Who WILL TElL oUR STORIES?

The Center for the Nuevo South (CNS) is a community-centered, non-extractive response to the cultural needs and challenges facing the Great Latino Migration to the American South. CNS is a cultural organization based in Durham, North Carolina, dedicated to opening spaces of creativity, collaboration and capacity for our Latino communities to create, share and distribute their own stories by any media necessary.

THE GREAT
LATINO MIGRATON

The Nuevo South is one of the most unique socio-political experiments of the 21st Century. Starting in the 1990’s, the American South experienced an historical demographic shift which brought millions of Latin American immigrants (half of them from Mexico) to its shores, making the it one of the fastest growing Latinx populations in the U.S. The South would never be the same again. The Nuevo South does not include Texas or Florida.

STORYTELLING IS BELONGING

CNS is focused on intergenerational cultural transmission by training Southern Latino youth in public multimedia storytelling while developing/implementing workforce development strategies that will bridge the Latino youth media gap and empower them to find ways to make a living telling the stories of their communities.

Storytelling/culture is belonging and belonging feeds our common  identities,  this is an essential process that creates and sustains social and equitable political power. Without intentional public Latino culture in the South , in 50 years from now, we will not exist as a people or as a culture.

The Virgin of Guadalupe appears to a group of tobacco farm workers, Pink Hill, North Carolina.

RADICAL IMAGINATIONS and critical fabulations

The history of migrants from south of the Rio Grande to the American South and the history of the more recent Great Latino Migration has generated a limited amount of archival and historical documentation. Our History is one of mostly erasure and invisibility in a Black/White Southern racial paradigm. CNS is commited to using every possible technology available to us to tell our stories in a world dominated by the visual image.