About Us
Chiapas Media Project (CMP)/Promedios
www.chiapasmediaproject.org
CMP/Promedios is an award winning, bi-national partnership that provides video equipment, computers and training enabling marginalized indigenous and campesino communities in Southern Mexico to create their own media. CMP/Promedios has created together with the Zapatista communities in Chiapas four Regional Media Centers where the communities produce their own video and audio productions as well as have satellite internet access. Since 2000, CMP/Promedios has been producing videos covering important human rights issues in the state of Guerrero, Mexico. CMP/Promedios has presented videos at numerous universities, museums, and film and video festivals around the world.
Over the last 12 years the work of CMP/Promedios has been instrumental in the transformation of how people around the world view the Zapatistas and their struggle for autonomy. CMP/Promedios has more broadly redefined peoples understanding of the importance of supporting indigenous media, indigenous self-representation and protecting human rights in Mexico.
National Campaign Coordinator:
Melody Gonzalez
Melody Gonzalez, originally from Santa Ana, California, is the daughter of Mexican immigrants from San Gregorio, Michoacan. Her father was a farmworker in Sinaloa, Mexico and in the United States. She is a graduate of the University of Notre Dame where she helped organize a campaign to cut an athletic sponsorship contract with a local Taco Bell franchisee in support of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers’ (CIW) Taco Bell boycott. In 2005, after the CIW won it’s 4-year boycott of Taco Bell, and after she graduated, Melody moved to Immokalee to work as one of the National Coordinators for the Student/Farmworker Alliance and for Interfaith Action of Southwest Florida, both partner organizations of the CIW.
For the past 3 years, Melody served as a bridge between the multiple student, faith, labor, and community-based allies of the CIW; raising consciousness about the exploitation and human rights abuses faced by farmworkers in Florida and moving consumers to take action to demand fair food, justice, and dignity. Melody was an active participant in the CIW’s women’s group in Immokalee and served as an interpreter, translating articles and doing simultaneous translation for CIW members at presentations, rallies as well as facilitating the process of farmworker negotiations with executives of fast food corporations.
Our Mexico Partners
Tlachinollan Human Rights Center of the Mountain
http://www.tlachinollan.org
Tlachinollan Human Rights Center is a non-governmental organization based in Tlapa de Comonfort, Guerrero, Mexico. For 15 years, they have stood by the Nauas, Na savi (Mixtecos), Me’phaa (Tlapanecos) and Amuzgo indigenous peoples, as well as other poor communities, in their struggle for justice and full respect of their human rights. One of the main goals is to have an impact on public policies, government programs and actions that can change the structural causes of human rights violations in the state of Guerrero, as well as community development through advocacy and development policies. Another goal is to build strategic coordination alliances with indigenous peoples and organizations on a regional, national and international level so that the defense and exercise of their human rights will be more efficient.
ProDESC
www.prodesc.org.mx
ProDESC is an NGO founded in 2005 whose main goal is the defense of economic, social and cultural rights in Mexico in order to provide enforcement, justiciability and accountability of these rights on a systemic level. ProDESC´s mission is to defend, from an integrated perspective, all people who are exploited in regards to their economic, social, and cultural rights. ProDESC´s provides an integrated defense of the ESCRs through strategic litigation, strengthening of organization processes, and political advocacy to better the living conditions of people. ProDECSC´s main themes of work are labor rights, Land-Territory and Natural Resources Rights, and Migrations. ProDESC address all these themes through a transversal approach of development rights, transnational justice, business-state—human rights, and gender mainstreaming.