Over time, many have tried to name what emerges from the ruptures that formed the Americas. When we look across this body of work, it becomes clear that this is not a new question. It is a continuous civilizational concern—one taken up, reformulated, and carried forward across generations.

If we place these efforts in sequence, a pattern begins to emerge.

Simón Bolívar (active ~1807–1830) confronted the immediate aftermath of rupture, asking how newly independent societies—heterogeneous, stratified, and unstable—could hold together politically.
José Martí (active ~1875–1895) shifted the frame, insisting that the Americas be understood on their own terms, restoring dignity to a condition long defined from the outside.
José Vasconcelos (active ~1910s–1930s) extended this into a projection, imagining that mixture itself would resolve these tensions through the emergence of a future humanity.
Fernando Ortiz (active ~1920s–1950s) moved closer to lived process, describing how cultures collide and transform through sustained contact.
W. E. B. Du Bois (active ~1890s–1940s) brought the analysis inward, naming the internal fracture required to live within overlapping and contradictory realities.
Frantz Fanon (active ~1950s–1961) refused abstraction, exposing how violence continues to structure identity, possibility, and the world itself.

Alongside this arc, and developing through the late 20th century, another body of work takes shape—one that begins not from abstraction, but from the necessity of living and organizing within these conditions.

The Combahee River Collective (active ~1974–1980), including Barbara Smith (active ~1970s–present), articulated early that systems of power are not singular but interlocking. Their work grounds theory in collective struggle, where those most impacted generate the frameworks required for survival and transformation.

Cherríe Moraga (active ~1980s–present) brings this into lived and relational experience, showing how these conditions are carried within bodies, families, and communities across time. She refuses any separation between the intimate and the structural.

Bernice Johnson Reagon (active ~1960s–2000s) adds a critical dimension through her articulation of coalition. She makes clear that continuity across difference is not given. It must be actively maintained under tension, discomfort, and risk. Coalition is not a space of ease, but a disciplined practice of staying in relation when coherence cannot be assumed.

This line of inquiry is further sharpened by Kimberlé Crenshaw (active ~1980s–present) and Linda Martín Alcoff (active ~1980s–present), who examine how difference is structured and misrecognized. Crenshaw shows how overlapping forms of power produce compounded conditions that often remain invisible. Alcoff shows how identity shapes what can be recognized, heard, and validated as knowledge.

Taken together, this body of work articulates what it takes to live, organize, and remain in relation under sustained contradiction.

Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui (active ~1980s–present) sharpens this further by refusing the abstraction of mixture altogether. Her work shows how narratives of synthesis can obscure the ongoing presence of colonial relations. She insists on contradictions that do not resolve, keeping attention grounded in material and historical conditions.

By the time John C. Mohawk (active ~1970s–2006) is actively theorizing, these lines of inquiry are already in motion. His intervention enters after the field has been substantially developed—and reorganizes it.

Drawing from Haudenosaunee governance traditions as a Seneca thinker, Mohawk situates coherence in relation to land, time, and intergenerational responsibility. Where others ask what emerges from rupture, or what it takes to live within unresolved conditions, he centers what has continued—and the forms of governance that have sustained continuity across centuries of disruption.

He also shifts the temporal frame. Where earlier approaches remain tied to institutional or civilizational timescales, Mohawk insists on horizons that exceed them. In doing so, he moves the field from interpretation toward orientation.

Humberto Maturana (active ~1960s–2021) provides a different kind of grounding across all of these efforts. His work shows that human systems are constituted through relationships, and that coherence is not an ideal but a condition for life to continue. What is at stake is not only identity or structure, but the maintenance of relational conditions under which life remains possible.

By the late 20th and early 21st century, further efforts emerge to increase the capacity of individuals and institutions to engage complexity itself. Toni A. Gregory (active ~1990s–2015) developed a theory of diversity maturity that frames difference as something to be engaged developmentally, requiring increasing levels of cognitive, relational, and systemic capacity. Her work sought to move beyond binary framings toward a more integrated ability to hold multiple realities at once.

This marks an important culmination.

But even here, the focus remains on the development of capacity within systems and individuals, rather than on the structural distribution of responsibility and consequence across populations. The question becomes how to better hold complexity, rather than who is already required to carry it.

Across these now-completed lines of thought, what emerges is a widening field—political, cultural, structural, relational, and lived.

But they also converge around a shared limit.

They do not fully name the structural position produced by these conditions—or the ongoing distribution of responsibility and consequence that sustains them across time.

This is where Terrenales sits.

Terrenales is not an identity category, nor a celebration of mixture, nor a projection of synthesis. It is a structural position that emerges from the entangled violences of the Americas—the enslavement of Black peoples, the genocide and displacement of Indigenous peoples, and the forced continuities that bind those histories together across generations.

To name Terrenales is to name a position structurally required to carry.

To carry memory where institutions close files.
To carry continuity where systems produce fragmentation.
To carry consequence where others are insulated from it.

This is not incidental. It is organized.
And it is ongoing.

I also want to name that this reading does not come from outside these traditions. My formation is deeply intertwined with these lines of thought—having worked directly with John C. Mohawk, having been guided by Toni A. Gregory in my doctoral work, and having learned directly from Humberto Maturana. This is not a claim to authority, but a statement of location. It is from this formation, and the responsibility it carries, that I can recognize both the depth of these frameworks and the limit they share.

It is from this ground that Poetic Futurism emerges.

Poetic Futurism does not begin from abstraction, projection, or identity. It begins from the recognition that the future is shaped through the relationship between meaning and responsibility. It is an orientation that brings coherence to how we understand what is happening and how we respond under conditions of acceleration.

If Terrenales names who is structurally required to carry continuity and consequence, Poetic Futurism asks how we build forms of life, governance, and relationship that do not continue to rely on that uneven distribution. It connects interpretation to responsibility, and responsibility to design.

In this way, Poetic Futurism is not an alternative framework alongside others. It is an approach to coherence.

Orientation matters here, because the future is a relationship—and we are already living inside it.

I also want to share that it is possible that travel for work may be safer in the United States in the coming period. As a result, I expect that I may be traveling more and writing less. I will continue to share when I am able.

As always, I welcome your reflections.