Sandy Joseph, activist: “I thought I could use social media to show other young women that being black doesn’t make us less valuable”

In August this year, three Afro singers residing in Chile invited Sandy Joseph (22 years old) to participate in the recording of a video clip that they shot in a park in Santiago. The law student not only accepted the invitation, but, during the recording, she took some photos with her cell phone which she then uploaded to her TikTok account (@déesse.haitiana ). The reactions were quick.

“People started commenting and messaging me that they didn’t know there was a community of Afro women in Santiago. , and they asked me how they could participate. I talked about it with other friends and felt a moral responsibility to support these women who wanted to be part of “something”, so I organized a picnic with a limited number of places to keep the “intimate space,” Sandy remembers.

The meeting took place at Bicentenario Park, where they arrived with blankets, things to share and a great desire to create community. “I spoke with my friend Wiki Pirela (@wikipirela ), an Afro-Venezuelan artist who exhibited in different places in Santiago, to carry out a painting workshop for girls. I wanted them to leave with something from the event, to remember their first meeting with the Afro community, which is why we did a very nice and meaningful drawing workshop. . The goal was to highlight black beauty; It was a day where we were not the victims, but the protagonists of the meeting,” he adds.

Sandy had started her activism on social media long before the recording of the music video exploded in terms of views. . As a fourth year law student at the Autonomous University, she decided to document her university life as a migrant woman and thus show a different reality from the one usually found on social media when we are looking for content of this type.

“I thought I could use social media without a tone of denunciation, as I did before, but rather by showing young migrants, young migrants and black women, that they can. ; that they can go to college and have a career; that they can be intelligent and that being black doesn’t make them any less valuable. It’s a wonderful reward of how black teenagers have given me their love, because they find my videos motivating,” says Sandy.

He also remembers that some time ago he was participating in an event and at the end a father and his daughter approached him, who told him that he was their number one reference. “There, I really understood and I was convinced that the way I carry out my activism is the right way. Now, I also reach young people, girls, who really need to have references, because there are none on television,” he says.

As part of the International Day of Women of African Descent, in July this year, Sandy was featured by UN Women as one of the voices of Latin America in this area. And in December, she was invited to present her ceramic work at the Haitian art exhibition in Chile, at the Palacio Pereira. There he exhibits the work entitled Faces of Haitian womeninspired in six stories of Haitian women victims of medical neglect in Chile and the Dominican Republic. This exhibition will be available until March 2024.

Sandy Joseph arrived in Chile on January 2, 2017 when she was only 15 years old. . He entered the country with his older brother. Their mother, who had arrived a year and a half earlier, was waiting for them here. Sandy’s parents are Haitian, but they met in the Dominican Republic, where she was born and raised, but never qualified for that country’s citizenship.

After spending almost two years separated from her mother, upon her arrival in Chile Sandy couldn’t wait to spend more time with her. However, his mother worked at home and he only saw her on weekends. Soon her brother started working as a temp and Sandy found herself alone in the room where the three of them were supposed to live. “I spent my first birthday here alone. It was January 17, two weeks after his arrival. In the Dominican Republic, I had a poor life, but I had my friends and my family. It was the first confrontation with the reality of migration, then the realization that I had to grow up in advance,” recalls Sandy.

For the first few months, he had to go to the civil registry office to apply for his visa in his school uniform, without the company of an adult. There he knew he would have to be self-sufficient from the first moment.

It was by experiencing the reality of migrants in Chile, particularly the Haitian community, that she decided to study law. “My vocation was born from the perception of the needs of my community. I saw that they had no tools, lawyers, or places to turn for help. I wanted to study law because I am in a country where I am a migrant and therefore I have to know how to defend myself and my community,” explains Sandy.

Helping others is something he learned from his mother. “If she’s in line for a procedure and sees that someone is lost or doesn’t quite understand how to do things, she gets out of the line and doesn’t hesitate to take them across town. “, counts. That’s why he decided to become an activist. “In recent years, I have put my heart and soul into this activism,” he says. He has visited hospitals, police stations police, homes and camps to help people in whatever they needed. Even last year a Haitian was shot in Santa Rosa and she was one of the people who were at the forefront of fundraising; He took him to clinics and visited him at home to help him with different things.

However, after supporting the community as he did for all these years, there came a time when his mental and physical health could no longer take it. “I could no longer live in this activism in the streets so this year I decided to prioritize my degree to finish it on time and then contribute as a legal defense attorney,” she says.

—Have you transferred your activism to social media?

— Partly yes. For example, I have helped many women in my community apply for free. Many of them are already professional technicians. I’m promoting the study because for me it’s super fundamental that Haitian women have economic independence, because economic violence exists within the community. I like that activism is multifaceted and I like this new direction I have taken to do it. I want to be with Afro women, talk about beauty and have these kinds of meetings, like the picnic, where we can be free and love each other.

—Beyond the face-to-face meetings that you can organize, do you have the impression that with your videos and posts a community is created from the conversations that arise in the comments?

—I also receive negative and hateful comments. But the majority are Haitians and migrants of different nationalities who feel demotivated, sad, and tell me that my videos support them on a daily basis, that they like my voice. I find it important to be present on social networks. You look for college student vlogs and you won’t find more than one or two creators who are racialized, black or black, and so there is no representation. Most of this type of content comes from young people with well-off economic status, who become famous for having a good life. One of my inspirations for creating these videos is a girl from Peru named Lissett. She lives in a camp with very few resources, but she uses the networks to give her insight and show herself different from the hegemons. This is how a community is created through videos, comments and meetings.