Happy Hispanic Heritage Month! A great way to celebrate Hispanic Heritage Month can be taking the time to watch some amazing movies directed by fellow Hispanics as well as supporting hermanas y hermanos across the world! I would recommend watching Real Women Have Curves, a 2002 film directed by Patricia Cardoso who is Colombian-American. The film is about a young woman named Ana struggling to live through cultural/traditional expectations by her mother. Throughout the film we see how she overcomes this issue. Ana breaks these stereotypes and generational barriers to do what is best for her even if it means not living up to her mothers expectations of being a woman.
My first time watching this film was in December 2022 when I attended a Latinx Workshop for a School. They were inviting Quad City Latina Leaders, which I happen to be a first-generation Mexican-American student and an active member of Latinos Unidos for St. Ambrose University. Margarita (teacher), chose Real Women Have Curves to watch for the 20th anniversary of the film’s release. I am thankful to have been able to attend the workshop, watch the movie, and overall meet hermanas de otros generaciones older and younger than me. Margarita told us we are here to support one another and us hermanas are as strong as the hermana next to us.
A few months later, I noticed on Linkedin that Margarita’s students also started taking on a community project for their school. They sold shirts with the words, “as strong as the hermana next to me” (and yes I did buy a shirt!). The Latinx Workshop Hermanas community project is called [School’s Name] Dignity Drive (for safety and confidentiality reasons I will not share the exact school) where $5 of every t-shirt ordered went towards supplying their school nurses with new underwear in many sizes for their middle school girls. This project was inspired due to menstruation cycles coming out of the blue and nurses would not have new underwear on hand to offer to students whose cycle can be unpredictable. It amazes me how motivated and dedicated students can be. I can’t wait to see what they will do in the future!