INTERVIEW: New PBS doc focuses on children earning badges for social justice
Photo: The Radical Monarchs are a social justice movement for children that began in the Bay Area. Photo courtesy of PBS / Provided with permission.
When Anayvette Martinez’s daughter came home one day from school, the fourth grader asked her mother whether she could join the local Girl Scouts troop. Some of her classmates had joined, and she wanted in on the national organization.
“Naturally she really wanted to join, too, and when I looked at the composition of the troop, I saw that she would have been only one of two girls of color,” Martinez said in a recent phone interview. “And my daughter has been raised in a very radical social justice family, and so I felt like that experience wouldn’t really speak to her as a young girl of color and as a girl that’s been raised very socially radically conscious from a very young age. And so I had the idea of what would it look like to start a group that took traditional elements, like earning badges, but centered on the experiences of young girls of color and also where they could earn badges based on social justice movement work.”
Without knowing it at the time, the idea for the Radical Monarchs was born on that day. When Martinez shared the idea with her daughter, the child became interested and implored her mother to follow through on the plan.
“At the time I was working full time as a community worker, and those jobs are never 9-to-5 jobs,” Martinez said. “You’re working 60-plus hours a week, and so the idea kept falling off. And my daughter never let go of that idea. She kept asking me, ‘When are we going to start that group? When are we going to start that group?’ And [she] started to recruit her own friends and tell them about this group that we were going to start, and so I knew I had to make good on my promise. I knew I couldn’t do it by myself, and so I approached my best friend, Marilyn Hollinquest.”
Hollinquest and Martinez took that initial idea and made it a reality in December 2014, and now almost six years later, they and their organization are the subjects of the latest POV documentary on PBS. We Are the Radical Monarchs recently premiered on the network and is now available to stream.
“I definitely think we are teaching them lifelong skills,” Hollinquest said, adding that the Monarchs earn badges in a variety of social justice causes, whether focused on LGBTQ+ allyship, the Black Lives Matter movement or environmental justice. “I think these are lifelong skills — learning how to advocate for yourself and your community, learning how to be a person who positively impacts the physical environment, and then also really learning how to have healthy relationships. So I think all of those things are needed in your lifelong journey of becoming someone who is a part of the solution and not the problem.”
In the new documentary the term “radical” is used to describe the actions of the Monarchs. Although an uncomfortable term for some people, for Martinez, the word means swimming against the current and thinking outside the box, being innovative and unapologetic.
“I think that we need to be unapologetic about fighting against white supremacy and climate change and all the -isms and all the things that are coming down that are being unmasked for us in this moment,” Martinez said. “I think radical for me means like going for it and being unapologetic about our politics and doing the work that [allows] us to be able to live in a kind of world that we all deserve to live in.”
Hollinquest added that celebrating culture is also important to the Monarchs. Each of the young girls in the group is able to share different elements of their particular background, and the leaders help everyone see overlaps and connections of the multiculturalism.
“Our unit and badges that they earn are always intersectional, so the conversations that we have about, let’s say, culture or race, we don’t only position them in the U.S.,” Martinez added. “There are always times and ways where we make connections about things that are happening globally in the global fight for land, sovereignty or environmental justice. I think that there’s always a context of what this work looks like here and also what our connections and overlaps are globally with other countries and those movements.”
For Hollinquest, the success of the Radical Monarchs has been a great surprise. The organization has graduated two troops in Oakland, California, and recently they launched two more troops in Oakland, plus groups in San Francisco and Richmond, California. They do recognize the need for more funding from the community and foundations, and they have experienced “growth bumps” over the last six years. There has also been resistance from some people, including threats agains the co-founders.
“As Anayvette mentioned, this came out of a need for her daughter,” Hollinquest said. “And we honestly thought it was just going to be one group. … Once we started to get all of this press coverage initially when we launched in December 2014 and beginning of 2015, when we would be at marches and those sorts of things, and people start hitting us up from the UK, from Canada, from all over the world and all over locally, we were like, OK, we hit some kind of needle on the head. And we just decided to rise to that need as much as possible and grow our organization.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
We Are the Radical Monarchs is a new documentary from POV on PBS. Click here for more information.
