How does an entire population come to see itself as a people, a shared ‘we’ strong enough to act together across differences?
This is the question driving Arianna Genis, the University of Minnesota’s second Visionary Community Fellow. Through her project, Genis is challenging one-dimensional narratives of Latino identity and building something far more powerful: a research-backed, community-rooted movement that connects culture, storytelling, and political action across the Midwest.
Genis—a seasoned organizer and political strategist—is two years into founding the Movida Initiative, a Minneapolis-based democracy lab that builds Latino civic, economic, and political power in the midwest. She has been using the fellowship, hosted by the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) and Liberal Arts Engagement Hub, to undertake Movida’s first projects: leading focus groups and launching a podcast series of roundtable discussions.
“We are on a journey to learn,” Genis says. “We’re not asserting that we know who Midwest Latinos are, we’re asking. We are in a time and in a country that is defining Latinos as less than human—it doesn’t matter if you’re Puerto Rican, and I’m Mexican, and you’re Salvi. We’re all being seen and targeted as the same. But we believe our people are more complex than that and deserve to be understood. So instead of accepting this definition, we’re pushing back against that and asserting something else together.”
Combining specialties to create new opportunities
Throughout the Visionary Community Fellowship, Genis has combined academic research and community organizing. She has worked with mentor Jessica Lopez Lyman (Chicano & Latino Studies), participated in the IAS’s interdisciplinary cohort of residential fellows, and collaborated with staff of the Liberal Arts Engagement Hub while also connecting her broader community to the University.
Genis typically spends most of her time in the field in direct contact with her constituents, conducting research and engaging organizers and leaders across the Midwest and country. She also studies Latino history, politics, and civic life with academics and cultural and media leaders. This combination shapes her work. The Visionary Community Fellowship has given her time and space to slow down, be curious, and receive feedback on her research from supportive colleagues across many different disciplines. Through her work with Lopez Lyman, she has also gained new skills in applying qualitative methods to community organizing.
These collaborations have helped Genis refine her approach, sharpening how research functions within Movida not as an academic exercise, but as an iterative tool for intervention and strategy. This is now shaping Movida's trajectory in its first years.
“Academics and organizers need each other,” Genis says. “I hope Movida is an example of how you can innovate when you choose to combine those worlds strategically and with integrity. Having research that is rigorous and created in partnership with this institution also helps give Movida credibility, while we push back against this very one-dimensional story of Latinos put forward by mainstream media and that many Latinos internalize because of how we are treated.”
Genis and her project have also expanded traditional definitions of research and community engagement across the University. Alongside Lopez Lyman, Genis has visited numerous University classes and even cultivated a base of dedicated students who continue to work with Movida. As part of a guided tour of the La Prensa de Minnesota archives at the Immigration History Research Center, Genis taught students how to use primary sources and archives in social media to create empowering narratives. Students in another course worked with Movida on demographics research using the American Community Survey and U.S. Census data.
As Lopez Lyman reflects, “Arianna transformed some of these students’ lives by helping them think about how they can still be grounded in their passions and their majors post-graduation, but with a new political consciousness that is part of a larger collective movement for Latinos,” For Genis, that ripple effect is the point.
The time and space to pivot
But the work hasn’t been easy, and as a result, Movida has changed shape since the fellowship began.
In the first year of her fellowship, Genis concentrated her research on understanding how Latino identities are constructed by conducting five focus groups, where Latino community members had intimate discussions about identity, agency, and belonging. But as the political landscape intensified both nationally and here in Minnesota, Genis felt she needed to respond to the moment. She knew she needed an alternative format that could capture larger swaths of Latinos across the Midwest that Movida could study.
Enter a new storytelling arm of Movida, which plans to host roundtable conversations that will explore and drive a very public conversation about who Midwest Latinos are from different angles.
Genis credits Lopez Lyman for her support in reflecting on Movida’s first year and helping validate the choice to pivot, as well as the IAS community for challenging her to consider new directions and questions. In fact, working with the IAS to design and moderate a public event called “Who Gets to Define ‘Latino’?” for the (In)Justice Series in December 2025 became the first step in Movida’s new direction.
Genis plans to launch the conversation series as a podcast to ensure her work reaches a broad audience. She is currently working on what the research around the conversation series will look like: What are people in each conversation learning? How does the audience react to what they hear?
“What’s incredible about the Community Fellowship is that you get to invest in one single person, and their work has a massive impact beyond themselves,” said Lopez Lyman. “The Movida Initiative is going to change the political and cultural landscape in the Midwest.”
With the flexibility of a non-profit, the research backing of the University, and the innovative design of an interdisciplinary project, Genis and the Movida Initiative have built a foundation designed to last and to travel.
Over the last year, Genis has used more of her fellowship time to focus on critical rapid response work in her community. Now, that is shaping Movida's next steps: the organization is leading a new research project in partnership with Georgia State Representative Stacey Abrams. Grounded in the recognition that enforcement conditions seen during Minnesota’s Operation Metro Surge may unfold in other communities, Genis and the team are producing a community-centered, iterative playbook that prepares communities for protection and care response.
Genis’s new work with Abrams is a direct example of Movida’s mission to translate rigorous research into community power. “We aren’t simply building an archive,” Genis says. “We are building community infrastructure. The stories we’re collecting matter and will shape our organizing moving forward.”
For Genis, that is what Movida was always built for, not just to understand who Midwest Latinos are, but to make sure that understanding has somewhere to go.