I have been thinking again about specialness and charismatic leadership, something I have taught and reflected on as part of my teaching and mentoring practice for many years. These are old questions for me. They began long before I had language for leadership, hierarchy, or specialness, and they began most explicitly in La Lima, Cortés, Honduras, and in Colonia SITRATERCO, the place that first taught me how to understand myself in relationship to other people.

La Lima was built through the banana industry and the enormous power of the Tela Railroad Company. Corporate power was visible everywhere—in who had access to what, in where people lived, and in the material conditions under which people lived. At the same time, La Lima was one of the places from which workers organized against that power. SITRATERCO emerged from the great banana-worker struggle of 1954, and workers eventually turned their collective power into housing, schools, cooperatives, childcare, worker education, social services, and communications infrastructure. I grew up in Colonia SITRATERCO, a residential community bearing the union's name and shaped by that worker-built social infrastructure.

The company organized something as fundamental as time. The whistle went off when the workday began, when it was time for a break, when it was time for lunch, and when the day ended. We organized around that whistle. It was part of the rhythm of everyday life whether you worked for the company or not. The sound moved through the community, and people knew where they were in the day because the company had marked the time.

I think that taught me something very early about power. Power is more than the ability to give an order. It can organize the conditions around which everyone else arranges their lives. It can become so embedded in the rhythm of everyday life that people begin orienting themselves around it almost without noticing.

And we were living inside another form of power too. The people around me came from a social world in which ordinary workers had organized themselves to create some of the infrastructure required to live. Collective power could become a house. It could become a school. It could become childcare, access to credit, education, communication—something other people could use. We lived simultaneously with concentrated corporate power and with the material consequences of workers organizing collectively in response to it.

That was the landscape in which I first learned to understand relationship.

My family life made those lessons intimate. Political violence and the political and economic conditions driving women's migration shaped a childhood in which my parents were absent and extended family provided my basic care. I moved among aunties, uncles, cousins, and other relatives who housed me, fed me, transported me, and made room for me in arrangements that were sometimes precarious. I understood very early that I depended on people's goodwill and that my presence created additional work and expense for households already carrying their own responsibilities.

I was also surviving violence and abuse, and so I became extraordinarily attentive to other people. I learned to read moods, expectations, danger, and power. I learned what taking up space might cost. I learned to minimize my needs and stay out of the way. Becoming invisible whenever possible was useful.

School became part of how I did that. I was asked to focus on academics, and in a very real sense that became my job. Doing well was something I could contribute to the arrangements sustaining me, and being occupied with school also made me a relatively low-maintenance child. I could put enormous amounts of my attention, energy, and ambition there. Achievement became entangled with usefulness, survival, and invisibility.

There was another social world shaping me at the same time. Outside the family, I grew up in a context with a deeply entrenched suspicion of individualism and of people positioning themselves above others. One of the ways that social regulation happened was through humor, teasing, making fun of people, and sometimes outright ridicule. Standing out could make you a target.

So I was learning three different things at once. At home, I was learning to minimize my needs, remain useful, and become as invisible as possible. At school, I was being asked to distinguish myself individually and was increasingly rewarded for doing so. Among my peers, the very things school rewarded could make me vulnerable to derision.

I was bullied and made fun of a great deal for being a good student.

That contradiction was formative. School was the place where I could put my energy, where achievement helped me contribute and created possibility, but success also made me visible in ways that could be socially costly. I was receiving institutional messages that said: stand out, distinguish yourself, achieve, become exceptional. At the same time, the social world around me could respond: Who do you think you are?

I learned early that both elevation and enforced sameness can distort relationship. A culture of specialness can turn capacity into rank. A community's rejection of specialness can also become a form of coercive leveling, where people are punished for developing or expressing capacities that distinguish them. Teasing can keep power from becoming too grand, and it can also become a way of disciplining people back into invisibility.

Then I migrated to the United States.

I arrived on August 25, 1985, speaking no English. School became useful in another way. It was one of the places where I learned how to navigate this country and its institutions. Yet something complicated happened as I became more successful at it. The strategies through which I had learned to stay out of the way increasingly caused institutions to single me out.

By the time I entered Middlebury College in September 1991, I had already supported the founding of a youth organization as a youth founder. At Middlebury I ran the Latino organization, and during my sophomore year faculty and administrators selected me as one of two Dana Scholars in my class. I later went to the Department of American Studies at SUNY Buffalo as a Schomburg Fellow and served as a teaching assistant for John Mohawk. I left Buffalo and returned to youth work in late 1997, later consulted with the Massachusetts Department of Public Health, and eventually returned to organizational work, where I built a dynamic gang transformation program.

Looking across that history now, I can see a pattern. I had learned how to disappear, while institutions kept making me visible. I was trying to be useful, while institutions increasingly offered me ways of understanding myself as exceptional.

This has made specialness complicated for me throughout my life. I know what it means for other people to decide that you are special whether you are trying to occupy that position or not. Teachers, faculty, administrators, organizations, and entire professional environments can confer distinction on a person. Recognition creates opportunity, and it also changes relationships. People listen differently. They make assumptions about what you know. Your ideas acquire more weight. Formal authority amplifies all of this.

I have seen that change happen in the smallest relational gestures. When I graduated from college, one of my cousins tried to stop addressing me with vos, the familiar form we had always used with one another, and began using usted, the more formal and deferential form descended from vuestra merced—“Your Mercy.” I understood immediately what the shift meant. My education had changed how she believed she was supposed to relate to me.

The history of these forms matters to me. Vos came to the Americas with the Spanish carrying an already complicated history of status and familiarity, and Indigenous people took it up and made it our own. As colonial society developed, the prestige system around language changed unevenly. The increasing preference for tú took hold first and most strongly in the viceregal capitals and major commercial centers that maintained the closest relationships with Spain, then moved outward through trade, migration, administration, education, and other networks of colonial influence. In more remote regions, including much of Central America, vos remained deeply embedded in everyday relationship. The geography of language itself came to carry the uneven geography of colonial power.

I love voseo because of that history. I love that a form of speech associated with familiarity and ordinary relationship persisted in places where colonial power had less ability to reorganize everyday life completely. I love that people took something inherited through conquest and made it ours. For me, vos carries intimacy, survival, continuity, and a refusal of unnecessary distance.

So when my cousin moved from vos to usted after I graduated from college, I experienced something much larger than a change in pronoun. Something intimate and familiar was being reorganized around formality, social distance, and deference. A credential had apparently moved me, in her mind, into another social position.

I had to tell her that I did not want that.

That moment stayed with me because it showed me how easily hierarchy can enter a relationship without anyone formally deciding to create it. A credential can change language. Recognition can create distance. People can begin treating you as though you have moved into another social position even when you are actively refusing that elevation.

Specialness can also generate resentment, envy, projection, competition, suspicion, and efforts to diminish the person being elevated. Those dynamics can emerge whether the person sought the distinction or even believes they deserve it. Once someone has been marked as exceptional, people can begin relating to what that person represents as much as to the person themselves.

This matters because specialness reorganizes the whole relational field. It can produce deference in some people, resentment in others, dependency somewhere else, and self-inflation in the person being elevated. Communities can produce charismatic leaders just as charismatic leaders can produce dependent communities. The desire for someone else to be the one who knows, decides, interprets, or carries uncertainty can itself become a way of relinquishing collective responsibility.

For me, this has required a difficult distinction. I had already learned to make myself smaller because shrinking helped me survive and remain easy to accommodate. When visibility produced tension or distance, making myself smaller could feel like a way to restore relationship. But deconstructing specialness cannot mean managing everyone else's discomfort by erasing myself.

Whatever capacities I developed existed inside an enormous infrastructure of other people's labor. Someone fed me. Someone housed me. Someone transported me. Someone made room for me. Someone taught me. Someone opened a door. Someone organized an institution before I arrived. Someone absorbed the costs that allowed me to become whatever I eventually became. My life has made the mythology of individual achievement very difficult for me to believe.

John Mohawk once told me that his main question for me was how my people remain who we are.

That question changed the way I saw everything.

Until then, much of my political understanding had been organized around reaction to oppression: conquest, dispossession, corporate extraction, political violence, migration, racism, and the many systems that had acted upon us. John's question redirected my attention. It asked me to look not only at what had been done to us, but at what we had continued to know how to do.

How had we remained?

What knowledge had survived because people kept practicing it? What forms of relationship, obligation, humor, resistance, adaptation, collective care, and discernment had continued to live in our bodies even when institutions had been reorganized around us? What had we learned across generations about how to live, survive, organize, resist domination, and remain recognizable to ourselves?

That shift took me from an analysis centered primarily on oppression to a deep appreciation for our collective know-how and embodiment.

I never left that way of seeing.

It changed how I understood La Lima and SITRATERCO. It changed how I understood my relatives. It changed how I understood migration. It changed how I understood leadership, education, organizations, and eventually my own difference.

The question became less: What has oppression done to us?

And more: What have we continued to carry despite it?

That is a very different political orientation. It places our people somewhere other than at the receiving end of history. It allows us to see ourselves as holders of knowledge, creators of coherence, builders of institutions, and practitioners of ways of being that have survived repeated efforts to reorganize us.

I understand the Honduran struggle of working people through that lens. For me, it belongs to a continuum that begins with the arrival of the Spanish and extends through successive systems of conquest, extraction, corporate power, political violence, and migration. The structures change, and our capacity to respond changes with them. We improvise. We organize. We build. We protect relationships. We carry knowledge forward. We remain.

SITRATERCO was part of that know-how. Workers confronted concentrated corporate power and turned collective organization into housing, schools, cooperatives, childcare, education, communication, and other forms of shared infrastructure. They were doing more than resisting. They were demonstrating what they knew about how people might continue living together under enormous pressure.

Mohawk's question taught me to see that.

And once I learned to see that way, I could no longer understand leadership primarily as the exceptional capacity of an individual. I became much more interested in the accumulated intelligence of people, in what communities know how to do together, and in the conditions that allow that knowledge to remain alive.

I now understand that what I have often experienced simply as my difference may be my core indigeneity. I mean a relational way of being that keeps pulling me toward responsibility, collective capacity, memory, and the question of what our power makes possible for one another. I come from a people whose struggle I understand as a continuous effort to remain who we are through conquest, extraction, migration, political violence, and enormous change.

For much of my adult life, I have been engaged in a deliberate project of achieving while deconstructing specialness. I have tried to build without needing to stick out, to produce consequential work without making myself its center, and to understand leadership as the work of building other people.

Over time, I have also had to understand that decentering and self-erasure are different things. My childhood trained me thoroughly in disappearance. The adult practice asks something harder of me: to be fully present, to honor my own needs, to use the capacities I have developed, and to accept the visibility and responsibility that sometimes accompany them while resisting the conversion of capacity into rank.

What I experienced as three different pressures in childhood—erasure at home, demands for individual distinction at school, and social punishment for standing out—did not end when I became an adult. In many ways, that triumvirate of pressure has continued through my entire life.

I continue to move through environments where I am asked, implicitly or explicitly, to make myself smaller in order to remain acceptable. I also continue to enter institutions that reward distinction, achievement, expertise, credentials, visibility, and leadership in ways that can rapidly confer specialness. And I continue to encounter the resentment, suspicion, competition, and social punishment that can accompany being seen as unusually capable or successful.

The conditions become even more complicated inside a heteropatriarchal, classist, and xenophobic culture, where recognition is never distributed neutrally and where the same capacities rewarded in one context can become reasons for rejection in another.

So I have spent much of my adult life asking questions that are at once political and deeply personal. Where is it actually safe to thrive? With whom can I be fully present without being asked either to become exceptional or to disappear? Will I be allowed to succeed at work without having that success converted into resentment, threat, or isolation? Will I be able to use what I know and what I can do without being placed above other people or punished for refusing to make myself smaller?

And perhaps most importantly: are there other people who also want to move away from specialness and toward leadership as a practice?

That question matters to me because I am increasingly uninterested in environments organized around either exceptional people or the social punishment of distinction. I want relationships in which people can become more fully capable without needing to become more important. I want communities where excellence does not require hierarchy and where equality does not require diminishment. I want forms of leadership that move according to need and capacity and that increase what everyone is able to carry.

My years as a manager and director made this much more concrete. Formal authority changes the meaning of nearly everything a person does. A preference can become an expectation. An observation can carry the weight of judgment. Attention can alter opportunity. People can begin orienting themselves toward what they think a leader wants even when the leader believes they are simply participating. Intention is therefore an inadequate measure of leadership. We also have to pay attention to impact.

Perhaps this is why I remain genuinely confused when I encounter people who aspire to specialness, particularly people who aspire to be the leaders.

I understand wanting to lead. I understand developing the capacity to convene, discern, decide, teach, organize, protect, create, and help people move through difficult conditions. I understand accepting leadership because a moment or a community requires something we are able to offer. I understand wanting to do extraordinary work and wanting our lives to matter.

What I struggle to understand is the aspiration to occupy the social position of the leader: to become the person others orient toward, whose interpretation carries unusual weight, whose wisdom is regarded as somehow different from everyone else's, or whose presence becomes central to a community's coherence.

For me, being singled out has usually presented a responsibility to manage rather than a position to pursue.

This is why I distinguish between doing leadership and becoming the leader. Leadership can be something we practice because relationship requires it. The leader can become an identity and eventually a social arrangement. Once that happens, the capacities of a community can begin reorganizing themselves around a person.

I think here, too, about that company whistle.

People can begin organizing around a leader in much the same way that a community organizes around a structure of power that has become central to everyday life. The leader becomes a point of orientation. People begin reading their moods, anticipating their preferences, arranging decisions around their presence, waiting for their interpretation, and measuring the rhythm of collective life in relation to them. Eventually that arrangement can begin to feel natural simply because it has become familiar.

There is a sound here in Richmond that takes me immediately back to La Lima. Chevron has a whistle that sounds almost exactly like the company whistle I grew up with. When I hear it, the distance between those two places collapses for a moment. The geography has changed, the company has changed, the industry has changed, but the sound of industrial power organizing place feels immediately recognizable to me.

That continuity matters because power is often experienced before it is theorized. We hear it. We schedule around it. We anticipate it. We orient ourselves to it. Eventually it becomes part of the atmosphere, something so familiar that we stop noticing how much of our life has been organized around it.

Charismatic leadership can work in a similar way. It can produce experiences that feel deeply relational. People can feel inspired, loved, connected, recognized, or transformed while authority is simultaneously becoming more centralized. A community may understand itself as radically different from hierarchical institutions while reproducing hierarchy through its everyday relationships.

The performance may be reciprocity while the enactment is hierarchy. The performance may be village while the enactment is centralization around a charismatic person. The performance may be regeneration while the actual relationships reproduce racial, gendered, economic, and social arrangements that the language of regeneration claims to transform.

This is also where these questions meet what I have come to call Poetic Futurism. Poetic Futurism asks us to pay attention to the forms of coherence we create through our relationships, institutions, and everyday practices. A community can speak the language of liberation while organizing its coherence around a charismatic person. It can speak of reciprocity while everyone is orienting themselves toward one person's approval, interpretation, mood, or presence.

The future is a relationship. That means the future is being made in the ways we distribute attention, authority, responsibility, care, knowledge, and consequence among us now.

Our language tells us very little about the future we are actually creating. The relationships tell us. The distribution of power tells us. Who becomes more capable tells us. Who becomes smaller tells us. Who everyone begins organizing around tells us.

This is one of the deepest roots of Poetic Futurism for me. The future is not built only by overcoming oppression. It is built by becoming able to recognize, protect, deepen, and extend the know-how that has allowed us to remain ourselves through it.

This is where I return again to SITRATERCO and the place that formed me. Alongside the whistle was another lesson about power. Workers organized, and the power they created together became infrastructure other people could inhabit and use. The measure of the work was larger than the visibility of any individual person.

Those two forms of power existed together in my childhood. One organized people around itself. The other came from people organizing themselves together.

That distinction continues to matter to me. I want to know what kind of coherence our relationships are producing. I want to know what becomes possible for other people because we were here. I want to know whether people's capacity for discernment increases, whether authority can move, whether knowledge circulates, whether people become capable of carrying work that once depended on us, and whether the relationships and infrastructure we build remain useful beyond our own presence.

Trying to live this way has carried a real cost. My adult life has included immense economic, relational, and professional instability. I have spent long periods uncertain about where I belong, how I will earn a living, which relationships will hold, and whether the work I am building will have the institutional support required to endure.

At the same time, there has been another kind of continuity.

I have made beautiful things. I have built programs, organizations, relationships, frameworks, learning spaces, and bodies of thought. I have taught and mentored people who went on to carry work of their own. I have helped create language for things people were experiencing but could not yet name. Across enormous instability, there has been a remarkably solid long-term pathway of creating beauty and influencing change.

I refuse to romanticize the cost of that path. Instability is instability. Precarity has consequences. And still, I can now see a coherence beneath it that I could not always see while I was living through it.

Perhaps the work of my life has been learning how to remain fully capable without accepting elevation, how to become visible without requiring anyone else to disappear, and how to build forms of leadership and coherence that leave more people able to carry what comes next.

Capacity creates responsibility rather than rank.

I continue to work at living inside that proposition: resisting hierarchy without returning to invisibility, carrying my capacities fully while remembering all the people and structures that have carried me, and building forms of coherence that depend increasingly on our collective know-how rather than on increasingly special people.

Perhaps my greatest contribution in this life will be a path built for a future where we are loved.