About Activist Explorer
I am an activist anti-colonial anthropologist, writer, and popular educator. As a young person I lived for nearly two decades in Mexico and I worked in the nationwide popular education movement, participated in founding two political-cultural organizations, and studied anthropology. My school, Escuela Nacional de Antropología, “turned on its head” the traditional anthropology which developed as a colonial tool to study the colonized for the purpose of controlling them. Rather than study “the other” as an outsider, the anthropologist’s focus is on one’s own community dynamics, relations, and cultures in the context of the unequal structures we live in, notably capitalism, imperialism and colonialism. Though born in the US, I consider my community to be the international community of activists, and the goal of study not only to understand but to participate in the work of social transformation.
I focus on activist culture, the ways people engaged in any aspect of collective social transformation communicate, think together, interact, and relate to one another and the world. Within this broad field I focus on:
- activist emotional landscape and activist everyday life, i.e., the particularities of being an activist (however one came to that path) as a condition which puts us existentially in contradiction with the status quo and how this affects both one’s emotional panorama and one’s daily life;
- Life in the liberated zone, exploring the spaces people open up in the midst of movements where they experiment with new ways of living and interacting, in keeping with the principles they are working to establish more broadly in society through their movements. In other words, practicing what they are preaching;
- Representation of activists in the cultural narrative, as individuals and in our movements, especially in fiction. I write and work with others on creating fiction in diverse genres with stories centering activist characters and social movements. Also, I critique the stereotyping and erasure of activists from mainstream and even progressive literature. I work in English and Spanish, but focus on the former because the US, as my country of origin, is the center of the empire and fiction is a big part of the narrative control it exercises in the world. Life in the Liberated Zone is also the name of the independent imprint for fiction featuring activists of our Activist Fiction Writers’ Circle.
- Solidarity now, focusing on the question of internal division and how activist organizations counter it.
I am starting a series of conversations with activists exploring these topics as they relate to their own experience and thinking–though of course bring in broader info. The idea is that as activists we focus outward on the world we are working to transform, yet the sustainability of our communities doing this work depends on understanding our own experience as people who must live within the belly of the beast we are working to transform. I feel that reflecting on how this contradictory condition affects our capacity to do this work can help us better sustain ourselves and handle the long-term challenges of activist life, whether working for a just peace for Palestine, fighting fascism, global climate catastrophe, or any of our other urgent (and totally interrelated) goals.
