Teacher’s Study Guide for Becoming Ourselves: How Immigrant Women Transformed Their World

Abstract

Becoming Ourselves: How Immigrant Women Transformed Their World is a film directed by Gary Delgado. It explores how the Community Transformational Organizing Strategy (CTOS) of Asian Immigrant Women Advocates (AIWA), a community-based labor organization in Oakland, California, enables low-wage, limited-English-speaking, immigrant women workers to redefine the meaning of leadership and to deepen our society’s capacity for democracy. AIWA has been an inspiration to hundreds of workers in the garment, electronics, restaurant, nail care, and home care industries of the Bay Area, and the organization’s CTOS method has been an influential model for many activist organizations. The film features testimony from rank-and-file workers active in AIWA as well as from present and former staff members speaking about the organization’s history of education, organization, and mobilization. This guide is designed to help teachers incorporate Becoming Ourselves into college courses in ethnic studies, women’s studies, sociology, and politics. It is meant to promote interactive, student-centered engagement so that the film becomes a learning tool and not merely a spectacle.