Letter to my children from a place called Land

Abstract

Initially written in the form of an essay, this letter is written to my children from a place called Land. It unveils the entanglements coloniality creates in young, racialized, and gendered lives through the colonial logics structuring childhood, memory, and borders. From a diasporic perspective, Land emerges as flesh rooted in the saberes, the knowledge of our mothers and grandmothers. Remembering and returning to the places we call home, in my case, US/Mexico border, help us grapple with trauma and also learn ways people respond to the violence. I illuminate the colonial wounds we bare and the knowledge we carry to suture and heal.

This is a letter to my children from a place called Land. Initially written in the form of an essay, it was meant to unsettle the colonial logics structuring childhood, borders, and memory. The essay aimed to unveil the colonial violence inherent in each of them. It was to state the entanglements coloniality (Lugones, 2007; Quijano, 2000) engenders in our young lives, and at the end, it was to offer remembering as a vital methodology to connect to place, experience, and learn familiar ways to suture our wounds (Smith, 1999). Then I read Stoh:Lo Nation author and poet Lee Maracle’s I Am Woman: Native Perspective on Sociology and Feminism (1996), and my being was altered and in turn so was my writing. I made connections between Maracle, the uncompromising work in This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (1983), and the writing of many Indigenous women and Women of Color. They lay bare the colonial wound of life questioned by the historical classification of people and land (Mignolo, 2005), and through their writing, they commit to the discomfort that tending and suturing bring about. The way they invoke the places and lands they experienced during their youth is a notion of sorts to return to themselves, to the child inside, to be guided by them to speak of what was once beyond language: violence, trauma, and beauty (Angelou, 2008; Queeley, 2011). I refer to notions of return as epistemologies that expose the urgency and necessity to return to the places we call home, which can also be the “sites of trauma” inflicted by historical violence, such as enslavement, genocide, colonization, and militarization, in order to grapple with the trauma and learn familiar ways to heal our wounds (Queeley, 2011).

In conversations about my research with elders living near Brownsville/Matamoros, at the easternmost point of the US/Mexico border, the notion to return was powerful. They remembered to reflect on how they made sense of life lived through the making of place, experiencing violence and learning ways to heal, unsettling the coloniality of childhood, borders, and memory through this process. The omnipotence of violence in both their recollections and in the immediate political moment spoke to the way children from the global south are forced to migrate, cross, settle, and die on or through nation-state borders due to the long history of land dispossession, displacement, and enslavement. Writing became an act of ripping the veil from the logics that pierce into our lives, our young lives, and to demand the immediate halt of US imperial invasions around the globe displacing children and their loved ones.

In Speaking in Tongues: A Letter to 3rd World Women Writers, Gloria Anzaldúa (1983) told us to

throw away abstraction and the academic learning, the rules, the map and compass. Feel your way without blinders. To touch more people, the personal realities and the social must be evoked—not through rhetoric but through blood and pus and sweat. (p. 173)

Thirty-six years have passed since Anzaldúa explained what it means to write through blood, pus, and sweat. I was 6 years old when her letter was first published in This Bridge. I wonder how I would have read her then. I read her today and her voice is haunting. Anzaldúa and Maracle write through the “blood, pus, and sweat” of an old, infected wound to remind us that we are still experiencing an “open wound” and that we still have work to do to treat, suture, and heal. Their work illuminates and legitimizes a messy process through which racialized and gendered people defend their life. Reading deeply about how coloniality structures childhood, borders, and memory helped me appreciate the notion to return to ourselves, to the child inside of us, and to give meaning to all those places and experiences that were once beyond words, to a place I call Land.

Therefore, what began as an essay morphed into a letter imbued with a sense of urgency to speak directly to my children about the colonial wounds we bear, to learn familiar ways to talk with my children about coloniality and violence without damaging their young lives, and to illuminate the beauty in those they love and can trust. Coloniality is nothing less than insidious in all of its manifestations. The processes coloniality engenders seek to control the world’s populations, to subsume all land, commonwealth, and ways of being within a global and modern world-system, the central elements of which are capitalism and Eurocentrism (Quijano, 2000). By hiding these violent processes behind the idea of modernity, capitalism and Eurocentrism work through projects of newness, progress, and development (Quijano and Wallerstein, 1992). Coloniality is rooted in colonial encounters, dehumanization, and racial classification of people/geographies and manages to survive colonialism by (re)producing modern/colonial structures and relations well beyond the presence of a colonial administration. Today, coloniality permeates every contemporary sphere of existence. The perversity becomes part of our common sense and can be what we live and breathe each and every day (Mignolo, 2011) if we do not remain vigilant about protecting our way of life.

I appreciate the work in critical childhood studies that has established childhood as socially imagined. Nonetheless, I consider Dumas and Nelson’s (2016) (Re)Imagining Black Boyhood: Toward a Critical Framework for Educational Research where we need to be in understanding how poor children and children of color, particularly Black children, continue to experience power and dehumanization through antiblackness, and I would add coloniality and empire. Dumas and Nelson argue that “Black boyhood itself has been rendered both unimagined and unimaginable” and that to assert this is to “lament that we have created a world in which Black boys cannot be” (p. 28). Brown and Black children who experience the direct violence of border crossings by way of trafficking, labor exploitation, and through their own imaginings of a better life are left to suffer the dehumanization of coloniality that starts from the moment they are conceived. In the learning practices of everyday life, colonial logics around childhood, borders, and memory pierce the lives of our children in ways that become common sense and seldom are they invited to participate in critical discourses, even when they become the topic (Morrison, 1987). This letter is a way to (re)imagine a world where binaries and hierarchies that denigrate, subordinate, and dehumanize Brown and Black children and childhoods are destroyed. It is to rip away the veil obscuring the structures that attempt to enclose their life and instead offer them the saberes of our mothers and grandmothers that have helped us thrive (Urrieta, 2013). I stand with those who work to illuminate the materiality and embodiments expressed by women who experienced the ravages of coloniality as children. We must respect and valorize their labor and knowledge, or saberes, as intimately connected to their survivance, their sobrevivencia (Federici, 2012; Galván, 2010; Vizenor, 2008). The letter before you is to my children from a place called Land.

To Mayahuel and Uxmal

This letter has been difficult to write. I recently learned of the letters written by my father shortly after my birth that never made it to my mother’s hands. Then I remembered reading with my mother that one letter that did. I also remember the girl in me, anxious and in love, sitting by the mailbox underneath the mezquite (mesquite) tree, waiting for that Atlanta postage from my novio (boyfriend). Your bisabuela Rosita (great-grandmother) tells me that she planted the mezquite to give me shade when my novios visited. The mezquite has grown tall with a much wider crown over the mailbox. Mezquite and I no longer wait for letters or novios, now we wait for each other. In my visits, I receive spider and bird offerings, and in return, she listens to the sounds you make. She knows I long to be like her, rooted in her ancestral lands known as the Tamaulipan mezquital ecoregion. Then, there are the letters and notes your abuela, Armandina (grandmother), is writing that the three of us will one day read together, an archive of our memories so we never forget.

In this letter, I hope you find the intimacies to fuel your youth and your growth and lessons to make you meditate (Angelou, 2008). I offer insights on an old form of violence that we continue to experience today called coloniality. I will not shelter you from how insidious coloniality is. To do so would make you vulnerable to it and even threatens to make you complicit in its perpetuation. I will not spare you the process of digging deeper into my words now and over time. You come from a long line of autodidactic people who used the tools at their disposable to teach themselves how to read and write in two languages—you can do the same and more. I echo Toni Cade Bambara (1983) when I ask that you read this letter in a way that can “coax us into the habit of listening to each other and learning each other’s ways of seeing and being” (p. vii), a habit I hope you carry with you throughout your lives. Learn to read and think deeply, as I too have learned to read and think deeply with Indigenous women and Women of Color who lay bare their wounds so that those who come after can learn and labor against further damage.

Learn to pause, learn about Land

I was introduced to Stoh:Lo Nation author and poet, Lee Maracle, too late in life, although it was at the right moment nonetheless. Reading her demanded of me what Leigh Patel (2014) describes as “deep pauses,” those forms of ruptures and changes to being and learning appropriate to counter the buildup habits of colonialism (p. 358). This quote led me to a deep pause:

In our grannies’ kitchens, where the scent of wood smoke and sumptuous meals cooked a thousand fires lingered in the unpainted walls and cupboards, that is where I learned the laws which enabled me to love my children. In my granny’s kitchen, the sweet smells and gentle words soothed the aches and pains of a six-year-old growing up in a schizophrenic situation. Unlike in school, in my granny’s kitchen I was not made to memorize or even contemplate the meaning of words.

“You will remember what you need to know when the time comes.” Right then, it was the sunshine of her presence that I needed. Her radiance was neither finite nor momentary. It is this shower that I bequeathed to my children.

Her love was not without discipline, but it did preclude violence. I searched her story for some parable, and after many years realized there was none. She could not give me my ancestors. I would have to find them myself. Not to let me walk away empty-handed, she gave me herself. She must have known I was desperate, for she never shamed me for begging. I was desperate, so desperate. (Maracle, 1996: 69)

I read Maracle between conversations about my dissertation research with people in my family and community. It took me days to come back to this very page. Maracle returned me to the scents, presence, and desperation of a place I call Land. Land is where we come from, the places we inhabit, it is the ground we walk on, the waters that engulf us, and all the life in it. I consider Land to be the flesh of our mothers and our grandmothers, their labor, their impermanence, their permeability, and their presence. Land is where learning and remembering how to suture and heal are practices that teach us how to thrive, respect, and tend to our relations and our long and deep wounds. Land is a place where property is such an intolerable sight and such an unbearable memory that we struck off our manacles and learn to be alchemists (Baldwin, 1970). Borders have no place in our materiality, nor in our imaginations. Land is where you as children and all our childhoods are loved, respected, and admired for their brilliance and their visions. This place called Land is a form of remembering, a return to our mother’s and grandmother’s insurgent praxis, which emerges from their materiality and sustains and amplifies our vitality, intimacies, and survival as it remains vigilant of the everyday colonial warfare we continue to endure (Dillard, 2000, 2012; Gaudry, 2011; Lugones, 2007, 2010; Pillow, 2015).

The way Maracle returns to her grandmother’s kitchen is part of the messy process of remembering, that notion to return to those places of trauma and find familiar ways to heal. Ngāti Awa and Ngāti Porou scholar Linda T. Smith (1999) defines remembering as a process within indigenous and decolonizing methodologies that “relates not so much to an idealized remembering of a golden past but more specifically to the remembering of a painful past, re-membering in terms of connecting bodies with place and experience, and importantly, people’s responses to that pain” (p. 244). Educational scholar Cynthia Dillard (2012), in the context of endarkened feminist inquiry, tells us how

learning to (re)member is about recognizing and examining our seductions: Those irresistible moments when we have been enticed away from ourselves, led away from our duties, and have accepted other’s principles or notions of identity and proper conduct as our own. (p. 15)

Smith and Dillard ask us to turn toward our embodiments, corporealities—a (re)membering of our lives to understand how modern/colonial logics shape our experiences and our materialities. To remember is deeply intimate and present in the theorizing of indigenous and women of color thinkers as radically manifested in this This Bridge Called My Back. Chicana feminists Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa (1983) tell us “a theory in the flesh means one where the physical realities of our lives—our skin color, the land or concrete we grew up on, our sexual longings—all fuse to create a politic born out of necessity” (p. 21). This messy process is present in the saberes of our mothers and grandmothers, in their flesh since time immemorial, tangible in our old ways and in our learning and practicing these old ways. (Re)membering is not a simple matter because it requires that we pick up tools rooted in our bodies (Cruz, 2001; Maracle, 1996)—messy and entangled flesh rooted in a place called Land.

I call the flesh of our mothers and grandmothers “a place called Land” because I consider myself a child of the diaspora who has experienced a tragic and false sense of dismemberment from the lands and the places our mothers and grandmothers carry with them, all those lands and places they remember (Solís, in press). I consider their and our flesh the lands we inhabit. If their bodies are not there to tell our stories and to pass down our saberes to educate us in our old ways, then the dismemberment is real (Solís, in press). A (re)imagining of Land is for those of who have been seduced by coloniality to believe we are something we are not (Dillard, 2012; Quijano, 2000, 2007; Mignolo, 2005). For those of us seduced to believe we have no mother (home) lands and ancestral and elder knowledge even as our flesh is woven with memories of frijoles, nopales, albahaca, and nixtamal (beans, cactus, basil, and cooked maize), even as we feel the rhythms and dance with the sounds of distant waters and lands (Dillard, 2012). Land is the flesh of our mothers and grandmothers, their embodiments, the constant and closest place to indigenous lands I know, and the only lands I can give to you (Solís, in press).

It was through a deep pause that I learned to appreciate my mother’s and my grandmother’s flesh, your abuelas. It was also through them that I learn to appreciate and respect the protection of life and land. It was through the beautiful hint of colors in the mornings walking with Rosita through her garden, the afternoon naps by her side, and the evening laughter across the kitchen table with all her children. It was also appreciating the labor Rosita put in taking care of her glucose levels, her meals, and her rest to prevent from slipping into a hypoglycemic coma. From a deep pause, this letter first emerged to unveil the toxic “signatures” coloniality pierces “under the skin” when we are young, causing us to suffer as we grow old (Shonkoff et al., 2012: e235). Learning to pause helps us appreciate the child in us who learned to remember intimate ways, such as when your abuela Armandina burned copal in prayer on Sunday mornings, to tend the wounds of that old form of colonial violence. These practices are habitual resistance within our saberes that labor against these piercing and eruptive toxic signatures that lead to our slow and premature deaths. Our saberes push back against coloniality, and they teach us to create, to carve out if need be, dwellings where we can heal directly from our relations with the land (Solís, in press). Rosita, her garden, her kitchen, her bedside presence, and her glucose treatments are the only land I know.

Childhood, memory, and borders

It is important for you to understand the ways in which coloniality creates a messy entanglement between childhood, memory, and borders that hinges upon violence. Toby Rollo (2016) positions the coloniality of childhood at the core of indigenous dispossession and coerced education, central to addressing present-day settler colonialism (p. 15). He insightfully traces the figure of the child within European and colonial logic through what he refers to as misopedy, an ancient form of social and political hierarchy that denigrates and subordinates children and childhood (p. 2). He states that despite “the fact that European xenophobic traditions such as anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, or Negrophobia are considerably older than race, misopedy appears to be older still.” Rollo argues that in order to understand how the violence of settler colonial logic “flows historically from civilizational precepts such as Manifest Destiny, terra nullius, the white man’s burden and the Doctrine of Discovery,” we need to unveil how the “degraded figure of the child provides the internal structure and logic of the colonial conception of the ‘Indian’”(p. 15). European and Western traditions have historically classified children and childhood in the following ways, and to be clear, this is not a comprehensive list:

1. Property—slavery, labor, citizenship—not allowed to own property.

2. Non-human—without agency, deficient in need of enlightenment or to reach rationality, autonomy, and consciousness—until fully human.

3. Sinful or corrupt—in need of saving and reform.

By tracing childhood within coloniality, we can unveil the long and historical logic of genocide, exploitation, dispossession, fragmentation, disposability of racialized and gendered children, and childhood and their peoples, particularly enslaved Blacks and the Indigenous. Crucial to how childhood has long been exploited within coloniality is through memory, the erasure of it, particularly memory connected to violence, trauma, and the betrayal of remembering—the darker side of the colonization of memory. Madina V Tlostanova (2014) states that at the basis of the coloniality of memory lies a self-legitimating violence of a repressive dehumanizing system disciplining people into absolute submission (p. 64). She is speaking about postcolonial, post-totalitarian, post-apartheid, post-dictatorship and other dimensions of post-dependence in which memory—collective memory—functions as a form of censorship, particularly of those who embody the memory of violence. Societies are offered sanctioned forms of construed collective memory through schooling, media, and political propaganda that do not conserve, but rather erase the past, which is still full of restless ghosts. Survivors are then “forced to forgive and forget, they are forced-fed with convenient versions of the past and an equally comfortable way into the future” (p. 64). You will find that this is done in very messy ways. Schooling—the colonial arm of empire building—is one example of how the coloniality of memory functions to prohibit, silence, erase, and dispense of particular children and their childhoods (Calderon, 2014). Most affected by this are children and childhoods who represent the memory of violence and those that continue to remember the violence as well as the lands and places in the flesh of their mothers and grandmothers.

Childhood and memory are embodied and impact our materiality. These are concepts that we learn and experience. My intent here is to expose these two concepts as structured by this old form of colonial violence and the idea of property within them. Both work to classify life and make it property for appropriation, reproduction, and consumption. We are not property. You are not property. You are not property of the state, you are not property of schools, you are not the property of medicine and research, you are not property of anyone else, and you are not your own property. There is no authority over you. The same applies to land, the one we imagine and the one we walk on and must help protect. Knowing this comes with much responsibility, humbleness, and respect. Lesson you will learn as you grow. This also comes with a heaviness that will sometimes make you cry. If you ever feel sadness, cry. Cry when your flesh needs to cry, even when you do not know why. I grew up among women who cry, and who understand the power of crying. Repressed tears make you sick over time.

Return to a place called Land

Childhood and memory are not alone. They need the colonial power of borders to reinforce our place within coloniality. Borders are colonial, material, monumental architectures that settle and occupy the control of life in highly complex ways. These ecological architectures bleed into everyday life and create entanglements that are not being resolved around our kitchen tables. This meant asking difficult questions and making difficult observations about the conditions under which our childhoods are experienced living by the US/Mexico border. What I am about to share with you are some of these difficult observations during my 5-month return home for my dissertation research. I share them with you because these are the messy manifestations coloniality creates in the places we live.

I read Maracle in a land made sovereign territory now called Brownsville, Texas, and Matamoros, Tamaulipas (Tamez, 2008)—a place obscured by the Texas–Mexico port of entry and northern checkpoints, militarized by US/Mexico border security. Heavily militarized by city, county, state police, and federal agencies from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to Homeland Security to Border Patrol, and from time to time, the Texas National Guard and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), I call this place my home. The geographies of my childhood grew from this place, from these lands. This is where Rosita settled after seeking wage labor at 16 years old. This is where my mother Armandina birthed me.

While there, I learned of the ensnaring chokehold the transnational cartel-state violence has brought upon this region. This territorial conflict-war has only intensified since 2006 with Calderon’s sexenio, the presidential terms in Mexico which are served in a single 6-year period. It is now considered “the most violent sub-national conflict of the century” even when compared to other civil wars (Lessing, 2015). The conditions and intensification of the drug wars on both sides of the US/Mexico border in the past decade alone have a much longer and intimate history. I grew up with stories of mafiosos y corruptos on both sides of the border. In these stories, the mafioso or drug dealers represented the masculine dissidence emerging from a populace in suffering, and although terrorizing and chilling, they are often sanctioned by fear. The corruptos, or the corrupted, represented the state-sanctioned masculinity of hidden dealings, direct negotiations, and exploitation. Time, capital, and technologies have certainly altered this binary.

Type 1 and Type 2 diabetes, childhood obesity, hypertension, HIV/AIDS, and different types of cancers among compounding mental health issues add to the tensions. It is difficult to take a trip to the local supermarket monopoly and witness our children drinking blue coloring, sugar, and water called juice from their bottles. I walk down the aisles to observe that some of the state Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) program food items contain preservatives and sugars (Billings and Cabbil, 2011). Then, I take you to my mother’s neighborhood park and see dozens of children and their relatives playing, running, sweating, and taking selfies in their workout clothes. I also witness our beauty.

In a conversation with a relative, I was made to see that there are no public hospitals or healthcare facilities for diagnosis, treatment, or emergencies. Families pull together to come up with ways to gather money for cancer treatments in Houston, organizing to sell chicken or brisket plates to cover the expense of treatments or funerals. My childhood friend, in conversation, amalgamated the intimacies in these experiences with the ultimate embodied materiality and tragedy, “death creates debt.”

I remember my grandfather’s endless emotional struggle with the local school district for their economic and political power mostly through land dispossession. He placed the newspaper on the table, his pen on top of it and began his rigorous analysis of the local news. In my time conducting fieldwork, there was at least one consequential death of a board member. The local reporting generates news from dead bodies found along the region as “random acts” of violence or as part of the “spill over” from Mexico’s violence. During the time I was there in 2016, three young women were reported missing. Two of them were later found dead. I reflect often on what “spill over” means when the flow of lives, capital, and policies across and along borders are so intricately connected despite and because of their presence.

In a conversation with another relative, I was learning about the inner workings of truck driving across this region, the loading, unloading, policies, and processes around all forms of cargo. Border Patrol at a local checkpoint had just impounded his truck. The driver and the truck were released but not his cargo bed. Border Patrol seized his cargo after finding tons of illegal contraband. Cargo policies prohibit drivers from entering loading docks. The cargo door is sealed and stamped. The driver does not come into contact with the cargo or the seal is broken He is free of any responsibility in relation to the cargo. However, the effects of the experience and the aftermath are what account for a complex understanding of violence. The care and the investment on his trucks are directly related to his and his family’s sustenance. He is now implicated in the drug trafficking economy of the border. The aftermath will involve lawyers, fees, and face-to-face interactions with “boundary reinforcers” such as border security carrying weapons at their hips (Bejarano, 2010). As he was sitting across from me, I could sense his anxiety. Elbows pressured against the table, he rubbed his face with the palm of his hands in preoccupation of everything he now needed to do to acquire his cargo bed and get paid. This is a corporeal expression I am too intimately familiar with.

I am also learning of the mass graves of unidentified and non-processed bodies mostly related to the 2012–2014 migrant upsurge from Mexico and Central America through this geographical corridor. This unfortunately includes thousands of unaccompanied children exposing their lives to migrate mostly to reunite with mothers and seeking waged work (Chavez and Menjívar, 2010).

In conversation with an elder I grew up with, I asked her about violence. She began to describe, almost in a Fanon (2004), the multiple experiences of why people sought her out. The most poignant was of a mother suffering from susto, fright. A stray bullet killed her young daughter while they slept. Not a very simple place from where to (re)member the things we learn to forget, nonetheless a much needed way to “understand the conditions under which we [our children and our childhoods] currently live” (Maracle, 1996: xi). I am reminded that coloniality is never complete.

I listened to community activists share stories about academic researchers and journalists who intrude into their lives, only to leave without so much as an offer to see results or representations. I was reminded of the chichis, the breast I carry in the “fieldsite” I call home (Villenas, 2000). I am deeply entangled in the vibrancy of this place that I began to reflect upon the degrees of separation, if any, from violence. I thought of the long and violent history of institutional knowledge produced on the backs of our communities. The degrees of violence are a matrix in which my own researcher’s chichis are complicit.

I talked and thought with people I grew up with about my research for months. I began to feel disheartened about the conditions producing our slow death. After some of those long conversations and with all these pointed images in my head about the violence I was learning and remembering, I sought out a quiet place—usually the inside of my headphones at the local Starbucks—to continue listening and learning from Maracle (1996): “When my sickened spirit needed to be healed, […], I sought the teachings of my grandmothers” (p. 36).

Remain young

Perhaps the geographies of my childhood, of my returns—the movement—to, from, and within this place I call home are the very messiness (Cruz, 2001) of a childhood that, in fact, has no end. The violent entanglements coloniality creates between childhood, memory, and borders are messy, historical, emplaced, and deeply, deeply intimate. Our young lives are rooted, they coalesce with materiality, they are embodiments, are lived in the now (Dumas and Nelson, 2016), and have no end. They resist and exceed disembodied classifications such as “developmental stages” and even “complex phenomenon,” vestiges of coloniality linked to misopedy, race, and gender, the very entrenchments structuring the “Other” (Quijano, 2000) through ontological and epistemological borders. Before I conclude this letter, I offer some saberes that I carry with me. They have kept me alive and in a good place. They were passed down to me by your family:

1. Drink water before you go to bed and leave a glass of water by your bedside for the morning. The magic of the moon leaves good health in your water, drink it as soon as you wake up.

2. We carry our altares, our altars with us, with all the prayers and blessings, but to honor our loved ones, carve out an altar in the place you will rest for the night. Light a candle, burn some copal, and offer some silence. This is one way of taking care of those you love.

3. Always carry something to read and a good pen or pencil. You can always use the pages as your canvas.

4. Eat well, exercise, and build a strong relationship with a good doctor, dentist, and especially a good healer.

5. Clean after yourself.

6. Learn to use a sewing machine. You come from women and men who were masters at sewing.

7. Learn how to knit.

8. Barter and if you must buy, buy used. And if you must buy new, pay with cash.

9. Learn to garden and tend animals. You will never go hungry or be lonely.

10. Know your neighbors, a cup of respect goes a long way.

11. Read the local news and learn politics.

12. Never come back to a drink you left behind. Buy a new one, watch the bartender, and never take a drink from anyone you do not trust.

13. Learn the art of self-defense.

14. Respect and listen to your elders.

15. Watch over each other, always.

I can only hope this letter takes you further in thought and in rootedness. May it amplify your political consciousness and guide your world-creation. This is a letter written from the intimacies of my grandmother and my mother’s flesh: a place called Land.