his terms the work of mourning, Trauerarbeit, working through: Durcharbeiten. I want to stress the importance of psychoanalytical theory rather than everyday psychology. You will know that I have drawn in this book on the theories proposed by artist and psychoanalytical theorist Bracha L Ettinger who created the term artworking, Kunstarbeit as it were, to propose a specific mechanism for understanding what I was naming aesthetic transformation in which aesthetic is not about the beautiful but about how we, the viewers, are affected by colour, touch, movement, duration, sound: the senses when we experience artworks.

Trauma cannot be a topic or subject matter for art: that would merely represent something as an event. Particularly in the wake of modernist acknowledgement of the autonomous affects of colour, field, medium, temporality, etc. art can be a site for this managed ‘encounter’ with residues of trauma that can also touch and move a spectator not with a topic or sense of specific event, but to compassion and hospitality to suffering.

In Encounters in the Virtual Feminist Museum, you argue that memory is not only personal but also political. How does feminist aesthetics reshape our ways of remembering? [Reference: Encounters in the Virtual Feminist Museum (2007)]

It is not feminist aesthetics that reshapes our way of remembering, it is that aesthetic practices may facilitate new ways of our responding to the encounter with art, as I suggested in the last question. Are there feminist aesthetics? Certainly, there are philosophers who ask questions about the aesthetic experience from feminist perspectives: that is to challenge the masculine as the sole position of such experience or analysis.

Feminist is not an entity but a position of questioning, that is constantly questioning itself. Since women are the majority of the population and the only group who is systematically killed just for being women on a mass scale (femicide is the term for this), attention to the life and dying of women is a preoccupation of feminist thought. This means defining patriarchy as a form of socio-political-economic domination and phallocentrism as the psychological, linguistic and ideological justification of a system of male domination and privilege. Feminist means analysis, deconstruction, contestation of how phallocentric patriarchies intersect with and are integrated with various economic systems such as capitalism or feudalism and with religious-theological-political systems. Feminist is a mode of enquiry and research, not a women’s alternative. Feminist means caring for all oppressed, disadvantaged and suffering minorities including the world’s majority, women and girls. If art and its histories form cultural memory, the canons of art preserve and that justify male domination and hence the violation of the human rights of women and girls whose humanity is diminished and whose lives are put at risk.

My virtual feminist museum is a concept and a device for asking: what would the world be like and what would we as people be like if we encountered in museums those forms and works of art that were oriented to and celebrated life: the preservation of life? Without idealizing women, who are as deformed as men are in their mentalities and ideologies by the phallocentric and patriarchal systems of power, feminist thought and analysis functions as a critical space of resistance and transformation that has to question and challenge itself, to learn from its own blind spots and negotiate its internal differences and potential hierarchies of privilege.

I do not work with feminist aesthetics but what I termed feminist desire: desire for the end of oppressive dehumanizing systems of power, of the kind of greed that is destroying our planet and rendering millions of lives almost unliveable and dehumanized. Rather than worrying about keeping women in their places, we all need to ally to keep the planet alive, and to do so we need feminist thought that names and challenges the basis of inhumanity: which is that one group of humans treat their fellow humans as instruments not people.

In 1972, a French writer, Françoise D’Eaubonne, an art historian, wrote a book titled Feminism or Death. It was the first feminist eco-critical texts linking the fate of nature and the planet to the fate of women… feminism is thus not a specialty for feminists. It is a condition of future existence for the planet and humanity. Can art do some work in this direction? Yes. Must we all deconstruct and denounce patriarchy and phallocentric thinking. Indeed.

III. Visibility, Institutions, and Feminist Curating

What curatorial practices or institutional strategies have you seen succeed in making space for women and other marginalized artists within mainstream art institutions?

Very few, for the reason that the issue is structural and cannot be mended by gestures of mere correction. But we can and must study strategies that propose different models and address the key elements of curation. These are not packaging ‘art’ as an experience for visitors to gain pleasure or acquire cultural capital. Currently museums and galleries, shaped above all by a rampant art market and art fairs where vast amounts of money are being made and from whom they get their funding to make exhibitions and purchase artwork, are not examining alternative models. They are about entertainment, cultural capital and further securing financial investment in objects branded by artist names by giving collectors and foundations that now own lots of works of art the seal of high cultural value.

I used to teach courses on exhibition histories and focused on a history of five DOCUMENTA exhibitions since 1989, a key moment in European history with the fall of the Soviet Union and the Berlin Wall. This was a study of curatorial strategies in this major exhibition of contemporary every five years and its was fascinating since these platforms of the biennials are now the major exhibition form.

In the few exhibitions I have curated, the framework has been conceptual: not just a theme, a period, an artist, a topic. My aim has been to encourage visitors to grasp the relations between the works they encounter and the histories, concerns, traumas, and indeed aesthetic transformations that are being tipped into visibility and aesthetic encounter by artworking. It is not that the art is made a woman, a category, already defined by the hierarchy of value of men versus women. It is the position from which she intervenes into a field of meanings, a pattern of discourses, a conversation about practices and modes of art making. How do these works of art do their work to transform my understanding of the world, my sense even of self, of others, of changing perspectives. My recent exhibition was titled Medium & Memory, and I selected eight artists all of whom have different practices, different concerns, yet all were brilliant transformers of their chose media: painting, video, drawing, collage, photography. All were deep thinkers about their practices. All were very engaged with different kinds of memory: memory of a book that has been read, memory contained in images that we collect and encounter that shape patterns of thought, memories that are missing because political trauma made them beyond imagining and remembering. I try to bridge the worlds of critical social historical feminist art historical writing and the intense issues of the present world through artworks that provoke responses and indeed incite words as we describe what the artwork is doing and how they lead us to discuss issues and concepts.

Medium refers to the great lesson of modernism. Memory addresses the burden we carry from our consciousness of the modern world that we inherit and this fearful, endangered and violent world in which we are now living, with uncertainty and dread. Can we, will we ever create a humanity shared by all and with the living planet on which we depen? Can we come together in thoughtful, ethically sensitive and life-oriented artmaking that is not about speculative profiteering of the very few who having made billions and get richer and richer while people starve, are washed away in floods caused by climate change caused by fossil fuel use, die from heat, or are murdered, as women are with relentless regularity.

Art has been a rich and brilliant site of creative thought in aesthetic languages. I still believe in its criticality. But as you ask me questions about my project over 50 years as a feminist art historian, I am hoping that some memory of what feminism has tried to achieve over 200 years worldwide will survive or even now challenge our complacency as disaster looms even as it has already has destroyed life worlds of many vulnerable peoples.

Feminist is one form of attention to women, certainly, but also to life, a life that is human for all and in being human, knows that we are the ones who must care for this planet or die. Art is not about entertainment, prices, fashion, celebrity or an even earning a living writing about it. It is a uniquely human activity that is called to account for the same responsibility. Often it is already performing that, if only we knew better how to read what it is doing and can do to affect us and change our understanding.

You often reflect on “absence” in dominant art histories. Can absence itself become a meaningful feminist strategy of presence or resistance?

Not at all! Resistance comes through being present, writing, creating, arguing, surviving, persisting. I do not have confidence that the feminist revolution of which I was a part since 1968 is being preserved, fully studied and remembered, understood in all its complexity and intellectual and artistic brilliance. It can become a category, an investment potential. For me it has always been a politics of practice and of knowledge. It is continuing and self-challenging and adapting and learning. The artists are always one-step ahead.

Feminism is now a memory, sometimes presented in distorted and reductive fashion. It has a very long history and dispersed geography. It was never one thing. It is a partner in continuously imagining how we might all live together, all living forms, in dignity and safety from violence and impoverishment of spirit and bodily life. This is very urgent. Those called men and those prepared to be the women that patriarchal cultures design and the violently police must be challenged to realize that this a moment of choice for humanity and life on this planet itself. Capitalism is still a force that has not been tamed for life, and we see this is an obscenity of the divisions of wealth and poverty , greed and indifference on this planet. Feminism, art and thought are partners in this continuing struggle.

“Reporting on the World: Ana María Betancourt on Journalism, Social Issues, and the Future of Media”

21 April 2025Gökhan Çolak Leave a comment

Starting Your Journalism Career and Sources of Inspiration

What experiences or events in your life had the greatest impact on your decision to start a career in journalism? What motivated you the most when you decided to pursue this field?

I loved writing and I wanted to have a job that allowed me to write as much as I could. But also at that time I was in high school and my History professor asked us to start being aware of the news because Colombia was living a historic moment: the State was going to sign the peace agreement with one of the oldest guerrillas of our country.

I wanted to be a reporter of peace and that somehow encouraged me to pursue my career in journalism.

During your time at Javeriana University studying Social Communication and Literature, what were the most important academic or personal lessons that shaped your journalism career?

Well in the university I started to actually feel disappointed about journalism. I felt journalism in Colombia was struggling, most outlets were financed by large corporations with a lot of political interests. And I saw little to no space to do journalism in a creative way.

So I started to see myself writing fiction and poetry. But I knew I wouldn’t make a living with just my creative writing because I wasn’t still prepared to publish my literary work. However, literature for sure opened my horizons and made me ask myself questions about the form and how the aesthetic part of writing can also be challenged in journalism.

Work on Social Issues and Its Impact

How did your personal passion for critical societal issues such as climate change, health, and gender inequality develop? How did working on these issues affect your career as a journalist?

I think it developed at a very early stage and it was because of two things: my older sister and my high school. My sister was studying Environmental Engineering and wanted to focus her studies in the social part of the environment. She planted a seed of multiple questions in my brain and since that moment I started to care a lot about climate change and the environment. It is also because I come from a country that is mega-biodiverse and I have always loved the nature that surrounded me.

My high school had a class of gender and literature where I started to be more aware about gender inequality and social justice. So when I started my studies in the university, I already had in me an objective of contributing to social justice in whatever I chose to work on in my life. Then, I guess that my studies also guided me through that path, I read a lot of gender, reception, literary and communications theory, as well as philosophy.

What methods have you used to make an impact with your stories on these topics? Particularly in gender equality, what were the biggest challenges you faced when covering such sensitive issues?

I started covering gender as a freelance in a small digital outlet and I tried to talk about topics that I did not see anywhere else at the moment: life feminist motherhood or menstrual disorders. But later, when I worked at Mutante I learn about the power of engagement journalism and how this method can actually amplify the impact of journalistic stories, because they are being useful and interpellating a particular type of person who was seeking for that information.

Now, if we talk about challenges, I would say that finding sources and accessing information. A lot of people experienced the topics I was covering, but they did not want to talk and it is because of social stigmas. Then large corporations, like fertility clinics, like to stay on the safe side, so they rather answer in a polite but incomplete way than respond to your questions.

International Experience and Your Journalism Perspective

How did your experience with the United Nations Environment Programme and the Colombian Consulate in New York transform your approach to journalism? What kind of global perspective did these international platforms offer you?

These experiences changed my approach in journalism significantly. The Consulate helped me connect with the Colombian immigrant community and the needs they had. I was not very aware of the way the community is living and the geopolitical relations behind massive immigration.

Then, UNEP was a place to understand international treaties, public hearings and the international environmental agenda. It helped me to see climate change in a global way, meaning that it showed me the relations of power behind greenhouse gas emissions, food waste and renewable energies. It wasn’t only UNEP as an institution, but the people who were there. Most people were from the Global North and had that kind of approach to the climate emergency, but the Global South has a knowledge that has not been appreciated but is essential for the survival of humanity.

While studying in New York, how did interacting with different cultures shape your understanding of journalism? How do you compare your experiences with the media landscape in Colombia to the global perspective you gained?

In NYC I’ve been covering particularly Latinx communities, and that means I am very exposed to multiple cultures, because Latinxs are not a monolith. So I’ve connected with Peruvians, Mexicans, Hondurans, Venezuelans, Ecuadorians, and of course Colombians. This has showed me that we are very similar, but our national histories are different and that crafts our paths heterogeneously. I see how Latinx people are all classified in the same box, but our culture and life experiences are utterly different. However, there is for sure something that unites us: our region has suffered oppression and colonialism even later than we started being “free nations”.

This approach contrasted with the media landscape in Colombia because in Colombia we mostly cover the national context, and when we cover the international it usually is from the same few countries that call our attention.

Cortazar once said that for him, living in France wasn’t a way to be apart from Argentina, it was actually a tool allowing him to see his country as a whole with perspective and distance. And I feel very much like that.

Digital Media and the Future of Journalism

How do the innovative approaches brought by working in digital media shape the evolution of journalism? What do you think about the impact of digital transformation on media content and audience engagement?

The innovative approaches brought by digital media have fundamentally reshaped journalism, not just in how stories are told, but in how communities are included in the storytelling process. Jeff Jarvis, in A Journalism of Belief and Belonging, argues that journalism’s role isn’t just to inform, but to “build bridges among communities” and “make strangers less strange.” That belief has been central to my work as a journalist who constantly thinks in engagement as an essential part of this craft.

Digital transformation has also allowed journalism to build trust in new ways. When we treat engagement not as a strategy to reach more people, but as a practice to foster community, we deepen the public’s relationship with journalism.

Did your experience at Mutante contribute to establishing your expertise in digital media? What are your thoughts on the impact of digital platforms on the future of journalism?

Digital transformation has opened up new ways to move beyond one-way communication and instead create dynamic, participatory spaces for dialogue. At Mutante I experienced firsthand how digital tools can be used not only to distribute content, but to actively listen to communities and co-create journalism with them. We built our editorial agenda around the real informational needs of our audience, using digital platforms to host conversation communities—safe spaces where people affected by issues like fatphobia or gender inequality could connect, share experiences, and help shape coverage.

This shift has had a profound impact on media content and audience engagement. Stories are no longer just produced for people—they’re created with them. Content becomes more relevant, empathetic, and actionable when it emerges from the lived experiences of the communities it aims to serve. For example, through engagement strategies like newsletters with high open rates, explainer content, and social media conversations, we were able to make complex topics like climate displacement or mental health more accessible and urgent.

Challenges and Opportunities as a Female Journalist

What have been the biggest challenges you’ve faced as a female journalist? How have you overcome these challenges, and how have they influenced your journalism practice?

One of the biggest challenges I’ve faced as a female journalist is navigating the intersection of economic precarity, immigration status, and gendered expectations—especially as a Latina, immigrant woman working in the U.S.

Feminist journalism isn’t just about telling stories—it’s about interrogating the systems that shape people’s lives. At La Papaya, a feminist publication I co-founded, and later at Mutante, I embraced a kind of reporting rooted in radical care, tenderness, and community.

These challenges didn’t just shape what I report on—they shaped how I report. I learned to approach journalism as a tool for both inquiry and empowerment, one that must offer not only critique but pathways for action. At Mutante, this meant pairing investigative stories with community dialogues and support networks. In New York, it’s meant spotlighting immigrant communities through stories that resist reduction to labor or struggle—showing instead how they build joy, resilience, and systems of mutual support.

Ultimately, the challenges I’ve faced have taught me that journalism must make space for both vulnerability and resistance. They’ve pushed me to tell stories that go beyond exposing injustice to also enable hope, healing, and transformation.

What are your thoughts on how women are represented in the media? What steps should be taken within the industry to make more women visible in journalism?

Women are often represented in the media through narrow, stereotypical lenses—either as victims or as exceptional figures who’ve “overcome” adversity, rarely with the full complexity of their identities, contributions, and struggles. This lack of nuance not only flattens our stories, but reinforces systems that make women—especially immigrants, and working-class women—invisible unless their pain is deemed newsworthy.

As a feminist journalist, I believe the problem isn’t just who tells the story, but who gets to be seen as a source of knowledge and power. At outlets like La Papaya and Mutante, I worked to challenge those dynamics by co-creating journalism with women who are usually excluded from traditional narratives—whether they were survivors of obstetric violence, informal workers, or community leaders.

To make more women visible in journalism, the industry needs to go beyond diversifying newsrooms. It needs to value and invest in alternative storytelling methods that center care, collaboration, and community engagement. That includes hiring more women—especially women from marginalized backgrounds—not just as reporters, but as editors, decision-makers, and strategists. It also means rethinking what we consider “newsworthy,” and creating space for stories rooted in lived experience, emotion, and collective knowledge.

Vision for the Future and Career Goals

How do you plan to shape your journalism career in the future? Are there specific projects you’d like to be involved in, and what kind of societal changes do you hope to contribute to through these projects?

I plan to shape my journalism career around the core belief that information is a tool for dignity and transformation—especially for those who have historically been excluded from mainstream narratives. My goal is to create journalism that starts by asking communities what they need, and that turns information into a pathway toward action and justice.

One project I hope to develop is a bilingual, hyperlocal resource hub for Latinx and immigrant communities in New York. Resources exist in the U.S.—like free clinics, subsidized food markets, and language classes— but information about them is fragmented, inaccessible, or simply not reaching the people who need it most.

More broadly, I want to be part of initiatives that challenge dominant narratives about Latinx and immigrant communities—stories that move beyond deficit framing and instead highlight resilience, contributions, and systems of mutual aid. Through community engagement, investigative reporting, and narrative storytelling, I hope to contribute to a media landscape that empowers rather than marginalizes, and that pushes for policies rooted in equity and care.

How do you think the experiences you’ve gained in journalism have transformed into a service to society? What is your personal mission in journalism in both the short and long term?

My experiences in journalism have taught me that storytelling is not just a profession—it’s a public service. From reporting on reproductive justice in Colombia to covering immigrant canners and nostalgia-driven plays in Queens, my work has always aimed to dignify lives often ignored by mainstream media. These stories are not just content—they are windows into systems, tools for empowerment, and sometimes, lifelines.

Living in New York as a Latina immigrant radically reshaped my understanding of identity, visibility, and structural inequality. For the first time, I saw myself racialized—as just another “Hispanic” or “Latina”—in a system that often treats our communities as statistics rather than individuals. This shift fueled a deeper commitment to what Eduardo Galeano called los nadie—the nobodies who don’t appear in history books, who are denied voice, name, and presence. My journalism now strives to rewrite that narrative.

In the short term, my mission is to continue building journalism that centers community needs, provides practical resources, and opens space for dialogue and participation. In the long term, I want to contribute to transforming newsrooms—structurally and culturally—so that they truly reflect the diversity of the people they serve. That includes advocating for more Latinx journalists in leadership roles, creating mentorship pipelines, and championing forms of storytelling that embrace care, complexity, and co-creation.