I hope this note finds you well. I come to you this time with an offering that has taken me over 30 years to offer. First, some context.

2024 was a painful year as I was driven out of the Master’s and PHD processes I designed, stewarded and recruited extremely diverse and gifted student groups to join. At the same time this terrible undoing of my academic legacy occurred through manipulation, force, and institutional violence, both my advanced degree institutions folded under the immense pressure of a business centric educational model. These institutions were remarkable.

The first was Goddard College, over 100 years old, which was founded in 1917. Goddard began as an experimental school seeking to educate farm workers in Vermont. It featured a developmental education process that accommodated farm worker schedules, small classrooms, distance learning, and a mentor/mentee self directed education model. Goddard was a great fit for me although not free from racism as I was asked not to write in Spanish because the institution had not hired any Spanish speaking writers to assess the validity of my work. And yet, despite this, I blossomed due to incredibly beautiful and powerful artists such as Bhanu Kapil.

The second was the Union Institute and University, at close to 75 years old. The Union was another radical educational experiment seeking to create a vehicle for the construction of Left PhD’s in the mid 1950s. Think about this. The type of brazen and courageous educational visionaries that would build a radical Left school in the 1950s are rare in this day of cowardly meek and skittish academics. The Union was built on a long distance learning model for working class students who had full working lives and wanted to advance their intellectual endeavors to strengthen and build Left thinking. The Union became the home for intellectuals who resisted the influence of Empire and capital on knowledge making processes. 

It was a laboratory where it was not unusual to graduate Black women PhD’s en masse at the hands of intellectual women of color who belonged to radical lineages and who stubbornly sought to redefine the terms of agreement and engagement in the processes of change that shaped them. For me, this was Dr. Toni Gregory, who to her last dying day fought for us and made plans for our various committees when it became clear her body was giving way to cancer. I have a doctorate today because of her immense sacrifice in making sure dozens of us were ushered correctly through our committee processes.

I look today at the news about the besiegement of Harvard and other places that are beacons of everything these two experimental schools stood up against. I can’t get mad that Harvard is facing losing research money when I know the school keeps at times 60% or more of every grant that comes in for its own internal operations, leaving a minuscule fraction of its social research funding to benefit anyone actually struggling to solve complex social issues fueled by complex adaptive systems engendered by genocide, colonialism, and enslavement on these lands. As such institutions somehow get typecast as Left, as radical, and as sites of the struggle for freedom, I just cannot partake of the industry that first extracted land for its sites, the bodies for its research, and the entire world as its laboratory. Such claims for the fight for democracy and freedom coming from such places are simply not credible while actual Left progressive higher education experiments fail to the business model that is at the core of American higher education.

These are the places where our Left leaders become politicized? These are the places at the forefront of some manufactured cultural wars? Really? And what about the 90 percent of people who cannot even set foot in these places? What of their education? What of their politicization? What of their practices for personal and collective creativity and practical capacities to change their immediate, collective, domestic and international conditions? Is this what the 21st Left leadership looks like? A class of Ivy League uncomformist privileged people politicized on these college campuses? Really?

At the core of my discomfort is the witnessing of the Left, Progressive, and Democratic incapacity to engage and mobilize the working class, a made up singular class of people that somehow cannot be smart enough to stop voting against their own interests and can’t figure out who their real friends are or how to think about their own living conditions enough to generate real solutions. So if you are working class your choices are to follow the random and completely unfounded rules of Empire or to follow the lead of the enlightened few who learned about them on a college campus and made a vow to change the world upon graduation and run change processes that are meant to somehow assuage our suffering.

The beauty of places like Goddard and the Union was that if you were indeed a working class student, you could have a working class life and be engaged yourself in the creation of solutions, practices and manners of thinking and being that emerged from your own conditions and that supported the construction of new forms of being, thinking and doing so your life could be different. Places like Harvard and others developed processes of engagement, teaching, learning, and program design that were modeled after places like Goddard and the Union. The illusion of access has been well funded by such places without actually opening the doors to all who would learn. At the same time these precious places were cannibalized, community colleges have been defanged and transformed into sites of workplace training with little to no academic freedom and with no intention on building political consciousness. 

The demise of radical Leftist efforts in higher education is evident in the intractable attrition rates of those of us who would be less a part of the colonial capitalist Empire that is at the core of higher education institutions in the the United States: Latin@s and Indigenous peoples trail behind every other group in enrollment, engagement, and graduation rates across both four year and community colleges in the United States. 

Such stubborn intractable rates are systemic outcomes fueled by institutions that do not value how we perceive and construct knowledge. Hispanic serving institutions and tribal colleges also fail to address these patterns of failure and disengagement. They produce outcomes that guarantee the existence of an underclass that is overrepresented in outcomes of death, imprisonment, poverty, illness, violence and exclusion. These are their real outcomes.

A system that operates in this manner is no site of the struggle for freedom or democracy, but rather the brazen co-optation of our techniques of resistance, creativity, social innovation, and adaptability in favor of the creation of a super class of change makers, radical thinkers, and freedom fighters. I say all this because as our experiments fail, we need new ones and we need new solutions. We need to create vehicles for political development while working people are engaged in the living of their lives. And the political frameworks that we need cannot continue to codify contempt and paternalism towards working people. 

It is simply not conscionable to build social movements where qualifying to belong to them entails an ivy league political science glossary, cultural references and shared values; where qualifying to work on immigrant issues does not require being an actual immigrant but rather belonging to a network of organizers who organize mostly themselves and their donors. This is a dynamic that is very much alive and well across “movements”/ “superclass industries” in the United States. 

In the meantime, actual grassroots movements often are in the position of having to organize against and around their would be superclass representatives. Over the past year, and as a result of Comunidades Organizadas we have learned about people defending land while going hungry in Honduras, weavers gathering after walking miles through union roadblocks in Guatemala, narcogovernment killings of priests in Chiapas and no money in sight to assuage the hunger, fund the weavers gatherings, and fully staff the Zapatistas. Why? Because philanthropy is failing to be adaptive while trying to address the outcomes created by the complex adaptive systems engendered by the Colonial project on these lands.

In the US, grassroots innovations are built with no funding because you have to have money to be funded. Resources get caught in the web of philanthropies private, family and intermediary and are slow to arrive where needed. Our communities have tremendous difficulties accessing resources and being seen through the lens of the values, references, languaging, and habits of the change making superclass of Ivy League or Ivy League adjacent grads. Our innovations are often unrecognized because they do not support or affirm a particular political narrative of our realities.

Thus, we first must convince our representative superclass of change makers of the fact that our realities are real, we show them our solutions, which they may or may not support. When our stuff works, they write books about their roles in making success happen and they become experts and authorities and we become informants and exemplars. They innovate in the field of philanthropy while our experience of being resourced barely changes. Superstars are made by elite schools and they feed on us to maintain their shine. They are our changemakers and we are their object of experimentation. What of this has anything to do with increasing our experience of freedom, autonomy, and hope?

So I guess I explain all this, a set of dynamics I’ve been living and analyzing for over 35 years of practice, to say that I refuse to publish my life’s work. I would much rather offer one or two years’ worth of free sessions to engage serious practitioners and thinkers to expand our collective sensibilities, analyses, set of tools and techniques, and to renew our collective commitment to create autonomous spaces for learning and experimentation in a time when our grassroots efforts from other eras are or have failed. I’d rather expose myself to the possibility of having my work co opted and appropriated again in favor of the emergence of a few good actual working class thinkers and doers so they can fully be in their creative might for the rest of their lives than fall into the machinery that capitalizes on the extraction, processing and packaging of knowledge as a type of individual intellectual property.

Just when it seems insane to simply say no to the machinery of knowledge production, I choose to say no. No, I will not go down the path of the individual book author for the sake of somehow protecting anything that should not be uniquely my property to begin with. There is no such thing as individual intellectual property. Nothing we make is ours only or should be. And all that benefits the whole, should belong to the whole. If there is anything that can strengthen our grassroots that I can give, I will give as I have done my entire life. There is no weakness or naiveté in my decision, but rather a deep howl of grief for the loss of our places of resistance and experimentation, of learning and transformation, of sites of encounter between young people and folks like John Mohawk, Toni Gregory, and Bhanu Kapil.

It may be that there is not much I have to teach in the end, or show for my 35 years of work. On the other hand, and as I look around at the hunger for new understanding, tools, techniques, analysis and theories that meets me among working class transnational women of color who have been denied the privileged political awakenings of the superclass, I believe I can be useful in supporting the emergence of a consciousness on this land, of this land, that is beyond the political gripes and misreadings of our original peoples that create Marxism and the American model of democracy, of the limited imagination of liberals, and the obtuse analysis that fuels the right wing, and the inflexible oversimplification offered by Libertarians and Anarchists.

Most importantly, I witness the genius that is found outside of these structures of being, doing, making, and thinking that replicate domination and control of the masses. Within these movimientos deslumbrantes there are serious theorists, creatives, innovators, visionaries, leaders, and visionaries that generate more in their lifetimes than the Academy as a whole has generated by way of social science in over one hundred years. They generate ideas, tools, techniques, practices, frameworks, models, and strategies that are useful and are custom made to meet the needs within their own ecosystems. 

Indeed, I believe, our collective futures are in the hands of these stunningly brilliant and beautiful women. Although the Academy and its adjacent change industries may attempt to cannibalize them and turn their stories into their products, they cannot for various reasons: 1) they innovate faster than the Academy can even perceive; 2) they deploy strategies of reversal to organize the superclass change makers into doing their bidding brilliantly; and 3) their wisdom cannot be captured by any artifice.

Connecting these women to each other is a dream and should be for anyone trying to bring multisectoral organizing efforts to scale at a transnational level. So instead of trying to convince our change making superclass so they can release funding, we at Loving Future have been building this bridging structure and we are transforming the organization little by little into the shape of that structure to use it, show it, and strengthen it over time. Soon, we will share with you new languaging that captures what we now understand to be our true functions all in the effort to strengthen our transnational strategies, grassroots practice based movements, and build the type of knowledge repository that can expedite and facilitate change from the consciousness of los de abajo. And we hope those of you who command resources will join our struggle whether you are of the change maker superclass or not, so that we may have a better chance at securing our future as a species.

And as mainstream academic institutions such as Harvard and others fail to generate useful analysis, critiques, tools of resistance and struggle that can help us build a loving future for humanity and the planet, and model strong leadership in times of uncertainty and crisis, I know that my path is not well worn as it is a path for a future where working people have agency and dignity as they endeavor to create lives full of joy, possibility, hope, and creativity. I know that the Left and progressives, as well as Liberals emulate the inflexibilities transferred to them by the Academy and its creations.  And this is why, our learning processes must sit outside these structures and be flexible enough to sometimes engage these institutions. And we cannot afford to have these institutions be fully in charge of our learning and our knowledge making and innovations development processes.  And no political parties or partisan groups can take the place of criticality and rebellion.

So here goes our Quixotic attempt at beginning to build such processes. If you are interested, please read on:

1. An online series called our Online Guacales (Online Gourds) exploring specific chapters of my would-be book, which is in its third iteration. I will sharpen each chapter based on the incredibly helpful chapter specific notes my beloved Bhanu Kapil generated from her careful reading of the manuscript and I will share each with those of you who would be interested in participating in this effort. At the end of the series, I will compile all chapters and call recordings and will make them available to whoever signs up to this process. I will hold calls in both English and Spanish and will provide translated materials to each group. The dates and times are Saturdays: 7/13/25, 9/13/25, 11/15/25, 1/17/26, 3/14/26, and 5/16/26. The times are 10 AM PST/ 1 PM EST for English, and 2 PM PST/5 PM EST in Spanish. If interested, please sign up here.

2. In person sessions through our existing Guacales. Recruitment is limited to already active members of our network.

3. A re-articulation of For A Loving Future (already board approved) as a manantial (the Spanish word for a place where water comes up from the ground) of grassroots practice-based ideas. For A Loving Future is taking the think-tank idea and we are building an anti think-tank think-tank that functions more like a fountain springing forth from the grassroots and our practices at the base of significant domestic and international social movements. We own our knowledge production function and we know what we make belongs to our community. We make ideas based on grassroots practices and vice versa and we work to strengthen at all times what is being constructed at the base by communities engaged in hundreds of years of resistance and innovation on this hemisphere.

I thank you for reading this email in times when it’s hard to read anything. I thank you for thinking, in times when thinking hurts. I thank you for doing things when it is easier to freeze. I thank you for caring about our collective futures when it is easier to bury our heads in the sand and only tend to the every day of our lives. I thank you for caring even if you disagree, for staying put, for moving forward, for courageously seizing this moment to create and conjure our collective loving future.

Donate to our Solidarity Fund here.