Rosario Dawson on millennials’ power

Rosario Dawson isn’t a millennial, but as a Latina activist, she sees the power in their numbers.

“Millennials will be the majority of the workforce by 2025, and by 2022, a quarter of teens in the U.S. will be Latino,” she said during Friday’s South by Southwest Interactive panel called “Star Power: Innovative Ways to Engage Millennials.” Currently, 20 percent of millennials are Latino, 14 percent are African-American and 5 percent are Asian, making them the most diverse generation Americans have ever known.

Previously, people were engaged with their physical communities, but the Internet has allowed those communities to grow globally. “(Millennials) see the digital world as their neighborhood.”

Millennials, as digital natives, want to be able take action immediately when they read a news article or even see a post on Tumblr. That can mean buying a bag or donating to a cause they feel strongly about.

Dawson, whose next movie, “Chavez,” comes out on March 28, talked about the parallels between the grass-roots organizational efforts of Cesar Chavez and those that we use now.

Using word-of-mouth activism, Chavez was able to mobilize farmworkers across the country and even Europe to stand up for their rights. In recent years, young people have used text messaging to organize classroom walkouts in protest of budget cuts or other issues they see as unfair.