“We’re in a fishbowl!” Sarah exclaimed. We all agreed, as passersby looked in at us with curiosity. Our small group of youth participants and adult educators, organized by the Media Education Center (MEC), a community based media production organization located in northern California, was embarking on an intensive project that would result in a short narrative video about youth life in San Francisco’s Mission District. The organization’s cofounder, Sarah, had made arrangements for classes to be held at the West Coast Video Foundation (WCVF), one of the nation’s premiere nonprofit media production centers. One wall of our workshop space was floor-to-ceiling windows that faced a long hallway leading to other media suites; because of this we worked under constant observation. The Mission District, which for much of the late twentieth century had been a working-class Latino neighborhood, has been reshaped in recent years by an influx of white artists, recent college graduates, and then later, young dot-com professionals. In the late 1990s the district was considered “ground zero” for the struggle against gentrification and displacement in the San Francisco Bay Area.1 We were working in a space that reflected these new shifts in the district, a state-of-the-art nonprofit media center on the edge of residential areas. The whirring of computers from the production suites surrounding us hummed throughout the room, as we brainstormed the plot.
