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AUTMHQ UPDATE
Hello and Hola!
Latinos buy 25% of all movie tickets nationwide, at only 17% of the entire population. Black people made up 44% of the audience of the latest iteration of the movie “Bad Boys,” making it the biggest earner of all action films on its opening weekend. Black and Latino moviegoers are determining the industry’s financial and cultural success, yet according to USC Annenberg’s Inclusion Initiative, less than 5% of speaking parts in films go to Hispanic persons, and only 16 out of the top 100 movies in 2022 featured Black characters. 3% of directors were Black that same year, while 81% were White.
Upturning this mismatch is Street Genius, a collective action of established Black Indigenous Persons of Color serving and leading Austin nonprofits. Street Genius’s 2-day events deliver empowering programming for boys through arts, design thinking, and entrepreneurship.
The Street Genius Collective includes Austin’s Urban Technology Movement, 100 Black Men Austin, Con Mi Madre, the newly formed Frontera Leadership Institute, Latino Arts Culture and Education Texas, and creators like Lucero Creative and Laura Donnelly, who founded the cultural STEM education nonprofit Latinitas 22 years ago.
New partners Cine Las Americas, Saint Primo, and Austin Film Society join this round to assist boys with technique, storyboarding, production, and editing, as well as how to use filmmaking as a vehicle to explore the perceptions of masculinity today. Panelists from the film industry will join the boys for lunch on Friday.
Michael Ward, Jr., founder of Austin Urban Technology Movement, explained, “AUTMHQ has cultivated a pipeline of support for Black and Brown women and men to engage in the city’s most flourishing and lucrative industries: technology and manufacturing. Film, like most industries, is dependent on tech.”
Laura Donnelly, Founder and former CEO of Latinitas, one of a handful of culturally reflective and literate STEM nonprofits nationwide and mom of a 15-year-old “Latinito,” said, “We are a collective of nonprofits that have over-indexed on success outcomes for adults and girls of color and are applying those same tenants to creating safe, supported space for boys.”
“Boys need us now.” explained Ruben Cantu, who founded the University of Texas Department of Inclusive Innovation, which closed because of recent Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion legislation and the newly launched Frontera Leadership Institute, “Boys are grappling with defining masculinity for themselves and as much as we inform them that they are ok as they are - they are bombarded with long existing toxic messages about their worth. Music videos are a great vehicle to examine this”
Best regards,
The AUTMHQ Team
Follow us on social media: @AUTMHQ
Visit our website: www.autmhq.org
Donate: www.autmhq.org/donate
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