While reviewing all the footage with Juan Flores and Galena Park, we were discussing how we wanted to construct our narrative. We came up with ideas like showing scenes of the colorful ships, refineries, and sand dunes while he narrates fun, childhood stories, in order to illustrate that these important, nostalgic moments are inevitably casted within this toxic environment. The inspiration for this idea was the well-known picture of the child biking at a park in the Manchester neighborhood, smoking refineries squarely behind them. Another idea we had was for the ending; we could end on a more positive note by using the clips of him praising the community for having its own fire station and police station, and having low crime, but with a backdrop of more shots of the polluted elements of the city, such as the polluted river that came with a “Danger!” sign to warn against eating any fish that were caught in it. Although this intention might be overlooked by outside viewers of the video, we wanted to do a play on “low crime” reinterpreted as “low violence” – while Galena Park might have “low violence” as measured by crime rates, the community as a whole is undergoing much “slow violence” because of the pollution and toxicity imposed upon it. Juan Flores even said that they have high asthma rates and cancer clusters that they know are caused by the pollution, but they can’t prove it. Even if this underlying intention goes unacknowledged, the overall idea behind this was to send an impactful message of the toxicity that residents of Galena Park are living with, by juxtaposing what he is saying with these images.
We ended up going with the last idea, but I do have unresolved reservations about it. I wonder, were we undermining his authority and his voice? It was regrettable that we did not film shots of the positive aspects of Galena Park that he mentioned – playgrounds, the fire station, the police station, kids running around, etc – that we could have used with these parts of the narration. By using more negative images of pollution and toxicity with his voiceover of the positive aspects of Galena Park, I wonder if we were subtly undermining his own narrative about the community by not allowing his positive commentary to go unchallenged in some way. This was a difficult line to traverse because of the conception of the project. While this was seemingly an open-ended digital narrative project of a neighborhood, these neighborhoods were undeniably chosen because of some aspect of toxicity and pollution that they are facing or have faced. There was the expectation, both on our ends as students and on the interviewee’s end, that the story that gets told has to do with the production of knowledge of this polluted environment. For this reason, it felt almost… misguided that there was just the one question that was talking about something definitively positive (their favorite things about the neighborhood), when ultimately most of the information and story that gets told would be about pollution. Perhaps this was just a situation unique to our neighborhood and what the interviewee decided to focus on, but it raises questions for me about how, oftentimes, in raising awareness of issues of oppression and discrimination in vulnerable populations, their identities get constructed primarily around these traumatic experiences. My concerns related to this issue in my digital narrative could stem from not elaborating more on the positive aspects of the community, and not gathering more shots of Galena Park holistically (rather than focusing on the toxic sites).
Overall, I will continue to think through this issue and my discomfort with it as I traverse these spaces of advocacy and awareness-building as a privileged outsider.