Talk the Talk: A Conversation on Language

Context

Talk the Talk was a four-part Reels series produced for Rutgers University's main Instagram account during Hispanic Heritage Month 2023, featuring students in honest conversation about their relationship to language, identity, and what gets carried or lost across generations.

Approach

Talk the Talk started as a conversation, not a campaign. A colleague and I were talking about what it feels like to be Hispanic and a few generations removed from where your family came from. Language is one of the clearest indicators of that distance. Not speaking Spanish, or not speaking it well enough, comes with its own insecurity, the sense that you're a more Americanized version of the people you came from, and that it might already be too late to pick up what got lost. Pew confirms it. Parental encouragement to speak Spanish drops from 85% in the foreign-born generation to just 26% by the third, and the share who say Spanish is essential to being Hispanic falls from 54% to 20% across the same generations. Speaking Spanish or Portuguese fluently in the U.S. isn't the natural outcome, it's the thing you have to actively fight to keep. The bet was that an honest conversation would land harder than another round of celebration, and that participants, once invited, would take it past language on their own.

Execution

Talk the Talk lived inside a larger HHM campaign that ran across Rutgers Today and the university's main social channels. I led social media on the campaign and produced the four student Reels that ran on @rutgersu, shooting, directing, and editing each one solo. I also photographed the staff and faculty featured in the written stories elsewhere in the ecosystem.

The Reels were short-form, documentary in approach but cinematic in finish. Casting came together with a colleague through Rutgers' identity-based student groups, covering Costa Rica and El Salvador, Brazil, Peru, and the Dominican Republic. Spanish and Portuguese, both represented intentionally. The through line was a shared question bank covering self-identity, code-switching, sayings that don't translate, and how language shows up on campus. Consistent prompts meant the four Reels held together as a series, and each participant's specific answer carried the difference.

Results

The four Reels reached 120,000 viewers on @rutgersu and pulled 1,684 combined likes and comments. Samantha's feature led the series at 34,400 views and a 2.0% engagement rate, closing with "I'm not ashamed of it, and I'm proud of it." Across the four, participants named the isolation, the embarrassment, the school-system pressure, and the more complicated position that language is central to identity without being a test of it. Four people, four real answers, none of them a slogan. The thesis was that an honest conversation would land harder than another round of celebration, and the numbers backed it up, with the campaign's most direct emotional resolution pulling its highest engagement.