5/2 Kwon
When I initially read the
beginning of the article, I thought the article highly resembled the
organization APEN as mentioned in Shah’s article. However, as I read the
article I realized AYPAL youth took a similar, but different approach to combat
a political issue. They exercised grassroots power by asking for community support
and planned to use the media to express personal stories of deportees and families
whose family member experiences deportation to essentially gain the attention
and support from their local congresswoman. Though the state does not fully
recognize their efforts, I think these youths bring up a different outlet for
social change— story-telling. The youth learned about deportation and the
seriousness of the issues through the narratives of their family histories. I
found this to be important as I saw this as the basis for their grassroots
building and media exposure. This could be applied to contemporary times as people
could use verbal communication to tell others of their struggles to find a
common space to make a difference or to reach a broader audience, many people,
especially youth could use social media to portray the social, economic, and
political hardships they face. Many will argue this can be a difficult tool to
use for change, but to make this effective, there must be more trust and
understanding that other people face similar issues. Therefore, I found this
article to illustrate that it is important to talk about and voice our issues
to reach a connection between the masses in hopes to reach those in power.
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