“Warriors, Not Victims”: Precious Knowledge, the Fight for Ethnic Studies, and Accountability to the #MeToo Movement

Abstract

This article shares an upper-division writing course's struggle to be accountable to both the #MeToo movement and the fight for Ethnic Studies in Tucson. These movements collided in our class after we planned a campus screening of the film PRECIOUS KNOWLEDGE, which chronicles the student-led movement to save the Tucson High School Mexican American studies program, and then received news that the director had sexually assaulted one of the student-activists in the film. In this article, collaboratively-written by the professor teaching the course and two students in it, we share our accountability process, and concrete methods for social-movement-accountability in the writing classroom.

Navigating Personal and Organizational Ruptures in Social Justice Movements: An Intimate Inquiry

“…Several artifacts were publicly available, such as blog entries written by an anonymous collective of young women organizers called MalintZINE (Anonymous, 2012(Anonymous, , 2013a(Anonymous, , 2013b(Anonymous, , 2013c. Artifacts also included articles by educators and local news that reported on the collective of young women speaking out and writing about what happened (Herreras, 2013;Kannan et al, 2020;Powers Hannley, 2013). The young women of MalintZINE began writing in response to the backlash their friend, another young woman organizer, received after she disclosed she had been sexually assaulted by a filmmaker who made a documentary about their movement for ethnic studies.…”

“…The response was so harsh she left the country to distance herself from the movement she had once been part of as a leader on the frontlines. She later returned and publicly shared her story with students, educators, and community members, with the support of her remaining friends (Kannan et al, 2020). Several professors who publicly voiced their support of this young woman also faced repercussions from movement leaders, educators, and their allies (Herreras, 2013).…”