3:45, 2/28/2025

Jaya Rajagopalan

While participants create their versadas I got to speak with a few of them. They were making based on their personal experiences within society. It was awesome to connect with them within the atmosphere of creativity and empowerment. Before we began preforming the versadas we began with learning a zapateado dance and then continuing to preforming the vocal versadas. As each participant preforms the atmosphere becomes more celebratory. By the end of the workshop the community mingled and spoke about how the workshop went and mingled with each other. Over all we successfully cultivated an atmosphere filled with new connections and experiences.

3:00-3:20, 2/28/2025

Birdie Bell

Yasmine began our event by thanking Iris Viveros for teaching us this process, followed by a discussion of feminist values, self-defence, and a wonderful land acknowledgement. She began a description of the process for creating the Decimas, explaining the syllable method and how the emphasis is supposed to fall on the seventh syllable. She then explained the rhyming system – ABBAACCDDC.

Before the event, the Logistics and Facilitating teams printed sheets with images from the Mujeres Grabando Resistencias movement, from México. They also provided worksheets with the syllable blocks and rhyme schemes to ease the process for our participants.