Feminist Formations 35.1: On Decolonial Feminisms: Engagement, Practice, and Action

Editor

Patti Duncan

Professor, Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies

Oregon State University

Managing Editor

Miranda Findlay

Editorial Assistant

aman agah

Founding Editor

Maryjo Wagner

Editors Emeritae

Maryjo Wagner

Patrocinio P. Schweickart

Margaret McFadden

Brenda Daly

Rebecca Ropers-Huilman

Adela C. Licona

Sandra K. Soto

About the Cover:

“Decolonial Feminisms”

2022

Oil painting

Victor Manuel Escoto Sánchez is a mixed media artist based in Mexico City. Victor Manuel incorporates a variety of themes in their artwork, including cultural, existential, and transcendental. Their art piece that is featured on the spring 2023 cover of Feminist Formations is an oil painting entitled “Decolonial Feminisms.”

As an art restorer, they have worked in the Frida Kahlo Museum, Chapultepec Park, and Templo Mayor—the main temple of the Mexica (or Aztec) people. IG account: @manu.art.x

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Editorial Board

Betty Harris, President of the Board, University of Oklahoma

Amy L. Brandzel, University of New Mexico

Jill M. Bystydzienski, The Ohio State University

Karma Chávez, University of Texas, Austin

Elora Halim Chowdhury, University of Massachusetts

Manisha Desai, University of Connecticut

Qwo-Li Driskill, Oregon State University

Laura G. Gutiérrez, University of Texas at Austin

Maurice Hamington, Portland State University

Priya Kandaswamy, San Diego State University

Rebecca J. Lambert, Syracuse University

Andrés C. López, Carleton University

Londie Martin, University of Arkansas at Little Rock

Vivian M. May, Syracuse University

Heidi J. Nast, DePaul University

Nana Osei-Ko , Oregon State University

Stephanie Troutman, University of Arizona

Feminist Formations recognizes the Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program at Oregon State University for its support.

Advisory Board

Athena Athanasiou, Panteion University

Rosi Braidotti, Utrecht University

Charlotte Bunch, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey

Veena Das, Johns Hopkins University

Jill Dolan, Princeton University

Philomena Essed, Antioch University

Marilyn Frye, Michigan State University

Sandra Harding, University of California, Los Angeles

Mervat F. Hatem, Howard University

bell hooks, in memoriam

Aida Hurtado, University of California, Santa Cruz

Alison Jones, University of Auckland

Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy, University of Arizona

Michael Kimmel, State University of New York at Stony Brook

Amy Levin, Northern Illinois University

Valentine Moghadam, Northeastern University

Haideh Moghissi, York University

Rebecca Ropers-Huilman, University of Minnesota

Sue Rosser, San Francisco State University

Birgit Sauer, University of Vienna

Marian Sawer, Australian National University

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Columbia University

Rebecca Wanzo, Washington University in St. Louis

Vol. 35 No. 1, Spring 2023

vii L eece Lee-Oliver and Xamuel Bañales, guest editors Editorial Introduction On Decolonial Feminisms: Engagement, Practice, Action

1 Delaney R. Olmo Trapped Between Colonial Legacies Watching Knotted Mirrors Unravel

Participation, Poetics, and Resistance

5 Mary Roaf Breakdowns to Breakthroughs: Participating in a Decolonial Black Feminism Program

19 Heather Montes Ireland Decolonization is Imminent: Notes on Boricua Feminism

31 Stephany Bravo and Yomaira C. Figueroa-Vásquez Re ections: On Strike MoMA, Caribe Fractal and Decolonial Feminisms as Political Arts Practice

48 Harleen Kaur, Katie Byrd, Nadia R. Davis, Taylor M. Williams Small Revolutions: Methodologies of Black Feminist Consciousness-Raising and the Politics of Ordinary Resistance

Indigeneity, Reclamation, Knowledge, Self-Determination

72 Hannah Blackwell Finding Nvnih Waiya: Re ections of an Indigenous Scholar

74 A shley Cordes and Micah Huff

Decolonial Feminist Storying on the Coquille River: A Digital Humanities Approach to Human and Non-human Communication

and Prevention of the Fall Chinook Salmon Extinction

98 Luhui Whitebear

Resisting the Settler Gaze: California Indigenous Feminisms

118 Su sy Zepeda

Xicana/x Indígena Futures: Re-rooting through Traditional Medicines

Decolonial Transgressions and Agency

134 Rawiyah Tariq NO

136 Annie Isabel Fukushima

A Multiplicity of Selves-in-Coalition: A Decolonial Feminist Witnessing Through Autoethnography

153 Victoria Bañales Body Parts

156 X amuel Bañales

A Conversation with Favianna Rodriguez: World-Making through Decolonial Feminist Artivism

Interventions, Structural Change, and Creative Praxes

197 L eilani Sabzalian, Michelle M. Jacob, and Roshelle Weiser-Nieto Resurgent Education as Decolonial Feminist Praxis

223 Ba o Lo

Anti-Asian Violence and Abolition Feminism as Asian American Feminist Praxis

242 Joanna Beltrán Girón

State Disappearances in the United States: A Decolonial Feminist Analysis About the Enactment of State Terror on Undocumented Immigrants by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)

270 Marcelle Maese

Lxs Caravanerxs and Nonsecular Protest: Rethinking Migrant Family Separation with Un llanto colectivo

295 Brenda Quezada Birth of the Universe

Editorial Introduction

On Decolonial Feminisms: Engagement, Practice, and Action

Leece Lee-Oliver and Xamuel Bañales, guest editors

This special issue of Feminist Formations, “On Decolonial Feminisms: Engagement, Practice, and Action,” brings together a contemporary, broad, and multivariate collection of decolonial feminist visions and expressions that build on critical knowledges, engage in social change, and offer pathways to forge futurities. The essays in the special issue elucidate current socio-political contexts locally, nationally, and around the planet, interrogate the entrenchments of structural inequities that bear their marks particularly on marginalized communities, and address current struggles for social change and liberation. The pieces demonstrate what decolonial feminist praxes look like in the imaginary and on the ground, in our lives, movements, and society. The issue has been carefully curated to explore a cosmos of feminist social justice modalities that vary in place, form, and expression, but share purpose in decolonization/decoloniality. The term “decolonial” has been central in critical conversations and spaces that have long trajectories in many parts of the planet, but particularly in the geographical area of the Americas or Turtle Island and Abya Ayala. In recent times, the term “decolonial,” and variants like “decolonize” and “decoloniality,” have gained increasing traction in academic spaces, activist movements, and social media. The visibility of these terms creates new opportunities to build upon the momentum of the times and explore decolonial feminist work today. In our commitment to this work, we are grounded in two scholarly frameworks as points of departure: (1) theories of coloniality/modernity emergent in Latin America that are used widely to examine coloniality of power through gender, heterosexualism, and racial formations; and (2) women of color feminisms in the United States that respond to the impact and simultaneity of oppressive systems through scholarship, coalition, and creative action. We embrace the contributions here as acts of decoloniality. That is, feminist praxes that: 1) identify, deconstruct, and transform ideologies of human difference, inferiority/ superiority, subordination/domination between colonized peoples and colonizing nations; 2) recognize and make visible where, when, and how coloniality

suppresses the living universe as necessarily under the power, domination, and surveillance of colonizing and imperialist gures; and 3) recollect, reclaim, and re-authorize the truth, dignity, and epistemologies of all life forms, seen and unseen.

One goal of “On Decolonial Feminisms: Engagement, Practice, and Action” is to amplify decolonial feminist actions that are situated in scholarly activism and social justice movements in—but not limited to—the United States. Since the United States occupies a crucial role in reproducing and maintaining coloniality, the special issue provides opportunities to see how decolonial feminists challenge critical power structures and create other possibilities. Another goal is to present abundant voices, heterogeneous movements, and theoretical inquiries that imagine life systems extricated from the legacies of colonialism, violence, and exclusion. Finally, we are grateful that the special issue can af rm and encourage readers to continue doing the dif cult work of decolonial feminism in varying modes and multiple spaces. Given the present socio-political context that includes war, destruction, and so much hate, perhaps inspiration can lead to an expansion of generative collective horizons.

We organized “On Decolonial Feminisms: Engagement, Practice, and Action” during an intensi ed time of resurging white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, and the coloniality of power. Complicated by the emergence of Covid-19, isolation and exposure to failing social systems inspired us to place attention on strategies that inspire hope and healing while providing insights for social change. In the midst of ongoing disrespect for liberation, we took note of increasing and unapologetic state violence and oppression, including: the persistence of femicide in North and South America, particularly of women, girls, and trans folk in Native American and Indigenous communities and families; anti-Blackness that sustains the vulnerability, invisibility, and precarity of Black people’s lives; the sterilization, erasure, and hiding of emigrant women and girls of color incarcerated by ICE; rampant anti-Asian rhetoric, hate, and violence, evident in the Atlanta, Georgia spa shooting in 2021; and the push of politicians and others to limit, control, or discipline the bodies and subjectivities of people who are feminine, trans, queer, non-conforming, non-binary, non-normative, racialized, undocumented, living in poverty, neurodivergent, and/or with disabilities. We bore witness to many progenitors of coloniality, like those in positions of power who used legal systems to marginalize people using religious freedom as a foil. Motivated by contemporary activism for justice, we nd hope, purpose, and alignment with Jîna Amini protests and social movements, such as #LandBack, Black Lives Matter, #SayHerName, #MMIWR, and #MeToo. Thus, the special issue simultaneously highlights and is grounded by the ways in which diverse networks, community-based projects, and public protests call local and global players into discussion, action, and social change. Fortunately, there are geopolitical and intellectual genealogies within decolonial feminist methods and modalities that create space and opportunities for

On Decolonial Feminisms: Engagement, Practice, and Action ·

bearing witness, forming alliances, and strategically harnessing political energies to bridge solidarities, amass technologies, and transcend heteropatriarchal, racist, capitalist systems of oppression. The special issue moves through topics that give traction to such participation, poetics, and/or resistance as in the works of Mary Roaf’s “Breakdowns to Breakthroughs: Participating in a Decolonial Black Feminism Program,” Heather Montes Ireland’s “Decolonization is Imminent: Notes on Boricua Feminism,” Stephany Bravo and Yomaira C. Figueroa-Vásquez’s “Re ections: On Strike MoMA, Caribe Fractal and Decolonial Feminisms as Political Arts Practice,” and Harleen Kuar, Katie Byrd, Nadia R. Davis, Taylor M. Williams’ “Small Revolutions: Methodologies of Black Feminist ConsciousnessRaising and the Politics of Ordinary Resistance.”

In addition, we center Native American and Indigenous decolonial feminists who reclaim knowledge and self-determination. Diverse approaches to these themes include Ashley Cordes and Micah Huff’s “Decolonial Feminist Storying on the Coquille River: A Digital Humanities Approach to Human and Non-human Communication and Prevention of the Fall Chinook Salmon Extinction,” Susy Zepeda’s “Xicana/x Indígena Futures: Re-rooting through Traditional Medicines,” and Luhui Whitebear’s “Resisting the Settler Gaze: California Indigenous Feminisms.” As we look to structures of oppression, several essays interrogate and offer decolonial feminist social justice modalities for change, such as Bao Lo’s “Anti-Asian Violence and Abolition Feminism as Asian American Feminist Praxis,” Joanna Beltrán Girón’s “State Disappearances in the United States: A Decolonial Feminist Analysis About the Enactment of State Terror on Undocumented Immigrants by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE),” Leilani Sabzalian, Michelle M. Jacob, and Roshelle WeiserNieto’s “Resurgent Education as Decolonial Feminist Praxis,” and Marcelle Maese’s “Lxs Caravanerxs and Nonsecular Protest: Rethinking Migrant Family Separation with Un llanto colectivo.”

The creative essays, poetry, and art herein offer subtle and electrifying engagements to confront the dulling effects of coloniality and explore the possibilities of decolonial pleasure, erotics, and joy. We invite you to pause and meditate on the transgressive work and creative erotics of Annie Isabel Fukushima in “A Multiplicity of Selves-in-Coalition: A Decolonial Feminist Witnessing Through Autoethnography” and Xamuel Bañales’ “A Conversation with Favianna Rodriguez: World-Making through Decolonial Feminist Artivism.” We nd thought-provoking opportunities in the illuminating poetry of Delaney R. Olmo, Victoria Bañales, Rawiyah Tariq, Hannah Blackwell, and Brenda Quezada. Finally, we call your attention to the cover piece by Victor Manuel Escoto Sánchez entitled “Decolonial Feminisms,” whose dark and bright colors illustrate ancestral forces that activate creative, intellectual, and political energies into action, movement, and power.

As editors, we nd solace, comradeship, and comfort in this project. The culmination of the special issue grows out of our decolonial feminist friendship

and politics that came together when we met as graduate students over a decade ago in a course on decolonial theories and philosophies. Committed to decolonial feminist practices of collaboration, we have ebbed and owed together since then, discussing political concerns, sharing intuitive insights, and building upon each other’s liberatory work and praxes. This collection of decolonial feminist works is de ned by actions against any one or number of the myriad entrapments of the state, imperialism, and white supremacy, including authoritarian feminism that suppresses peoples’ bodies, minds, and spirits. In many ways, the special issue is a continuance of the self-determination of our elders, teachers, and movements.

In this spirit, we thank all contributors who offered a glimpse into or treatise on their engagement, praxes, and actions. We are grateful for the conversations that they generate, the spatial analytics they provide, their embrace of transdisciplinarity and the tools that inspire, transform, or build upon decolonial feminism ideals, dreams, and futurities. “On Decolonial Feminisms: Engagement, Practice, and Action” is decolonial feminist work that aims to “undo” the logic of coloniality with the intention of moving society towards liberation and sovereignty. Scholars, protectors, culture bearers, artists, poets, and activists take readers on critical journeys by examining how decolonial feminism operates within, or disentangles from, enduring technologies of western colonialism and imperialism, often exposing the ssures that impact futurity. We invite you to travel through the special issue and to go beyond epistemological, ontological, and transnational borders to imagine and shape new horizons grounded in transformative knowings of decolonial love, joy, pleasure, healing, action, and possibility.

Leece Lee-Oliver (Blackfeet/Choctaw) is an associate professor of American Indian Studies and Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies, and Director of American Indian Studies at California State University, Fresno. Lee-Oliver completed her doctorate degree from UC Berkeley and has authored essays on Native American, Indigenous, Third World and Transnational feminist responses to national policies and ideologies that pose challenges to sovereignty, safety, and security. Her community work engages Native American cultural bearers and urban Indian efforts to protect sovereignty and navigate anti-“Indian” violence today.

Xamuel Bañales is an associate professor and former chair of the Ethnic Studies Department at California State University, Stanislaus. Bañales completed their doctorate degree from UC Berkeley and has authored essays in many critical anthologies and journals, including Ethnic Studies Review; Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies; Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society; The Bilingual Review/Revista Bilingüe; and North American Congress on Latin America.

Trapped Between Colonial Legacies

Delaney R. Olmo

Remember ancient blue lace agate sky

Beneath howlite nestled fog branches, Etched inside earth’s perennial body.

Surrendering to night

blooming jasmine

Raindrops covering doe eyes

Emerging cradled woodland

carrying these ancestral terrains

©2023 Feminist Formations, Vol. 35 No. 1 (Spring) pp. 1–4

onto our backs,

Each time you struggle you must remember. Honoring the people and what remains, inside this resistance. Following the lulled humming

and shell covered rattlers

striking against beaded wrists decorated orbiting binary stars, Our ancestors’

mahogany skin

Sustains with us, luminescent alternating—wind still existing.

Watching Knotted Mirrors Unravel

When we nally arrive. We inherit language and stories beneath our borrowed skin and Teeth. Devote them to the keepers of embryo and womb, appoint history as a screwed frame

To widen the path for the keepers and dreamers, our hair is rooted ever growth nested willow reed.

When we speak our language, an ancestral star will echo our names. The way the morning sun

can recognize fragments. The way this lineage can teach us to wear our sea like rare velvet.

Insert our voices as sanctuaries. The knot of a proud lion, scattering eternal red ashes.

Delaney Olmo explores dreams, colonial legacies, intergenerational trauma, and the subconscious mind in her work. In her free time, she enjoys baking sweets and doll collecting.

Breakdowns to Breakthroughs: Participating in a Decolonial Black Feminism Program

Mary Roaf

This essay highlights my rst-hand experiences as a participant in the 2019 Black Transnational Decolonial Feminism summer program in Brazil. Grounding the article in critical scholarship—including Black feminist thought and decolonial feminism—I explore, re ect upon, and examine key challenges and possibilities that emerged in the program. I am interested in contributing to fostering transnational, Black feminist solidarity and forging connections across lines of contention.

Keywords: Black feminism / Decolonial feminism / Transnational feminism

My silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you. But for every real word spoken, for every attempt I had ever made to speak those truths for which I am still seeking, I had made contact with other women while we examined the words to t a world in which we all believed, bridging our differences.

—Audre Lorde, The Cancer Journals

Introduction: Diasporic Coalition and Solidarity

I had the privilege of attending the third annual Decolonial Black Feminism Summer School program. The Center of Study and Investigation for Decolonial Dialogues hosted the program in Cachoeira, Brazil, which took place from July 28 to August 2, 2019 (Center of Study and Investigation for Decolonial Dialogues).

©2023 Feminist Formations, Vol. 35 No. 1 (Spring) pp. 5–17

I was excited to participate in this program since it aligned with my research interests on Black feminism (Roaf 2023), and it provided the opportunity to connect to a cohort of students, scholars, and community-based activists. In particular, I was inspired to share the space with diasporic Black feminists in the country with the largest number of people of African descent outside of Africa (Schwarz and Starling 2019). However, I did not expect to encounter the tensions that began between participants and the organizing institute prior to arriving in Brazil, eventually erupting into full-blown con icts during the program. These challenging and, at times, problematic interactions among participants revealed the ways in which race, class, gender, and nationality divisions appeared within the collective.

Thus, this exploratory essay is about my journey participating in the third annual Decolonial Black Feminism program. First, I discuss my scholarly framework that engages with Black feminist thought, decolonial feminisms, Indigenous feminisms, and Black feminist approaches in anthropology. I proceed by providing the social context of the Black decolonial feminism program as well as general information about its structure. Thereafter, I highlight challenging issues that arose through the program and the productive outcomes that emerged as a result. I’m interested in exploring the barriers involved in fostering transnational, Black feminist co-solidarity in the program, and I see this essay as a contribution to forging connections across lines of contentions that occurred.

Black (and) Decolonial Feminisms

My essay draws upon Black feminist scholarship and praxis. One central component of Black feminisms is the way in which Black women have contested gendered, racialized, and class oppression in the US at least since the 17th century (Collins 1999; Davis 1981; Giddings, 1984; Gross & Raimey 2020; Harris-Perry 2011; hooks 1984; McGuire 2010; Robnett 2000; Smith 1994; White 1999). For example, freedom ghters, such as Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman (Dunbar 2019; Painter 1997), demonstrated Black feminisms on the ground that challenged multiple oppressions. The Combahee River Collective describes these “systems of interlocking oppressions” in the following way: “The most general statement of our politics at the present time would be that we are actively committed to struggling against racial, sexual, heterosexual, and class oppression, as seen as our particular task the development of integrated analysis and practice based upon the fact that the major systems of oppression are ‘interlocking’” (Combahee River Collective 1986, 1).

Sociologist and critical race scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the term intersectionality in 1989 to elucidate the 400 years-long institutional and legal forms of discrimination stemming from race, gender, and class that impact Black women (Crenshaw 1991). In doing so, she called attention to the interstitial elements distinguishing Black feminist activism as simultaneously countering

gender, class, and racialized norms. Finally, contemporary expressions of Black feminisms are evident in social movements like #MeToo and #MuteRKelly (Lukose 2018; Roaf 2023).

I am also in conversation with decolonial feminisms, which emerges in Latin America (Lugones 2007 and 2010; Velez 2019; Pitts, Ortega, and Medina 2020; Espinosa-Miñoso, Lugones, and Maldonado-Torres 2021) and is entangled with US women of color thought, speci cally Black and Latinx feminisms (Velez 2019). In the seminal essay “Toward a Decolonial Feminism,” María Lugones draws from women of color feminisms at the same time she moves away from this framework. Instead, she focuses on the coloniality of gender in the Americas and the colonially constructed categories of gender, race, and sexuality to offer a decolonial feminism: “I propose the modern, colonial, gender system as a lens through which to theorize further the oppressive logic of colonial modernity, its use of hierarchical dichotomies and categorical logic. I want to emphasize categorical, dichotomous, hierarchical logic as central to modern, colonial capitalist thinking about race, gender, and sexuality” (Lugones 2010, 742). A contribution of this framework is that it does not take the category of “woman” for granted but, instead, identi es colonizing categorizations and oppressions that must be grappled with, interrogated, and transgressed to build more transformative coalitions across colonial difference.

Emma D. Velez (2019) provides a critical reading of Lugones’s engagement with intersectionality theory. Velez argues that, in Lugones’s linguistic critique of intersectionality (the essentializing and separable assumptions in categories like “woman” or “race”), she “unwittingly distances herself from theories of intersectionality and, in so doing, also the intellectual labor of Black feminists” (Velez 2019, 392– 93). However, Velez nds value in Lugones’s theories in that, “decolonial feminism reorients our feminist practices of resistance towards the possibility of generating liberatory worlds for women of color by working to dismantle categorical logics with the aim of transforming their very meanings” (Velez 2019, 400).

Indigenous feminisms also provide an integral frame of reference within decolonial, transnational feminist perspectives. Decolonial critique necessitates the recognition of long-standing Indigenous resistance to the continued occupation of ancestral lands and exploitation of resources, and there are efforts to address the omission of Indigenous feminisms in the transnational space. For example, as part of the inaugural Transnational Feminisms Summer Institute held at the Ohio State University in July of 2014 (Leong et al 2015; Blackwell, Briggs, and Chiu 2015), scholars organized a roundtable that addressed “the absence of Indigenous feminisms from feminist discussions of the transnational, even though many Indigenous nations in the Americas are themselves traversed by settler colonial nation-states. . . .” (Aikau et al 2015, 84).

In addition, the institute included a roundtable that addressed the limitations and possibilities of transnational feminism. As part of the discussion,

scholar activist Maylei Blackwell shared her experiences, insights, and analyses from her work supporting Indigenous Mexican women activists in a movement to garner sovereignty over the resources of their ancestral lands (Blackwell, Briggs, and Chiu 2015). This highlights a key principle of Indigenous feminisms that addresses larger, transnational issues of poverty, marginalization, and state violence within localized contexts. Thus, decolonial feminisms also demands to challenge (settler) colonialism and heteropatriarchy (Arvin, Tuck, and Morril 2013).

I am interested in grounding Black feminisms in dialogue with lived experience and coalitional politics rooted in the loving relationship between women of color (Alarcón et al 2020: x). At the same time, I emphasize synthesizing analysis with practice that connects Black feminisms with María Lugones’s conceptualization of decolonial feminism, and the ways in which both frameworks inform and expand each other. By combining intersectionality with decolonial feminism’s targeting of “categorical” logic of the coloniality of gender helps to create an opening to render the structures of power and oppression visible. As such, a Black decolonial feminism can provide the possibility to contest the material impact of oppression on Black women’s lives, while also dismantling colonial categories to further create liberatory ways of knowing and being (Lugones 2010).

When I attended the Decolonial Black Feminism program, I did not go with the intention of conducting research or writing a scholarly publication. However, upon completion of the program, I realized that I could contribute to shedding light on coalition-building within a transnational context by writing an essay about my experience. Given that I re ect upon my involvement in the program through participant observation, my approach is grounded in Black feminist and decolonial methods in anthropology (Harrison 1991; Williams 2014). Erica Lorraine Williams’s application of a Black feminist anthropological lens to her advocacy with and research on sex workers in Brazil is useful: “Tensions around issues of race, gender, class, sexuality, and nationality surfaced not only among my research interlocuters, but also in ways that implicated my own identity… My engagement with these issues draws inspiration from the intervention of Black feminist approaches to anthropology, which highlight self-re exivity as an important strategy for ethnographic writing” (Williams 2014, 216 –218). As much as the complex or con ictual politics of race, class, gender, and nationality played out during the Decolonial Black Feminism program, I’m also implicated through my participation.

My self-re ectivity is part of an autoethnographic approach that foregrounds a critical lens, alongside an introspective and outward one, to make sense of who we are in the context of our cultural communities (Boylorn and Orbe 2014). That is, critical auto ethnography is a method that allows for personal and cultural critique. I utilize this approach due to my positioning as both participant and observer that blurred the boundaries between “subject”

and “researcher.” In addition, critical autoethnography is useful for centering lived experiences and problematizing colonialist epistemological concepts of what constitutes “valid” research and data. Finally, this method facilitates the “. . . blending of cultural and interpersonal experience of everyday interactions with others, intersectional components of identity, and the critical treatment of autoethnography as a method” (Boylorn and Orbe 2014, 15).

My goal is to contribute to the evolving conceptualization of Black decolonial feminism by sharing my experiences, observations, and insights from participating in the third annual Decolonial Black Feminism program. My positioning as a Black woman and Ethnic Studies scholar from the US in the context of Brazil allowed me to recognize and experience Blackness in marked and unmarked ways that a context of differing hierarchies of class, nationality, heteronormativity, and colorism shapes. By doing so, I bore witness to the “colonial wounds” within myself and others, formed connections across lines of difference, and forged a common ground based on identifying multiple, shared oppressions (Anzaldúa 1987; Lugones 2010; Mignolo and Vazquez 2013; Lopez 2018). Coalitional and solidarity work is a tradition in women of color organizing (Ordona 1994; Lugones 2003) and, although this type of work is dif cult and messy, it is also where we may dream and enact new horizons with decolonial love and joy (Negrón-Muntaner 2020; Sandoval 2000).

Decolonial Black Feminism Program

The Center of Study and Investigation for Decolonial Dialogues hosted the program in Cachoeira, Brazil, which is a small, historic, colonial town about 73 miles from Salvador, the capital city of the state of Bahia, located in the northeast region of the country. Cachoeira was intentionally chosen due to its long history and legacy as a center of Afro-Brazilian cultural, political, and economic signi cance (Center of Study and Investigation for Decolonial Dialogues). Cachoeira is a historically Black city that was the site of colonization and enslavement with an emphasis on sugar cane cultivation, which was central to Brazil’s colonial economy from the early 16th to late 19th centuries (Schwarz and Starling 2019; Skidmore 1999). Perhaps more importantly, Cachoeira is the site of three major uprisings launched by enslaved Africans between 1807 to 1835 and a historic maroon society comprised of escaped Africans, or quilombo (see Farfán-Santos 2016). In fact, Africans in Cachoeira spearheaded the rst of at least 10 revolts in Bahia during the 1820s (Reis 1988). Cachoeira has many houses of Candomblé—an African diasporic syncretic religion (Rodrigues de Souza 2020)—and has one of the oldest Catholic Sisterhoods of Black women in the world called Irmandade da Boa Morte (Smith 2002; Irmandade da Boa Morte), which was established in the 19th century to support manumission of family members and offer funerals to the enslaved community (Center of Study and Investigation for Decolonial Dialogues).

The Decolonial Black Feminism program included a cohort of 45 students from various parts of the world, including the US, the U.K., the Caribbean, and Europe, and 25 from Brazil (Center of Study and Investigation for Decolonial Dialogues). The program aimed to provide an immersive experience where participants could connect with the local context, practices, and people. One of the most important components of the program for me was that participants stayed in local accommodations as roommates close to the center where daily lectures and small group activities took place. Additionally, some roommates were matched by countries and linguistic backgrounds, and this provided a holistic experience in which participants not only learned together, but also ate, explored the city, and lived with each other.

The program’s instructional design and delivery consisted of whole-group lectures during the mornings, a break for lunch, and small-group discussions during the afternoons. For example, on July 28, 2019, the program began with Dr. Conceição Evaristo (literafro: portal da literatura afro-brasileira) addressing 70 program participants and 430 attendees as the lecture was open to the public. Guest faculty instructors came from the US, Mexico, and different parts of Brazil, and alternated lectures in English, Spanish, and Portuguese. These faculty also facilitated additional learning experiences for participants by conducting visits to landmarks of Afro-Brazilian signi cance in Cachoeira. An important element of the program was that the organizers invited participants to form groups. The goal of the groups would be for participants to share ideas and create presentations to contribute to a collective understanding of transnational decolonial Black feminism, enhancing the collaborative nature of our collective theorizing.

The program invited the participants to know a “different world” and learn about one another’s cultural differences (Center of Study and Investigation for Decolonial). I welcomed the opportunity to connect with African diasporic women, which included those from primarily English-speaking countries and Latin America. This meant speaking Spanish with my Colombian roommate and spending a lot of time socializing with her and Brazilian program participants who conducted their lively conversations exclusively in Portuguese. This decentering of English as the default lingua franca extended to the lectures. Program organizers provided headphones for live translations into languages spoken by participants.

The program structure of conducting whole group lectures in a large room, followed by smaller group discussions in breakout rooms created a balanced way to process scholarship and to re ect on how it applied to our speci c geographic locations and roles as academics or community-based activists. I found that participating in small group conversations enhanced the connections with other participants in personal ways. I was thrilled to be in a transnational space with Black feminist scholars and activists who were interested in participating and engaging in exciting dialogues around decoloniality because such spaces

are very rare in the context of where I live and work in the Central Valley of California (Gilmore and Gilmore 2003). However, challenges soon emerged throughout the program that created breakdowns among participants. In fact, it soon became evident that the issues were the result of ssures that existed long before the program even began.

Tensions and Breakdowns

Prior to the start of the program, there were email exchanges between participants. The program had provided the email addresses of participants to introduce ourselves. One signi cant source of tension was when participants expressed upset and disappointment to nd out that Angela Y. Davis (Davis 1981), who had spoken at the rst Decolonial Black Feminism program of 2017, would not be a guest faculty instructor, as the advertisement for the 2019 program led many to believe. Participants asserted that this information was false and had been intentionally disseminated to increase enrollment. In fact, a disgruntled participant expressed her disappointment during the opening address on July 28, 2019, upon learning that Angela Y. Davis would not attend the program. The next day, some participants stated that this person had returned home. A second con ict that involved attendees from the US was when they learned that their charges for tuition and lodging fees had been increased to cover the cost of Brazilian participants. Program organizers had not communicated this vital piece of information until members had paid these expenses along with travel costs. Many of the American attendees who were graduate students and community-based activists had created Go Fund Me accounts and other fundraising methods to nance their program-related expenses. As such, they objected to the inability to make an informed decision to also cover other attendees’ costs. As I observed these exchanges via email and during in-person conversations among participants, I recognized how colonial logic operated through the complex assumptions of those who were or were not considered economically privileged.

Other issues emerged during the remainder of the program. One challenge was that the program didn’t create a space for participants to position ourselves through the lens of power, privilege, and oppression based on our respective geopolitical contexts that we came from. Unfortunately, this void in uenced participants to create biases about one another based on looks, appearances, or assumptions. For example, given Brazil’s long history of complicated racialization that camou ages a deeply strati ed color-based hierarchy (Skidmore 1999; Jullié 2012; Schwarz and Starling 2019), there were complex and sometimes con ictual tensions among Afro-Brazilians and other participants, including non-Afro Brazilians and white-adjacent folks of other Latin American backgrounds. Finally, another problem came from dissatis ed participants of several regions of the world who found fault with the format of the daily whole-group

sessions. These sessions were held in a community/cultural center in which Brazilian, Mexican, and Caribbean guest faculty delivered traditional lectures in a large hall. These attendees critiqued the program in two ways. First, they did not agree with the lecture-style method and argued it was colonial for subscribing to a top-down delivery from “experts” that rendered participants as passive recipients, instead of as active agents engaging in an equal exchange of ideas and knowledge. As a result, this group petitioned the program organizers to replace a scheduled lecture by a guest faculty instructor in order to conduct their own presentation. Second, the dissatis ed group critiqued the physical layout of the large room in a colonial building. Speci cally, they disliked the auditorium style of the room comprised of nearly 200 xed seats that faced an open- oor space in front of the chairs with the one-way, didactic lecturing that took place during whole-group morning sessions.

While the insights of the dissatis ed group merited serious consideration and conversation, the delivery of their critiques and changes of the schedule failed to account for a critical positioning of the transnational hierarchy at play among members of the collective. This approach seemed presumptuous and contradictory since they overrode consensus from the rest of the group. Soliciting consensus, or at least an opportunity to discuss their concerns with the group without changing the schedule, would have been re ective of a more collaborative approach.

In addition, the dissatis ed group’s critique of the physical layout of the large room did not consider that the community center was the only facility in Cachoeira that could seat all the participants. As such, they did not consider the nancial constraints implicated with hosting the program in a small, Brazilian town with limited resources. By the end of their comments, all the Brazilian participants left the room and congregated in the outside hallway. Many of them were crying and comforting each other due to feeling personally attacked as de cient hosts who had provided an unsatisfactory physical location. A scholar based in the US who grew up in the Caribbean tearfully explained that the community center was the best that the program could offer due to limited resources and a proliferation of colonial-era buildings. She continued to explain that she had also undergone a similar educational experience due to growing up on a small, colonized island that did not have the resources to invest in cutting-edge, innovative architecture and design. This breakdown seemed like a missed opportunity to have a critical conversation between those who occupy marginalized statuses within their home countries while acknowledging their privilege in relation to fellow Black participants from the Global South.

Transformative Lessons: Breakthroughs

The challenges in the Decolonial Black Feminism program led to several breakthroughs. On a personal level, the critical dialogues that took place during

the program not only further developed my critical awareness by which to understand and question Blackness in the US in relation/comparison to other contexts but also enhanced my appreciation of rich and complex Afro-Brazilian histories, social justice activism, and cultural arts (Cavalcanti 2018; Jullié 2012; Reis 1988). Having the program in the predominantly African descent town of Cachoiera allowed participants to visit key historic and contemporary sites of Black resistance. For example, meeting with one of the members of the Sisterhood of the Good Death and attending a celebration with dance, song, and food at an Afro-Brazilian community organization enriched my understanding and appreciation of the strength and beauty of this centurieslong-heritage, bringing participants closer to building solidarity and sharing in decolonial love and joy.

In addition, the program brought together African descent women from all over the diaspora enabled participants to connect intimately within formal and informal contexts, and the layered dynamic between participants of the Global North and South reminded me of the dif cult but necessary work that’s required to create bridges across transnational borders. I often witnessed or grasped various insights from a range of perspectives by engaging with participants from the Global South, which included listening to the criticisms of non-US attendees during private conversations. For example, I connected with a participant who was half African and half European, and a young scholar of Caribbean background. Both lamented about feeling invisible and pushed to the margins by a binary focus on Brazilians and Americans. They believed that this attention devolved into a bifurcation of perspectives in which Americans imposed an imperialistic, hegemonic worldview onto the whole-group discussions. It reminded me of Chandra Mohanty’s groundbreaking essay (Mohanty 1984) where she argues that Western feminism scholarship reduces women in the third world as an unnuanced, homogenous group. Such experiences expanded my deep grasp of the nuances inherent in building substantive relationships across lines of race, gender, class, and nationality, which further enhanced the value of cultivating decolonial feminist co-solidarity.

Last but not least, some of the most important breakthroughs occurred when participants engaged in reparative and transformative discussions that would lay the groundwork for critical presentations that groups delivered at the end of the program. To elaborate, when addressing our shared challenges with gender-based and state-sanctioned violence and poverty, these groups highlighted the need for future program to integrate critical topics, such as pleasure activism, queer and trans color of critique, and transnational solidarity (see Brown 2019; Ferguson 2004; Salem 2019; Snorton 2017). I contemplated how future programs could more intentionally incorporate Indigenous theories, scholars, and community-based activists and participants to further enact decolonial feminisms. Regardless, the cooperative work at the end of the program powerfully illustrated how the participants contributed substantive theoretical

and praxis-based elements to the collective experience, which helped to expand our understanding of decolonial Black feminisms.

Conclusion: Forging Black Decolonial Feminist Pathways

As the title of the Decolonial Black Feminism program suggests, decolonial and Black feminisms merge. Although Black feminism might take certain subjectivity categories for granted, I don’t believe relying upon them is the end goal. Instead, it is through Black feminisms by which we can work towards decolonial feminisms to create new horizons beyond the coloniality of gender. While I recognize that coalitionary and solidarity work entails some degree of turmoil and con ict, I also propose a response to María Lugones’s questions of: “How do we learn about each other? How do we do it without harming each other but with the courage to take up a weaving of the everyday that may reveal deep betrayals?” (Lugones 2010, 755). I suggest to those who participate in critical spaces to consider entering them with mindful and intentional ways, with a vision toward understanding and transcending colonizing limitations. Furthermore, I believe it’s important to critically examine and ascertain our aspirations and objectives in relation to participants’ varying education/learning journeys, experiences, and praxis, as an answer to Lugones’s speci c question of “with whom do we do this work?” (Lugones 2010, 755).

I recognize the potential pitfalls of replicating the very structures and processes we seek to eradicate through gatekeeping in often elitist, arbitrary ways. The ip side of this conundrum, however, lies in imposing a super cial, non-critical, neoliberal inclusivity approach that can undermine or even derail nuanced and complex coalition-building. The Decolonial Black Feminism program invoked Lugones’s exhortation to problematize the colonial constructions of gender from the vantage point of lived experiences. Although the participants came from a wide range of socioeconomic backgrounds, gender identities, sexual orientations, and nationalities, the program culminated in a breakthrough of openness, receptivity, and collaboration on personal and collective levels. In this light, the program helped to forge decolonial Black feminist pathways to further coalition, solidarity, and liberation.

Mary Roaf is the 2022–23 Interim Chair of the Department of Ethnic Studies at California State University-Stanislaus. Mary’s research, teaching and social justice activism addresses interlocking oppressions of race, class, and gender. Speci cally, her research addresses dismantling the “school to prison” pipeline and building upon her work on Black decolonial feminisms after participating in the 2019 Black Decolonial Transnational Feminism Program in Cachoeira, Brazil. Dr. Roaf’s commitment to exemplary decolonial pedagogy garnered her the Elizabeth Papageorge Faculty Award in Teaching for the 2020 –21 year. Dr. Roaf will also participate as a Fulbright Fellow in the Fulbright-Hays General Study Abroad program in South Africa during the 2023 summer.

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Decolonization is Imminent: Notes on Boricua Feminism

Heather Montes Ireland

In Rican feminist thought, decolonizing is not merely an approach, method, or exercise, but an ongoing way of life. From Puerto Rican nationalist Lolita Lebron’s cry that she “came to die for Puerto Rico” to the signal from Boricua author Elizabet Velasquez that “staying alive, well, that too is Puerto Rican history,” Rican women have long struggled, resisted, and endured against colonial time. This “ongoing performance of bodily endurance” (Sandra Ruiz, 2019) under US colonialism, most recently marked by Maria, economic violence, the coronavirus pandemic, and femicide is a decolonial yearning, documented in the cultural work of Boricua women writers, artists, and activists. Boricua feminist thought, however, is largely absent in the academic feminist canon. In this paper, I argue Boricua feminism is not often interpolated as feminism since it does not resemble the expected, and particularly, Western, view of feminism as “women’s struggles against men and patriarchy,” though multiple patriarchies hinder the lives of Puerto Rican women and gender minorities. Rather, anticolonialism is at the forefront of Boricua feminist and queer struggles and subjectivities, yet is dislocated by these same lenses, and interpellated as not properly endemic to gender and sexual identity formations. Yet Boricua feminism is vital to decolonial feminist imaginings.

Keywords: Anticolonial / Boricua / Decolonial / Feminism / Puerto Rican / Queer

and that ever since Mami moved to New York

she’s spent her life just trying to survive the day.

©2023 Feminist Formations, Vol. 35 No. 1 (Spring) pp. 18 –29

& if you think about it, really think about it, staying alive, well, that too is Puerto Rican history.

—Elisabet Velasquez, When We Make It (318)

In demanding space within the future, I also ask Latinx studies to continue remarking its spots, even if such markers land us on X. As a via negativa through the living death of colonialism, Ricanness is an intersubjective relational type of dreaming of an otherwise.

—Sandra Ruiz, Ricanness: Enduring Time in Anticolonial Performance (29)

Puerto Rican independence ghter and revolutionary Lolita Lebrón stormed the US capitol in 1954. She aimed her gun not to shoot anyone, but at the housetop, where the sound of shots rang out from above the congressional chamber. Then she famously cried, “Viva Puerto Rico Libre!” while she and three other independence-movement comrades unfurled the Puerto Rican ag, the beloved and once outlawed emblem of a colonized people,1 to display boldly in the very seat of US empire. When apprehended, Lebrón was asked why she participated in the shooting. Lebrón stated that she did not come to kill anyone, rather she “came to die for Puerto Rico,” her homeland. Dressed rather ceremoniously in heels, a skirt suit, and pearl earrings, she was anticipating her own death, offering up her life in the ght for her people’s liberation and for her own freedom from colonial subjectivity in this life.

Though Lebrón’s actions were framed as an act of unjusti ed terrorism and feminized madness by United States imperialists, news media, and others sympathetic to US colonial pursuits, Puerto Rican studies scholar Sandra Ruiz (2019) disrupts these framings to expose how instead this act of de ance “shakes the very leveling ground of democracy, gender, race, sexuality and humanity [. . .] to transcend unsovereign oppression” (39). As Ruiz notes, Lebrón came to the capitol without harmful intent, “but to free herself of colonial domination” (35). Ruiz’s re-reading of Lolita Lebrón’s anti-colonial, revolutionary performance magni es the offering of her life as a colonial subject as that “prime example of those contingencies between death, colonial pathology, liberation politics, gender performance, and bodily endurance, as they sit at the center of Ricanness” (38). Lebrón and her death drive, according to Ruiz, is an act of a feminist revolutionary dealing a blow to the seat of US colonial power.

I begin with the story of Lolita Lebrón, one of the most revered Puerto Rican anti-colonial revolutionaries, and Ruiz’s re-reading, to illustrate the ways in which Puerto Rican feminism takes shape beyond the bounds of Western feminist interpolation. Throughout this essay, I argue that Puerto Rican feminist

thought, which I refer to as Boricua2 feminism, is not often interpolated as feminism when it does not resemble the expected, and perhaps moreover Western, view of feminism as women’s struggles against men, sexism, and patriarchy— although multiple patriarchies hinder the lives of Puerto Rican women and other gender minorities, and critiques of patriarchy are certainly vital to Boricua feminism. Rather, as anticolonialism is so often at the forefront of Boricua feminist and queer subjectivities, it is dislocated by these markers and indexed as not properly endemic to gender and sexual identity. Yet coloniality has been, and remains, pervasive in structuring gender and sexual formations, underlining, as critical Indigenous studies scholar Joanne Barker (2017) writes, “the importance of a critical address to the politics of gender, sexuality, and feminism within how sovereignty and self-determination is imagined, represented, and exercised” (7). Decolonization that does not account for the colonial gender/sex system will not serve the Puerto Rican women in the colony and throughout the diaspora who have long struggled, resisted, and endured against heteropatriarchy and/in colonial time. This “ongoing performance of bodily endurance” (Ruiz, 2019) under US colonialism, most recently marked by Hurricane Maria and other disasters,3 the coronavirus pandemic, austerity, privatization, economic violence, and femicide, is a decolonial yearning documented in the cultural work of Boricua feminist writers, artists, and activists. As Carmen Lugo-Lugo (2010) writes, “Puerto Rican women writers constantly reveal in their works the hidden connections between feminism and Puerto Ricanness” (118). Whether illuminated in poetry, prose, literature, and other cultural works, or through anti-colonial action and independence efforts, Puerto Rican feminists have exposed the speci c struggles of gendered colonial subjugation.

Boricua feminism further resists any misconceptions that coloniality is a thing of the past. As colonialism is a persistent and ongoing regime, it is a present reality in the lives of Puerto Rican women, gender-expansive, trans, and queer people. Nor is it solely a state of mind, but rather points to decolonization as an urgent, daily, embodied struggle. Bianca Graulau (2022), an independent Puerto Rican reporter and truth-teller, describes by video the experience of navigating colonial infrastructure amid consecutive climate disasters:

It’s day three without electricity in Puerto Rico, things in my fridge are starting to rot. [. . .] it’s too hot. I can’t turn on a fan; there’s no running water so going to the bathroom is a hassle. Can’t cook. And it reminds me of an interview I did after Hurricane Maria where someone said, “We’re used to not having these basic services at times, but when it’s everything all at once, your life and your day becomes about surviving.” [. .] People here are expected to afford their already costly lives, and on top of that, afford generators, the fuel for the generators, water reserves . . and, also, take these constant losses; there are people in the South [of the island] right now that lost everything.

In her video, “Sólo el pueblo salva al pueblo” (“Only the people can save the people”), Graulau further highlights the work of Puerto Rican community groups creating “community kitchens to feed their neighbors, handing out solar lamps [. . .] out of love.” It is this form of anticolonial love, creativity, and persistence that sustains the life of Boricuas in the colony, while colonial power produces conditions amenable to death and loss.

I contend that decolonizing is not merely an approach, method, or selfcontained exercise in Puerto Rican feminist thought, but an ongoing way of living, existing, persisting, and theorizing anti-colonial not-yet-futures. Decolonizing is not metaphorical4 (Tuck and Wang 2012) in Boricua feminist contexts, but rather is an embodied persistence and pressing-on, an imagining and enacting decolonization in circadian rhythms. Here, I point to decolonization within Puerto Rican feminist contexts, speci cally the ways Boricua feminism insists that decolonization happen now and in the not-yet-but-imminent decolonial future. The Puerto Rican queer and trans decolonial project Center for Embodied Pedagogy and Action [Descoloniza PR] (CEPA) explains that, for the colonial subject, decolonization “is a process that begins as a personal questioning of one’s conditioning (what we value, how we learn) and ends with the autonomy of our lands. Our body is the rst territory we can decolonize” (Rosario and Pat). Decolonization is a set of collective and individual embodied practices and theories within Boricua feminism that destabilize every facet of colonial power.5

Boricua Feminism’s Decolonial Critiques

Boricua feminism is vital to anti-colonial feminist struggles and decolonial imaginings. Boricua feminist thought, however, is largely absent in the academic feminist canon and has not been institutionalized along with Chicana/Latina studies, though Puerto Rican feminists have been writing for decades both alongside other feminists of color and within a Puerto Rican anticolonial literary tradition historically.6 While there is certainly much to offer decolonial feminist formations through questions of de-canonization itself, the absence of Boricua thought is glaring. These works are both there, and not there, as Puerto Rican feminists are always, already writing from places deeply attentive to overlapping issues of power and coloniality, gender and sexuality, race, geopolitics, and capitalism in generative ways that should inform feminist decolonial knowledges.7 According to Lugo-Lugo, Puerto Rican feminist writers “re ect the status of the island and the effects such status has on them as writers and as women” (110). And she says further: “In fact, these women are writing from overlapping subordinate positions, as women and as colonial subjects, where they experience a double dose of silencing and double invisibility. Moreover, it is also important to talk about the economic positioning of the island globally, the repercussions of such positioning for women on the island, and the ways in which contemporary women writers document this positioning in their works”

(2010, 110). Lugo-Lugo points out that the subjugation of Rican gendered colonial subjectivity is dually implicated, and as colonized women, an experience and critique of the “overlapping subordination” of colonialism and patriarchy is germane to Rican feminist theorizing. Yet, she also gestures to the ways the very silencing of colonial subjects through the colonial relation itself may also function in the suppression of Rican feminist thought. Perhaps it may be posed that if the subaltern is speaking, yet no one is listening, how might the condition of coloniality reify a silence around, and the abjection of, Puerto Rican feminist theories and subjectivities.

Puerto Rican feminist theory and cultural work is perhaps, as I have asserted, not always interpolated as feminism because of the centrality of colonialism to Puerto Rican subject formations, and similarly, there may also be ways that interpretations of coloniality and decoloniality operate to cover the revolutionary anticolonial8 imaginings of Boricua feminists. In this way, how we conceive of the colonial and decolonization will also change what is revealed. The anticolonial impulse is, as Torres writes in her examination of queer Puerto Rican memoir, also bound up for multiply minoritized colonial subjects with other affects, like shame, that are produced of colonization. The decolonial endurance that Ruiz speaks of is also an awareness of how shame “implicitly and explicitly conditions the articulation of Puerto Rican identity” (2009, 84), and that this is manifest in the ways that “Puerto Ricans are placed in a context where we are perpetually responding to shame” of colonial domination and a history of often forced, mass migration to the US (2009, 85). This co-thinking of shame and colonization, rather than replicating the longstanding pathologization of colonial subjects, it is instead a way forward in understanding how colonialized people live under generations of oppressive conditions which produce speci c Puerto Rican gender, sexual, and material formations, and how we might understand these as anticolonial.

Boricua feminism also expands the category, and proper objects, of feminism in nuanced ways, underscoring the mutuality and co-constitution of colonialism and heteropatriarchy. El Comité de Mujeres Puertorriqueñas, centering anticolonial and independence struggles in their work, demonstrates how critiques of ongoing US colonialism as oppressive to women are distinctive to Boricua feminism. In the essay, “In the Belly of the Beast: Puertorriqueñas Challenging Colonialism,” El Comité writes:

Our work has at its roots the conviction that to address issues affecting Puerto Rican women, we must seriously and systematically challenge the colonial relationship of the United States with Puerto Rico. Our understanding of the exploitation and racism that result from this colonial relationship shapes our political development and our consciousness as oppressed women. The oppression faced by women both in Puerto Rico and in the United States is a direct consequence of the political, economic, and military interests of

the US government. There is an urgent need for other women living in the United States to grasp this understanding and to join us in the struggle. (125)

Writing, as they also note, in a broader Latin American revolutionary anticolonial tradition, this Puerto Rican feminist collective explains the simultaneity of colonial, racial, and gender oppression for Puerto Rican women. In so doing, they call for US feminists to recognize, or “grasp,” not only their struggles as women under colonialism but, indeed, the struggle against US colonial rule and imperialism as a feminist struggle.

In their statement, El Comité also call upon an anticolonial feminist genealogy which includes writers and activists Luisa Capetillo, Julia de Burgos, and Lolita Lebrón—Puerto Rican women who have been “active voices in the national struggle against US presence and control in Puerto Rico” (131). In their expansive notion of feminism, they express and theorize how colonialism is responsible for the oppression of women, a paradigm that can be found articulated in the work of other Puerto Rican women writers as well. “Even though Puerto Rican women are in a precarious predicament vis-à-vis politics and the economy,” as Lugo-Lugo notes, “they have been active challengers of their unequal status, always resisting the structures that contribute to their subordination” (103) through writing, activism, and cultural work.

This distinctive Boricua feminist theorizing is also demonstrated in diasporic social and racial justice movements of Puerto Rican women in the US mainland, and as I would suggest, in the documents of the Young Lords movement. Puerto Rican women in the movement placed a critique of heteropatriarchy prominently in the organization’s 13-Point Program and Platform from its rst draft in October 1969, as they understood a uniquely gendered, colonial, and racial struggle from the very inception of the movement. Then, between the time of the original statement and the revised November 1970 platform, Puerto Rican women’s issues took an even greater prominence in the mission of the Young Lords organization, with the addition of this statement:

WE WANT EQUALITY FOR WOMEN, DOWN WITH MACHISMO AND MALE CHAUVINISM.

Under capitalism, women have been oppressed by both society and our men. The doctrine of machismo has been used by men to take out their frustration on wives, sisters, mothers, and children. Men must ght along with sisters in the struggle for economic and social equality and must recognize that sisters make up over half of the revolutionary army; sisters and brothers are equal ghting for our people.

FORWARD SISTERS IN THE STRUGGLE!

The focus of Boricua feminist activists and writers has linked colonialism, capitalism, imperialism, economic justice, with gender and racial injustices.

To further distinguish the Puerto Rican feminist tradition within a broader Latina feminist body of work, requires us to look for the “multiple insurgencies”

that Chicana historian Maylei Blackwell (2015) articulates, and to recognize the ways that colonialism has been and remains a gendered and sexual project. In Irene Vilar’s memoir Impossible Motherhood: Testimony of an Abortion Addict, she writes of sexuality, multiple pregnancies, abortions, and intergenerational trauma. For Vilar, the granddaughter of Lolita Lebrón, whose own mother died by suicide when she was only eight years old, colonialism is a main point of contention in her book as she discusses how frequently she sought abortion care, beginning when she moves to the United States as a teen. In a relationship with a man much her senior, she diverges from a neoliberal feminist narrative of individualized, private matters of reproductive choice to situate her story in the context of American imperialist exploitation of Puerto Rico, the intergenerational shame of gendered colonialism, reproductive injustice, bodily sovereignty, and the manifestation of layered forms of oppression against Puerto Rican women.

Colonialism and Boricua Queer Thought

Boricua feminist thought is also distinct from, though closely connected to, other Latina feminist traditions and theorizing. Examples of this are particularly salient in the contributions of Chicana work around sexuality, such as Chicana lesbian/queer feminist writings, as compared with Puerto Rican queer scholarship and cultural production. As Lourdes Torres (2009) points out, “a proliferation of writings by Latina lesbians has theorized issues of intersectionality; however, missing still are the voices and analyses of Puerto Rican lesbians who articulate the speci city of Puerto Rican gender, sexual, racial, national, and class dynamics similarly to the way that writers such as Moraga and Anzaldúa and others have done for the Chicana lesbian experience” (84), particularly as we think, theorize, and teach in the interdiscipline of feminist, gender, and sexuality studies.

Sexuality and queerness have operated as generative categories of analysis within Latina feminist formations. Chicana feminists have theorized sexuality in their work in dynamic ways.9 Queer Chicana writers, like Anzaldúa and Moraga, confront the pain of being marked an outsider to one’s nation as a Chicana lesbian subject. Chicana lesbian feminist thinkers have resisted the conventions of patriarchy as earlier Chicana feminists, while also railing against the nationalist constructions of the patriarchal family and the ways Chicana lesbians were seen as betraying the heteropatriarchal family. Where Anzaldúa (2012) writes of a queer borderlands consciousness that is developed from geopolitical and psychic borderlands, queer Puerto Rican lmmaker and scholar Frances NegrónMuntaner portrays the transformation into queer consciousness, simultaneously sexual and diasporic, of the Puerto Rican lesbian in her lm, Brincando el Charco: Portrait of a Puerto Rican (1994). In an experimental mix of documentary and archival footage, ctional story, and soap opera-style vignettes, the lm tells the

story of Claudia, a light-skinned Puerto Rican woman and visual artist living in the United States. Negrón-Muntaner describes Claudia’s search for community and identity as a diasporic, queer Puerto Rican: “[h]ence what forces Claudia into a diasporic condition is [what] seemingly proves her the worst of the worst, a lover of women. La más mala” (516; emphasis in the original).10 She continues, describing Claudia’s queerness as exceeding the prevailing Western notions of the gay coming-out story: “Brincando el Charco is the rst narrative lm to have created a space for lesbian subjectivity in Puerto Rican cinema. Yet this subjectivity is not narrated as self-generating. Instead, it is radically impure and repeatedly fails to look at itself in a mirror and joyously exclaim, ‘It’s me! I’m out!’ Quite the contrary” (Negrón-Muntaner, 513). Where Chicana lesbians have been ostracized, seen as vendidas and traitors to the race and to family, Riqueña queer women have been propelled out of the homeland, as sexiles,11 to become diasporic subjects as have many other Puerto Ricans before. This Rican queer identity formation bares the shame of multiple expulsions, as queer and colonial subject.

A scene from Brincando al Charco: Portrait of a Puerto Rican (1994) illustrates how colonialism is often at the forefront of Boricua queer struggles and identity formations, and how this interferes with the ways they are expected to de ne their sexual identities:

The protagonist of the lm, Claudia, is talking on the phone with her editor: [Claudia is in the dark room, exposing photographs, the phone rings, and she moves to pick it up]

Editor: Claudia, you know I’m really committed to increasing the visibility of gays and lesbians of color. And I truly like some of your stuff . . .

Claudia: But . . . ?

Editor: Well . . . well, the problem is if your genuinely interested in marketing yourself as a Latina lesbian artist, you’re just going to have to have to let go of certain issues.

Claudia: Like . . . ?

Editor: Well, for example: I can tell you that my readers are not concerned about colonialism. Unless, of course, they’re interested in the political implications of S&M relationships.

Claudia: [Frustratedly] What?

Editor: [Scoffs] Alright. This, this is exactly what I mean. I don’t know why you would start your book with an image of a seemingly straight man, carrying an American ag. What does that have to do with you as a lesbian? [Cuts to a screen with the question, what does that have to do with you as a lesbian?, repeated in white writing on a dark screen.]

Puerto Rican feminism and queerness must be understood as cohering around anti-colonialism, such that colonial oppression is theorized and understood as a racialized heteropatriarchal project.

Latina feminist philosopher Maria Lugones (2007) has explained how colonialism gave rise to a modern/colonial gender system, with attendant social and racial identities that permeate our lived existences, with a colonial state built as a power structure that created hierarchicalized gendered categories, upheld by heteropatriarchy, as a tool of social control. And as “gender itself is a colonial introduction” (Lugones 2008), and Puerto Rican feminisms, derived from the experiences and the enduring struggles of colonized women and gender/sexual minorities, are erupting from that place of enduring under gendered colonialism and bringing the anti-colonial into existence. As Lugones also cautions, this again does not intend to convey a move “to add a gendered reading and a racial reading to the already understood colonial relations” as she “proposed a rereading of modern capitalist colonial modernity itself” as a radical decolonial (re)arrangement of understood social power relations.

Analysis and issues of sexuality have also been pivotal to the composition of Latina feminisms broadly and are key, as well, to decolonial feminist formations.12 Today, queer Latin@ critique is emerging as a strong successor to these discourses and interventions. Conceivably, queer Latin@ studies will help shape the future of Boricua feminism, as well. In queer of color critique, the role of colonialism as shaping gender, sexual, and racial formations and systems is now a distinctive feature of the eld and a key intervention. Yet, this intervention has not necessarily been integrated wholly within feminist, gender, and sexuality studies and theories. Ruiz reminds us, though, that Ricans are still enduring, bringing an anti-colonial futurity into the present moment, and well as the notyet-here, despite the present moment that “is a site of terror for queer, Brown, minoritarian, colonized, Rican subjects” who are queerly situated while “engulfed by heteronormative strategies run by colonization, racialization, and sexualization” (29). As Ricans endure (under) colonial time, temporality is remade as “queer ways of being-in-the-world disorganize and reorient heteronormative ways of existence” (28). This reading reminds us that through Rican anti/decolonial and queer feminism and cultural work, decolonization is here, though it is notyet-now, it is imminent. It is in the “refuge” found in the “resilient dreaming” of Boricua feminists, along with and perhaps beyond the pain of now, as “time and its anxious residue sit at the very interior of queerness” (Ruiz 2019, 28). I offer these notes as a way of thinking about Boricua feminism and decoloniality. And with the traces of theorizing “from the glum reality of the present in a hopeful stance toward something better,” as Ruiz (2019, 29) remarks on the work of Jose Esteban Muñoz, it is with this moment’s hope that conversations on decolonial feminism will eventually always include the existence and theorizing of the colonial “unwanted being[s],” Puerto Ricans, enduring (anti)colonial time and creating our futures otherwise.13

Heather Montes Ireland (she/ella) is an assistant professor of Women’s and Gender Studies and is af liated faculty in the Critical Ethnic Studies Program and the

Department of Latin American and Latino Studies at DePaul University in Chicago. She is a queer CaliRican migrant to the Midwest, where she has lived for the past decade. Her research is focused on the interstices of racial capitalism, intersectional economic justice, anti-colonialism, poverty nance and welfare policy, and women of color studies. She is writing a monograph examining the cultural formation of entrepreneurialism as it has shaped anti-poverty policy, bearing consequences for the lives of low-income women of color in the United States and transnationally.

Notes

1. For approximately a decade beginning in 1948, Law 53: La Ley de la Mordaza or “Gag Law,” made it illegal to own or display the Puerto Rican ag, and to participate in independence activities.

2. Boricua is an anticolonial, de ant term for Puerto Rican people that expresses a uniquely Puerto Rican heritage, cultural identity, and relationship to the land and our ancestors pre-conquest. Derived from the Taíno word Boriken, this was the original name of the archipelago prior to the arrival of European settlers.

3. In September 2022, ten days post-Hurricane Fiona, hundreds of thousands in Puerto Rico are still without power, particularly in the south of the island. Five years after Hurricane Maria, Puerto Ricans living in the archipelago contend with daily power outages and the broken promises of the privatized power grid, LUMA Energy.

4. See Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang’s (2012) article for more on the topic of settler colonialism and a critique of decolonization as merely a metaphor for social justice. They write, “we want to be sure to clarify that decolonization is not a metaphor. When metaphor invades decolonization, it kills the very possibility of decolonization; it recenters whiteness, it resettles theory, it extends innocence to the settler, it entertains a settler future” (3).

5. Boricua feminist and queer decolonial practices are often manifested through creative ways of imagining a decolonial present and future otherwise. Practices include artistic and creative expressions, material and physical rhythms and bodywork, relationality with the land and food, Indigenous and African spiritual traditions, diasporic returns, political movements, communal care, pedagogical and theoretical insights, truth-telling, and many additional practices, in the archipelago and beyond.

6. Joanne Barker (2017) also describes how critical Indigenous studies has different origins from other ethnic studies, critical race, and diasporic studies elds, which “originated primarily with activists engaged in civil rights movements” (9) while Indigenous studies was concerned with “Indigenous peoples’ efforts to secure collective rights to sovereignty and self-determination [. . .]” (9). Learning from Barker, Puerto Rican studies’ central focus on the colonial condition crosses these intellectual and genealogical boundaries.

7. While Puerto Rico has imagined itself as a “racial democracy,” the legacies of colonialism and its highly strati ed Spanish racial categorization and “blood purity” ideations have bestowed the archipelago with a potent color caste system. Constructions of race and racism in the archipelago, and the Caribbean more broadly, have taken very different forms than in the United States with its policies of segregation, Jim Crow laws, and redlining, and therefore, US notions of race cannot be easily mapped onto a Puerto

Rican context. Additionally, many Puerto Ricans travel between the colony and the United States, which also impacts racial identity development. There is a robust body of scholarship on the politics of Puerto Rican race and ethnicity that is germane to my analysis here. For more on this topic, see Duany (2000), Negrón-Muntaner and Rivera (2007), and Rivera-Rideau (2015), among a growing body of literature.

8. As Ruiz makes clear, as we create paradigms and explicate de nitions, “[r]egardless of pre x, there is no get-away plan that erases the historical intensity and discursive practices of colonialism’s aggressive force” (2).

9. Chicana writers (Castillo; Lopez; Cisneros) have long theorized around sexuality, disrupting the iconography of Mexican/Latina womanhood as portrayed through the image of la Virgen de Guadalupe, for instance.

10. Negrón-Muntaner, Frances. “When I Was a Puerto Rican Lesbian: Meditations on Brincando El Charco: Portrait of a Puerto Rican.” GLQ New York. 5 (1999): 511–526.

11. See Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes “Queer Diasporas, Boricua Lives: A Meditation on Sexile” for a complete discussion of this queer Caribbean Latinx migrant formation.

12. Indeed, my hope is this essay will also open up space here to think/complicate the ways we conceptualize current forms of colonialism as extractive or settler, as technologies of current-day (extractive) colonialism, such as austerity policy and tax code, are producing colonial modes to approximate other forms of settler-colonialism (in places like Hawaii and Puerto Rico, as examples.) The Puerto Rican tax code at this time is designed to create what many Boricuas are calling “a Puerto Rico without Puerto Ricans,” encouraging and incentivizing wealthy settlers to purchase Puerto Rican land. This has created not only dispossession but entirely different ways of relating to the land, as Puerto Ricans see the land, such as beaches, as public, while colonial actors know only privatization and pro t.

13. This essay’s decolonial efforts to highlight Boricua feminism are also written with an aim to “open possibilities of political solidarity against US and Canadian [and European] imperialism and colonialism” with colonized islanders and Indigenous peoples inside of the Caribbean and South and Central America (as well as outside, including Native Hawaiians, Pasi ka peoples, Native Americans and American Indians; as this is by no means an exhaustive list) in the heterogenous, collective, feminist and queer decolonization.

References

Anzaldúa, Gloria. 2012. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books.

Asencio, Marysol. 2009. “Migrant Puerto Rican Lesbians Negotiating Gender, Sexuality, and Ethnonationality.” NWSA Journal 21, no. 3 (2009): 1–23. http://www.jstor .org/stable/20628192.

Barker, Joanne. 2017. “Critically Sovereign.” In Critically Sovereign: Indigenous Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies, edited by Joanne Barker, 1–44. Durham: Duke University Press.

Blackwell, Maylei. 2015. Chicana Power!: Contested Histories of Feminism in the Chicano Movement. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Duany, Jorge. 2000. “Neither White nor Black: The Politics of Race and Ethnicity

among Puerto Ricans on the Island and in the US Mainland.” Paper presented at the Conference on “The Meaning of Race and Blackness in the Americas: Contemporary Perspectives,” Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island, February 10 –12, 2000.

El Comite de Mujeres Puertorriqueñas. “In the Belly of the Beast: Puertorriqueñas Challenging Colonialism.” Eds. M Jacqui Alexander, et al. Sing, Whisper, Shout, Pray!: Feminist Visions for a Just World. Fort Bragg, CA: EdgeWork Books, 2003. Graulau, Bianca. “Puerto Rico Update: Sólo el pueblo Salva al Pueblo.” Tik Tok, @biancagralau, September 20, 2022. https://www.tiktok.com/@biancagraulau/video /7145527861150010670.

La Fountain-Stokes, Lawrence. 2008. “Queer Diasporas, Boricua Lives: A Meditation on Sexile,” Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas, 41:2, 294–301. doi: 10.1080/08905760802404259

Lugo-Lugo, Carmen R. 2010. “Writers of the Colony: Feminism via Puerto Ricanness in the Literature of Contemporary Women Authors on the Island.” Latino(a) Research Review. Vol. 7:3. Pp. 101–120.

Lugones, Maria. 2007. “Heterosexualism and the Colonial/Modern Gender System.” Hypatia 22, no. 1: 186 –209. http://muse.jhu.edu/article/206329.

———. 2008. “The Coloniality of Gender.” Worlds & Knowledges Otherwise, 2 (Spring), 1–17.

———. 2010. “Toward a Decolonial Feminism.” Hypatia, 25: 742–759. doi: 10.1111/j .1527-2001.2010.01137

Moraga, Cherie. 2005. Loving in the War Years: Lo que Nunca Pasó por Sus Labios. Cambridge, Mass: South End Press.

Negrón-Muntaner, Frances and Raquel Z. Rivera. 2007. “Reggaeton Nation.” NACLA Report on the Americas, 40:6,

Negrón-Muntaner, Frances, dir. 1994. Brincando El Charco: Portrait of a Puerto Rican. National Latino Communications Center; Independent Television Service. https:// www.wmm.com/catalog/ lm/brincando-el-charco/.

Negrón-Muntaner, Frances. 1999. “When I was a Puerto Rican Lesbian | Meditations on Brincando al Charco: Portrait of a Puerto Rican.” GLQ 5:4, 511–526.

Rosario, Melissa and Lau Pat. “CEPA Home: What Is CEPA?” Accessed September 20, 2022. https://www.decolonizepr.com/en/home [permalink https://perma.cc /FNS6–PEYJ].

Rivera-Rideau, Petra R. 2015 Remixing Reggaetón: The Cultural Politics of Race in Puerto Rico. Durham: Duke University Press.

Ruiz, Sandra. 2019. Ricanness: Enduring Time in Anticolonial Performance. New York: New York University Press.

Torres, Lourdes. 2009. “Queering Puerto Rican Women’s Narratives: Gaps and Silences in the Memoirs of Antonia Pantoja and Luisita López Torregrosa.” Meridians 9, no. 1 (2009): 83–112 http://www.jstor.org/stable/40338769

Tuck, Eve and K. Wayne Yang. 2012. “Decolonization is not a Metaphor.” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, Vol. 1, No. 1 (2012): 1–40.

Velasquez, Elisabet. 2021. When We Make It. New York: Dial Books Penguin Random House.

Re ections: On Strike MoMA, Caribe Fractal and Decolonial Feminisms as Political Arts Practice

Stephany Bravo and Yomaira C. Figueroa-Vásquez

This piece is an assemblage of two voices meditating on the Strike MoMA protests, the work of digital humanities/material project [Taller] Electric Marronage, and the ways that decolonial feminisms allows for a complex understanding of our roles and commitments to practices that span across and beyond western institutions (including museums and universities). By tracing these events and experiences through a decolonial feminist politic, we aim to render transparent the tangle of insurgency and complicity that we negotiate as Black/Latina scholars and organizers within dominating institutions. The essay further considers the content and context of the art exhibit “Caribe Fractal/Fractal Caribbean” by José Arturo Ballester Panelli and how fractality, ecology, and the sacred are linked to human living beyond capitalism and fragmentation. In the wake of the pandemic fractality, ecology, and the Sacred are tools for practicing intersubjectivity and relationality.

Keywords: Decolonial Feminisms / Fractality / Intersubjectivity / Pandemic / Relationality / Strike MoMA / [Taller] Electric Marronage / Visual art

Fractal 1: Introduction

On Friday June 4, 2021, members of [Taller] Electric Marronage were invited to share our work with the StrikeMOMA Working Group. Strike MoMA, a twophase, stakeholder-led decolonization process for MoMA without the authority of MoMA, consisted of orientations, training sessions, writing projects, public arts, campaigns, and protests.1 Additionally, Zoom sessions optimized reach for those unable to physically convene. On the ground and online, those who

©2023 Feminist Formations, Vol. 35 No. 1 (Spring) pp. 30 –46

joined the efforts of Strike MoMA learned about the museum’s board members and their “ties to war, racist prison and border enforcement systems, vulture fund exploitation, gentri cation and displacement of the poor, extractivism and environmental degradation, and patriarchal forms of violence” (StrikeMOMA Working Group, n.d.-b). Participation by those in attendance premised a larger understanding that both museums and universities are essential aspects in the civilizing discourses of colonial modernity and active participants in (re)producing the material structures of colonialism, that in turn, makes those of us who work within their walls complicit (StrikeMOMA Working Group, n.d.-a). Our work as scholars and as curators of Electric Marronage (a dual-university funded project) is contingent on nding ways to both escape from and work within institutions marred by histories of colonialism, exploitation, racism, and dispossession in order to subvert the historied co-optation and chicanery of higher learning institutions. What follows is a decolonial feminist re ection on the complicity of museums and universities in settler colonial and extractivist logics and actions, the work of Electric Marronage within these sites of violence and power, and an examination of the physical gallery exhibition and digital gallery exhibit we curated in 2020, “Caribe Fractal/Fractal Caribbean” and “En Tiempos de Pandemia/In Pandemic Times” by Afro-Puerto Rican photographer José Arturo Ballester Panelli.

Fractal 2: Electric Marronage

[Taller] Electric Marronge presents itself as a group of Black, brown, queer, writers, artists, and organizers. Its members, the electricians, have strategically taken it upon themselves to plot points across the escape matrix through petit marronage –stealing away on the electric platform in order to connect, abscond, and reveal.2

Established in 2018 and made public in 2020, the work produced through Electric Marronage occurs with the understanding that we are products of histories and infrastructures engulfed in violence from enslavement to genocide, those affected, speci cally Black and Indigenous peoples have not received their due reparations.3 Electric Marronage turns to the digital realm, brings together those at the underside of colonial modernity to engage in dialogue through workshops, conversations, and exhibitions which take seriously our collective lived realities in the making of liberatory futures. We are not without contradiction, as Electric Marronage opens a juncture in the digital realm, our host institutions continue to occupy Indigenous territory and dispossess Piscataway, Susquehannock, Ojibwe, Odawa, and Potawatomi peoples (Miner). As Nelson Maldonado-Torres remarked during the StrikeMOMA Working Group meeting, “some of us supporting the strike are curators or educators—scholars who work

in museums or universities—and I don’t think that we can so easily disentangle ourselves from extractivism and what it means” (StrikeMOMA Working Group, n.d.-a). We cannot fail to acknowledge or critique our institutions enduring and multifaceted ties to modernity’s agenda in the attack on Black and Indigenous life and this complicity is particularly profound in those individuals who fail to imagine or provide venues to live beyond modernity’s hold.

Pivotal to Electric Marronage’s decolonial turn is the powerful force of the imagination as we maneuver within sites of power, that is, we believe that decolonial reparations consists of responding to the insurgent calls for land back, the demands to repatriate stolen artifacts and remains, and the call to end the crisis of gender and sexual violence that disproportionately affects Indigenous women and girls. These actions are part of a material reparation and are essential to fueling a reparation of the imagination which entails “an ethical demand for decolonial love re/produced through technologies of relations across difference, and the labor of imagining other ways of being human in the modern/colonial and settler colonial world” (Figueroa-Vásquez 2020, 197). Electric Marronage comes to fruition through a reparation of the imagination fermented by electricians, descendants of those previously denied, arguably still denied existence in a profuse amount of systemic ways.4 Electricians carry their ancestral legacies of resistance and hash out strategies grounded in the labor of love across relations within and outside of the modern/colonial and settler colonial world. Electric Marronage is bound by four rules of fugitivity: escaping, stealing, feeling, and whatever. Marronage— ight from slavery and conscription for either brief or permanent periods of time—serves as our point of departure. Together, these rules and strategies guide us and help us conceptualize how to conjure and build upon the experiences of ancestors who resisted in an array of ways that have led to our ultimate existence.5

Guided by these rules and strategies leads us to the understanding that institutional access cannot be the endpoint if it leads solely to the perpetuation of colonial logics and practices. There are a few things that we have learned from our trajectories within institutions of power as we pay close attention to the path already paved by practitioners of decolonial thought. For one, Audre Lorde’s words illuminate the complexity of our roles as historically excluded individuals making our way into the master’s house, “For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change” (Lorde 1984, 112). The work produced within Electric Marronage is sustained by a group of Black (Caribbean and United States) and Latina women, with contributions from Asian, Arab, Paci c Islander, and Indigenous scholars, writers, and organizers. In short, Electric Marronage requires more than the tools and practices that the university offers to remain sustainable and have an impact. That which is required can be found in Laura E. Pérez’s (2010) decolonizing politic where those at the underside of colonial modernity bring forth categories

of “knowledge and existence” that were “previously unseen marginalized and stigmatized” –epistemologies pertinent in the survival of our lineage and kin. The taller is cognizant (as the name suggests) that organizing and having an impact must be premised on logics of resistance including theft and fugitivity.6 Across the digital humanities, Electric Marronage seeks to practice the interest of life beyond survival by accounting for old, hybrid, and emerging strategies inside and outside of academia. Electric Marronage recognizes that the tools that women of color need and rely on are not luxuries—we leave no stone unturned when it comes to imagining and building futures.

Fractal 3: “Caribe Fractal/Fractal Caribbean”

The question explicit in Strike MoMA remains: what does a postMoMA future look like? The answer is not universal and cannot be if we consider the histories and stakes that each individual has to bear. Nevertheless, it is our belief that even when hyper visible, the work spearheaded by women of color is not given enough credit. This is particularly true in academic settings where there is often a push for sheer novelty, systemic devaluation of women of color feminist thought, and a rush to jargon not of our own making that cannot begin to grasp possibilities of abundance and strategy that women of color bring to their works (Christian 1987; Dotson 2016). If we center decolonial feminist thought and praxis, then we would come to understand that the postMoMa future does not begin after a distant colonial temporal order, but rather can and does exist right alongside us. We are here because someone before us chose to believe beyond colonial con nement.

Through a reparation of the imagination, Electric Marronage has conceived of numerous projects that plot points across relations inherent in lived experiences and realities. One of those projects was the curation of “Caribe Fractal/ Fractal Caribbean” by José Arturo Ballester Panelli during the spring of 2020.7

“Caribe Fractal” is an ongoing project by Ballester Panelli, an Afro-Caribbean artist based in Puerto Rico.8 Ballester Panelli’s work explores the ties between Afro-Caribbean aesthetics, histories, ecological systems and its diasporas through a multimedia approach integrating installation, photography, digital design, video, and sound. Caribe Fractal, as theorized by author Mayra SantosFebres and Ballester Panelli is a way to think beyond colonial cartographies that imagine colonial subjects and geographies as fragmented.9

In her 2019 Womxn of Color Initiatives keynote at Michigan State University (MSU), Santos-Febres used some of Ballester Panneli’s images to discuss how Caribbean fractality is both a way to think and talk about ecology and Afro-syncretic spirituality. It is likewise a Caribbean philosophy and Afrodescendant philosophy that traverses ideas of contradiction as the only vehicle for movement or transformation. Instead, Caribbean fractality re ects “nature, social organization, and artistic expression” that is multiple, varied, and related

(Santos-Febre 2019). For Santos- Febres, the fractal Caribbean is part of a whole, a cosmology rooted in the most microscopic aspects of the land and its organisms as well as a way of seeing, being, and enacting a worldview that is insurgent and deeply embedded within Afro-Caribbean syncretic and Sacred cosmologies including Santería and Lucumí. Caribbean fractality can be understood as part of a decolonial feminist imperative to see communities, political practices, artistic endeavors, and other acts as complex, interrelated, and necessary parts of transformation at structural, personal, spiritual, or community levels.

Initially, “Caribe Fractal” at Michigan State University was to consist of an exhibition at the MSU Museum and a four-week residency by Ballester Panelli which would have resulted in arts seminars and classroom visits to various Ethnic Studies and Art, Art History, and Design courses on campus. Additionally, Ballester Panelli was scheduled to conduct talleres on photography and fractality with students and community members which would culminate in a pop-up exhibition of student and community works at the MSU Broad Art Lab during the closing reception. As originally conceived, “Caribe Fractal” at MSU would immediately follow groundwork in Puerto Rico where Ballester Panelli alongside professors Yomaira Figueroa-Vásquez and Estrella Torrez led the immersive experience of #ProyectoPalabrasPR (#PPPR).10 Working with Yagrumo Taller Experimental de Imágenes, #PPPR brought undergraduate and graduate students from MSU as well as third and fourth year students from Lansing’s Everett High School to Adjuntas and Santurce, Puerto Rico, for a communitybased study-away program during March 1– 8, 2020. The program’s goal was to foster an immersive program that attended to the learning of Puerto Rico’s culture, history, and politics through direct engagement with artists, organizers, and community activists. The second goal of #PPPR was to create an exchange, within two weeks of the students’ return to Michigan, we would host one or more of our artists, organizers, or activists to travel to MSU. This exchange would consist of a collaboratively designed paid residency that would act as a sustaining and reciprocal method of hosting, resource, and knowledge sharing.

Ballester Panelli was to be 2020 #PPPR exchange residency. However, on the last day of the #PPPR and Yagrumo Taller Experimental de Imágenes study-away program, MSU began procedures to return all its study-abroad and study-away students back to campus. Followed by an immediate lockdown, the COVID-19 pandemic was beginning to unfold in the United States. The rst case had arrived in Puerto Rico via a cruise ship on March 8th, the very same day that the students were boarding their ights to Michigan. On March 9th, as the university and the state began their unprecedented lockdown, FigueroaVásquez carried two large packages of 18"×18"×18" acrylic panels on her ight back to Michigan from Puerto Rico. The task was undertaken in efforts to ensure secure transportation of the delicate panels and to alleviate costs that would thereon be utilized for other community projects. During our separate returns to Michigan, we wouldn’t have fathomed the university’s refusal to provide an

alternative option for programming, the devastation on the horizon, or how the pandemic would impact our families and the communities to which we belonged. The precarity of Electric Marronage’s work through the university and warnings provided by Lorde, manifested themselves.

The Exhibit

In the face of the unprecedented effects of the pandemic, Electric Marronage reassessed the goals set in place and reimaged how this work could be shared amid a global pandemic. The transported 18"×18"×18" acrylic panels were safely tucked into a closet awaiting an installation date that would not come for months. On the surface, the transfer of the panels from the Caribbean to the Midwest documents the unrecorded labor undertaken by women of color who believe in the power of narratives as a transformative means towards survival across relations. This is particularly true when institutions begin to make cuts in programming that can be seen as vestibular to the epistemologies and priorities upheld by universities. However, the invisibilized efforts made by women of color demonstrates a breach, a crack in the order of things, and a refusal to

Figure I. José Arturo Ballester Panelli, From left to right: “Agua,” “Mercado,” and “Tierra,” Caribe Fractal, 2019.

acquiesce. The movement of bodies across waters detail forms of solidarities that are imbued by trust amongst kin. Fractality as a decolonial feminist imperative demonstrates practices of seeing and being, which generate grounding the selves in relations across difference. Forms of labor that occur outside of academic and cultural institutions underscore a commitment to artists’ practices, an appreciation of their material works summoned by devastation, and the epistemological shifts that their works cultivate and exchange through breaching and crossing.

The labor of love invigorated through Electric Marronage became especially crucial, in this case, during a pandemic that caused havoc on those historically excluded, marginalized, and ignored. These unrecorded acts culminate into the necessary ampli cation of powerful accounts of resistance that artists such as Ballester Panelli bring forth through their art. Furthermore, these acts allow audiences to have conversations about the status quo and tactics towards survival during a time when institutions delve into statistically understanding the unfolding pandemic through a static and limiting periphery interested in a “return to normal.” The inability of the ivory tower to promptly intervene during the pandemic ampli es how women of color have consistently returned to the work conducted on the ground—made paths across space and time to center on those who prove invaluable under the reckoning of catastrophe. Months later, when invited to participate in the conversations around the Strike MoMA, we considered the inextricable link between universities and museums as institutions that perpetuate settler colonial orders of knowledge and extraction. We re ected on our work in the gallery space at MSU in relation to a behemoth art institution like the MoMA. We thought about the ethics and practices that undergirded our work with Electric Marronage which were shaped by community, student, and fractal networks, and that of the MoMA as an extractivist and exclusionist institution. What could the MoMA become if it were to radically shift its modus operandi and attend to the histories, needs, and ethical demands of its community and those made most vulnerable by capitalist extraction and ongoing forms of dispossession and racism?

“Caribe Fractal” artworks exploring nature as a force of destruction, dispersal, and renewal in the Caribbean’s ongoing dialogue with climate change and ties to diaspora alongside Santos-Febres’ understanding of Caribbean fractality as a decolonial feminist imperative that sees transformative interconnectedness across structural, personal, spiritual or community levels demanded a radical turn. Electric Marronage served as a mediator to a world outside of the MoMA where we are unbound by the imperial nostalgia that demands capture and display.11

Electric Marronage, as digital current, traverses the physicality of the museum. The fractals are in conversation with Ballester Panelli’s extensive training, beginning from his childhood experiences at the age of eight where he playfully emulated his father’s photographic techniques in el campo to selftraining practices garnered through local artists and galleries (Ballester Panelli

2020). One practice in his self-training has remained a constant throughout the years and it’s centering quotidian items, paying close attention to the details and components that culminate in the essence of an item, always gauging the inner workings that are often taken for granted, but that ultimately inform ways of being. In “Caribe Fractal,” Ballester Panelli emphasizes the need to remain attentive to the smaller details found within the everyday (Ballester Panelli 2020). Looking for the patterns within the fractals that comprise “Caribe Fractal” forces audiences to explore larger signi cations and implications found within daily realities. When installed, the twelve acrylic panels, “Tierra” (18"×18"×18") and “Mercado” (36"×36"×36"), create a multilayered fractal work (See Figure 1 “Agua,” “Mercado,” and “Tierra”). “Tierra” and “Mercado” gesture to this practice of engaging with the quotidian, each of the twelve panels present a different photographic image which has been digitally enhanced and altered.

“Tierra,” for example, consists of six close-up images of vegetation native to Puerto Rico. These images are then recon gured as geometric patterns where the audience is forced to pay particular attention to the same image through a range of vantage points. Panels centering on the vegetation demand that those who are not natives to the area bear witness to an integral part of Puerto Rico’s ecosystems and expound on conversation dealing with disasters such as Hurricane María. Both “Tierra” and “Mercado” utilize the layering of panels, when positioned against light, the panels become translucent to the point that the six panels don’t solely have individual meaning but must be read in unison. Fractality here becomes porous with meaning, demanding that the audience make do with narratives of presumed fragmentation and ensuing un/cohesiveness. “Mercado” adds to the interpretation by foregrounding a scale as its front panel which poses questions on a deliberate tactic of balance, weight, surveillance, and mobility.

Additional fractals such as “Mariwo,” a 6'×6' photo on polyester (See Figure 2 “Mariwo”), demonstrates a mix of geometric patterns in various shades of green. Mariwo or mariô refers to the stalk of a dry palm leaf, its spiritual uses serve in the protection of spaces from negative energy and separator between worlds.12 Upon closer inspection, one can note that it is not a singular image, but that similarly to “Tierra” and “Mercado,” the original photograph has been digitally cropped and posed through various angles that mirror each other. The geometric patterns that surface demand that audiences remain attentive to a singular structure of the image through various angles, all while being aware that what is captured within the frame of the polyester does not depict the full scope of the mariwo –one must explore beyond the frame. Audiences are forced to simultaneously grapple with and maneuver between the visual and material implications of “Mariwo.” In the wake of disasters, we must contend with the survival of the Mariwo and the survival of the Puerto Rican diaspora in connection to the Caribbean and the world at large. “Tierra” exempli es fractality as a unison of forces meant to be categorized as opposite of each other, but that

complement each other and craft relations. “Mercado” adds to the conversation on fractality by gesturing towards practice, that is, the ability or inability of its audience to balance along the scales. “Mariwo” leaves the message clear, survival is fractal.

Fractal 4: Art in Pandemic Times

In the fall of 2020 Electric Marronage turned towards maroon logics and built on the lessons from the organizers and artists in Puerto Rico that have formulated auto-gestion and grassroots projects to bregar, or problem solve on the ground within colonial imperial contexts. At the university we engaged the digital when support diminished for our project, we utilized telecommunication

Figure 2. José Arturo Ballester Panelli, “Mariwo,” Caribe Fractal, 2019.

systems such as Zoom provided by the university to host a reception and curated a digital exhibition for “Caribe Fractal.” Following Electric Marronage’s rules of fugitivity: escaping, stealing, feeling, and whatever, proved crucial during the pandemic as we posed questions regarding dissemination and accessibility within the digital realm: “The digital—doing digital work—has created and facilitated insurgent and maroon knowledge creation within the ivory tower. It’s imperfect and it’s problematic—and we are all imperfect and problematic. But in that sense, I think the digital humanities, or doing digital work period, has helped people create maroon—free, black, liberatory, radical—spaces in the academy” (Dinsman 2016). Electric Marronage took on the digital, despite the boundaries and limitations. Centering “Caribe Fractal” provided both method and praxis within the digital realm, one that was in direct conversation with histories of dispossession globally. Fractals reminded us that geographies are not fragmented as the cartographies of modernity would like us to believe. Rather, like fractals, spaces and people collide. Through Electric Marronage’s rules of fugitivity, “Caribe Fractal” propelled itself as a counter to the digital which is sustained out of traditional notions grounded on binaries and codes. Fractals within the digital realm embedded the saliency of relations. The digital as a limited technology that has barriers to entry and is imperfect as a democratic platform, became a site of escape sustained through relations (Risam 2018). After the closure of the MSU Museum, Electric Marronage sought support from MSU’s Residential College in the Arts and Humanities (RCAH) LookOut! Gallery which showcases a compelling array of exhibits and programs centered on visiting and local artists, students, and community groups. In collaboration with the LookOut! Gallery, and its then director of exhibition spaces Tessa Paneth Polak and preparator Steven Baibak, we began to execute the material and digital exhibit. Not only were arrangements for the transportation of additional works made through these digital platforms, but without Ballester Panelli on campus to physically curate these items, calls were made to gather information on the signi cance of pieces and their placement. Once the pieces arrived at the gallery and were displayed, we contracted AbleEyes™, a platform for providing “visual, state of the art experiences/teaching tools to children and adults with disabilities.” Through AbleEyes™’ technology the visuals of “Caribe Fractal” were reproduced and uploaded to digital realm making the exhibit accessible for those with disabilities as well as those under stay-at-home orders worldwide.13 The digital exhibitions allowed individuals access to the art, the ability to shared experiences online, and build community. Audiences were able to make their way throughout the gallery while viewing Ballester Panelli’s work from any vantage point, even able to zoom in and receive a close-up of immaculate details. We then prepared a digital exhibit to accompany “Caribe Fractal” on the Electric Marronage website. This included a video interview with Ballester Panelli overlayed with fractal images as well as images that conjured

Figure 3. José Arturo Ballester Panelli, “Caribbean Flaming June,” En tiempos de pandemia, 2020.

the Afro-syncretic practice of Santería through images of plants, land, botanicas, and other sacred ephemera. Together, the digital exhibits from the LookOut! Gallery and the Electric Marronage website sutured two distinct and inextricable aspects of Caribbean fractality: ecology and the sacred.

In the six months that had passed since the pandemic had locked down cities, campuses, and nations, Ballester Panelli added other important elements to the exhibits, a project called “En tiempos de pandemia” (In Pandemic Times) which offered never before seen video footage of a Puerto Rico amid the pandemic. He utilized a camera drone to navigate various streets and shorelines focusing on populations that remained houseless, a critique on both the devastating aftermath of Hurricane María, the inept governmental response to the pandemic, and continual ood of tourism that brought with it a rise of COVID-19 cases.

As part of “En tiempos de pandemia,” Ballester Panelli worked with family and community members to prepare meals for those who were unhoused, what he called “fuera de la burbuja” (outside of the bubble). In doing so, he aimed to shed light on the way that those suffering with substance misuse, mental illness, and poverty were left outside of the relative safety of a home. In addition to preparing daily meals, Ballester Panelli engaged folks in conversation and saw them as valued and valuable community members and subjects for his art. He insisted that this sector of the community deserved faithful witnesses and, in his work, he made those usually the recipients of abject neglect into ethereal gures.14

The image “Caribbean Flaming June,” for example, is a photo of a houseless woman in Santurce, PR sleeping in a vestibule and wrapped in a sheet [See Figure 3 “Caribbean Flaming June”]. Ballester Panelli blurred the image forcing the viewer to look closer, to gaze upon the subject, and to focus on the survival of those living outside the safety of a home during a pandemic. Moreover, we see this “Caribbean Flaming June” image superimposed on a fractal image of the sea and she is surrounded with feathers, denoting ecology, the celestial, the sea, and adornment. This image, when rst exhibited, was printed onto a twin-size mattress, and leaned on the gallery wall, offering the viewer a way to contend with the layered signi cance of the materiality of the mattress and the visuality of attending to those who are most invisibilized, ignored, and devalued. Together “Tierra,” “Mercado,” “Mariwo,” and “Caribbean Flaming June” requires us to make do with histories of fractality, to learn from everyday surroundings and people by making connections that would otherwise be lost.

Fractal 5: Decolonial Feminisms, Reimagining Worlds/Otherwise

Decolonial feminisms, is an anchoring point for our work in organizing, curating, and coordinating transnational, hemispheric, and digital projects that

imagine beyond the limits and con nements of universities and institutions. While there are multiple and complex genealogies to decolonial thought and decolonial feminisms (Indigenous, Black, Caribbean, Chicana, Latin American, etc.), we nd it fruitful to see the linkages in how these political imperatives and intellectual traditions help us navigate and disentangle the matrices of Western and white supremacist understandings of being, knowing, humanity, and ecology, and arts practices. Our drive to create spaces for visual and other arts to thrive, is propelled by decolonial feminist ways of knowing and methods of subverting and expanding the cracks in the ongoing colonial projects that seek to invalidate the practices, arts, language, and knowledge of communities it deems as Anthropos, noncivilized, and fungible (Nishitani 2006). Decolonial feminist practices, ethics, and politics, thus, informs our work within and across community spaces and sustains us as we strike new paths that traverse hostile institutions, norms, and structures.

In the document “Framework and Terms for Struggle” produced by StrikeMOMA Working Group to guide those interested in learning or organizing, they state, “There is no blueprint for dismantling MoMA, but here is the starting point: whatever comes after MoMA, it must preserve and enhance the jobs of museum workers and enact reparative measures for communities harmed by the museum over time, beginning with the legacy of land dispossession. The agenda is open, but any path forward must be premised on the acknowledgement of debts owed: from top to bottom and horizontally too, between and within groups, communities, and movements.” “Caribe Fractal” as one of many points of departure across the digital realm envisioned and practiced by Electric Marronage allows us to contend with Strike MoMA’s call. “Caribe Fractal” as Electric Marronage’s rst exhibition held within the parameters of the land grab institution that is MSU was met with numerous hurdles that at the same time offered us room to imagine worlds/otherwise. Turning to the digital realm, with all its imperfections and barriers, crafted an agenda in conversation with Strike MoMA’s call to acknowledge the “debts owed” as individuals working within and outside of institutions that remain unaccountable.

Electric Marronage is not rid of critique. Electric Marronage is by no means an end. Electric Marronage is not the only way. What Electric Marronage does is pave another road for us to reimagine worlds, to build towards the future, to maintain hope and it works for the time being. Perhaps years from now Electric Marronage may cease to exist, possibly shifting into something anew or sunsetting altogether, but from it there will always be a group of women of color and the digital kinship that they created throughout talks, workshops, blogs, and curations which will remain ever-envisioning the worlds/otherwise we need.

Stephany Bravo is a dual doctoral candidate in English and Chicano/Latino Studies at Michigan State University. Her transdisciplinary research documents how

BI&POC in present-day Compton, California account for their lived realities through poetry, murals, archives and other ephemera. Stephany serves as the Project Manager for the Open Boat Lab which mediates curation, storytelling, and community organizing development in the Diaspora Solidarities Lab.

Yomaira C. Figueroa-Vásquez is an Afro-Puerto Rican writer, teacher, and scholar from Hoboken, NJ. She is Associate Professor of English at Michigan State University and the author of Decolonizing Diasporas: Radical Mappings of Afro-Atlantic Literature (Northwestern, 2020) and the forthcoming The Survival of a People (Duke University Press). Her published work can be found in Hypatia, Decolonization, CENTRO, Small Axe, Frontiers, Hispano lia, Contemporânea, Post 45 Contemporaries, SX Salon, and other scholarly journals and public forums. She is a founder of the MSU Womxn of Color Initiative, #ProyectoPalabrasPR, the Mentoring Underrepresented Students in English recruitment program (MUSE), and the DH project Electric Marronage. Dr. Figueroa is a 2015–2017 Duke University SITPA Fellow, a 2017–2018 Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow, a 2021–2022 Cornell University Society for the Humanities Fellow and the PI of the Mellon Diaspora Solidarities Lab (www.dslprojects.org).

Notes

1. Phase one laid the groundwork for phase two where a spokescouncil-based convening determined the shape, steps, and mechanics of a just transition to a postMoMA future that prioritized its workers and communities. See StrikeMOMA Working Group. “Framework and Terms for Struggle.” StrikeMOMA Working Group of the International Imagination of Anti-National Anti-Imperialist Feelings (IIAAF). Accessed December 7, 2021. https://www.strikemoma.org/.

2. [Taller] Electric Marronage. “About.” Accessed December 7, 2021. https://www .electricmarronage.com/

3. We do not understand African-descended peoples and Indigenous peoples as mutually exclusive groups. We recognize and af rm Indigenous sovereignty, the rights of Indigenous African peoples, and the lives and legacies of Afro-Indigenous-descended peoples.

4. Electricians refers to the group of individuals behind Electric Marronage, they also refer to themselves as kin.

5. Electric Marronage takes its heed from within the matrix of histories of maroonage and cimarronaje across the Caribbean and the Americas. The word marrón is derived from the “New World” Spanish word “cimarrón” which was rst used to describe livestock that had escaped into the hills, or cimas, in Caribbean colonies. Marronage includes distinct and interrelated histories of Black and Indigenous ight from colonial and settler plantations in both temporary and permanent instantiations (petit and grand marronage). In some cases, permanent secluded communities were created such as Palenques and Quilombos (Brazil and Colombia) and in all cases maroons were disruptive of colonial and imperial projects that sought to make subjects and slaves out

of Africans and Afrlo-Indigenous peoples. While the histories of palenques, quilombos, and marronage is fraught with both internal and external tensions, the acts of marronage are rooted in forms of self-determination, liberation, and providing protection, resources, and sustenance for one’s chosen communities. Attending to practices of marronage likewise allows us to attend to logics of worlds/otherwise, that counter the limited and limiting worldviews of the modern/colonial enterprise and instead attend to alternative practices and desires rooted in decolonizing and liberatory ways of being and knowing that extend through interrelationality and reciprocity.

6. Taller is one Spanish word for workshop. In Puerto Rico and its diaspora, a taller can range from an artist or community space to an auto repair or teaching space. Talleres are inherently collaborative and community oriented and have been used as a way to denote insurgent spaces as well as grassroots efforts. The founders of [Taller] Electric Marronage, both Black Puerto Rican feminists, take up the term taller as a way to open up possibilities of collaboration beyond the academy and in relation to local, hemispheric, and transnational communities to which they are accountable.

7. José Arturo Ballester Panelli is an Afro-Caribbean artist based in Puerto Rico. His work explores the ties between photography, Afro Caribbean aesthetics, history, and the racial, social and ecological systems in the Caribbean and its diasporas.

8. Caribe Fractal is one of many curations, workshops, and dialogues curated through Electric Marronage that attend to insurgent decolonial and Black feminist politics, practices, and ethical imperatives.

9. “Fractals” are a method that are also part of what adrienne maree brown calls “emergent strategy” of organizing along the grain of Black feminist speculative praxis and entails understanding how “complex systems and patterns arise out of a multiplicity of relatively simple interactions.” See: brown, adrienne maree. “Fractals.” Accessed February 21, 2022. http://adriennemareebrown.net/tag/fractal/.

10. #ProyectoPalabrasPR (#PPPR) is a “radical hurricane recovery project” in partnership with Salon Literario Festival de la Palabra. Immediately after Hurricane María, a women of color collective emerged on the island and worked alongside diaspora with the intention to serve as a collaborating partner after disaster, their efforts ranged, but were not limited to the areas of fundraising and documentation through testimonio.

11. Rosaldo, Renato. Culture & Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1993).

12. Rodriguez, Claudia. “¿Qué es el Mariwo? El que separa los mundos espirituales.” Ashé. https://ashepamicuba.com/mariwo-santeria/. Accessed January 17, 2023

13. AbleEyes provides a user-friendly platform to teach skills and explore environments from several different perspectives. It is designed with disabled users in mind, including wheelchair users, those with autism, ADHD, the elderly, victims of trauma, those with anxiety, the hearing impaired, and those with post-traumatic stress disorder. It is also local to the Greater Lansing area, allowing us to work closely with and be accountable to a community-based organization in our area. See: Able Eyes. “Mission Statement.” Accessed December 10, 2021 https://www.ableeyes.org/

14. Ballester Panelli’s twenty plus years of work as an artist, designer, and teacher is personal and political. Having lost his job and home after Hurricane María in 2017, he went to the neighboring island of St. John and helped with rebuilding efforts. In doing so he recentered himself within his lived experience growing up in the mountains

Stephany Bravo and Yomaira C. Figueroa-Vásquez · 45

of Adjuntas and his positionality as a “jibaro” (i.e.- man of the mountains in Taino language) an act that helped him reconceptualize his art and life as countering colonialisms claim to death and destruction. Ballester Panelli, José Arturo. “Ballesta 9.”

Accessed December 10, 2021. http://www.ballesta9.com/.

References

Able Eyes. “Mission Statement.” Accessed December 10, 2021. https://www.ableeyes.org/.

Ballester Panelli, José Arturo. “Ballesta 9.” Accessed December 10, 2021. http://www .ballesta9.com/.

Ballester Panelli, José Arturo. “Caribe Fractal, Fractal Caribbean.” Residential College in the Arts and Humanities (RCAH) at Michigan State University, LookOut! Gallery. Accessed December 9, 2021. https://rcah.msu.edu/uniquely-rcah/lookout /Ballester-2020-Exhibit.html.

Ballester Panelli, José Arturo. 2020. “José Arturo Ballester Panelli Entrevista.” By Maya Santos-Febres, Sept. 28, 2020, video, 12:26, https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=InlPJxmTbQQ.

brown, adrienne maree. “Fractals.” Accessed February 21, 2022. http://adriennemaree brown.net/tag/fractal/

Christian, Barbara. 1987. “The Race for Theory.” Cultural Critique (6): 51– 63. https:// doi.org /10 2307/1354255

Dinsman, Melissa. 2016. “The Digital in the Humanities: An Interview with Jessica Johnson,” Los Angeles Review of Books, July 23, 2016, https://lareviewof books.org /article/digital-humanities-interview-jessica-marie-johnson/

Dotson, Kristie. 2016. “Between Rocks and Hard Places: Introducing Black Feminist Professional Philosophy.” The Black Scholar 46 (2): 46 –56

Figueroa-Vásquez, Yomaira C. 2020 Decolonizing Diasporas: Radical Mappings of AfroAtlantic Literature. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.

Lorde, Audre. 1984. Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. New York: Crossing Press. Miner, Dylan. “Home.” American Indian and Indigenous Studies. Accessed February 2, 2023. https://aiis.msu.edu/about/history/.

Nishitani, Osamu. 2006. “Anthropos and Humanitas: Two Western Concepts of ‘Human Being.’ ” Translation, Biopolitics, Colonial Difference, 259 –273.

Pérez, Laura E. 2010. “Enrique Dussel’s Etica de la liberación, U.S. Women of Color Decolonizing Practices, and Coalitionary Politics amidst Difference.” Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social Sciences 18 (2): 121–146.

RCAH LookOut Gallery. “Creativity Lives Here.” Accessed December 10, 2021. https:// rcah.msu.edu/uniquely-rcah/lookout/index%20NOT%20USED.html.

Risam, Roopika. 2018. New Digital Worlds: Postcolonial Digital Humanities in Theory, Praxis, and Pedagogy. Northwestern University Press.

Rosaldo, Renato. 1993. Culture & Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis. Boston: Beacon Press.

Santos Febres, Mayra. 2019. “Contemporary Caribbean Fractality and Racial Ecosystems: A Native Perspective.” Womxn of Color Initiatives Keynote Address. Michigan State University.

StrikeMOMA Working Group. n.d.-a “A Conversation with Kency Cornejo, Saudi

García, Macarena Gómez-Barris, Nelson Maldonado-Torres, Mónica Ramón Rios”

Accessed February 16, 2021, https://youtu.be/a4HNvsf8XEs

StrikeMOMA Working Group. n.d.-b “Framework and Terms for Struggle.” StrikeMOMA Working Group of the International Imagination of Anti-National Anti-Imperialist Feelings (IIAAF). Accessed December 7, 2021. https://www.strikemoma.org/. [Taller] Electric Marronage. “Home.” Accessed December 7, 2021. https://www.electric marronage.com/

Small Revolutions: Methodologies of Black Feminist Consciousness-Raising and the Politics of Ordinary Resistance

Harleen Kaur, Katie Byrd, Nadia R. Davis, and Taylor M. Williams

While small, midwestern towns across the United States have become the center of the battle against Critical Race Theory and identity politics in education over the past several years, one small town in Michigan became the launching pad for a grassroots gender-consciousness program grounded rmly in the experiences of young Black women. The Gender Consciousness Project (GCP) has ourished into a program co-facilitated by previous participants across several schools in the metro Detroit area, all while national- and state-level discourse became increasingly hostile towards any material or theoretical support of Black women’s lives. In this paper, we the three pilot participants of GCP and one co-facilitator return to the recordings of the rst iteration of GCP to examine how exactly a small-town consciousness-raising project took root amidst these circumstances. We explore how the project cultivated, and how its primary facilitator and founder conceptualized, a Black feminist consciousnessraising methodology which centered the agency and capacity for consciousness of young Black women, or Black girls, speci cally. Through this analysis, we offer that one such Black feminist consciousness-raising methodology is to spark small revolutions through the everyday possibilities for resistance and refusal of cooptation.

Keywords: Agency / Beauty / Belonging / Black feminisms / Dialogical learning / Self-re exivity

If any female feels she needs anything beyond herself to legitimate and validate her existence, she is already giving away her power to be self-de ning, her agency.

—bell hooks, Feminism is for Everybody

©2023 Feminist Formations, Vol. 35 No. 1 (Spring) pp. 4–70

I’m not promising you happiness, but I'm promising you agency.

—Dr. Nesha Z. Haniff, creator of the Gender Consciousness Project

If agency is the power to validate one’s experience as worthy in and of themselves, radical feminist praxis must consider how the simultaneously peripheral and oppressed can also realize their self-de ning capacities. The Gender Consciousness Project (GCP) is one such dialogical intervention, which began by offering a taste of agency to three young Black women in a small, blue-collar town in Michigan. In this paper, we—the project’s three pilot participants and one co-facilitator—explore how it did so. Analyzing the recordings of the pilot program, we identify the methodology and consciousness-raising strategies employed to “promise agency” through gender consciousness. We explore how Black feminist consciousness-raising methodologies can be simultaneously precise and exible, move non-linearly and yet with direction, and function independently of any one individual facilitator or research project – or, through the agency of the participants. Through these methods, GCP contributes to decolonial feminist praxis by grounding itself in storytelling, relational learning, and lived experience as its sites of knowledge production.

First, we highlight the intentions behind GCP through an engagement with scholarship on Black and decolonial feminisms, consciousness-raising, and dialogical learning. We also include background around the project’s location, Belleville, Michigan. Then, we offer our analysis of the project through three instances of consciousness-raising focused on primary themes of beauty, belonging, safety, and morality. We are inspired by Jennifer C. Nash’s conceptualization of Black feminisms as an approach that “centers analyses of racialized sexisms and homophobia, and that foregrounds black women as intellectual producers, as creative agents, as political subjects, and as ‘freedom dreamers’ even as the content and contours of those dreams vary” (2018, 5). Through this analytical frame, we examine GCP as a non-hierarchical project of learning, community, and consciousness-raising by way of its method: centering the validity of small (i.e., ordinary) experiences to develop big (i.e., global) theory and analysis.

Origins: Dialogical Learning and Black Feminist Consciousness-Raising

I tapped into parts of my brain that weren’t tapped into before. It was really good that I could actually have a deep conversation about things that matter, and it wasn’t so one-sided.

Usually when I talk to people my age, it’s me talking and them saying, ‘oh, okay,’ about something that I want to talk about. But here, everybody listened, and I wasn’t the only one

talking . . . it’s important that other girls get the same experience as we did to prepare them for the future. —Nadia, age 16

It helped me broaden my horizons and think more deeply about topics that I wouldn’t have thought about—at least as deeply as we did—on my own. —Taylor, age 15

These conversations forced me to take off my blinders. Because it’s really easy to ignore things and be like, oh, I can’t do anything about it, so why even [think] about it? It put me in a place where I have the ability to make change and not just watch the world pass me by. —Katie, age 16

The Gender Consciousness Project began with a story . . . three stories to be precise. Each participant entered the program sharing a story of a woman in their life, one after the other. These narratives intertwined into a collective yet nuanced space, one in which something as seemingly simple as a story— lled with contradictions, unful lled hopes, and still unyielding dreams—became the foundation to theorize about the construction of our worlds. However, this foundation cannot be built through storytelling alone. In his introduction to Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Donald Macedo highlights the dangerous tendency of liberal pedagogical discourse to turn dialogical learning into a risk-free exercise of self-empowerment:

By overindulging in the legacy and importance of their respective voices and experiences, [US-based] educators often fail to move beyond a notion of difference structured in polarizing binarisms and uncritical appeals to the discourse of experience. I believe that it is for this reason that some of these educators invoke a romantic pedagogical mode that “exoticizes” discussing lived experiences as a process of coming to voice. . . This creates . . the transformation of dialogical teaching into a method invoking conversation that provides participants with a group-therapy space for stating their grievances. (Freire 2000, 17–18)

The failure to move beyond identarian categories in academic discussions of lived experience has been criticized elsewhere as the “still-existing structure of settler colonization” (Arvin, Tuck, and Morrill 2013, 9). More speci cally, these scholars critique an absence of a decolonial feminism, which rejects a singular, composite “re-presentation of Woman by hegemonic discourses” for “women— real, material subjects of their collective histories” (Mohanty 1988, 62). Rather than using one’s experience as a heuristic for all possible subjectivities, a decolonial feminisms approach to dialogical learning reorients subjectivity from a xed, categorical experience of power to a continuous project of (re)situating oneself within local and global relations of power.

In bell hooks’ writing on consciousness-raising, she further clari es Macedo’s concern regarding therapeutic support versus political transformation:

Early on in contemporary feminist movement, consciousness-raising groups often became settings where women simply unleashed pent-up hostility and rage about being victimized, with little or no focus on strategies of intervention and transformation. On a basic level many hurt and exploited women used the consciousness-raising group therapeutically. It was the site where they uncovered and openly revealed the depths of their intimate wounds. This confessional aspect served as a healing ritual. Through consciousnessraising women gained the strength to challenge patriarchal forces at work and at home. (2000, 7– 8)

Thus, while therapeutic dialogue can certainly validate one’s agency as an oppressed subject, it must also heal wounds of oppression to then allow for “strategies of intervention and transformation.” Chandra Mohanty (1988) similarly marks the discursive as signi cant, for it still re ects realities, or even desires, regarding the material. Likewise, we can recognize storytelling’s power in generating agency through Black diasporic feminist writing (Hua 2013), or offering re exive relationality in academic spaces, which otherwise produce a sense of rootlessness critical to upholding settler-colonialism (Fernández, Hisatake, and Nguyen 2020). In articulating storytelling as a decolonial feminist praxis, scholars note: “being with others challenges individualizing, ahistorical, and apolitical assumptions underlying the colonial difference, rooted in structures that cement the coloniality of power, barring our bodies and silencing our experiences” (13). Thus, it is through relationality that decolonial feminist consciousness-raising transforms apolitical conversations into radical dialogue, in that it effectively connects what one may experience as an individual issue to structural causation and implementation. Dialogical learning allows participants to re ect on their differential experiences within the same space to understand how said difference is constructed through unequal distributions of power, safety, and belonging (not inherent categorical distinctions). When rooted in Black and decolonial feminisms, then, the joint process of consciousness-raising and dialogical learning encourages an epistemology focused on radical politics of restructuring social and political relations through our collective and inherent agency.

GCP also emerged from the necessity for dialogical learning and consciousness-raising grounded in the experiences of young Black women, less remarked upon than the importance of consciousness-raising for adults (Owens et al. 2017). In choosing to work with teenagers, GCP intervenes early in the cooptation that occurs through patriarchal violence by going into high schools where young Black women are normally criminalized, policed, and punished (Morris 2016). Storytelling in school also functions as decolonial pedagogy; Devika Chawla (2018) asserts storytelling in midwestern US-based education spaces upends whiteness as the normative embodied relationship to power, a tactic she

calls “autobiographical disruption.” Considering Freirean praxis, which calls for placing full trust in the people to think and act critically, working with young Black women serves as an egalitarian marker that each person, regardless of their status, can be conscientized. Drawing from Ruth Nicole Brown’s (2009) notion of Black girlhood celebration, the Gender Consciousness Project centers these young Black women as storytellers, knowledge-producers, and experts on their own lives. Mirroring original consciousness-raising tactics, the storytelling forces GCP participants and facilitators to “confront their internalized sexism, their allegiance to patriarchal thinking and action, and their commitment to feminist conversion” (hooks 2000, 12). In this way, GCP makes strategic and accessible connections to systemic oppression through personal experiences, resisting the cooptation of Black women’s experiences into a single Black woman’s narrative devoid of material implications (Collins 1996).

GCP, Year Zero: Welcome to Belleville, Michigan

In June 2016, Dr. Haniff and Harleen Kaur entered Belleville High School to begin the Gender Consciousness Project with three young Black women—Katie Byrd, Nadia Davis, and Taylor Williams—just after their sophomore year. The one-month program aimed to shift participants’ consciousness on gender, to notice its presence in all aspects of their lives, such as social media, education, and music. The goal was for participants to leave the program with a better understanding of how gender is actively constructed through social and political forces to restrict their full humanity, as well as demonstrate how it is linked to daily actions and thought processes that they perhaps did not already see as gendered. The setting of Belleville, Michigan, and its proximity to the University of Michigan, was crucial to GCP’s development in these initial years.

Belleville is twenty miles southwest of Detroit, Michigan, with a population just shy of 4,000. From 2000 to 2010, Belleville’s Black population nearly doubled from 7.55 to 14.1 percent (US Census Bureau 2010). Less than thirty minutes away, the University of Michigan has faced increasing criticism for its declining Black student population—just 4.4 percent in 2018, the year all three pilot participants started college (Hiyama and Basha 2018). In part, the decision to establish GCP in Belleville was a deliberate choice to leave the shadow of the University. While closer to Ann Arbor than Detroit, Belleville’s social and political location is drastically different from the University’s. Most high school graduates from Belleville attend community college or vocational school. Basing a university-funded project in a community largely forgotten by the University became an active way to reallocate institutional funds and resources to bene t the community, rather than Black communities serving the University’s research desires. The distance from the University to Belleville also meant that the University students facilitating the program could not do so at their convenience, as many experiential learning projects allow, but

Harleen Kaur, Katie Byrd, Nadia R. Davis, and Taylor M. Williams ·

were required to tangibly center the community throughout their participation (Haniff 2022).

Many Black families in Belleville work in the auto industry but were forced to relocate away from areas proximate to industry plants as they gentri ed. Despite the forced migration, Katie emphasized, “To most people in Belleville, going to the plant is a good job—you can support an entire family on that salary. People in Belleville understand that hard work does give you what you need.” As a result, many of Belleville’s Black residents continue to thrive on industrial, blue-collar work. Still, racism and classism deeply structured social groups and teacher-student dynamics for the participants, during their high school years especially. Katie and Nadia re ected upon their experiences as two of the few Black students in the Gifted & Talented program. They recalled anti-Black remarks made about Black students in the school and how the parents of Black G&T children became very close as a protective mechanism. Exacerbated by the lack of Black educators in their schools, these dynamics meant a dismissive, at best, and punitive, at worst, scholarly environment for Black students. Nadia shared how she not only begged teachers to write her college recommendation letters, but, in one instance, wrote the letter herself on behalf of her white male teacher. Katie noted certain teachers, advisors, and administrators seemed viscerally uncomfortable with the increasing population of Black students in the district. This became most apparent in the transition from middle to high school, when a disproportionate number of suspensions were doled out to Black students, and pre-college support was lacking, if not entirely absent.

Still, all three women said growing up in Belleville gave them a sense of identity, purpose, and community which continues to inspire and shape them today. Recent scholarship is changing the perception of small town, blue-collar communities to show how places like Belleville are home to Black communities deeply invested in the wellbeing and education of their youth (Brown 2018). Taylor noted that growing up in a tight-knit Black community, alongside the support of her mother, allowed her to value education more than her cousins who did not relocate to Belleville. Nadia shared that growing up in a nearly all-Black neighborhood, where most adults had blue-collar, industrial jobs like her own parents, often felt like an incubator; however, it was these “positive Black in uences in my life over time made me into the person I am today, who was able to be self-suf cient” and push for better opportunities and resources throughout her educational experience. Katie called growing up in Belleville “sacred,” as the small-town environment meant she could bike from one end of town to the other and never feel out of place. It was a safety and physical freedom she did not appreciate until she became older.

Data and Methods

Our data consists of 720 hours of audio recordings from the pilot program, which ran from June 21 through July 21, 2016. Participants and facilitators met a total of eight times: twice a week for ninety minutes except the week of July 4. We rst listened to the recordings to summarize the content of each meeting. Next, we highlighted key types of dialogue that demonstrated the process and methodology of transformation through gender consciousness. We then re-analyzed the meetings using the identi ed themes as codes and selected quotes to determine overlapping conversations between the meetings. These excerpts functioned as scaffolding for the detailed analysis of consciousness-raising offered below.

Sparking Small Revolutions: Three Glimpses into Gender Consciousness-Raising

In our analysis, we found that GCP’s methodology was predicated on three overlapping tools of dialogical pedagogy: 1.) narrative storytelling to name social and political location, 2.) real examples of women to demonstrate how gender functions as an experience of relative power, and 3.) the tool of “self-grading,” where participants determined the diligence of their analyses on gender. Rather than using grading to diminish the participants’ capacity for intellect or critical thinking, grading was reconceptualized as a signi er of the extent to which participants were situating their own experiences in their analysis. By validating lived experience as epistemology and allowing the participants to determine their own stage in the consciousness-raising process through self-grading, participants’ theories of gender constructed from individual experience (the local) was not diminished in relation to the consciousness-raising process (the global); both were established as signi cant locations of knowledge production.

Out of our analyses, we selected three instances of consciousness-raising which we found particularly compelling and indicative of the program and our experiences of it. In analyzing the meetings for evidence of methodology, we noted that consciousness-raising is not linear. Rather, gender consciousness developed out of a continuous attempt towards rootedness in one’s social and political location through community (perhaps, another type of decolonial feminism). While later meetings certainly built upon previous ones, the goal was not a comprehensive or nite understanding of all social and political issues. Instead, by developing critical tools for raising consciousness each meeting, participants were able to build upon the techniques for analysis they had previously learned and been “graded” on. These tools of analysis furthered a comprehension that gender consciousness was an experience of internalizing one’s inherent value in the world and, to develop consciousness, one must work to identify these modes of internalization in every social relation they experience.

I. The Politics of Beauty through Skin Color and Hair Texture

Throughout the different iterations of GCP, the question of “am I beautiful?” or “how beautiful am I?” comes up in some version or another. Various social media platforms, and entertainment media itself, continuously add fuel to this anxious attachment to one’s beauty, particularly for Black women who are commodi ed, sexualized, and villainized simultaneously through popular culture (Halliday 2018). Thus, complicating the question of beauty also became a measure of how much participants could retain against the bombardment of media content. Here, we think through constructions of beauty that emerge through skin color, hair, and behavior. For the participants, skin color predicted perceptions of character and personality, while hair was something to craft and construct in relation to beauty norms that were always magnetized towards whiteness—or at least a digestible form of Blackness (Rowe 2022). Each participant recognizing that they were making choices to craft their behavior and self-image in response to reactions to their hair type and skin color was crucial to identifying their unique experiences as Black women. It clari ed that experiences of belonging in the Black community are not solely constructed based on racial ideologies, but gendered and classed ones, too.

In the rst few meetings, the topics of beauty, objecti cation, and selfcon dence were interwoven into most conversations as the participants shared stories of their grandmothers and mothers and re ected on their own experiences in various school districts, neighborhoods, and family gatherings. In meeting two, much of the conversation came after Nadia shared the story of her paternal grandmother, who “grew up in the 1950s, very fair but African American, which was not very much appreciated. She was too light for Black kids and too Black for the white kids, which left her secluded and gave her self-con dence issues.” This notion of wanting to be recognized as Black, and also not recognizing the privileges of having a lighter skin tone, extended into the present as participants analyzed the pressure to act “more Black” in school, particularly when non-Black students were present.

Nadia: Oh, it’s not just about the skin color anymore. You gotta actually t in.

Dr. Haniff: Well how do you t in to be more black?

Taylor: Ghetto.

Dr. Haniff: So, you have to talk a certain way.

Taylor: Ignorant.

Katie: You have to be loud. Gotta be from Detroit.

Taylor: Yeah. I mean, just because I am, I don’t go around and aunt it.

Nadia: Gotta be hood rich.

Katie: It’s just too much because they expect you to be this big amboyant person out there. And then when you act sort of like, you know, classy, like you have manners, you’re polite. You can speak, well, you can speak intelligently . . .

Taylor: Then they say you act white.

In this meeting, all three participants largely focused on the construction of Blackness through behavior and how behavior predicted one’s level of belonging. Here, many of the stereotypes being ascribed to them were based on racist and classist tropes of how lower-income Black people should behave. Participants identi ed these tropes as partly constructed through media; in the story of her grandmother, Nadia identi ed her grandmother’s low self-con dence about her body because “she didn’t look like the women on TV.” As a result, moving past negative self-image was largely about individual self-con dence and af rming one’s appearance in relation to beauty standards.

Dr. Haniff: What’s wrong with your hair?

Taylor: Well, my hair doesn’t look like Nadia’s when it’s natural, but I mean, nothing’s really wrong with it. I just don’t have the con dence to wear it.

Dr. Haniff: But I keep hearing this word con dence.

Taylor: My self-esteem can shrink sometimes.

Dr. Haniff: If you wear your hair differently.

Taylor: Just in general. So then like little things like that, I’m like—I’m good.

Nadia: You got to nd that go-to style.

Katie: Yeah. I think you look cute with it when your hair is natural.

In the following meeting, the participants were asked to re ect directly on their own skin color and hair and how it related to the level of attractiveness they were assigned. Taylor did identify that her skin color, as “caramel,” was “ideal in the Black community,” but she also did not claim to have “experienced privilege from being my color.” Nadia, who is mixed, shared her thoughts next.

Nadia: I might have [light skin privilege] unconsciously, like I had some guy’s attention over a dark skin woman or something like that. But to me, at the same time, [being light skin] does dissociate me from my own community. It also kind of puts a target on my back to the white community and they have this, what are you question all the time. Even though they don’t know what I am, they just know I’m not white. But I have a resistance to talk about this because I don’t feel those same things that another woman of darker color would. So, who am I to judge other people? Because I have the privilege, but at the same time, it’s like the rest of the world doesn’t think– the majority doesn’t think I have the privilege.

Katie, the darkest in skin tone of the three, shared last. She started by detailing her journey with hair and why she started wearing her hair natural from a young(er) age. Many chemicals and treatments caused her hair to fall out, so she wore braids in between that phase and going natural.

Katie: People started mistaking me for like a guy . . until this year when I came to the conclusion that my hair isn’t made to be an accessory. It’s more made to be like a—it’s like an afterthought sort of like, it’s like an accent, you

know? It’s made for ef ciency, not decoration like it is for most people. I feel like my hair, for me, is sort of like a re ection of my attitude. Like I’m business rst and hair later, you know, it’s, for me, it helps me concentrate. I don’t have to worry about, what am I going to do with my hair tomorrow? What is it going to look like on Tuesday? Like, no, it is what it is and I’m going to do my work. I can focus on other things. And it’s just for productivity. Mostly for me, it’s more like a functional thing now.

Dr. Haniff prompted Katie to share further about her experience with skin color.

Katie: It’s hard to put into words. Like I know I’m kind of towards the darker end of the spectrum. Automatically, I don’t get the cute factor that most lightskinned girls get. And my hair is for ef ciency, not for decoration, so I’m not the most attractive person. I understand that too.

Nadia: That’s not true, Katie.

Dr. Haniff: No, but she’s being honest about how she feels.

Katie: It makes my personality have to be bigger than for most people. And, due to my color, I do nd myself trying to shrink it a little bit when I meet new people, especially people that don’t really know me.

Dr. Haniff: Cause you think the Blackness terrorizes them?

Katie: It does. Yeah, it does. It freaks people out. They don’t know what to expect when they seen you. I could tell people, hey, you could talk to me any time you want to, but then they—like I have to explain myself before I show them my true self. So the people that would say that I’m mean, or whatever, they don’t know me. Like they haven’t spoken to me. But they see me and they see the braids and they say, she must be mean, or she must be loud. This dialogue is indicative of two primary refusals of consciousness that were common towards the beginning of GCP: the fear of solidly locating one’s social and political exclusion in the construction of Blackness as terror (“I’m kind of towards the darker end of the spectrum”) and the intersection of gendered, racialized, and classed locations of power which insist a particular reconstruction of behavior to become more palatable (“I do nd myself trying to shrink” and, earlier, “My self-esteem can shrink sometimes”). The speci c identi cation of Blackness as the source of terror by Dr. Haniff both addresses the former and sets up Katie to, eventually, realize the latter.

At the end of the meeting, about 30 minutes later, Dr. Haniff asked the participants for their reaction to that meeting’s conversation. Nadia and Taylor had notably different re ections than what they shared earlier.

Taylor: I think it was informative. I thought about my own views because I didn’t even realize I got —I never really paid attention to privileges and stuff until I started having to think about it for this and—it’s just brought some stuff to my attention that I would have never thought about.

Nadia: It kinda made me realize how much I didn’t know about what it feels like to be secluded from, you know, humankind. Like when Katie was talking about people saying she’s intimidating. Like I know Katie personally, she’s the least intimidating person I know. So, it kind of made me realize how unconsciously, how many privileges I have just being light-skinned and having curly hair. I guess we all have curly hair, but a different type of curly hair. And how I thought how much I thought I knew, but I didn’t actually know, and they opened my eyes.

Here, the possibilities of dialogical learning are immediate. Participants translated the nuances in their narrative into greater consciousness by identifying variations in social and political locations through their relationships to beauty. As participants recognized that they made choices (i.e., enacted agency) in navigating these social perceptions, it elucidated their social and political responsibility to also acknowledge relative privilege. Rather than reifying the categories of Black, woman, or blue-collar as such, decolonial feminist consciousness-raising troubles these categories and the ways in which they close off recognizing our relationships to others and our unique experiences of power.

II. “Are You Black or Are You a Woman?”: #BlackLivesMatter and Choosing Race Over Gender

The week of July 4, GCP took a break to account for family travel and events during the federal holiday. For the break, the participants each selected a social media platform to analyze for popular messaging that related to gender roles. However, during the week away, social media was largely consumed by two live videos which captured the police murders of Black men: Alton Sterling, killed by Baton Rouge police on July 5, and Philando Castile, killed by St. Anthony (Minnesota) police on July 6. Returning to meetings on July 12, the main topic of conversation was the new wave of protests led by the Movement for Black Lives. In her analysis of Instagram, Taylor shared, “We’ve been free for how many years now? But [police brutality] is still a problem in 2016. And then the other point I thought of was all lives matter and some people take it the wrong way. Some people are like, oh, that’s racist, Black Lives Matter is racist—all lives matter. But the ones you see in the media are the black people who are getting killed.”

The discussion continued:

Dr. Haniff: What do you think about the contradiction between saying all lives matter and then Black lives matter?

Taylor: I can see both sides of it. I agree with like, yeah, all lives do matter. I’m not taking anything away from that because they do, we’re supposed to be one big human race, you know, but then Black lives matter because those are the ones you see on TV recently that have been getting killed by all these cops and all these other people like Trayvon Martin and stuff. Those are the

lives you keep seeing over and over in the media that are being taken. So something needs to happen there too.

Katie: I feel like since it’s people getting killed by the authorities, I think that’s what’s mainly the problem. If it was just people just killing other random people, that’s life, you can’t stop that. But when it’s the authorities, people that are supposed to protect you and then are killing and seem to be killing one speci c race of people all the time, it gets to be a lot of pressure.

Dr. Haniff: There’s this whole discussion that to say all lives matter is to sort of undermine the idea of Black lives matter.

Nadia: I totally agree.

Katie: That’s what some people believe.

Dr. Haniff: Why do you totally agree?

Nadia: I totally agree because saying all lives matter was a reaction to Black lives matter. Basically the people who came out with all lives matter are trying to undermine the oppression of Black lives. Yeah, obviously all lives matter, but at the same time, they obviously don’t if Black people are getting killed because they’re Black! And then when you see the people that are saying all lives matter, all lives matter, all lives matter, they’re mainly white people and they’re like, oh, well, yeah, police use excessive force all the time. But you’re not being killed cause you’re white is the thing. I understand that being a police of cer can get to your head and you just start running around town doing what you want to do. But you never see a white person getting killed because they’re white. You see a Black person getting killed almost every two weeks because they’re Black.

Dr. Haniff: Why do you think it’s mostly white people who say all lives matter?

Katie: I think they’re trying to differentiate. They’re trying to say that it’s not just Black people being oppressed. It’s everyone being oppressed, and that Black people are just having their little microscope moment and they’re not looking at the big picture and that everybody is created the same. No one’s being prejudiced against. It’s just the authorities going against everybody. And for Black people, that’s not true because you see people that look like you all the time, you know, getting slayed basically. For a person that isn’t of the same ethnicity, it can be hard to connect with that type of thing. You can kind of detach yourself from the situation because it’s not as relevant to you. Yes, they’re a person just like you, and yes, that could have been you, but it’s not, they don’t even look like you. To me, it just depends on who you ask.

Dr. Haniff: Do you think that when people say white lives matter, you think that’s racist?

Nadia: I don’t think it’s racist. I think it’s a attack on Black lives matter. I guess in a way you could say it’s racist, but that speci c term is not racist. It’s not like saying the N-word and you’re white. It’s a racial attack on Black people. I think if you can differentiate the two, I guess you can, but I don’t know.

Dr. Haniff: You know, your generation was raised with the reality that you have to be really careful and you have to be really cautious about saying something is racist.

Katie: Yeah.

Dr. Haniff: How do you feel about that? Why do you think– who’s telling you that you should be careful?

Taylor: Some people are really openly sensitive, I think.

Nadia: Yeah. Cause I mean, obviously our parents tell us like right from wrong, but when you go out into school and you say something . . . like, if you’re white and all your friends are Black and they’re saying the N-word, so you think it’s okay to say the N-word too, and then you go to another group of Black people and you start saying the N-word and then you get beat up. Then it’s like, okay, what did I do? I think it’s society, I guess, because now with people starting to say, okay, you’re white, don’t say that around me. You know, then you have white people saying, okay, then don’t call me a cracker. You can’t call me a cracker. So, I think it’s just kind of retaliating against each other.

Dr. Haniff: Are black people racist?

Nadia: Yeah. Katie: Yes.Taylor: They can be.

Dr. Haniff: What score do you think I’m going to give you on that, from one to ten?

Katie: Let’s just call it a one.

Dr. Haniff: The answer to that question is zero.

Katie: Oh, see, I was close. [laughter]

Dr. Haniff: Well, let me explain why Black people cannot be racist. Because racism is about power. Exercising power over somebody . . if you don’t have that power, you can be prejudiced, but you cannot be racist because racism is the power of one race to exercise power over another race. You can be prejudiced against somebody, but even though you’re prejudiced, do you have the power to make that prejudice real? A white police of cer has the power to make his prejudice real in that he could shoot somebody and get away because the system condones that, although the system would never openly say it condones that, but it does.

Although no further discussion on power and prejudice took place in this meeting, the seed was planted. The following meeting, the conversation transitioned to discussing ideas for the nal digital project, which allowed participants to become active shapers of media dialogue rather than passive consumers—a critical transformation in young Black women recognizing their agency in the process of subjectivity-formation (McPherson 2019).

Dr. Haniff: What’s your focus [for the website]? Are you focusing on race, gender?

Nadia: Well, we were saying, of course we would maximize race because it is a problem. But at the same time, we would have to include other things because,

since the majority of the population is white, we can’t have like, oh yeah, this doesn’t include me, blah, blah, blah, blah. So we could have women’s issues . . . and race issues and . . . mainly, what we talked about were women and race issues, but we can expand on that too.

Dr. Haniff: Would you say that, if you look at it, when you’re looking at gender and race, are you prioritizing race?

Katie: I think we might accidentally end up doing that . . .

Nadia: Even if we didn’t want to.

Dr. Haniff: Why do you think that is?

Nadia: Because we’re all so passionate about racial issues, it’s a lot of things going on and a lot of misconceptions that are being led on people.

Dr. Haniff: Why do you think I’m asking you this question, whether you’re prioritizing race over gender?

Taylor: Because it’s still a big issue, like we were talking about last time, like Black lives matter. It’s not just Black men lives matter, Black women lives matter. It’s all of them.

Dr. Haniff: When you think about Black Lives Matter, does it read to you that Black men’s lives matter?

Taylor and Katie: Yeah.

Nadia: For me, it goes that way sometimes, but other times it goes another way. Like I think it includes women if you think about it.

Katie: I feel like it sort of started off with guys though, I don’t know. Cause there were a bunch of like Black women that suffered from police brutality too. And they weren’t mentioned in a lot of cases.

Dr. Haniff: Well, I just want to say these are important things I want you to think about because Black Lives Matter is predominantly a male-focused movement [despite being started by three Black women]. And it’s not different from the civil rights movement, which was where women were very heavily involved, but it always ended up to be males at the top getting them the majority of the attention. I’m not saying that race is not important, but you can be subsumed by race in a way in which you really marginalize the really, really important issue—because you can’t separate being a woman from being black. Ozi [guest attendee]: All this conversation reminds me . . I was in the car with Dr. Haniff and there were mostly Black gay men in the car. And someone had mentioned how it’s really sexist that Beyoncé has an all women band. So then I got into it and somebody asked me “well, Ozi, are you Black or are you a woman?” And Dr. Haniff, who is next to me is like, don’t answer that. Don’t say anything. I just remember [thinking], this feels like hell right now. And then getting out of the car and crying, because I just . . . I’ve never been asked that before. All to say that . . . learning the lesson that I can’t separate gender from race—and how dare somebody even ask me that!

Dr. Haniff: Well people don’t ask that; they act on it all the time because they exclude women all the time. When I asked the question, why are you

prioritizing race? I think it happens a lot too. . . . Since you’re all 15 going on 16, I think you should change it by what you say. I don’t know if you’ll change the world, but change a little piece of it.

The salience and necessity of GCP is made clear at this moment—despite the group’s focus and name even declaring the centrality of gender, gender had to be reiterated as a requirement of analysis at each step of the process. Through this, Dr. Haniff ensured that the signi cance of gender is not lost in the dialogue. Dr. Haniff returned to the digital project and including gender.

Dr. Haniff: I want you to think about this when you’re thinking of your blogs and how you’re gonna make sure you don’t forget to include gender issues. I’m not saying don’t talk about race, but gender issues as a Black woman those are important things to think about as well when you’re talking about what are the realities of Black girls your age in school? We don’t have a lot of those voices at your age at all. Now that you’ve listened to this, do you have some topics that you think that you would want to sort of discuss that would be relevant to young girls in school?

Katie: I guess you could talk about like, basically, like the aesthetic and like tonal appearance. Like, I’ve noticed, you can be the smartest person in the room but if you are a black woman you can still be seen as intimidating. I went to a conference where we had to ask patients questions and I was often told that my tone was very aggressive, and that I should be more empathetic with the way I talk.

Slowly, the dots started connecting—behavior is not a subconscious response but an active reaction to misogynist and racist policing. Participants were reminded that they, too, had agency to craft the narrative around Blackness and girlhood.

III. “Don’t Exempt Yourself from the Analysis”: Being Raised as Good Black Girls

While storytelling was a crucial part of GCP’s methodology of consciousnessraising, equally important was engaging with the daily realities of the participants, particularly the content and interactions which shaped their everyday lives. Earlier, we addressed social media; here, we will focus on popular music and its role in constructing ideologies of gender, moral policing, and the right type of woman. For meeting four, participants selected and analyzed the lyrics for a few popular songs they felt relied upon gendered stereotypes. In the excerpt below, participants had just nished a line-by-line analysis of the lyrics of Fetty Wap’s 2015 song “Trap Queen.” While the participant who selected this song only listened to church music, she still knew “the song was really popular, and a lot of people listened to this song.” Indeed, “Trap Queen” sold over 10 million copies and generated the most on-demand streams in 2015. Thus, even the

participant most un-attuned to popular culture was aware of the song’s impact on the trope of a loyal Black woman.

Dr. Haniff: In terms of this song, why did you think he’s talking about money when he’s talking about women? How are they connected?

Nadia: I guess that’s what he wants and what he’s after.

Dr. Haniff: Why do you think they’re connected?

Nadia: I think that, in his context, the more money you have, the more females come to you. Like gold diggers are super pretty, I guess. Probably good at doing other things with the men because they’re older.

Dr. Haniff: You mean like sexual?

Nadia: Yeah.

Dr. Haniff: Is that true? Is there some truth to that?

Nadia: Some truth. Yeah.

Taylor: Some women are just after men with money, they don’t care about his character.

Katie: I feel like now, in the present day, girls are more attracted to having things than necessarily emotional connections. If he can provide for you, that’s basically the same thing as love to them.

At this point in the conversation, Dr. Haniff starts telling a story about her friend, an 84-year-old woman who identi es a good man as someone who comes over, asks if she has groceries, and gives her $20 to put gas in her car.

Dr. Haniff: Is she a gold digger?

All: No.

Taylor: I think [in the song], he was just talking about like, looking good and having matching Lambos and stuff. I think, in terms of her case, it’s more along the lines of stuff she needs versus wants, and he’s more taking care of her in a way.

Nadia: Yeah. I think that there’s a difference between taking care of somebody who’s older and needs to go get groceries and put gas in her car versus like here’s a brand-new car and a new house. Here’s all these clothes in return for your sexual favors.

Katie: I don’t know what to say on this . . .

Nadia: I mean, cause we’re not like that. I mean, I know people that are like that. My dad does, but I don’t personally, so I don’t have much experience.

Dr. Haniff tells another story about her friends who were married, and the husband took on caretaking responsibilities while the wife worked an of ce job. After about ten years of marriage, the wife asked for a divorce because she could no longer deal with her husband not having a job. To this, the participants offer:

Katie: I guess she felt like he wasn’t going to do the job as a male.

Nadia: I think it’s the stereotypical version of man and woman being together. Like the man is supposed to be the breadwinner. I think that some women are just used to that. Like, I don’t want to be the breadwinner. You be the breadwinner.

Taylor: Usually traditional values, like how you were saying, the man is supposed to bring home the most money.

This time, Dr. Haniff shares that she is giving the participants a B- for their analysis.

Dr. Haniff: The construction of masculinity, the way men are supposed to be constructed, is that they must provide. And guess who buys into that most of all?

All participants, quietly: Women.

Dr. Haniff: Women. And if they don’t provide—if they don’t do what, in people’s heads, they think that men should do, then they’re not really men who are respected. You could all think of your own dads, all the things he does to take care of his family. That’s really, profoundly, important to him and to his partner.

So, it comes to a sort of point when men believe that the more money you have, then the more you will do well with women. Because women believe— and they say this openly, or sometimes not openly— does he have a job? Does he have a job is a question about resources and money, particularly if you come from a poor community. Politically, if you are a powerless person, particularly if you don’t have any agency in the world, who you hook up with becomes very important. I’m sure none of you want to hook up with a man who don’t have a job. You don’t. Okay. Don’t exempt yourself from the analysis. Okay. That’s the rst error of a lot of analysis that you do with women is that you exempt yourself from it. You have to put yourself into it all the time.

This moment was transformational for participants to identify how their analysis was falling short: they failed to include their own experiences of girlhood, Blackness, and blue-collar life into their understanding of the world around them. By making their quotidian small in relation to feminist theory, they denied their own agency as storytellers and creators. After looking at a few more song lyrics which more explicitly Orientalized and objecti ed non-white women (e.g., “Don’t Mind” by Kent Jones), Dr. Haniff moved to close the discussion by asking the implications of listening to this music overall. The following truncated interaction, primarily between Dr. Haniff and Nadia, demonstrates the transformation in including oneself in the analysis, especially for Nadia who listened to this music the most.

Dr. Haniff: What do you think of this [song]?

Nadia: I think it’s disrespectful, but you wouldn’t think it was disrespectful just hearing it. You would have to actually read the lyrics to nd the meaning of the song. Obviously, this guy doesn’t really have much respect for women.

Dr. Haniff: Do you think that when [women] hear the words, they understand that it’s disrespectful?

Nadia: I feel like they understand that it’s disrespectful, but they feel like, well, it’s not towards me personally, so I can say it.

Dr. Haniff: That’s a good point. What do you think about that? Do you think that when you hear a song, which you all listened to, that you can separate yourself from the song?

Nadia: Yeah, I guess because it’s just like, I think that’s just a natural thing. Well, I don’t do that. So obviously this isn’t about me, but like at the same time, it’s still degrading our own species.

Dr. Haniff: Do you think that you participate in the degradation of women by listening to this music?

Nadia: Honestly, yeah. Unconsciously . . . every day we do.

Taylor: Not purposefully, but I guess thinking of it like that. Yeah. I guess we do . . .

Katie: We never turned on the radio and [think], let me just talk about how horrible women are.

Taylor: The more popular it gets, then the more widespread the messaging becomes.

Dr. Haniff: What do you think is wrong with that?

Nadia: I think it’s too normal for women to say, oh, it’s just that other girl. Cause it promotes the activity of saying that this stuff is okay. So you have girls saying that, oh, okay, this is what guys like, so I’m going to do this. And then you have other girls that are kind of like, just separate themselves. I’m not that girl, when really we should be helping each other. [Saying], no, don’t do that.

Dr. Haniff: Wow. This is a hard one. Why do you think this is a hard one?

Nadia: We all participate in it every day.

Harleen: Where do you think you get the initial reaction to say, oh that’s not me, that’s somebody else?

Nadia: I think a lot of it comes from our parents kind of giving us a lot of—I don’t want to say self-con dence and permission to dissociate yourself—but like how we might think that we’re too good. Like we’re better than that, or too good for the rest of the population of women. Like, I’m above every other woman that this is about, so I get to listen to it. I think that’s where that unconscious decision comes from. You know how you get to that point, where you listen to the song so much that you know all the words without even having to know all the words?

Dr. Haniff: So there’s a large level of unconsciousness, even though you’re saying the word you’re not clicking in your head, this is disrespectful to me.

Nadia: I didn’t really realize how disrespectful this was until I actually read the lyrics and was kind of dissecting the song for myself. And I think a lot of the radio really does that to you and like the music business, they make it to where it plays with your mind and you don’t realize it.

Dr. Haniff: You must be aware that we participate in our own oppression all the time. And by listening to it, you are doing exactly that. And so you may think that you’re better, but there are a lot of people who actually believe it’s okay. We have to go from unconscious to conscious because we are colluding in our own demise every single day. This one moment of rising up—just one second and rising up—is, to me, revolutionary.

By the end of the ninety-minute meeting, participants were fully transformed by the message of not exempting oneself from their analysis of gendered experiences of power. Rather than placing themselves on a moral high ground because of their upbringing, participants could recognize the subliminal, or overt, messaging about the degradation of women they unknowingly consented to by participating in and engaging with popular media. Although they could not change the entire music industry, by acknowledging their complicity in absorbing and promoting misogynistic messaging, they could recognize their agency in rejecting mainstream stories of Black girlhood and creating new ones out of their daily lives in Belleville.

The Ongoing Story of GCP

Through the liberatory power of self-re exive narrative and dialogue, the Gender Consciousness Project expanded to four schools across metro Detroit over the last ve years. Starting with a story from each participant about a woman in their life, the narratives launched a dialogical methodology that calls each woman into the transformation of consciousness and recognition of agency through the words of her own story. In the nal meeting of the pilot program, Dr. Haniff revealed this methodology to the surprise of the participants:

Dr. Haniff: What was the rst thing I asked you to do, do you remember?

Nadia: We had to write a story about the women.

Dr. Haniff: Right. And why do you think I asked you to write that story?

Nadia: Because in some way she relates to us. In some way her struggles, not necessarily pass down, but–

Taylor: They’re struggles we’re aware of.

Dr. Haniff: Well, I asked you to write the stories because all of the questions that we discussed came from those stories.

Nadia: Oh, for real?

Katie: I see what you did there. That’s sneaky!

Dr. Haniff: Do you remember we talked about color? We talked about hair, remember? And the things you said, how color made you feel like you were a

threat? All of those discussions came from your stories. These are all things that are happening in your life. The stories didn’t come from me. The stories were coming from you. That’s the signal of the methodology, is that the stories must start with you. If we go to another group of girls, they might have different stories. The cleverness is to pick out what the subject is that is relevant to that person’s life.

By developing an analytical framework rooted in individual experience and a Black feminist epistemology, GCP allows participants’ consciousness and understanding of their agency to continue developing in the years after the program. Katie and Taylor, who have not participated in GCP since the pilot, shared the following about its ongoing impact:

Katie: GCP taught me the importance of speaking with my own voice and how bene cial thinking freely can be for my own success. It’s not easy, but I nd peace in knowing that I am now my own woman and I can’t be generalized or put into a box. I am myself, it’s not for anyone else to decide.

Taylor: The Gender Consciousness Project has helped me to both develop what I want to do in my future career and grow as an individual. I not only had the opportunity to learn more about what it means to be a young woman of color in this country, but also the opportunity to open my eyes to the world around me. Through this process, I was able to nd my voice, and within that, nd my purpose. I now have a sense of agency, and I believe that with the knowledge that I have gained through this project, I can accomplish anything that I put my mind to.

Thus, increased consciousness meant realizing that the narratives we accept about ourselves are crafted. A rejection of complacency and complicity for a recognition of our agency meant understanding we have the power to craft it ourselves. Nadia and Harleen, who continued to engage with GCP as co-facilitators, felt the impact on their critical thinking and how they conceptualize working alongside community to develop consciousness and recognize agency. More speci cally, the ongoing internalization of GCP’s methodology meant recognizing when resistance should be a large effort or when it should be small, albeit still signi cant.

Nadia: Since I have remained involved since the pilot program, the project has been able to challenge me and mold me on how to work with the community. Working in the community can be unpredictable and forces you to constantly be innovative, which has prepared me more for life after college than any other job. Also, in my personal life, GCP constantly forces me to learn new perspectives about being a woman of color. This knowledge is not from the classroom, but from working with the students. Every time I engage with the media, I am constantly thinking about how this engagement furthers my own oppression. In this way, I have been able to think critically

about all the nuances of my life, and make knowledgeable decisions about what I choose to engage with.

Harleen: When I think about my own transformation, I think it was one of self-worth—that even if I do not believe the system can be changed, I know it’s all a project of power and social control that is meant to convince me I am less than. So, even when I am experiencing those moments, I can understand why I am experiencing them and how to separate my inherent worth from it and resist.

For Harleen, who observed Dr. Haniff during the pilot program, the choice of letting participants speak on their own, engaging, or disrupting was very instructive. In witnessing this, Harleen realized it is necessary for an individual navigate through their own internalized notions of gender before introducing new ideas, allowing them to recognize the possibility for re ned analysis and consciousness through their own logic and voice. This method centered the Freirean notion of co-intentional education, placing the narratives, experiences, and capacity of the participants at the center.

While the pilot GCP used storytelling as a launchpad for grounded analysis, in training new facilitators, Dr. Haniff noticed this method left the project vulnerable to gaps in each facilitator’s self-re exivity. Thus, the current version of the project begins instead with an open dialogue in which participants identify issues of concern in their own lives, such as colorism in the beauty industry and romantic relationship pressures. Through this, GCP still leaves the power to structure the project to the participants and, rather than relying on a formal narrative structure in which participants share a written story, creates an informal mechanism of storytelling through collective dialogue. In this, GCP returns to the Freirean dialogical method, in which the “educator must have political clarity . . . to intervene not only pedagogically but also ethically” (Freire 2000, 20), while the participants’ experiences, as co-constructors of knowledge, can lead the transformational dialogue. This adaptation still centers the quotidian to develop consciousness, in that “[u]nderstanding the way male domination and sexism was expressed in everyday life created awareness in women of the ways [they] were victimized, exploited, and, in worst case scenarios, oppressed” (hooks 2000, 7). By offering young women the tools to consciously engage with everyday situations, rather than engaging in feminism as an intellectual thought experiment, this project develops a path to employ critical thinking about the ordinary as a tool for consciousness.

In moving towards informal narrative as a starting point, GCP still makes clear the possibilities—ideologically, academically, and theoretically—of doing small versus large work. The ongoing impact of GCP represents the value of small work—here, raising the consciousness of a handful of young women over a few months—which is not encouraged or supported in academia or traditional research spaces. Yet, this is what frontline work must entail. While signi cant

effort and funding continues to be invested in conversations on the oppressed and their experiences of violence and victimization, there is signi cantly less invested in how to extricate these same people from that oppression. To intervene in the cooptation of violent and oppressive systems, slow and small work is necessary so that these conversations can shift from solely theoretical and academic to one of praxis. A decolonial feminist praxis centers these intentions, as well, where the value of agency does not increase with quanti able results, but through an ever-increasing commitment to collective, relational, and in nite liberation.

Methods like the Gender Consciousness Project allow participants to acknowledge their individual stories and how they connect to—and can change! —the structural whole. While consciousness-raising groups utilize gendered experiences as a tool to engage and come together, the consciousness-raising process is only successful if it takes individual, structural, and relational components into account to become a process focused on transformation. Once an individual, particularly one who has historically been told that their voice is insigni cant, is given a platform to share their narrative, they will take full responsibility for re-shaping their own story (i.e., recognize their agency). The radical act of fearlessly sharing one’s experiences takes hold, producing new worldviews and the power to push these individuals and communities forward. A small revolution, indeed.

Harleen Kaur is an Assistant Teaching Professor in Sociology at Arizona State University and holds a PhD in Sociology from UCLA. She studies the endurance of imperialism-driven incorporation and colonial constructions of identity categories as they emerge in contemporary diasporic projects of nation-state belonging. Her current project, Martialing Race, traces the co-optation of Sikh embodied sovereignty and community negotiations for safety and recognition into empire- and state-driven tactics of increased surveillance, militarization, and policing. She can be contacted at kaurharleen.phd@gmail.com.

Katie Byrd is a recent graduate from Xavier University of Louisiana where she obtained her BA in History with a double concentration in digital humanities. She is currently working towards an MLIS at Wayne State University`s School of Library and Information Science. She is also interested in community archives and their ability to document social change in underrepresented communities.

Nadia R. Davis is a recent graduate of the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor where she obtained her BA in organizational studies. She was the lead facilitator of GCP-Belleville for four years and currently works as an HR Analyst for Citi Bank.

Taylor M. Williams is a recent graduate of Eastern Michigan University where she obtained her BBA in Business Management with a minor in Music Performance. Her future plans include pursuing her MBA with a focus in social impact to eventually start her own consulting rm.

Acknowledgements

Our endless gratitude to Dr. Nesha Z. Haniff for bringing us together in radical community, to our anonymous reviewers and the special issue editors for the opportunity to re ect on the life-changing process, and to the generations of Black feminists before us who changed the world through their small, ordinary, world-changing revolutions.

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Brown, Karida L. 2018. Gone Home: Race and Roots Through Appalachia. University of North Carolina Press.

Brown, Ruth Nicole. 2009. Black Girlhood Celebration: Toward a Hip-hop Feminist Pedagogy. Peter Lang Publishing.

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Collins, Patricia Hill. 1996. “What’s in a Name?: Womanism, Black Feminism, and Beyond.” The Black Scholar 26 (1): 9 –17.

Haniff, Nesha Z., ed. 2022. Pedagogy of Action: Small Axe Fall Big Tree. Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan.

Fernández, Jesica Siham, Kara Hisatake, and Angela Nguyen. 2020. “Decolonial Feminism as Re exive Praxis: Lugones’s ‘World’-Travelling as Stories of Friendship in Academia.” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 41 (1): 12–34.

Freire, Paulo. 2000. Pedagogy of the Oppressed: 30th Anniversary Edition. 30th anniversary ed. New York: Continuum.

Halliday, Aria S. 2018. “Miley, What’s Good?” Girlhood Studies 11 (3): 67– 83.

Hua, Anh. 2013. “Black Diaspora Feminism and Writing: Memories, Storytelling, and the Narrative World as Sites of Resistance.” African and Black Diaspora: An International Journal 6 (1): 30 –42.

McPherson, Kisha. 2019. “ ‘We Need a Seat at the Table’: Black Girls Using New Media to Construct Black Identity.” In The Black Girlhood Studies Collection edited by Aria S. Halliday. Women’s Press.

Hiyama, Andrew, and Riya Basha. 2018. “University Receives ‘F’ Grade on Racial Equity in Public University Study.” The Michigan Daily, September 26, 2018 http://www .michigandaily.com/campus-life/umich-fail-racial-equity/ hooks, bell. 2000 Feminism Is for Everybody: Passionate Politics. Pluto Press.

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Rowe, Kernysha L. 2022. “Tangled: Black Hair and Texturism in Ethnodrama.” Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies 22 (1): 32–43. US Census Bureau. 2010. “Race - Belleville, MI.” Database.

Finding Nvnih Waiya: Re ections of an Indigenous Scholar

Hannah Blackwell

There is a hill in Mississippi. Her name is Nvnih Waiya It is said that we came from her. She is our mother mound. Is she home to me?

Raised up in bottomland in southeast Oklahoma. Government “Promised Land.”

Chahta allotment land.

Choctaw Reservation land. For those who walked home land. Is she home to me?

There is a road in Tushka Homma, Oklahoma. It is called Nanih Waiya Road. Dead ends at our original sacred capitol grounds

Bronzed statues memorialized in time They are what is left for us to nd. Is she home to me?

There are government buildings erected to educate. Designed to eradicate. Some attempt to illuminate. A tool to assimilate. People to take. Money to make. Is she home to me?

There are forests for the trees. For some to do as they please. Raining down grief. Little left for our piece/peace.

Mined up. Dried up.

©2023 Feminist Formations, Vol. 35 No. 1 (Spring) pp. 71–72

Achieve and leave. The American Dream. Is she home to me?

There are faraway places with jobs to teach. If I polish and publish and be the Native they need. While my people left here are out of reach, I’ll squelch the voice that says their aim is to leech. Leaving me sick, deprived, and alone. It’s the price I’m told. Is she my home?

There is a place deep inside of me. It never has to agree. It’s a place that is free. Free of doubt, fear, and shame.

It’s never harsh and it doesn’t blame. Blame can be rightfully bestowed upon some. But, in this place, there is only room for love.

It’s from this place that I look at angles from above At the hurt and anger and unfair ways

At abuse and death and pride and hate. I carry these things through my body, mind, and soul. There’s power here. It’s strength for walking this road. And when it proves to be too heavy a load I dissolve it with prayers prayed now and long ago from my relations around me both known and unknown and turn it into love in the place I call home.

Hannah Blackwell is a citizen of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma. She recently completed her PhD at the University of Oklahoma and currently serves as a Professor of Education at Collin College. Her research focuses on higher education, Indigenous/ Native education, media (country music, performance, and print culture), and socioeconomic class (speci cally within rural cultures).

Decolonial Feminist Storying on the Coquille River: A Digital Humanities Approach to Human and Non-human Communication and Prevention of the Fall Chinook Salmon Extinction

Ashley Cordes and Micah Huff

The Coquille River Basin has long been a steady stream of stories, peoples, animals, and non-human objects. The basin has, however, been polluted, invaded, and subjected to myriad maltreatments, the most recent result of which is the decline of the Coquille River fall Chinook salmon. This article contributes to the “On Decolonial Feminisms” special issue by addressing this decline through a participatory action research project based in the digital humanities, Indigenous feminisms, and landbased pedagogy. From this theoretical framework, we produce a method of critical cartography and storied land utilizing ArcGIS story-mapping technology to educate viewers on the history of the Coquille River Basin and the decline of Chinook salmon. This project challenges settler narratives, particularly settler environmentalism and patriarchal control of land, by rejecting dichotomies that deanimate non-human beings and by demonstrating Indigenous feminist stewardship of land through love, desire, care, and prayer. The article ends by providing an overview of the ways digital art projects can continue challenging settler colonialism and by encouraging feminist scholars to theoretically expand their work to interrogate and challenge the patriarchal subjugation and oppression of all beings.

Keywords: Decolonial feminisms / Digital river / Human and non-human relationality / Indigenous / Participatory action research / Salmon / StoryMap

©2023 Feminist Formations, Vol. 35 No. 1 (Spring) pp. 73– 96

Ji-la, my name is Ashley Cordes, I am Ko¯kwel, white-coded, and a descendent of Susan Adulsa Wasson. This article is an invitation to visit our website, which contains a StoryMap1 about the Coquille River and its intelligences, communications, stories, and crises. First, as a Native feminist protocol of respect, we wish to acknowledge the Indigenous peoples and homelands that deeply inspired this project (Celia Boj Lopez 2015). Ashley was afforded opportunities to pursue this project partly on her ancestral homelands, and partly in a place where her Tribe’s congressionally prescribed service area overlaps with the traditional homeland of the Kalapuya people. Ashley and Micah Huff, an ally, were employed by an institution situated on lands occupied by Eastern Shoshone, Paiute, Goshute, and Ute peoples. The Coquille River itself ows through various regions of the Coquille Indian Tribe’s (CIT) cultural oversight areas in what is now known as southwestern Oregon, places we steward and continue to care for.

The Coquille River Basin has long been a place where stories, peoples, animals, and objects have owed. However, it has been polluted, invaded, and forced to experience myriad maltreatments (Arkoosh et al. 1998). Currently, it is the site of the decline (nearing the critical point of extinction) of the Coquille River fall Chinook salmon (Coquille Indian Tribe 2021). CIT Chief Jason Younker expresses the urgency of the situation:

We need to rebuild the original Coquille River Basin so it is able to heal itself. It once was one of the largest estuaries on the West Coast. With heavy diking, clear-cut timber practices, over-farming, pollution, and others, the oxygen needed for healthy salmon runs does not exist. South Slough National Estuarine Research Reserve on Coos Bay is nearing 50 years without logging and only now are we seeing the original channels removed from heavy siltation. Chinook salmon smolt were recently spotted and the Eagles have returned. All we had to do is let the estuary heal itself by getting out of the way.2

This project is a response to the continuing violence against salmon in the Coquille River Basin and translates the river into a digital format after a period of deep place-based learning from it. In contributing to this special issue, “On Decolonial Feminisms,” we offer multimedia art, text, further learning resources, and an annotated map to respond to all three of the issue’s goals: engage, practice, and take action. This article’s additional speci c contribution is to vividly illustrate a collaborative decolonial feminist approach to art and activism that engenders different modalities of understanding and storytelling in digital environments. In the process of translating the Coquille River into an Indigenous digital river system, we aim to expose others to the intelligences and relational communication of non-humans.

Two statements in the Vision and Values of the Coquille Indian Tribe motivated us to offer this project and accompanying article. The rst is, “considering the impacts to our people, land, water, air and all living things,” and second is, “practicing responsible stewardship of Tribal resources” (Vision and Values

2017). These values underscore an urgent need to form better relationships with waters and lands. If we do not forge relationships rooted in kinship, stewardship, and reciprocity, we risk conferring master/slave relationships (Lewis et al. 2018) under the guise of making lands, waters, and machines that interface with them more “fruitful, productive” (Calderón 2014, 326). We are constantly negotiating choices to move in a more positive direction with these relationships. Otherwise, we continue to concretize violence in the Anthropocene, this age in which humans have profoundly impacted the environment and have not adhered to Indigenous epistemologies regarding care for the more-than-human world (Whyte 2017). We are learning to live with troubles of mass extinction of plant and animal life (Haraway 2016), in what many Indigenous peoples consider a postapocalyptic state (Gross 2002).

This article accompanies the StoryMap and is organized as follows: rst, we discuss Indigenous feminisms, digital humanities, and musings on human and non-human relationships, particularly with respect to land and water as pedagogy. Next, we introduce the speci c mapping, artistic, and analytical approaches used to carry out this project. We then move into a description of the texts and image elements on our digital river. This project, created on the ArcGIS platform, includes several points of conversation (salmon, dentalium, a uid dynamics phenomena known as vortex shedding, plant architecture and biophilic design, and a song). Points comprise areas on an interactive digital illustration. When visitors of the map scroll over points and click, they are given opportunities to learn more. The project provides original mixed-media art, descriptions, stories, multimedia content links, and lesson plans. It does so through the format of “scrollytelling,” a mode of digital interactive storytelling in which scrolling and other digital interactions are used alongside traditional techniques such as prose and song (Pascal Schneiders 2020), and storied land. Storied land is the process of utilizing geography and mapping to tell stories about the movement of humans and non-humans or the history of speci c geographical locations (la paperson 2014). To center a core example, this section ends with a StoryMap detailing the salmon decline and efforts to prevent it by the CIT. Lastly, we discuss the overarching implications of the project and situate it within a call for additional complementary Indigenous art and digital humanities projects with decolonial implications.

Digital Humanities and Indigenous Feminisms

We ground our work at the intersections of the digital humanities and Indigenous feminist thought and activism. The digital humanities, de ned broadly, is a body of scholarly, theoretical, and practical study that, according to Kathleen Fitzpatrick (2012), is distinguished “in its exploration of the difference that the digital can make to the kinds of work that we [humanities scholars] do as well as to the ways that we communicate with one another” (14). While “digital

humanities” connotes a human-centric approach, this project is ecocritical (Buell 2009), concerned with the environment and non-human beings as kin. We draw on Indigenous feminisms, which are uniquely positioned in this ecocritical grounding to provide portals for accessing and growing our understandings of overlapping systems of oppression as well as connections among sovereignty, gender identity, interspecies communication, climate change, technology, and more. Furthermore, we nd Indigenous feminisms to have inherently decolonial aims of returning Indigenous lands and restoring sovereignty over those lands and ways of life. Jaqueline Wernimont (2018), when discussing feminisms in the digital humanities, states, “the language of desire and love weave across twentieth- and twenty- rst-century feminist work… I wonder how love, desire, care, and prayer might transform the futures we create, how they are already transforming the presents we currently inhabit” (641– 642).

From this foundation of decolonial love (Figueroa 2015), care, desire, and prayer, Indigenous feminists interrogate gendered social conventions and perform research that, according to Leece Lee-Oliver (2019), “makes intelligible that which is obscured by institutional erasure, [in particular] how anti-Indianism and the dehumanizing trope of the ‘Indian squaw’ are embedded as technologies of human difference and materialize in colonial ideology, and negatively impact Native American peoples and societies and beyond” (3). For example, counter to gendered social conventions, Indigenous feminists act as stewards of the land rather than practicing patriarchal ownership, extending care to non-human kin and guarding against pollution and environmental degradation concerns (Cordes 2020, 287). This stewardship is upheld through a relational approach, which according to Kate McCoy, Eve Tuck, and Marcia McKenzie, sees all beings, including the non-human, the “inanimate,” and the digital, as beings we are related to, focusing on connections that are “familial, intimate, intergenerational, and instructive” (2016, 9; See also Lewis et al.). Through this relational approach, Indigenous feminists uphold love and care as central tenants of theory and practice.

Additionally, Indigenous feminists are grounded in desire and prayer by tying cultural and spiritual practices into pedagogy and activism. Pedagogical practices bring together Indigenous storytelling methods and spiritual connections to land to emphasize Indigenous futurity, responsibility, and care for land, and to challenge dominant Western patriarchal ways of thinking (Morgan Mowatt et al. 2020; Elizabeth Fast et al. 2021; Marie-Eve Drouin-Gagné 2021). The practice of storytelling has been utilized to challenge settler mapping and environmentalism, as noted by scholars la paperson (2014, 127) and Katja Sarkowsky (2020, 108 –109). With this wide body of research, pedagogy, and activist work, Ranjan Datta (2018) states Indigenous feminists “serve to preserve Indigenous voices, build resistance to dominant discourses, create political integrity, and most importantly, perhaps, strengthen the community” (36). Our project is inspired by the practices of love, care, desire, and prayer that

Indigenous feminists engage in through their community roles, addressing institutional erasure, and encouraging relational cultural and spiritual expression.

From this lens of Indigenous feminism, we further tie ourselves to Indigenous thought through a practice of land-based pedagogy, which Matthew Wildcat et al. (2014) de ne as “forms of education that reconnect Indigenous peoples to land and the social relations, knowledges, and languages that arise from the land” (1). A land-based practice, according to Jennifer Redvers (2020), “implies a deep connection with and non-separation between human beings and the natural world. . . . [including] all aspects of the natural world: plants, animals, ancestors, spirits, natural features, and environment (air, water, earth, minerals)” (90). This practice of understanding complex relationality has been a part of many Indigenous groups’ approaches to education and healing, especially across what is currently known as North America. From land-based pedagogy and healing programs, researchers and activists have created learning environments welcoming to Two-Spirit, nonbinary, and others under the LGBTQIA+ umbrella, fostered positive mental wellness outcomes in Indigenous populations, and adapted academic curricula to Indigenous students instead of forcing students to adapt to Western pedagogies (Fast et al. 2021; Redvers; Mowatt et al.).

While a land-based pedagogy may initially appear to counter digital projects, cyberspace is not separate from land. The infrastructure that maintains the Internet, such as servers, cell towers, and underground cabling, are physical instruments built on the land (Duarte 2017). We cannot wholly separate physical and digital terrains. Furthermore, as Ashley Caranto Morford and Jeffrey Ansloos (2021) have noted, “cyberspace provides a connective means by which Indigenous people are tethered in relationship to place, even in and through digital environs” (297). While certainly a different experience of land-based pedagogy than exclusively in-person experiences of land, digital projects, as we will signi cantly demonstrate, still provide meaningful connections to the land.

Within a land-based pedagogy, we further commit to extending care to nonhuman entities by upholding what Kim TallBear (2011) calls “an aversion to the human/nonhuman split because of an explicit understanding that it engenders violence” (para. 26). This split perpetuates violence by allowing individuals and structures to deem non-humans as lesser and therefore worthy of exploitation through a process of deanimating. This makes some beings “seem less alive in order to justify hierarchies” (TallBear para. 26). As Suzanne Kite (in Lewis et al.) reminds us, “no entity can escape enslavement under an ontology which can enslave even a single object” (para. 39). Instead, we use land-based pedagogy to emphasize that humans are just one part of large, interrelated ecological systems, rather than the center and height of creation (Lewis et al.; Finn, Herne, Castille 2017; TallBear; Mowatt et al.; Redvers). Sentiments of posthumanist scholars such as Haraway (2015) are useful in their suggestions that “all earthlings are kin in the deepest sense, and it is past time to practice better care of kinds—as

assemblages (not species one at a time)” (162). Indigenous feminisms often provide more particular, place-based, and plural perspectives. Zoe Todd (2014), for example, discusses the many place-based ways of knowing and de ning sh for the Inuvialuit of Paulatuuq and the ten species they regularly harvest. Sometimes certain “species” indeed do need care on a speci c basis. In the case of the extinction of the fall Chinook salmon detailed in this project, this species needs particular attention, in addition to an understanding of their relation to assemblages of species (e.g., lamprey, smallmouth bass, seals, humans). We learn of those needs through land-based pedagogy.

Lastly, a land-based pedagogy also emphasizes storytelling as a means of understanding and connecting to the surrounding world. Sarkowsky (2020) notes that storytelling is a key element of the struggle for land and rights, as it inscribes our relationship with land through literature (108). Storytelling centers Indigenous knowledge and epistemologies, serving as a reminder of Indigenous connections to a place and its history (Archibald 2008; Twance 2019; Mowatt et al.; Iseke & Moore 2011; Datta 2018; Powell, Weems, & Owle 2007). As Calderón argues, land-based practices “must start from the supposition that all places were once Indigenous lands and continue to be … there has to be an acknowledgement of this reality to critically examine what it means to inhabit lands that were once (and continue to be) the homelands of Indigenous nations” (Calderón p. 27). Further, to challenge settler historical and environmental narratives, Thomas King (2003) tells us, “Want a different ethic? Tell a different story” (164).

Methods and Materials

Critical Cartography as Feminist Practice

In this project, we take the suggestion of King to tell a different story on terms discussed with the CIT. We bring together digital humanities, Indigenous feminist thought and activism, and land-based pedagogy through a practice of critical cartography, storied land, and participatory action research. Critical cartography “is the mapping of structural oppression, as well as the critique of mapping as an exercise of power,” focused on the ways maps act as master narratives by creating “taxonomies of land, water, and peoples” (la paperson, 123). Sébastien

Caquard and William Cartwright (2014) note critical cartography is especially focused on how maps act as spatiotemporal storytellers, tracking the movements of beings, borders, and lands across time (104).

Mapping as a feminist practice, as argued by Meghan Kelly (2019), acknowledges that “all knowledge is situated in personal subjectivities and social contexts” (37). Therefore, a feminist approach to mapping draws on relevant feminist themes and theories based on the understanding that a researcher is trying to come to or the hegemonic structures they challenge. We draw from the themes of Indigenous feminisms to form our method, one that is grounded

in Indigenous ways of knowing, such as the aforementioned storytelling, landbased practice, and relationality.

The cartographers’ mapping combined with Indigenous storytelling methodologies follows the tenets of storied land, “a method of land education, by extending critical cartography’s spatial analysis with a temporal analysis implied by Indigenous struggle and Black resistance: the when of land, not just the where of place” (la paperson, 115). As a practice, “storied land moves place back, between, and beyond to Native land, providing a transhistorical analysis that unroots settler maps and settler time” (la paperson, 124). Through Indigenous storytelling within the context of a StoryMap, maps move beyond just mapping out locations, providing answers to questions of who lived there, when, how, and what cultural stories, myths, practices, and performances they shared.

Storytelling and Art

Many Indigenous storytelling styles also include interactive elements that adapt stories for the target audience (Fernández-Llamazares and Mar Cabeza 2016, 3; see Powell, Weems, and Owle). To add an interactive narrative to our map of the Coquille River, we work with ArcGIS mapping technology, which allows us to overlay text, images, and video elements on an interactive map (“ArcGIS Online”). With this, we implement a style of scrollytelling where readers can move through the webpage and map at their own pace and interact with the map elements nonlinearly, further disrupting the linear settler spatiotemporality of mapping. Songs, stories, and art can be placed into context within the map, tying the river to Coquille knowledge and histories. Jarrett Martineau (2015) suggests, “Indigenous communicative media (visual art, performance, lm and video, literature, storytelling, and diverse digital and new media arts) comprise a complex prism through which to re ect, understand, critique and interpret our reality” (140). Notably, the nished map is a multilayered form of artistic decolonial imagining.

An essential part of Indigenous methodologies includes properly crediting the artists and thinkers included in a project. A simple acknowledgement line at the end is insuf cient; thus, we share the speci c roles and collaborations here and in the project itself. For the map and website components, Justin Sorensen in Creativity and Innovation Services at the University of Utah provided ArcGIS services. Micah Huff composed and produced the song, “The River’s Melody,” which is embedded in the project. All the art (ink on paper and digital) of the dentalium, salmon, leaf blueprint, camas, and roots as well as the photographs of the river are by Ashley Cordes. These were edited by Ashleigh McDonald using a Photoshop application for visual consistency. Sudhanshu Sane procured a dataset and created the visualization of the von Kárman Vortex Street with Ashley Cordes. Gary R. Vonderohe, assistant district sh biologist at the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife at the Charleston Field Of ce, was consulted for essential sh data.

Community Engagement

The project is also concerned with community research, or participatory action components (Weber-Pillwax 2009), and working with the Indigenous community in an iterative and respectful manner. Throughout this project, various historians, cultural bearers, artists, and natural resources activists from the CIT were consulted. They provided important feedback and information that shaped the project’s trajectory. Expert interviews were also conducted with Brenda Meade, chair of CIT, and Chief Jason Younker in September 2021. Lastly, Kassie Rippie, Coquille Tribal historic preservation of cer (THPO), Clark Walworth, CIT communications director, Denni Hokema, CIT anthropologist, and Helena Linnell, CIT biological planning and operations manager, provided reviews, information, clari cations on dates, cultural material, and internal contacts. This StoryMap and its code repository will be given to the CIT to use as they see t, for example on their website concerning the salmon crisis, as references in newsletters, or to share with the broader community.

Description of the Project

When stepping into a river, we experience a corporeal connectedness of being submerged in that water, which can serve as a time machine, transporting us to storied places and prior historical memories. This website is a digital step into the river. The project begins with opening text to frame the project and then draws readers by having them scroll over a digital representation of the river as though they were wading through it, experiencing art, stories, and the history of the land along the way. The following is a brief overview of each section on the website, detailing the reasons for each section and what they aim to accomplish.

Salmon Relatives

This rst point of the StoryMap is “Salmon Relatives” visualized by salmon art, a video, and text explaining the relationship of the Coho and Chinook salmon to the Coquille people. It discusses respect for the salmon and their environment, particularly due to their sacri ce of providing themselves as food to those in the region. This relationship is used to articulate a mutually caring relationality with the world around us and, in particular, how our social systems can impact that relationship. In this case, we focused on how ignoring salmon as kin to the Coquille justi es the pollution of their habitat by settler industries.

Dentalium

The StoryMap leads the viewer to an illustration of a dentalium necklace. The accompanying text explains that many dentalium necklaces or pieces thereof lie buried in the soil under the river or have been carried by streams to the

Figure 1 Ink on paper by Ashley Cordes.

Figure 2. Ink on paper by Ashley Cordes.

ocean. Furthermore, it describes how dentalium has been used historically, with particular attention paid to how they were used to build relationships between people and salmon. This attention to history and relationality is used to both emphasize relationships between humans and non-humans while storying the land of the Coquille River via the sharing of its history.

von-Kármán Vortex Street

With the relationship to salmon rmly established, the StoryMap then moves to a time-varying ow visualization of the von-Kármán vortex street as an example of our attempts to comprehend the intelligence and dynamics of water. This change in topic expands the scope of consideration in our relational approach to beings which are not commonly considered to be sentient or intelligent. It asks the reader to explore their relationships to the phenomena around them and expand their consideration and care to what is often overlooked.

Plant Architecture and Biophilic Design

With the viewer having been put into the position of considering the intelligences of the phenomena around them, they are then brought to illustrations of plants and a discussion of how the witnessing of nature in uences our built environments through social processes. Stories of architecture and infrastructure based on the patterns found in nature work to reduce deanimating human/ non-human splits based on limited views of intelligence and design. Instead, it is shown that humans are constantly learning from nature, a relationship that we should respect and care for rather than assert forceful control over.

The River’s Melody

After discussing biophilic design, the StoryMap presents a song inspired by the river’s melodies with an accompanying description discussing how the land both makes and inspires music and what the readers can learn about their relationship to land in recognizing the everyday melodies that surround them. This section

Figure 3 Visualization of the von-Kármán vortex street. The data were generated using Gerris Flow solver (Stéphane Popinet, 2003) and visualized by Sudhanshu Sane and Ashley Cordes.

Figure 4 Ink on paper by Ashley Cordes.

Figure 5. Ink on paper by Ashley Cordes.

further solidi es the lesson of the previous section, demonstrating directly how the Coquille River inspires artistic creation and expression. Additionally, the section explicitly asks the reader to consider how they listen to the world around them and how listening differently could lead them to better, more ful lling decolonial networks of care.

A Return to Salmon as Relative and Core Example of the Fall Chinook Salmon Decline

Indians do not talk about nature as some kind of concept “out there.” They talk about the immediate environment in which they live. They do not embrace all trees or love all rivers and mountains. What is important is the relationship you have with a particular tree or a particular mountain.

Vine Deloria, “The New Materialisms of Indigenous Theories of Non-Human Agency”

When I, Ashley Cordes, began the river StoryMap project, I intended it to include only the river art section, the rst half of the website. However, news began to circulate about the potential extinction of Coquille River fall Chinook salmon. The number of fall-run Chinook adult spawning sh declined from more than 30,000 in 2010 to 275 in 2019 and remains low (Coquille Indian Tribe 2021). Tribal Chair Meade called this the third crisis in 2021, happening alongside the pandemic and rampant wild res.4 The salmon crisis became a more urgent story to include in this project, particularly because of the importance to citizens of the CIT. The story is told through a series of map points and features to help visualize statistics, locations, and pedagogy important to understanding the salmon decline and the urgent need to address it. The Coquille River is in crisis, and thus the CIT, which has stewardship responsibilities, is responding. Oregonians and some key partners are not adequately reciprocating, but the goal is to work to nd substantive solutions.

On April 27, 2021, the CIT exercised its sovereign powers to declare a state of emergency for the salmon. One of the rst important points on the StoryMap contains a copy of the CIT’s Resolution CY21085 “Declaration of Emergency (Coquille River Salmon).” This point on the map corresponds with North Bend, the location of the government of the CIT where it was signed and processed. The resolution authorized Tribal executives to take all lawful measures to restore the salmon, appropriated a budget, and called on community partners to address the crisis. The opening statement of the emergency declaration highlights how the Tribe’s history and identity are tied to the lands, waters, animal life, resources, and lifeways of our ancestral territory. The emergency declaration continues:

Since time immemorial, Tribal members have transmitted traditional ecological knowledge about how to use, respect, nurture, live with, learn and take care of our salmon. . . . The sharing of this traditional ecological knowledge between generations of Coquille people depend on healthy and resilient salmon populations [and] part of the Tribe’s intergenerational teaching is that salmon are the Tribe’s relatives, and that Tribal members must protect their relatives from termination or extirpation. (Coquille Indian

This declaration stresses interrelationships between species and our responsibility to protect salmon for the good of all. It also stresses the commitments, visions, and values of the CIT as a sovereign Nation that is part of larger geopolitical entanglements. The emergency declaration was critical in bringing attention to the declining numbers of fall Chinook salmon.

Reasons for the Declining Numbers

There are many reasons why the fall Chinook salmon numbers are declining, contributing to what Chair Meade, calls a perfect storm.5 The river is experiencing habitat issues such as erosion. Humans have contributed to the problem through excessive wastewater discharges into the river (Andrew Sheeler 2016). The water is also becoming warmer, a phenomenon that can be partially remedied by a sustained effort to plant more trees.

Figure 6 Distribution of wild Chinook salmon, smallmouth bass, and striped bass in the Coquille Basin. Legend is provided in the StoryMap.

Tribe 2021)

Critically, “invasive species” are thriving in those warmer conditions and eating the salmon at high rates. Smallmouth bass were illegally dumped in the river more than a decade ago. Along with striped bass, these sh are devouring native Chinook smolt before they can reach the ocean. On the map, colored lines with corresponding species show the distribution of Native Chinook salmon, smallmouth bass, and striped bass in the Coquille Basin. Notably, the smallmouth bass occupy a lot of the same rearing/spawning areas as the salmon in the Coquille Basin, and the majority of smallmouth bass predation on juvenile salmon is upstream of the city of Coquille.6

Over shing of salmon is also a factor—for example, as noted on the map, at the Port of Bandon and many other locations. The past two years witnessed a high exploitation rate, with 40 percent of the sh that came into the Coquille River being harvested (moving the population from around 500 sh to under 300).7 In 2020 and 2021, all salmon shing on the river was closed for the purpose of building back a hatchery brood and to preserve wild sh. As a result of these factors, in recent years the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife (ODFW) has less than half of the Chinook salmon outlined in its hatchery plan.8

Strategies to Help

Several strategies are being used to help the salmon. For example, electro shing, no-limit angling and even spear shing have been employed to remove invasive bass species from areas key to the life cycle of salmon. To increase broodstock and improve hatchery production, the CIT has organized volunteers and community partners to collect returning adult salmon with nets. The CIT is also urging additional maintenance of rundown sh hatcheries.

The map shows a point on Ferry Creek, a Coquille River tributary, where ODFW works to collect adult salmon for its hatchery program. Adult salmon returning from the ocean to spawn need to be protected from seals at Ferry Creek. The Coquille successfully called for the installation of a seal excluder, a fence that prevents predators from chasing the salmon upstream. Broodstock may also be collected in other areas besides Ferry Creek, and alternatives are being considered. For example, the CIT considered setting up a black garden tarp cover to create cooler, safer essential areas for the salmon. The sh also nd refuge under the bridges in Ferry Creek where the temperature is cooler.

Chair Meade said that these efforts are critical, but we also need help from Mother Nature including wetter years, cooler springs, and good ocean conditions to help sh get to prime spawning habitats and from the estuaries to the ocean.9 For this salmon crisis, the CIT is calling for co-management of the Coquille Valley watershed with ODFW, for legislative xes at the federal level, and for the community, including landowners in the area, to recognize how essential salmon are to the CIT as kin.

Additional Map Points Related to Coquille Traditions

The map includes additional points. For example, there is a pin just above the city of Powers, which is one of many locations where the CIT harvests lampreys. Today we use many miles of river for harvesting, but traditional harvesting would take place along the entire river and estuary. Lampreys are important as they contribute to a healthy ecosystem by feeding off dead sh and providing nutrients to the water. Resembling eels, lampreys have existed for at least 300 million years. Their bodies are boneless, but their distinct sucking mouths have an abundance of teeth. Salmon and lampreys have long relied on each other, and both are essential to Indigenous peoples in the Paci c Northwest. Like salmon, lampreys are being eaten in large numbers by smallmouth bass and are subject to the Coquille River’s habitat issues.

This point on the map presented an opportunity to include the traditional words for lamprey (“singtae” in the Miluk language of the Lower Coquille people; “magulnah” in the Athapaskan dialect of the Upper Coquille; and “scoquel” in Chinuk Wawa, the trade language shared by Paci c Northwest tribes).10 It was also a unique opportunity to include an oral history quotation suggesting the lamprey abundance years ago. Lottie Evanhoff, a Coos Tribal member who lived until 1944, said: “Eel swarmed in the river. They wriggled through the rapids, and they sucked on the rocks. Men speared the eels of the rocks and they set funnel shared nets in the stream. They used canoes in deep places and dipped up the eels with long handled dip nets.”11

Per the suggestion of the THPO, the map includes another point at the Coquille Culture, Education and Learning Services building, a place that stores a leister spear, a traditional technology. A leister spear is used in the salmon migration season and is a reminder of the importance of salmon as an essential rst food. Making the spear requires materials from elk, cedar, vine maple, and spruce. It exempli es the interconnectedness among assemblages of species needed for the CIT to catch and connect with salmon. For this point, we included a Coquille Tribal seal and ag that prominently display the leister spear and connote that salmon is key to who we are as a people.

Termination Empathy

One of the most important points of the maps is at Bullards Beach, the location of the rst annual salmon ceremony after Restoration in 1988. The CIT has held salmon ceremonies from Bullards Beach up to North Fork since time immemorial, but this ceremony in 1988 celebrated the newly re-established Tribal government. It marked a symbolic next chapter after the Tribe’s termination.

Importantly, the emergency declaration resolution, shared earlier, also expresses empathy, a capacity to tend to the struggles of others with fortitude and historical memory. Empathy is critical in the declaration’s mention of termination as a human- sh shared experience. The Coquille peoples, along with other tribes in western Oregon, were terminated by the Western Oregon

Termination Act (1954). The Coquille peoples know the realities of genocide and assimilation that settlers systematically enacted, particularly in the mid-1800s with removal to reservations, and a century later with the act that withdrew federal recognition (Cordes, 2021). We know the resulting devastation. There was loss, and that loss remains to this day even as we work hard to rebuild a strong sovereign Nation.

We do not want our salmon kin to experience this loss, nor do we want to experience their loss. Humans and sh have long experienced the complexities of colonialism together, and we should listen to the philosophies of sh that have survived for millions of years (Todd, 2018). Presumably, by the time this article is published, the situation for fall Chinook salmon will have changed. The hope is that the efforts being made by the Coquille with community partners will improve the numbers of the fall Chinook salmon rather than lead them to extinction. There was a time of abundance when the salmon nourished us, and we work toward restoring that abundance for the bene t of future generations. We express gratitude to those who have navigated the StoryMap, taking a digital step into the Coquille River. To help the salmon, the CIT suggests writing about concerns to then Governor Kate Brown, getting involved with community partners such as the Coquille Watershed Association, and spreading word about the crisis. To learn more from the CIT, please access the online K–12 place-based curriculum produced as part of Senate Bill 13: Tribal History Shared History.12 Particularly relevant are Grade 4 Lesson 5 Plan: Coastal Lifeways,13 Grade 8 Lesson 2 Plan: Coquille Potlatch Culture,14 and Grade 10 Lesson 3 Plan: Survivance and Tribal Government.15 Lastly, more information on salmon and the tribes and nations in what is now known as Oregon can be found on the Oregon Department of Education website.16

Thoughts on Decolonial Feminist Potentiality and Project Implications

This project afforded a unique opportunity to layer stories, to understand general ideas of environmental intelligences and thereafter link to the very particular salmon crisis. The rst half of the StoryMap, the river art section, assisted in a broader understanding of relationships and communication between humans and non-humans by analyzing several points related to the Coquille River. It was motivated by the sentiment that if we sought to affectively understand the different intelligences of elements of the river and relationship between them with more nuance, we would be more inclined to change our relationship to the river and the beings within it. The second half of the StoryMap was an opportunity to illustrate where we fell short in our capacity to honor the wisdom of salmon and to protect the salmon of the Coquille River Basin. It detailed points of interest regarding the imminent extinction of the fall Chinook salmon and the CIT’s efforts to prevent it, based on our particular relationships with them as kin.

This project demonstrates how digital humanities praxis intertwined with the love, care, desire, and prayer of Indigenous feminism can produce artistic and cartographic means of challenging oppressive colonial “master” narratives. Hierarchical human/non-human splits, which de-animate in order to enslave (TallBear; Lewis et al.), were challenged through animating and expressing love for the Coquille River and the salmon that inhabit it. When we recognize the intelligence on display in the von-Kármán Vortex and the ways the river produces its own melodies, we break down hierarchies of human and nonhuman intelligence, demonstrating how our knowledges intertwine and inspire one another. When we recognize and honor the salmon’s sacri ce, especially through gifts of dentalium, we challenge hierarchies of love, care, and prayer by extending these tenets of feminism to non-human kin.

Settler environmentalism presents “ ‘nature’ as rape-able, and ‘development’ as the normalized aim of modernity” (la paperson, 117). We choose instead to tell the stories of the CIT, the Coquille River, settler colonialism in the Paci c Northwest, and the Chinook salmon. We present land as something to be respected as its own animated entity, interconnected with humans rather than separate from them. By mapping how the salmon use the river and marking key points of historical and modern interest to the CIT, the project upholds its decolonial aims by upending stories of settler maps and replacing them with Indigenous stories, human and non-human alike. As a result, the Coquille River StoryMap demonstrates how decolonial Indigenous feminist praxis can be performed in a digital space.

From this Indigenous feminist praxis, we both demonstrate and propose a theoretical shift in the view of who or what the “subject” of feminism is. Just as Judith Butler (1999) and Lee-Oliver interrogated the subjects and research focuses of feminisms, we interrogate the idea of humans (or the patriarchal oppression/subjugation of humans) as the subject of feminism through a practical refusal of deanimating human/non-human dichotomies (TallBear). As a result of this praxis, we argue that feminism should theoretically shift to focus on interrogating and challenging the patriarchal subjugation and oppression of all beings. As Butler argues, “the identity categories often presumed to be foundational to feminist politics, that is, deemed necessary in order to mobilize feminism as an identity politics, simultaneously work to limit and constrain in advance the very cultural possibilities that feminism is supposed to open up” (187). We are not saying we should do away with identity politics as a whole; identity as an analytic highlights important differences, such as the speci c needs of the Chinook salmon and where they overlap and/or diverge from the needs of the CIT. Instead, we propose that feminists emphasize their subject as the processes of patriarchy and their varied effects on all beings. Women can still be, and arguably should be, a primary focus of feminism in this theoretical shift. However, if we recognize that “no entity can escape enslavement under an ontology which can enslave even a single object” (Lewis et al., para. 39), then

feminism, and especially decolonial feminisms which combat the enslavement of lands and people, must theoretically and practically expand to challenge the patriarchal enslavement of all beings.

This project has limitations due to technological constraints, timing, and complex histories accompanying our methodologies. For example, we acknowledge that mapping and cartography can be problematic because they are often beholden to arti cial boundaries that have been colonially imposed and lead to erasures of Indigenous conceptions of land (Harris 2004). Our map includes settler cities, rather than the names of the nations and Indigenous communities that have lived there for many millennia. Even adding these or displacing settler cities with Indigenous cultural oversight areas could be fraught, as Indigenous Nations often occupied the same areas or stewarded them at different historical times. Putting a line on a map is political and often dangerous. Another limitation is that this story is still unfolding; by the time this article reaches the reader, efforts to save the salmon may have changed. To remedy this limitation, we plan to periodically update the StoryMap in an iterative manner and honor requests from the Coquille.

We also recognize the accessibility issues at multiple levels with our work. There are digital divides preventing individuals from many marginalized communities from visiting our website (Duarte, 75). Additionally, even if one can access the webpage, the page may not be suitable for audience members with various disabilities. We have tried to mitigate this by ensuring that some accessible elements are always present-text that a screen reader can read for those with low/no vision or a high-contrast mode for the map for those who are colorblind. However, we are limited by ArcGIS’s built-in accessibility settings and recognize that accessibility is an ongoing process and conversation that requires numerous tweaks.

Despite limitations, this StoryMap project also importantly demonstrates how situating a project within the community leads to a better, more expansive project. Collaborating with the CIT had immense bene ts. The THPO, for example, was generous in her time, and she suggested different points to address (such as the lampreys and the leister spear) and she suggested quotations and images to include to make the map more meaningful to our history. She also suggested including language groups on the map, such as Miluk, adding an important layer that ties language to land and life. Chair Meade suggested including points on the map that show the actual hard work Coquille peoples engaged in to help our salmon kin. Further, working with those in the community has meaningful ethical bene ts. For example, we received a suggestion to remove a point that included potentially dangerous information about an archaeological site that could lead to looting. Ultimately, many people helped to make this project come together. This collaboration is essential to activating community activist momentum and avoiding harm that otherwise might have been overlooked.

Like other scholars and artists, we agree that creative community-engaged projects tend to bring attention to critical issues in ways that cut through noise and activate momentum for healing and understanding. For example, Theresa May and members of the Klamath Theatre Project (2015) produced a communitybased play about the death of more than 30,000 coho and Chinook salmon in the Lower Klamath River. It detailed the trauma of the salmon deaths, possibilities of storytelling to transform communication between Indigenous and nonIndigenous communities impacted by disasters of the Klamath watershed, and connections between Indigenous peoples and salmon that Western epistemologies fails to recognize. Another important project is by the Tribal Government of the Confederated Tribes of Coos, Lower Umpqua, and Siuslaw Indians. They recently created a StoryMap called Abundance, a web-based narrative about their lifeways and languages. Abundance was produced to demonstrate care for their healthy communities and ecosystems and to complement the curriculum of Senate Bill 13, a mandated curriculum about the Native experience in Oregon in K–12 public schools. Land-based pedagogy has been translated by Indigenous peoples in a variety of different media including web-based stories, video games (LaPensée 2021), lesson plans (Sabzalian, Morrill, and Edmo 2019), traditional and digital art, theater, graf ti, and music. More projects like these are necessary and should be shared with appropriate audiences with the permission of Indigenous communities and the content creators.

Final Thoughts

As scholars working at the intersections of Indigenous studies, feminisms, and digital media, we are particularly attentive to the blurring experiences of ows, boundaries, digital interfaces, and “natural” environments. We translate the elements that we touch, swim in, walk through, drink, eat, and gain life from into digital formats to tell new stories. Learning from the land-based and digital pedagogies of the Coquille River provided a new modality to imagine the experiences of previous and future generations, forging better relationships with sentient beings and objects along the river’s pathways. Rivers are dynamic vectors of historical memory and are indeed pedagogy.

In the project’s process, we learned that critically oriented Indigenous art-making and cartographic storytelling afford decolonial dreams of different futures and imaginaries. As Martineau (2015) suggests, “creativity activates possibility, and with it, decolonial potentiality” (50). Our hope is that some potentiality is activated when people visit the Coquille River or our digital map.

We hope it may encourage healing of the Coquille River Basin and replenish the fall Chinook salmon. The story needs to be told in various formats to all who are listening, to activate a prism of decolonial potential for an even larger goal—the full return of the Coquille River Basin to the Coquille peoples’ stewardship.

Feminist Formations 35.1

Author’s Note

The authors of this article are happy to report that after the writing of this article, Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife Commission unanimously approved of the CIT’s bid for a historic co-management agreement. Under the agreement, the CIT will share responsibility for managing sh and wildlife in Coos, Curry, Douglas, and Lane counties. This includes the Coquille River Basin and will signi cantly impact the CIT’s ability to work toward restoring the salmon.

Ashely Cordes is an Assistant Professor of Indigenous Studies. Her research lies at the intersection of Indigenous media, critical/cultural studies, place-based storytelling, and community-based participatory action research. Her recent work in these areas has been published in journals such as Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies, Critical Studies in Media Communication, and Feminist Media Studies. Ashley is an enrolled citizen of the Ko¯kwel/Coquille Nation.

Micah Huff is a web software developer at the University of Michigan School of Social Work. This work was done in part at the University of Utah Department of Communication. Their research is focused on the intersections of digital media and critical cultural studies.

Notes

1. The web address for the StoryMap: storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/3678bc6932c7 4332b0d57adf3434aa55

2. Jason Younker, email interview with Ashley, September 16, 2021.

3. See Note 2.

4. Brenda Meade, Zoom interview with Ashley, September 24, 2021.

5. See Note 3.

6. Gary R. Vonderohe, phone interview with Ashley, September 1, 2021.

7. See Note 6.

8. See Note 6.

9. See Note 4.

10. Kassie Rippie, phone interview with Ashley, September 7, 2021.

11. See Note 10.

12. Senate Bill 13: Tribal History Shared History: www.coquilletribe.org/?page_id =9266.

13. Particularly relevant are Grade 4 Lesson 5 Plan: Coastal Lifeways: www.coquille tribe.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/gr.-4-Lesson-5-Plan-Coastal-Lifeways.pdf

14. Grade 8 Lesson 2 Plan: Coquille Potlatch Culture: www.coquilletribe.org/wp -content/uploads/2021/02/gr.-8-Lesson-2-Coquille-Potlatch-Culture.pdf

15. Grade 10 Lesson 3 Plan: Survivance and Tribal Government: www.coquilletribe .org/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/gr.-10-Lesson-3-Plan-Survivance-and-Tribal -Government.pdf

16. Information on salmon and the Tribes and Nations in what is now known as Oregon found on the Oregon Department of Education website: www.oregon.gov /ode/students-and-family/equity/NativeAmericanEducation/Pages/Senate-Bill-13-Tribal -HistoryShared-History.aspx#:~:text=In%202017%2C%20the%20Oregon%20Legislature ,provide%20professional%20development%20to%20educators.

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Resisting the Settler Gaze: California Indigenous Feminisms

Luhui Whitebear

The settler gaze has created the conditions in which Indigenous women and TwoSpirit people experience high levels of violence both historically and in current times. This essay analyzes California Indigenous feminist resistance to the violences in the mission impacted region of the Californias. Toypurina, Bárbara Gandiaga, and Yaquenonsat are discussed as examples of California Indigenous feminist resistance to settler colonial systems that contributed to the murdered and missing Indigenous women, girl, and Two-Spirit (MMIWG2S+) crisis during their time period. These historic California Indigenous women are then compared with current efforts to address the MMIWG2S+ crisis in California and beyond. Counter-colonial Indigenous intergenerational storytelling is used as a methodology to read these stories and the settler records in order to resist the settler gaze.

Keywords: California Indigenous / Counter-colonial / Indigenous feminisms / Indigenous resistance / Intergenerational storytelling / MMIW / Settler colonialism / Settler gaze / Two-Spirit

“CALIFORNIA IS A STORY. California is many stories.”

—Deborah Miranda, Bad Indians

Introduction

In the construction of the settler state of California, Indigenous people have been framed as relics of the past and gone, leaving only fragments remaining usually in the hands of non-Native scholars and hobbyists whose narratives

©2023 Feminist Formations, Vol. 35 No. 1 (Spring) pp. 97–116

reify the absence of Indigenous peoples, our voices, agency, and rights. This fragmentary thinking can be found scattered across lands, settler records, public school curriculum, and public tellings. Thus, the damaging master narrative has shaped how Indigenous Californians are viewed, discussed, taught about, and decentered historically and in present times. As an Indigenous person from California who grew up with a strong connection to my Coastal Chumash heritage, lands, and waters, I have always known that the dominant story about Indigenous California was incomplete and dominated by settler stories of who we are. Family and Tribal research has offered me a clearer connection to my Cochími and settler ancestors as well as the histories that enable me to draw the path they traveled to who I am today. Working through counter-colonial intergenerational methodology and engaging alternative constructions of the usefulness of fractal analysis, this essay is a work of reclamation. It is written from my perspective as an Indigenous California person and contributes to the growing academic work by Indigenous California people to reclaim our stories and connections in resistance to the settler gaze from which our stories are dominated.

I call this work counter-colonial intergenerational storytelling. It is a rhetorical practice to disrupt the process of settler colonial erasure and to reclaim cultural memories within Indigenous activist circles as well as within Indigenous communities more broadly. Counter-colonial intergenerational storytelling is a rhetorical practice within Indigenous activism that reclaims critical pieces of our histories and identities that are often hidden or erased from dominant discourse within and about Indigenous activism. Counter-colonial intergenerational storytelling is a praxis: it is both theory and methodology combined, informed by Indigenous activism, grounded in Indigenous feminist and queer analyses, and intervening to restore balance and healing within Indigenous communities. It is a counter to the settler colonial discourses and systems of oppression that have been intentionally imposed upon us to disrupt our connections to our lands and our identities.

Through this essay I use counter-colonial intergenerational storytelling to look between and within three stories of Indigenous feminist activism during the Spanish mission period of California. It is here I look for patterns that reveal recognizable fractals. I also engage with adrienne marie brown’s use of fractals for systemic change to see that, “The patterns of the universe repeat at scale. There is a structural echo that suggests two things: one, that there are shapes and patterns fundamental to our universe, and two, that what we practice at a small scale can reverberate to the largest scale” (brown 2017, 52). By using counter-colonial intergenerational storytelling I look for those patterns across time, those left in colonial records and our retellings of Indigenous California histories, to listen for the echoes of the ancestors that remain waiting to be heard. These fractals offer entry points to work towards reclaiming our histories

and cultural memories of Indigenous California that have been long dominated by settler colonial tellings.

The term California is being used in this essay to describe both what is often referred to as Baja California and Alta California to draw attention to ways in which settler borders attempt to sever our connections, histories, and current day issues. The term Indigenous Californians refer to those who have ancestral connections to the settler state of California, whereas Indigenous in this essay refers to the original peoples of the Americas more broadly. Two-Spirit means Indigenous people whose gender and/or sexual identities exist beyond the settler imposed cis-heteropatriachal norms. While the identities themselves are not new, the term Two-Spirit itself was agreed upon as an umbrella term for Indigenous people to replace the derogatory term “berdarche” in 1990 at the Intertribal Native American, First Nations, Gay and Lesbian American Conference in Winnipeg (Driskill et al. 2011, 5). These blanket terms are not intended to replace our own terms and names for our peoples and identities and are rather used as uni er terms.

To encapsulate settler colonialism to its very core, it is the process in which groups from other lands assume superiority in order to attempt to replace existing Indigenous customs, governing systems, societal norms, political frameworks, and ways of being. In other words, “settler colonialism is a persistent social and political formation in which newcomers/colonizers/setters come to a place, claim it as their own, and do whatever it takes to disappear the Indigenous peoples that are there” (Arvin, Tuck, and Morrill 2013, 12). The settler society constructs what is considered acceptable and the ways in which societies are assembled. Settler colonialism is always about seeking to replace what is with a goal of land and resource acquisition and the accumulation of wealth-based power (Barnd 2017). One of the results of settler colonial processes to control the continual erasure of Indigenous people is the creation, cultivation, and use of the settler gaze.

The settler gaze is used to describe Indigenous California women and TwoSpirit people as casualties of settler violence; it is a dangerous narrative that continues to shape our realities in current times. Indigenous feminisms tell us we are much more than that. We are mothers, healers, resisters, warriors, and leaders worthy of dignity, respect, and life. As an Indigenous California person, I understand that Indigenous feminisms rely on our connections to stories, lands, waters, and ancestors. It is a responsibility. I take this work seriously, as a purpose, and with care. As I bring forth the stories shared in this essay, I explain the settler gaze as well as explore Indigenous California feminist resistance to it to show how rhetorical and discursive representations of anti-Indigeneity, and the particularities of misogyny, are re ected, resisted, and used to shape our stories and lived realities.

The Settler Gaze

There are many ways to gaze: in a mirror, at another, at art, towards nature. All offer a re ection of ourselves within the worlds around us. Unlike re ective gazes, the settler gaze is a tool constructed by settlers in order to create a set of constructs that settlers, expansionists, and governmental agents use to maintain the imaginary of those subjected to settler colonial systems and the purpose of the settler. The settler gaze is a powerful tool used by settlers to put forth what they imagine Indigenous people to be, which is reinforced by settler norms that create distinctions and devised that signify relational elements between settlers and Indigenous people. The basis of the settler gaze is rooted in domination and the erasure of the experiences and identities of Indigenous people. Mary Louise Pratt interrogates settler art and writing as produced along contact zones; the role they play is to uphold settler superiority over Indigenous people and lands. Pratt argues that “de-exoticizing places and peoples become in the eyes of the seeing-man repugnant conglomerations of incongruities, asymmetries, perversions, absence, and emptiness” (Pratt 1992, 220). The images created through settler records and art reinforce the settler imaginary of the vast emptiness of Indigenous California waiting to be conquered.

The settler gaze is a tool in which settlers build systems to differentiate Indigenous people through a lens of conquer and subjugation. For example, the 1850 Act for the Government and Protection of Indians provided a state sanctioned slave market of Indigenous Californians well beyond the passage of the thirteenth Amendment in 1789. This act, which “was not repealed in its entirety until 1937,” also allowed for the abduction of Indigenous children by settlers in order to use them for indentured servitude (Johnson-Dodds 2002, 5). The settler gaze deeply informed that law by building upon stereotypes of Indigenous people and the “danger” they posed when consuming alcohol, for example, and con ated Indigenous people with colonial stereotypes of the “savage Indian” who was represented as resistant to progress and unaware of what is best for their children. The settler gaze was used to justify continued slavery of Indigenous Californians based on the established practice of Indigenous bodies used as labor for construction of the settler state that began with the Spanish mission system. Many markers throughout California, like the mission system, “Indian schools,” Alcatraz, and racist-misogynistic place names serve as monuments to the settler gaze and its power to reduce Indigenous peoples, societies, and rights while providing the justi cation of settler dominance for generations to come. The settler gaze is systemic, rhetorical, and based upon settler colonial consciousness.

Tamara L. Hunt describes the colonial gaze as how colonial powers, “saw the colonies through eyes that were blurred by misinformation, misconception, and stereotypes” (Hunt and Lessard 2002, 1). Much like the colonial gaze, the settler gaze is used to assert the image it creates of Indigenous people

as a way to assume self-proclaimed authority and control of our lands, waters, and bodies, and much like the male gaze, the settler gaze is dependent on cisheteropatriarchal expectations of where one’s ostensible place is in society. The settler gaze is used to create the image of who we should be and how we should show up in the world, and in the settler world, that is conquerable. In her article, “Domesticating Imperialism: Sexual Politics and the Archaeology of Empire,” Barara Voss describes “imperial visions of colonial seduction” that “existed in the imaginations of colonial explorers” (Voss 2008, 193). Colonizers constructed the settler gaze from the place from which we would be viewed and where they imagined we belonged. For Indigenous people, that becomes the past—the place we belong in order for settlers to convince themselves there is justi cation for ongoing occupation and exploitation of our lands and waters. For Indigenous women and Two-Spirit people, that became compounded by gendered and sexual domination. The place we belong is in the memory with fragments of who we were remaining—a tragic tale of the past “portrayed as passive victims of colonization” (Voss 2008, 193) and a casualty necessary for the society that exists now.

For Indigenous women and Two-Spirit people, the settler gaze has been used to depict our bodies as being deserving of violence due to heteropatriarchal and heteropaternalist constructions of perceptions that we are “weak, incompetent, naïve, and confused” (Arvin, Tuck, and Morrill 2013, 13). The continual oversexualization of Indigenous women has also created a means to embed these violences into everyday life and in law and policy. The settler gaze is embedded into the settler records and makes possible the high levels of violence we face in current times, which will be discussed later in this essay. The historic erasure and reliance on these types of archival records perpetuate a cycle of violence against Indigenous people in California, particularly Indigenous women and Two-Spirit people. As a result, our resistance becomes part of who we are as we must continually assert our roles in our communities as well as our presence in the settler records of resisters, leaders, and warriors. The settler gaze is used to shape where we t in these records yet, “the pens and lenses of non-Native soldiers, missionaries, and settlers provide much of the fragmentary written evidence from which we can catch glimpses into the rich lives of these warriors” (Tatonetti 2021, 27). These fragmentary pieces, today theorized as fractals, are left behind intentionally or not, allow us to learn from and bring into the larger story of Indigenous feminist resistance. Counter-colonial intergenerational storytelling calls for us to listen to these stories to recenter our knowledges rather than carry forward colonial knowledges of who we are. This particular Indigenous feminist lens not only helps us recognize the settler gaze, it helps us nd the stories, deconstruct—rather than return—the settler gaze, and reimagine our worlds with us at the center, in order to reconstruct our stories of Indigenous feminist resistance.

Indigenous Feminisms

Settler violences have shaped the ways in which Indigenous people experience feminism. While some Indigenous women have asserted that feminism does not have a place in Indigenous circles, I agree with the longstanding assertions by Indigenous feminists like Paula Gunn Allen that feminism drew its roots from Indigenous women’s political leadership and autonomy (Gunn Allen 1986). Additionally, Luana Ross reminds us that feminism has often created hostile spaces as they have asked us to ostracize Indigenous men rather than call them into collective healing while also reminding us that feminism allows us a way to bring gendered experiences into conversations about Indigenous issues (Ross 2009). The word feminism may feel new to Indigenous communities, but it has been part of our communities long before the word existed. Indigenous women and Two-Spirit people’s leadership and political autonomy have always been part of who we are, but “whitestream” feminism has grappled with how to bring in matters of Indigenous sovereignty and identity to broader feminist efforts for generations (Arvin, Tuck, and Morrill 2013). The Indigenous feminists that were drawn upon for whitestream feminism are our fractals. They knew that remaining committed to Indigenous women’s leadership, they would impact the larger scale beyond their speci c peoples. They were, and are, our continued connections to our sovereignty as Indigenous people.

Indigenous feminisms calls for whitestream feminism to be accountable for the ways settler colonial violence is reinforced by feminist actions and the erasure of Indigenous feminisms. This calls for whitestream feminism to grapple with how it has used and bene ted from the settler gaze. It also calls for our own communities to be accountable to the ways settler colonial violence shows up in our communities due to internalized oppression and lateral violence. This calls for our own communities to understand and heal from the ways we have been conditioned by the settler gaze. Just like the calls to accountability are braided together by Indigenous feminisms, a bulk of scholarship using an Indigenous feminist lens calls for the recognition of the connections between the violences towards lands and bodies. Particularly, “The violences towards Indigenous bodies and lands are intertwined and part of the settler colonial paradigm. At its root, Indigenous feminism is about these connections as well as the ways in which settler colonialism has in icted gendered violence on our bodies and spirits because of who we are as Indigenous people” (Whitebear 2020). In the context of Indigenous California, these ties to lands and bodies are threaded through our experiences with settler colonial systems. California Indigenous feminisms ask us to restore the relationships to our lands, waters, and cultural memories, especially through stories, by countering settler colonial dominance. It asks us to remember we are more than what the settler records depict us as.

Our stories are controlled by the dominant narrative as being situated in the past, especially in the areas impacted directly by the California mission system, which is the focus of the remainder of this essay. As part of Indigenous feminist theory and methodology, counter-colonial intergenerational storytelling provides a way to examine settler records and look for stories between where gaps remain—cracks left as doors or windows opening to our past in order to reach through and pull stories of Indigenous resistance forward to us. It is a pathway to our ancestors to travel back and forth across with an understanding the there is never a single story or single truth to explain who we are and why we resisted.

Indigenous California and Resistance

The dominant story of the construction of the Unites States tells a story of manifest destiny and westward expansion. California enters the conversation primarily through the gold rush and the rapid acquisition of land after statehood. The settler gaze is used to reinforce this as “the” story of California. However, the story of statehood and colonization started much earlier. As the declaration of independence was being signed, the California mission system was already established with missions spanning across both Baja California and Alta California. These missions were part of Junípero Serra’s “Sacred Expedition” under the direction of Spain to colonize and convert Indigenous Californians while also establishing military bases known as presidios (Whitebear 2022). Alta California was later simply renamed California at statehood, distinguishing itself from México while retaining an aesthetic of a romanticized Spanish past by retaining the California part of the name. The missions themselves hold stories of both trauma and resistance in their walls, beams, and graves. Each time I visit Mission Santa Barbara, I touch the same adobe and wood that some of my ancestors touched—a very real connection and touch across time to them. Their stories, and others remain waiting for us to return to.

The dominant tellings of California describe the missions as places Indigenous people “helped” build and chose to be at. The settler gaze is used to assert that Indigenous people are remembered as a tragic tale lost to disease and, in more recent times, genocide. It is framed as a “sad story” with fragments of Indigenous communities remaining. Even in describing Indigenous people, a progression of colonization is used to describe their place in the settler system: Indios (Indians) become neophytes (new converts) before reaching status as solidero (soldier) or gente de razon (people of reason) (Dartt 2009). Indigenous women and Two-Spirt people are highly invisiblized in all accounts with sprinkles of representation here and there. Colonizers strove to eradicate Indigenous women and Two-Spirit people’s leadership, presence, and political autonomy.

Despite the story that has been constructed about California Indigenous people being docile casualties of colonization, there was resistance. There has always been resistance. For example, the largest organized uprising in the mission

system was the Chumash Revolt of 1824 (Beebe and Senkewicz 1996). This revolt began at Mission Santa Ines and spread to La Purisma and Mission Santa Barbara resulting in a massive uprising and the burning of all three missions to varying degrees. Counter-colonial intergenerational storytelling offers a path to the fractal remains about this resistance within settler records.

The signi cance of this revolt has been largely missing in discussions about Indigenous resistance to colonization and minimized by settler retellings, both contributing to the master narrative created through the settler gaze about Indigenous California. In particular the Mission Santa Ines webpage describes the uprising as lasting “less than a week” rather than four months (Mission Santa Ines, n.d.). This misrepresentation separates this mission from the others and upholds a narrative that the missions maintained control of the Chumash people. In reality, most of the mission was burned to the ground and therefore no longer needed Chumash presence at Santa Ines which allowed the people to either ee or join in resistance at one of the other missions, which many did (Blackburn 1975).

There is also not much documentation about who was involved with the planning of the revolt. The vague descriptions rely on centering men as the leaders and those who made decisions and mostly only includes names of the padres and military of cers (Beebe and Senkewicz 1996; Blackburn 1975; Hudson 1980). This dominant telling is not in alignment with the shared leadership men, women, and Two-Spirit, or aqi, people held in Chumash societies. The Chumash Revolt was also a planned and coordinated effort that spanned across a large part of the central Chumash territory. In passing down the story of the revolt in an interview with J.P. Harrington, Maria Solares includes a description of one of the wots (chiefs) asking for the men and women of Santa Ines to travel to La Purisma “so that if they were all to be killed they would all die together” (Blackburn 1975, 224). She goes on to say that along the road to La Purisma, “many Indian men and women were strung out along the road” (Blackburn 1975, 225). This short description helps show that both men and women were ready to ght together in resistance to the mission control of their lands, bodies, and waters. Given there is much documentation of aqi presence in Chumash societies (Miranda 2010a), it is not far off to say there were men, women, and aqi people involved with the Chumash Revolt.

This is one story of many about Indigenous resistance in the mission impacted region of California against settler colonial control and violence. The remainder of this essay uses counter-colonial intergenerational storytelling to focus on the stories of three Indigenous women from the California mission impacted region who also resisted settler colonialism in their own communities, and as a result, resist the settler gaze and settler records. These three women are part of the fractal patterns of Indigenous feminist resistance in California. The following sections that explore these women’s stories confront settler records through counter-colonial interrogation and rewriting.

Toypurina as a Land Defender

The settler gaze works as rhetorical device that is used to decide how Indigenous people are remembered throughout settler records. Many times, settler histories directly clash with community rememberings of the very same people. Toypurina is an example of an Indigenous woman whose story has been dominated by the settler gaze in settler records. Known as a Tongva medicine woman, Toypurina is most well known for her involvement with the uprising at Mission San Gabriel. Her story is also becoming one of the most reclaimed stories of resistance by Indigenous Californians—a testament of the power of counter-colonial intergenerational storytelling and story reclamation as a form of resistance to the master narrative about Indigenous California women.

The Lost LA Curriculum Project is an example of how decolonized praxes in story reclamation serve to reimagine local histories and change the ways in which collective consciousness is informed. The Lost LA Curriculum Project has brought in several accounts of Toypurina’s story to help students in the Los Angeles public schools to learn more about local Indigenous histories. They include one of the earliest documentations in settler records about Toypurina’s involvement with the uprising as told by Mission San Gabriel’s of cial historian Thomas Workman Temple II in his article titled “Toypurina the Witch and the Indian Uprising at San Gabriel.” In the description of her, Temple writes of Toypurina as being “an Indian sorceress” and “the Indian witch” (Waldron, n.d., 7). His retelling of this moment in which the Indigenous resisters were captured not only describe her in a romanticized way using terminology of the time that was meant to bring in fear, but he also ensured he documented her as deceiving her people rather than leading them. It is important to note that this depiction of Toypurina was written in 1931, forty-six years after the uprising itself, much like the famous Chief Seattle speech was constructed using the settler imaginary and settler gaze decades after he delivered it. The retellings through the settler gaze shaped the view of Toypurina at the time of the uprising and were passed down to Temple, a person of mixed Indigenous and colonizer ancestry. It was reinforced through academic publication and therefore became viewed as “legitimate.”

In his article “Sources of Rebellion: Indian Testimony and the Mission San Gabriel Uprising of 1785,” Steven W. Hackel interrogates Temple’s accounts of the uprising, including his assertion of Toypurina as being one of the main organizers of the uprising (Hackel 2003). Hackel’s analysis offers an important view on relying on Temple’s article documentation in how it relies on stereotypes and a romanticized depiction of testimonies. At the same time Hackel upholds the settler gaze of Indigenous women by minimizing Toypurina’s involvement in the rebellion. Regardless of whether this was intentional, the framing around who was the leader of the rebellion centers Nicolás José as the authoritative gure and Toypurina as more of a bystander whose participation was purchased through beads (Hackel 2003).

By using counter-colonial intergenerational storytelling in reading the spaces between and gaps that remain, we can see that Nicolás José relied on Toypurina to gain support for the rebellion. Whether or not she planned or initiated the rebellion should not discount her involvement or serve as a source of disappointment of California feminist and/or activist scholarship. Based on analysis of her testimony, Hackel asserts that Toypurina was involved with the rebellion due to land disposition by both the Spanish colonizers and other Indigenous people who were being moved to Tongva lands (Hackel 2003). In his essay titled “The Rebellion Against the Mission of the Saintly Prince the Archangel, San Gabriel of the Temblors, 1785,” Eric Frith further asserts that, “Toypurina was taking her stand against demographic and ecological compression; the steady undermining of community integrity and stability; and the disruption of a subsistence way of life by a nascent, and growing, commercial political economy” (Frith 2014). By the current day standards, she would be described as a land defender.

Toypurina was not a casualty of a changing time, nor did she play a minor role in the rebellion. While her conviction for her role did not result in her death, she was exiled from the San Gabriel area, sending a message to her people that resistance was not an option in order to stay connected to land and community. She assumed a role of leadership and served as a diplomat between villages, garnering support of the people to rebel against the settler colonial forces that were taking over their lands and resources. This was a direct threat to the heteropatriarchal norms upheld by the mission system. She is remembered across generations of Indigenous peoples through stories as a warrior woman that helped lead her people against settler colonialism, a piece of the ongoing fractal patterns. She also serves as a current day source of inspiration through public art and education described by one mural creator as representing “the ultimate strength, the woman ghter, the mother who protects her children from harm at Ramona Gardens” (John 2014). This community description represents the people and how her memory is carried on—a counter to the settler gaze upheld in dominant discourse, especially in academia.

Bárbara Gandiaga in Resistance to Sexual Violence

As with Toypurina, the settler gaze was used to shape the way in which Bárbara Gandiaga has been remembered in the settler records. Bárbara O. Reyes discusses the settler accounts of Gandiaga, thought of as either Kumeyaay or Pa-ipai, in Private Women, Public Lives: Gender and the Missions of California. Reyes brings forth the only documentation of Gandiaga in settler records during the deliberations about her involvement in the death of two padres at Mission Santo Tomás in Baja California. The settler accounts depict her as a woman pleading for her life and claiming no involvement in the assassination of one of the padres named Eduardo Surroca, a crime for which she was executed for

nonetheless (Reyes 2009). Her posthumous conviction of the assassination of another padre named Miguel Lopéz four months earlier than Surroca’s death is also discussed by Reyes.

I draw from Reyes’ interrogation of the settler records in comparison to the oral histories of Gandiaga and the gendered violence that occurred in the California missions. I agree with Reyes’ assertion that Gandiaga held the selfagency and autonomy to advocate for justice against the padres, likely for acts of violence, despite her containment within the mission walls. Reyes’ deep analysis of testimonies of how Gandiaga’s story was retold by her own people help ll the gaps in the settler records of her motive to be involved with seeking justice. Counter-colonial intergenerational storytelling calls us to listen to these stories. Given she was moved from the monjerío (women’s quarters/nunnery in the missions), which are also well documented sites of sexual violence (Miranda 2013; Rizzo 2020), to a private quarter adjacent to the padres’ sleeping quarters (Reyes 2009), it is not hard to draw the line to what she was subjected to. Sexual violence was prevalent in the missions, and as more stories emerge through the writing of primarily Indigenous women, the more stories like Gandiaga’s can be recovered. Her story is a reminder that settlers controlled the courts, records, and silences to maintain settler control both in their times and to the present day. Today, Gandiaga’s name is added to ever growing murdered and missing Indigenous women, girls, and Two-Sprit people (MMIWG2S+) list, who have been subjected to sexual violence and death due to settler colonial systems and consciousness. The settler colonial system in which she lived controlled the legal system, and even with her own claims to innocence, the story among her people was that she was able to seek justice in her own terms. While she did not kill the padre herself, she was able to gather the support she needed from Indigenous men at the mission in order for the padre to be assassinated. These actions were a direct threat to the settler colonial system, and much like has been done many times by colonizers, fear was used to control the people. Gandiaga was publicly executed alongside two Indigenous men, Lázaro Rosales and Alexandro de la Cruz, also convicted for the death of Surroca (Reyes 2009). The message sent was that if you speak up about violence and seek justice, you will be punished and/or executed. The result was the reinforcement of silence around colonial violence, especially around sexual violence.

Much like Toypurina, examining the fractal realities of Gandiaga’s life, we are able to reproduce accurate accounts of both the ways in which each gure has been discounted in settler records and recorded as not having agency and political autonomy, and yet, work to take back and reimagine the historical record in holistic fashion. In settler records, Gandiaga is framed as jealous woman and/ or as just following the orders of men (Reyes 2009). Even in tourist materials about Baja California, Gandiaga is described as “an Indian domestic” yet also named as instigating the murders of both the padres (Kier, n.d.). Her story is reduced to a single sentence using the settler gaze with a reminder that she was

an Indigenous woman that was supposed to serve her superiors—a contemporary assertion of heteropatriarchal structures. Her resistance to violence and the leadership she assumed with some of the Indigenous men in the mission are turned into a story that label her simply as a murderer that deserved death. The larger narrative constructed by the travel site also reinforce a message the Indigenous women are dangerous, especially since the two men also convicted of the murder of Surroca are not named. Resistance to settler violence is notably more dangerous if Indigenous women are involved.

The Baja California travel site is replicating the same type of public narrative and message that was being sent back in 1806 when Gandiaga was executed: know your place. In the borderlands of Baja California, the current day rates of MMIWG2S+ are not given a statistical number, but they are known as being high. The use of public facing rhetoric is a settler colonial tool of control, especially in this area of Baja California. Reyes writes, “The way in which acts of aggression against her that occurred in the ‘private setting’ were invisible in the colonial judicial proceeding, yet the act of resistance against this oppression was transferred into a public arena and became an opportunity for colonial institutions to exert power over the colonized” (Reyes 2009, 78). Gandiaga was murdered not for killing the padre, but rather for speaking up against violence towards Indigenous bodies. She was murdered by the settler state. Through oral histories, Gandiaga was described as being placed between the two men and higher on the scaffolds when they were executed (Reyes 2009). Indigenous women and Two-Spirit people have been conditioned by settler colonial systems to keep silent about violences that occur in the private setting through fear by these types of public facing assertions of control. While the travel site does not give details, the reminder of what happened to Gandiaga is asserted through the mention of her name alone. Public discourse surrounding speaking up about violences can still have dangerous consequences for Indigenous women and Two-Spirit people. Gandiaga’s story in the larger pattern of fractals of Indigenous feminist resistance is especially important to countering these public discourses related to normalizing sexual violence and murder of Indigenous people.

Yaquenonsat the Matriarch

Much like Bárbara Gandiaga, an Ohlone women named Yaquenonsat, also known as known as Fausta, helped plan the assassination of one of the padres named Quintana without carrying out the killing herself (Rizzo 2020). While this took place a couple years after Gandiaga’s execution and several hundred miles away at Mission Santa Cruz, the assertion of Indigenous women’s leadership and autonomy is present in Yaquenonsat’s story as well. The act of seeking justice for sexual violence is also present. Martin Rizzo discusses Yaquenonsat’s story in conversation with another woman named Yunan that was also involved

with the plan to assassinate Quintana (2020). While this essay focuses on Yaquenonsat, it should be noted that the women involved with leadership and resistance should be viewed as the norm rather than exceptions of the time. Much like Toypurina and Gandiaga’s stories, Yaquenonsat’s story has been hidden due to the settler gaze. Indigenous women are not supposed to resist, and they are especially not supposed to remain free when they do. Countercolonial intergenerational storytelling helps us follow Yaquenonsat’s resistance and leadership within the mission walls.

Unlike Gandiaga, Yaquenonsat was closer to her thirties when she entered mission life. She was a mother and listed as a monja (nun) in the settler records (Rizzo 2020). The settler gaze is used to argue that she was converted and assumed a life of religious servitude. However, I agree with Rizzo that being listed as a monja had less to do with religion as it has to do with political positioning and leadership for women like Yaquenonsat. Her political autonomy as an Indigenous woman coupled with her social positioning pre-mission life afforded her the latitude to use settler roles to assume her existing leadership. Yaquenonsat found a way to navigate the violence and oppressive settler colonial system to continue to exert her position within her Ohlone community while within the mission walls.

Holding a leadership position with both her people and the church gave Yaquenonsat the ability to be in communication with the padres. Quintana was known for his cruelty towards Indigenous people and his violence behavior, including sexual violence (Rizzo 2020). The settler records retell his story as being murdered by Indigenous people and Indigenous oral histories tell his story as being killed in response to raping a young woman, “although historical records remain silent about the particulars” (Rizzo 2020, 309) Like with other settler records, much is missing surrounding the why behind Quintana’s assassination, but the gaps are lled by similar cases and oral histories. The reason for his assassination is not important to the settler records, but how he was killed is especially important to the settler records given the women involved in the planning remained hidden from settler persecution.

The sexual violence in the missions was not included in the settler records, yet it was present. The stories passed down generationally between Indigenous people retold what had happened. In her book Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir, Deborah Miranda writes a letter to Vicenta Gutierrez based on the documents left by J.P. Harrington through his interviews with Isabel Meadows and Kitsepawit, also known as Fernando Librado. Meadows documented Vicenta’s rape by one of the padres named José Real at Carmel Mission and Kitsepawit documented the ways in which the priests worked in collaboration with nuns in the monjerios to rape the Indigenous women and girls forced to live in them more broadly (Miranda 2013, 22–23). These powerful retellings by Meadows and Kitsepawit help ll those gaps in the settler records of what was happening to Indigenous people at the hands of the padres. This was counter-colonial

intergenerational storytelling in practice. In her article “ ‘Saying the Padre had Grabbed Her:’ Rape is the Weapon, Story is the Cure,” Miranda also discusses how after Vicenta disclosed the rape, her people sought justice leading Real to ee the mission and repost at the Monterey chapel (Miranda 2010b). Much like a message was sent at Carmel Mission, Yaquenonsat helped send a message that rape is not tolerated in her community—but at Mission Santa Cruz, the padre did not escape.

Yaquenonsat was able to navigate the settler system in the missions through a position of monja that signaled her allegiance to the church through the settler gaze. However, that same positioning allowed her to remain hidden as the church investigated Quintana’s murder nearly a year later. She was not suspected of helping plan the assassination and her people helped keep her name hidden from investigation (Rizzo 2020). She was able to exist in a space between leveraging the settler gaze for the bene t of her people and other Indigenous people at Mission Santa Cruz. Had she been caught, she would likely have faced similar public execution much like Bárbara Gandiaga as a form of fear and control. However, she continued to resist settler control even while contained within the mission walls. Yaquenonsat is part of the fractal pattern of Indigenous women’s resistance tied to the other Ohlone women as well as Toypurina, Gandiaga, Vicenta, Meadows, Kitsepawit, those at the Chumash revolt, and many others who resisted the impacts of the Spanish mission system in California. They are all part of that pattern spiraling from their ancestors to those of us in this generation as we continue the patterns forward to counter the settler colonial systems that are used to control our stories and cultural memories. They all help us escape from the ways in which we have been dominated by the settler gaze.

Breaking Free from the Mission Hold

In relation to how colonizers in positions of dominance and structural power used sexual violence as a tool of control, Miranda writes, “He re-educates the [N]ative woman: whatever she knew about gendered power, relationships between men and women, her own sexual agency and pleasure, has been violently over-written by this new curriculum of violation, submission, and complete lack of choice in the matter” (Miranda 2010b, 95). This domination over our bodies and lands has not only impacted our views of our own histories and places in society, it has shaped how dominant society views us in current times. That re-educating did not just impact Indigenous people, it impacted all people. Scholars have written extensively about the normalization of violence against our lands and bodies. This normalization has also contributed to the MMIWG2S+ crisis. Particularly, “The master narrative tells us that Indigenous women and Two-Spirit people are deserving of violence and are a threat to the colonial nations. Indigenous teachings tell us that our worlds cannot exist without them” (Whitebear 2021). It is

through Indigenous teachings and knowledge systems that we can unravel that re-educating that shaped the master narrative through Indigenous feminisms and Indigenous feminist theories (Arvin, Tuck, and Morrill 2013).

In California, Indigenous women have been resisting the attacks on our lands and bodies, as shown with the three women in this essay. Toypurian, Bárbara Gandiaga, and Yaquenonsat were facing the MMIWG2S+ crisis during their time and found ways to resist and intervene the settler colonial systems that made these violences possible. The passing down of resistance remains necessary in pushing back on the MMIWG2S+ crisis in current times as well. This is how we are part of the fractals and patterns of resistance. A study released by the Urban Indian Health Institute in 2018 listed California as one of the top ten states with large MMIWG2S+ urban case counts (Urban Indian Health Institute 2018). They also reported that about 75 percent of the cases identi ed in their full study did not include Tribal af liation—a re ection of the way the settler gaze has been used to render us as already disappeared. Additionally, the Sovereign Bodies Institute highlights the level of this violence in the California and in their 2021 report listed California as being in the top ve states nationwide with the highest level of MMIWG2S+ cases (Sovereign Bodies Institute 2021). As discussed on their social media, MMIW USA also recognizes the high rates of MMIWG2S+ cases in California as well as the role the Interstate 5 corridor plays in traf cking. They are also furthering this conversation by bringing conversations between MMIWG2S+ cases in México and the United States. The violence is still here—a continuation of that mission hold and the walls of silence the missions build around us. However, our resistance is still here as well. It shows up in ceremonial spaces, in the streets, on the ground doing searches, in the courtrooms, on the oors of senate, and in the classroom reclaiming, resistance, and seeking justice for those touched by colonial violence.

At the time this essay was written, there have been signi cant strides towards addressing the MMIWG2S+ crisis yet there is much work to do. Understanding the historic context to how we have arrived at this point helps us address the root issues. Growing bodies of what may be called Indigenous resistance scholarship are helping us all learn more and make the connections. In California, this violence is not new, nor is the resistance. Counter-colonial intergenerational storytelling can help us look to our stories, like those in this essay, and tie them to where we are in current times and understand how our Indigenous feminist resistance has always been the fractals glowing across generations in resistance to settler colonial violences. Organizations like the Urban Indian Health Institute, Sovereign Bodies Institute, and MMIW USA serve as platforms for our current day warrior women and Two-Spirit people to continue the resistance of the impacts created though the settler gaze. These moments of reclaiming the public narrative of what is acceptable and what is not can help offer healing to Indigenous communities.

We are More than Scattered Pieces

Indigenous ways of knowing, and what I described as counter-colonial intergenerational storytelling, have continued to pass down our truths as Indigenous people despite settler colonial attempts to silence and erase us. They are forms of resistance and a means to carry us forward into future generations. As I have written before, settler records are far from settled and are far from straight, both in terms of time as well as identities represented. This erasure from settler records continues to be used as weapon against us, especially in California mission impacted areas. Public record and settler records have used the settler gaze to decide whether Indigenous people are still “here.” In California, Spain used conversion, forced servitude, and caste in an attempt to erase us. México leveraged similar tactics for its short reign over California along with citizenship. The United States followed using germ warfare and massacre as old tools as well as national citizenship a new tool, leading us to where we are in current times as California Indigenous people in the mission impacted region facing settler records meant to quite literally to erase us. It is through nding ways to look at the “spaces between” that we can critically examine settler records for those often third spaces (Driskill 2016; Pérez 1999) our stories remain hidden safe from the settler gaze. This is where counter-colonial intergenerational storytelling offers a methodology to nd the pieces left behind. In discussing the absence of women from studies of the California missions, Martin Rizzo asserts that, “This absence, which signi es the rst point of these women’s misrepresentation, is obscured by the misconceptions and assumption of histories and the producers of archival documents” (Rizzo 2020, 291). Expanding on Rizzo’s assertion, I bring in the role of the settler gaze in upholding this continued erasure of Indigenous women and Two-Spirit resistance.

Despite the intentional colonial violence and attempts to contain us in the imaginary of who we should be, Indigenous women and Two-Spirit people have continued to resist erasure from the settler records, a continuation of generations of ancestors doing the same. In her book Written by the Body: Gender Expansiveness and Indigenous Non-cis Masculinities, Lisa Tatonetti explains, “Though hegemonic narrators may try to own the narratives of Indigenous warriors and de ne and defame Native peoples in their texts, the expansive ways in which such female-identi ed and gender-variant people inhabit their bodies, lives, and gender roles defy that containment” (Tatonetti 2021, 27). Yet the master narrative constructed through the settler gaze continues to decenter this resistance and continues to normalize violence against our bodies, a way to hold our bodies and identities in a colonial container of where we are supposed to be—a re ection of laws and policies that uphold violence towards us. Much like the mission walls and California Indian auction blocks, this type of violence contributes to the 500+ year crisis of murdered and missing Indigenous women, girls, and Two-Spirit people. Understanding that these connections are part of

ongoing settler colonial violences is imperative to help us in seeking justice, healing, and restoration for our communities. This essay helps pull pieces of our fractal stories together using counter-colonial intergenerational storytelling in resistance to the settler gaze that has served as the underpinning of these violences by looking for patterns in our stories.

Conclusion

Returning to brown, the term fractals is used to understand patterns. Dominant de nitions of the term end with fractals being able to cause chaos. However, brown writes, “When we speak of systemic change, we need to be fractal. Fractals—a way to speak of the patterns we see—move from the micro to the macro level. The same spirals we see on seashells can be found in the shape of galaxies. We must create patterns they cycle upwards. We are microsystems” (brown 2017, 59). Reading brown’s words, it is no wonder dominant de nitions of fractals bring in chaos as a caution. Chaos can disrupt. Disruption causes pause and an opportunity for change, which threaten systems of oppression. When we see that fractals emerge in our stories, both written and told across generations, we can see not only the replication of the settler gaze across time, we can also see the Indigenous feminist resistance that has always been there—a means to disrupt the settler colonial systems that rely on the settler gaze to keep up contained. Chaos. A word used to instill uneasiness and fear. In the stories presented in this essay, the chaos was necessary. I am in agreement with brown that these fractals can create systemic change. It is our power in recognizing them that the settler colonial systems fear. Indigenous feminists are a continuation of the fractals of the stories that our ancestors lived and an extension of them into the future generations. We are the patterns in the fractals that tell our stories of resistance across time.

Since contact, Indigenous women and Two-Spirit people have been resisting violence to our bodies and lands and have been using settler records to pass this knowledge down to us. As we reach up to them we must remember that, “we are engaged in a very Indigenous practice of: that of storytelling as education, as though-experiment, as community action to right wrong, as resistance to representation as victim” (Miranda 2013, 29). Toypurina, Bárbara Gandiaga, and Yaquenonsat were far from victims and serve as reminders and guides engaging in counter-colonial Indigenous intergenerational storytelling in the continued resistance against settler colonialism as well as the ways in which the settler gaze is used to control our narratives. Isabel Meadows, Kitsepawit, and Maria Solares remind us of the power of story and of ensuring we pass these stories down to counter the dominant narrative. They chose the stories to pass down to us in resistance to being erased to ensure they would be heard today. They are our fractals and guides we can gaze back at to recognize the patterns we see today. Miranda writes, “the story of sexual violence against women was a constant

and brutal element of reconquista, and in this history, Indian women are always documented as victims” (Miranda 2013, 96). We will no longer be conquered/ reconquered or documented as victims. We are resisters, survivors, leaders, and warriors. It is through our stories we will continue to reach through the cracks in the settler records across generations to coalesce a healing story together.

Luhui Whitebear is an enrolled member of the Coastal Band of the Chumash Nation with Huestec and Cochimi ancestry. She is an assistant professor in the School of Language, Culture, and Society (Indigenous Studies) at Oregon State University. Her research interests include California Indigenous histories/current day issues, Indigenous feminisms, and Indigenous rhetorics. Luhui is also a mother, poet, and activist engaged in community-based work.

Notes

1. This theory and methodology is grounded in my experiences with intergenerational Indigenous activism and was developed during my doctoral research.

2. While there is signi cant scholarship related to the “disappearing Indian” and “people of the past,” erasure through settler records is what is being discussed in this section, particularly that of Indigenous feminist resistance in California.

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Xicana/x Indígena Futures: Re-rooting through Traditional Medicines

Susy Zepeda

A central thread of this article is to open a dialogue around traditional medicines such as sacred tabaco (tobacco) as it connects to Xicana Indígena1 ceremonial praxis, Mexican traditional medicine, and decolonial feminist futurities. I’ve argued elsewhere, as in the case of the 2019 Xicanx Futurity art exhibition, Xicana/x people have created a digni ed path to self-determination that honors Indigenous roots and complex familial legacies and lineages across the hemisphere (Zepeda 2022, 141–153). In visual artist Gina Aparicio’s installation titled, Ipan Nepantla Teotlailania Cachi Cualli Maztlacoyotl (Caught Between Worlds, Praying for a Better Future), she creates a sacred space for collective prayer in the context of an art exhibit through tobacco ties, intentionally creating a place for pause, re ection, and grounding, before taking the next steps into the larger part of the art installation that evokes a sacred circulo (Tello 2017). These tobaccolled prayer ties in red cloth, because of their public visibility, became a site of contestation. This essay asks: what are the responsibilities and connections diasporic Mesoamerican peoples have to sacred plant medicine? Knowing that sanación (healing) arrives from working in collaboration with plants, what are the most respectful ways to work with tabaco : tobacco : picietl? What shapes the pathway of self-determination of Xicana/x peoples who are consciously re-rooting? How do we honor madre tierra, plant medicine, and ancestors?

Keywords: Decolonial feminist futurities / Intergenerational relations / Mesoamerican lifeways / Mexican traditional medicine / Plant medicine / Sanación / Self-determination

©2023 Feminist Formations, Vol. 35 No. 1 (Spring) pp. 117–131

I was a curandera before birth

And I am a curandera now

Channeling generational trauma

Listening to its voice

Feeling its pain

Helping my mother heal

Helping myself heal

Remembering

That our bodies are not disposable

That our existence is hope

That we are worth living

That we have something valuable to share with the world

That we need to heal

For our next seven generations

—Berenice Dimas, “Queeranderismo” (77)

Figure 1 Ipan Nepantla Teotlaitlania Cachi Cualli Maztlacayotl (Caught Between Worlds, Praying for a Better Future) (2019). by Gina Aparicio at the Shrem Museum

Indigenous/traditional medicine creates a relationship with nature, the place-cosmos. Through activating Indigenous values of respect, responsibility, and renewal, disconnected original peoples can restore their teachings and cultures. They can change the effects of domination. Colonization is permeable. The potential of human beings does not have to be limited by oppression or limiting paradigms that may not factor the power of prayers and ceremonies left by earlier generations or the spirits of memory in the foreground.

—Patrisia Gonzales, Red Medicine (235)

Introduction

This essay is concerned with Xicana/x peoples, as “disconnected original peoples,” the sabiduría of plant medicine, and decolonial feminist futurities (Gonzales 2012a, 235).2 At its core, this work is articulating Xicana/x peoples’ responsibility to re-member and self-determine through a conscious re-rooting in plant medicines to walk in balance with the earth and cosmos. The vision of this queer Xicana Indígena root work is to create an explicit site of analysis and praxis to connect again to spiritual roots, plant medicines, and ceremony that can lead to a path of conocimiento and sanación (healing) of intergenerational traumas for Xicana/x Indígena peoples including detribalized and de-indigenized Chicanx and Latinx communities. Through this site of analysis and praxis, I caution us not to recreate forms of violence, fear, or accusations of appropriation (Anzaldúa et al. 2003). There is an assumption that people who self-determine as Xicana/x or Chicano/a/x are not doing the work to know their respective Indígena lineages and traditions, do not follow protocols that respect the earth and peoples of the earth, and are appropriating Indigenous cultures. This essay aims to disrupt untruths that mark Xicana/x peoples as “lost” mestizos, particularly those who are at work diligently to reconnect with ancestral teachings and ceremonies in respectful and meaningful forms.

This work of re-rooting our medicines is part of articulating an evolving yet established dialogue of Xicana/x Indígena studies that is grounded and aware of the implications of reclaiming Indigenous practices and lifeways. Part of what I’m arguing for is the visibility of the social praxis and acknowledgement of right relations of Xicana/x Indígena peoples with plant medicine. There is profound evidence of intergenerational trabajo (work) to remember ancestral wisdom and traditions in accountable and reciprocal forms, holding at the root the consciousness that sabiduría Indígena is a life force that guides a balanced relationship with madre tierra. Notable examples of these critical and interconnected practices include Hood Herbalism created and led by Berenice Dimas3 and Las Maestras Center: For Xicana[x] Indigenous Thought, Art and Social Praxis

based in Chumash homeland, created and led by Cherríe Moraga and Celia Herrera Rodríguez. Yet what can interrupt the possibility of these decolonial feminist futurities, are the intellectual and political debates over who has the right to claim Indigeneity based on nation-state demarcations, and who governs the proper way to be Xicana/x Indígena, and the praxis of how to hold ceremony (Hartley 2012).

To ground my arguments, I focus on the visual storytelling of spaces of ceremony and spirit work created by queer Indígena artist Gina Aparicio (Xicana/ Apache/K’iche’), whose art was publicly spoken of as a contested form of extraction. In order to do the work of healing from intergenerational traumas of susto (fright), shame, vergüenza, and grief that have been internalized over generations due to colonial state logics of racism and projects of de-indigenization, I ask: how can art as visual storytelling re-narrate our connections to madre tierra and our plantcestors (River Rose Apothecary 2014)? Evoking Mayahuel, the Mexicayotl feminine maguey plant energía, protector of fertility and seeds, and so much more, I ask: can a deeper meditation with our relationship to plant medicines signify a pathway to attend to debates of proper protocol and praxis, accountability, and interconnectedness? Barker’s (2018) articulations about Indigenous land are helpful here and in alignment with Xicana/x Indígena logics of understanding relationships to the land that remove harsh notions of ownership or possession. She wrote in her essay, “Decolonizing the Mind,” “Indigenous land is not property or a public commons; it is a mode of relationality and a related set of ethics and protocols for lived social responsibilities and governance de ned within discrete Indigenous epistemologies” (Barker 2019, 209).

It is the rooted medicine in plantitas (plants) and madre tierra that opens the path for Xicana/x peoples to heal (Román 2012). Not one people or community “owns” what Román (2012) calls “nuestra medicina” but we do have to engage with the earth and plant medicine in ways that are respectful and accountable to the land, waters, original peoples, more than human relatives, all of which can be assessed by the praxis we employ.

In my analysis of Aparicio’s visual prayer I emphasize her methodology of creating her art as ceremony to demonstrate her political and philosophical underpinnings that stem from a Xicana Indígena vision to be in balance with mother earth. A formulation akin to Patrisia Gonzales (2012a) journey with “plantas,” she tells her story:

Long before I decided to pursue a doctorate, my journey to understand las plantas would lead me to many recetas and to medicinas such as peyotzin, yauhtli, maguey, and tobacco, and el poder de las ores, the healing power of owers in puri cation rites. To Indigenous people, the plants are medicines. These four plantas, or medicines—in fact, ceremonial plants—organize this story of how I learned their power and application. These plants are my guides in understanding fertility, pregnancy and labor, and general imbalances, be

they physical or spiritual. Plant knowledge is so important for Nahua cultures that we literally “plant” who we are, our ombligos (umbilical stubs), placentas, and names. (Gonzales 2012a, 14)

Aparicio’s generative relationship with tobacco and peyote medicine (represented in the form of clay sculptures), is directly connected to her desire to bring consciousness about pathways that honor the plant medicines as well as ways to work with their technologies to assist us in praying.

Aparicio’s Ipan Nepantla Teotlaitlania Cachi Cualli Maztlacayotl (Caught Between Worlds, Praying for a Better Future)

Through Gina Aparicio’s Ipan Nepantla Teotlaitlania Cachi Cualli Maztlacayotl (Caught Between Worlds, Praying for a Better Future) art installation an Indígena worldview is opened. Through the intentional naming and construction of this sacred space, we can see her sabiduría of the Nahuatl language, her alignment with political and cultural efforts to revitalize this language and many more Indigenous languages that are very much alive in Mesoamerica, yet always under the threat of extinction due to global capitalist structures (including the nation state of Mexico) that aim to extract from the earth and in turn displace pueblos originarios.

Aparicio offers a distinct visual prayer for madre tierra that is rooted in ceremony. Birthed in 2014, this mixed media installation has traveled and been exhibited in three signi cant geographical and chronological variations and iterations—Florida 2014, Los Angeles 2017, and Davis, California 2019.4 Aparicio’s starting point or imagined space of ceremony for this installation is Nepantla, a “zone of possibility.” Anzaldúa theorizes nepantla as a “site of transformation,” “the zone between changes where you struggle to nd equilibrium between the outer expression of change and your inner relationship to it” (Anzaldúa 2002, 548– 9).

I rst interacted with Ipan Nepantla Teotlaitlania Cachi Cualli Maztlacayotl in Florida as part of Gina Aparicio’s MFA project, at this time she herself was at the altar—at the doorway—she guided the process of making a prayer tie with tobacco for everyone who visited her installation at the art gallery. The altar was positioned below a cork board that Aparicio outlined with peyote re-kilned clay buttons and at its center the four directions outlined with deer silhouettes and a large peyote button ower at the center.5 This was the doorway to the larger part of the installation that held four nahuales in ceremony standing rooted in the four sacred directions around an 8-foot circular wooden Coyolxauhqui stone representation as the inner circle. Each nahual (standing animal gure) en las cuatro direcciones of the circle is holding a ceremonial instrument (a rattle, drum, ute) or pipe and is prepared to offer a traditional song. When we spoke about the sacred elements, I asked Aparicio where she would place the re in

her installation if the museum would allow. She replied, “If they (museum) let me, in the ombligo of Coyolxauhqui,” her center (Aparicio 2018). In her belly button, the center of the circle.

At the Shrem Museum, for the Xicanx Futurity exhibition, it was the use of tobacco plant medicine, and particularly the making of prayer ties that became contested in the case of Aparicio’s sacred offering. In part, because Gina, or another person to hold the doorway, were not there to guide the making of the prayer ties. An occurrence that was determined in relation to the Museum restrictions and limited possibilities of “organic materials” that exist within that institution. Ipan Nepantla Teotlaitlania Cachi Cualli Maztlacayotl (Caught Between Worlds, Praying for a Better Future) is, in Aparicio’s words, a “communal prayer for social justice and a better world for our future generations.” As an activista and visionary of peace, Aparicio’s aim was to create and contribute to a dialogue that can lead to a shift in cosmic consciousness that honors madre tierra. This is re ected in her raising of the tobacco prayer altar also referenced as “a tobacco prayer for peace.” Before entering the circle of the larger installation, Aparicio brings together the sacred and the political by inviting visitors to “make a prayer,” an intention, with the tobacco prayer ties on the interactive altar for “what they feel needs to be changed, where they see injustice,” for example, with the environment, the earth, relation with other human beings, internal changes, or changes in structures, governments, or nations. Ofrendas of gratitude and permiso. Aparicio builds on the teachings learned from her maestrxs in ceremony, walking the red road. In a 2022 dialogue with human rights activists and ceremonial elder Rocky Rodriguez (Xicana/Zapotec), Gina Aparicio shared a memory of rst learning how to pray with tobacco ties in 1990 when she rst met Rodriguez, in Colorado at the Chicano Youth Liberation Conference (Aparicio and Rodriguez 2022).6

Healing De-Indigenization through Plant Medicines

As mentioned above, it is the tobacco prayer altar that begins the installation, as it encourages the visitor to reconnect with an earth-centered conscious way of life and invites a practice of meditation and prayer, instead of the capitalist colonial detached entitled way of life. Aparicio invites the viewer to transform their consciousness of the moment by re ecting and making an offering with this sacred plant medicine, often thought of as a grandfather, and a small red square piece of fabric that becomes a prayer tie (see Figure 1). Placed on a cork board with peyote owers, made of red clay-sacred earth, creating a space to rest prayers. The altar held the elements of sage, a feather, and water. The four nahuales, one in each cardinal direction, follow Lakota teachings, imparted on Aparicio by elders: Bear woman in the South (yellow), Owl woman in the West (black), Jaguar woman in the East (red), Deer woman in the North (white). As part of the altar guidance, visible on the placards in Figure 1, Aparicio wrote,

“Tobacco is one of the sacred medicines for Native Peoples. Prayer ties are used to make special intentions. Take a pinch of tobacco into your left palm. Say a prayer or make an intention for the world you’d like to see. Place the tobacco onto the center of the cloth and pin it to the wall and join our communal hope for a better world.”

Ipan represents what resembles or can be understood as a peyote ceremony, where ancestors are invited to the all-night journey, in a respectful way, to join in collective prayer. Aparicio intentionally offers a place to pray: teotlaitlania and heal for a more balanced world by giving people the room to face the traumas of colonization, racialization, forced removal, and near elimination through the experience of her mixed media installation. A sacred space to re-root. Aparicio’s Mesoamerican spirit-centered structures work to shift our senses to the present moment enough to be able to time travel and visit with and remember our antepasados through our breath, prayer, and ceremony. Aparicio’s “offering” is a re-centering of memory through song, prayer, and material connections to earth. With the earth-colored lighting, she disrupts the white walls and creates the sensation of entering madre tierra, like ceremony: “It is a prayer for the healing of ourselves, our community, our madre tierra…It is an act of self-determination. It is meant to transform the white walls of an institution into sacred space. These prayers are arrows ghting for the children we will never know. The vision is to unify the red, black, yellow, white, all the races, all peoples, to be part of a new beginning” (Aparicio 2018).

As viewers walk through the installation, we hear songs on a loop, featuring Grupo Tribu, In Lak Ech, Cihuatl Tonali, and Aparicio herself reciting a spoken prayer and playing a hand drum. The song supports the feeling or remembering of ceremony as one walks through. All the music and voices heard are cis-gendered women, except Grupo Tribu. Their song “Fecundación Sagrada,” however, is about mujeres, mujeres who transform into nahuales. The lyrics prompt introspection, asking and evoking: “¿Que Mujer Eres Tu? . . . Mujer serpiente, Mujer venado, Aguila mujer, Mujer jaguar, mujer, mujer . . . Mujer de tierra, Mujer de mar, Mujer montaña, Mujer de arena, Geogra a de mujer” (Which woman are you? . . . Serpent woman, deer woman, eagle women, jaguar woman, woman, woman . . . Women of the earth, women of the sea, mountain woman, sand woman, geography of woman.). The signi cance of these ceremonial songs is that they allow for another modality to travel and open one’s heart to the memories of ceremony and the teachings of ancestors. The heartbeat of the drums, palabra, traditional song resonates as tools, as pathways, to unthreading legacies of patriarchy, colonialism, and imperialism. Aparicio’s visual art as activism is a praxis of decolonization, a visual storytelling of transformation. Remembering through song and visual storytelling of connections and ceremonies with plant medicines are particularly important in the historical context of Xicana/x and Latina/x communities who have been displaced, “de-tribalized,” and “de-Indigenized” to differing degrees across the hemisphere

(Gonzales 2012a). Colonization was a source of harmful fragmentation for Indigenous peoples of Mesoamerica and continues in the present day through racist colonial legacies that embed forgetting and misremembering. Yet our ancestors don’t forget us. We remember when we work with plant medicine in balanced ways, alignment is possible when we listen for the remedies and healing they offer us.

Bon l Batalla (1996) signi cantly argues about Mexico original pueblos, “De-Indianization is a historical process through which populations that originally possessed a particular and distinctive identity, based upon their own culture, are forced to renounce that identity, with all the consequent changes in their social organization and culture. De-Indianization is not the result of biological mixture, but of the pressure of ethnocide that ultimately blocks the historical continuity of a people as a culturally differentiated group” (Bon l Batalla 1996, 17). He continues, a “major achievement of the process of de-Indianization,” is that “it has succeeded in convincing large parts of the Mesoamerican population to renounce their identi cation as members of a speci c Indian collectivity” (Bon l Batalla 1996, 18). I argue that this disidenti cation (Muñoz 1999) is part of a susto, trauma for de-tribalized Xicana/x peoples who are actively creating ways of connecting back to a rooted path. I contend that precisely this susto requires the building of balanced relationship with rooted plant medicine for healing and a way to come back home. This invites further meditation for Chicana/o/x studies scholars to continue moving away from harmful or exclusionary identity formations, like mestizo and Hispanic, and move towards a re-Indigenization that includes lineages and generational legacies. It is a pathway that many Xicana Indígena and otherwise Indigenous identi ed intellectuals, artists, and communities have been re ectively walking for some time (Forbes 1973; Moraga 2011; Gonzales 2012a; Luna 2012; Hernández 2005; Rodríguez 2014; Alberto 2016; Lara and Facio 2014, Román 2012; Medina and Gonzales 2019; Garzo 2020).

Rooted Xicana/x Indígena Futures

The artist I feature here, Gina Aparicio (Xicana/Apache/K’iche’), consciously identi es as a Xicana Indígena that is rooted in traditions and intergenerational relations. I have argued that Xicana/x artists, activists, and intellectuals who engage in Indigenous sacred practices do so in digni ed and respectful forms. And while a remembering is happening, it is conscious and based in aligned praxis. Thus, I aim to disrupt and uproot what Saldaña-Portillo and Trujillo (2021) articulate as an “ongoing Chicanx extraction of Native American and Indigenous sacred practices for the purpose of shoring up a lost indigeneity” (Saldaña-Portillo and Trujillo 2022, 157). As a participant and witness of sacred ceremonial spaces, the mischaracterization that Saldaña-Portillo and Trujillo (2021) claim is divisive and dismissive of deep ancestral healing work. They base

their analysis on a harsh critique on mestizaje and the way it erases Indigenous communities, yet charge Chicanx people as bene ting from mestizaje (SaldañaPortillo and Trujillo 2021, 156). I argue that, like many other Xicana Indígena scholars who have done the work to see the depths of the state-imposed mestizaje, that positing mestizaje as a viable and still necessary “trope” for “Chicanx historical consciousness” harmfully freezes Chicana/o/x and Xicanx peoples who do not nd resonance with mestizaje and its racist and exclusionary logics (Saldaña-Portillo and Trujillo 2021; Zepeda 2020).

Visual storytelling through the artwork of Gina Aparicio, and other sites of wisdom that consciously work with plant medicine and ancestors, re ect an active decolonial pathway to rooted Indigenous futures (Pérez 2003, 2007; Miner 2014). Xicana/x Indígena historical consciousness is bound up in the four directions, traditional medicine, interconnectivity, and intergenerational wisdom, or what Patrisia Gonzales calls “Mexican Traditional Medicine” (MTM). Gonzales (2012a) writes, “Mestizaje is the master narrative of the Americas that was constructed to de-Indigenize peoples.” She continues,

And just what do people mean when they say mestizaje or mestizo —not Indian, part Indian, de-Indianized Indian? And if there is a part, how great is the part?

As Celia Herrera Rodríguez asks in her performance art, “What part Indian am I?” What do those parts tell us? Are the parts designated “not Indian” because nation-states have constructed a narrative that its original peoples are no longer ethnically Indian or culturally Indian or cosmologically Indian? . . . It is important to recognize that many mestizos, operating from internalized oppression, and actively participate in discrimination against Indigenous peoples and help foment the climate that breeds dis-Indigenization. Yet many ancestors of contemporary “Mexican origin” people did not have the power to publicly challenge or pre-empt the state-imposed story of a denied ancestral legacy (read nation-state-constructed mestizaje). (Gonzales 2012a, 213–214)

Gonzales ends by articulating, “mestizaje is an insuf cient paradigm or unit for analysis, particularly when working in the context of “MTM” (Gonzales 2012a, 213–214). This is a signi cant and important intervention, particularly in the debates that dismiss the immense practices and philosophies of Xicana/x Indígena peoples.

Uprooting Colonial legacies of Surveillance

In colonial Mexico, peyote medicine was so revered and useful, female midwives and healers were prosecuted by the Holy Of ce of the Inquisition for employing it, and colonial records document its widespread use among Indigenous peoples of Mexico. Despite religious persecution of its users, its medical and ritual use continues today among numerous Mexican Indians from Huichol and Tarahumara, Native peoples of the north, and detribalized Mexicans and “Chicanos indígenas” who

use it medicinally in homes with families as part of prayers or in large ceremonies. (Gonzales 2012a, 28)

Priests and colonizers used existing social networks to exact social control and surveillance. The inquisition used repression of entire families and communities, torture, death, indentured servitude, and even prison in perpetuity for repeat or gross offenders, as was the case of the midwife “madre Chepa”. . . . The inquisition and colonial authorities utilized public displays of power to repress Indigenous worldviews and replace the grand pre-Columbian public ceremonies. Public trials replaced the feasts, where the ticitl and the temixihuitiani (someone who causes to give birth, midwife) or the tepalehuiani (helper or midwife) once danced with bunches of marigolds and tobacco in honor of Tlazolteotl, the guardian of midwives, medicine, and birth. (Gonzales 2012a, 77)

Mesoamerican peoples left a constellation of symbols about life, the universe, and a cosmology that still speaks to their descendants and Indigenous people today, much as the painted rocks speak, the river spirits speak, the plants and the trees speak. These symbols on ceremonial calendars, barks, hides, and stones are all forms of communication left to us for the purpose of memory. For Indigenous and detribalized people who were interrupted from the knowledge contained within these symbols, they may read the images from the constructs created or transmitted by the media or academics. (Gonzales 2012a, 87)

In a recent article, Calderon and Urrieta (2019) included the Xicanx Futurity art exhibition in their essay “Studying in Relation: Critical Latinx Indigeneities and Education” as a form of colonial appropriation, yet in many ways their discussion could have strongly bene ted from engagement with the artists, co-curators, or museum staff to complicate their analysis. They did not provide context for the exhibition or engagement with the curatorial text such as the exhibition brochure or the wall text exhibited next to the artwork at the Shrem Museum. The only cited source used in the misrepresented analysis was the California Aggie, the University of California, Davis campus newspaper. One important question in this debate is how we navigate the surveillance in this modern colonial moment. This can manifest in the form of “Call Out Culture,” which adrienne maree brown theorizes as “a punitive tendency…within our movements” (brown 2020, 1).

Confusingly Calderon and Urrieta (2019) use the Xicanx Futurity exhibition as an example of uprooted artwork. Yet the exhibition held the work of established Xicana/x and Indígena artists, who have been walking a digni ed path, each in their own way. The artists include: Gina Aparicio, Celia Herrera Rodríguez, Margaret Alarcon, Felicia Montes, Gilda Posada and Melanie Cervantes of Dignidad Reblede. Six Indígena artists who weaved an intergenerational prayer that disrupted energies like ni de aqui, ni de alla. A migration narrative that is rootless. Yet a dominant narrative that is easily adaptable when economic

and social-political factors make it dif cult for communities to nd home after displacement due to created and imposed borders built on xenophobic policies and legislation. Calderon and Urrieta (2019) discuss the exhibit as an example of “some contemporary Chicanx production of mestizaje/indigenism” that “is also based on the appropriation and display of sacred Indigenous objects and spiritual practices” (Calederon and Urrieta 2019, 8). Suggesting that “this put Chicanx artists in con ict with local Native communities due to the lack of understanding of the cultural protocols that were not followed and not understanding how such lack of communication reproduces the historic ways museums have mishandled Indigenous cultural objects” (Calederon and Urrieta 2019, 8). This articulation undermines the art exhibition in all its formations without one single open dialogue with artists, co-curators, or museum staff to ask about communication with local Native communities, our collective knowledge about colonial museum culture and cultural protocols, or the visionary logic of the Indígena artists who intentionally created a space for the sacred. adrienne maree brown wrote and I would agree, “I don’t nd it satisfying, and I don’t think it is transformative to publicly call people out for instant consequences with no attempt at a conversation, mediation, boundary setting, or community accountability” (brown 2020, 55).

As a co-curator of the Xicanx Futurity exhibition along with Carlos Jackson and María Esther Fernández, I want to elevate the narrative of honoring plant medicine and Xicana/x peoples working with plant medicine through the story of the exhibition that was held on Patwin land, also referred to as “Wintun Homeland” by Diana Almendariz, an elder and cultural practitioner of Maidu/ Wintun and Hupa/Yurok descent and traditions. This exhibition, which ran from January 2019 –May 2019, began with Almendariz’s words, stories, and land acknowledgement at the opening day which unexpectedly brought almost 1,000 people together that January afternoon at the Manetti Shrem Museum and close to 10,000 visitors over the span of ve months. Both the opening and the run of the exhibit broke Shrem Museum records, showing the resonance of the exhibition theme, artwork and artists.

At the exhibition initial meeting, when the co-curators met the museum staff and presented the vision of the Xicanx Futurity exhibition, beyond elaborate introductions with the almost all white museum staff, a central question we answered as co-curators, was “Why now?” Our collective response was:

This is a critical point in which it is necessary to ground and advance a critical conversation about Chicana/o/x Art History, with a particular emphasis on ceremony and necessary unthinking of the imposed border. The representations we are curating in this art exhibit do the work of challenging the idea that our hxstory began during the 1960s when the concept of Chicano was asserted with a myopic emphasis on Aztec ancestors and culture. We need Xicanx Futurity now because divergent voices, peoples, lineages, practices, and

visions to the mainstream have been consistently marginalized. It is important to complicate “Chicano art and identity” by insisting that it is always in formation—in this contemporary historical moment, with our current political climate, it is imperative as responsible and accountable social actors, cultural workers, and intellectuals to name and acknowledge the historical trauma colonization has caused for over 500 years. We center ceremony as a way to gather our tools for intergenerational healing to ensure present and future generations do not repeat colonial cycles of disconnection, particularly as our current U.S. administration works to criminalize Xicanx existence. In this moment, we acknowledge that visual representations have the generative capacity to re ect our sacredness and honor our differences. Xicanx Futurity does the work to complicate pre-existing notions of Chicana/o/x Art by highlighting a vibrant visual storytelling of ceremony and political practices that pave grounded pathways to understanding the ever-shifting possibilities of Chicana/o/x Indigeneity that is invested in not replicating settler colonial practices that uproot or disregard Indigenous peoples. We acknowledge that part of trauma has been a continued invisibility of empowering representations in larger society, including contemporary art museums. This visual manifestation of a movement will bring a healing of spirit to many. (Co-curators of Xicanx Futurity, 2018)

In preparation for this meeting we also de ned key terms, one of them being decolonization, along with memory and ceremonia. As co-curators we were intentional in our every step. It is signi cant to meditate with this art exhibit as a “visual manifestation of a movement” that “will bring a healing of spirit to many” particularly as it is clear that wounds were opened. At the end of the exhibition run, witnessing the controversy over the prayer ties take ight, Aparicio was disheartened by never being invited to a seat at the table for dialogue. Aparicio kept on with her prayer and ceremony. The tobacco ties were respectfully taken down and a small ceremonial re was held on Nisenan homeland. The re was offered in the spirit of the four directions and overseen by a local elder. It held a sacred space to offer the ties so the prayers could be uplifted to ancestors with song, storytelling, and palabra.

In the praxis of continual re ection, I propose the concept of cross-pollination, as offered to me by an Otomi elder and used in ceremonial circles, as a concept to interrupt the accusation and idea of appropriation. The echoes of tensions are legacies of conversations that are not new, yet are fully aware that capitalist nation-state and racist colonial structures rooted in white supremacy would prefer we stay in a state of perpetual fear and con ict. I ask the question: how do we intentionally manifest alternative pathways? How do we move in dignity and respect as we are all learning the dif cult enseñanzas and unraveling con icting colonial histories of land and race?

Susy Zepeda is an associate professor in the Chicana/o/x Studies department at the University of California, Davis (Patwin homeland). Her scholarly work is intentionally transdisciplinary, decolonial, and feminist in a community-centered and grounded way. Susy’s research and teaching focus on: Xicana Indígena spirit work, decolonization, critical feminist of color collaborative methodologies, oral and visual storytelling, and intergenerational healing. Dr. Zepeda’s writing appears in the 2019 anthology Voices from the Ancestors: Xicanx and Latinx Spiritual Expressions and Healing Practices, and in 2020 published the essay, “Decolonizing Xicana/x Studies: Healing the Susto of De-indigenization” in Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies as part of the Dossier: Fifty Years of Chicana Feminist Praxis, Theory, and Resistance. Susy’s rst book, Queering Mesoamerican Diasporas: Remembering Xicana Indígena Ancestries, was published by the University of Illinois Press in 2022 as part of the Transformations: Womanist, Feminist, and Indigenous Studies book series.

Notes

1. See Luna 2012 for an in-depth theorization of the philosophy and possibilities held within Xicana Indígena.

2. I rst started to articulate these thoughts in 2021 upon invitation from Dr. Marcelo Garzo Montalvo’s Latinx Xicanx Indigeneities seminar hosted by the Committee Ethnicity, Migration, and Rights at Harvard University. Then Visiting Assistant Professor, Dr. Montalvo invited me to speak about Xicanx Indigeneities, focusing on queer Xicana Indígena art, healing, survivance/thrivance and futurity. This initial planting of seeds and dialogue propels my thinking in this essay to think through multiple forms of Indigeneities across the hemisphere, next to Native and Indigenous survivance as theorized by Vizenor (1999), and decolonial futurities (possibilities).

3. Hood Herbalism is an in person and online herbal education project created by Berenice Dimas, for Black, Indigenous, People of Color. “Hood Herbalism is an autonomous and community based herbal education project. We gather to unlearn and decentralize colonial ways of understanding plant knowledge.” https://hoodherbalism .com/hood-herbalism/, last accessed March 5, 2022.

4. This communal prayer, originally exhibited in 2014 at the Museum of Fine Arts in Tallahassee, Florida, was part of Aparicio’s Graduate Student Thesis Exhibition, and subsequently became in 2017, a variation exhibited as part of the Mujeres de Maiz 20th Anniversary Retrospective Art Exhibition.

5. Gina Aparicio’s prayer altar is part of her mixed media installation Ipan Nepantla Teotlaitlania Cachi Cualli Maztlacayotl (Caught Between Worlds, Praying for a Better Future) was a featured art work as part of the 2019 Xicanx Futurity Exhibition at the Manetti Shrem Museum in Davis, California.

6. In this dialogue, elder Rocky Rodriguez offers the story of being the rst Chicana granted permission to participate in Lakota Sundance ceremony by Leonard Crow Dog.

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NO

Rawiyah Tariq

I remember saying “No”

The way it rolled off my lips with the same ease as good morning, good evening or goodnight

The laughter that announced its arrival and lled the silence in its wake I remember how clean it was No regrets

No taint of “with exception” or “I’ll consider if you would only . . .”

My No was softness around me

Something warm with muscles running beneath the tuft coat of a cat like beast

It coiled around my feet licked my calves

A gentle thing to me but terrifying to others

Untethered Unleashed

I remember how I wielded it, fed it, loved it with an unconscious ease before I was told to chain it, hide it, deny it valuable resources so others could love me

No one has ever loved me in the particular way my No once had. I’m remembering her as I cry over her starved and shrunken frame

As I brush her coat, give her my tears to drink and my rage to eat

I tend her the way she tended me as a child. I pull her into my heart and beg her forgiveness.

Remind her how we were once like Calvin and Hobbes

Changing worlds, bending possibility, clearing roads

©2023 Feminist Formations, Vol. 35 No. 1 (Spring) pp. 132–133

Expansive . . . I remember her as she buries her face into my hair with relief Grown now as I am

I remember the child this beast once guarded I remember how precious we were to each other I remember And I welcome both back home.

Rawiyah Tariq is a Black, gender expansive, fat, disabled, neurodiverse artist and kink aware professional. Their roots are in queer, poly-amorous, fat community. Their tone is re ective of these roots and their work is informed by how these intersect with their Blackness. Connect to their work at ASovereignEmbodiment.org, MammyIsDead.com, or Instagram @mammyisdead.

A Multiplicity of Selves-in-Coalition: A Decolonial Feminist Witnessing Through Autoethnography

Annie Isabel Fukushima

This article offers a speci c methodology: an autoethnography of decolonial feminist witnessing to invite the reader into the world of the praxis of navigating institutional spaces recognizing where these entrances and departures are imperfect, messy, violent, and lled with resistance. The author offers examples of coalitional work through local and transnational experiences that were fostered through survivance in colonial systems. Recognizing how multiple institutions shape people’s lives, this article highlights lived exemplars where the author traverses academic and legal institutions. The author re ects on witnessing in the courts as a legal expert witness. The role of narrative and witnessing is central to a decolonial feminist praxis; therefore, the author re ects on a state-wide consortium to end violence, where opportunities to narrate stories were facilitated in a performance. To conclude, the author re ects the self-in-coalition as a response to the material violence of coloniality in institutions.

Keywords: Academic / Autoethnography / Decolonial feminism / Institutions / Legal / Narrative / Witnessing

It was 9:30 in the morning, and I had just nished a meeting. As I stared at my screen, I heard a light tap on my door. I turned to see a person peering through the window of the looking-glass door, Michel Foucault’s (1995) panopticon materialized in university spaces, where we regularly can feel how power is enacted through everyday surveillance. Glass windows under the guise of open concept become a way to know who is in their of ce, who is working, where people can look in on the everyday worker. I thought to myself as I grabbed a mask to cover my face to greet her, “this must be urgent.” I had left the “Do

©2023 Feminist Formations, Vol. 35 No. 1 (Spring) pp. 134–150

not disturb” sign hanging on my door. I opened the door, and she immediately entered my of ce with tears in her eyes. Without skipping a beat, she began to talk about the tone of my email. As the woman rambled on, I recalled how whiteness works in institutions. Seemingly innocent, fragile, defensive moves of victimhood, the sinister side is her tears are violent—people of color can be reprimanded (Accapadi 2007), red, denied tenure, arrested, or murdered (Matias 2019). She resolved that the next time she had a concern she would come to my of ce. They will come at you in-person and hide their paper trail. I documented the exchange, a passive maneuver of survival for women of color. A paper trail of witnessing racism structured by coloniality, a paper trail that cannot guarantee my own existence. The mundane exchange is something I have experienced before. The accumulation of small actions—tears, complaints, the denigration of women of color behind our backs about capabilities or professionalism, collectively accumulate to create narratives about women of color in spaces, places, of academia. Our brown, beautiful, erce, intellectual, bodies are hypersexualized, hyper-visual, and dangerous even when silent, because the threat is that we are in academic spaces—we exist, I exist. After the exchange, I immediately surrounded myself by texting my friends and mentors, connecting with comrades, and was immediately ooded with resources and presence. As I write this, I am now positioned in a role as Associate Professor and Associate Dean of Undergraduate Studies. I am the rst woman of color in this administrative role, and I have been told I am the only Asian-Latina faculty at my institution. Regardless of rsts, I know that I am not the only woman of color administrator—I am surrounded by community of people known and unknown, who are in coalition with our presence resisting institutional violence.

The materiality of colonial violence occurs in institutions, including academic settings. As I re ect on a speci c institution in this opening, I am reminded of Louis Althusser’s Ideological State Apparatuses. The violence of institutions has material consequence. As stated by Stuart Hall, “The problem of ideology, therefore, concerns the ways in which ideas of different kinds grip the minds of masses, and thereby become a ‘material force’ ” (Hall 1996, 27). But, even in the face of such violence, there is abundance. Here I pause for lessons learned from Candace Fujikane’s “Indigenous economies of abundance” (2020, 3) where abundance is made possible through activist, community and Indigenous forms of practice, organizing and resistance.

I begin with the opening example as a gesture to open this article as an autoethnography of decolonial feminist witnessing resistance in institutions. Through this methodology, I invite the reader to enter into the world of a decolonial feminist praxis of navigating institutional spaces recognizing that these entrances and departures are imperfect, messy, violent, and lled with resistance. Recognizing that there are multiple institutions shaping our lives, and as a scholar, I am navigating multiple institutions, this article traverses academic and legal institutions, through a decolonial feminist methodology of witnessing.

Methodology: Decolonial Feminist Praxis of Auto-Ethnography & Witnessing

Multiple scholars including Maria Lugones (2003), Laura Perez (2019), Paola Bacchetta et al (2019), Chandra Talpade Mohanty (2003), Evelyn Nakano Glenn (2015), Chela Sandoval (2000), among others, fostered my arrival to decolonial feminisms. And my theory is deeply informed by a praxis—the practice of theory. Lugones’ understanding of the “self-in-coalition” (Zaytoun 2019, 47) appeals to theorists and decolonial practitioners to move towards a “sense of activity of the self in metamorphosis” (2008, 86). To that effect, Lugones’ seminal writings provide praxical interventions (Alarcon et al. 2020, xi).

Central to my own theory is witnessing is Lugones notion of faithful witnessing, a witnessing on the side of the oppressed (also see Figueroa 2015). Here, I refer to witnessing as encompassing the self-witness, the account of events, the witnessing of the process of witnessing, and the witness as human and nonhuman (i.e., the law). I grapple with witnessing in Migrant Crossings where I invite readers to enter into a practice of witnessing that bridges theory and practice—an ethnic studies praxis. In particular, Migrant Crossings endeavors to facilitate a theory and practice of witnessing how migrants cross into visibility legally, through frames of citizenship, and through narratives of victimhood. Witnessing is not merely passive; witnesses construct, participate in, and create the normative visions of what it means to experience contemporary violence and human rights violations in the twenty- rst century. To speak to witnessing is to grapple with narrative, storytelling, listening, testimonio, and subjectivity. Normative forms of witnessing reinscribe what it means to be legible. Therefore, new forms of witnessing are needed, forms that do not reify colonial dualities. While I take on the migratory subject as a border crosser, a subject of decolonial possibilities, where one traverses social, geographical, political, and ideological borders, to see subjects beyond a duality requires new forms of witnessing—an unsettled witnessing. An unsettled witnessing is a commitment to witnessing without being settled with what one is seeing. Unlike spectators, witnesses are called to action (Fukushima 2019a). The necessary actions to unsettled witnessing include raising questions about normative aspects of events and examining the politics of representation as infused with the discourses surrounding nationhood, race, and gender. Such witnessing enables the witness to see communities for their complex personhood, beyond the narratives that construct them as other, and a subject to be pitied.

In this article I draw upon a decolonial feminist autoethnography, where the scholar enters into what Walter Mignolo calls “epistemic disobedience”— a delinking from the disciplinary management of knowledge and an opening toward the plurality of decolonizing knowledges forged among the racially devalued and discredited (Mignolo 2009, 4). To this effect, the method offered in this article is a decolonial feminist autoethnography. Drawing upon a tradition

of autoethnography, I systematically analyze my own personal experience (Ellis et al. 2011) as a research modality that accommodates “subjectivity, emotionality, and the researcher’s in uence on research” (Ellis et al. 2011, 274). Additionally, autoethnography allows the researcher to “retrospectively and selectively write epiphanies . . . and to analyze these experiences” (Ellis et al. 2011, 276). I have utilized this methodology to examine my pedagogies (Fukushima and Vei 2022), therefore, epiphanies and experiences are sutured throughout this article. It is in this way I resist colonial epistemologies which creates a cohesive system of people, practices, values, and knowledge (Smith 2012, 95). The slippages offered here between institutions, between the self-witnessing institutions, the self-in-coalition, witnessing the self, that this autoethnography is an endeavor, albeit imperfect, to foster epistemic disobedience.

Coalition: From the Self to the Collective

To begin to offer a theorizing decolonial feminisms’ calling to witness as means to resist colonial structures, it is rst important to frame decoloniality. Decoloniality implies the “recognition and undoing of the hierarchical structures of race, gender, heteropatriarchy, and class that control life, knowledge, spirituality, and thought, structures that are clearly intertwined with and constitutive of global capitalism and Western modernity,” it is a relational way of seeing (Walsh 2018, 17). Building upon this understanding Walsh, to grapple with the relational ways of seeing, is to contend with the many hands that are part of our entrances and departures in this world. It is, as Walsh offers, a way of seeing decoloniality in the context of the everyday, what she refers to, drawing upon Anzaldua, as “decolonial cracks.” These decolonial cracks are the places within a colonial matrix or system are the place of one’s location, agency, and everyday struggle (Walsh 2018, 82), that give us a “nepantla perspective”-the ability to inhabit a liminal space. How does one witness the cracks in institutions if their whole world is de ned by settler colonialism?

My mother, a hanguk sadam (Korean) migrated to the US due to poverty from a legacy of Japanese colonization. There are cracks one begins to see when raised by a working-class immigrant mother whose family was shaped by Japanese colonization. It is instructive to turn to Kuan Hsing Chen’s Asia as Method where imperialism and colonialism are positioned within a global context. And in doing so Chen describes the multiple colonialities in Asia-from Japan’s colonization of Korea and Taiwan, imperialism in China, and Japan’s own dual status as colonizer and colonized in relation to the US (Chen 2010, 10). It is for this reason, as I write this as a KoreXicana whose entry into the world, my birth, on Omaha-Ponca lands, was not one where I was alone, no one ever does, but also determined by coloniality. An endeavor to rehumanize and counter practices (thinking with Maldonado Torres 2016, 10) is to share that I literally did not enter the world alone that was shaped by colonial structures that

led my mother to migrate to Nebraska. I was joined by my twin sister, where we were carried by the body of my Korean immigrant mother, pulled out into the world by the hands of doctors and nurses, whose presence I cannot remember. As the daughter of an immigrant woman shaped by coloniality, my presence has been one of multiple settler colonial realities that continues to shape where I call home. Recognizing the centrality of a multiplicity of feminisms, including Indigenous and Native feminisms, fosters a “potential to decolonize the ascendancy of whiteness in many global contexts” (Arvin et al. 2013, 11). I turn to a memory I have about a gure my mother told me about when I was maybe around 8-years-old. It was the story that there was a queen, Queen Min, my family’s namesake, who was known for her resistance of Japanese in uence on Korea and brutal assassination. She is also known for her resistance of patriarchy and a symbol of Korea colonized by Japan (Cha 1982; Lee 2006). I grew up learning about Queen Min, when my mother said that our name was the same as Queen Min and that we were from the same clan. I recall her saying with certitude that there was only one clan of Mins, meaning that we were possibly all related. I have never done a genetic test to trace the truth of this story, only to know that it empowered me to learn about the strong women in family, including my mother, who immigrated to the US in the 1960s.

A decolonial feminisms centralizes the self-in-coalition, which is de ned by Kelli Zaytoun’s drawing upon Anzaldúa and Lugones, as an awareness that “prompts deep listening to the speci cities of the testimonies and strategies of others as they participate with them in mutually formed resistance efforts,” where the selves, drawing upon Lugones understanding, are pluralistic (Zaytoun 2019, 47–48). After I was brought into the world on Omaha-Ponca traveled to Briton, at the age of 8 I migrated with my family to Hawaii, where I learned about the struggles of Kanaka Maoli and also about White, Asian, and colonial settler presence (Saranillio 2013; Fujikane and Okamura 2008). I have traversed many Native lands since my arrival, where today, I work in a Predominantly White Institution hosted by Ute, Paiute, Goshute, Shoshone, and Diné people. I offer this tracing to illuminate that coloniality is not singular-it is complex, lled with mobility and multiple settlements. The invitation then is towards a decolonial border thinking that “emerges from the people’s antiimperial epistemic responses to the colonial difference-the difference that hegemonic discourse endowed to ‘other’ people, classifying them as inferior and at the same time asserting its geohistorical and body-social con gurations as superior and the models to be followed . . . the decolonial epistemic shift proposes to change the rules of the game” (Tlostanova and Mignolo 2012, 62– 63). As my body navigates colonial spaces with decolonial turns, it is in reconciliation with being an author of an autoethnographic decolonial witnessing as one that inhabits contradiction, where even in moves to witness on the side of the oppressed (Lugones 2003; Figueroa 2015; Fukushima 2019). I too am shaped by colonial structures-where coloniality is multiple-spatially, historically, and embodied. Colonialities are

met with resistance, where even memory is a site of struggle and resistance (Vasquez 2009). A decolonial feminist witnessing embraces relational ways of seeing (Fernández et al. 2021), centralizes a nepantlera status (Anzaldúa 2015; Gutierrez-Perez 2018), and inhabits contradiction.

This is a signi cant theme that bridges decolonial feminisms: struggle and community. Chandra Talpade Mohanty frames this for us in how she describes “Third World Women” as an imagined community. She writes in the eld de ning text, Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity: “I have chosen to foreground ‘Third world women’ as an analytical and political category, thus I want to recognize and analytically explore the links among the histories and struggles of Third World women against racism, sexism, colonialism, imperialism, and monopoly capital. I am suggesting, then an ‘imagined community’ of oppositional struggles-‘imagined’ not because it is not ‘real’ but because it suggests potential alliances and collaborations across divisive boundaries, and ‘community’ because in spite of internal hierarchies within Third World contexts, it nevertheless suggests a signi cant deep commitment to what Benedict Anderson, in referring to the idea of a nation, calls ‘horizontal comradeship’ ” (Mohanty 1983, 46). Here, Mohanty provides a way to understand the coalition as an imagined community that is in opposition to coloniality. As movement and the signi cance of names coalesce, Reina Lewis and Sara Mills often used interchangeably Third World Women with “women of color” (2003, 49). From Mohanty to Lewis and Mills, those whose subjectivity aligns mobilize through oppositional alliances of a common context of struggle. As such, the tradition of decolonial feminisms draws upon a rich set of theorists including Audre Lorde (see Negrón-Muntaner 200, Chela Sandoval’s understanding of “oppositional consciousness,” bell hooks, Rey Chow, among others), offer windows into a praxis of decolonial possibility. Drawing upon Shireen Roshanravan’s discussion of Ella Shohat’s notion of the plurilogue, which links together different, co-implicated sites of struggle (Roshanravan 2014, 41), throughout this article I suture different moments of institutional witnessing, seeming disconnected, yet cohered through witnessing the self-in-coaltion.

The cracks in institutions are seen in the places where those who endeavor towards decoloniality collectively organize. In 2016, we formed the Women of Color Academics (WoCA) Collective at the University of Utah, a collective of 16 individuals, students and faculty, including myself. It was under this sign of WoCA a collective began to uidly expand the boundaries of who counts as women of color—how gender is uid and racial connection complex. Paci c Islanders, Chicanas, Latinas, Asian-Latina, Asians and Asian diasporas from Korea and Vietnam, Native American women, were among our earliest founders. WoCA started as 16 individuals, and today is comprised of 260 people where we recognize that the category of “women” is a sign that is bordered, therefore we have broadened the mission to include “transgender and gender non-conforming / non-binary people of color academics.”1 We have always worked to resist

institutional co-optation from neoliberal equity and belonging endeavors in the institution. However, the collective relied on these very resources, and despite the many who participate in our collective, as such, we are limited in how we can grow based on the demands on our time, the limited capacity, and that I regularly hear from WoCAs about how they are tired, or their time stretched thin by institutional demands. Consequently, WoCAs nd means of feeding ourselves and sustaining connection in a myriad of ways through workshops, socials, online connections, nding each other, and being in community. It is not about the mass of people attending events that breathes life into WoCA, but the smaller organized activities, actions, and opportunities, that foster community and connection, the ability to be present for each other. In January 2023, our last writing retreat drew 45 WoCAs together, who wrote on their individual projects, in a space that was held for all of us. The clicking of the typewriters surrounded the group, rustling of papers, and soft voices chatting with each other, as we grounded together in our own individual writing projects.

Even the self-in-coalition is multiple, where the border crossing of disrupting coloniality can be materialized through creative and transnational forms of organizing. Transnationalism rejects rigidly de ned points of comparison, recognizing that migrants are shaped by a diffuse transnational eld (Fukushima 2019a). A theory of transnational feminisms is a theoretical and political project that pays attention to border crossing and draws on the works of transnational feminist thinkers and practitioners M. Jacqui Alexander (2006), Tina Campt and Deborah A. Thomas (2008), Inderpal Grewal (2005), and Chandra Talpade Mohanty (2003). Diasporas are shaped by global ows that are racialized and gendered. These ows cut across borders. And border crossings are shaped by multiplicity. At times, these crossings are subversive, at times, they are constrained by the nation-state in the form of deportation, anti-immigration laws and practices, and criminalization. To work in coalition is a central theory for my own praxis and pedagogies as a border crosser—that is, such gures, embodiments and lived experiences give rise to a theory of transnationalism and a transnational feminist framework which fosters border crossing as theory and practice. Migratory Times, a decolonial feminist platform and collaboration, which has been central to fostering my own understanding of the possibilities of transnational organizing and the limits of working across multiple sites. In 2013, in response to exclusionary practices in publishing, a group of us co-founded Migratory Times where we identi ed as feminists, artists, and scholars from Asia, Europe, Latin America and the United States. Migratory Times builds from conversations between scholars and artists and activists, from the streets to independent art spaces to college campuses. Our work constitutes a collective inquiry regarding digital spaces and global race, gender, sexuality, and labor politics; the transnational exchange of visual cultures and social justice through media and technoscapes; and the intervention of contemporary artists and activists in (re)de ning other landscapes of knowledge. It was beyond the institution

of collective spaces that I also found myself traveling into—that sometimes, the place of the institution cannot be our only home (although, it may be for some). Migratory Times projects construct a decolonized knowledge commons centering women’s voices and experiences in multiple settings. To this effect, a theory of witnessing coalition means nding it in multiple sites, places, and spaces, to enact relational ways of being, where the decolonial feminist praxis is not singular.

Witnessing: Pedagogies of the Border Crosser

To reconcile the colonial violence via institutions, is to recognize that such violence is not singular-it is multiple. As scholars have worked to reconcile immigrants as settler, thinking with Chadrashekar (2018), or even refugee settler desires (Espiritu Ghandi 2022). As the condition of coloniality perseveres, I return to witnessing in the cracks, where decolonial possibility occurs even in institutions. Here we turn to another institution that for some who are imbricated in educational institutions like me, nd themselves in another one—the institution of the law.

In 2021, I was asked by a public defender to provide an expert witness report for a migrant who was being criminalized for selling drugs. Like case exemplars appearing in Migrant Crossings—the case example of Saul and Rigoberto Valle—Giron t the patterns of human traf cking. While I am not saying it was or was not traf cking, here Giron is like the gures I discuss in my book as quasi-traf cked. I have been thinking alongside the work of Elizabeth Povinelli and a theorization of quasi-events. A quasi-event of human traf cking encompasses events that could not be veri ed as happening or not happening. The only veri cation was Giron’s testimony itself. I thematically analyzed his testimony for patterns familiar with others cases. His lawyer sought to settle this case, she asked me to write a letter, hoping that the judge would have sympathy for the Latino migrant forced to sell drugs in the US. An uncomfortable reality beset me as I realized the case was an appeal for a more humane form of criminalization. Even with the knowledge that Giron would be convicted no matter what I wrote, I was contracted to write a letter to the judge.

In 2021, I wrote to the judge the following:

Based on a review of the documents provided to me, my research and my knowledge of and review of academic literature, my knowledge of speci c cases involving traf cking, my experience with many human traf cking victims, it is my opinion that the facts Mr. Giron alleges are consistent with other individuals who have been human traf cked. It is my opinion that there are similarities to other traf cking schemes with recognizable fact patterns. It is my opinion that the circumstances in the Mr. Giron’s case are similar to many human traf cking scenarios where coercion exists and results in victimization.

. Labor traf cking occurs in a range of industries. Although, commonly

studied industries include domestic work, agriculture, restaurants, hospitality, factories, and construction, it is not the industry that makes it “human traf cking,” but rather the coercion and work conditions and exploitation as discussed below. Research shows that lack of upward mobility, perceived economic opportunity in the United States, and con ict in their home countries drives labor migrants to seek employment overseas in countries like the United States. Many victims of labor traf cking come to the United States for work opportunities and / or to improve the quality of life for their family members and themselves... The criminalization of unauthorized migrants has led to an overlap between drug cartels and human smuggling (Ibid).

Drawing upon Albert Biderman’s framework of psychological coercion (Baldwin et al. 2015) in the report I drafted, there was an endeavor to illuminate how coercion is utilized by traf ckers to establish compliance: isolation, monopolization of perception, induced debility or exhaustion, threats, occasional indulgences, demonstration of omnipotence, degradation, and enforcing trivial demands. Giron, a migrant from Honduras, was threatened, forced to sell drugs to pay debts, he was stalked by his employers, and out of fear for his life, he ed to Los Angeles, and he was lied to about the kind of work he would labor in. Despite the familiar pattern of human traf cking, Giron himself a survivor of violence, the carceral response of a human rights movement continues to persevere in the US. The appeals and the limits of these appeals are not lost on me; Giron sat in detention on Tonva land. The lesson learned from Giron, a border crosser, is how colonial systems continue to place power and control over those who disrupt the colonial order through mechanisms of carcerality—arrest and deportation—a form of social death.

Serving as an expert witness in multiple courts, I continue to witness how migrant subjects are bound to what I have referred to as a tethered subjectivity (Fukushima 2015; Fukushima 2019b), which is the product of neoliberal governance and security. The tethered subjectivity are the dualities in (self-) perception of migrant identities that discursively and in practice circulate and are rei ed through the law, social relations, and politics (Fukushima 2019b, 146). The duality of a tethered subjectivity encompasses victim/criminal, legal/illegal, citizen/noncitizen, and even human/subhuman, or, as phrased by Lisa Marie Cacho, “dead to others.” To untether migrants from being bound to being seen in dualities, an untethered subjectivity, requires new modalities of seeing. Where were the cracks of decolonial possibilities for Giron? As literal and gurative border crosser, Giron traversed geographically into the US, but also disrupted notions of categorical construction of criminality where his lawyer still sought to le for a “more humane” conviction, recognizing that within the colonial structures, he would be criminalized. He pointed to the limits of the law, where “victims” are criminalized, and whether one refers to immigrant as settlers or

not, the modern colonial system currently does not work to the advantage of migrants like Giron.

Due to my positionality, when I enter into the court spaces, my racialization and embodiment as a woman of color also makes its way into the courtroom. My body entering the courts can also produce cracks, even as I serve as a witness within them. In 2018 when I was called to appear in court as an “expert witness” for Echon Jr., et al., v. the Sacketts civil case. In this particular case, the accused represented themselves. I serve as a subject matter expert in court cases; for this case, I was brought to testify on human traf cking. It was the rst time I had been cross-examined by someone who was not a lawyer. The accused (defendant) included a white man, who after I had been questioned by the plaintiff’s attorneys promptly started his cross-examination by referring to me as “Ms . . .” As the defendant self-representing his case approached me to cross examine me, he paused after referring to me as “Ms . . .” He continued by telling me and the court that he would not bother to say my name. As a response to being unnamed, I started to say my name for the defense, but paused, as I did not want to come across as a condescending academic. It was the shortest cross-examination I had to date experienced, but it was also memorable. To be told explicitly by the opposing party that they would not even bother to say my name in the courtroom is a common form of racial microaggression, a brief form of indignity that communicates a racial slight (Sue et al. 2007). To be unnamed, is commonly experienced by communities of color and immigrant communities. In other cases, such as the Ghost Case where Chinese immigrants were forced to commit a scam (Fukushima 2019), they too were also unnamed by law enforcement who testi ed about their case, referring to the immigrant defendants in that case by what they wore or their age. Communities of color who navigate colonial legal systems, when unnamed, are reminded, they/we do not exist. While the party I was hired by (the plaintiffs) ended up winning their case, it was whiteness in this colonial context coupled with heterosexism that fostered the interaction, even in brevity, where the exchange about my name (or endeavor to not name me) in the courtroom was an endeavor to erase me. While I had been called in as an “expert witness,” I was reminded how power and whiteness in colonial systems wills its face in the courtroom.

I re ect on these experiences of being an expert, because as I work with a decolonial feminist framework, I am still not outside of institutions even in other spaces beyond academic institutions. Institutions shape life, community, and the world we live in. And as conveyed by anthropologist Carole McGranahan, “To testify on another's behalf is an exercise in privilege and compassion. As privilege, it is to use one's status and knowledge to serve another. . . . Such ethnographic witnessing is, as anthropologist and performance artist Gina Athena Ulysse (2015) puts it, a means of engaging the visceral in the structural so that processes of inequality and dehumanisation can be named and

challenged. Witnessing is moral optimism” (2020, 107). The plurality of border crossings occurring in institutions are multiple.

Building a Coalition—Witnessing Multiple-Selves in Coalition

In 2020, at the height of the pandemic I co-founded and co-led the GenderBased Violence Consortium (GBVC). At the same time other initiatives were being born as a response to the university’s failure to respond to the death of a white woman who had experienced intimate partner violence. In October of 2022, four years after her death, Lauren McCluskey, the McCluskey Foundation organized a Race for Campus Safety in memorial of her death, and life, she was a student athlete (Ashcraft 2022). Another case had occurred that year in February of 2022–of Zhifan Dong, an international student at the University of Utah from China, was found murdered. Zhifan was murdered by her ex-boyfriend Haoyu Wang, whom she had a protective order against—a legal remedy for domestic violence victims to court order a distance between them and a person abusing them. In reviewing the publicly made available documentation of campus communications, entitled “Timeline Documentation” communications on February 9, 2022, two days before Zhifan was found murdered in a hotel room in Salt Lake City, the documents showed that the Housing Residential staff notes had mixed up Zhifan (the murdered student) with her murderer (Haoyu Wang). The document showed Wang typed, and a pen mark crossing out the name, with Dong handwritten above it. And vice-versa, where Dong was typed, a pen mark crossed out Dong with handwriting above the name “Wang.” The crossing out of names, indicates someone had mixed up the two, where names of involved personnel are redacted from public records (University of Utah 2022). The crack in the case may be found in a re-reading of the names crossed out. Mae Ngai was interviewed re ecting on the colonial legacy of names and individuality. The news report conveyed, “Misidenti cation of people of Asian descent by Westerners dates all the way back to European colonialism in China, according to Mae Ngai, an Asian American studies professor at Columbia University. She said colonists didn’t ‘bother to register what any individual looked like, because they didn’t see them as individuals’ ” (Schermele 2022). As I write this it is February 2023, over one year since the murder of Zhifan Dong, the campus is, and was, silent—no foundations, runs or collective responses. There is a need to foster spaces that create coalition across racial and gender difference. I have witnessed in Utah, that while there is a growing discourse surrounding domestic violence, violence continues to be silenced and the norm. The GBVC is a state-wide coalition of academics and community advocates working on issues of violence—domestic violence, sexual violence and human traf cking.

On April 15, 2021, GBVC produced and premiered Utah Women’s Narratives. Utah Women’s Narratives. The project was co-directed by Diane Lê Strain,

Aimee Pike, and Francesca Hsieh. The project featured three acts—“Identity,” “Loss,” and “Resilience,” respectively–and it “emerged from an attempt to create a platform for women who were willing to share their stories, particularly those who experienced marginalization related not only to their gender, but also in relation to other identities” (LêStrain et al. 2022). The poems, narratives, and creative writing showcased a range of embodiments, experience, and the way that violence shapes are multiply gendered and racialized lives. I recall witnessing the raw vulnerability and erceness expressed by the actors, writers, and directors who told experiences of abuse, human traf cking, domestic violence, sexual violence, and survivance.

There are many lessons in the Utah Women’s Narratives, but one that I share here illuminated the painstaking need to witness each other. The piece entitled “Llorona” by Sandra Del Rio Madrigal tells the story of a narrator who informs her Tía (aunt) about having a miscarriage. In Spanish and English, the audience witnesses a person re ecting on the memory of telling their aunt about a miscarriage, a disclosure, and a witnessing of connection where Tía herself had also experienced a miscarriage. Llorona is performed by Micki Martinez. The descriptive work of the writing by Madrigal, a Chicana writer of Utah, illuminates how even when people are apart, there are ways people come together in support, solidarity, coalition, to witness: “Tía and I cried together. I didn’t then understand the landline’s buzzing sound. And as we said goodbye, nor the quietness that hung in the air. I only thought about how I had held my tear in my hands, holding the promise of hope that had only been like a silent whisper-a icker that would never light with the world” (Madrigal 2021, 14). Although an emotionally intense story about loss, it also captures the power of witnessing one another as connected with the realm of mythology and reality. As the narrative concludes, it continues as follows: “I still hear my Tía’s mourning wails through the halls of my bones each time I look at my two children. I hear Tía Martha’s crying, and I think of her as la Llorona. She sweeps memories of watching her baby leave; sweeping them into a stream” (2021, 14). The gure of Llorona is invoked, but not as a monstrous dangerous gure. Instead, the wailing woman, Llorona, is conjured up in time of loss and grief—a symbol of intergenerational connection and anguish. And it is through the conversation between the narrator recalling her conversation with her Tía, that coalition is illuminated between bodies coming together to witness each other in time of pain, dif culty, and even, trauma, breaking the disconnection created by violence. Re ecting on La Llorona, whose wails can be heard for Giron and Zhifan? It is this example that I share as illuminating the work of a decolonial feminist witnessing as blurring between the academic institution and the community. Through the performance of a community in coalition with the GBVC, the work shares a palpable connection between two individuals—Tia and her sobrina (niece)—via phone line, across time and space. While we do

not read if Zhifan’s parents cried for her through the phone calls, one can only imagine. And likewise, we know from the presentencing report, Giron had a wife and a son who were with him in the United States.

Suturing together multiple modes of witnessing, from the courtroom, to performance, to the banks of my memory, the praxis of a decolonial feminist witnessing occurs across space, place, and time. I offer my own autoethnographic re ections as a means to create a phoneline to others experiencing similar violence, resisting together, to model the modalities that have led to my survival of creating coalition and enacting a praxis of ongoing decolonial feminist witnessing.

In Conclusion

In the opening, I started with the knock on the door. And in colonial institutions, the forms of coloniality that pervades everyday life can feel like a knock, a quiet rap on the door from another person. Although I write now as an Associate Dean, Director, and Associate Professor, it was not long ago that I was almost pushed out of my institution. I had made the mistake of having a mediated meeting with a colleague to discuss the racism I was experiencing. It was a mistake because I did not know that my own tapping on this colleague’s door to have a meeting mediated by the then AVP of Diversity would send her on a path to push me out. This person won and lost at the same time; I am still here. Unlike many colleagues, I was fortunate. I read and hear story upon story of how colleagues are forced out of their institutions because of ongoing coloniality. A decolonial feminist witnessing through autoethnography facilitates opportunities to nd the cracks even within colonial structures. To see these cracks, one inhabits a nepantla perspective of a border crosser who is committed to the self-in-coalition, to being in coalition with the many. To be in coalition is to recognize the coalition that surrounds the individual is manifold; there are people who are seen and unseen. I was surrounded by chairs in Ethnic Studies, a transformative Dean, colleagues, peer-reviewers, colluders, community, who were and are always with me, leading to my early tenure during a global pandemic.

Multiple emotions arise as I re ect on these experiences-from the experiences I have survived in colonial structures, to the endeavors to continually witness on the side of the oppressed, witnessing myself, witnessing others. As Audre Lorde teaches us, “Women responding to racism means women responding to anger, the anger of exclusion, of unquestioned privilege, of racial distortions, of silence, ill-use, stereotyping, defensiveness, misnaming, betrayal, and coopting. My anger is a response to racist attitudes, to the actions and presumptions that arise out of those attitudes” (1981). Colonial violence can lead to our death, socially and physically. I survived in academia because I am surrounded by people who will me to live, to be present, and to exist. And through witnessing

on the side of the oppressed, I too will others to exist, supporting, connecting, being in coalition.

I do not re ect on my experiences naively. The violence I have struggled against was not only enacted by white bodies but because of an investment in colonial violence. The violence is also internalized and within communities of perceived allyship I have witnessed others endure much worse forms of colonial violence; it is not a race to the bottom, but I know their pain and experiences are not found in this autoethnography. The violence of coloniality is multiple, ongoing, a struggle that seeks not to rest, therefore the self-in-coalition cannot rest. If trauma breaks our connection to ourselves and community, the work to heal from colonial violence are connections. And to work to resist the violence of racism and internalized violence in our communities, I endeavor to do this work in coalition with a commitment to witnessing on the side of the oppressed, even if imperfectly, at times limited and bounded, and in other cases also experiencing failure. It is the connection of coalition, and the empathy of entering into the world of the Other, that makes possible a radical present, and possible future. It also means the intellectual work of the decolonial feminist scholar is ever-more pressing.

Annie Isabel Fukushima is Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies in the School for Cultural & Social Transformation at the University of Utah. She also serves as the Associate Dean of Undergraduate Studies and the Director of the Of ce of Undergraduate Research. For 2023, she is the Lead Fellow for Mellon Funded Transformative Intersectional Collective. Fukushima is the author of the award-winning book, Migrant Crossings: Witnessing Human Traf cking in the US (Stanford University Press, 2019).

Notes

1. Women of Color Academics Collective. 2023 University of Utah. https://woca .utah.edu/

References

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Body Parts

Victoria Bañales

(Originally printed in Porter Gulch Review, 2019, reprinted with permission)

I used to think I was ugly.

“This one sure is ugly—ugly like her grandma,” says my uncle, carefully inspecting me when I was seven years old. I run into the bathroom and cry.

I used to hate my skin color.

“¡India!” “N****r!” my third grade classmates shout. Too dark. Darker than a midnight sky.

I didn’t know midnight skies were beautiful with their twinkling diamond stars.

I used to feel ashamed about my toes.

“Old lady toes! Old lady toes!” a fth grade classmate jeers, pointing to my sunbaked, wrinkly toes while others turn to stare. I learn to avoid opentoed sandals.

I used to feel embarrassed about my feet.

“Too patona —big-footed,” complains my mom, frustrated at having to buy new shoes, year after year, my feet elongating to a size 8½—much too large for a twelve year-old Mexican girl.

Upper-class Chinese women once crushed and bound their feet for the sake of beauty. Crippled and disabled, they hobbled for the rest of their lives. I think about this.

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I used to deplore my legs.

“Too thin,” my older cousin laments, shaking her head. “Qué lástima que no saliste piernuda, mira nada más. ¡No tienes piernas! You have no legs!” she bemoans, lling me in on a little secret: “Did you know that wearing leg warmers inside dark stockings or tights can make your legs look fuller?” Instead, I pair dresses and skirts with mid- to high-rise boots.

I used to feel uncomfortable about my breasts.

“Double D! Double D!” my sister teases (even though I’m only a size C). I hunch my shoulders and wear tight- tting minimizer bras alongside loose T-shirts and blouses.

I used to loathe my nose.

“This one’s big-nosed— narizona,” my grandmother says, blaming it on my father’s genes. My cousin chimes in. “¡Bruja!—witch!” he jeers.

In high school, my sister’s friend gets a nose job prior to her quinceañera. Everyone says she looks prettier. I think about this.

I used to dislike my behind.

“Too damn at,” says my aunt. “No tienes sentaderas—you have no butt,” she opines with furrowed brows, scrutinizing my rear. I tie a sweatshirt around my waist.

(No legs and no butt. How very distressing and confusing to nd out you are missing key body parts.)

And then . . .

In my twenties, six-hundred miles away, the voices begin to dissipate and drift away. Like parting clouds.

My body parts. I realize.

I have toes, feet, and legs—useful for standing, walking, bicycling, climbing, running, and dancing. I have a behind, and my built-in cushion is very comfy to sit on. With my nose, I pass air into my lungs; smell the sweet,

sickly evening scent of jasmine; and taste the spicy green enchiladas, savoring the roasted tomatillos and peppers. Years later, after I give birth, my breasts provide life nourishment for my beautiful baby boy.

I think about this.

When the hot summer months arrive, I wear shorts and skirts, bare-legged. I open my chest like a blooming ower and learn to stand a little taller. I store my winter boots in the closet and wear open-toed sandals and ip ops, letting my toes wiggle free. I bake in the warm sun, my coffee-colored skin radiant and glistening.

I realize.

Dark night skies are beautiful with their twinkling diamond stars.

Victoria (Vicky) Bañales is a Chicanx writer, teacher, mother, and activist. She is a member of the Writers of Color-Santa Cruz County, the Hive Poetry Collective, and founder and editor of Journal X, a social justice literary arts magazine. The recipient of poetry, teaching, and academic awards, she completed a PhD in Literature and Feminist Studies from the University of California at Santa Cruz, and her poems and essays have been published in various journals and anthologies. More information at vickybanales.com.

A Conversation with Favianna Rodriguez: World-Making through Decolonial Feminist Artivism

Xamuel Bañales

This essay is a conversation with Favianna Rodriguez, an award-winning transdisciplinary artist, cultural organizer, and social justice activist based in Oakland, California. Favianna’s projects include visual and public art, writing, cultural organizing, and building power via institutions. Along with her extensive studio practice, she is the co-founder and president of The Center for Cultural Power, a US-based organization that empowers artists to disrupt the status quo and ignite social change. The interview highlights decolonizing feminist world-making possibilities in Favianna’s art and activism (or artivism) while traveling through critical topics, such as food, porn, and psychedelics. Committed to the principles of a decolonial feminist praxis, one goal of the essay is to contribute to transcending the coloniality of gender through solidarity and collaboration. Another purpose is to advance conocimiento and inspire others to (continue to) enact decolonial feminisms to further transform.

Keywords: Art / Activism / Artivism / Decolonial Feminisms / Food / Porn / Psychedelics

I met Favianna Rodriguez (see Figure 1) at the beginning of the fall 1997 semester at Casa Joaquín Murrieta (or Casa Joaquín), a residential housing cooperative for UC Berkeley undergraduates that was founded in 1970 by Chicano/Latino student activists (see Delgado 2009; Luna 2019; The Greenlining Institute). At Casa Joaquín, Favianna and I worked together as kitchen cooks, often having critical conversations or dancing and singing along to cumbia, merengue, or other Latinx musical genres, while we boiled large pots of beans, stirred rice in oiled pans, and zealously prepared the dinner menu of the evening. We lived on

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the same oor in separate rooms, and we often saw each other in the hallway on the way to or from campus. Since then, my feminist friendship (Johnson and Leiper 2021) with Favianna continued as we crossed paths in political/cultural spaces in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Favianna is an award-winning transdisciplinary artist, cultural organizer, and social justice activist based in Oakland, California. Favianna makes prints and posters that incorporate political slogans, assembles collages with varying shapes, colors, and textures, and paints large-scale vivid murals that feature “regular” people (Vox Creative 2022). Her art and activism (or artivism) (see Sandoval and Latorre 2008; Quintanilla 2020; Becerra 2021) address a variety of social topics, such as migration, gender justice, climate change, racial equity, and sexual liberation. Furthermore, Favianna’s collaborations include Ben & Jerry’s anti-Donald Trump-inspired ice cream avor “Pecan Resist” (Mayer 2018), public art commissions with the City of San Francisco (Orvino 2022), and a partnership with Joey Soloway of Topple Productions that helped to create the Disruptors Fellowship for marginalized voices in the entertainment industry (Rodriguez 2020).

In addition to co-founding and serving as president of The Center for Cultural Power (The Center for Cultural Power), Favianna helped to initiate various cultural and political organizations, like the EastSide Arts Alliance (Eastside Cultural Center) and Presente.org (Presente.org), the largest Latino

Figure 1 Image of Favianna Rodriguez in her studio standing between plants and artwork (2022). Photo by Bobby Gordon. Image courtesy of Favianna Rodriguez.

online organizing community in the United States (Favianna Rodriguez). Additionally, Favianna was a coeditor of the book Reproduce & Revolt/Reproduce y Rebélate (MacPhee and Rodriguez 2008), which offers a prominent collection of graphics by political artists from around the planet. Favianna is an established artist who has de ed many structural challenges, not only personally but also professionally, especially in the art world in the United States, which struggles with erasing, whitewashing, or taking seriously Latinx art and artists (Dávila 2020).

As an Ethnic Studies professor, over the years I have used Favianna’s artwork as teaching material. There are several online podcasts and interviews that showcase Favianna and her work (e.g., Boyer 2020; Orvino 2020; Vox Creative 2022), and academic books have featured her art on their covers (e.g., Truax 2018). In addition, scholars have analyzed Favianna’s artwork through multiple angles, such as her feminist contributions to decolonial thought (Pérez 2019) and in uence on contemporary social justice efforts (see Becerra 2021). However, I had not come across a scholarly essay about her life and artivism that I could use in courses for a general student population. To address the gap, in 2018 I informally brought up the possibility to Favianna of conducting an interview. The idea was great, but many professional commitments and limited time halted the process. Fortunately, we had the opportunity to resume the project a few years later.

In the fall semester of 2020, after the second outbreak of Covid-19, CSU Stanislaus invited Favianna to conduct a virtual poster-making workshop via Zoom for the campus community, which included students from the Chicano/a/xLatino/a/x Cultural Production course that I taught then. In the workshop, Favianna weaved together her art practice, critical topics, and personal lived experiences, such as unapologetically sharing her abortion stories to destigmatize the subject (PopSugar 2022). Students communicated that the workshop was engaging and inspiring as many felt empowered to express their own stories creatively. Thereafter, Favianna and I agreed on a date and time for the interview, which took place online via Zoom on November 8, 2020. After transcribing and organizing the interview, I met with Favianna again via Zoom on November 18, 2022, and then exchanged several emails, to follow up on edits, clarity, and ow.

Decolonial feminisms informs and grounds this essay. As a political struggle and theoretical framework, decolonial feminisms has roots in Latin America (Lugones 2007, 2010; Martínez 2019; Pitts, Ortega, and Medina 2020; Curiel 2021; Espinosa-Miñoso, Lugones, and Maldonado-Torres 2021; Martínez and Agüero 2021; Martínez-Cairo and Buscemi 2021) and is in complex interrelation with Black, US Latinx, and Native American feminist (or women of color) thought (Pérez 2010; Arvin, Tuck, and Morril 2013; Lee-Oliver 2019; Velez 2019; Alarcón et al 2020). Thus, referencing decolonial feminisms in the plural is important given the different nuances and contexts of the theories and praxes. Central components of decolonial feminisms includes af rming that gender is a

construct of modernity/coloniality, expanding the narrow treatment of gender in theories and analyses about decolonization, and centralizing resistance, plurality, and coalition to defy the logics of categorial, hierarchical, and dichotomous colonial power (Sandoval 2000; Lugones 2007 and 2010; Pérez 2010; Rodrigues 2022). As feminist philosopher María Lugones advocated, working towards a decolonial feminism includes “learn[ing] about each other as resisters to the coloniality of gender at the colonial difference, without necessarily being an insider to the worlds of meaning from which resistance to the coloniality arises” (Lugones 2010, 753).

This essay centralizes decolonial feminist politics in multiple ways. Favianna and I are dedicated to the principles of decolonial feminisms that recognize and seek to transcend the coloniality of gender (Lugones 2007 and 2010) through coalition and solidarity. In addition, the interview highlights decolonizing feminist world-making possibilities (Lugones 1987; Alarcón et al 2020; Alcoff 2020) in Favianna’s artivism while traveling through critical topics, such as food, porn, and psychedelics. Finally, along with serving as an academic resource, the conversation advances conocimiento (Anzaldúa 2015) in which living memory and embodied knowledge contribute to “knowing and telling” (Blackwell 2011, 10), potentially inspiring others to (continue to) enact decolonial feminisms to further transform (Bañales forthcoming).

Attuned to the colonizing assumptions, motivations, and values that often inform traditional Western research practices (Smith 1999), this interview falls in line with our decolonial feminist politics and friendship, instead. The conversations between Favianna and I occurred in an informal manner and with a playful attitude, which “involves openness to surprise, openness to being a fool, openness to self-construction or reconstruction and to construction or reconstruction of the ‘worlds’ we inhabit playfully” (Lugones 1987, 17). Since a relationship of trust or rapport (Thwaites 2017) had already been established long before the interview, the dialogue was open, “not worrying about competence, not being self-important, not taking norms as sacred” (Lugones 1987, 17). Moreover, as feminist border thinking beings with forked tongues (see Anzaldua 1987; Mignolo and Tlostanova 2006; Lugones 2010), the style of the interview involves colloquialisms, sentence structures, or vernacular that may deviate from the linearity of “standard” English—what Jamaica Kincaid named as “the language of the criminal” (Kincaid 1988, 32).

In Conversation with Favianna Rodriguez

Xamuel Bañales (XB): Scholars consider the convergence of activism and artistic production as “artivism” (Sandoval and Latorre 2008; Quintanilla 2020; Becerra 2021). As Angélica Becerra underscores, you are one of several twentyrst century artivists who are changing contemporary social justice efforts (Becerra 2021). Please describe your work as an artivist.

Favianna Rodriguez (FR): My artivist work presents a vision of what’s possible, and I do it through images, art forms, and different mediums. I also do my artivism—what I project and the story that I tell—through social media. Now, as I start to produce short lms, I am doing artivism with video. I feel that my artivism is about a practice of truth and reconciliation around what has happened to us as marginalized people and imagining what the future can be. In the past, I often called myself an interdisciplinary visual artist, but I think that what I do is more than that; it is world shifting through objects and experiences. I make things, but I also help to create experiences through actions, like when I grow weed or cook for people.

I just harvested my rst weed plant and there is an art to its process and cultivation. I see weed as medicina, so how I grow it will impact the healing experience it facilitates. With food, I’ve been doing “Fed by Favi” pop-ups in Los Angeles, California, which is about my new lifestyle where I talk about cannabis, masturbation, and being vegan (see Figure 2). I create an experience where I dress slutty or super sexy, prepare food, and take people through a fourcourse meal, while I witness the participants’ reactions. It’s been off the hook! I’ve also been taking erotic photos of myself naked (see Figure 3), and I was the executive producer of my rst porn that I launched for the 2020 US presidential election. My art is a blend of all of that and it is part of my “Fed by Favi” project.

(XB): Wait a minute! (Chuckling) I thought that maybe we would end the conversation with such topics, so it’s exciting that we are just beginning. It seems that your “Fed by Favi” project is partly about reclaiming the power of the erotic (Lorde 1984), and that you view pornography in a similar light as critical scholars who analyze the subject through feminist/queer/trans studies or approaches (Mikkola 2017; Pezzutto and Cornella 2020; Rodríguez 2014 and 2023). Please say more about the porn that you mention and why you created “Fed by Favi”.

(FR): I feel like I am world building. As an artist-activist or artivist, sometimes the things I talk about—like masturbation—or whenever I pose naked on my social media, I sense an anti-sex vibe. So, I am having to create an almost separate body of work so that I can be explicit and take people through a sexpositive experience. In doing so, it’s like asking people for their consent upfront so that I can take them through that door and go into another portal. This is one part of my art. Then there is another part where I want to train artists and activists, and that’s why I run a non-pro t organization that involves building people power. I try to create different worlds and see how they intersect, and I feel these spaces can be very regenerative. For example, I have a body of artwork that celebrates my deep connection to cooking and plants, which represents my reciprocal relationship to nature (see Figure 4 and 5). When I work on my garden, things grow; when I cook, people have a visceral and embodied

Figure 2 Photo from Fed by Favi series in Los Feliz, California (2020). Photo by Bobby Gordon. Image courtesy of Favianna Rodriguez.

Figure 3. “I got options” (2021). Photo by Bobby Gordon. Image courtesy of Favianna Rodriguez.

Figure 4. “Favi’s Cocina 11” (2021). Collage with linoleum block, photo transfer, monoprint and screen print elements on Cotton Rag Paper (22.5 × 15 inches). Image courtesy of Favianna Rodríguez.

experience. Creating feels like it’s my superpower that I must use. For me, it’s about being in our bodies, like healing, eating, harvesting, and smoking weed. “Fed by Favi” is about this.

Returning to the lm—I don’t even like the word “porn” because it puts my creative work in a loaded category. I want to make explicit, more accurate depictions of sex that feel joyful and sexy, that are part of a good story. When I

Figure 5 “Saturday at Home with My Plants II” (2019). Monoprint collage on birch panel (30 × 24 × 1 inches). Image courtesy of Favianna Rodríguez.

was working on the 2020 US presidential elections, I wanted to nd new ways to encourage people to vote. I thought, can we reach people politically through sex by making porn? We did. The short lm is called Putting the “O” in Voting (B 2020) (see Figure 6) and it was done in collaboration between Favianna.com Studios, Lotus Lain, and Gordon B Productions (Parkman 2020). The lm blends civic engagement and sexual pleasure, and it is about two young voters of color who are a couple: a Latina woman (Marina Maree) and a Black man (Scotty P). In a bedroom scene, the couple talk erotically about voting early, “giving a fuck” about democracy, and then proceed to have sex. The well-known porn site Pornhub (Pornhub) featured Putting the “O” in Voting on their webpage. I had a reporter hit me up and say that the piece was “really good” and that they liked many of the details. They saw the lm as a work of art and featured it on PinkLabel.TV (Peepshow Media). This project is also part of the “Fed by Favi” body of work.

(XB): The artivism that you describe reminds me of María Lugones’ concepts of “world”-traveling and “world”-making (Lugones 1987), where the meaning and practices of many “worlds”—or several possible spaces—overlap. The metaphors describe navigating relational processes that involve the embodiment of plural and non-static subjectivities to understand and learn about difference (Herron, 2017; Alarcón 2020; Alcoff 2020; Baldwin 2020; Dewart et al 2020). In many

Figure 6 Film still of Putting the “O” in Voting (2020). Image courtesy of Favianna Rodriguez.

aspects, your artivism creates openings and spaces that serve as an invitation to travel into other worlds, pointing to new horizons and ways of being. You mentioned that there have been negative reactions to the topic of sex and sexuality in your artivist public life and work. Can you talk more about this?

(FR): Consent is very important to me. Given that some people are in a transition towards being more accepting of sex and sexuality, I think that the best thing I can do is be explicit about the subjects. However, if I post a photo on social media of myself with a zucchini, for example, and I hold it as if it was my cock, people report it, or like 100 people will unfollow me as a result. In other words, many react negatively to content they consider provocative or controversial. Because this happens, I create another “world” where people can enter it with an af rmative “yes.” This world is about psychedelics, cannabis, and food, where I try to tell the story of how these things are medicines that are from the earth to heal. How can we get into a relationship to understand this?

My art is in adrianne maree brown’s book Pleasure Activism (2019), and I really like her framework of combining erotic and emotional desires with organizing work against oppression. I think about how we can fully be in our bodies in our activist work, and how pleasure can activate this. Colonial capitalist thinking makes people believe that they rst work hard and then play later; this idea that one can only have pleasure or enjoy it after it has been earned. It is ingrained in people to view pleasure as a privilege. I was brought up with this belief, and it’s fucking bullshit! It is a right to be able to feel joy and pleasure in one’s body, and there are many ways one can incorporate them. It doesn’t mean you have to buy sexual toys or expensive books to engage. Pleasure is really all around us and available. How do you create spaciousness to love yourself, know your body, and experience all the wonderful things that it can do? I think pleasure and joy are fundamental principles for social justice work that we do. For example, the ght to unionize or for fair wages is partly so that workers can have more joy in their lives and with loved ones. I reject the notion that our bodies are made to only work. We have a body that we should be able to fully enjoy, and that involves pleasure and joy.

I also think about intergenerational healing. I am the rst generation in my bloodline that can express myself and be a “full-time” artist. I re ect on my father’s lineage as a Black Peruvian—how I carry the trauma of his racialized experience in my body—and how I can be part of the generation to restore the pain. I believe one must witness the respective trauma then move it through deep healing. For me, part of my art includes doing medicine or setting up camps in the desert at Burning Man with women of color and others who intentionally want to go through ceremony together. Using plant-based medicines and psychedelics is like enacting accelerated generational healing to decolonize. In fact, I created a series of collages that are inspired by my transformation through plant-based healing (see Figures 7 and 8).

(XB): You raise several important points. For example, you mentioned consent— when a person agrees to the desires or proposal of another in mutual approval. This makes me think about how consent, then, challenges heteropatriarchal colonialism/coloniality, which is based upon stealing land, enacting violence, and oppressing people across race, gender, and sexuality (Smith 1999; Lugones 2007; Castañeda 2011; Mallon 2011; Maldonado-Torres 2016; DiPietro 2020).

(FR): Absolutely! The current social and political context is about domination and extraction, controlling, and taking. This has been normalized in Western culture. We must move towards a way of life in which we are aligned with nature, in balance and not dominating, to have a regenerative relationship with earth, in which we think about how we are being good stewards, replenishing, and giving back. I learned this through gardening, which is why I grow my

Figure 7. “Plant Medicine VI” (2019). Monotype collage on wood panel (12 × 12 × 1 inches). Image courtesy of Favianna Rodriguez.

food and cannabis medicine; they are very much a part of my artform because they activate all parts of my body to engage in a decolonizing somatic practice. Under colonial racial capitalism (Koshy et al 2022), our bodies are conditioned to be like vessels that violate nature. In contrast, through positive corporal experiences, people can see, feel, and embody their liberation, which is why I am about pleasure, speci cally orgasm. I’ve done several prints celebrating pussies that are inspired by exploring my body, leading with pleasure—not with fear, shame, or guilt—and getting in touch with my orgasms (see Figure 9). I think that surrendering to orgasm and feeling our bodies in their fullest joy is healing. Unfortunately, colonialism has attempted to take this joy away from us! Colonizing society tries to silence the topic of sex and orgasm, and we usually carry the weight of this trauma on our backs— entonces lo temenos que sacar or get it out.

Figure 8. “Plant Medicine II” (2019). Monotype collage and photo transfer on wood panel (12 × 12 × 1 inches). Image courtesy of Favianna Rodriguez.

Figure 9 “Deliberate Orgasm AP 1” (2015). Monotype, color pencil, and linoleum block on handmade Korean Hanji Paper (25 × 19.25 inches). Image courtesy of Favianna Rodriguez.

It’s not just about orgasm, though, which is why I also combine sex with food. Trauma is also in what we consume and eat—this is why I cook vegan dishes. Colonialism has forced us to rape and pillage nature and animal life. What is being done to animals and how do we treat them? The animal agricultural industry poses serious threats to the environment, climate, workers, wildlife, and destroys land, such as in the Amazon. I feel we must heal and get aligned with the natural world. We must cleanse the past, readjust the pallet, and purge like one does with ayahuasca medicine. In an ayahuasca ceremony, I got a vision that I was at a cauldron, making food for warriors that helped them to have a multi-generational view of why it’s important to resist and transform systems of oppression. By making the caldo or soup, I was like a vessel to help with liberation; it was about making things, like my art or food. I have always loved to cook—you know this, Xamuel!

(XB): Yes, that is how we connected—working and making food in the kitchen of Casa Joaquín. I remember you once cooked a Peruvian vegetarian dish with potatoes and eggs.

Figure 10 “Study for Ancestral Food Legacies I” (2021). Collage with linoleum block and screen print elements on Cotton Rag Paper (22 5 × 30 inches). Image courtesy of Favianna Rodriguez.

(FR): ¡Papa a la Huancaína! I had a gift for a variety of cooking then, but I hadn’t connected it to my art practice. Now, I cook plant-based food and it’s like casting a spell to realign with the earth and purge the colonizer white man’s diet. The typical Western diet is literally killing us—just look at what our gente is dying from, like poor nutrition, illnesses, and other health problems. Unfortunately, we are usually not connected to our ancestral diets. For me, plant-based cooking is one way that I share my love for earth and how she nourishes us, and I made a collection of prints that focus on ancestral food knowledge (see Figures 10 and 11).

(XB): Food sovereignty, decolonizing our diets, and practicing reciprocal relationships with the land, water, plants, and animals in sustainable ways (Kimmerer 2013; Calvo and Esquibel 2015; Coté 2016; Montford and Taylor 2020; Calderón Farfán, Dussán Chaux, and Arias Torres 2021) are critical for earth mother Pachamama, our wellness, and survival—topics that your artivism addresses. In your ayahuasca vision, it’s like the cauldron was the holder of your magic: it’s through your hands and what you create that you nourish. Whether it is though art, food, or porn—for lack of a better word—or something else,

Figure 11. “Study for Ancestral Food Legacies II” (2021). Collage with linoleum block and screen print elements on Cotton Rag Paper (22.5 × 30 inches). Image courtesy of Favianna Rodriguez.

what you make can serve as medicine for collective healing to transcend beyond colonialism/coloniality.

(FR): The power of imagination is huge! This is why when I have an orgasm or eat nourishing food, I really tap in and feel connected through a deep, bodily experience. I feel my body, taste buds, and energy go up and down my spine. I feel! I actually feel! Land extraction on a global scale is killing our species and destroying life, and the pain that colonial racial capitalist system produces has numbed us. Feeling offsets this pain by integrating and aligning us to mother earth. We have signi cant shifts that we must make, and I see my work as an artivist as bringing life. I think about this when I am gardening (see Figure 12), that I am here to contribute to making another world. I love growing food and making it, in service of natural cycles and the web of life.

(XB): Please talk about the path that led you to your current artivism.

(FR): I was born in 1978. Growing up in the 1980s and 90s in east Oakland, California, shook me up. It was the era of AIDS and when former President Ronald Reagan expanded and reinforced many of Nixon’s War on Drug policies, which had racist consequences. For example, there were harsh penalties targeting people of color for nonviolent drug crimes that led to a massive increase in incarcerations. Drugs—like crack cocaine—devastated urban communities and Oakland was one of them. As a kid, I witnessed things like heavy police presence, gang violence, and what drugs do to underserved communities. I often felt unsafe, but I knew that it wasn’t normal to be so scared.

I was a young creative kid and made a lot of art that my dad would hang on walls at home. He taught me how to express myself, to read, and to speak in Spanish. My two immigrant parents were entrepreneurs who didn’t go to college. They were supportive of me having a voice, but they also wanted me to follow a traditional route. I was an honor roll student with a 4.2 GPA and was awarded prizes for academic achievements. I was a high achiever since I was a kid, and I think it had to do with my parents working all the time. My accomplishments were due to hyper productivity—which I eventually came to realize was not healthy. I excelled academically and practically got a full scholarship to attend UC Berkeley. My mom was a travel agent at some point, so we had opportunities to take trips while I was growing up. Seeing other parts of the world really helped me to realize that feeling unsafe in Oakland wasn’t right and that I had options.

I lived in Mexico City for about three years as a teenager. There was an expansiveness of culture in Mexico City that differs from what I learned in schools in the United States where white supremacy clouds everything. For example, the history I was taught in the United States mostly centered white people and their experiences. Although Latin America also tends to privilege

Figure 12 “Favi in Oakland” (2022). Photo by Bobby Gordon. Image courtesy of Favianna Rodriguez.

colonial knowledge, I was exposed to different things in Mexico City. Located in the Third World or Global South, Mexico City plays a prominent in uential role in Latin America, which has been deeply affected by European and American imperialism. In Mexico, I was exposed to muralism, revolutionaries like Simón Bolivar and Che Guevara, and Nueva Trova, which is a movement of Cuban music with political content that emerged after their revolution of 1959. Being in Mexico City helped me to understand the spectrum of a Latin American experience in a way that I never have in the United States. The United States does not present people of Latin American background in complex ways but through simplistic and stereotypical narratives.

After living in Mexico City, I came back to Oakland. The Fruitvale neighborhood that I grew up in had a strong Chicano movement, cultural murals, and hip hop was happening. I started organizing and created the rst Latino student club at San Leandro High School. I also helped to walk out students at my school in protest of racist propositions in California at the time. I was a young activist because I knew that things were whack! The people who helped me to organize during the mid and late-1990s included Luis Sánchez, through groups like Ollin, which used to be called Student Empowerment Program and then Voices of Struggle.

Before I went to college, I was like, “Chicano power” and “Fuck the system!” I used to go to Casa Joaquín, attend math and science programs that they had at UC Berkeley, and connect with students from Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán (or MEChA) (see Licón 2014), who would come and organize at our high school. That connection was very valuable because I thought, “cool, once I graduate from high school, this is the community that I can be a part of when I am in college.” When I went to college and moved to Casa Joaquín, I met other artists, like Jesús Barraza—co-founder of Dignidad Rebelde (see Barraza and Cervantes 2016; Barraza 2019)—who at the time was learning about the internet. This changed my life and opened the doorway to new technologies. I taught myself how to build my own website and how to code when the internet was very basic with html pages. I studied architecture in college but then I got more involved with organizing. For example, I helped with the 1999 hunger strike to save Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley from budget cuts (see Luna 2019).

In 1999 is also when I got an internship with the Center of the Study for Political Graphics (Center for the Study of Political Graphics) in Los Angeles, California, and this opportunity came from The Getty Marrow Multicultural Undergraduate Internship program (The Getty Foundation). It was the rst time that I looked at political and solidarity posters of the Black Panthers, Cuban revolution, and feminist activism. They opened my mind! I thought, “Wow, I could be making political posters of things that are important to me. That’s what I want to do and get them out into the world.”

Figure 13. “Del Ojo de Dios no se escapa nadie” (1999). Screen print (26 × 20 inches). Image courtesy of Favianna Rodriguez.

Afterward, I had the opportunity to get an internship with Self Help Graphics and Art in East Los Angeles (Self Help Graphics & Art). Being in Los Angeles nourished my ties with the creative and activist scene in the area, which included hella Chicano organizing and arts, such as the punk-rock fusion collective Ollin. Self Help connected the network through community events like the Día de los Muertos, and art and activism moved through a lot of spaces. The way I got connected to the internship was when I took Dr. Laura Pérez’s Chicano Studies art class at UC Berkeley in 1998. She had invited the artist Yreina D. Cervántez to class, who is known for her murals, printmaking, and multimedia painting (see Pérez 2019). Yreina saw my work—she really saw me—and encouraged me to continue to develop my artistic talent. When she curated the Maestras Atelier XXXIII at Self Help Graphics in 1999 —which was the rst all-female major silkscreen workshop there—I was invited to be a part of this. I participated in the Maestras Atelier alongside many talented Chicana artists, like Diane Gamboa, Barbara Carrasco, Alma López, and Yolanda López—it was tight!

As part of the Meastras Atelier, I created “Del ojo de Dios no se escapa nadie,” (Figure 13), which is about patriarchy’s abusive and objectifying sexual behavior. When I think about that image, I feel like it represents the essence of who I am. That was the rst art major piece that I made. It centers an openlegged gure with eyes covering the crotch. Decades after I made it, despite having a more sophisticated analysis, I feel the same way about the message. As womb carriers, we have the power to create life, which is the basis of how this universe exists. For me, whether it’s about pussy power or talking about our relationship to earth, the image represents the essence of who I am: being in my body/embodied, challenging colonial norms. I feel all of this is represented in that phase where I created that piece. Looking back, it’s uncanny. I know I have evolved with my art and that I am a very different artist since then, but when it comes to that piece, I am like, “wow, that is the essence of my art.” I nd it amazing that young Favi was thinking like that, but it’s also not surprising.

Then, in 2000, I got pregnant and had an abortion. I was like, “You know what? I want to do what I want to, which is to be an artist. I am learning skills and technologies that are not part of my education at UC Berkeley.” I failed a lot of classes because I fell behind due to my activism, and I didn’t bother to do anything about it; I wanted to start my own business and gure things out myself. That is around the time that I helped to start a small graphic design company called Tumis. Jesús Barraza was a part of the business and I worked with people like Tony Carranza who is an artist based in the Central Valley of California in Fresno. Through Tumis and using my computer skills, I realized that people would pay me for my art. I’m good at selling—my mom taught me that—and the business was successful. Then I had a small art studio called Taller Tupac Amaru with Jesús, where he started helping me do screen-prints. I continued to

be involved in the arts and organizing, like co-founding the EastSide Arts Alliance, which is a multiracial cultural center in Oakland, California. I got to meet and interact with important historical activists like Emory Douglas, Kathleen Cleaver, Amiri Baraka, Bobby Seal, and Yuri Kochiyama. I was surrounded and part of a vibrant political community.

As I continued to create art, in 2009 is when I worked with journalist Roberto Lovato and co-founded Presente.org, which the largest Latinx online organization that advances social justice with culture, media, and technology (Presente.org). The organization helped to remove Lou Dobbs—a racist white American political commentator from mainstream television at the time—and we helped with the Trail of Dreams campaign when undocumented folks walked from Florida to Washington D.C. (see Solórzano 2022). We helped to challenge racist violence, like when members from the US-Mexico border vigilante nativist group Minutemen Project killed Raul Flores Jr. and his nine-year-old daughter Brisenia Flores, and we helped to activate people to support the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to serve on the Supreme Court. Then, in 2010, the Arizona senate introduced and eventually passed the SB1070 —the “Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act,” which became known as the “show me your papers law” for targeting brown people. Chicano activist musician Zack de la Rocha from Rage Against the Machine organized Sound Strike to boycott Arizona (Kraker 2010). It inspired a lot of musicians to stop playing in Arizona because it had become a laboratory for designing several racist policies. What happened in Arizona then was similar to the racist legislation in California during the 1990s, like the passing of Propositions 184, 187, 209, 227, and 21 (HoSang 2010; Bañales 2012; Luna 2019). Presente.org was modeled after the Color of Change (Color of Change), a progressive nonpro t racial justice organization in Oakland, California. I had met the folks who started Color of Change and they taught me to combine technology and activism. However, by 2011, I asked myself, “In this movimiento, where are the artists at? How can we do cultural strategy without the artists—we need them! Yo, I am an artist and I need to advocate for us.”

(XB): Since the late 1960s and early 1970s, community members created several cultural political organizations throughout the United States that are still active. In California, examples include Self Help Graphics in Los Angeles and Galería de la Raza in San Francisco (see Jackson 2009; Galería de la Raza). Despite such spaces, did you believe there was a void in the cultural political arts in Oakland at that time?

(FR): I think that there were not enough investments, resources, or spaces for cultural arts of which my generation could take advantage. A lot of the cultural arts organizations were struggling, or many hadn’t really grown. This is largely

due to the systemic racism of the mainstream artworld and funding streams, which is why we must demand investment in the cultural arts. At the time, I felt like I needed to organize with artists. I couldn’t just be an artist in a movement space—I needed to be an artist in a cultural space. I was all about a movement but one that centers culture because there are so many underserved artists.

I got resources, raised money, and the CultureStrike project was born in 2011, led by me and co-founded with Jeff Chang. The rst thing we did, along with Andrew Hsiao (editor at Verso Books) and Ken Chen (former Executive Director of Asian American Writers Workshops), was to go to Arizona to connect and meet with folks. We wanted to bring a delegation of artists there and that’s what we did. We brought folks like Teju Cole, dream hampton, W. Kamau Bell, El MAC, Elizabeth Mendez Berry, Daniel Alarcón, Emory Douglas, and Maxine Hong Kingston—a bunch of dope people! Everyone came from different parts of the country and met in Arizona. It was like a $60,000 project to make this happen. We visited detention centers in Pima County in Arizona to witness Operation Streamline—a 2005 joint initiative of the US Department of Homeland Security and Department of Justice that criminally prosecutes unauthorized border crossing through a “zero-tolerance” approach. From this work, CultureStrike was born, and thereafter I worked with several artivist, like Julio Salgado from the UndocuQueer Movement (see Ochoa 2015). Based on this work with CultureStrike, I was featured in a three-part documentary series that artist Pharrell Williams produced titled “Migration is Beautiful”—which is also the name of one of my most recognized prints (see Figure 14). This series was signi cant because it challenged the negative rhetoric and views about immigration and undocumented migrants in the United States and Williams released it on his “i am OTHER” YouTube channel (i am OTHER 2013). Since then, CultureStrike and the work of other organizations evolved into the Center for Cultural Power, which had a budget of ten million dollars in 2022.

In time, I realized that it was important to tell my story and how culture can help move things, why art is essential, and why we should be talking about artists. Then I started getting involved with labor, reproductive, and climate justice movements. For example, through my organization, I supported Walmart workers with their efforts to unionize and ght for fair wages in 2013, and I did a bunch of creative work with the People’s Climate March in 2014 in New York City. I feel like I have been deeply solidifying my relationship with movements and bringing culture to them. By bringing art to actions, I can help people to think about the importance of culture and to see artists. We don’t want to just have transactional relationships; we want to be part of an ecosystem that gures out how to pay artists. That’s why I started The Center for Cultural Power: to move resources to Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (or BIPOC) and other marginalized artists. I know that I have my superpower through creating, and I feel like I need to inspire other artists to see their superpowers. So, in this

Figure 14. “Migration is Beautiful 2018” (2018). Offset lithography (24 × 18 inches). Image courtesy of Favianna Rodriguez.

organization, I am not focused on themes around decolonizing sex; I treat this as a separate body of work.

(XB): Perhaps in the future, all your projects will combine. It makes me think of your unapologetic “Pussy Power” digital prints (see Figures 15 and 16) and “Pussy Power Imaginary” project (see Pérez 2019) that you announced in 2015. Not only did this art and project af rm “sluttiness” and womxn’s bodies, but it also called attention to misogynist politicians who work to limit or end access to health, birth control, and abortions. These issues are pressing given that the Supreme Court of the United States overturned Roe v Wade in the summer of 2022, taking away federal protection for abortion rights. In many ways your work enacts a decolonial feminist imaginary and futurity that challenges heteropatriarchal coloniality by creating new narratives in society and moving away from survival towards cultivating horizons of desire and in which we thrive (see Pérez 1999; Gunn 2019; Mendieta 2020). Folks who are “already there” understand the interconnections, but mainstream audiences may not yet.

(FR): The Pussy Power social justice posters were part of a series of feminist reactions to the political and conservative attacks on abortions during that time. In 2011, I had a second abortion (PopSugar 2022), and I publicly spoke about it to shed away the shame and break the silence, as well as put a face to the debates and complicate the narratives around the subject. Given the overturning of Roe v. Wade, as a cultural worker I realize that there is more work to do to normalize abortions, to see it as a standard medical procedure and not weighed down by “moral” values. Political conservatives—who are majority white hetero cisgender men—control politics, and we see how they polarize critical topics, like abortions and trans rights. Many young people are identifying as non-binary and there is more trans visibility in pop culture, but mainstream politics may not re ect this. Cultural power moves on a different track than politics.

I also do my cultural movement work with my organization. I am at a point when legally, I must keep my art and organizing work separated. Before, both were more combined because they weren’t about things considered controversial like sex or “drugs.” So, my organization has been growing by focusing on topics like racial-, gender-, climate justice, or prison abolitionism. In my artistic practice, I want to be able to play and try everything. For example, I have been making earrings, growing food, starting to produce pleasure-based events, as I mentioned earlier. I have ideas that I can help to manifest, so I understand my role as a creator is also about making space for collaboration or bringing resources and abundance to projects—it’s sort of like setting up a table for things to emerge and happen. With the porn, it’s been super fascinating. From the moment we started to make the lm, the vibe of the space and the

Figure 15. “Pussy Power” (2012). Digital Print (17 × 12 inches). Image courtesy of Favianna Rodríguez.

Figure 16. “I’m a Slut” (2012). Digital Print (17 × 12 inches). Image courtesy of Favianna Rodríguez.

people we hired were all very intentional. When I took a break, the woman that I hired for sound came up to me and said, “Hey, I met you in Arizona in 2011. This is the rst porn that I have ever worked on; we love you in Arizona and the work that you do.” Then I ended up connecting her team with my organization to work on videos activating Arizona voters during this past 2020 US presidential election.

I have experienced several personal challenges before arriving at a space where I could thrive. In 2014 is when I met a person who I would romantically

Figure 17. “I Accept You” (2019). 4-color serigraph on Chip Board (14 × 12 inches). Image courtesy of Favianna Rodriguez.

be involved with for four years but, unfortunately, was abusive and violent. During this time, I took care of my father when he was diagnosed with cancer in 2015. He died the following year, which was a big turning point. In 2017, I realized that I was in an abusive cycle with my partner, and I didn’t tell anybody about it. It was so bad that I had to plan my exit for safety purposes and because I couldn’t get rid of him. He was manipulative and would say alarming things like that he was going to cut his veins, and he would pull out knives, pull his hair out, or scream at me. It got to a point where I didn’t want to come home. My career was exploding, so I hardly had to be home; I was traveling like once a week. I could be numb from productivity, and I was still healing from my dad’s death. I was nally able to execute my exit plan from the relationship in 2018, and October became very signi cant because it was when I ended a major cycle. When I looked at the history and patterns of my relationships and upbringing, I realized that I was reenacting trauma bonds. I was like, “wow!” So, in 2018 is when I began to intentionally address this issue. As I recovered from the abusive relationship, I created a serigraph that re ects my journey of self-love and acceptance (see Figure 17). Through this process, I became curious about using natural medicines or what we call “psychedelics,” so I did ayahuasca for the rst time for my healing.

What followed was another bad relationship, and I had my third abortion in October of 2019. The person who I was sleeping with at the time disappeared after I got pregnant, which is what happened the rst time I had an abortion in 2000. I realized that I was enacting womb trauma and needed deep healing around this and the relationship choices I was making that were taking a toll on my body. When my mom immigrated to the United States from Peru, she got pregnant by her partner at the time who was abusive. In time, Ricky was born in 1970 at a Catholic hospital where the staff didn’t speak Spanish. The nuns in the hospital were not going to encourage abortion, so by default they advised my mother to give up her son for adoption. I was born years later, and my mom didn’t tell me that my brother existed until Ricky found us when he was thirty-one years old (I was twenty- ve). I know my mom had womb trauma that passed on to me—but that’s not the only family trauma that continues.

On my dad’s side was my grandmother Lucia Cardenas who was AfroPeruvian. She was a live-in domestic service worker—the maid—who used to clean for a well-off white Peruvian family. Don Jorge was the patriarch, married with a family. He was married to a light-skinned Peruvian, but my grandma also birthed three of his children. I see this as a violation of my grandmother since there was an uneven hierarchical relationship in which he had more power as her boss. She didn’t have much of a choice or access to abortion, so I see her children—which includes my father—as a product of rape. Don Jorge never engaged with my grandmother’s life. She didn’t talk about it, but I know how to put two and two together. I thought, “How did my grandmother have kids with Don Jorge when he was also married, and my dad’s half-sister are from the

same generation.” Things que se permetían en Perú: silences. He never married my grandmother; she still had to live as a Black mother with kids: my dad and two twins (Jorge and Daniel who are my uncles). Gustavo is my dad, and Ricky is my older brother. Ricky is the son of one of the twins. My mom’s rst baby daddy was from one of Gustavo’s siblings. Things are so interwoven.

The white family took and spoiled my uncles, los mellizos—that’s what they call twins in Peru—because they are seen as a sign of good luck. Unfortunately, the twins started drinking heavily when they were fteen years old and were alcoholics most of their lives. After my family migrated to the United States, my grandmother lived at my parent’s home in Oakland. One of my twin uncles was frequently drunk around the Fruitvale area and often came home beaten up; he died before my grandmother did. Both of my twin uncles mirrored each other—my other uncle died of alcohol related complications. I thought, “My grandmother brought life into this world through uneven power structures and witnessed the demise of her two sons to a familial and cultural system that just made them numb.” I believe this harm that my grandmother experienced requires sooo much healing work that she could not do, and she held on to so much pain. I realized that I inherited generational womb trauma from both sides of my family. In a ceremony, I could see and feel that pain, so I knew that my next journey was to do womb healing.

This last abortion that I had in October of 2019, I decided not to do it via medical procedure but through a doula at home (PopSugar 2022). It was another experience. I thought, “Wow, even colonization has taken this form of healing from us.” We are hardly ever presented with the option to be able to heal from not allowing new life to come—sometimes it’s not the right time and we have to close that portal. Feeling this abortion deep in my body was a healing experience. The rst two abortions (one in 2000 and the other in 2011), I didn’t feel them; I was numbed out on my back in a clinic. This one in 2019 I did feel, and it was what I needed to take back my body. I consider myself an educated “woke” woman, but in my healing work, a lot of it was learning how to re-parent, reclaim, and protect my body, and not put it in dangerous situations. After the last abortion, I felt like I had matured through the process.

In 2020, when October came around, I felt good, free, and manifesting my power. Good weed was coming, my art was selling, my organization was growing. I think I am creating abundance and empowering other women to build power. Currently, I am in a phase where storytelling is very important to me. I share my stories on social media, like why I grow cannabis, what I do with it, and how it makes one feel good. I talk about other topics like masturbation to help others engage with those practices. Also, I am working on a TV show concept based on my mixed-race family, generational trauma, abortions, and how breaking cycles relate to healing the planet. I’m drafting out the seasons of the show and working on grant writing to fund the project.

Figure 18. “Release What Doesn’t Serve Me” (2019). Collage with monoprint on Cotton Rag Paper (30 × 22.5 inches). Image courtesy of Favianna Rodriguez.

(XB): The body is often central in your work (e.g., Figure 18), and art has the power to heal and transform pain (Vox Creative 2022). Furthermore, embodying artivism and joy are ways to reconcile social injustice or intervene in colonial domination (Cantrick et al 2018; Negrón-Muntander 2020). Because carrying intergenerational trauma in the body has dire consequences (van der Kolk 2014; Duran 2019), healing from oppression through decolonial practices is especially critical. For example, you mentioned that your last abortion with a doula provided a healing experience that contrasted your numbing one through Western medicine. Can you elaborate on this healing experience?

(FR): My abortion through Western medicine was a detached, sterile, and oppressive experience. A doula helps with the healing because they can provide care before, during, and after the abortion. I contacted a friend who is a doula and part of a network of birth workers and abortion providers. She said I could do the process at home with abortion pills, so she came to my house and helped to prepare me. The spiritual aspect of this abortion included talking to my womb and vulva and having a ceremony around the process. The rst night when I took the pills, the grief and pain kept me up as I thought about my grandmother, mother, and upbringing in a culture where sex or womb trauma were not talked about openly. About two days later, the embryo came out with blood and tissue. It was a very moving experience, and I had a ceremony where I buried the embryo in the backyard. I realized that I hadn’t fully grieved my rst two abortions, but the ceremonial burying of my third one allowed me to heal. This healing process is very important because I do believe we are making a choice to end life, even if it may not be fully developed, and that is our right as womb carriers. I also believe people who have abortions must have the option to grieve. If we don’t have spaces to grieve, the pain—the harsh energy—sometimes cannot move. By sharing our stories, we can heal ourselves and our communities.

Given that the right-wing has coopted the idea of life and turned it against those of us who ght for the right to an abortion, I must clarify that I do believe it is the decision of the person who is holding the life—the womb carrier—to determine if it is the appropriate time or not. It’s very important to keep abortion accessible and safe, but I also think that some critical feminist frameworks—like reproductive justice—must decolonize their views because they were developed through a lens of white supremacy. We must also embrace our ancestral ways of healing. Curanderas and parteras—or birth workers—many of whom heteropatriarchy colonialism has attempted to silence or erase, carry traditional knowledge around abortions and can serve as our guides. A lot of the ancestral ways and wisdom that doulas practice is through the passing of conocimiento or knowing. As a creator of culture, I feel that I am relearning things that our people already know, like how to grow food, care for plants, or to be in relationship to medicine. It’s like I am returning to my basic core knowledge, activating my DNA. That’s where I am currently at with my art form, really thinking about

all the ways that I can help to reshape all these concepts, while opening other minds to them.

Through rituals or ceremonies, I allow communication with my ancestors. I feel and see my people, my past, my community. I realize how our traditions are so important and contain so much wisdom. There have been culture keepers who pass down their wisdom and healing through the foods that they made. When I make curries, I am like, “How the fuck did human beings gure out how to mix these ingredients?” When I eat and taste certain ingredients, I feel communication through my mouth and taste buds, like something powerful happens. For example, I can feel ginger and turmeric open parts of my body, like my sinuses and jaw. People over time have developed a language between foods and the natural world that speak to different parts of the body. I am attuned to this alchemy and want to help other people experience this.

(XB): The recent or contemporary socio-political context involves many critical movements and issues, such as: Black Lives Matter; Land Back; #MeToo; Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls; anti-Asian racism, hate, and violence; ICE arrests, detentions, and deportations; Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions; COVID-19; and climate change. You mentioned your coalitional work and solidarity efforts with artists, activists, and artivists, as well using social media with your artivism.

(FR): Yes, social media is another tool to enact social change. Every tool has great things that it can do. I use certain skills in my art, and then I have other techniques when I cook, like following recipes. Smartphones are a medium where people interact in technology space. Through social media you can transport people somewhere, but it’s about guring out, how does one take them and to where? My targeted audience is people in the United States as well as Latin America, although not limited to these areas. In many ways, I speak about the cultures of how I was raised, which have inherited and are informed by colonial values. In general, my work is for people who experience colonization or social inequities. I have done art workshops for artists throughout the Arab region, such as Sudan, Tunisia, Lebanon, Beirut, Palestine, and Egypt. Although there are big cultural differences especially around gender and sexuality, at the core, we share the common goal of social justice. I believe that if we are going to move away from a culture of sexual violence and harassment, then we need a culture of agency, sexual liberation, and healing. So, even if people don’t agree with my work or don’t think it’s relevant to their lives, they can see the value and recognize links to their respective social contexts. My organization provides a space to collaborate with other people about critical topics and questions. My socio-political analysis is informed by several frameworks, like Black Liberation practiced by the Black Panthers or Black Lives Matters, so it’s been such a gift to apply what I have learned. How is

anti-blackness showing up in how we work? How do we call anti-Blackness into question? How do we demonstrate solidarity? In my organization, I get to do this with so many collaborators. For example, we partnered with a group of Black survivors of sexual assault to develop a storytelling projects. One of them was Rethinking Gender where various artists were commissioned to create illustrations of gender inclusivity for a children’s coloring book. With climate justice work, we are intentional about collaborating with groups who are BIPOC led. We look at Indigenous sovereignty and related issues, such as moving away from extractive practices and moving towards regenerative economies. Our gender justice work breaks binaries by including folks from all genders. Our electoral work is about activating Latinx and Black folks, guring out how to tell stories that re ect our communities and invite us to think differently about our electoral system. I feel so lucky to have created a space and be in a community where we can ask dif cult questions and gure out solutions.

For me, art is not a privilege only for the elite. Cultural expression comes in many forms, and my life’s work is about demanding that all communities have the right to access art and express themselves. My art is about creating in multiples, so there is a lot of it, and not just about one piece. I don’t make one expensive painting of which the goal is to hang in a museum. Instead, I make prints, for example, because they’re accessible and many of them. Emory Douglas, who was the minister of culture for the Black Panthers, taught me that my art did not have to exist in elite places (Vox Creative 2022). My art could live in a newspaper or poster, multiplied in many places at once, reproduced over and over. In addition, I do critical artwork in other ways. For example, the woman who produced the short porn lm that I mentioned earlier, Lotus Lain, she’s a Black woman who organizes BIPOC performers in the porn industry. I’m like, “Fuck yeah! I am all about it. Let’s do things together, let’s create together.” I get to do that in a very different space that is about the art. I feel really fortunate to use my art in so many generative ways.

But there is a lot of work to do to enact social change. There is so much activism that is being done by women of color. Right now, I feel like I am doing too much. Why do I need to be extraordinary to survive? There is something that we need to do about this—especially as women of color who have been so programmed to help—to gure out the right balance. That’s the conversation that I am having now with myself. I think that’s what the next body of work is about: healing. Then, guring out, how do I get into balance? I am active and creating more art than I ever have been. I feel like I am having great sex, I am eating well, and things are feeling really good. I want to continue to create art that helps to facilitate this for more people, especially Latinas. Xamuel, the things that Latinas tell me! I’m like, “damn, colonialism has really fucked us up.” It’s been twice, rst by the European colonizers then the United States. It’s deep and traumatizing, so there is a lot of work to do with our gente. I like the idea of in uencing culture as a form of social sculpture. In my workshops,

I talk about waves, how culture is like water that creates ripples. I believe we must be more intentional about creating ripples with momentum. If we keep making social changes that are only about the mind or body, we are limited. We must also invite a vision of the future and bear witness through art because they can facilitate healing and transformation.

(XB): Previously you mentioned attending Burning Man, which is an annual week-long event held in the Black Rock Desert in the United States that focuses on art, self-expression, community, and self-reliance. As you know, one longstanding critique of Burning Man is that it lacks racial diversity (Oniah 2021), despite one of the guiding principles of the event is “Radical Inclusion.” I know that you have worked hard to push racial inclusivity in Burning Man (see Boyer 2020), but for folks who may not be familiar with the space, could you share why it was important to do so?

(FR): I went to my rst Burning Man in 2011 when a professional associate at the time invited me to go with some activists. What I saw and experienced there blew my mind open. You are in another world—a city where anything can happen. To have a ctional space can be empowering because you can invent yourself, while you get exposed to what it is like to live freely, where you can express your desires and be in conversation with nature. White people have had the spaciousness to gure all that shit out, to create these spaces that can be very conducive to having breakthroughs. Burning Man is similar to an ayahuasca journey: it’s an experience that accelerates your transformation as you question your worldview.

I learned how to “burn” or participate in the event—such as setting up and running a camp—through my intellectual property lawyer. It was empowering because she taught me so many details, like how to create an autonomous village to protect you and others from nature’s elements and how to rely on one another for survival. It’s all about your camp, so if it is sloppy, you are not gonna have a good experience. To organize a camp means planning for food, having enough water, guring out how to power our lights—all those things. Years later she asked me to be the lead of the Que Viva camp. I noticed there were very few Black and Latinx people when I rst went, so when I became the lead, I asked key questions about racial justice, and stated that I wanted to center the leadership of BIPOC women. I felt like she took up too much space, so I called her out on it and challenged her. She exploded and I felt that she displayed white fragility and white privilege. I got into an argument but then the people of color that I brought to the camp stood with me. We wanted to take the camp in another direction, so, my relationship with my associate ended. I then created my own camp. I was like, “I am in charge; we can do this!” What I really liked about my camp is that we centered racial justice and led with pleasure activism. We were like, “cool, let’s plan out all really good meals; let’s have all these things that we

Figure 19. “Time to Rise 1” (2022). Collage with screen print, phototransfers, and linoleum block elements on Cotton Rag Paper (15 × 11.25 inches). Image courtesy of Favianna Rodriguez.

want to experiment with; let’s make sure that our whole set up looks really nice, protected, and that our shower works.” The work brought us together. We as BIPOC, especially as women who are in leadership and were helping with our movements, we needed to have a space to be wild and free, and that meant that we needed real support from the Burning Man organization. We realized that we needed to name the racial exclusion and challenge Burning Man to address the problem and makes changes. Given the context of the Black Lives Matter and Time’s Up movements, Burning Man felt the pressure and made some changes.

(XB): We have covered so much in this conversation! Thank you for sharing your knowledge and experience of your decolonial feminist work. May your artivism inspire others to enact change. Any closing thoughts that you would like to share?

(FR): Your welcome; the conversation was so much fun! To conclude, I want to share a little bit about my experience participating at the 27th annual United Nations Climate Change Conference (UNFCCC) or Conference of the Parties of the UNFCCC, commonly referred to as COP27. The conference took place in Egypt during November 2022, and I talked about the role of culture, art, and entertainment as it relates to climate change. It was a powerful moment in my career because it was a global platform to help shape critical dialogues around urgent matters that I care about and affect a lot of our people. I was in community with this movement that includes multigenerational representatives from throughout the world. For example, there were leaders from the Amazon and the African continent. It felt like a once in a lifetime opportunity to contribute to shaping important global conversations. It was a humbling experience for me, and I felt very blessed to witness and participate.

One of the major takeaways from UCOP27 for me was the crisis of climate chaos. I have done a series of prints that focus on planet earth (see Figure 19), so this topic was especially important to me. There is an argument within climate spaces that Western imperialism, colonization, and white supremacy caused the climate crisis, and that it is not something that emerged recently but when Europeans invaded and ravaged the Americas and other places on the planet. One of the prominent discussions or demands at UCOP27 was about loss and damage, and that polluting nations and those responsible for the climate crisis should pay for reparations. For hundreds of years—especially over the last decades and years—certain powers have accelerated the exploitation of natural resources and increased greenhouse gas emissions. Corporations, like gas and oil companies, are getting richer and causing irreparable damage to the planet, humans, and ecosystems. Many countries are raising the question of who should be paying for reparations. Obviously, it would be the United States, England, and all the other colonizer nations. Demanding for reparations at a global level

was groundbreaking because it goes against government slogans of adaptation. How does one adapt to climate change? There comes a point when adapting isn’t an option because resources are so exploited with detrimental consequences.

Finally, there were also conversations at UCOP27 about how the earth exists because of the power to create life, and the problem of heteropatriarchy that empowers cisgender men to make harmful decisions about the planet. This is connected to the global sexual/gender violence crisis against womb carriers and people whose gender and sexual identities don’t t heteronormativity and cisnormativity. Indigenous women who participated at UCOP27 regularly stated: when women heal, so does the earth; when the earth heals, so do women. Guided by the principles of decolonial pleasure and joy, my artivism is deeply connected to restoring the planet and creating conditions for women and marginalized folks to heal and work towards social change.

Xamuel Bañales is an associate professor and former chair of the Ethnic Studies Department at California State University, Stanislaus. Bañales completed their doctorate degree from UC Berkeley and has authored essays in many critical anthologies and journals, including Ethnic Studies Review; Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies; Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society; The Bilingual Review/Revista Bilingüe; and North American Congress on Latin America.

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Resurgent Education as Decolonial Feminist Praxis

Leilani Sabzalian, Michelle M. Jacob, and Roshelle Weiser-Nieto

In this paper, we describe and analyze the ways in which we center the importance of kinship and relationality in an Indigenous education seminar. Throughout the seminar, we invite Indigenous teacher candidates to turn inward to see, learn from, and teach about the brilliance of their own lands, languages, and communities. We view our work as thinking with Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s beautiful vision of resurgent education. We do this work in collaboration with Tux ámshish Dr. Virginia Beavert, Yakama Tribal Elder, who serves as a mentor in our program. We focus on three key points that advance our vision of resurgent education as decolonial feminist praxis:

1) Relationality is power;

2) Land is a nurturing teacher who constantly extends power to us;

3) Creating space for resurgence requires challenging colonial relations of power. We conclude that our project is a form of decolonial feminist praxis and invite our feminist colleagues to see themselves as part of and responsible for this vital work.

Keywords: Elders / Indigenous education / Indigenous feminisms / Land / Relationality / Resurgence / Teacher education

Hanging on the wall of a small conference room in our Sapsik’wałá (Teacher) Education Program of ce suite is a beautiful blanket based on the ancient and complex Indigenous Northwest Coast practice of Chilkat weaving. A cultural reading of this blanket might emphasize the beauty and intricacy of the Northwest Coast formline design by Tlingit artist Richard Dalton III, who adapted the blanket design from a 19th century Chilkat blanket. Indeed, the blanket should be appreciated for its cultural aesthetics. A political reading of the blanket, however, would emphasize not only the beauty and skill woven into the blanket, but also the survivance Indigenous peoples have embodied

©2023 Feminist Formations, Vol. 35 No. 1 (Spring) pp. 195–220

so that Chilkat weaving could persist despite colonial policies and practices of dispossession and erasure. That the blanket was purchased from Eighth Generation, a Native-owned company that supports “Inspired Natives” rather than “Native-inspired” art, adds another layer of meaning. A political reading would also illuminate the contested space in which the blanket hangs, a small conference room that was transformed into a student room for our Indigenous teacher education program. This student room was not generously given to our program by benevolent university administrators, but strategically advocated for as part of Michelle’s job negotiations. The blanket also was not given to our program out of generosity but gifted to Michelle after a longstanding dispute over the institution supporting Indigenous education symbolically, but without nancial, scholarship or personnel supports to operationalize that expressed commitment. In this reading, the blanket re ects institutional neglect and betrayal, as well as a erce Indigenous feminist ethic and praxis of holding institutions accountable for Indigenous peoples' concerns and priorities.

Figure 1 Richard Dalton III (Tlingit), “Blanket of Knowledge,” adapted from a classic 19th century Chilkat blanket, Yaakoosge X’óow features Raven the creator. Courtesy of Eighth Generation. https://eighthgeneration.com/products/blanket-of-knowledge -throw-blanket

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As Indigenous feminists asserting our presence on a university campus, we relate to this blanket. Like the blanket, we have been admired for our beauty, but not our survivance, skill, or tenacity; we have been asked to talk about Indigenous cultures, perhaps give a land acknowledgement, but ignored or despised when we advocate for our political commitments to Indigenous peoples. And just as the blanket serves as a memory of colonialism and survivance we too remember the ways institutions have sought to erase or betray us.

As a symbol of the colonial context in which we work, as well as the brilliance of Indigenous knowledge systems, the blanket reminds us that even though we must advocate ercely for Indigenous education within the colonial contexts of the university, we also cannot let that advocacy overshadow or distract us from the vital work of nurturing Indigenous brilliance. The blanket is also an expression of resurgence, the focus of our next section.

Resurgent Education

Resurgence offers an important framework for decolonial feminist praxis in education. Indigenous studies scholars forward resurgence as processes and practices that can regenerate Indigenous lifeways and nations and realize Indigenous futurities (Aikau 2015; Corntassel 2012, Corntassel et al. 2018, Simpson 2011, 2017). Here we respectfully draw from Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg scholar Leanne Simpson’s work, as her theory and practice of resurgent education shape our own goals within an Indigenous teacher education program. In her rst theorizing of resurgence, Simpson (2011) wrote that resurgence involves “signi cantly re-investing in our own ways of being: regenerating our political and intellectual traditions, articulating and living our legal systems; language learning; ceremonial and spiritual pursuits; creating and using our artistic and performance-based traditions. All of these require us—as individuals and collectives—to diagnose, interrogate, and eviscerate the insidious nature of conquest, empire and imperial thought in every aspect of our lives” (17–18).

Resurgence moves away from approaches to social change that center and contest colonial relations of power, toward practices of nurturing Indigenous relationality and systems of intelligence (Simpson 2017). As Aikau (2015) offers, “Indigenous resurgence focuses on those things that restore a sense of individual and communal responsibility for our language, histories, territories, ceremonial cycles, and intellectual practices” (656). Though settler colonialism can “explain how Indigenous peoples became disconnected from our lands, languages, histories, and ceremonial cycles,” it cannot explain “how to transform the system or to envision an Indigenous futurity” (Aikau 2019, 84). This is why, we believe, Simpson (2017) has advocated that for Indigenous communities, “our most important work is internal” (6).

Resurgence recognizes that alternatives to our present colonial realities will come, not from investing more time and energy into the state, but by nurturing

the alternative realities that lie within Indigenous intelligence and systems of relationality. Resurgence comes from the “reinvigoration of Indigenous systemic alternatives—alternatives that have already produced sustainable, beautiful, principled societies” (Simpson 2017, 49). For us, resurgent education involves helping future Indigenous teachers recognize the power of their own knowledge systems and embody and communicate that value to their students. As a form of decolonizing feminist praxis, resurgent education is about “making power” within Indigenous communities “to reclaim indigenous traditions, bodies, languages, and homelands” (Jacob 2013, 6). To do so, we are part of a longstanding tradition that Kiowa scholar Robin Zape-tah-hol-ah Starr Minthorn and Wichita scholar Heather J. Shotton report in their study of Indigenous women in higher education, carrying “forward the teachings and values” of our Indigenous communities and utilizing them as “resources and inspiration” to guide our journeys (2019, 8). In particular, we emphasize the value of Tma’áakni (Respect) (Jacob, Gonzales, Finley, and RunningHawk Johnson 2019).

As an Indigenous teacher education program that relies upon funding secured by faculty in competitive federal and state grant competitions and that is enmeshed within state licensure requirements that are deeply entangled with and invested in coloniality (Tuck and Gorlewski 2019), we recognize the contradictions and limits of enacting resurgent education within such an institutional and colonial context. We recognize the complexities and messiness of decolonial work and do our best to repurpose universities to advance Indigenous desires (la paperson 2017; Smith 2012), including desires for self-determination and nation building (Brayboy, Fann, Castagno, and Solyom 2012; Brayboy, Solyom, and Castagno 2014). We also hear Simpson’s critique that “postsecondary education provides few useful skillsets to those” wanting to shift relations between Indigenous nations and the state, or “learn to think in the most complex ways possible within the networked system of Indigenous intelligence” (14). While it remains an open question for us whether we can further resurgent education within a predominantly white institution, we are driven by a sense of relational accountability to both the Indigenous students we serve and the Native nations who are our partners in this work. As Smith and Smith (2019) have argued, “Indigenous work in the academy is an important part of the process of decolonization because the academy plays such a signi cant role in the production and legitimation of knowledge” (1085).

Having a say in who will become a teacher in our communities and how they will be prepared to support the next generation of Indigenous children is a project that we take seriously in order to counter the ongoing epistemic violence of settler colonialism and create space to reclaim Indigenous ways of knowing and being. Though “turning away from the state” is a core tenet of resurgence, it “does not mean complete disengagement”; rather, it requires self-re exivity on our part of “the limitations of certain strategic engagements with the state” (Corntassel 2021, 75). For us, this involves working to decenter state power in

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the process of determining who is quali ed to become an Indigenous educator. We have accomplished important work in this regard, advocating successfully for the removal of high stakes content knowledge exams and creating an alternative, holistic assessment to evaluate content knowledge, which has been accepted by our state’s teacher licensure commission. These strategic engagements with the state have helped create space to foreground our own values and visions of Indigenous teacher education.

Our decolonial feminist praxis is driven by a sense of hopefulness and a practical desire to see what we can do to support Indigenous education within whitestream academic spaces (Grande 2015), as we are not yet willing to cede these spaces to the institution. We try to use the time and space we have with future Indigenous educators to help them reconnect with their own systems of intelligence and power, so that they, in turn, can do the same with their future students. Internally to our university-based program, we support the Indigenous educators we prepare to think critically and carefully about the purpose of education and what counts as knowledge. This involves helping future Indigenous educators realize that “[e]ducation cannot just be about shifting our children into the urban middle class,” but “must be about turning our children inwards” (Simpson 2017, 80) toward the brilliance of their own lands, lifeways, and systems of intelligence. This is challenging work given the layers of federal, state, and university colonial bureaucracy we navigate, but we remain hopeful. We note on an ongoing basis that the struggles we engage and labor we undertake bene t Indigenous students, and all students. Indeed, creating exibility within rigid oppressive bureaucracies is a primary way that we can “diversify the educator pathway,” which state bureaucracies claim is one of their highest priorities. Our efforts highlight a relationship between insurgent and resurgent education (Corntassel 2011). While careful to not let external advocacy overshadow our internal work, outward-facing efforts to “educate policymakers and the general public on the history of indigenous self-determination” are often critical to creating spaces for resurgence (Corntassel and Witmer 2008, 147). Said differently, our decolonial feminist praxis within a whitestream institution engages in anticolonial and decolonial praxis (Patel, 2016) to unsettle coloniality and create physical and curricular space to recognize and nurture Indigenous brilliance. Our desire-based approach (Tuck, 2009) to Indigenous teacher education recognizes that complexities, contradictions, and hope are core features of decolonial feminist praxis within whitestream institutions. We are engaged in important Indigenous futurity work, recognizing that “our institutions will never change if we do not dream big and take critical steps toward those dreams” (Lipe, 2018, 165).

In this article, we share examples of how we engage this precious and liberatory work. We detail how we approach this work, acknowledge our successes and limitations, and conclude with our vision of Indigenous futurities in teacher education. Our Indigenous communities have longstanding traditions of inviting

guests with “good hearts” to listen and learn from us. Following this tradition, we share information here that we believe will be bene cial to a broad audience. We invite you to sit with us, learn with us, and take what we share to further your own work to repurpose universities to advance Indigenous desires.

As we describe in this article, this is ongoing and imperfect work: we smuggle in Indigenous values, practices, and thought wherever we can. We prioritize relationality in our work with each other and with students. We work to strengthen the sense of kinship students feel with each other and within their own communities. We ask students to interview youth and Elders in their communities, to teach each other about their nations, lands, languages, and lifeways. In this way, we are af rming an Indigenous feminist practice of honoring “our extended kin networks . . . largely managed by women through an ethics of inter-relationality and responsibility” (Anderson 2019, 123). We remind students that the state’s public education system is so new, so young compared to their communities’ understanding and practices of education. And most importantly, we model this by fostering an intergenerational community and valuing Elder knowledge. We created a new position in our College, Distinguished Elder Educator, now held by Tu xámshish Dr. Virginia Beavert of the Yakama Nation (hereafter Tu xámshish), who as we share below, guides and supports our work.

Context of Our Program

Students in our program are completing a rigorous master’s degree and teacher licensure program of study. The coursework and requirements are set by whitestream educators who usually do not have a meaningful relationship with any Indigenous communities. In the past, Indigenous students were required to attend seminars and workshops outside of the whitestream curriculum, but it was all extracurricular, and none of that work was credit-bearing or even visible on a transcript. One meaningful change, then, was to claim space in the curriculum by having the year-round seminar count for credits, with the option to replace one class in the whitestream curriculum. Notably, the seminar is also the only opportunity for most students to have an Indigenous instructor in their graduate career. The seminar, then, is the space that anchors much of what we discuss in this manuscript. One of the ways we use the seminar space to nurture Indigenous brilliance is to help students see how they already have vast knowledge of effective educational systems that they have witnessed and experienced in their families and communities. For example, we discuss the role of Elders as our most revered culture keepers and teachers within our communities. We then note how within Western education systems it is most common to have classroom spaces that exclude Elders. Such a practice is limiting and epistemically violent. How can students become highly quali ed teachers if they themselves have no opportunity to engage with Elders? It is becoming more common for universities

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to create positions like Elder in Residence. At our academic institution we are fortunate to have two such positions. We created one position, Distinguished Elder Educator, and we are grateful Tu xámshish chooses to collaborate with us through her serving in this role. Tu xámshish attends seminars, speaks at university events, and in non-COVID times, regularly attends meals and gatherings at the longhouse on campus. She lives on campus during the academic year, and students often take her food and gifts, a beautiful practice of relationality from our home communities. Tu xámshish is patient with us as collaborators, and with our students. She reminds them of the importance of working with Elders in their home communities and families—that she can share what she knows, but she is only one person and they should be seeking out and working with other Elders. Tu xámshish regularly reminds us of the importance of kinship as a foundational part of any Indigenous education effort. Our work directly supports “amplifying and renewing Indigenous family leadership and engagement in systems of education that aim to support Indigenous communities’ resurgence” (Bang, Montaño Nolan, and McDaid-Morgan 2019, 789).

A Note on Methodology

What follows are lessons we have learned from our work engaging resurgent education within our institution. We came to these insights by sharing and listening to one another. Just as Muscogee poet Joy Harjo (1994, paragraph 1) has written that “The world begins at a kitchen table,” so too did our paper, a methodology embodied by other feminists (Lyiscott et al. 2021). Below, we highlight key ndings from our talks together, which include our emphasis on relationality, the importance of land, and the advocacy work required to create space for resurgent education within whitestream institutions.

Resurgent Education as Decolonial Feminist Praxis

Relationality is power

Relationality lies at the heart of the Sapsik’wałá Program and our work with future Indigenous educators. Our program speci cally fosters relationality through three types of Indigenous community— Consortium, Cohort, and Communities of Practice. Our program operates in consortium with the nine federally recognized tribal nations in Oregon, a process that fosters meaningful relationships and shares power with Native nations in the state. Our students form a cohort of Indigenous educators within the broader cohort of students within the master’s program, to reduce their isolation and foster a sense of community within one another. Moreover, our students learn within an Indigenous community of practice, an Indigenous education seminar where students process with one another their unique experiences and aspirations of becoming Indigenous educators of Indigenous youth.

Our emphasis on consortium, cohort, and communities of practice helps contextualize how relationality is embedded within our program, a value and praxis that complements our efforts to nurture a higher educational environment rooted in respect, relevance, reciprocity, and responsibility (Kirkness and Barnhardt, 1991). In this section, we focus primarily on relationships fostered within our Indigenous education seminar. Supporting students to recognize that relationality is a form of power and to strengthen and sustain relationships among students and their relationships to their families, communities, and homelands, is core to our understanding and practice of resurgent education.

Relationality with each other

Public schools and universities typically reproduce and reward a sense of individualism and competition among students (Grande 2015), colonial and capitalist logics rooted in scarcity that undermine relationality. Universities in particular can also be cold, competitive spaces that neglect students’ cultural knowledges and community connections (Fong et al. 2019). Our program structure is grounded in a decolonial feminist praxis that recognizes and nurtures relationality, a counter to colonial and capitalist logics typically privileged within universities. It is a space where we engage in the Indigenous feminist practice of visiting, “a relating that is imbued with accountability, vulnerability, and mutuality” (Tuck et al. 2022, 2).

Our cohort within a cohort model is a structural commitment to offering Sapsik’wałá students a space where they can remain true to their Indigenous values, cultures, and familial beliefs. Guided by Tu xámshish, who has advised us to focus on kinship within the Indigenous education seminar, we work to foster and strengthen the sense of relationality students feel with each other in their cohorts, with the Indigenous faculty and Indigenous graduate students who support them, and with the broader network of alumni they will be part of upon graduation, a community that now includes over 100 other Indigenous educators. We intentionally nurture a sense of extended family among students and faculty during their time on campus and away from home, a practice that re ects higher education research ndings that “replicating the extended family structure within the college culture enhances the student’s sense of belonging and leads to higher retention rates” (HeavyRunner and DeCelles 2002, 29). For us, our focus on kinship also embodies a decolonial feminist praxis of refusing heteronormative and biological understandings of family, and instead, recognizes family as “big, beautiful, diverse, extended multiracial families of relatives and friends that care very deeply for each other” and that includes “a web of connections to each other, to the plant nations, the animal nations, the rivers and lakes, the cosmos, and our neighboring Indigenous nations” (Simpson 2017, 8– 9). Our intergenerational learning community provides a nourishing space focused on reciprocity, as we all learn from one another and the people and places that are important to us. We believe the importance placed on relationships contributes

signi cantly to the success of the program and the Native graduates who return to tribal communities to be educators.

As a Sapsik’wałá alumni returned to the program as a graduate employee, I (Roshelle) can also testify that the connections developed through the program have been vital to my own success in academia and those relationships have been long-lasting. Existing in an Indigenous body on campus can be a culture shock and feel isolating, however, our program was where I could fully and authentically be myself. I could talk about my struggles, spirituality, and feelings of imposter syndrome, and I knew my professors and fellow cohort members would be able to resonate with and support me. Indigenous erasure is a structural feature of many universities (Shotton, Lowe, and Waterman 2013), but our presence as a cohort de ed that erasure and served as a source of strength and power. When we walked across campus or into one of our classes as a group, we felt powerful, a rare feeling on a predominately white campus. We could take up the sidewalk space instead of being forced aside or even run into on some occasions. When someone would say something problematic in class, we did not feel like a lone voice speaking up. Feelings of community and care from my cohort members and faculty carried into my career as an educator as well. I often reached out to my cohort members when I needed support, whether it was school-related or not. We stayed in touch, celebrating life milestones, promotions in our careers, and got to be aunties and uncles to each other’s children.

As a program, we feel a sense of responsibility to nurture that sense of relationality among our alumni, recognizing that our responsibilities do not end when students graduate. Beyond arranging for paid mentors for our students during their rst two years of teaching, we created an Alumni Network and hosted an Alumni Summit in which our alumni could come together, reconnect, network, and share ideas. The keynote speaker at our rst summit was Tu xámshish who encouraged us all to keep going and emphasized the importance of continuing our work in education with a good and strong heart. Many of our attendees commented how supportive it felt to be in relation with fellow Indigenous educators and were grateful to have the time to come together, reconnect, and spend time in conversation. Our alumni encouraged us to keep up the momentum of collective learning, and our program has continued this tradition by making the summit an annual event.

Relationality with our Elders

“Imínk nam pinatkinanita ttáwaxt wiya’ utpa.” This quote by Tu xámshish hangs on the wall adjacent to our beautiful blanket in the Sapsik’wałá student conference room our program worked so hard for and means, “Look to your roots for guidance.” Elders are our traditional knowledge and culture bearers, and it is an honor and blessing to learn from and look to Tu xámshish for guidance (Archibald 2008). She comes to all of our seminars, listens thoughtfully to our students, and advises students and staff with stories, re ections, and instructions

from her own experiences and traditional knowledge. She models humility and wisdom, often expressing, “I don’t know everything, but I am happy to share what I do know.” Tu xámshish urges all of us to engage our Elders and encourages students and teachers to work with Elders from their Tribes and families. One of the student’s seminar homework assignments is to connect with a cherished Elder in their life and have a conversation with them. Students then share what they learned from Elders in their communities, including lessons on taking care of our health, encouragement to do well in school, and reminders to walk with respect, humility, bravery, and love.

For us, centering Elders and Elder knowledge is an important counter to the Eurocentric and epistemically violent practice of excluding Elders in education and privileging academic knowledge. Our decolonial feminist praxis draws on the strengths of Elder knowledge, through structural changes, such as the Distinguished Elder Educator position we created, as well as privileging Elder speakers and writers, such as Tu xámshish (Beavert, Jacob, and Jansen 2021; Beavert 2017) and Kussamwhy (Wilkins 2008), among others. Fostering an Elder-guided, intergenerational learning community has been core to our decolonial feminist praxis as Elders often hold important knowledge that can compel “ ightpath[s] out of settler colonialism” (Simpson 2017, 17).

Relationality with youth

“Maybe if we call attention to the young generation they might also help make things better” (Beavert 2017, 160). Our emphasis on fostering an intergenerational learning community not only involves valuing Elders, but perhaps most importantly for future Indigenous teachers, involves fostering relationships with youth. Tu xámshish shares that we have much knowledge to gain from the youth in our communities, and af rms the importance of developing and maintaining relationships with our young people. We actively resist a “top-down view” or “savior complex” around what it means to be in relationship with our youth (Bird-Naytowhow 2017, 3). In contrast to pedagogies rooted in adult supremacy, our decolonial feminist praxis foregrounds reciprocity when developing relationships with young people, understanding they teach us just as much as we teach them (Wilson 2008). For this reason, another seminar homework assignment is to have our Sapsik’wałá students reach out to and connect with a treasured young person in their life. Some insights gleaned from the youth in their lives included stories of humor, pride, strength, and lessons of the importance of being a role model and making wise choices to stay on the right path. Our emphasis on recognizing the brilliance of children aligns with Indigenous understandings of kinship that cherish children and recognize their rights, responsibilities, and capacities to make important contributions to the community as a whole (Simpson 2017).

Relationships with families

“Family is seen as of utmost importance for many Indigenous people. Family is what holds us in relationship as individuals and bridges us as individuals into our communities and nations” (Wilson 2008, 86). Through seminar, we encourage students to be kinship-centered and put family rst, a value Indigenous faculty model to ensure the future Indigenous educators experience the importance of developing strong relationships with not only their students but also the student’s families and communities. Aligned with Tu xámshish’s guidance to focus on kinship, our resurgent educational approach also centers knowledge passed down from generation to generation. Through our seminar assignments, we encourage students to share the traditional and cultural knowledge embedded in their family histories, stories, and communities. This invitation counters epistemic supremacy by showing students we value their familial and community knowledge and that we can all learn from their valuable teachings. Our students often share stories of their loved ones, and we enjoy seeing pictures of students’ families and precious teachers who share these knowledges, including their parents, aunts, uncles, grandparents, and children. In valuing students’ families, we af rm who our students are and where they come from, sending the message that our students’ cultural ways of knowing and being are important forms of knowledge. By af rming that families are a key context in which Indigenous education and everyday resurgence occur (Bang et al. 2019; San Pedro 2020), we encourage students to recognize that the “teachers” in their families and communities are important knowledge keepers, and the students themselves are important in this circle of relations because they are learners and sharers of this important knowledge.

Our Sapsik’wałá seminars are also a place where families are welcome. When we were able to meet in person, students were welcome to bring their children. We would have meals and our students and staff could bring their loved ones, and these times were full of laughter, connection, and joy. When we moved to remote learning due to COVID-19, we would still see each other’s families, human and more than human, in the background and give them a smile and wave. Seminars are a space where we could be together with fellow Native-kin which was especially important while we were all remote. Some of our students and staff experienced signi cant losses during that time and were not able to travel home to gather for important ceremonies. We were able to support one another, listen, and care for one another as we processed our grief and isolation. These are all small, yet important, ways of af rming Indigenous identity and making space for the power of Indigenous culture and knowledge in Western education settings. We are taking back education through resurgence and placing our people and knowledges at the center.

Our emphasis on relationality is core to our decolonial feminist praxis of resurgent education. By nurturing the vast and beautiful networks that connect students to each other, the youth and Elders in their communities, and their

families, we are reaf rming relationality as a key source of Indigenous power. Further, by foregrounding relationality in our everyday work with Indigenous educators, we are nurturing futurities in education that value relationality. Our emphasis on relationality also includes students’ relationships to Land, and the vast network of life those lands sustain.

Land is a Nurturing Teacher Who Constantly Extends Power to Us

As we shared in the previous section, family stories are one way to share landbased knowledge. Students share how they learn about their homelands, traditional stories, and build meaningful relationships with sacred foods through listening to, observing, and remembering the teachings their grandparents, aunties, uncles, parents, siblings, and friends generously share with them. This is, of course, how education has always taken place in our Indigenous communities. It is a joy to witness students sharing the deep base of knowledge they bring with them. Such knowledges are not always honored, af rmed, or even noticed in Western education settings. This is a Eurocentric and epistemically violent trend in whitestream education that we enjoy disrupting in our program (Battiste 2000; 2013; Kuokkanen 2007). Our program counters this violence through the decolonial feminist commitment that “story is Indigenous theory” (Million 2014, 35) and the belief that the Indigenous theories that inform our students’ lives are vital to their future practice as Indigenous educators. Building upon the strengths of family and community teachings that students bring with them, we also take up resurgent education by engaging Indigenous land education (Tuck, McKenzie and McCoy 2014). COVID has provided us with the opportunity to engage students in this work in diverse ways. For example, we engage traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) as homework and sharing assignments. One Diné/Navajo student completed her TEK homework assignment by creating a beautiful set of slides that taught the spiritual, relational, technical, artistic, scienti c, and cultural signi cance of the processes involved in gathering, preparing, and completing a rug weaving. The student learned this process from her grandmother. In the sharing of her assignment, it was clear that the photos of her grandmother’s sheep farm brought the student an overwhelming sense of love, strength, and gratitude. Seeing her beloved Indigenous homeland and having the opportunity to share it with her classmates and program faculty and staff was a gift to honor and af rm the deep wisdom and knowledge her grandmother had shared with her, as well as a gift to all of us who witnessed the homework presentation. We were struck by the vast amount of knowledge it takes to properly sheer and prepare sheep wool, identify, gather, and process the plants used to dye wool, and to expertly weave the wool once all the materials are prepared. In this one assignment, we were gifted with ideas of how to use TEK in classroom lessons for science, math, English, ethnic studies, social studies, and we had concrete ways of how

Indigenous language could be integrated throughout: naming the plants, seasons/ months when different activities take place, relationship/kinship terms, verbs for the different actions involved, and even simple things like numbers (of sheep, of plants, of steps of the weaving process), as well as colors. For some of us, the southwestern desert does not automatically seem to be a place with a vast array of plant dyes available. The student’s presentation disrupted this assumption, and it taught us about the wealth of resources in her homeland and the good care her people have always taken to be in good relation with their more than human relatives. It invited us to notice the tremendous resources we have all around us, which we can only engage if we are aware, humble, and willing to be in good relation with our environment.

Through the TEK homework assignments, students are provided with an opportunity to learn about and share their cultures, and important resources to their people. The seminar is structured so that each student shares in every class gathering. Kinship is a main theme for our seminar that our Elder mentor, Tu xámshish Dr. Beavert, has encouraged us to use. By inviting the students to think and share about important TEK resources for their Indigenous communities, we are reminding them of their more than human kinship network. As Tu xámshish reminds us, when we are mindful of all the precious relatives surrounding us in our environment, we can avoid struggling with feelings of loneliness or alienation. She reminds us: You are never alone; your kin is always around you.

In the seminar, we require students to read Tu xámshish’s book, The Gift of Knowledge. This beautiful book is based on Dr. Beavert’s dissertation. She came back to school in her 80s to earn a PhD in Linguistics at the University of Oregon. In doing so, she stepped into leadership roles at the Northwest Indian Language Institute and Department of Linguistics, and she created the Ichishkíin Language Program at the university, which is the leading institution in the world for training students to speak, read, and write Ichishkíin, an endangered Indigenous language. A full two years of the language is offered and Tu xámshish’s students are leading in elds of linguistics, history, and education. We share this information to af rm that Elder-in-Residence positions, which are becoming more common at universities, are critical because of the high standards and rigor to which Elders hold themselves and us. We like to remind our students, who sometimes re ect on the challenges and dif culties of graduate school that yes, it is tough. And Tu xámshish did that, and more, in her 80s and 90s. It is a joy to discuss Tu xámshish’s book with the students and having Tu xámshish participate and witness this. In one section of the book, Tu xámshish discusses the traditional practice of seeking one’s power (similar to what other Tribes call a vision quest). At one point in the seminar, students had the courage to share they had not gone through that traditional practice, and they wondered if somehow their identities were lacking in some way. Tu xámshish has a beautiful, nurturing, and af rming way of responding. She shared with us: Power is in the

world and in you. She gave us important homework: Go outside and be quiet. There is power around you!

As we mentioned, this important teaching happened in the context of students discussing seminar reading about seeking one’s power. Students re ected that they hadn’t done this, that this component of cultural teachings was not present in their upbringing, and there seemed to be a sense of loss or perhaps a questioning of whether one’s identity was somehow weaker because of decisions that parents/guardians made to not engage that particular traditional practice. And Tu xámshish shared that one component of that teaching is always available to all of us—if we simply go out onto the land (“go outside”) and be open to the teachings (“be quiet; pay attention”). In this generative way, Tu xámshish reminded us to not be limited to focusing on what we don’t have, rather, to have the courage and bravery to acknowledge what we do have available to us. In this case, she challenged us to connect to the power of place af rming the longstanding Indigenous pedagogical principal that land is an important teacher (Styres, 2011).

Creating an intergenerational learning community that values Elders, land-based knowledge, and Indigenous languages is one of the ways we disrupt whitestream education at our university. We recognize that schools have been “spaces of [w]hiteness, [w]hite rage, and [w]hite supremacy, all of which function to terrorize students of color” (Love 13). For Indigenous students in particular, education has been used as a weapon of settler colonialism to eliminate Indigenous peoples as Indigenous peoples, re ecting the “monocultural aspirations” of the nation-state (Simpson 2014, 22), and the settler project of dispossessing Indigenous homelands and undermining Indigenous nation building. One way to resist this ongoing oppression is to provide space for Indigenous students to reclaim the relationships, knowledges, and practices that settler society has intentionally tried to sever. We do this in multiple ways. For example, students share phrases and sentences in their Indigenous languages, and we all practice listening, learning, reading, and speaking each other’s Indigenous languages. Due to the diversity of our cohorts, we typically have 5 Indigenous languages represented, nearly all of which are endangered due to the assimilationist and violent history of Western education in Indigenous communities. We also share TEK resources/relations of the day with students re ecting on how they are relating to their own Indigenous homelands—e.g., water, snow and acknowledging that our fresh drinking water is connected to the snowpack in the mountains in our region; the health and well-being of that land is connected to the health and well-being of all peoples and more than human relations downstream. Finally, we feature a Kinship term of the day that connects students with their languages and provides opportunities for sharing about relatives who are important teachers to them. Often these assignments and activities will prompt students to call or visit relatives and friends they have “not had time to connect with” but they’ve prioritized these connections due to the homework in our seminar. What a joy

it is to hear about a loving phone call with a parent, grandparent, or auntie. Any use of Indigenous language is a step toward healing the wounds Western education has in icted in our communities. As Tu xámshish states, “Language is important for everyone. That is part of your spirit of life” (Beavert 2017, 159). One of the main inspirations for our seminar is the point that our strength and healing always comes from our Indigenous lands, communities, and cultures. Each moment that our students (and we) can engage and live this is a step forward in resurgent education as decolonial feminist praxis.

Creating Space for Resurgence Requires Challenging Colonial Relations of Power

Our nal takeaway we share in this manuscript is that the spaces forged for resurgent education within universities must continually be fought for and defended. Creating space for resurgent education requires challenging colonial relations of power. Colonialism is constantly “shape-shifting” in its methods to eliminate Indigenous peoples (Corntassel 2012). Indigenous erasure has a gravitational pull. Even as universities express support for Indigenous programs, institutional policies and practices that underfund programs, overwork program faculty, or disregard the knowledges, experiences, and political commitments of Indigenous faculty subtly work to undermine these programs. We know this pattern intimately.

Every few years, the federal government opens a new grant competition to support Indigenous teacher education, and every few years, we request (then remind, then demand) support from our college, Provost, and President’s of ce to make our grant application competitive, and more importantly, our program stronger and more sustainable. Strongly worded emails, public shaming, letters of support from our constituents, even threats to resign are all strategies we have used to secure basic support for our program. We have been successful in securing support from the university, in part, because our program operates in consortium with the nine federally recognized tribal nations of Oregon, and we believe university administrators hope to remain on good terms with these nations. While grateful for the support we have received, we also wish that we didn’t have to spend so much time and energy reminding the institution of its responsibilities to support Indigenous students and Indigenous education.

Predominantly white institutions are not hospitable spaces for us as Indigenous feminists, or for our knowledge systems (Kuokkanen 2003, 2007); whitestream institutions are not good hosts. Hospitality, as Kuokkanen (2003) writes, is a “fundamental openness to the other” (267) and requires relational accountability, responsibility, and reciprocity. Universities re ect society’s broader structures of imperialism, colonialism, and Indigenous erasure (Patel 2021) and “often have systems and practices that maintain and reproduce this situation and the privileges infused within it” (Smith and Smith 2019, 1093–1094). To create space

for resurgent education within the university, we have had to engage in what Ahmed (2021) calls complaint as feminist pedagogy (7), the “counterinstitutional work” of complaint activism. We have had to name and complain the speci c ways institutional policies and practices reproduce Indigenous erasure and work against the aims of our program. We have had to make visible the institutional mechanics (25) that undermine Indigenous education and go to “work on the institution” (282).

Just as we must be critical, strategic, and self-re exive of our engagements with the state, we must also have a critical relationship with our own institutions. “Trying to address an institutional problem means inhabiting the institution all the more” (Ahmed 2021, 275–276). Even as we recognize the potential of the academy “to facilitate the positive transformation of Indigenous life and aspirations,” we must also recognize that “it can also be a major in uence in the continued colonization and oppression of Indigenous Peoples, their knowledge, language, and culture” (Smith and Smith 2019, 1077). Presuming our complicity, rather than “our own criticality” (Ahmed 2012, 5), by understanding the potential for university work to reproduce existing relations of domination is necessary so that we remain re exive about our own complicity, committed to subverting this colonial legacy, and answerable (Patel 2016) to our students and communities in the process.

Universities are colonial, but they are also sites that re ect Indigenous feminist praxis and survivance. The types of resurgent educational spaces we have described—whether a physical space, like the student room where students can smudge or gather, or curricular spaces, such as time with a Distinguished Elder Educator or the four-credit seminar that provides students time and space to re ect on their responsibilities as Indigenous educators—have not been granted to us benevolently by the institution, but were created and advocated for by us as Indigenous faculty. These spaces re ect the various ways we have tried to “hotwire” the institution to support Indigenous desires and re ect the reality that “[w]ithin the colonizing university also exists a decolonizing education” (la paperson 2017, xiii). Given that the settler colonial drive to erase and replace Indigeneity is a structuring practice of the university (la paperson 2017; Tuck and Gaztambide-Fernández 2013), these spaces must be protected and defended.

Indigenous education within the context of colonial institutions requires such advocacy given that, as Mvskoke scholar Tsianina Lomwaima (2000) has written, “the history of American Indian education can be described in three simple words: battle for power” (2). That battle for power permeates the legacy of our own program. As Rosiek and Snyder (2020) have documented, our program was initially founded in 2002, funded by a professional development grant from the Of ce of Indian Education. However, three years after its inception, Native students in the Sapsik’wałá Program became frustrated with the racism they experienced from students and faculty, and the program’s inability to prepare

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them to be Indigenous educators. Students worked through the prescribed departmental and college protocols and channels to address their concerns, including con ict resolution with an external mediator who agreed the College had a responsibility to make program changes; however, the College buried the report and ignored their concerns. In response, the students organized a protest where they publicly shamed the very institution that recruited them, a protest that was joined by students from across campus, community members, and local educators and activists who had long felt ignored and betrayed by the College. The public protests eventually led to the removal of the department head and Dean, substantial structural changes to curriculum within the master’s program, four new degree programs, and the hiring of an Indigenous faculty member to lead the program. These complaints came at great personal cost to some of the students who would never personally reap the bene t of the resources they helped secure for future students. But the future-oriented praxis of these students was not just a “no” to the College. As Ahmed (2021) observes, “to make a complaint is often to ght for something” (26). Sapsik’wałá students were not only contesting their own oppression; they were complaining for of the type of education that they and future Sapsik’wałá students deserved. Our own work is indebted to this legacy of courageous and creative student organizing, and we take seriously our responsibilities to continue this work. We worked, as Ahmed described, to “become a feminist ear”: “Becoming a feminist ear meant not only hearing the complaints; it meant sharing the work. It meant becoming part of their collective. Their collective became ours. I think of that ours as the promise of feminism, ours not as a possession but as an invitation, an opening, a combining of forces” (6 –7). Being a feminist ear is a responsibility. We see ourselves in relation to a broader “complaint collective” (Ahmed 2021) committed to Indigenous presence within an institution predicated on Indigenous erasure. Supporting resurgent education within the colonial context of the university requires active, critical, and conscious work to contest Indigenous erasure and forge what Lomawaima and McCarty (2014) have termed “zones of sovereignty.” Zones of sovereignty describe the spaces actively carved out by Indigenous peoples to protect and promote “expressions of Indigeneity” and that nurture “practices of creative self-determination toward goals of equity, justice, tolerance, and mutual well-being” (65– 66). Zones of sovereignty must also be understood in relation to what Lomawaima and McCarty (2006; 2014) have termed the “safety zone,” a framework of ideologies and institutional practices that constrain and manage “acceptable” or “safe” Indigenous cultural difference. We have had to defend our programmatic and curricular spaces from elimination, and we have witnessed the ways our perspectives as Indigenous feminist faculty are heard only when they do not threaten the overall ideology of the institution or the status quo, all examples of the logics of elimination and containment that characterize the safety zone (Lomawaima and McCarty 2014). For us, decolonial feminist praxis requires subverting the boundaries of

the safety zone and continuing to forge “places where it is safe to be Indigenous on Indigenous terms” (Lomawaima and McCarty 2014, 64).

Our advocacy for the Distinguished Elder Educator position now held by Tu xámshish is a prime example of this work. Seeing the need for our students to have more sustained engagement with Elders and recognizing the bene t that Elder guidance could have on our department and college, we proposed a Distinguished Elder Educator position for our College. Our Dean and the Assistant Dean of Equity and Inclusion for our College approved, but as an informal title and in name only. Recognizing that Elder Educators, like other faculty, deserve to be compensated, Leilani utilized her startup funds to offer a modest salary for Tu xámshish. Over time, we negotiated and expanded this position by writing a formal job description and requesting a direct appointment for Dr. Beavert, whose position is now written into the federal and state grants that are crucial funding for our Indigenous teacher education program. As the position is reliant on grant funding, it remains precarious, rather than a formalized institutional commitment; but we continue our advocacy, hoping to create a more permanent and sustainable role for Elders in our College.

We share this story to illustrate one of the many crafty and creative negotiations that decolonial feminist educators must employ in their own work. In university contexts that want us to “ ll a gap . . . merely by being present, embodying cultural difference without signi cant change to the status quo” (Bunda, Zipin, and Brennan 2012, 941– 942), we must continually create space for our priorities and struggles to be heard on our terms. We, alongside the Indigenous graduate students we mentor, experience isolation, a lack of institutional support, and racism (Brayboy, Fann, Castagno, and Solyom 2012). We openly share our experiences as Indigenous faculty with our Indigenous teacher candidates because we recognize that they may also need to “practice a subversive pedagogy” and “work in opposition to the system that employs them” (LadsonBilings 2009, 140). They, too, may need to engage in “creative insubordination” to racist and colonial education practices and “develop the political knowledge and their propensity to take risks on behalf of students” (Gutiérrez 2016, 53). We model this for them, while also learning from them whether our political work is experienced as supportive.

Our insight that Indigenous peoples must actively contest our own erasure within colonial institutions and create space for our own experiences, struggles, priorities, and aspirations is not new. Indeed, a wealth of literature on Indigenous student and faculty experiences within higher education supports our assertion (Brayboy et al.. 2012, Brayboy and Maughan 2008, Frawly, Larkin, and Smith 2017, Kirkness and Barnhardt 1991, Kulago 2019, Kuokkanen 2007, Minthorn and Shotton 2018, Shotton, Lowe, and Waterman 2013, Smith and Smith 2019; Waterman, Lowe, and Shotton, 2018; Tachine 2022). We situate our work within this legacy and reiterate our takeaway that spaces for resurgent education must be continually created, protected, and defended because we have witnessed

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growing support for Indigenous initiatives within the university. This support, however, often reproduces colonial patterns of erasure and extraction: support for cultural programming, but not our political commitments; support for land acknowledgments or Indigenous Peoples’ Day proclamations, but not tuition restitution for Indigenous students, tenure-lines for Indigenous faculty, or the creation of Indigenous-centered spaces on campus. Moreover, rather than a “ ‘whole of institution’ approach to improve Indigenous outcomes” (Rigney 2017, 45), universities often place the responsibility for Indigenous educational initiatives on the shoulders of Indigenous faculty who, like us, are often few in number. To be clear, we view the “Indigenous work” we do in the academy “as an honorable responsibility, rather than a burden’ ” (Smith and Smith 2019, 1076). We engage in the practical work of being “disloyal to colonialism” and asserting our presence and “decolonial desires” (la paperson 2017) because we see our work in relation to a longstanding Native feminist practice of “bearing an Indigenous future into existence out of a genocidal present” (Morrill 2017, 15). As Simpson (2014) has written: “If the academy is concerned about not only protecting and maintaining Indigenous intelligence, but revitalizing it on Indigenous terms as a form of restitution for its historic and contemporary role as a colonizing force (of which I see no evidence), then the academy must make a conscious decision to become a decolonizing force in the intellectual lives of Indigenous peoples by joining us in dismantling settler colonialism and actively protecting the source of our knowledge—Indigenous land” (22). We see the project of dismantling settler colonialism and protecting Indigenous land as multifaceted. For us, a major strand of this project is educational. Working within a teacher education program to prepare future Indigenous educators that can support Indigenous students in understanding the brilliance of their own lands, nations, and knowledge systems is one way we approach this long-term outcome. We do this Indigenous work within the university because we view higher education, and more speci cally the preparation of Indigenous educators that will serve Indigenous youth and communities, as a key to nation building (Brayboy et al. 2012; Brayboy et al. 2014). We believe, too, that holding others, including our institutions, accountable for supporting Indigenous students is a form of respect and an expression of love.

Our hope in highlighting the landscape of erasure we are up against, as well as the active and sustained labor required to create and protect spaces for resurgent education, is to enlist all feminists working within institutions built on Indigenous homelands to share this honorable responsibility. “Indigenous work is inherently political and is overtly pro-Indigenous” (Smith and Smith 2019, 1085). Indigenous work and resurgent education should be led by Indigenous peoples, but this work within university contexts also requires co-conspirators and accomplices (Rohrer 2018) who are willing to create and protect space for Indigenous education within the academy; it requires that feminists see themselves as decolonial “complaint activists” and be “willing to cause damage”

(Ahmed 2021, 286) to the institutional logics and processes that undermine Indigenous peoples. As Arvin, Tuck, and Morill have offered, “Native feminist theories demonstrate that feminisms, when allied with other key causes, hold a unique potential to decolonize the ascendancy of whiteness in many global contexts” (2013, 11). For us, this is an invitation for all feminists to see themselves as responsible for decolonial praxis and supporting “Indigenous work” in the academy. It requires that all feminists raise problems about their institutions, even if speaking up means that they might now be viewed as a problem (Ahmed 2021). We are tired of our colleagues pulling us aside after meetings, telling us privately that they support us; we need feminist colleagues who voice those critiques publicly, despite their discomfort or the risks involved. We need feminist colleagues who take up the academic and activist commitments decolonial praxis requires because the changes we need within whitestream institutions are systemic and require each and every one of us to commit to this honorable work.

Remembering That Our Ways Are Wise

In this article, we outlined how we have taken up the project of resurgence within a university-based teacher education program. We highlighted the complexity and contradictions of engaging resurgent education within a university context, as well as some lessons and insights we learned along the way. We shared the importance of relationality and land to our conception of resurgent education as decolonial feminist praxis, and suggested that spaces for this work must be continually advocated for, as well as protected and defended. Recognizing the colonial context of university work, yet unwilling to cede these institutional spaces to colonial desires, we illustrated how we have tried to “hotwire” the university to support our decolonial desires and feminist praxis (la paperson 2017). We also invited other feminists who work within institutions built on Indigenous homelands to join us in this “honorable responsibility” (Smith and Smith 2019)

Our purpose in sharing our efforts is not to offer the model for decolonial feminist praxis, but to highlight one way this Indigenous work can be taken up in the academy. We have been “pushing ourselves to go beyond the why of settler colonialism, heteropatriarchy, and heteropaternalism to the how of decolonization... includ[ing] envisioning alternative preferred futures for the generations yet to be born” (Aikau, as qtd in Aikau et al. 2015, 87). We hope our readers take something meaningful away from our efforts to embody Indigenous survivance and decolonial feminist praxis in the academy. We have much to learn as we engage the complexity and messiness of this work within our institution, but we have been committed to “giving our best effort and trying our best to do right” by Native students within our university (Sabzalian, Malliett, and Helms 2020). We invite other feminists to nd the decolonial “complaint collectives” (Ahmed 2021) at their respective universities and join in the work.

Leilani Sabzalian, Michelle M. Jacob, and Roshelle Weiser-Nieto ·

We have intentionally centered Indigenous teacher education in our manuscript, in part because it is the work in which we are engaged every day. However, we hope readers will be inspired to see connections between our analyses and broader scholarship by Black and Brown feminist theorists, including the many and varied ways decolonial feminists engage in the “oppressing ↔ resisting process,” a process that is “continually resisted, and being resisted today” (Lugones 2010, 748) by decolonial feminists across the globe. As Indigenous feminists working in the United States/North America/ Turtle Island, we are deeply indebted to Black feminisms in particular as this important work helped make possible the newer eld of Indigenous feminisms within our academic institutions. Our own academic training and growth as feminist scholars was done with the guidance and nurturing of Black feminist scholarship. We continue to bring this work into conversation with our own praxes, building curricula around the phenomenal work of Bettina Love and the promise of abolitionist teaching (Love 2019). We also remain committed to enacting forms of resurgent education that do not replicate antiblackness (Simpson 2017). As scholars and teachers who engage intersectional feminisms, each time we think, teach, and write we are indebted to Kimberlé Crenshaw, Audre Lorde, Patricia Hill Collins, and bell hooks, to name several of our Black feminist in uences (Crenshaw 1989; Hill Collins 2000; hooks 1992; Lorde 1997). “Intersectionality” supports us in centering Indigenous women’s experiences in our analyses, “in order to contrast the multdimensionality” of their experiences of oppression “with the single-axis analysis that distorts these experiences” (Crenshaw 1989, 139). Hill Collins’ caution that “a matrix of domination contains few pure victims or oppressors” and that each of us “derives varying amounts of penalty and privilege from the multiple systems of oppression which frame everyone’s lives” (287) reminds us of our privileges and responsibilities as seasoned or emerging academics working within elite institutions. Lorde (1997) reminds us that anger, when “[f]ocused with precision...can become a powerful source of energy serving progress and change” (280). We feel a sense of kinship with Black feminist struggles for liberation, which often have deep resonance with our own. Our commitment to inviting Indigenous educators and students to turn toward the brilliance of our lives, for example, echoes hooks' (1992) commitment to “loving Blackness as political resistance.” We share these connections to highlight the ways in which Indigenous liberation is always tied to Black and Brown liberation in the settler colonial academy (and society), for as Audre Lorde (1997) has taught us, “[We are] not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from [our] own” (285). As Arvin (2019) echoes, “building alliances grounded in this kind of Indigenous feminist world building, in concert with other forms of intersectional feminism, holds the promise to bring forth not only new methods of combatting settler colonialism, imperialism, patriarchy, and white supremacy, but also new relationships that could make such ghts

more sustainable for all of us” (340). These connections, alliances, and loving struggles across our communities always enrich all of us. Our resurgence is collective.

Returning to the blanket that we described at the beginning of our article, we are reminded again of Indigenous brilliance. Though beautiful, that blanket is not merely aesthetic. As we described, it represents the politics of advocating for “zones of sovereignty” (Lomawaima and McCarty 2014) within the university; our erce advocacy for physical and curricular spaces in which we can see and value one another and the brilliance of our respective communities. The blanket also represents a beautiful vision for resurgent education. That blanket would not exist without an education that turned its maker toward the brilliance of their own lands, knowledges, and lifeways. And the blanket re ects not only the efforts of the individual weaver, but also a collective who stood with and by them. As Diné scholar and weaver Amanda Tachine (2021) reminds us, “a woven rug … takes more than the weaver to complete.” We recognize that much of what is important to our communities will not (and should not) be learned within universities, but we also recognize that we can and should play a role in turning Indigenous students toward the brilliance of their own communities, a sentiment expressed in the Alutiiq value piciipet uswituu’uq, our ways are wise (Drabek 2013). That fundamental premise—that our own lands, communities, and lifeways are wise—is a teaching and commitment that permeates our decolonial feminist praxis of resurgent education.

Leilani Sabzalian (Alutiiq) is an Assistant Professor of Indigenous Studies in Education and Co-Director of the Sapsik’wa ł á Program at the University of Oregon. Her research utilizes Native feminist theories to create more just and humanizing spaces for Indigenous students in public schools. Her research also prepares educators to challenge colonialism in curriculum, policy, and practice, and implement important Indigenous-led initiatives, including Tribal History/Shared History, a law that mandates curriculum on tribal history and sovereignty in all K–12 public schools in Oregon.

Michelle M. Jacob loves imagining and working toward a future in which kindness, erceness, and creativity saturate our lives and institutions in delicious and inviting ways. Dr. Jacob is an enrolled member of the Yakama Nation and is Professor of Indigenous Studies and Co-Director of the Sapsik’wa ł á Program at the University of Oregon where she is also Af liated Faculty in the Department of Indigenous, Race, and Ethnic Studies and in the Environmental Studies Program. Dr. Jacob delights in encouraging writers to reach for their dreams in her popular The Auntie Way Writing Retreats. Michelle has published eight books, numerous peer-reviewed journal articles, and has a strong grant writing track-record. Her research interests include Indigenous methodologies, health, education, and Native feminisms.

Roshelle Weiser-Nieto (she/her/hers) is from Klamath Falls, Oregon and is Modoc and Yahooskin Paiute of The Klamath Tribes and Chicana. She is a 4th year doctoral candidate at the University of Oregon in the Critical and Sociocultural Studies in Education program. Her research is focused on Indigenous pedagogy, praxis, curriculum, Ethnic Studies, and historical healing.

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Anti-Asian Violence and Abolition Feminism as Asian American Feminist Praxis

Bao Lo

Anti-Asian violence during the pandemic has been largely framed by mainstream media as an individual response to the pandemic and reduces anti-Asian violence to “hate” toward Asians, therefore justifying increased use of law enforcement and carceral punishment of individuals committing hate incidents. Additionally, some members of the Asian American community advocate for policy changes and collection of hate crimes statistics that rely more on carceral punishment. Other members of the Asian American community argue that hate crime statistics and legislation do not provide systemic changes necessary to address anti-Asian violence. Specically, Asian American abolition feminists are challenging mainstream narratives that isolate violence to conversations of racism alone and calling for the abolition of the carceral system that is historically and inherently responsible for violence against Black, Indigenous, people of color (BIPOC) communities and women. This paper addresses carceral solutions to anti-Asian violence and the opportunities of abolition feminism as an Asian American feminist praxis to challenge violence against Asian Americans. Focusing on survivor-led movements and responses to violence in its multiple forms, I discuss how abolition feminism may be necessary for redressing anti-Asian violence. I also consider how Asian American abolition feminism can achieve truly liberating, transformative solutions and healing to violence through an abolitionist and decolonial feminist praxis that centers and engages with Indigenous Paci c Islander communities.

Keywords: Abolition Feminist / Anti-Asian violence / Asian American Feminism

©2023 Feminist Formations, Vol. 35 No. 1 (Spring) pp. 221–239

“With heavy hearts, we call our community together to mourn the eight lives lost during the shooting on Tuesday night in Atlanta. As we pay honor to the individual victims and send our support to the survivors, it is undeniable that this was a targeted violence against Asian Women Massage Workers. As Asian massage and sex workers, we wish to hold a space of radical love and healing for our shared communities.”

Red Canary Song Vigil for 8 Lives Lost in Atlanta Shooting, 2021

After the Atlanta shooting in March 2021, I was reminded of the trauma I experienced from the Stockton shooting and massacre of Southeast Asian American children at an elementary school. In 1989, a 24-year-old white male opened re on an elementary school campus in Stockton, California during recess when hundreds of children were playing. The shooting resulted in thirty wounded and ve young children of Cambodian and Vietnamese descent killed (Escalante 2019). The assailant, Patrick Purdy, targeted children of Southeast Asian immigrants, who were resettled in this country after the Vietnam War and formed communities in cities such as Stockton (Arellano 2021). Growing up in Stockton, I remember this horrible atrocity as I was eleven years old then and attending an elementary school. At the time, I did not think that this was a racially motivated incident, although the reason the assailant shot and targeted Southeast Asian children was due to his fears that they were coming in hordes and taking over his city, re ecting the history of xenophobia against Asia and Asian Americans. After the school shooting, I remember feeling shame, confusion, and uneasiness about the targeting and killing of the Southeast Asian children, as I was around the same age and of the same background. At the same time that I was afraid that this could happen again and that I could be the next target, I also felt ashamed and could not understand why Americans did not like us and would want to kill us. As a child, I also remember students calling me “Gook” in elementary school, but I did not understand its reference to anti-Vietnamese and anti-Asian sentiment, particularly as many Southeast Asian refugees and their children resettled in signi cant numbers in the 1980s throughout the country after the Vietnam War.

Violence has always been part of our lives and underlies the systems that connect our experiences. As a child of Hmong refugees, I was born in a Thailand refugee camp and came to the United States at a young age. Due to their involvement during the Vietnam War as US allies, Hmong refugees were largely resettled in the United States and began arriving in the mid-1970s. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) recruited the Hmong people of Laos as war allies during the Vietnam War. They became targets of genocide for aiding the United States after the Vietnam War ended. American political interests and military

intervention in the Vietnam War were driven by the containment policy of the Cold War (Chan 1994, 23). After the communists took over Laos in 1975, the United States pulled out of Laos and evacuated about 12,000 –15,000 Hmong to refugee camps in Thailand. However, the majority ed on their own. Like other Southeast Asian refugees, Hmong people were brought to the United States by war and US imperialism and militarization (Espiritu 2014). After our community was settled here, the country continued to in ict violence against our communities through its declaration of war on our communities using state sanctioned violence such as criminalization and incarceration (Tang 2015; Lo 2018). Violence is broader than the interpersonal and needs to be critically understood and connected with other forms of oppression such as US imperialism and empire, war, militarization, racism, settler colonialism, and heteropatriarchy.

Anti-Asian violence during the pandemic has been largely framed by mainstream media as an individual response to the pandemic and reduces antiAsian violence to “hate” toward Asians, therefore justifying increased use of law enforcement and carceral punishment of individuals committing hate incidents. Additionally, some members of the Asian American community advocate for policy changes and collection of hate crimes statistics that rely more on carceral punishment. Other members of the Asian American community argue that hate crime statistics and legislation do not provide systemic changes necessary to address anti-Asian violence. Speci cally, Asian American abolition feminists are challenging mainstream narratives that isolate violence to conversations of racism alone and calling for the abolition of the carceral system that is historically and inherently responsible for violence against Black, Indigenous, people of color (BIPOC) communities and women. This paper addresses carceral solutions to anti-Asian violence and the opportunities of abolition feminism as an Asian American feminist praxis to challenge violence against Asian Americans. Focusing on survivor-led movements and responses to violence in its multiple forms, I discuss how Asian American feminism connects with abolition feminism to address questions such as: How can anti-Asian violence be understood through the perspectives of Asian American abolition feminism? How is abolition feminism necessary for redressing anti-Asian violence? Looking forward, I consider how Asian American abolition feminism can achieve truly liberating, transformative solutions and healing to violence through an abolitionist and decolonial feminist praxis that centers and engages with Indigenous Paci c Islander communities.

Carceral Solutions to Anti-Asian Violence

Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, anti-Asian violence has been on the rise and garnered national attention. Between March 19, 2020, and June 30, 2021, the Stop AAPI Hate Reporting Center has documented 9,081 hate

incidents. From April to June 2021, the number of hate incidents increased from 6,603 to 9,081. Additionally, 63.3 percent of all reports are hate incidents experienced by women (Yellow Horse et al. 2021). A recent report, “The Rising Tide of Violence and Discrimination Against Asian American and Paci c Islander Women and Girls,” shows that AAPI women and girls have experienced hate incidents 2.2 times more than AAPI men between March 2020 and March 2021. Additionally, nonbinary people have reported increased experiences of hate incidents. The numbers are suspected to be much higher as many of these incidents are not reported. The data also reveals that these hate incidents are based on race, ethnicity, and gender (Pillai, Yellow Horse, and Jeung 2021). On March 16, 2021, anti-Asian violence escalated to the shooting and death of six Asian women in Atlanta, Georgia. A 21-year-old white male shot and killed eight people, six of whom were Asian women (Aspegren, Miller, and Hayes 2021). With the national spotlight on anti-Asian violence, solutions have focused largely on government initiatives and hate crimes legislation that increase carceral punishment. The Biden administration re-established the White House Initiative on Asian Americans and Paci c Islanders, established originally under the Obama administration, to respond to anti-Asian violence. Additionally, President Biden signed Senate Bill 937, the COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act, into law on May 20, 2021 (Sprunt 2021). The bill designates the Department of Justice to expedite review of hate crimes, provide guidance for law enforcement agencies on processes for hate crime reporting, collecting disaggregated data, expanding educational campaigns, and raising awareness of hate crimes during COVID19. The bill also provides grants for state-run hate crimes reporting hotlines, implementation of the National Incident-Based Reporting, and law enforcement activities or crime reduction programs. The bill allows for a court to order an individual convicted of a hate crime offense to participate in educational classes or community service as a condition of supervised release (Congress 2021). Even though the bill acknowledges the rise of hate incidents against Asian Americans during the pandemic, some members of the community argue that the bill does little to address systemic racism that subjects Asian Americans to racial violence in the rst place (Yan 2021). Instead, the bill mainly increases the power and authority of law enforcement to police communities of color and creates division between Black and brown allies (Chalermkraivuth and Sharma 2021).

With scarce data reported by local and national government agencies, the Stop AAPI Hate Reporting Center has been at the forefront of collecting hate incidents to advocate for policy changes since March 2020 (Asher 2021). The Stop AAPI Hate Reporting Center is a collaborative effort of community organizations and university researchers to increase crime statistics collection. At the beginning of the pandemic, the center relied on news reports to identify hate incidents and found that there was a correlation between xenophobia and the rise of hate incidents against Asian communities globally and nationally (Takasaki 2020, 344). The center also highlights that the scapegoating of China, or

blaming Chinese people and China for the coronavirus, constituted 48 percent of the total hate incident reports (Yellow Horse et al. 2021, 1). With its success to track the trends of hate incidents against Asian Americans, the center has garnered both local and national attention. Takasaki (2020) explains that the success of the center is due to the collective effort of community organizations and the prioritizing of community needs.

The Asian American community has also formed community foot patrols to respond to anti-Asian violence during the pandemic. As attacks against Asian Americans surged throughout the Bay Area in early 2021, community volunteers started patrolling the streets of San Francisco and Oakland’s Chinatown to protect community members and businesses and help report hate incidents to the local police (Smith 2021; NBC Bay Area Staff 2021). During the lunar celebrations of February 2021, community volunteers have been helping the police patrol Oakland Chinatown, where community residents and businesses have been a prime target of anti-Asian violence during the pandemic. More volunteer groups have formed in other cities such as Seattle and New York to patrol Asian American communities (Chavez and Kopp 2021). In the summer of 2021, the Oakland Chinatown Chamber of Commerce called on Governor Newsom for more policing and law enforcement to address anti-Asian violence in the bay area (Colorado 2021). Community members and business owners are also advocating for more police and express that “they feel safer with more police” (Ho 2021). Advocates of policy changes and heavier reliance on carceral punishment believe that the system can be reformed to work for marginalized communities. However, hate crime statistics and legislation, policing, and crime control may not provide the systemic changes necessary to address anti-Asian violence. Kuo and Bui (2021) argue that hate crimes data collection and police data surveillance are carceral data that contribute to narratives that justify the incarceration of communities of color and enact further violence. Therefore, “law enforcement and police data are not the solution for safety nor for redressing anti-Asian violence” (Kuo and Bui 2021, 6).

The reduction of anti-Asian violence to “hate” toward Asians have also normalized the use of law enforcement and carceral punishment of individuals committing hate incidents, speci cally communities of color (Rodriguez 2021). Anti-Asian violence during the pandemic has been largely framed as “an individual response of hate and blame of a group for the pandemic.” For example, many news reports isolated hate incidents and sought the personal motivations behind one person’s actions (Takasaki 2020, 347). Additionally, mainstream news reporting is framing the stories of hate incidents against Asian Americans as “horri c attacks” by perpetrators who are people of color that hold anti-Asian sentiment. For instance, a Latino male stabbed an Asian American family in Texas because of his fear and association of the Chinese with COVID-19 (Ramirez 2020). In February of 2021, a Black male was arrested for aggravated assault of an elder of Asian descent in San Francisco (Lah and

Kravarik 2021). These mainstream news reports pit marginalized groups against each other and deepens the racial divide that upholds systemic racism and white supremacy (Kim 1999).

Carceral solutions to anti-Asian violence perpetuate the carceral state as “safe” and “protecting” and rely on policing and punishment to resolve violence. Carceral responses have also minimized gender-based violence and criminalized victims of the massage parlor in the Atlanta shooting of March 2021. Additionally, carceral strategies re ect the failures of the mainstream antiviolence feminist movement such as carceral feminism to account for the systemic ways women of color experience violence. Carceral feminism emerged from the anti-violence movement of the 1960s that was fundamentally radical (Kim 2018). However, as the movement gained mainstream recognition and support alongside the growth of neoliberalism of the 1970s, feminist reformist strategies reinforced punishment and crime control by the state (Bumiller 2008). Based on a white middle-class perspective, carceral feminism ignores the impact of state violence on poor, working-class women of color (Law 2018). With its pro-criminalization stance, carceral feminism reduces gender violence as interpersonal and relies on the carceral state to punish the individuals that commit the violence. For instance, carceral feminism engages with systems and depends on state resources that individualize violence and control and punish crime such as policing, prosecution, incarceration (Kim 2020; Terwiel 2020; Heiner and Tyson 2017). As scholar activist Angela Davis explains, carceral feminism led to “an overly simplistic carceral analysis that promoted policing and prisons as solutions” (Davis et al. 2022, 90). The reliance on the carceral state dismisses how state violence produces and reinforces gender violence (Davis et al. 2022, 122). The use of carceral strategies to resolve gender violence leads to more criminalization of marginalized groups.

Abolition feminism challenges carceral feminism and its pro-criminalization stance and lack of attention to working-class women of color. Rooted in community-based responses, community accountability, and transformative justice, abolition feminism promotes an anti-violence and anti-carceral politics that can transform society beyond reforming the current system (Davis et al. 2022). Abolition feminism aims to end all forms of violence including interpersonal and state violence and questions the safety and protection of the carceral state. Within this framework, Asian American abolition feminists are addressing anti-Asian violence that moves beyond carceral solutions.

Abolition Feminism as Asian American Feminist Praxis

Abolition feminism builds from research and organizing that center women of color in anti-violence and anti-prison movements. In a collective commitment to guaranteeing the survival of all people, INCITE! and Critical Resistance developed a statement in 2001 that brings together the abolition movement

and women of color feminist politics. The statement calls for community-based approaches to violence that do not depend on carceral systems and logics, opposition to legislation that promotes prison expansion, connecting interpersonal and state violence, the centering working-class women of color in the analysis, organizing practices, and leadership development of anti-violence and anti-prison movements, and the centering of state violence committed against women of color in organizing efforts (Critical Resistance and INCITE! 2003). Scholar activist Angela Davis argues that abolition and feminism are inseparable, as the core of the abolitionist movement of the 1990s that led to the formation of Critical Resistance was feminism. As Davis expresses, “abolition must be feminist and feminism must be abolitionist” (Davis et al. 2022, ix). Thus, abolition feminism bridges abolitionist and feminist politic and praxis and connects state and interpersonal violence and the resistance movements to end violence in these multiple forms. For instance, organizing work to end gender violence must also work to end the prison industrial complex (Davis et al. 2022, x). Davis explains that if the process of criminalization was used to punish gender violence, then this would only strengthen the structural racism that was responsible for incarcerating people of color (Center for Race and Gender 2020). Abolition feminism demands institutional change such as the dismantling of carceral systems, while creating community practices of safety, accountability, and healing that do not engage the carceral state.

Abolition feminism has been the underlying framework for organizing against gender and state violence. For instance, as a national radical feminist of color organization dedicated to ending interpersonal and state violence, INCITE! formed over twenty years ago to mobilize women of color against violence (INCITE!, n.d.). With its grassroots anti-violence organizing with women, trans and gender-nonconforming people of color, INCITE! has been at the forefront of abolitionist feminist praxis, which envisions and works toward a world free from all forms of violence including gender and state violence (INCITE! 2020). INCITE! has been especially important for challenging feminist politics that engage the carceral state to address gender violence (Davis et al. 2022, 78). Additionally, Critical Resistance has paved the path for contemporary anti-prison activism. After the 1998 conference that brought people together to strategize against a booming prison population of the 1980s and 1990s, Critical Resistance was established as a national organization in 2001 Through protests, campaigns, advocacy, and movement building, Critical Resistance has been instrumental in shifting the focus on prison reform to prison abolition. Critical Resistance popularized the concept of the “prison industrial complex” to denaturalize crime and punishment and broaden an understanding of incarceration as solutions to social, political, and economic problems. Focusing on women of color experiences with incarceration, the leadership of feminist activist and scholars of Critical Resistance has been essential in connecting state and interpersonal violence (Davis et al. 2022, 34–35).

As a theoretical frame, abolition feminism is important for centering the experiences of women of color in scholarship on criminalization, incarceration, and policing. As Black women have been made invisible in these academic conversations, Black feminists demanded action to center Black women’s experiences. Black feminist activist Beth E. Ritchie (2012) provides an intersectional analysis of gender and state violence against Black women to expose the multiple forms of abuse these women experience. Ritchie critiques the anti-violence movement that has gained visibility and credibility in the mainstream at the expense of making Black women susceptible to state violence produced from carceral institutions and logic that punish gender violence. Black feminist and antiviolence activist Andrea J. Ritchie (2017) also centers Black, Indigenous, and women of color experiences in broader discourses of police violence, criminalization, and incarceration. For instance, Ritchie shows how police responses to domestic and sexual violence against women of color has led to increased police violence against women of color. The reliance on law enforcement as solutions to domestic and sexual violence produces police violence against women of color that include verbal abuse, physical violence, refusal to respond, and even death (Ritchie 2017, 186).

Violence targeting Asian Americans during the pandemic has led to clashing Asian American responses such as hate crimes statistics and legislation that rely more on the carceral state versus feminist abolitionist strategies. Since the Atlanta shooting in March of 2021 targeting Asian women, Asian American abolition feminists have become more visible in challenging carceral solutions that are fundamentally and historically anti-black and anti-Indigenous and criminalizes and punishes labor such as sex work. As survivors of violence, Asian American abolition feminists are challenging their marginalization and invisibility of mainstream narratives and the Asian American community, as well as the failures and complicity of the state and criminal justice in perpetuating violence in their lives. As such, they are calling for the abolition of the carceral system that is historically and inherently responsible for violence against BIPOC communities and women. Through their experiences, they see the connections between interpersonal and state violence and are organizing at the intersections of violence and abolition that move the conversation of anti-Asian violence beyond “hate.” As abolitionist and scholar activist Dylan Rodriguez (2021) explains, an abolitionist analysis depersonalizes anti-Asian violence and dialogues with other forms of state violence such as gentri cation, redlining, deportation, and the criminalization of sex work. Employing an abolition feminist framework based on radical feminism, Black solidarity, and anti-carcerality, while also centering sex workers, migrants, and refugees, these women are pushing a more complex framing of anti-Asian violence that goes beyond “hate” (Rodriguez 2021). Asian American abolition feminism also makes visible and challenges the failure of the state to support women who are victims of violence as well as the violence inherent in the institutions that are supposed to protect women (Davis et al. 2022, 131).

Asian American feminists and community organizers have been calling for the abolishing of systems of criminalization and punishment that contribute to anti-Asian violence and anti-Blackness. Using online blogging, Asian American Feminist Collective (AAFC), established as a response to the exclusion and tokenism of women of color speci cally Asian American women during the Women’s March on Washington in 2017, denounces carceral solutions to anti-Asian violence and calls for the abolition of systems that expand criminalization and punishment such as the police, prison, and military complex. Instead, AAFC advocates for community interventions and responses to anti-Asian violence (Asian American Feminist Collective 2020a). Similarly, Asians4Abolition, a coalition of organizers and activists in the New York City community, advocates for anti-carceral solutions such as mutual aid and community care to address anti-Asian violence. Asians4Abolition states that the systems which are supposed to protect and serve justice are the perpetrators of violence and have taken signi cant lives from the Asian American community (Asians4Abolition 2021). Utilizing the support of various organizations to sign onto a collective statement, Asian American abolition feminists reject increased policing. In their statement with over three hundred signatures of community organizations, Red Canary Song calls for an intersectional, feminist perspective on anti-Asian violence and problematize the criminalization of sex work that harms Asian massage workers. (Red Canary Song, n.d.). After the passage of the COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act, over seventyve organizations signed a statement that opposes the legislation and its reliance on law enforcement to address anti-Asian violence during the pandemic. The statement calls for systemic change that addresses the root causes of anti-Asian violence and solidarity with BIPOC communities against criminalization and mass incarceration. The demands include opposing the COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act, shifting resources from law enforcement to communities, designating hate incidents as a public health issue, and rejecting proposals that rely on policing and punishment as a response to anti-Asian violence (GAPIMNY 2021).

Asian American abolition feminists have also made themselves more visible through events and webinars. After the Atlanta shooting, Red Canary Song, a grassroots massage worker coalition, held a vigil to honor and name the victims that were diminished from mainstream news reporting (Red Canary Song 2021). Recently, Red Canary Song organized a memorial vigil with Asian American Feminist Collective to remember the eight lives lost in the Atlanta shooting. The event brought together sex worker rights activists, abolitionists, labor organizers, and allies to mourn and stand strong with Asian American abolition feminists against gender and sexual violence (Red Canary Song 2022).

Asian American Feminist Collective also organized a webinar with 18 Million Rising, a digital community that mobilizes young Asian Americans toward the collective liberation of marginalized communities, to advance conversations on abolition feminism and transformative justice in Asian American feminist politics (Asian American Feminist Collective 2020b).

The webinar, “Beyond #StopAsianHate: Criminalization, Gender, and Asian Abolition Feminism,” provides the stories of four Asian American women who are taking an abolitionist stance against anti-Asian violence (Haymarket Books 2021). Yves Tong Nguyen, a queer Vietnamese sex worker became involved in organizing that intersects anti-violence and abolition, since she is criminalized as a sex worker and sees how the criminal and legal system fails people. As a survivor of violence, Yves now organizes with Survived and Punished of NY, an af liate of Survived & Punished (S&P), a national grassroots coalition of organizers from the Stand With Nan-Hui defense campaign, California Coalition for Women Prisoners, Love & Protect (then known as Chicago Alliance to Free Marissa Alexander), and the national Free Marissa Now Mobilization Campaign. Founded in 2016, S&P organizes to support survivors of domestic and sexual violence, free criminalized survivors, and abolish gender violence, policing, prisons, and deportations (Survived & Punished, n.d.).

Hyejin Shem, a queer Korean organizer and cofounder of S&P, explains that she became involved with organizing that intersects anti-violence and abolition due to violence within her own family, including multiple generations of war, domestic violence, and sexual and child abuse. In the process of guring out her sexuality, she started working with immigrant and refugee survivors of violence who were primarily trans and queer in San Francisco. In her organizing, she learned about abolition and her work with survivors of domestic violence such as the victims being punished by the system for actions such as being charged with child abduction that take them out of the violent environment. Survivors were faced with harsh punishment by the system for doing what they needed to do to survive. She realized that her work with survivors of violence was connected to the abolition movement of systems that also punished survivors of violence.

Coming from a Cambodian family of war refugees and history with genocide, Ny Nourn expresses how she was born into violence and witnessed domestic violence from a young age. As a formerly incarcerated domestic violence survivor, she thought the system would protect her but instead it in icted violence toward her, particularly by the courts. After serving 16 years in prison, she was immediately detained by ICE and through community advocacy she was granted a pardon that prevented her from being deported. Ny’s involvement in organizing against violence and prisons started when she was incarcerated in the largest women’s prison in the world. As she only saw Black and Brown women, she organized while incarcerated to free survivors of violence and to dismantle systems that targeted immigrants, refugees, and BIPOC communities. Ny is currently co-director of Asian Prisoner Support Committee, which provides support to Asian and Paci c Islander (API) prisoners and raises awareness about API incarceration and deportation (Asian Prisoner Support Committee, n.d.). Similarly, Connie Wun comes from a Vietnamese family of war refugees. As she faced racial and gender violence at a young age, she began organizing when she was in college. With family members who have been incarcerated, she

saw herself and the Southeast Asian community aligning themselves with the abolition movement. Connie was involved with the abolition movement in the 1990s that led to the creation of Critical Resistance and she also organized in the Bay Area with INCITE!. Currently, Connie is co-founder of AAPI Women Lead, which aims to end violence in AAPI communities in solidarity with other communities of color (AAPI Women Lead, n.d.). She has been an educator, researcher, writer, and organizer working on issues of racial and gender violence for over 25 years (Haymarket Books 2021). After the Atlanta shooting, Connie appeared on Democracy Now!, an independent news show, to contextualize the incident within the larger history of sexual violence against Asian women and to frame this violence as systemic (Democracy Now! 2021).

Asian American feminists are organizing with anti-violence and abolitionist movements to address violence in its various forms. Through their experiences with violence including domestic violence, policing and prisons, immigrant detention, and war and militarism, the four Asian American women became involved with the abolitionist movement. As Asian American abolitionist organizers, they believe anti-Asian violence should be understood within an abolitionist framework in order to achieve collective liberation from systems that produce violence. As they are impacted by the same criminal legal system that punishes and divests in communities of color, Asian American abolition feminists see that gender-based violence is connected to state violence. Their stories show that the criminal legal system does not protect women of color and further endangers victims and survivors of violence. Asian American abolition feminists also want solutions that support collective healing and liberation of marginalized communities. However, given the national framing and understanding of anti-Asian violence as second marginalization of Asian Americans as “the threat of disease” within a heteronormative white America, Asian American abolition feminists are challenged by the heteronormative nationalism of Asian Americans who call for resolutions and policy reform, a validation from the state that further rationalizes the use of carceral punishment of crimes committed. Smith (2011) explains that racial justice premised on secondary marginalization takes on “a nation-state model of governance through violence and dominance that maintains rather than challenges colonialism and white supremacy”. As the rise in hate incidents escalated to the Atlanta shooting of March 2021 that targeted Asian American women, Asian American feminists and organizers are pushing the conversation on anti-Asian violence that centers on race and racism alone. Asian American abolition feminism challenges antiAsian violence in ways that do not depend on the carceral state.

Asian American abolition feminism offers an Asian American feminist praxis that moves beyond Asian American visibility and incorporation in the nation-state. As producers of intersectional feminist scholarship, Asian American feminists along with other women of color feminists challenge white supremacy and heteropatriarchy. Asian American women formed alliances with

other women of color nationally and globally and established Third World feminism to challenge the women’s movements of the 1960s and 1970s that centered on white feminism. Additionally, Asian American women are understudied in women’s, gender, and sexuality studies, as well as Asian American Studies and Ethnic Studies. Multilayered and complex, Asian American feminisms have consisted of radical and liberal strategies, which have been at odds with one another. Radical Asian American feminists embraced socialist Asian women from Vietnam, China, and North Korea as political role models toward liberation and decolonization, whereas liberal Asian American feminists sought for inclusion and visibility in the nation-state (Wu 2018). Asian American abolition feminism continues the radical traditions of Asian American feminisms and moves the national attention and responses to anti-Asian violence beyond Asian American visibility and recognition by the nation-state. Scholar Shireen Roshanravan (2018) suggests an Asian American feminist praxis of coalitional visibility such as Asian-Black solidarity to refuse and disrupt the nation-state. Similarly, feminist scholar Lynn Fujiwara (2018) suggests an Asian American feminist praxis based on multiplicity (incommensurable, differing, and con icted positionalities) to build coalitions with other women of color feminists and challenge invisibility in white feminist politics. The framework of multiplicity “enacts a form of solidarity that simultaneously recognizes Asian Americans as racially privileged vis-à-vis Black Americans and as racially subordinated by white supremacist foundations” (Fujiwara 2018, 258). For instance, Asian American Feminist Collective (AAFC) imagines an Asian American feminist politics that move “beyond the narrow bids for political and economic inclusion” in the nation-state and toward liberation from systems of power that position Asian Americans differently yet in relation to other communities of color (Asian American Feminist Collective 2018). Asian American abolition feminists are employing a framework of multiplicity to sustain solidarity with other communities of color as mainstream America and even members from the Asian American community call for more carceral solutions to anti-Asian violence. As radical Asian American feminism, Asian American abolition feminism sees the liberation of Asian Americans from violence as connected and shared with other communities of color, given violence in its multiple forms against women and communities of color are historical and inherent in the carceral systems that are supposedly about safety and protection.

Abolitionist and Decolonial Futures for Asian American Feminist Politics

Asian American feminists are adopting an abolitionist feminist approach to violence as they see their experiences and liberation from systems that produce violence connected and shared with other communities of color. Moving forward, Asian American abolition feminist politics may consider engaging more with colonial resistance against violence, speci cally with feminists from

Indigenous Paci c Islander communities, to achieve truly liberating, transformative solutions and healing to anti-Asian violence (Lugones 2012; Mack and Na’puti 2019; Teves and Arvin 2018). As Native Hawaiian feminist scholars Stephanie N. Teves and Maile Arvin (2018) explain, Asian American feminists should recognize and acknowledge the differences and con icts of their positions, such as the ways Asian American feminists participate in the erasure of Paci c Islanders. Although there is critique of US imperialism in Asian American feminist scholarship, Paci c Islanders are often left out of analyses of transnationalism and Asia-Paci c (Teves and Arvin 2018, 114). Teves and Arvin warn that the Asian Paci c Islander (API) category is a settler-colonial construct that diminishes Paci c Islanders and homogenizes the histories and experiences of these groups for inclusion into the nation-state (Teves and Arvin 2018, 120 –121). Asian American liberalism maintains settler colonialism, Indigenous dispossession, heteropatriarchy, and nation state governance and control (Trask 1999; Fujikane and Okamura 2008; Saranillo 2013). Thus, Indigenous perspectives should be centered in Asian American feminist politics that connect racism, colonialism, and gender. Asian American abolition feminist politics have the potential to build deep coalitions with Indigenous Paci c Islander communities to challenge anti-Asian violence in its multiple forms. As Hawaiian nationalist and feminist scholar Haunani-Kay Trask reminds us, Indigenous women leaders of the Paci c have always been at the heart of resistance against colonial violence (Trask 2016). Similarly, Native Hawaiian feminist Lisa K. Hall explains that “Native Hawaiian women have resisted the criminalization of sexuality and colonial ideas about sex and gender since the beginning of missionary contact to the present” (Hall 2009, 29).

Given shared visions, an abolitionist and decolonial feminist praxis might help us create truly liberating, transformative solutions and healing to anti-Asian violence. As Mack and Na’puti (2019) argue, decolonization is necessary in anti-violence movements as gendered violence needs to be understood as part of colonial violence that is an ongoing manifestation of US settler colonialism. Similar to abolition feminism, decolonial feminist strategies move us away from punitive responses that underly settler colonial and carceral logics and reject the reliance on the carceral state by the mainstream antiviolence movement (Heiner and Tyson 2017). For instance, Keys (2021) argues that a decolonial feminist praxis contextualizes violence through a colonial lens and challenge the ways the coloniality of race and gender construct Black women of color experiences of sexual and gender-based violence in the US. Mendez (2020) shows how dependency on state imposed policy such as Title IX that enforce “safety” and “protection” to address gender-based violence works to silence and deny survivors of color, queer, trans, and gender nonbinary of resources for healing. Instead, Mendez proposes a transformative justice approach as decolonial feminist praxis that builds community support and resources and healing for survivors. Similar to abolitionist philosophy, transformative justice

has “the well-being of humanity at its core” (Mendez 2020, 99). Additionally, Indigenous resistance to sexual violence that emphasize decolonization help us envision coalitional decolonial feminist possibilities (Mack and Na’puti 2019).

Abolition and decolonial feminisms also require epistemic delinking from systems of the colonial nation-state, such as the prison industrial complex. Abolition feminism critiques and connects the multiple forms of violence that is produced and punished by colonial state institutions seeks for social transformation rather than the reform of oppressive institutions. Decolonial feminisms offer critiques of Western hegemonic feminisms and an epidemic disobedience to coloniality (Martinez and Aguero 2021). For instance, feminist philosopher and activist Maria Lugones offers the possibility of change and liberation at the tension of colonial difference. In the space where the coloniality of power is enacted, Lugones sees a movement toward coalition that takes up the logic of decoloniality (Lugones 2012, 85). Decolonial feminism is the beginning or possibility of overcoming the coloniality of gender. Lugones argues that decolonial feminism is resistance to the coloniality of gender that allows us to understand and appreciate resistance beyond the self in relation to resisting. Decolonial feminisms exhibit feminisms that are resisting through an understanding of the colonial difference, multiplicity, and coalition at this point of difference (Lugones 2012, 84). Likewise, feminist scholar Andrea Smith (2011) advocates for Indigenous feminisms that centers anti-colonial theorizing and practice in feminist politics. Centering indigeneity and gender decolonizes white feminism and disciplines that promote recognition or inclusion in the colonial nation-state (Smith and Kauanui 2008; Arvin, Tuck, and Morrill 2013).

Abolitionist and decolonial feminist critiques provide more complex iterations of anti-Asian violence that go beyond “hate” and mainstream framings as an epidemic. Abolition and decolonial feminisms help us reimagine and create political and epistemological futures that can build and support the kinds of communities we envision. Abolitionist and decolonial possibilities exist in the spaces of marginalization that provide opportunity for us to create truly liberating, transformative solutions and healing.

Bao Lo is Associate Professor and Program Director of Asian American Studies in the Department of Ethnic Studies at California State University, Sacramento. Her research interests include contemporary race and racism, decolonization, settler colonialism, community organizing, student activism, and Asian American Studies, with a specialization in Hmong American Studies (email: lo@csus.edu).

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State Disappearances in the United States: A Decolonial Feminist Analysis About the Enactment of State Terror on Undocumented Immigrants by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)

Joanna Beltrán Girón

State violence in the so-called United States impacting undocumented immigrants living under the construction of (il)legality calls for a decolonial feminist enactment of psychosocial research. This article presents a multi-scalar analysis of the embodied aftermath of state violence, enacted through the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) practice of state disappearances, on two undocumented Latina immigrants. Centering on decolonial feminisms and drawing on liberation psychology and intersectionality, this study investigates the embodied sequelae of living undocumented under the terror of ICE. This study undertakes a secondary analysis of two interviews that were selected from a larger database of in-depth interviews (N = 39). The two stories were selected considering gender and explicitness of the embodied aftermath of psychosocial torture by ICE. The data was gathered in Austin, Texas in 2019, marking a year after the two largest ICE raids in recent history which together resulted in the arrests of at least 304 Latinx immigrants in Central, South, and North Texas. ICE terror has embodied, affective, and material consequences on those who are subjected to such violence; therefore, a decolonial feminist analysis about the embodied impacts of state violence and its sequela contribute to understandings of decolonial feminist enactment of qualitative analytic methods in psychology.

Keywords: Abolition / Crimmigration / Decolonial feminisms / Immigration and customs enforcement / Intersectionality / Liberation psychology / Psychological violence / Racialized embodiment / Settler colonialism / Sequelae / State violence

©2023 Feminist Formations, Vol. 35 No. 1 (Spring) pp. 240 –267

La mayoría de estas leyes y esto que está pasando es muy tensionante y es muy racista. Muy racista

Es que no nos quieren. Nos quieren a todos pa’ fuera

This paper begins with quotes from two stories. Considering these two experiences together generates a form of radical entanglement that allows us to closely examine both the individual and collective embodied impacts of the violent enforcement of settler borders. At the heart, this paper is a collage of conversations that gathers around the exchange that occurs between the Spanish narrations by Sabiduría and Amor and my theoretical offerings in response to those stories. Though I will offer non-verbatim translation and analyses in English with a few sprinkles of Spanglish, you will read the narrators’ voices in Spanish to remain grounded in their vocalization and because meaning is lost in translation. Importantly, the narrators come from different Mexican states, so they pronounce certain words differently or use unique place-based words or expressions that are commonly spoken in their places of origin.

Sabiduría and Amor, the two women whose voices are carefully uplifted in this article, articulate their own experiences as undocumented women migrants and from within these articulations we can understand how crimmigration operates and the ripples it creates. Sabiduría is a 53-year-old woman from Tamaulipas, México. Amor is a 49-year-old mother of two, also from México. Both have been living in Austin, Texas, for at least two decades. They live in the MéxicoTexas borderlands (not to be confused with living along the US-México border or border towns.). Borderlands are border/lands—territories that have been delineated with colonial pens that restrict movement and belonging. It is in this historical, political, ideological, and hemispheric context where the stories of the narrators are situated. So, this paper is concerned with how they articulate their lived experiences, and it also examines the racialized and gendered fashion in which state violence, through Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids, detention, and deportation, enact psychological violence. Namely, I argue that ICE is a state apparatus of repression that enacts violence on racialized undocumented immigrants through systematic abductions, widely known as raids, detentions, and deportations.

I spoke with Sabiduría and Amor in 2019 —a year after the 2018 mass ICE raids in Austin. Inevitably, the narrators carried an embodied historical memory of those raids. First, at the beginning of 2018, ICE conducted a seven-day mass raid where ICE agents arrested more than 145 Latinx migrants in Central and South Texas. Then in the summer, ICE raided a Load Trail factory in North

Texas where they arrested at least 159 undocumented workers. The latter was considered to be one of the largest immigration raids in recent history. According to TRAC Immigration, by May of 2018, ICE had arrested at least 27,657 undocumented immigrants in Texas. Based on the same dataset, in Travis County alone where the narrators live, ICE had arrested at least 1,161 undocumented immigrants. ICE arrests and raids are traumatic. This paper takes up an interdisciplinary analysis to explore both the aftermath of mass raids and living under the constant threat of being detained and deported.

Broadly, this paper is situated in a context where racial capitalism (Gilmore 2017) and settler colonialism (King 2019; Speed 2019; Dunbar-Ortiz 2021) structure oppressive conditions, infrastructures, and social relations in Turtle Island (colonially known as the United States of America). The territory that is known as “Austin” is traditional Coahuiltecan, Jumanos, Numu nuu (Comanche), and Tonkawa land. Austin gets its name from Stephen F. Austin, a racist white man who played a signi cant role in the expansion of slavery in the region. State: Historically, Stephen F. Austin is known as “the Father of Texas,” hence arguably he symbolizes the epitome of Man/the overrepresentation of human as Sylvia Wynter (2003) would suggest. Based on the historically symbolic constitution of this geography, we can argue that anti-Black racism as/in addition to state violence and settler colonialism are foundational characteristics of the state of Texas. In fact, Texas is home to 18 active US military bases and 171 military sites, including Fort Bliss—the largest military infrastructure in the state and the second largest in the army—and Fort Hood, located roughly 60 miles to the North of Austin, is the (third) biggest active-duty base of the US armed forces. Moreover, combined with 27 oil re neries, 57 state prisons, 30 modernday concentration camps (also known as immigration detention centers), and about 10,886 gun stores, Texas represents a militarized occupation on stolen land(s) touted by large groups of white supremacist nationalists (including border vigilantes/militia). Texas, then, is arguably the epitome of settler and imperialistic ideologies and capitalist infrastructures that justify the economic, political, and cultural invasions and interventions in other countries in the name of “democracy”; yet, domestically, it is far from a democracy. To be clear, the United States of America exploits, excludes, and punishes refugees who emigrate to this country to escape the poverty, violence, and corruption that this country’s imperialist interventions have generated and exacerbated in the refugees’ home countries and ancestral lands.

It is equally important to name the violence that is enacted across colonial borders, and in this case: México. Globalization and the rise of neoliberalism have exacerbated poverty as violence in México which is where the two narrators are from. Capitalism has re-structured the Mexican nation-state in ways that (re) produce economic and social inequalities and thus psychosocial violence (e.g. NAFTA). State violence, such as the criminalization of and violence against immigrants and refugees, is present across borders, especially now that the US

has expanded its southern border as far as the nexus between Central and South America through its Southern Border Program. For example, on March 27, 2023, a re broke out inside a detention center in Ciudad Juárez (right across one of El Paso’s border bridges) where 40 immigrant men were killed (and at least 25 others were injured). A couple of days after the re, I spoke to some of the immigrants who were camping outside that detention center and they told me that there is no way that the detainees could have started a re because they were stripped of their possessions upon entering the detention center, including any lighters or match sticks they would have had on them. In fact, VICE news released a news report claiming that the migrants died in the re because they could not pay a $200 bribe to be released. Local solidarity activists in collaboration with the migrants put up banners outside of the detention center with the phrases

“ESTADO MEXICANO ASESINO,” “NEGLICENCIA IGUAL A CRIMEN

DE ESTADO,” “NO ES TRAGEDIA FUE ASESINATO,”

“NECROPOLÍTICA LE LLAMAN,” “STOP CRIMINALIZING MIGRATION. CBP BLOOD IS ON YOUR HANDS TOO,” among others. Crimmigration, then, is an apparatus of state terror that in its coercive expansion to the south spreads violence against predominantly working-class racialized migrant bodies. My background informs my political scholarship. I am a queer immigrant from what is known as El Salvador. I am here in what is known as the United States because US imperialism forced my grandmother and my dad out of their ancestral lands. I am a third generation forced immigrant and an un/welcome guest on stolen land(s). I am also an anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist, decolonial feminist organizer, activist, and psychologist whose commitment to abolition and liberation psychology are rooted in the radical history of student organizing in El Salvador. I am also a survivor and child of survivors of colonial and state violence. I have inherited a history of intergenerational trauma, including land and spiritual traumas. My body and spirit are simultaneously healing from and resisting colonialism, imperialism, fascism, and the racial capitalist cis-hetero patriarchy. My body bears the sequela of being in constant struggle. Fighting oppression has resulted in a painful in ammation of my body which is an example of how oppression is deeply ableist. Every day, I experience a chronically activated nervous system and an autoimmune system that ghts itself. But I am also medicine. I ght for self-determination and liberation through radical healing, decolonization, abolition, and also through the reclamation of my ancestral language(s), ancestral land(s), spiritual practices, Earth Medicine, dreams, creativity, imagination, and rest. Who I am—from the emotional to the cellular to the cosmic level—deeply informs my activist scholarship. As a human on this earth and an intellectual, I humbly recognize that I will always be a student. The more I learn from and with human relatives, non-human relatives, the land, spirits, and the cosmos, the more I un-learn, re-learn, un-do, and re-do. This article is one of the ways in which I resist cultural, intellectual, and ideological colonialism, imperialism, and (neo)fascism.

As you accompany me in this paper, my request is that you engage with the endnotes in ways that make sense to you. While the endnotes are used to weave the larger fabric of this text, they are alternative stories (McKittrick, 2020) that are meant to elaborate on ideas and highlight the interconnectedness (or contradictions) between conocimientos that may not seem related, but that are/could be.

Decolonial Feminisms and The Study of State Violence: An Interdisciplinary and Multi-scalar Approach

This paper is interdisciplinary and multi-scalar (Weis and Fine 2012). Drawing on decolonial feminisms (Speed 2019; Wynter 2003; King 2019; Lugones 2016), feminist geographies from Iximulew and Ecuador (Kab’nal 2010; Colectivo Miradas Críticas del Territorio desde el Feminismo 2017; Colectivo de Geografía Crítica del Ecuador 2018), in conversation with intersectionality as intersectional feminism (Crenshaw 1991) and liberation psychology (Martín-Baró 1988; Martín-Baró 1990; Martín-Baró 1994), I take up an analysis of racialized affect and embodiment as narrated by two women crossing borders, carrying the scar tissue of violence and the desires for liberation. Namely, I look at how state terror permeates the intimate (affect, embodiment: fear, nervios), personal (the materiality of structures: being rendered undocumented), and interpersonal level (relationships with others: how people treat them) without losing touch of the non-linear dynamism across these scales.

Informed by the narrators’ stories, Shannon Speed (2019), So a Zaragocin (2020), and Lorena Kab’nal (2010), I situate affect and embodiment in a context of settler colonialism which is enforced via state violence. In conversation with liberation psychology, I treat the psychosomatic experiences as embodied theory and legitimate processes of knowledge production that shed light on the ways settler violence pierces and permeates different scales, from the structural and cultural to the psychological and embodied. The visceral and affective are not separate from the historic, economic, and political.

Shannon Speed (2019) and So a Zaragocin (2020) resist the colonial constructions of borders and nation-states by embracing a hemispheric view rather than a national or transnational approach. In her writings on how settlercapitalist violence is rendered on the bodies of Indigenous women migrants, Speed persuasively argues that “spaces north and south of the [US] border are in essence ‘settler’ ” (18), and thus Indigenous women’s migration journeys must be articulated as movement between distinct settler spaces. Zaragocin notes that “there is a geographic transgression that we build by honoring a hemispheric gaze and not the one that results from a transnational approach. We are not interested in recognizing and legitimizing the colonial space of the nation-state. We do not need the nation-state, for a hemispheric view” (22). Zaragocin’s mirada hemisférica de-centers nation-states and opens up new spatial articulations such

as the study of geopolitics from our emotions and corporeality. While this paper takes a historical approach to contextualize the US as a nation-state, it also recognizes that settler violence is a hemispheric phenomenon and pursues an analysis of the sequelae of such violence by focusing on the embodied experiences of the narrators. In this way, I treat emotions and the body as affective geographic sites where violence is enacted, medicine is applied, and knowledge is produced.

Historical memory matters. We must remember that throughout the history of the United States, exclusionary and racist immigration policies have been designed by white settlers through settler colonial logics. Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz (2021) reminds us that, “the history of the United States is a history of settler colonialism. The objective of settler colonialism is to terminate Indigenous peoples as nations and communities with land bases in order to make the land available to European settlers” (23). In a 2020 interview with Latino USA about her book City of Inmates, Dr. Kelly Lytle Hernández emphasized that “immigration control is about managing the international ow of non-white workers into and out of this nation of settlers.” She adds that Black Americans and non-white immigrant workers have a shared enemy: settler colonialism, which renders shared experiences of being “surveilled, policed, interrogated, picked up, locked up, and removed from our families.” It is important to keep this in mind as this discussion examines how state violence (as an expression of settler violence) is enacted by ICE.

The experiences that I highlight in this paper are located at the southern border of the US—at a location where immigration and criminal punishment intersect. Structurally and analytically this project is intersectional. Kimberlé Crenshaw (1991) reminds us that structural intersectionality exposes how multiple de ned axes (race, class, gender, national origin) work as mutually constitutive structures that shape the lives of historically oppressed people. Our lives are impacted by the ways in which racist, sexist, classist, and ableist systems converge to create inequalities. For María Lugones (2016), intersectionality “reveals what is not seen when categories such as gender and race are conceptualized as separate from each other . . . once intersectionality shows us what is missing, we have ahead of us the task of reconceptualizing the logic of the ‘intersection’ so as to avoid separability” (4). In this paper, intersectionality helps untangle the hilos that connect the racialized and gendered psychosocial fabrics of the crimmigration system (Stumpf 2006; García Hernández 2014). Furthermore, I respectfully borrow from Kab’nal’s theorization of territoriality (which she refers to as territorio cuerpo-tierra). Lorena Kab’nal is a Maya Q'eqchi'-Xinka territorial communitarian feminist whose praxis is rooted in her experiences as an Indigenous woman in Iximulew (known as Guatemala). Kab’nal reminds us that territoriality must be taken into account when we theorize about bodies. Thus, the concept of territory body-land suggests that bodies, territories, and lands are mutually constitutive—when colonial violence

is enacted on territories and lands through, say, extractive projects (e.g., mining, water/land privatization) then such violence is also enacted on the bodies who inhabit those territories, and conversely, when violence is enacted on the body then such violence is also occurring at the land and territorial levels. The beauty of this framework is that it reminds us that healing and liberation are mutually constitutive in territories bodies and lands. I borrow from Kab’nal’s framework to argue that we must consider how the United States has constituted territoriality/borders in order to truly understand the stories of the narrators. It is in a territoriality that was built on slavery (McKittrick 2013) and genocide (Dunbar-Ortiz 2021) that (il)legality is conceived.

Moreover, Juliet P. Stumpf (2006) points that crimmigration is the merging of criminal law and immigration law. Crimmigration regulates “the relationship between the state and the individual” and is fundamentally a system of “inclusion and exclusion . . . [It is] designed to create distinct categories of people” and serves to “separate the individual from the rest of US society through physical exclusion and the creation of rules that establish lesser levels of citizenship” (380). When I look into the logics and the materiality of crimmigration—which rest on the colonial construction of the binary citizen/non-citizen—I expose the ways in which oppressive structures deliberate violence and wounding on racialized and gendered bodies who are situated at the intersection of borders/citizenship.

I engage with the narrators’ testimonies by naming the logics of exclusions/ dehumanization and the material infrastructures (ICE as a repressive organization) to contextualize the lived experiences of the two narrators who made this article possible. Rather than making claims about their stories, I seek to make claims from their stories.1 By refusing to isolate affect and embodiment or treat them as pathologies or as inherent states of the narrators, I make space for a territorial and land-based analysis that contextualizes the bodies as geographic sites where structural conditions are enforced and felt.

In an analysis of the coloniality of being, Sylvia Wynter (2003) articulates the “Human struggle” as one where Man (violently) articulates itself as the human through the social construction of the “irrational/subrational Human Other” (266) and, on the other hand, the defense of the well-being of those who have been historically rendered as Others—the colonized. Lethabo King (2019) adds that according to Wynter, the conception of humanity/Man is anti-Black and “to a large degree, anti-Indigenous” (18). Lethabo King also argues that the ‘human’ “requires the death of Indigenous and Black people” (21). King points out that white supremacy has de ned what it means to be human, and that part of materializing the de nition of this term/structure requires the death or recon guration of Black and Indigenous bodies into something that is other than/less than/different than the (white) human.

Furthermore, Hortense Spillers (1987) reminds us that the violence in hegemonic human-making is materialized through “lacerations . . . ssures, tears, scars, openings, ruptures, lesions, rendings, [and] punctures of the esh.” And

when we think of Joy James’ (2016) argument that “the United States’ longest war is with its domestic target: enslaved or captive black women” (255), we begin to see anti-Black violence (in the form of war) as historically organized as well as intentionally and systematically enacted on bodies that have been constructed as Black/Indigenous. After all, race is a social construct (Wynter 2003; Quijano 2000), yet its execution is materially and spatially oppressive and painful.

Further, Katherine McKittrick (2013) argues that the plantation can be used to historicize racial violence(s). We can migrate this place-based framework to the border/lands where there is a history of anti-Black racism. Then, we can see what emerges from this soldering of Black feminist theory/decolonial futures. In fact, McKittrick reminds us that “geographies described as battlegrounds” (7)—such as the militarized US-Mexico border—follow a geographic system that “came to organize difference in place and to regard this differential process as a commonsense or normal way of life” (7). At the root, anti-Black violence has profoundly shaped how violence is enacted at different scales and across different bodies in the United States. These relations are profoundly shaped by global and local histories and geographies. If we understand decolonial feminism(s) as anti-colonial, anti-racist, and anti-capitalist (Vergès 2021), then decolonial feminisms encourage us to critically think about the body in ways that question white supremacy’s de nition of the human. Coupled with an emphasis on affect and embodiment, decolonial feminisms add complexity to our understanding of the impacts that state violence has on racialized and gendered bodies.

Data and Methods

My research questions include: What are the embodied, affective, and psychological impacts of living undocumented amidst a constant threat of detention and deportation? And what do Sabiduría and Amor teach us about the ways in which state violence operates at the intersections of race, gender, class, citizenship, and territory?

Study Design and Participants

The narratives in the present article are drawn from a larger public health study (Pinedo, Beltrán Girón, Correa, and et al. 2021). I pursued a secondary analysis of the narratives of two out of the 23 narrators I interviewed in 2019. Importantly, this study took place in 2019, marking a year after several traumatic ICE raids (Aguilar 2018; Al Dia 2018).

While the study stands on the shoulders of critical epidemiological research, my paper uses a decolonial feminist liberation psychology framework to highlight the complex affective, embodied, and psychological experiences that show up as anxiety, depression, and other psychosomatic expressions amidst state terror. Following the narrators’ self-identities, I will focus on the ways in which the lives of racialized, non-Black Latinx2 undocumented immigrants are impacted by an

organized repressive organization: ICE.3 The narrators are considered undocumented. Narrators were not asked about their immigration status, instead, they self-disclosed their immigration status during the interviews.4 The two stories were selected considering gender and explicitness of the embodied aftermath of psychological torture by ICE. The sequela of detention and deportation, then, is the central focus of this paper.

In Their Own Voices: Stories of Racialized Embodiment, ICE Terror and Resistance to Crimmigration

In this section, I will introduce the two women who shared their stories with me. I tried to capture their wisdom, the power of their testimonies, the complexities of embodiment, and their subversive stories of resistance. I weave their narratives with what is known, from scholars and activists, about the enactments of state terror these narrators identify. I ask that you please hold the stories with care and appreciation because those voices carry embodied wisdom that exposes the perverted ways in which state terror is enacted on racialized and gendered bodies.

As a state violence scholar and survivor, I have learned to center joy and love when working with survivors of colonial and state violence(s). So, to disrupt damage-centered research (Tuck 2009), I use adjectives as pseudonyms to honor the relational affective processes during the interviews. In this way, every time you read their names you will be reminded of how wise and lovable/loving they are. I used thematic analysis to nd common threads among the stories. But most importantly, I let the stories breathe by not imposing theories on them. Rather, the stories speak for themselves, and I contribute to the knowledge the narrators produce.

Sabiduría, the woman who shared her story with me held tremendous wisdom about survival amidst anti-immigration policies in Austin. She is a 53-year-old woman from Tamaulipas—a state to the east of what is known as México bordering McAllen, Texas. Her brother was picked up by a truck after getting out of work six months prior to the day of my interview with her. In a heartbeat, he was just gone and became one of many who are forcibly disappeared in México amidst the context of a US-backed “war on drugs” and Mexican cartels. According to Carolina Robledo Silvestre (2016), in México, forced disappearances became an of cial category of political repression since the US-backed Dirty War in 1968. Forced disappearances, then, have become a dependable tool of political violence (Bourgois 2001), everyday violence (Scheper-Hughes 1992), and psychological violence (Martín-Baró 1990). Unquestionably, Sabiduría expressed feeling terri ed of going back to Tamaulipas in fear of getting kidnapped or killed: “Pues el crimen organizado se está apoderando casi de todo y es muy peligroso ahorita ir para México. Matan mucho. Yo tuve un hermano que me lo desparecieron. Ya tiene como seis meses de desaparecido. No lo hemos encontrado. Ya se desapareció . . . No sabemos nada de él. Da miedo ir para allá.”

The violence that is generated from organized crime is interweaved with other forms of violence(s) such as femicide/feminicide5 (Lagarde y de los Ríos 2005) or the state killing of women.6 The arguments about the origins of “woman” as a social construct vary, though there is agreement that women of color have been historically deemed inferior by European colonizers. María Lugones and Oyèrónké ˙ Oyeˇwùmí argue that gender (as we know it based on biological determinism) was inexistent before colonization, but that gender was created with the introduction of the Western gender system which gave women an inferior status to “ t the processes of Eurocentered global capitalism” (Lugones 2008 13). Others believe that gender-based hierarchies, including ancestral patriarchies, date to pre-colonial times (Kab’nal 2010; Segato 2010) and that violence against women has deep roots in prehispanic Mesoamerican times (González-López 2015). Presently in what is known as México, women are being killed “by everyone, from cartels and gangs to legal authorities, from strangers to husbands, fathers, and brothers” (Speed, 2019 42). In fact, Tamaulipas, Sabiduría’s place of origin, holds the second highest percentage (13.7%) of cases of women who have been forcibly disappeared compared to the national total (López 2019). Tamaulipas is a dangerous place for Sabiduría, and so is Austin. When asked to describe Austin, Sabiduría says, “Desde que hubo la bomba en las torres gemelas empezó a cambiar mucho. Nos empezaron a despedir a muchas personas. Empezaron a veri car los seguros sociales. Empezaron las rentas a subir mucho. . . . Hace como dos años me metí a un pasto y salió el gabacho bien enojado y le dije: “Discúlpame, es que me equivoqué y me metí.” Y empezó a gritarme “mojada” y que “voy a llamar a la policía.”

Speed’s argument that migrant women face violence(s) across different settler contexts is helpful here because it reminds us that violence, though it takes different forms and shapes depending on the nation-state context, operates similarly throughout the hemisphere. In fact, she argues that women migrants experience a myriad of violence(s) at home, on their journey, and in the United States. Sabiduría is afraid to go back to México in fear of getting killed and/or disappeared like her brother. However, the threats persist regardless of where she goes. In the United States, a gabacho (white man) threatened to call the police on her when she accidentally drove into his yard. In Texas, it is widely known that the police collaborate with ICE, so calling the police on an undocumented migrant could result in the detention and deportation of that person. Sabiduría is not safe in either place. Her experiences are de ned by a racialized sexist violence that is deeply intricated with her class status as poor/working-class and her immigration status as ‘non’citizen/undocumented. This discussion is concerned with how unjust structures travel across settings and create a myriad of inequalities that impact individuals at multiple levels (cultural, interpersonal, personal/intimate). These levels are webbed, violence ows, accountabilities are multiple, but the echoes of violence live in her body. Sabiduría has been rendered undocumented which has various impacts

on her life: from gabachos threatening her safety to social or state agencies denying her of important resources such as a driver’s license and rental assistance: “Yo cuando llegué [a Austin hace 30 años] todo estaba bien. A uno le daban muchos bene cios. Ahora ya le quitaron muchos bene cios. Las licencias ya no las dan, andamos sin licencia. Nos han quitado muchas cosas.”

Crimmigration is not just enforced by ICE, it is also enforced by the police. Sabiduría is aware that one of the ways in which immigration enforcement agents (ICE agents, and now also the police and state troopers) target racialized immigrants is by stopping them on the road: “a veces se paran allí en la 183, en la 290, ahí están esperando. Si ven gentes con escaleras, pues, paran y se lo llevan. Y ahora ya están veri cando hasta las placas.” Sabiduría shares that police tend to target racialized immigrants who drive trucks with step ladders on the back of the trucks because they have associated construction tools with ‘illegality.’ Not having a driver’s license can lead to a state disappearance such as an arrest, detention, and/or deportation. Moreover, not having a license generates fear and stress in Sabiduría: “Da miedo. Miedo porque ya uno no puede hacer nada. Yo tengo carro, lo tengo quebrado, pero cuando tenía carro, andaba con miedo. Pues ahora como no estoy manejando estoy más tranquila en autobús. Es mejor.” What is the context that renders women migrants like Sabiduría vulnerable?7 In 2017, Texas Governor, Greg Abbott, signed the Texas Senate Bill 4 (SB4), popularly known as the “show me your papers” law. This bill banned sanctuary cities and allowed police of cers, including campus police, to question the immigration status of those who they arrest or detain. Sabiduría comments on this matter: “El nuevo gobernador es Greg [Abbott]. No entiendo si tiene familiares mexicanos [su esposa es nieta de inmigrantes Mexicanos], no sé porqué es así. Es republicano. Ese puso la SB4. Si lo detiene la policía, lo pueden reportar a inmigración… Están veri cando las placas. Ya saben que teniendo un apellido Latino te siguen y te paran. Ay no, horrible . . . La policía les dio [a ICE] números de placa, números de luz, de todo eso… Austin era un santuario, ahora ya no.” Structurally, SB4 reinforces systems of (il)legality and crimmigration that institutionally marginalize, exclude, and punish racialized undocumented immigrants. Broadly, I argue that the undocumented immigrants who are predominantly targeted by laws such as SB4 are those who are criminalized based on their race or ethnicity and skin color, namely those who come to the United States from the Global Majority/Global South.8 Sabiduría is a brown-skinned woman and an immigrant from México who speaks with a thick English accent.

Emotionally, SB4 has created a context of unsafety for undocumented women migrants like Sabiduría. To put it in her words: “Da miedo. Miedo porque ya uno no puede hacer nada. Yo no tengo carro, lo tengo quebrado, pero cuando tenía carro, no hombre, andaba con miedo . . . Yo me pongo a veces depresiva, a veces no sé, piensa uno "Me van a agarrar, me van a pegar." Es difícil . . . Que a veces uno no puede dormir. Uno no duerme, uno no descansa bien.” Sabiduría’s experiences with fear, depression, and trauma-related insomnia are

examples of racialized affective embodiment. In the 1980s, psychologist Adrianne Aron treated Salvadoran refugees who forcibly emigrated to the United States in search for safety to escape a US-backed civil war in El Salvador. Aron noticed that the refugees reported experiencing anticipatory fear which became evident when they indicated becoming conscious about trivial behavior such as opening the door to exit, choosing a road over another to go to work, limiting the places they can go, and what and who they should speak to. With this in mind, anticipatory fear refers to when “people dedicate a great deal of psychic energy to evaluate and avoid dangers in a manner that can be predictable” (1987, 467).9 Sabiduría no longer has a car, but she when did she expressed feeling fear when she was on the road in anticipation of a potential arrest, detention, and/or deportation. Her anticipatory fear of being stopped by the police while driving caused her great distress, so much so that she would not sleep, worried that the police would stop and arrest her (and turn her over to ICE) for not having a driver’s license or that another driver would hit her which could lead to the presence of the police, which could ultimately result in an arrest, and if turned into ICE, a deportation. That said, it is critical to name that while fear can generate great distress, it is also a sacred protective mechanism that has helped Sabiduría navigate dangerous places and situations. That is, Sabiduría’s body is wise and so is her fear.

Racialized affect and embodiment are interrelated with gendered mechanisms of oppression. Racialized affect and embodiment make a call for a practice of leaning into somatic experiences, but most importantly these visceral experiences highlight the ways in which capitalism racializes and genders bodies. Punishment is enacted in those accords because punishment is in the esh (Richards-Calathes 2021). Though some may not consider detentions and deportations as punishment, the affective consequences of them say otherwise. Sabiduría talks about the aftermath post-deportation of an ex-boyfriend when they lived in Ohio:

Le quitaron la troca y las herramientas… Se supone que son 24 horas de detención, pero lo tuvieron cinco días detenido. Sin ningún cargo. No había hecho nada. Lo tuvieron detenido hasta que fue inmigración por él… Me afectó mucho. Era mi novio . . . Me quedé sola porque él era el que trabajaba yo no tenia trabajo en ese tiempo. Tuve que volver a empezar de nuevo . . . las mujeres nos quedamos solas porque estamos acostumbradas de mujeres [a que los hombres trabajen], y los hombres están acostumbrados a ayudarnos con los billes [gastos] . . . [Los hombres] son los que nos mantienen la casa . . . Nos apoyan mucho económicamente y cuando se lo llevan pues nos quedamos sin ese apoyo y no podemos a veces solas . . . Uno queda en shock pensando:

“¿Cómo le voy a hacer? ¿Cómo voy a pagar la renta?” porque desgraciadamente ellos ganan un poco más que nosotras las mujeres, y especialmente si somos Latinas porque las blancas tienen otro salario.

Sabiduría highlights both the economic and gendered sequelae of a deportation. She stresses that the deportation of her ex-boyfriend economically impacted her because she was not employed at the time. Labor is gendered in many traditional Latinx households. While men are encouraged to occupy the public space, earn an income, and take on the role of the breadwinners, women are expected to remain in the private space (home) to perform unpaid care work, emotional and domestic labor. Sabiduría acknowledges the gendered division of labor and stresses that there is a “shock” (economic, emotional, and moral) when the breadwinner is no longer able to provide due to a deportation.

Circling back to the main idea of this paper, according to the MerriamWebster dictionary, a sequela / noun / is an aftereffect of a disease, condition, or injury; and based on the wisdom I have learned from migration justice organizers and activists,10 I want to uplift the voices that view detentions and deportations as systematic abductions/forced disappearances. In this case, this paper is interested not just in the sequelae of a detention or deportation but on the affective experiences of living under the terror of a detention and/or deportation. Based on my experience as a survivor/child of survivors and in my organizing and commitment for truth and justice, viewing detentions and deportations as state disappearances and kidnappings is arguably an accurate claim because those who know someone who has been “detained” and/or “deported” may experience a form of affective and embodied susto/shock—as well as other emotions and physiological reactions – similar (but not necessarily equal) to those who experience other forms of state disappearances (e.g., under contexts of high intensity con ict/warfare and militarized occupations). Namely, ICE raids, detentions, and deportations generate a painful aftereffect among the survivors and their impacts create rippling effects (“nervios”) across communities.

Forced disappearances during warfare have been used as psychological tactics to instill fear among community members (e.g., ‘this could happen to me’) and to completely remove the body politic for its political potential to transform oppressive conditions. Moreover, forced disappearances/kidnappings in the fashion of raids/arrests, detentions, and deportations also remove the body politic from communal networks of care and ultimately from its means of production. As we think of different enactments of forced disappearances, we see that there is an intentional strategy to spread terror, weaving the affective sequelae of forced disappearances across the hemisphere. In such cases terror does not cease with the victim’s death [or disappearance], because it is only after the death [or disappearance, which can actually lead to death] that the acts accomplish their purpose—to show others that this could happen to them as well (Menjívar and Rodríguez 2005).

Though the structural conditions can be different between a context of warfare, political repression, geno/ethnocides (e.g., the Dirty War in Argentina; Pinochet’s military dictatorship in Chile post US-backed coup; El Salvador in the 1980s; Ríos Montt’s military dictatorship and genocide of Mayan people in

Iximulew in the 1980s; the 43 students disappeared in Ayotzinapa, México in 2014), and a context of repressive violence amidst places that feel like warfare but are not of cially declared as such (like in the United States where fascist domestic terrorism/mass shootings by white supremacists remind us that (often) armed white men, including police of cers across the racial spectrum, take on a lethal approach to eliminating who they consider to be non-human/less than human), the repressive tactic of disappearing people/bodies for their political potential and to spread terror share similarities. Therefore, I would like to focus on the condition of the aftermath expressed in chronic emotional injuries as well as the somatic and psychosocial weathering and psycho-emotional maiming which is evident Sabiduría’s story. Though it is important to recognize that her pain does not eliminate her agency and ability to resist. State terror, administered via psychological terror, generates a deeply embodied psychosomatic sequela that travels with the bodies as they move and navigate territories. This sequela is a constant present.

Like with any abduction, forced disappearances ripple across. Entire families and communities are impacted by them. Sabiduría expresses: “[Una deportación] le cambia la vida a uno. Tanto a ellos como que a uno. Le cambia la vida en cinco minutos ya uno queda hasta en shock.” The fear of detention and deportation impacts collectives alike. That is, the fear of is enough to keep undocumented immigrants in a chronic state of terror, anxiety, and silence. Sabiduría elucidates this statement: “Mis amigas han sentido ese rechazo [sentimientos anti-inmigrantes]. Se siente enojo, rabia por todo. Mujeres que se han peleado con mujeres anglosajonas, y lo primero que les han dicho: “Voy a llamar a inmigración.” Ya uno no puede pelearse. A veces se queda uno con el enojo dentro de que uno no puede defenderse.”

Sabiduría shares that there have been times when white women have been racist toward her friends and have made xenophobic threats such as calling immigration of cials on them. She adds that when things like this happen, the anger stays with her because she was not able to release it at the time of the verbal assaults / threats. Instead, she stresses, “ya lo que hace uno es callarse y tirarse al cuarto”; she stays silent and goes to her room, presumably to cry. While there is no way to know whether someone is undocumented or not, a white supremacist culture of Othering informs and conditions privileged groups into discriminating against others based on someone’s physical appearance (e.g., skin tone, height, hair color/texture, etc). Affect that intersects with class, race, and gender-based oppression highlights the racialized anger, rage, and weathering that results from those racist encounters. Racialized embodiment reminds us that affect such as sadness, indignation, anger, and rage that result from navigating and enduring racism get stored in the body which can ultimately lead to a chronic state of fear, terror, anxiety, depression, and a series of health consequences.

But Sabiduría is not naïve. She knows why things are the way they are. She knows structural inequalities are at play and she knows her power: “No nos

quieren. Nos quieren a todos para fuera. Ellos quieren que no existamos porque su raza de ellos se está terminando. [Pero] nosotros somos fuertes y trabajadores.” Though she shared experiencing an array of emotions—from rage and sadness to fear—she is not de ned by them. Sabiduría is a strong, generous, and wise woman who donated her story to create a positive impact. Her hope is that her story can push for social change so that cities like Austin offer mental health resources to undocumented immigrants because she has noticed that many of them suffer from anxiety, depression, and nervios that result from navigating injustices.

The affective and embodied sequela of state terror is also present in the second narrator. Amor is a 49-year-old woman and undocumented immigrant from México. She is a mother of two and a caregiver for her mother. In the name of immigration justice, Amor encourages her undocumented friends and mothers to use their voices to call out racism. I was inspired by her amor (love) for her family, community, and social transformation. Amor has lived in Austin for two decades and has seen an array of changes in the city. She has noticed that xenophobia has increased in Austin especially since former president Donald Trump was elected. She is considering moving out of her two-bedroom apartment but suspects that she and her family will encounter racism and inequality everywhere they go. Amor says, “[Austin es menos amigable] con las políticas que han hecho, con el presidente nuevo que está que ha hecho más políticas anti-inmigrantes. De hecho, yo me quiero mover de Austin para otro lado, pero pues, como que en todas partes es igual.”

Moreover, it is worth noting that structural injustices generate material conditions that lead to heightened vulnerabilities among undocumented immigrants. For example, Amor reports that they live in an apartment complex where her white neighbors consume and sell drugs which rst, expose her children to those activities and substances, and second, leads to heavy police presence. On one occasion, there were 12 police cars surrounding the apartment: “Nos habíamos salido a una esta y regresamos y estaban como doce patrullas porque había arriba unos vendedores de drogas . . . Hay [norte] americanos vendiendo drogas y eso nos perturba a todos.” Sometimes the police place restrictions on exit and entry, and when this happens, Amor and her family stay at a friend’s house until the police is gone. Understandably, she does not trust the police:

Ahora la gente no reporta muchas cosas. La otra vez me robaron mi carro y hable a la policía pero no era [durante] las redadas, todavía no estaba el SB4.

Ahorita ya no hablaría . . . Yo a la policía se los he dicho cuando hay café: “yo no confío en ustedes. Yo no les hablara a ustedes si a mí me pasaría algo porque ustedes están con ellos [ICE].” Ya para mi un policía no signi ca con anza. Si tengo un problema pues me callo, lo resuelvo yo, o me muevo. Hasta mi hijo les ha dicho [en los cafés]: “pues ustedes cooperan con la migración.” Le dije a ellos [los policías]: “mi hijo estaba pero sorprendido de ver cómo la policía ayudaba

[a los agentes de migración].” Hay mucha descon anza, mucha inseguridad. Y ellos supuestamente dicen que esas leyes [como SB4] son para estar seguros.

In the above-stated vignette, Amor describes that she stopped calling the police for help after SB4 was passed and after she heard about the ICE raids. Now when she needs help, she either stays quiet or tries to solve it on her own. However, there was one place where she felt somewhat safer to be near the police: at the cafés, or as they are of cially known ‘Coffee with a Cop.’ These events invite the community to mingle with Austin police. At the cafés, Amor’s disabled son told police of cers that they do not trust them anymore because they cooperate with ICE. Amor elaborated on her son’s statement and told the of cers that her son was shocked to learn that the police collaborate with immigration agents. The police agents, to none of our surprise, responded with “es que nosotros tenemos que ayudar.”

Another reason why Amor and her family no longer trust the police is that the police have harassed and intimidated minors at her son’s school inquiring about their parents’ immigration status. Amor narrates: “Dice mi hijo que allí en la escuela cerquitas estaba una tiendita. Y hasta a los niños la policía, los de migración, les preguntaba: “Y tus papás, ¿son de México? ¿Tienen papeles?”

Cuando ellos lo único que querían era ir a comprar su lonche, unas papitas, una soda… Ellos están haciendo algo ilegal que es acosar a nuestros hijos en los campus [de las escuelas] . . Entonces, tiene que haber protección y nosotros no queremos que nos hostiguen a nuestros hijos, o vamos a hacer una acción legal.”

Arguably, for many immigrant children and children of immigrant parents, their schools are not safe and can feel like “sites of toxicity,” as McKittrick would argue. In a context like this, from an early age, immigrant children and children of immigrant parents might become fearful and anxious about their safety and the safety of their parents or caregivers. This could become a core wound which could perhaps lead to a fear of abandonment and a sense of unsafety in their childhood which could show up in their adulthood. Moreover, laws like SB4 have led to an enactment of a culture of difference-making among young students: “En febrero que hubo una redada a los niños les decían otros niños en las escuelas: ‘Ya se van a llevar a tus papás.’ Y tuvimos que hablar con los directores.” Amor stresses that, immediately after the February ICE raids, a group of parents spoke to the principal after they heard that some students teased their children with threats that ICE was going to take their parents away. Furthermore, Amor describes the impact that ICE raids have had on children: “Los niños van con miedo porque no saben si sus papás van a regresar. Yo estaba en un grupo de inmigración y allí no enseñaron muchos derechos y fuimos al capitolio pues a dar nuestros testimonios. Ahí también los maestros hasta lloraban porque dicen que a muchos niño les afecta psicológicamente.”

While on a trip to the Capitol Building for an immigration training, she witnessed a group of teachers giving emotional testimonies about the

psychological impact that ICE raids have had on their young students. She also stresses that now children go to school with fear because they do not know if their parents are going to go back to pick them up from school. Moreover, after the February raids, her son told her that ICE deported one of his classmates’ mom: “[La mamá] se fue al H-E-B para comprar la comida para cuando el niño llegará. Y a su mamá la agarró la migración.” The boy’s mom was detained while she was getting groceries at H-E-B (a supermarket chain). ICE deported her. The boy cried and cried ‘mommy’ at school every day after the deportation of his mom. Amor elaborates: “Dice [mi hijo] que ese niño pues se regresó para México. Dice: "lloraba y lloraba ‘mami’ allí en la escuela." Porque, ¿qué hizo su mamá? Ir para la comida. Para prepararle su comida. Pienso, “¿Y si sería mi caso?” Y pues nuestros hijos son niños que están estudiando. Y son niños que están haciendo mucho esfuerzo para que tengan tanta hostilidad y para que tengan sus padres tanta hostilidad.”

Amor further commented that the boy whose mom was deported returned to México, likely to reunite with his mom. The above vignette demonstrates that detentions and deportations impact, materially and psychologically, not just those who are detained and/or deported but kinship networks. Arguably, detentions and deportations are techniques of psychosocial and political violence that are targeted not just at individuals, but families and collectives. This violence is not isolated, but intentionally and systematically enacted on racialized bodies that the state has rendered undocumented. Moreover, while recounting a different story of deportation, Amor tells me that her friend’s daughter witnessed when ICE agents detained her uncle and that the girl always remembers that moment. Let’s read directly from Amor: “Ver a los niños que también se llevan a sus familiares es un estrés. A una amiga dice que su hija miró cuando se llevó la migración a su tío y ella siempre se acuerda de eso. No se le olvida. Es un trauma para los niños. . . .” Children can experience trauma when they witness the detention of a relative, Amor stresses. One of the arguments I highlight in this paper, based on the testimonies of Sabiduría and Amor, is that ICE detentions and deportations are enactments of state violence/state torture, and that this violence spreads fear and terror among those who have been rendered undocumented and their families. Amor also reported that the raids are larger now: “son más grandes. Yo una vez miré como en el 7-Eleven andaban buscando gente que trabajaba sin papeles allí.” That is, while carrying out her daily activities, she saw ICE going inside a 7-Eleven store to look for undocumented workers. At this point, arguably, the violence that is enacted by ICE has become habitual because it shows up while people are carrying out mundane, everyday activities, such as driving around, going to the store, or going to work.

Psychologists and sociologists interested in state violence have noted that fear is an affective mechanism of state repression and control (Martín-Baró 1990; Menjívar and Rodríguez 2005). Fear is an instrument of state terror and state terror is supposed “to engender fear in everything people do” (Menjívar and

Rodríguez 2005, 17) like going to H-E-B or a 7-Eleven. State terror is mediated by the logics of dehumanization, punishment, and fear, and in the context of these stories, I argue that the United States relies on forced family separation to continue to consolidate its power and hegemony and spread fear. Thus, such fear can be articulated as a colonial breaking technique: a form of emotional maiming, a strategy used to break a target’s will. That is, a (neo)fascist technique of psychological warfare that is inherently ableist. Within a context of state terror, fear can be “linked to uncertainty regarding the conservation and development of one's life and family and it is expressed in how we fear misfortune, disaster, ruin, misery, and the future . . . [F]ear is an intense emotion, which indicates that the meaning that the person attributes to the situation in which they nd themselves, is of danger and the person perceives and understands it as a vital threat” (Lira Kornfeld 1987, 177). Family separation is a tactic of state violence—a breaking technique—that ruptures the social fabric and induces fear, and such fear holds historical meaning. We cannot ahistoricize or dis-embody emotions in contexts of state violence, settler colonialism, and the rise of neofascism. Racialized embodiment and affect remind us that state terror, such as family separation and abductions at the hands of ICE, impacts individuals and collectives at the emotional, physiological, and psychological levels. Unjust structures rely on and reproduce violence that is visceral. For example, detentions and deportations are really distressing for Amor: “Pues estresada. Yo no podía dormir cuando eran las redadas. [Los niños] estaban en una escuela charter. A partir de ahí los puse en una escuela pública para ya no manejar. Pero yo tengo un niño en silla de ruedas y a él se le pasa el camión [bus escolar]. Como quiera lo tengo que llevar. Muchos policías detienen a la gente que maneja y no tiene licencia. Siempre tengo que ir viendo que no haga velocidad, y es mucho estrés.”

Stress and tension are deeply racialized visceral experiences in Amor’s life. After the raids, Amor reported not being able to sleep. She was stressed out and tense. She decided to transfer her children from a charter school to a public school to drive less and avoid encountering ICE agents. She reports that around the time of the raids, many police agents were detaining drivers who did not have a driver’s license. It is a lot of stress, she highlights. Moreover, Amor names that the stress she feels comes from many different factors, including: “¿Y qué hago yo? Estar criando a un niño que está en silla de ruedas que quiero que tenga un futuro . . . Recibo tanto estrés de muchas partes, y no es justo . . . Mi hijo usa medicamentos, es un niño discapacitado. Yo tengo que ir por sus medicinas. Es tan tencionante . . . Y yo los miraba [agentes de ICE] en las gasolineras. No podías poner gasolina. No podías ir a comprar comida.”

Activities such as pumping gas in her car, picking up prescriptions, and driving her wheelchair-bound son to school or to doctors’ appointments became tensing, stressful, and fear-inducing for Amor: “Esas leyes son para temorizar a la gente.” These laws generate terror among the people, she adds. State

violence permeates the intimate (affect, embodiment) and interpersonal scales (networks). Amor elucidates that point when she states, “Donde quiera andaban [agentes de ICE]. En las iglesias. Una vez una amiga me dijo: “apenas estoy comprando en el H-E-B pero me dicen que ya vienen para aquí.” Y dejaban las cosas y se iban.” According to Amor, ICE has targeted places that are considered sanctuary, such as churches, to intimidate undocumented immigrants. ICE has also targeted grocery stores, forcing undocumented immigrants to leave their groceries behind and leave quickly. “Y eso era un estrés,” Amor further declares. State violence compromises everyday activities and collective behavior, and ultimately political engagement. In this context, going to churches or grocery stores become stressful and life-threatening activities. Under such dangerous contexts, nervous systems become aroused, chronically, which can lead to a constant activation of neurotransmitters and stress hormones such as adrenaline, dopamine, and cortisol, which can result in signi cant short and long-term health consequences. ICE terror can ultimately lead to chronic stress, dis/ease, and painful in ammation in racialized bodies, so the fear of being detained or deported is enough to weather undocumented immigrants. She adds, “El estrés lo tenemos constantemente y diariamente. Si salimos a comprar la leche . . . Nosotros no tenemos una vida tranquila.” The stress is constant and daily. We do not live a calm life.

ICE terrorizes and such violence can be traumatic. Martín-Baró (1988) de nes trauma as multilayered: psychic trauma is a wound that a dif cult experience leaves on a person; social trauma is a historic process that affects an entire community; and psychosocial trauma is a wound that is caused by the prolonged experience of a violent context, and it underlines that the wound will take on different forms depending on the peculiarity of the lived experience of a person. Based on the stories of Sabiduría and Amor one can argue that the psycho-social trauma they experience is interwoven with colonial trauma. Furthermore, DeGruy (2005) and Caldwell and Leighton (2018) de ne trauma as physical, emotional, psychological, or spiritual injuries caused by oppression and social injustice, leaving transgenerational imprints at the physiological and neurological levels. In other words, violence shows up in somatic geographies (Richards-Calathes, 2021), individually, collectively, and across lineages (Brave Heart, 1998). Therefore, ICE raids (as systematic abductions and family separation) must be viewed as enactments of state terror(ism) that have signi cant health and mental health consequences. If state terror aims to break down a person, then it is no surprise that Amor expresses feeling cansada, hostil, cualquier cosita me enoja porque no duermo bien —she is tired, hostile, anything triggers her anger because she does not sleep well.

We must remember that violence is met with resistance. Amor is active in her community despite being (rendered) undocumented. She participates in parent-teacher conferences, connects her mom friends and other parents with resources, encourages her friends and community members to advocate for

themselves, and at times she has directly and openly questioned the police for collaborating with ICE back when she felt safer to do so. However, navigating oppressive conditions is taxing. Amor narrates: “Yo en veces lloro. Cuando mis hijos se duermen yo lloro porque me siento sola, porque tengo que pasar por tantas cosas . . . Ellos tienen que estar fuertes y ellos tienen que seguir. Pero si ha sido difícil estar aquí. En veces he querido regresar [a México], pero no me puedo rendir porque atrás de mí vienen ellos. Yo tengo que estar fuerte para ellos. Los miro a ellos y digo: bueno mañana va ser otro día y ellos tienen que ir para su escuela.” Here my intention is to hold space for Amor’s tears because her body is wise and so are her sadness and her tears. Sometimes I cry when my children go to bed, she says. There are times when Amor feels alone and wonders why she has gone through so many stressful situations. Being in the United States as an undocumented single mother has been so challenging that sometimes she wants to go back to Mexico. But her children’s education is important to her. Despite all, she remains strong for her children and looks forward to brighter days. So, she stays. Amor is a loving and generous woman. We can learn from her wisdom/advice too: study, learn, and know your rights so you can ght back: “A muchas mamás les digo: ‘estudien el inglés.’ Pues tienes que aprender. A muchas mamás les hacen muchas cosas. Les digo: ‘estudia. Ve a la escuela.’ Muchas cosas no las aprendes si no sabes tus derechos.”

Decolonial Feminist Liberation Psychology and A Praxis of Critical Re exivity: Towards a Historic Responsibility to Abolition

Decolonial feminisms and liberation psychology might seemingly stand in opposition to another.11 However, it is important to highlight the powerful potential that lies at their intersection. On the one hand, decolonial feminisms are driven by a desire/goal for autonomy, self-determination, and liberation among historically oppressed peoples and, on the other hand, liberation psychology was popularized by a Spaniard Jesuit philosopher and psychologist. I use decolonial feminist liberation psychology to converse with and re ect back on the lived experiences of the women who shaped this article. Decolonial feminisms are ontologies (and cosmologies) that guide us in our praxes against colonialization, colonialism (Kab’nal 2010; Vergès 2021; Fanon,1963) and coloniality (Wynter 2003; Segato 2010; Lugones 2008; Quijano 2000); simultaneously, decolonial feminisms guide us in our personal and collective journeys toward decolonization, abolition, healing, and liberation. On the other hand, at its core, liberation psychology is an anti-imperialist project (Martín-Baró 1990; Martín-Baró 2014) that supports liberationist movements because it recognizes that in order to be psychologically healthy, we must rst dismantle psychosocial systems that keep us oppressed. Martín-Baró believed that liberation psychology must be concerned with 1) generating new liberatory psychological models and theories that respond to local needs and desires for freedom, 2) contextualizing and

articulating place-based/local psychosocial experiences and struggles in support of social movements, and 3) restoring psycho-social fabrics. And liberation psychology is also committed to participating in social protest and resistance like many Salvadoran psychology students did in the 1940s to the present date. That is, there is a radical and revolutionary history of psychology students who enacted and embodied liberation psychology about four decades before liberation psychology was popularized by Ignacio Martín-Baró. This history of revolutionary student protest and resistance is at the root of my commitment to an abolitionist and liberation psychology.

Hence, liberation psychology is a praxis.12 Martín-Baró states, “[T]o create a liberation psychology is not simply a theoretical task; rst and fundamentally it is a practical task.” As a liberation and abolitionist psychologist who is committed to decolonization, I acknowledge that psychology carries a wicked, violent past (Simango and Segalo 2021). Take, for example, the involvement of the American Psychological Association in the torture of political prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, a US black site in Cuba; psychology’s military development of moral studies which was concerned with population control and later gave birth to the elds of culture and personality psychology in the United States; and psychology’s key role in the manufacturing of psychological warfare after Rensis Likert proposed that bombs were not as effective at destroying enemies as strategies that were meant to break an enemy’s will (Summers, 2008). Such lethal proposition (known as the “psychological effort”) is evidenced in The CIA’s Nicaragua Manual: Psychological Operations in Guerrilla Warfare (1985). In fact, I argue that the weaving decolonial feminisms and liberation psychology can subvert the colonial, militaristic and neoliberal logics that characterize the foundations of psychology and positivist and Eurocentric psychological research (Martín-Baró 1994; Danziger, 1997; Moscovici and Markova 2006; Winter and Barenbaum 2008; Green and Cautin 2017). This paper, then, solders a dialogue between decolonial feminisms and liberation psychology, the narrators’ voices, and my own analysis about their experiences all the while contouring these conversations in Spanish, English, and Spanglish.

The structural-intimate is not a dialectical relationship. The conversation between intersectionality (Crenshaw 1991), embodiment (Wynter 2003; King 2019; James 2016; Spillers 2005; McKittrick 2013), territoriality (Kab’nal 2010) and hemispheric approaches to analyzing bodies across (colonially constructed) borders (Speed 2019; Zaragocin 2020) allow us to examine multiple scales—from the ideological and structural to the most intimate experiences of affect and embodiment. Accompanied by liberation psychology, decolonial feminisms direct conversations about affective, somatic, and psycho-social experiences in ways that refuse to pathologize, psychologize, and essentialize historical, cultural, racial, intergenerational, and spiritual traumas. That is, a decolonial feminist liberation psychology exposes how domination that is rooted in colonialism, and enforced via state violence, generates a painful aftermath. As decolonial

feminists and liberation psychologists we must speak truth to power not just in our theory, but in our practice.

By focusing on Sabiduría’s and Amor’s affect and embodiment, I tended to the sequelae of being rendered undocumented while navigating a racist place like Austin. There is power in their stories. Their lived experiences expose the ways in which the United States enacts ideological, structural, social, and psychological violence on them. It is from their lived realities that an understanding about how state violence operates emerges. Such violence(s), relentlessly and aggressive accompany the women as they navigate a myriad of enactments of violence in their home countries, in the border/lands, and in the United States. Therefore, it is crucial to journey with women across borders and across relational and kin networks, not only in place.

As we journey with them, we see that state violence ripples across. Both narrators reported having been signi cantly impacted by the recent ICE raids and by the detention and deportation of either a signi cant other or community members. As we saw with Sabiduría, she felt a sense of emotional, moral, and economic loss after ICE detained and deported her ex-boyfriend. This reminds us that economic impact is always gendered, and gendered impacts are always racialized. Similarly, Amor reported feeling tense, stressed, and insecure while driving and shopping for food. The fear of being detained and deported is constant.

ICE raids, detentions, and deportations are enactments of psychological violence. State violence scholars Cecilia Menjívar and Nestor Rodríguez ask, “What is the purpose of the most brutal tortures? Are they intended only to establish a generalized climate of fear? Are they meant to keep in place a docile workforce with low wages to bene t the wealthy and multinational corporations? Are they to eliminate the opposition? … To set an example?” (2005, 16). We can ask the same questions about ICE. In fact, I argue that ICE is a repressive organization. The psychological torture that is enacted on racialized people who have been rendered undocumented is intentional. Fear and pain, as in many contexts of warfare and state violence, are politicized/political and essential to keeping people alienated from their own bodies, stressed out, and in a perpetual state of susto. The affective embodiment of torture and the sequelae of psychological violence are necessary to fortify the logics or (il)legality/dehumanization. Thus, this paper engages with a decolonial feminist analysis to expose psychological violence as an expression of white supremacist domination.

Analyzing narratives by researchers who are survivors of state violence introduces complex dynamics of critical re exivity for the researcher and for the readers. Those of us who have been forced to endure, survive, or escape conditions of state violence and who have had the opportunity to tell our testimonies or write about them will tell you that this work is far from easy. Witnessing testimonies of interpersonal, cultural, and structural violence is heartbreaking and retriggering. Their stories stayed with me. Throughout this process, I have

felt indignation, anger, grief, rage, survivor’s guilt, powerlessness, and sadness. My body metabolized these emotions into in ammation and aches which triggered a series of even more complex psycho-emotional and physiological experiences (Beltrán Girón 2021). These emotions, however, ignite within me a sense of responsibility to act. I treat my emotions as powerful guides that re-direct me to a radical praxis and attune me to my interconnectivity with the cosmos, the land, human relatives, non-human relatives, spirits and ancestors, and my own self—from the affective and the spiritual to the cellular and quantum particles that make up my (meta)physical body. From this sacred place, I can hear my ancestors’ calls for truth, justice, and liberation.

Decolonial feminisms remind us that the ght for liberation is a life-long commitment. As a migration justice activist and an anti-imperialist organizer this commitment is clear to me. Those of us who have (or have not or have yet to) come into contact with testimonies of state violence have a social responsibility to protest, subvert, and ultimately abolish/destroy repressive institutions. This paper stands on the shoulders of abolitionist struggles that ght to end the prison- and military-industrial complexes. ICE operates at the nexus of both. Social scientists have an ethical responsibility to amplify and stand in solidarity with abolitionist agendas as well as to contribute to and join abolitionist struggles. ICE was created less than two decades ago, and though the white supremacist logics of dehumanization have existed long before ICE was formed, its elimination can be achieved.13

This article is a labor of love because love is sacred and what is sacred cannot be destroyed.

Joanna Beltrán Girón M.A., M.Phil. Ph.D. (c) (she/they) is an organizer, educator, researcher, consultant, and medicine worker interested in the intergenerational transmission of trauma and in collective healing/medicine. They accompany survivors of colonial, state, and interpersonal violence in their ght for truth and justice. Her scholarship and healing work draws from liberation and abolition psychology, decolonial feminisms, spirituality, herbalism, metaphysics, quantum theory, science ction, cyberfeminisms, and ancestral healing. Joanna is certi ed in Reiki, Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR), and Interactive Technology and Pedagogy.

Notes

1. Shannon Speed (2019) reminds us that narrators carry embodied experience which “presents a source of knowledge not bound by hegemonic ideological frames” (10).

2. Alan Pelaez Lopez, an Afroindigenous poet from Oaxaca, México, sheds light on the white supremacist heteropatriarchal and anti-Black racist colonial legacies behind the term “Latinx.” While the original study did not critique the term “Latinx,” now

that I have learned more about the ways in which settler violence permeates cultural, racial, and ethnic identities and as I re ect about my own (former) self-identi cation as Latina and later as Latinx, I am split between honoring the narrators’ self-identi cation with Latinidad and the wounds that emerge from it and that are perpetuated by it.

3. In 2003, the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) was dissolved and reformulated as Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Though the INS had operated since 1933, ICE is the latest settler formulation and technology of terror that enforces crimmigration.

4. As a trained qualitative interviewer, I practiced mindful ethics (González-López 2011) during the interviews which allowed me to center the narrators’ affect, emotions, and embodiment during the interviews. Grounded in Buddhist practice, GonzálezLópez (2011) de nes mindful ethics as a “paradigm with conceptual foundations in mindful inquiry and mindfulness, grounded theory, and ethically important moments and ethics in practice” (451) that allows researchers to ground their work on process, allowing for an appreciation of the “here and now” when unexpected ethical concerns arise during the eldwork.

5. While femicide refers to the systematic killing of women, feminicide is a political term. Feminicide holds responsible not only the male perpetrators but also the state and judicial structures that normalize misogyny, or hatred toward girls and women (Lagarde y de los Ríos, 2005) and cuerpos feminizados (Segato 2010).

6. I use the term “women” to refer to anyone who self-identi es as a woman.

7. Speed (2019) stresses that “vulnerability is not a condition of the women themselves, but rather a structural condition . . . a condition consciously created through the settler-colonial process, and, though functioning differently across space and time, consistently deploys racial and gender ideologies to manage the ongoing business of settler occupation” (5).

8. The term “Global South” has been contested because the notion of the “south” is positioned as a margin away from a given (dominant) periphery: the global North. Decolonial feminists problematize the colonial legacies in geographies/place (McKittrick, 2021) and hegemonic topographies (Faria 2017). Therefore, I also use the term "Global Majority" to de-center Western/Eurocentric/Hegemonic geographies.

9. In the same article, Aron writes a footnote about anticipatory fear as an experience that can emerge from planned insecurity. Planned insecurity was a technique of psychological warfare that was perfectioned in nazi Germany.

10. On February 6, 2020, ICE tased, pepper sprayed, and consequently kidnapped Gaspar Avendaño Hernández at his front yard in Brooklyn as he was leaving for work. Avedaño Hernandez was also shot in the face by ICE. On February 8, 2020, I participated in a rally where relatives, organizers, activists, and lawyers demanded the city, starting with NY State Attorney General Tish James, to investigate the shooting. At the rally, in solidarity with Gaspar and his family and community, a Black organizer and a Jewish activist each gave a brief speech in response to the arrest and shooting. Despite their historical and racial differences, they both forwarded an analysis that merits highlighting: for the Black organizer, ICE reminds him of the the ku klux klan; and for the Jewish organizer, ICE reminds her of the gestapo. The activists also articulated that the kkk and gestapo relied on disappearances/kidnappings/abductions to enact terror on Black people and Jews, similar to how ICE now relies on forced detentions and deportations to enact fear and terror on undocumented immigrants.

11. The contradiction I want to highlight is this: liberation psychology was popularized by Ignacio Martín-Baró, or “Nacho” for short. Nacho’s training as a liberation theologian had a big in uence in his articulations of the role of the Catholic church amidst a US-backed military repression against social movements in El Salvador. Later on, based on his political positionality as a liberation theologian, he proposed that the role of psychology and psychologists in the face of warfare is to stand in solidarity with the oppressed popular movements. As political as liberation theology was at the time and continues to be, it is imperative to also highlight the violent legacy of Catholicism and the Catholic church. Catholicism is a religion and spiritual belief/system that was violently imposed on the original peoples in what is known as “the Americas” and around the world. So, I often grapple with the questions: can liberation psychology (in the way that was articulated by Martín-Baró) contribute to liberation struggles? And if so, how? And how has liberation psychology matured over time as it is informed by more recent global and local social liberationist movements?

12. Brazilian educator and philosopher, Paulo Freire (1970), de nes praxis as a commitment to action-re ection-action in the transformation of oppressive and exploitative conditions.

13. A different world is possible; or in the spirit of the Zapatistas: un mundo donde muchos mundos quepan es posible.

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Lxs Caravanerxs and Nonsecular Protest: Rethinking Migrant Family Separation with Un llanto colectivo

Marcelle Maese

Written and directed by Celia Herrera Rodríguez and Cherríe Moraga in 2018, “Un Llanto Colectivo: Press Conference & Performa-Protesta” took place in front of ICE headquarters in downtown San Diego (September 15th) and then in front of Otay Mesa Detention Center (September 16th). Envisioned as an act of consciousness raising around family separation, Central American caravans, and the detentionindustrial-complex, the yer invitation read, “[T]his is ceremonial resistance.” This writing is an extension of my witness of and participation in Un llanto colectivo. I provide a historical context for lxs caravanerxs, as well as interviews with Maestras Celia and Cherríe. The meeting point for each of these different modalities is the PerformaProtesta, while the fragments of my own migrant history of family separation act as an invitation to the reader to consider intergenerational healing within and beyond biological family and chosen forms of solidarity.

Keywords: Central American caravans / Chicana Feminisms / Queer Migration Studies

my mother taught me to say thank you for another day of life

(as soon as my eyes open from sleep) and

©2023 Feminist Formations, Vol. 35 No. 1 (Spring) pp. 268 –292

whenever possible wake up go outside thank the sun for rising

She taught me to look at la luna para ver si hay agua o viento. I can still feel the calm and closeness I felt with her those nights she would open the kitchen door facing the backyard. We would stand in the doorway and look up at the sky.

I did not inherit my father’s love of the ocean.

Maybe because I never sat near the water with him. I never learned to swim. His stories of running away from whatever responsibility he had for the day to spend time at the beach did not make me carefree. I worried. What would make him run away?

I have always found solace and adventure in the solidity of desert mountains and rocks. The ocean moved too much. It would undo me, kill me. I used to hate the feeling of sand being pulled out from underneath my feet, of water and salt pushing me around.

I was driving to El Paso when I received the call that my father died.

I knew when my phone rang why it was ringing. I was thankful for the solitude in knowing I had hours of driving through the desert colors. I was relieved that the glaring heat just outside my window and the steering wheel gripped by both my hands was how I would begin being on the other side of having waited for this phone call my whole life. I heard cursing, and I heard someone screaming, “I want to live,” when I realized the person screaming was me.

But I could not cry.

Y eso que soy bien llorona.

Two months later, I found myself facing the ocean thankful for the sinking feeling of wet earth, for the canto Yemaya coming in from very far away, por estar sola y bien acompañada, por llorarle a mi papá, I’ve always missed you, What’s new?, por un llanto colectivo.

Come home.

Come on.

It’s time to live.

Un Un llanto colectivo: September 15–16, 2018, San Diego, California

Commonly referred to in the media as the Central American caravans, the Viacrucis del Migrante is a yearly pilgrimage joined by those who nd it safer to cross the Mexico-Guatemala border and travel through Mexico in organized mass rather than migrate alone. Foregoing the high price of a coyote, a strategy that remains outside mechanisms of accountability and that too often ends in violence and exploitation, lxs caravanerxs prefer the accompaniment of human rights organizers, church members, and fellow migrants who know the route. Some sources date lxs caravanxs as early as the 1980s, coinciding with the civil wars of Guatemala and El Salvador, and as part of the emergence of the Sanctuary Movement in the United States (Thornton 2019, 34). Others contextualize lxs caravanerxs within a concerted effort to raise political awareness around the danger of traveling through Mexico and cite the 1999 caravanx of Central American mothers as an important precursor to the 2010 organization of the “viacrucis migrante” or “Way of the Cross” (McKee and Silva 2020, 21). For the most part, the yearly Viacrucis del Migrante organized during Holy Week received little to no attention by the United States mainstream media, perhaps because the route was not focused on reaching the US-Mexican border. For many, the nal destination was México City. By contrast, the 2017 Viacrucis de Refugiados “culminated with a televised livestream on Facebook when 78 migrants presented themselves at the San Ysidro Port of Entry to claim asylum” (Thornton 2019, 34).

The 2018 Viracrucis del Migrante also marked a turning point in this yearly practice when the newly elected US president created unprecedented media attention when he enlisted the caravans as antagonists in his “Build The Wall” campaign. Despite the number of anti-immigrant Executive Orders and the hatespeech circulated through Twitter, May 2018 also marked a turning point given that it was the largest caravanx up until that date. The various organizations that supported lxs caravanerxs throughout their journey recognized that the work of accompaniment was far from over given that detention centers awaited those asylum seekers that were viewed as lucky enough to enter the United States.

Understanding that this incredibly powerful mobilization would require new forms of thinking and collaboration, on August 24, 2018, Celia Herrera Rodríguez and Cherríe Moraga visited Centro Cultural de la Raza for “Un Llanto Colectivo en Dos Voces,” “an act of collective remembering and political

I will not tie you down. I will play and love.

resistance.” In their roles as cofounding directors of Las Maestras Center for Xicana Indigenous Thought & Art Practice, this fundraiser and plática was publicized through social media as a prelude for “the September 15–16 ‘Un Llanto Colectivo’ against family separations event.” Likewise, Otay Mesa Detention Resistance (DR) was established following the culminating events of the Viracrucis Migrante en la Lucha in May of 2018 as a committee within Pueblo Sin Fronteras that would provide focused support to those imprisoned in Otay Mesa Detention Center (OMDC). The press release circulated by DR and Las Maestras Center called on “all persons of conscience, including artists/performance artists, youth, familias, community members, students, teachers, workers, professionals, organizers and activities,” and described the “actions and testimonial performances” as a ceremonial, theatrical and community-based two-day action. The yer invitation read, “Please NO PROTEST PLACARDS—this is ceremonial resistance.” Las Maestras Center (U.C. Santa Barbara), partnering with organizations throughout the San Diego-Tijuana region (Pueblo Sin Fronteras, National Domestic Workers Alliance, American Friends Service Committee, Families Belong Together with Indivisible San Diego), as well as with support from Centro Cultural de la Raza (San Diego) and Chicano/a Studies of San Diego State University, coordinated a press conference and PerformaProtesta 5 in front of ICE Headquarters in downtown San Diego (Saturday) and at Otay Mesa Detention Center (Sunday).

On Friday, September 14th, I joined over 40 participants at Centro for a day long rehearsal and workshop in preparation for the PerformaProtesta to take place over the weekend.6 At Centro, we practiced the script of the PerformaProtesta that Cherríe had written by editing and revising testimonios taken directly from caravanerxs. We also rebuilt the altar Celia had prepared as a way to begin and enter the nonsecular space of ceremonia, an altar that we carried with us as we moved across the different spaces of detention, as well as the location of where we closed our ceremonia: Playas de Tijuana/Border Field State Park (Sunday).7 The need to go to the water emerged organically after spending three days together, and how we closed our ceremonia was also improvised: each of us in solitude and prayer offered owers to the ocean, some of us concluding in silence, others in ancestral song. As the interviews with Celia and Cherríe explain, each element of that weekend—the altar, the script, the relation between PerformaProtestors and performa-audience/witness—was open to collaboration. As Celia explains, everyone was allowed “to bring what they know and to use that the way they know rather than impose an art form or an altar or some idea. That was a lesson in terms of collaboration: how to adjust and allow people to bring their best and allow what it is that they have.”

This writing is an extension of being a witness to and participant of un llanto colectivo, a pathway for (re)entering a way of being that is grounded in the teachings offered by ceremonia and the history of my own family separation. This nonsecular ontology of collaboration grounded in an “adjusting to” and

“allowing people” to bring their best selves, coupled with an epistemological return home, that is, a form of deep listening to narratives of state violence that enables a self-re exive valuing of “what” and “how” displaced families know, more broadly characterizes the new and ancestral form that Cherríe names PerformaProtesta. Because the naming of llanto colectivo as “PerformaProtesta” emerges from the need to address the historical speci city of contemporary forms of imprisonment and family separation, I situate llanto colectivo within the relation between aesthetic and political form that Alicia Schmidt Camacho explains in her foundational text Migrant Melancholia: “[T]he defense of rights has entailed a new search for form—for a politics that might carry forward [our] desire for justice and preserve the integrity of [our] communities across the border. The demand for a different framework of governance doubles as a search for political and aesthetic forms that can perform the work of representation in all its sense” (2008, 12). To this end, I understand the PerformaProtesta as an invitation to a grieving of our dead that enables a remembering of how to live, a politics of interweaving ancestral knowledge with strategies of selfdetermination. More speci cally, I claim that for those of us who are committed to organizing against the necropolitics of nation-state violence, we must be willing to collectively grieve those that we have lost personally if we are to remain politically vigilant and intellectually open to new and historical forms of collaboration and solidarity.

In what follows, I provide a brief historical context for lxs caravanerxs, as well as interviews with Maestras Celia and Cherríe. The meeting point for each of these different modalities is the PerformaProtesta, while the fragments of my own migrant history of family separation act as an invitation to the reader to consider intergenerational healing within and beyond biological family and chosen forms of solidarity. I am grateful to have experienced how we can collectively relearn the life-saving importance of uncensorship, of digni ed and dignifying collaboration, of not having to justify credible fear. I know I have to remember this feeling of un llanto colectivo, carry this drop of water with me for a long time.

Historicizing lxs caravanerxs’ Route: Moving Beyond the Binary of Legal and Illegal Migration

I want to be clear to folks in this region who are thinking about making that dangerous trek to the United States-Mexico border, do not come.

Do not come. The United States will continue to enforce

our laws and secure our border. There are legal methods by which migration can and should occur, but we, as one of our priorities, will discourage illegal migration.

—Vice President Kamala Harris Guatemala City, June 7, 2021

While refugees register with the United Nations and then wait in their home country, asylum seekers present themselves to the US government. “Regardless of whether they come to a port of entry or are caught crossing, once asylum seekers tell US immigration of cials that they are afraid to return home, of cials are required by law to process the cases as potential asylum claims” (Morrissey 2017). Their case is then evaluated through a credible-fear interview that determines if they face persecution in their home country “because of their race, religion, nationality, political opinion or membership in a speci c group” (Morrissey 2017). If credible fear is established, asylum seekers are allowed to proceed with a court process. If US immigration determines that migrants are not credible, they are deported instead of being given a hearing. If they are allowed to continue with a hearing, ICE must also determine the likelihood of showing up to court. If ICE determines that they not only face life threatening danger, but, just as importantly, are capable of legal behavior, migrants must then also “prove their identity” by submitting “government-issued identi cation,” documents that many do not have given the conditions of traveling and the political context of their home countries from which they escape (Morrissey 2017).

This brief description of the asylum process is enough to disprove any notion that there is a simple or quick “catch and release” of caravanerxs, a misleading and hateful phrase popularized and weaponized by the 45th president. The crimmigration8 narrative of illegality is founded on a discourse that claims that caravanerxs are composed of those who are either too ignorant or too violent to follow rules. Sadly, but not surprisingly, the democrats’ win over Trump did nothing to indict or interrupt this narrative. As noted above, Vice President Harris’ statement made in Guatemala City refuses to clarify that to seek asylum is one of those “legal methods by which migration can and should concur.” Paradoxically, it is precisely the incredible reach and complex network of legal redress that the routes clearly demand that warrants the need for an ideology that works toward characterizing lxs caravanerxs as inherently unruly and therefore deserving of the violent imposition of “law and order” and incarceration. One such example is the “Adelanto 8.”

After arriving in Tijuana on May 9th as part of the 2017 Viacrucis Refugiados, the “Adelanto 8” were imprisoned at the Adelanto Detention Center located in Victorville, California. Following the death of eight detainees earlier that year, Adelanto drew further attention as arriving caravanerxs refused to quietly submit to in ated bond amounts, medical neglect, and physically abusive staff. The

Adelanto 8 demanded “good faith negotiations with ICE” that included a lawyer and immediate release because according to US immigration law, “immigrants do not need to be detained pending administrative hearings” (Rebels 2017). The Adelanto 8 were part of a growing number of hunger strikers speaking out across various detention centers across the country. In response to the organized political movement against illegal imprisonment and human rights abuses, the for-pro t business The CEO Group (Global Leader in Evidence-Based Rehabilitation) retaliated against hunger strikers at Adelanto—a group that had grown from 8 to 50 hunger strikers—by denying visitation to family members, lawyers, and political watch groups, and shutting down phone privileges. However, the spectacle of hate speech and repression against imprisoned caravanerxs failed to deter the growing intranational political movement. On the contrary: it built the groundwork for a new nonpro t and grassroots network of resistance.

2018 Viacrucis Migrantes en la Lucha

I want to say this prayer for each and every one of you, and all the people that are going to be there tomorrow. May the creator look down on each and every one of us here. Bless each and every one of these people from the four directions. Bless each and every one of them in their hearts and their minds and their bodies. As these spiritual warriors, as these physical warriors, come.

—Stan Rodriguez

Chicano Park

April 28, 2018

March Without Borders

Walk from LA to TJ in solidarity with 2018 Refugee Caravan

The prayer offered at Chicano Park by Kumeyaay elder Stan Rodriguez provides a localized example of a transnational coalitional politics that undoes simple or normative understandings of the struggle for migrant self-determination. In contrast to the limited gesture of humanization and legal rights that depend upon a secular and nation-state authority, Elder Stan’s prayer opens a decolonial pathway that situates the organized response in the San Diego Tijuana border region. The undoing of migrant-native binaries offered by our elder’s prayer is part of a multiracial and anti-border praxis of transformative justice. In this way, intranational solidarity, accompaniment, and coalition are materialized through the strength of shifting networks of resistance.

While it is important to understand this expansive existential and political set of methodologies that inform lxs caravanerxs as part of the longer history of resistance in Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala, my focus is limited to

a brief outline of the various stops and coordinated intranational efforts that accompanied lxs caravanerxs route from their crossing of the Guatemala-Mexico border in March of 2018, to their arrival to the US-Mexico border town of Tijuana in mid-April of 2018. My overview of this particular historical moment provides the political context that immediately precedes the PerformaProtesta in September of the same year. I also claim the multiple routes as mobile sites of economic resistance, national conviviality, and intranational collectivity that clearly contest narratives of criminality. In contrast to a liberal view that aims to humanize asylum seekers while remaining uncritical of the coloniality of nation-state borders, the routes traveled by lxs caravanerxs teach the importance of including Central America as part of the US popular consciousness of “border politics.” Hence, the crossing of the Mexico-Guatemala border marks an important site of protest against the US Mexican border.

Consider that while maintaining a particular sense of national culture and history, lxs caravanerxs make it a point to cross in intranational solidarity across the Mexico-Guatemala border. On March 16th, 2018, caravanerxs marched in protest in the border town of Tapachula, Chiapas, demanding that Mexico stop deportations and accept refugee and asylum applications. When the Mexican Commission of Refugee Aid refused to speak to them, they marched to the Honduras consulate where they protested the unlawful election and violent regime of President Orlando Hernández. Still waiting for the of cial start of the “Way of the Cross” to begin on Easter (April 1st), thousands remained in Tapachula, Chiapas, exasperating resources of governmental, nongovernmental, and grass roots organizations. Caravanerxs therefore depended on the “care of neighbors and other migrants” (2018c) who created improvised kitchens outside the Bethlehem shelter located in Tapachula to provide just one example of the various informal and uid networks that emerge along the routes in intranational solidarity. These networks also inform the various modes of travel that are determined by shifting availability of resources and volunteers, and the ongoing and different arrival and departure times of caravanerxs.

Consider, for example, how according to CE Noticias Financieras, Maya Zepeda leaves Honduras in December of 2017, remains in Tapachula, nds work as a waitress, and then becomes part of the community that provides mutual aid for lxs caravanerxs passing through in March of 2018. When interviewed by a journalist, Maya explains that she is waiting on documentation because “I really want to be Mexican” (2018a). It is unclear what the path for Maya will be: will the Mexican government follow through with promises of documentation and employment? Will she join lxs caravanerxs, perhaps ending up in a different border town or in a US or Mexican detention center? What is clear in her response to the reporter is a strategic crafting of a public image that refutes criminality while teaching the political history of Honduras. She is careful to self-represent as a “good migrant” who promises to work and dutifully assimilate to the (Mexican) nation-state, and, paradoxically, is also critical of the

nation-state when she explains that she and her husband lost their maquiladora jobs making T-shirts because of the economic and social instability created by the violent regime of Honduran President Hernández. Moreover, Maya is but one example of the strategic participation in the transnational dialogue across borders and between various actors that include national governments, activists, and caravanerxs. In response to Trump’s Tweets, for example, “Mexico has the absolute power not to let these large ‘Caravans’ of people enter their country,” and “Democrats do not want borders, that’s why we have drugs and crime,” caravanerxs held signs that read “We are all American by birth,” making political claims to the continent while circumventing the logic of nation-state plenary power (2018c).

When the caravanx of cially left Tapachula, Chiapas on April 1st, the plan was to walk to the “municipality of Mapastepec, where they would board the cargo railroad” that would take them to Ixtepec, Oaxaca (2018b). While there were plans to meet with lawyers in Puebla from April 5–7, at that time, it was still unclear, or at least not made public to the media, if the route would conclude in Mexicali or Tijuana. Upon arrival to Mexico City on April 7, 2018, there was a protest at the US Embassy and the Angel of Independence, and a planned meeting with representatives of the United Nations and the Organization of American States at the Basilica. Later that week, on April 9th, a meeting was scheduled with La COMAR (La Comisíon Mexicana de Ayuda a Refugiados) (Mexican Commission for Refugee Assistance) where the following demands were made: increase the budget for La COMAR, improve processing claims and treatment of migrants who are often placed in detention for up to seven months, and provide identi cation papers (2018b). The arrival to Mexico City announced both the conclusion of the traditional route of the yearly pilgrimage, and the publicized statement that those moving forward to seek asylum in the US would continue to Tijuana. At this point, Pueblo Sin Fronteras, an organization that has historically played an important role in accompanying the yearly pilgrimage, and continues to provide an important site for intranational coalition in the Tijuana-San Diego area and beyond, estimated the number of caravenerxs at 600, a signi cantly smaller group than the 1200 that cohered at the Mexico-Guatemala border a few weeks prior (Santiago 2018).

Given the long history of transborder organizing across the Tijuana-San Diego border, coupled with ICE arresting more than 4,000 immigrants between October 2017 and May 2018, making San Diego among the “top ve counties where ICE arrests [were] concentrated” (James Daria 2019, 24), the transborder region was particularly attentive to the arrival of the 2018 Viacrucis Migrante. Already in place was the aforementioned Pueblo Sin Fronteras decades experience with lxs caravnerxs, the American Friends Service Committee, Al Otro Lado, Casa del Migrante, and the more recently formed San Diego Rapid Response Network (SDRRN).9 The scrutiny of the border was intense given that for the rst time the yearly pilgrimage was broadcast for an international

audience. As part of a proudly anti-immigrant government led by the 45th president, scenes of caravanerxs de antly climbing the partition at Border Field State Park Beach, sitting on top as they waived the Honduran ag and speaking through the gaps in the border fence to the thousands that welcomed them, replayed through the various media outlets as evidence of “crisis at the border.” Whether seen as the manifestation of the hordes of criminals Trump’s border wall could protect us from, or as part of a convoluted policy debate amongst the more liberal, of little interest was how witnessing lxs carvanerxs’ de ant resistance and mass organization reopened wounds and recommitted hearts for so many of us. Absent from the international consciousness were the quieter forms of political praxis and theoretically complex encuentros such as the “March Without Borders” event at Chicano Park where Elder Stan offered prayers in preparation to receive all those that were heading toward the Border Field State Beach to welcome lxs caravanerxs.10

Interviewing Las Maestras: Self-Determination and the Right to Grieve

After my rst interview with Celia (October 8th, 2021), she suggested a follow-up with herself and Cherríe (November 3rd, 2021), so that I could better understand the writing process for the PerformaProtesta. I was curious about where the dialogue came from, how the cantos were composed, and what the process was for improvised revisions since the original script is quite different than what we performed. And, as someone who has never acted before, I was also curious about how the days we spent together were organized. According to Cherríe, the script for the PerformaProtesta was based on testimonios that Detention Resistance collected from caravanerxs incarcerated at Otay Mesa Detention Center. Her students helped transcribe the testimonios which were “all in Spanish, and all [by] men.” She then adapted the transcripts, using a mix of English and Spanish, incorporating the role of two elder teatristas, Elvira and Hortencia. But, as Cherríe explains, the key to the adaptation process happened at the Enclave Caracol in Tijuana where they went with a group of students to speak to organizers and caravanerxs. There she spoke to three women who “were very forthcoming about their lives, about crossing, and la bestia. It was so dense. They experienced so much it could have been several people as much as they experienced.”

Celia also credits Cherríe’s years of experience as a dramaturge for enlisting foundational teatristas and experienced cultural workers that came prepared to guide and improvise the kind of acting workshop that, like the space of ceremonia, enables a healing return to the body. On the rst day of our gathering at Centro, I was incorporated into the process and practiced my lines as part of the “coro.”

The PerformaProtestaa is divided into three parts. Part one—“Lloro”— begins with, “Mi llanto tiene una trayectoria de muchos, muchos años.” As

different actors read the reasons for their llanto, I joined in with the rest of the coro —or Caravanerxs—in a form of call and response and repeated the word “lloro”:

ACTOR: Yo lloro porque abandoné mi tierra.

CORO: Lloro.

ACTOR: Porque dejé a mi madre

CORO: Lloro.

ACTOR: Porque estoy lejos de mi hija

CORO: Lloro.

ACTOR: Por la libertaded que nos robaron las fronteras.

CORO: Lloro.

ACTOR: Porque no sé si regresaré.

Part Two—“The Interrogation/Testimonios” restages the credible fear interview that, as the rst section of this essay explains, is a key component of the asylum process. For example, “The Interrogator” asks

“Did someone harm you?”

“How did they harm you?”

“Did something happen to you on your way towards the border?

“What would happen if you would return?”

But unlike the scene of interrogation, here, caravanerxs are accompanied by ancestral song and a coro that expresses their uncensored digni ed rage. In unison, the coro yells

Porque

Soy gay

Soy indígena

Soy activista en mi pueblo

Soy trans

¿Tenemos que repetirlo? We run the risk de que nos maten. In this way, the PerformaProtesta shifts the scene of interrogation from the violent and solitary encounter with Border Patrol to the collectivity of caravanerxs, the form initially chosen to mitigate fear and express political solidarity. Beyond the immediate temporal and political context, the PerformaProtesta also incorporates the “credible fear interview”—renamed interrogation—into the place of ceremonial practice: the accompaniment and placement of the altar, the movement of the sahumadoras that weave in and out of the formation of the PerformaProtestors, praying over us with the smoke of copal, the repetition of ancestral songs learned through previous ceremonias. The coro refuses to perform the good worker trope, reclaiming their identities that are the cause of their prosecution. They refuse the script of retraumatization the

nation-state insists upon when asylum seekers are forced a type of confession designed to permanently criminalize rather than ever granting credibility as the title suggests (Luibheid and Cantu 2005; Luibheid 2015).

In what follows, I provide a small selection of the interviews. Far from utopic, the interviews, like the PerformaProtesta itself, raise several questions around intergenerational solidarity between Mexicans and Central Americans, between pueblos originarios in the US and in Latin America, between university politics and community organizing, to name a few sites of contestation. Celia’s and Cherríe’s experience of “Entry Denied” to ceremonial life, for example, epitomizes the tenacity of border thinking to migrate beyond the secular parameters of the nation-state. In an act of de ance, however, it is precisely their long history with the labor of ceremonia, a pathway aligned with decades of Xicana internationalist organizing, that enables envisioning new forms of political solidarity with lxs caravanerxs. As a pedagogy of solidarity, Celia and Cherríe do not attempt to humanize caravanerxs nor do they seek “to save the children.” Instead, the PerformaProtesta enables a conscious (re)commitment to a political and nonsecular engagement with the wounds of ancestral, historical, and contemporary family separation that rejects the imposition of family as de ned by the nation-state (Luibheid and Chávez 2020).

“I’m not performing for anybody”: Historicizing el acto and Xicanx Indigena Internationalism

Marcelle: You have such a long history with activismo, Celia, from el movimiento and CASA, to the UN and La Red Xicana Indigena. Can you tell me more about it?

Celia: When I was organizing [with Bert Corona and] for CASA, we would go into restaurants and have these very loud “Know Your Rights” discussions about the different ways in which as an undocumented person you had civil rights. We could feel the audience, just people sitting around us, eating, their little ears would just start listening. We were very loud and very boisterous, and then we would hand out our cards and we would leave. And sometimes people would come after us and say, what do you mean, where are you going, where can I go. And that’s how we used to get people interested at bus stops, on busses, in the garment district.

Bert would send us to the State Department where there were undocumented people waiting for deportation. If people wanted someone to advocate for them, we would go with them into the immigration hearing. Those immigration judges were just like the Luis Valdez characters with the baton, rude and loud and big. And they would scare the shit out of you, for those who are so respectful of authority. You learned how to face them, and defend the people

you were standing with, and not run away even though everything in your body was saying run as fast as you can.

Bert always said that my time at CASA was equivalent to a college education. I worked for them for years as a volunteer. I lived with them, ate with them. We were not necessarily a family but united in the work that we did. I worked with salvadoreños, nicaragüenses. I met people from Chile, Argentina. I met people from Nigeria, Uganda. I met folks that were all dealing with immigration issues. He opened an of ce for me, and said, “Here’s the legal room, and you’re in charge. You and a lawyer. You’re going to create the defense system.” What the hell? We just did it. There was no doubt. He kind of had a way: here’s $50 go over there and do that. He used to give you a little piece of paper with somebody’s phone number, money for gas, and then a mission. You got sent out and you had to go accomplish and gure out how do it. That form of advocacy, that form of being engaged, of not having everything done for you, [it’s not] like service learning [where] everything’s organized for you. [With service learning,] you just arrive, and you feel like you’re empowered but you don’t really get an opportunity to really know what it’s like to build the pathway.

Our generation dealt with colonial projects in Africa and South America and in the Americas and Asia. So [working with the UN] was just the next piece of Indigenous peoples really looking at those politics and really trying to reckon with how they were not only going to survive but impact and speak for planetary survival.

I have to say that other than the [Venceremos Brigade] to Cuba and working for Bert, and ceremonial life, the UN experience was the most eye opening and expansive I have had. Listening to Indigenous people from all over the world and realizing that the identity of indigeneity is much broader than what we know here in the north and North America. There are so many different ways each government, each country, contends with its Indigenous peoples, and many different ways Indigenous peoples contend with their governments.

What really interested me was that we as Chicanos shared a common experience with many Indigenous peoples around the world in diaspora removed from their lands, in dealing with the nation-state, in dealing with capitalism, in trying to identify a sense of who we are outside of the original markers and accepted notions of who we are.

[In participating in the Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, I thought about] how would we agree upon the word indigeneity? How would that be for Indigenous children that are coming from Mexico and Central America? I was reading through the DRIP [Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples] and it was very dif cult to apply because we’re a transnational people. It would look different than in the US because there they guide themselves by Federal law—what is native, how it applies to native children protected by their native tribes, who gets to foster and who gets to adopt if something happens to the child’s family.

Flor Crisóstomo made a comment before the UN oor that because her children were Mexican born and still in Mexico, nobody cared about them in the same way that they cared about the children that are here. In other words, US-born children still count on migrating their parents on some level even if it’s psychological. We always talk about these are American US citizens and their families are being deported. That kind of discussion appeals to the idea of the American citizen having the right to their family and children. But she commented that nobody really cared about her as a mother being separated from her children because their children being in Mexico did not have a right to their family because they were not US citizens. How can we apply the DRIP to her? Because she is Indigenous, she is Zapotec. It didn’t.

I was watching children being incarcerated and knowing there is protection for Indigenous children, but not for migrant children. How can we protect the rights of migrant Indigenous children. How do you differentiate that? What happens to the rest of the kids who are urban, native children, mestizo children and our separated?11

Does the colonizer care if I cry?: Ceremonia, Collaboration, and Collective Grief

Marcelle: How did the project emerge?

Celia: I just felt so sad. Seeing the children, it really opened up wounds that I thought I had worked so hard to reckon with. I had gone to healers, years and years of ceremonial work, of ceremonial commitments. I kept asking myself, why am I not storming those doors? Why am I not over there, storming those doors? Why am I so passive? I see this happening. What am I doing? Just standing here? I couldn’t understand why we as a society were not knocking down those doors. I’m still asking that question.

What am I going to do when those kids come home? When they return, some of them surely will, what will we have to say to them? How will we explain what we did or didn’t do? I felt I had to let go of the grief. I felt like I had to go over there, on that dirt, on that ground where all those little feet had traveled. I needed to let go of this pain, this llanto, this rage, and pain. I felt those kids. I just felt them: what it’s like to be separated, to lose, to not know what’s going to happen tomorrow, to be beset upon by adults, to not really have a way to defend yourself. I knew that.

That’s why I wanted to do the piece, and then I spoke with Cherríe. I said to her, if it were up to me, I would just go take my blanket, go over there, light a re, go cry. Then I thought, maybe, maybe this is not just about me. Maybe this is about us. Maybe we can call on all of us who call ourselves warriors for the people because there are some of us who have had that language in our mouth at one time or another: warrior for the people.

I felt like as women, all the work that we’ve done, that maybe we needed to come together. Maybe that one prayer, that one llanto, would at least allow us to see one another. Cherríe helped me organize it in such a way that we could bring our students, we could gather with other women. I asked her if she could organize as a director. Cherríe devised a way of calling on the women that she knew. The word began to spread that way: calling on the curanderas, on the re keepers, las maestras, the people that keep the re going in our ceremonies. We started thinking about what it would actually be like. It was very interesting for me because when I was little, I really couldn’t cry. I couldn’t cry in front of my grandmother because her grief was bigger than mine. You know how it is with adults. Her grief was bigger than mine, but I couldn’t ever really have it. With my stepfather, he just refused to allow me to have any expression of feeling whatsoever. He just bullied me into not showing him my humanity. So to cry in front of people that I love is the hardest thing I can do. I can cry at a commercial, or a cartoon, but to cry in front of someone I love is very hard. So I was telling Cherríe that, which is why we moved into the acto, into theatre. And that was really interesting because it challenged so much of our Mexicanness, of who we are, how we have been trained to hold on to our shyness. I saw so many of the muchachas, they were really really challenged with the idea. Even my own granddaughter, she said, hmmm, I’m not performing for anybody. It was really deep, to see how that aspect of us, that letting go. Expression is a privilege, and so many of us don’t have that privilege of free expression. Our attempt was to come together in our grief, and to think of it as power. To think of it as a way of enacting our power even in our grief. Does the colonizer care if we cry? I doubt it. But I felt that the children might care. Maybe they might see it, hear it.

I want us to feel again. It’s the llanto that allows us to feel. We have to see each other, witness each other, join together in our release. I’ve always believed from ceremonial life that the healing that we do in community is as important as the work we do on ourselves individually.

Cherríe, with her experience as a dramaturge, and the years she has in directing and also writing, she helped organize and brought some folks that worked with us to allow us to be able to do that llanto, to be able to get in our bodies and to be able to release it. We took the component of the healing aspect that was coming together to release, and then utilized that as part of the acto, the kind of acto-practice that is in our cultura.

Marcelle: Can we talk about the days we spent together? What do you remember about the rst day at Centro?

Celia: [Doris Difarnecio] pressed so many of us into service. The idea of dancing across the room is my worst nightmare. You realize how hard it is for us to take up space and trust each other in the taking up of space and that mattered. That

in itself was a ceremony. That piece of it, even resisting, however we responded, as preparation for us in terms of our own relationship to our own bodies and our own voices.

It was interesting having to collaborate with all of the mujeres that worked the altar: the purpose of the altar, where it needed to be centered, how it needed to be worked. I didn’t really know whether I needed to push the altar or not push the altar. There was the altar that I brought, and then I realized, the mujeres, in their practice, have their own way of doing things. We had to allow everyone to bring what they know and to use that the way they know rather than impose an art form or an altar or some idea. That was a lesson in terms of collaboration: how to adjust and allow people to bring their best and allow what it is that they have. The people that came around were really wonderful, really sincere, very practiced, and they owned it, grown mujeres. The women that had worked together before and the women who had not worked together before knew and assembled themselves around the altars. And kept doing it over and over again. I was very honored, very blessed that they came.

The medicine of it, the real medicine of it was the call. That we called out to all these folks and they came. The fact that these women came, that medicine itself was really important. It taught me so much about how you make a call, and then how you let go. That was the prayer. Besides the altar making and the time we came together, it was the fact that everybody came. The fact they felt it in themselves. That to me was the start of the ceremony.

Cherríe: The trust was overwhelming. That people can show up and just trust. It’s amazing.

Marcelle: Can you talk about the second day? Why downtown San Diego?

Celia: What really caught my attention was how innocuous it looked. Everything was in the basement, below ground, and that everything just looked like a regular business park. It reminded of those regimes, those Nazi regimes, those repressive regimes that reminded me of Chile, reminded me of the disappeared. You can’t see in the surface that something is happening, and right there in our very own city below the surface. These folks are being arrested, they’re lives are at stake really, their whole life is at stake in that moment, in that decision to escape whatever they were trying to escape. Whether it was hunger or poverty, or political repression, only to nd themselves again facing the might of the United States immigration system. And lost, they are faceless, we don’t know who they are. We don’t see it. We really don’t pay attention to it. We think that somehow, it’s not important if those people go missing, those bodies. It’s amazing to me that politically that we’ve accepted this so much so in our society. So that’s why we went there. I wanted us to make it visible.

Cherríe: My feeling was, when we were there, all that work that we went through with the script wasn’t needed. I felt like the real deal was the ceremony. All of those parts: the making of the altares, walking in and out, we didn’t really need any words. We had to have microphones, we had to have all these things to be heard, and right in the middle I’m going, throw that out. There is a relationship between ceremony and performance because it’s all ritual. That is the origins of performance and theater—ritual. In this moment, it was a rito. That’s what was required. The words were not required.

What really moved me was the ceremonial part. For all the rehearsals we did, ironically, I think that was all good, because we spent time together. And we got to know each other. I don’t think it was that training that got people to feel the way they felt. It was going down to Otay Mesa, being there, and hearing that man call in and call us compañeras.

The trouble is that we were disconnected from our real audience, which is them, the people inside. So performance to perform that wasn’t the point, the point was to protest. And to protest you have got to stir up some trouble. But fundamentally, it was really the llanto, it was the prayer. Even going to the beach, that was just fabulous, wonderful. It was just right. You know when things are right.

Marcelle: How did you feel the difference between being at the federal building, being in the city, and then being at the detention center? It felt very different to me to be in those different spaces.

Celia: It was very different because we could see the prison, what we think of as prison already. You could see the barbed wire, you could see the stone walls, you could see the desolation around it. When you go to any prison, you start to really feel it, the barrenness of it and what that means. We also got more into our prayer. The rst day we basically started that prayer, by the second day we were in it. I think that’s why, to me, we felt it more. I think I expected more people to come out. I was surprised when we weren’t joined by folks and community. I wondered about that.

Marcelle: As you were talking, I began thinking that it wasn’t just that a lot of people didn’t show up. Walking up to the detention center, but mostly walking away. Walking away was the hardest part.

Celia: Me and Cherríe, we tease each other. Sometimes we say, I really want to reoccupy my Mexican Americanness. I never referred to myself as a Mexican American. I always felt I was Chicana. I was Mexican, and when I got to college I liked the terminology, Chicana, because it connected me up with other young people like me, that understood what we had grown up through. There was a politic in it that I still love and hold on to. That self-naming and that decision

that it’s a political spiritual journey that we’re on toward self-determination. So being alone in that, it’s how I have been feeling all along. I feel the kind of hatred, desprecio, that our people have been shown over these years. It’s not the rst time or the only time. We all grew up with it in one way or another we felt it. But now it’s just so loud. It’s just so loud. And it’s unexamined.

Even amongst ourselves. I feel like now we have divisions between us and Central Americans. I’m speaking about that a little bit because I was really surprised. I went to a meeting with these young folks that were talking about wanting Central American Studies. They were busy talking about their experiences with Mexicans, talking about Mexican hegemony. They kept looking at me every time they talked like somehow, I had broken it. You may call it hegemony, but we don’t have that kind of power. And I’m wondering: who is brokering this? Who is bringing this conversation to bear? How can we see one another again? And see that this generational struggle over 40 years is nothing? If we think of ourselves as continental people, then we can say that we have been engaged in this struggle for 500 years. We have 30,000 years of relationship, 60,000 years of relationship, with the last 500 in con ict maybe. And what’s the con ict? It’s the nation-state con ict. Not us. Not ours.

So politically speaking, the experience I’ve had is not only having the state, and racialized society looking at things Mexican either as victims, as invisible, or as the enemy, then having those of us who we should be in league with also looking at us as if we have something that we’re not sharing or that we’re standing in the way of. This is who we are at this moment, this political moment, and it’s something we must pay attention to. It’s almost like saying you can show solidarity, but we’re not in league. You can just be an ally. What the hell are we talking about ally? What does that mean?

We’re in need of plática and education. This is the only medicine for what’s happening right now: the process of educating ourselves about what is going on in the world and what our role in it is. As teachers, this is the next generation of issues that are coming to our desk, how are we prepared to handle it?

Not all Ceremony is Healing: Rethinking Family Separation

Marcelle: I want to talk about sexual desire. How do you see that in your practice, and in your ceremony? For me it feels very different. I don’t know if it’s because I came to these things very late in life, in my mid 40s, but I have always had the real privilege of being around queer women and queer Chicanas. It’s a very different experience of ceremony. It’s a very different experience of even being taught something. I don’t know if you see it as just who you are, just as part of your practice. I don’t know how to say it but I want to recognize the difference and not take it for granted because not all ceremonies are healing. Not all people are welcoming in this way. Not all people allow you your politics fully. So I feel very lucky, and I don’t know how it happened but I want

to recognize that difference in some way. I don’t know if that’s a question or something you can speak to.

Cherríe: Celia and I, next year is 25 years that we’ve been together, and then there was ve years before that of being friends, of knowing each other. It’s a curious thing because as you get older, people think they can forget you have a sexuality. You’re supposed to smile when I say this because it’s funny. We laugh at it. Because it’s actually not true. Many of us continue to have a sexual life. It’s so integral to who we are at this age in our lives.

Speaking for myself, the work of being out, and owning it, for most all of my life, and then when Celia and I got together, and we began to go to ceremony, we experienced so much homophobia. We came in as a family, and we were not really. Even when it wasn’t blatant you felt it anyway, you always felt like an outsider, because things were so masculinist. Then we started working with road women. The best medicine ceremonies we were going to is when Celia sat in the position of the road woman because then it was not an issue. The men were there, and the women were there, and it was ne. But everything was so heterosexual from the young ones to the old ones. It was better to get the young boys into ceremony instead of young women. And you saw young parejas that were heterosexual, but we remained invisible.

But you’re absolutely right if you think about the llanto collectivo, there were so many heterosexual women, and plenty of queer women, and it was all ne because we aren’t studying men. Nobody was deferring to men. And sexuality, if you’re talking about desire, this is the thing with both Celia and me, what I have always felt since the time I was coming out and writing about being a lesbian, I always felt really very strongly that what queer women were doing for heterosexual women was allowing them a sexuality. Because we’re the ones that were forced to talk about desire, and they weren’t talking about desire. We talked about desire because we had to. All these years later, now you see how Chicana heterosexual women are not threatened by us. They are feminist in really integral way and there is a ceremonial life attached to that as well. We’re hermanas.

And as we’ve grown older there’s a different kind of energy that happens with people also feeling the component of [us] being elders in that context, but it doesn’t desexualize us. Me and Celia are a pareja in public. If they want to desexualize that, that’s their problem. If you would have asked me 30 years ago if this was possible, that you could be with heterosexual Chicanas and queer Chicanas, that we could make ceremony together and share and it wouldn’t be an issue, I never would have believed it then because the homophobia was so rampant.

Celia: Well, I think I have to back up from where you started because I always have to start with my mother’s language. I mean I call her my mother because

my grandmother was my mother because my mother died so young. My grandmother always spoke of us being women alone in the world. She said because of that, I should never expect to have support, not even from other women. She said that because she felt that other women all took their power from men. We have no men in front of us, and we have no men behind us, therefore you have to be self-sustaining and have great integrity.

This idea of not having a male gure behind me, really began to in uence me as I started to grow up and I started to see that there were many invitations by men for partnering up for power. I kept saying I have my own thing; I have my own road. I have things I have to do; I don’t have time for that. It had nothing to do with desire or sexuality. I just knew I had my own road, and I knew my road was pretty female. It took me a long time to admit that to myself because I was being in uenced by the politics and homophobia and my own fears. I had to through my own healing. My own healing had to do with getting me back to myself.

What I realized in the healing, very publicly, was that for me to take the rst step toward having come toward wholeness, I had to admit I was a lesbian publicly. This was important. This was me. This was the result of the healing which kind of freaked out the medicine people a little bit. Because they said don’t go tell people that I did that to you. Don’t go tell people that you became a lesbian at my sweat lodge. There was a lot of, keep it on the down low. Are you sure? Shouldn’t you have more interpretations? No, no. I’m sure, I know this because I got the word. I saw it from the spirits. I saw it in myself.

That was my early formation in the medicine ceremonies among the culture of Chicano Indigenous world, way back in the 1970s. So, there was no place to put this until I started to really encounter that there were other women. There was a woman’s world that I was not aware of, having three children, being in my little Sacramento world, then the political world that I occupied among Chicanos. But I quickly began to see that in many ways I was an empowered person, many things had empowered me. I kept trying to nd my way to a woman healer which I eventually did.

We learned to make res. People taught us to make re, that was very important, that was essential. People began to be able to pray for themselves, and hold ceremonies for themselves, and not have to necessarily ask permission of men. They themselves felt as they began to practice this because they felt they couldn’t do it any other way. Because it was not necessarily always men’s homophobia. It was women’s internalized sexism, that male identi cation. You knew that there was a man at the other end of their leadership, the elder, the grandpa, the uncle, that they checked in with. So, it was a mixed bag. Sometimes they were open, sometimes they always have to ask permission. This fear, this you need to be careful with what you do, was one of those little metaphors for you need to ask permission of a man.

Because when you ask permission of the grandmas, many of them really didn’t know. Then you really start to realize that some women’s practices were obliterated, were fragmented. What was left was what was assembled after colonialism with patriarchy already making a deep mark on women’s leadership. I saw that the grandmothers couldn’t really tell us necessarily how to free ourselves because they weren’t free.

When I met Cherríe, a lot of language came with that meeting, a lot of understanding. Walking in together to a ceremony, as soon as you walk in with Cherríe, all of a sudden, we’re suspect, we’re there to change things, we’re there to do something, they don’t know what. That’s how deep the patriarchy is in terms of our spiritual practice. As we’ve gotten older, we haven’t been quite as shocking to people. I always gured it’s because the older you get people don’t assume you as a sexual person anymore.

That political aspect of the spiritual—sexuality—that is a politic. There’s something there that really matters that we have to get back to as women. We have to come back to our bodies. That’s Cherríe’s work, the real basis of her work that I’ve seen over the years. It’s still hard to reconcile. I don’t think it’s all done yet. I think we’re still dealing with that issue so thank you for asking that question because it matters. This idea of the body and desire and who we are as women, why we can have ceremony and why we can sit in front of the re. I don’t have any problem with it. I can sit in front of that re. I can hold the medicine. I’m not afraid of holding that space. But it creates this issue around other people who begin to question what right I have to that. And I always say I don’t, it’s not a right, it’s a responsibility. There’s something about the language we have around us being more important than our relationships to each other. As women, we know how to pray. We know how to pray and let other people say their prayers. It’s as simple as that.

feet sinking into sand

I stand at the edge where earth touches ocean Oigo el llorido del mar, el respiro del aire.

—Gloria Anzaldúa

I imagine my dad as a little boy.

He used to tell me how he remembers his parents, afraid of the concentration camps arriving to Tunisia, sent him to hide in a Catholic orphanage. On one of his dad’s visits, he remembers the beating he got when he said, “The Jews killed Jesus.” It’s hard to explain the laughter and complete joy in my father’s voice when he would imitate my grandfather saying, “I’ll kill you myself before I let you talk like this.” The beating didn’t matter because that’s the day my grandfather decided to take him home.

There were many episodes of what I now recognize as immobilizing depression for my father. Days, weeks . . . maybe months of silence. Sometimes I would sit next to him, stare at the thick scar on his neck, and ask, What happened there? He would say, That’s when they left me for dead in the streets.

A French police of cer had slit his throat and left him to bleed out in the street.

Then stories of the Tunisian revolution, of losing and nding the jacket where he taped all of his family’s money at the bus stop where he got too hot, of refugee camps, of sur ng and the wood surfboard that broke his nose, see, it’s still crooked, laughter, of sleeping in unlocked cars, of running away from home and moving to the states, and always the same advice: you’re going to have to work double or triple just to be able to sit at the table next to Joe Shmoe, to prove you’re someone to anyone. If you want to make something of yourself don’t look to a man and good luck because I have nothing to give you.

There are many ways to die. To stop living.

I nally know what you mean by Joe Shmoe… laughter.

I want to live.

Your grief is not bigger than mine because it is not yours or mine.

Merecemos y sabemos cómo politicizar nuestro llanto colectivo.

Nuestra lucha es por la vida.

Marcelle Maese is an Associate Professor of English and Director of Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of San Diego. She is part of Red Feminismos, Cultura, y Poder, a transnational collective of decolonial feminist scholars and artists, and is a member of Detention Resistance, an abolitionist collective that works in accompaniment with those imprisoned at Otay Mesa Detention Center. Her writing has been published in Frontiers, Arizona Quarterly, and qui parle. Her chapter, “Historical Materialism, The Decolonial Imaginary, and Chicana Feminist Theories in the Flesh” appears in Dialectical Imaginaries: Materialist Approaches to US Latino/a Literature (2018) and is also available in translation as part of the collection, Perspectivas feministas de la interseccionalidad (México, Logos Editores—UAM Xochimilco, 2021). She is currently writing her book manuscript, Xicanx Poetics: Confession, Song, Criminality, and the Coloniality of Gender, a study of the

relationship between song and confession, social and literary forms that historicize the colonial relation between legal redress and nonsecular protest.

Notes

1. In place of the English term the caravans, I use the term lxs caravanerxs as a textual strategy for signaling the long history of decolonial resistance that connects asylum seekers to Indigenous land and water rights. In contrast to the chaotic spectacle of third world poverty produced and circulated by mainstream reporting on the caravans, the term lxs caravanerxs names a desire to study the political strategies that inform mass movements for self-determination that think beyond humanization within the secular parameters of the nation-state. I also claim that in an act of self-naming, caravanerxs question the legal categories of migrant, refugee, and asylum seeker while advancing a erce negotiation of governmental frameworks for legal redress. For histories of resistance, see Suyapa Portillo Roots of Resistance: A Story of Gender, Race, and Labor on the North Coast of Honduras (2021), Roberto Lovato Unforgetting: A Memoir of Family, Migration, Gangs and Revolution in the Americas (2020), and Alicia María Siu’s artist talk for her mural “From Our Ancestors” presented at Centro Cultural de la Raza (October 11, 2020).

2. While the yearly pilgrimage during Holy Week is known as the Viacrucis Migrante, with each year sometimes given a particular name, for example, Viacrucis de Refugiados in 2017, and Viacrucis Migrante en la lucha (2018), caravanxs are also coordinated throughout the year. The widely circulated image of Maria Meza running from teargas, pulling her two daughters, Celia and Saira, by the hand, happened in November 2018, two months after the llanto colectivo PerformaProtesta. See “Honduran Migrant Seen Fleeing Tear Gas With Her Toddlers is Now in US”

3. For a succinct overview of the violence faced when migrating through Mexico, see Daniela Barba-Sánchez “On Crossing Deserts and Hostile Territories: Sources of Vulnerability for Central American Immigrants in Mexico” in the 2018 –2019 study The Migrant Caravan: From Honduras to Tijuana: An Analysis by the Center of U.S.-Mexican Studies Fellows. For an overview of transborder organizing in the Tijuana/San Diego region in response to the 2018 Viacrucis Migrantes en la Lucha, an introduction to the asylum process, and cursory history of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, or “The Northern Triangle,” see the same report. For an overview of Executive Orders, see “A Timeline of the Trump Administrator’s Efforts to End Asylum” provided by the National Immigrant Justice Center (National Immigrant Justice Center).

4. Shortly after, Detention Resistance became its own grassroots abolitionist collective.

5. Throughout this essay, I use the difrasismo PerformaProtesta. The use of difrasismo allows me to situate the historical speci city of the form of Un llanto colectivo— el acto —within a tradition of Xicanx poetics. See Alfred Arteaga’s Chicano Poetics: Heterotexts and Hybridities (1997).

6. For additional writing on Un llanto colectivo, see publications by Jade PowerSotomayor (forthcoming 2023), as well as Alexis Meza’s and Leslie Quintanilla’s “No Estan Solxs: Mourning Anti-Migrant State Violence as Countersurveillance Praxis” in Violence, Migration, and Detention during Trump’s Reign of Terror and Beyond, edited by Arturo J. Aldama and Jessica Ordaz. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, (forthcoming 2024).

7. Of course, I am indebted to Xicana feminist theorizing of the relation between the political and the sacred: Gloria Anzaldúa, Amanda Ellis, Elisa Facio, AnaLouise Keating, Irene Lara, Cherríe Moraga, Laura E. Pérez, Christina Garcia Lopez, Celia Herrera Rodríguez, and Suzy Zepeda to name those I have studied most closely.

8. See de nition of “crimmigration” in Cuauhtémoc García Hernández, César. 2013. “Creating Crimmigration.” Discretion & Deference: Immigrants, Citizens, and the Law (6): 1457-1515. https://digitalcommons.law.byu.edu/lawreview/vol2013/iss6/4.

9. Cofounded in December 2017 by “the ACLU of San Diego & Imperial Counties, the San Diego Organizing Project, and SEIU local 221 in partnership with a coalition of more than 40 immigrant rights and social service organizations, attorneys, and faith and community leaders,” the San Diego Rapid Response Network operates a hotline for “ongoing immigration emergencies such as checkpoints, raids, arrests, and harassment,” and provides temporary housing, “travel assistance, nutrition services, medical screenings, legal assistance, and nancial support for asylum seekers” (Sand Diego Rapid Response Network).

10. Dr. Stanley Rodriguez received his doctorate from the University of California, San Diego, and currently teaches at Kumeyaay Community College. For information on March Without Borders see https://www.facebook.com/events/112509286275967/ and https://www.facebook.com/PuebloSF/videos/2145493692143987

11. See Toro-Morn, Maura I., and Nilda Flores Gonzalez. 2011. “Transitional Latina Mother—Activists in the Americas: The Case of Elvira Arellano and Flor Crisostomo”. Journal of the Motherhood Initiative for Research and Community Involvement 2 (2): https:// jarm.journals.yorku.ca/index.php/jarm/article/view/34540; and The United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, especially “Plight of Migrants” https://www .un.org/development/desa/indigenouspeoples/unpfii-sessions-2/sixth.html. On Xicana Indigeneity, see Luna, Jennie. 2012. “Building a Xicana Indígena Philosophical Base” Hispanic/ Latino Issues in Philosophy 11(20): 9 –16.

References

Arteaga, Alfred. 1997. Chicano Poetics: Heterotexts and Hybridities. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

CE Noticias Financieras English. 2018a. “Mexico delivers visas to migrants.” CE Noticias Finaniceras English, April 4, 2018. https://advance-lexis-com.sandiego.idm.oclc .org/api/document?collection=news&id=urn:contentItem:5S1M-58M1-JBJH-J4XM -00000-00&context=1516831.

———. 2018b. “They Expect the Arrival of 700 People to CDMX by Carvana Migrante.” CE Noticias Financieras English.

———. 2018c. “Trump lashes Mexico and demands to stop the Migrant Viacrucis.”

CE Noticias Financieras English. https://advance-lexis-com.sandiego.idm.oclc.org /api/document?collection=news&id=urn:contentItem:5S18-X4P1-JBJH-J330-00000 -00&context=1516831.

Daria, James, Carolina Valdivia, and Abigail Thornton. 2019. “The Response of Civil Society on Both Sides of the US-Mexican Border.” In The Migrant Carvan: From Honduras to Tijuana An Analsyis by the Center for US-Mexican Studies Fellows (2018 –2019). San Diego: Center for US—Mexican Studies UC San Diego School of Global Policy & Strategy.

Luibheid, Eithne. 2015 Entry Denied: Controlling Sexuality at the Border. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Luibheid, Eithne and Karma R. Chávez. 2020. Queer and Trans Migrations: Dynamics of Illegalization, Detention, and Deportation. Champagne: University of Illinois Press.

Luibheid, Eithne and Lionel Cantu. 2005. Queer Migrations: Sexuality, US Citizenship, and Border Crossings. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

McKee, Irwin, and Aída Silva. 2020. “Introducción: La historia insólita de la caravana migrante y del hondureño Douglas Oviedo.” In Caravaneros, edited by Douglas Oviedo et al. Mexico City: Festina Publicaciones.

Morrissey, Kate. 2017. “Many from refugee caravan remain in detention.” The San Diego Union-Tribune. https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/immigration/sd-me -asylum-processing-20170610-story.html.

Latino Rebels. 2017. “Eight Detained Asylum Seekers Resume Hunger Strike at Adelanto Detention Center.” Latino Rebels. https://www.latinorebels.com/2017/06/22 /eight-detained-asylum-seekers-resume-hunger-strike-at-adelanto-detention-center/. San Diego Rapid Response Network. “About Us.” San Diego Rapid Response Network, accessed November 11, 2021. https://rapidresponsesd.org/about-us/.

Schmidt Camacho, Alicia R. 2008. Migrant Imaginaries: Latino Cultural Politics in the US-Mexico Borderlands, Nation of Newcomers. New York: New York University Press.

Shoichet, Catherine E. and Leyla Santiago. 2018. “The Migrant Caravan is Still Coming. Trump Says Don’t Let Them In.” CNN. https://advance-lexis-com.sandiego.idm .oclc.org/api/document?collection=news&id=urn:contentItem:5S51-STM1-JBPX -X 4T2-00000-00&context=1516831.

Thornton, Abigail. 2019. “The History of Caravans as a Strategic Response.” In The Migrant Caravan: From Honduras to Tijuana: An Analysis by the Center for Mexican Studies Fellows (2018 –2019), edited by James Daria and Abigail Thornton. San Diego: Center for US-Mexican Studies UC San Diego School of Global Policy & Strategy.

Birth of the Universe

Brenda Quezada

The Sun sets the sky as it’s rippling it with red waves of scorching lava, swirls of orange-pink cotton candy clouds, with baby shades of blue tides that sweep up the ocean oor and into the atmosphere.

Brother sun is now asleep, and the night has brought its stars to light the constellations

I must climb up to the roof somehow I need to climb up to the roof because I must take a good look at Mother Moon.

As I lay back on the roof shingles the sandpaper is scraping my delicate skin like a cat's tongue

I’m obsessed with the way I watch Moon undress as she puts Earth to rest Feeling her breeze nipping my breasts, I make love to Mother Moon while the stars expose our naked esh in the dark We create constellations as she takes me to a climax that transcends into a milky way beyond the cosmos

BIRTHING THE UNIVERSE

©2023 Feminist Formations, Vol. 35 No. 1 (Spring) pp. 293–294

Brenda Quezada is a Queer, Mexican-Indigenous writer and poet based in the Central Valley of California as an undergraduate at Fresno State University. Her academic work is rooted in her passion for queer theory, feminism, topics of gender and ethnicity, while she embodies decolonial interrogations of systems of oppression through her intersectional resistance. Brenda’s poetry and spoken word express her joy in the liberation of autonomy with her self-re exive nature, as she believes writing is a healing tool passed down by her ancestors’ persistence. Brenda enjoys punk rock, drag, spending time with her three dogs in nature and writing poems under the moon. She aspires to get a master’s degree in creative non ction writing and publish books of poetry and memoir.

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Resisting the Settler Gaze: California Indigenous Feminisms

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Xicana/x Indígena Futures: Re-rooting through Traditional Medicines

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A Multiplicity of Selves-in-Coalition: A Decolonial Feminist Witnessing Through Autoethnography

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State Disappearances in the United States: A Decolonial Feminist Analysis About the Enactment of State Terror on Undocumented Immigrants by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)

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Lxs Caravanerxs and Nonsecular Protest: Rethinking Migrant Family Separation with Un llanto colectivo

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Birth of the Universe