what it is, extended version

I grew up in a small desert town in Arizona, on the banks of the Colorado River

surrounded by purple and gray mountains. As a child I would spend a lot of time

wandering around the open, undeveloped Mojave Desert landscapes behind our house

watching the moonrise and stars fall. Before colonization, the land was inhabited by what

white settlers refer to as the Mohave people. These peoples referred to themselves as the

Pipa Aha Macav, meaning people by the river. They honored the river as sacred, and it

nurtured their thriving agricultural system. By the time that I came into being, the Pipa

Aha Macav had all been displaced onto the Fort Mohave Indian reservation, and there

was no trace of the abundant agriculture they had cultivated for thousands of years. Of

course, this story was unknown to me a child. No one ever explained the segregation

of our communities, and I never thought to ask. Our school would host culturally

appropriative events, bringing in women elders who would show us how to make fry

bread but never teach us about the people themselves, their culture, or how it came to be

that we lived by the river and they lived on the fringes of our town, across that imaginary

line called the reservation boundary.

The majority of our town’s population provided the casino district across the river with

their service workers, and survived on poverty wages. My family was no exception to this

paradigm. Socio economics played a major factor in my life, limiting access to resources

and opportunity. Everything from the food boxes full of processed crap that we subsisted

on, to the inequitable education I was allocated was determined by my inherited socio-economic status. The schools I went to were what you would call “failure factories” and

my service class parents did not possess the cultural capitol to engage with or invest in

my education. Quite the opposite, they were disengaged. Looking back, I can see how

teachers and school staff also failed to allocate time or resources to my education. There

were no sports, no art classes, no tutoring, no summer camp, or any camp of any kind.

Maybe this was because the social services that could have supported my success in

school were not available due to lack of availability. However, the way that I internalized

it as a child was that statistically speaking, I was not worth investing in or allocating

educational resources to. My family was entrenched in poverty conditions and poverty

mentality, and I was destined to be as well. To my teachers, I just did not possess the

ability to learn. I had one sibling whose experience was much the same. He was held

back in 1st grade because he couldn’t read. Neither of us developed proficiency in any

subject and were promoted not based off of proficiency levels, but rather because what

would be the point of holding us back? We did not do homework, pay attention in class,

or apply ourselves in any way. I had no connection to school, nor did school have any

relevance to my life. No one ever talked to me about graduating high school, much less

the possibilities of higher education. However, as a child I had no concept of educational

inequities and inequalities, and just assumed that school was like this everywhere. I kind

of thought of school as just a place where parents could send their children while they

went to work.

Despite my indifference towards school, I had an active curiosity and was deeply

engaged in learning about and exploring my land base. I wandered the desert looking

for gems and rocks, waited quietly for lizards to wander by, and watched for jackrabbits

and roadrunners to dash across the red desert dirt. My friends and I would ride our

bikes down to the river and spend the day jumping off rocks and sunbathing on the

docks, skipping stones, and watching the sun set. As I saw it, it was the school day that

interrupted learning and exploration.

When I was 11, my family relocated our land base to the Cascadian bioregion, but our

social location remained the same. Same unjust educational system, the same socially

deprived state of being. The changes in the landscape however were excruciatingly

difficult to adjust to. The open and undeveloped desert landscapes were replaced by

urban development that surrounded us for miles in all directions and all of a sudden

it wasn't safe to play outside. Wet, soggy rain fell constantly. Life became sedentary

and enclosed. There were no more days at the river, no more solitaire wandering, and

no more connection with nature. To fill all of my time, I started reading. I developed a

voracious reading appetite, and the only thing I wanted to do anymore, was read. I would

gulp down whole books in a day, skipping school and isolating myself in my room. I

hardly have any memories of what school was like, but I can remember in vivid detail the

stories and characters I got to know during those years. Through stories, both fiction and

non­-fiction, I became educated about our history of cultural genocide, ethnic cleansing,

chattel slavery, and Manifest Destiny. As I read about the Trail of Tears and the Indian

Removal Act, the development of what would come to be profoundly painful feelings of

grief, sorrow, and shame began to become informed.

Outside of books, life post Mojave was dull and destructive. I attribute this to many

factors, including the departure from my familiar land base and subsequent disconnection

with nature, and the lack of mentorship to help me process what I was reading and

learning. Though I have always held a strong resistance to authority, this resistance

became the outlet for all of the feelings that I felt, but lacked the language to express.

By the eighth grade I had decided there was no reason for me to waste my time at school

anymore, and I stopped attending. I think that there was a truancy officer who came out

to our house once, but that was the extent of the effort applied to keep me in school. I was

fourteen years old. I also decided that I had had enough of our dysfunctional family life

at home, and went in search of better conditions. Fulfilling all of my societal projections,

I spent a couple of years going in and out of juvenile detention, foster homes, and group

homes. I had my first child when I was 16, and got a job at the first food service joint that

would hire me. As a reflective adult, I often wonder where the social services were that

could have provided housing, food, and childcare. With these basic survival needs met,

and just a little bit of encouragement, I may have returned to school. However, nobody

ever referred me to these services, and I remained ignorant to their existence. For the next

several years, survival sex and tolerance of domestic abuse kept us sheltered and fed, but

also forced my mind and soul into a state of disassociation.

Then, when I was twenty­one, a coworker informed me that anyone could apply

for financial aid to go to college and that I should try to go to school. This was a

revolutionary concept for me, invoking feelings of doubt and timid hope. Chewed and

weary to the bone by poverty and all of its conditions, I decided to at least go to the

local community college and ask some questions. A few hours later, after a lot of hand

holding, I had submitted an application for FAFSA, and completed all the forms to enroll.

I walked out stunned by the ease of the whole process, and confused about why no one

had ever told me that this existed as an option for me. Of course, at that time I lacked

the social analysis that would later inform me about the industry of higher education

and student debt slavery. But for that moment in time, my self­perception and life

possibilities shifted drastically.

That autumn, I registered for my first term of community college, and English 101 with

Melissa Favara was my first class. Though I didn’t, and couldn’t have recognized it then,

I was extremely fortunate to have Melissa as the instructor with whom I would begin

my journey through higher ed. Instead of choosing irrelevant literary abstractions to

study, our entire syllabus was built around the industrial food system. For the first time

in my life I was offered criticism of the food system to analyze and actually thought

about where the food I consumed came from. Through the documentary King Corn, and

Eric Schlosser’s book Fast Food Nation, she introduced me to the vile mechanical food

system that fed me; that fed my children. With a slow and deliberate pedagogy that I can

only aspire to, she offered alternatives to the industrialized food system. I was introduced

to a completely parallel food system that I never know existed, incorporating in the works

of Michal Pollan, and the idea of local food systems, and organic food.

As perfunctory as it could have been, I cannot give enough credit to my experience in

this class as the point at which my social location and life trajectory jumped tracks. In

all aspects, this class with this specific instructor functioned as a gateway to awareness.

I couldn’t help but wonder how and why the food system had mutated in the way that it

had. In my search for understanding, I became aware of the merger between corporate

industry and politics and how they are more or less the same entity, serving corporate

interests. The more I researched, the more I became aware of how this merger between

business and state produced and imposed not only this abhorrent food system, but a

whole slew of other social injustices that I had been completely ignorant to my entire life,

yet were very much a part of my life.

Since that time, I’ve been actively involved in working for social change. The early years

of my work were spent primarily as an activist and volunteer for various mainstream

organizations including Planned Parenthood and AmeriCorps. However, I think that my

disenchantment with reform and the dismantling of myth was my most productive work

with those agencies. I found that bureaucracy and I could not work together. I found that

female reproductive health was an issue bigger than the funding of Planned Parenthood’s

budget. I learned that petitioning the city to build more grocery stores in food deserts was

not the same as Food Justice. I learned that the same entities that are elected to represent

the interests of The People revolve in and out of working for corporations. I learned so

many things. During this time, my habitus and cultural capitol grew at an exponential

rate, catapulting me from a state of ignorance to a state of awareness about the world and

my place in it.

This transition was both painful and rewarding, incarcerating and liberating. Developing

a framework and language to articulate the systems of poverty, patriarchy, and classism

I’d experienced all my life helped me not only understand how intersections of gender,

class, and culture work, but also how entrenched in these systems I was. This was the

painful part. The recognition of the power within these institutions and how dominantly

they had controlled my life left me flailing without a sense of agency and no strategy

for developing one. “Rage Please” became a way to get my need for agency met. I

raged against the machine, injustice, academia, people with privilege, and whatever else

felt good to rage against. Over time, exposure to different radical organizations, self-education, and participating in countless direct actions, workshops and trainings helped

me to develop a healthy sense of agency not grounded in rage. I began to connect with

communities that were not just raging against injustice and oppression, but actively

working to address these systems by creating parallel institutions. I connected to

communities that had visions for what our world could look like and had created pockets

of safe spaces in which they could practice principals of mutual­aid, accountability,

and compassion. However, despite being immersed in this counter culture, it was still

incredibly isolating. We were just small islands surrounded by oceans of dominant

culture complacency and agents of oppression. I began to grow tired of sitting around in

the same circles with the same people, talking about the problems and just wondering

when enough would be enough. When would The People rise up? What would it take to

ignite a mainstream movement that would demand change?

These inquiries prompted me to enroll the Women, Activism, and Social Change course

in the Spring of 2011. This is where I met Marlene Howell, the next instructor to have

a pivotal influence on my life trajectory. Today I consider her a mentor, and a friend. I

have grown so much from learning and working with Marlene, and again can only aspire

to someday develop the pedagogy that she so fluently practices. I remember the very first

day of class when she said, “...there will be no text books for this class. We’re not gonna

play the text book industry game in here.” and “Don’t write a paper that tells me what the

article says, I’ve read it! I already know. What I want to know is what you think about

the article.” I left that first class knowing that I had finally met an instructor that “got it”.

She went above and beyond Melissa’s social justice pedagogy by taking the time to get to

know me, personally. She supported and encouraged me to believe that I was capable of

more than what I believed myself capable of. “Are you going to continue on to get your

doctorate?” she asked me once. I didn’t know how to answer because I had never thought

of that as possibility for my life. She would do things like invite me to present my essays

at these things called Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Colloquium, that I had

never before heard of. And still, long after I have left her classes as a student, she invites

me to TA for her and to speak to her new students.

As a student, learning with Marlene helped me develop the agency to interrupt

oppression, and find a frontline in working for social justice. However, I still had a

constant gnawing desire to understand the dynamics of revolutionary social movements,

and how they were born. As I read about bank bail outs happening simultaneously

alongside widespread foreclosure and displacement, and AIG using Tarp money to pay

for all inclusive executive retreats, I ached to understand what else had to happen to make

people indignant enough to organize mass political action.

All of these questions, connections, and experiences culminated in the Fall of 2011

with the onset of the Occupy Movement. I dropped my classes, packed my bags and

moved into Chapman and Lownsdale Square ready to take advantage of the platform

that the Occupy Movement provided. Within our Food Not Bombs community we

started a kitchen, practicing the principle that access to food is a human right we fed

anyone and everyone. I made new connections with people who were as passionate

around educational access and equity as I was. We started a library that grew into an

autonomous education project called Our School. I participated in organizing large­ scale

demonstrations and direct actions. I worked with others to form intentional community.

I worked with grassroots movements in Detroit and saw first hand the devastation of

economic and industrial collapse in an urban environment. The years of 2011 thru 2013

were pivotal in my development as an organizer. I am extremely appreciative for all the

experiences I’ve had, both positive and negative, as these experiences have helped me

identify the areas in which I need to grow to be an effective change agent and ally.

These days my growing edges are really all about identifying the influence of colonial

capitalism in my own life and walking a path towards decolonization of my self, my life,

and my spirit. This work manifests in so many ways, and there are infinite opportunities

for growth. Processing my educational experiences have been extremely painful because

I can see how deprived of educational support and opportunity I had been as a child. I

do not hold any one party responsible for my experiences but rather, I place the blame

squarely on our society that accepts and reinforces how socio­-economic status determines

allocation of educational resources and maintains the social order between the haves and

the have-­nots.

The experiences I have shared in this essay, and the many, many more that did not make

this draft, along with the perspective that I hold from this social location that is uniquely

mine, all shape the information I choose and feel compelled to share with the world.

The practice of sharing this information, and the pedagogical form that this practice

takes, is informed by occupying positions of both agent of oppression, as well as target

of oppression. Having had to identify and acknowledge the ways in which I not only

experience oppression, but also reproduce it, has been a painful process. However, I

believe this to be a process that cannot be ignored or justified just because of the antiquity

of these systems that by now reproduce and replicate themselves through all of us. This

said, I also understand the need to create intentional spaces that will hold this process

with grace and compassion; spaces that will encourage vulnerability and risk so that

our collective stories can be shared, relationships can be built, and the colonized can

decolonize.