Let's Talk About Sex: Digital Storytelling for Puerto Rican Latina Youth

The Center for Digital Storytelling (www.storycenter.org) surfaces authentic voices around the world through group process and participatory media creation. The recognition that personal narratives can play a key role in community health education and training, health service provision, and heath policy advocacy has grown dramatically over the past several years. Stories created in our public health workshops represent marginalized voices in complex, dignified, and dynamic ways. Storytellers explore their lived experience, craft and record narratives, and produce multimedia pieces. The process of making a two to four minute digital story in one of our workshops is personally transformative for the storyteller, who has the chance to reflect, learn, grow and connect with others in the group.

Public health efforts focused on Latina adolescent sexuality are commonly framed by the persistent syndemic of teen pregnancy/births and STIs, a myopic approach that perpetuates silences that contribute to health inequities and overlooks the clear need to incorporate and acknowledge experiences of trauma in adolescent sexual and reproductive health education and programming.

In this proposed film festival session, we will screen a selection of digital stories created through our 2013-14 National Institutes of Health (NIH) funded collaboration with the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, “Let’s Talk About Sex: Digital Storytelling for Puerto Rican Latina Youth,” a culturally centered, narrative-based approach for analyzing participants’ own depictions of sexual values and practices.