An Open Letter to the Community: Why We Left Milwaukee Film (with update)

5 min readDec 14, 2020

Community Update, December 17, 2020:

Open letter to follow

On Monday, December 14, 2020, we published a public statement to our community outlining our reasons for resigning from Milwaukee Film. We have been overwhelmed by the outpouring of support we have received over the past week. Thank you for sharing our story. Thank you for sharing YOUR stories — we have heard from past patrons and staff of Milwaukee Film who have shared similar sentiments.

At the same time, we also submitted a 6-page resignation letter to CEO Jonathan Jackson, detailing specific and numerous examples of the themes described in our public statement. Milwaukee Film has chosen to respond by minimizing, dismissing, and erasing us and our work. See below a screenshot of Jackson’s email response to our letter, focusing on CSF as property and offering no recognition of our grievances, let alone compassion, remorse, or responsibility. Milwaukee Film deleted our post containing the public statement from both Instagram and Facebook. These efforts only further demonstrate Milwaukee Film’s refusal to authentically engage in the work of diversity, equity, inclusion, and racial justice.

As Milwaukee Film continues to capitalize upon the program we created, please be mindful that any future iteration of CSF comes from the institution we have described in our public statement. An institution that perpetuates structural inequity and mistreats staff of color, an institution that does not value or support our community.

Please continue to hold Milwaukee Film accountable.

Over the course of three days, our statement was shared 105 times and Milwaukee Film has now erased it.

An Open Letter to the Community: Why We Left Milwaukee Film

As co-founders of Cine Sin Fronteras, it is with heavy hearts that we share our resignation from Milwaukee Film. Cine Sin Fronteras has been made possible through the deep relationships we built with our community partners and the community at large. We share this letter with the confidence that our community will hold us with a lot of care and understanding as we walk away from something we created with so much love.

On June 5, 2020, Jonathan Jackson, CEO of Milwaukee Film, issued a public statement asking to be held accountable for failing to dismantle the systemic racism that plagues the organization. For the past six months, we have reflected on his statement, our experiences, and the conversations we attempted to have at the organization to address such issues, all the while going back and forth about whether we should share our testimony with our community. Ultimately, we feel it would be an injustice if we did not address our community in an effort to provide insight into our experience as women of color operating within Milwaukee’s Film’s environment. We needed to write this in order to set it free from our minds and hearts.

We are so proud of what Cine Sin Fronteras has accomplished over the past five years:

Successfully developed a program with deep intentionality and integrity in order to properly serve our Latinx constituents and the Milwaukee community at large
Grounded our work in a programming philosophy that is BIPOC (Black Indigenous People of Color)-centered, LGBTQIA+ inclusive, and that challenges assumptions and stereotypes of Latinx communities
Curated five years of highly-rated films and well-attended culturally-based community events that created space for critical conversations, connection, and celebration
Created a recognized brand and hired local talent to create the Cine Sin Fronteras logo
Cultivated partnerships with dozens of community organizations to ensure awareness of and access to the Milwaukee Film Festival via Cine Sin Fronteras
Ensured the presence of bilingual volunteers at Cine Sin Fronteras film screenings and led bilingual marketing and outreach strategies
Attracted local (WUWM, 88.9 Radio Milwaukee, Telemundo Wisconsin) and national (Remezcla, La Liga Zine, Shadow and Act) media recognition

Unfortunately, we have accomplished those things while experiencing:

Consistent questioning of and pushback on our vision and goals, resulting in denial of or lack of support for our ideas, and effectively stunting our growth
Inconsistent and inequitable distribution of resources, including budget, support from internal departments, and access to travel and professional development
Undercompensation and enormous pay disparities across the organization — we were paid $13 per hour (then demanded $15 in 2019) while executive staff made $100,00–180,000 per year plus benefits
Inadequate and inequitable staffing support, including announcing the termination of one co-programmer “due to COVID” at a staff meeting without informing them (they were not able to attend), and expecting the remaining co-programmer to work in isolation
Constant shifts in supervision and structure
Co-opting and centralizing processes that we had specifically and intentionally developed for Cine Sin Fronteras in order to uphold the cultural integrity of our program
Lack of demonstrated engagement in the work of diversity, inclusion, and equity

Some of the things we have laid out above may not be new to some of you. Many of you held space for us over cafécito to share how to work around the toxic systems that Milwaukee Film upholds, in order to ensure that we could provide the best curated program every festival. Gracias de todo corazón.

This work has been a labor of love — we knew we were undercompensated, but were thrilled by the opportunity to create something meaningful and beautiful for our community through an entity as important as Milwaukee Film. It pains us to know that Milwaukee Film will continue to benefit from our labor and the deep relationships we have in the community, but after five years, we are no longer willing to sacrifice our mental and emotional well-being within an organization that has never fully invested in our success. This unhealthy environment has compromised the heart of the work we aim to do, which is to uplift the Latinx diaspora in all of its intersecting and beautiful ways, through film. We will no longer allow ourselves and our community to be tokenized and devalued. We will no longer struggle to operate within Milwaukee Film’s systems, conditions, and culture that does not support or value our work.

We hope this public statement serves as a notice to Milwaukee Film and other organizations that claim to value diversity, equity, and inclusion work and issued racial justice statements this past summer. Writing a statement is nothing more than a PR tactic. Adding diverse staff and programming to an environment that structurally perpetuates oppression only results in doing more harm to communities of color. Milwaukee Film must take actionable steps to address structural racism in order to create a work environment that is empowering and allows BIPOC staff to thrive, not just survive. Until you do that, you are only capitalizing on culture rather than practicing equity and “tak[ing] meaningful action on racial justice.”