I want to build on yesterday’s message and respond to a question I received about Terrenales and Terrenal leadership.

Before going further, I want to offer a brief definition to ground us. Terrenales are not an identity, cultural category, or affinity group. Terrenales names a structural position in the Americas. It refers to descendants of Black and Indigenous peoples whose lineages were shaped by enslavement and genocide, and who therefore carry an ongoing responsibility to hold continuity where systems have repeatedly offloaded harm. This position is not chosen, and it cannot be entered through identification. It is inherited through lineage and lived through exposure to consequence.

This formation is specific to the Americas and to the conditions that continue to organize life across this hemisphere.

It has taken me from 1997 to now to name this.

Over that time, I observed patterns that did not fit the categories available to me—across communities, across institutions, and across my own life. What I was seeing was consistent, but it was not explainable within the language of identity, representation, or even most social theory. Naming it too quickly would have made it available for flattening. It required time, observation, and lived confirmation across many contexts before it could be named with precision. What is being named is not new. It has been lived across generations. What is new is the clarity.

Terrenales develop their capacities over time through what is inherited, what is learned, and what is practiced. There is inheritance, including biological and embodied memory shaped by generations living under unresolved conditions of violence and continuity in the Americas. There is learning through family, community, and informal systems of guidance that teach how to navigate conditions that formal institutions do not account for. There is also practice, developed through lived exposure—through organizing, institutional contact, and repeated encounters with systems that misread or displace responsibility.

For me, this formation was not optional.

It is also important to say that writing publicly is deeply challenging for me, and even more so when it requires writing about myself. Given my formation, attention directed toward the individual is something I have been taught to refuse, redirect, or diffuse. To speak in the first person in this way runs counter to how I was taught to move and to hold responsibility.

This is part of why it has taken me so long to share these ideas publicly.

I am writing now because I do not see this being named elsewhere, and withholding it would not be a responsible response to the conditions we are in.

What remains unarticulated are the frameworks required to make these conditions legible with precision—Poetic Futurism, a hemispheric orientation, Terrenales as a structural position, and hemispheric topology as a way of understanding how these conditions are organized and how they move.

My biological lineage includes Haplogroup A2, a maternal lineage associated with Indigenous peoples of the Americas, alongside a broader mixing of peoples across Central America. I am of this hemisphere, and my formation takes place within its conditions.

Within my family, I learned early how to hold coherence under pressure—through experiences of institutional and social punishment, erasure, and rejection. This was not taught as theory. It was learned through expectation, correction, and practice.

This learning also took place within institutions. It included surviving violations of bodily integrity within systems of education, as continues in Honduras and elsewhere today. Rather than organizing around protest in conditions where it was unlikely to change the outcome, my family taught me how to navigate that terrain with clarity. The expectation was not that harm could be avoided, but that it would be met with intention.

I learned to understand when consequence was likely and to be in charge of when it happened—to choose when it would be incurred in alignment with a position or a stand. Even under constraint, there was still responsibility for how I entered the moment.

This was then developed through practice—through organizing work and later through institutional exposure. This is how these capacities are formed. It is inherited, learned, and practiced over time.

This is not unique. It is one expression of how these capacities are formed across the hemisphere.

These capacities include the ability to read consequence, to anticipate how systems land in lived experience, to maintain coherence under pressure, and to act with responsibility in conditions where recognition is absent.

But these same capacities are often misread.

Terrenales are frequently unintelligible within dominant cultural and institutional frameworks. The ways they move, decide, and respond are interpreted through categories that do not recognize the conditions they are shaped by. As a result, behaviors that are functional within their lived reality are often seen as problematic, excessive, disengaged, or non-compliant.

Over time, this misreading is not only external. It becomes internal. Many Terrenales come to understand themselves as the source of the difficulties they encounter. The absence of recognition becomes interpreted as personal failure rather than structural misalignment. This produces disorientation and a diminished sense of belonging and well-being.

The cost of carrying continuity under these conditions is cumulative. It is sustained exposure to consequence without recognition, without redistribution, and without relief.

At the same time, communities raising their children to meet the world as it actually is—not an abstracted version of it—are also misread. The forms of preparation, discipline, and awareness required within their conditions are not recognized as development. They are treated as deviation. This is one of the dynamics behind what is often described as school failure, low participation in the economy, or difficulty integrating into institutions.

Terrenales survive education.

They move through systems that were not designed to recognize or develop the forms of capacity they carry. What is learned in these spaces is not only content, but how to endure, navigate, and at times resist conditions that misread them.

At the same time, these conditions are also where a distinct superclass of change makers is formed. Terrenales develop capacity through sustained exposure to complexity, constraint, and consequence. The very conditions that create pressure also refine their ability to read systems, anticipate outcomes, and act with coherence under strain.

But these same conditions also produce a pattern of removal. Those who most consistently hold continuity, exercise refusal, and resist being shaped into individualized actors are often the least compatible with institutional norms.

Terrenales also refuse individual attention. This is not a matter of preference. It is structural. Their orientation is organized around responsibility and continuity, not visibility. Individual attention introduces distortion. It isolates what is relational, shifts accountability onto the individual, and redirects focus away from what is being carried. As a result, attention is often redirected, diffused, or declined.

Refusal is not withdrawal. It is how coherence is maintained when alignment would require fragmentation.

Within institutions, this is routinely misread. Leadership is defined through visibility and individuation. Those who do not organize themselves in this way are seen as lacking leadership, rather than operating through a different form of it. What is being misread is not absence of leadership, but refusal of its dominant form.

As a result, they are frequently sidelined or exit. This is not incidental. It determines which forms of leadership remain within institutions, and which are forced out.

The result is a structural inversion. Those most able to carry continuity under pressure are least likely to remain. Those who remain are those most able to align with institutional expectations.

Over time, this produces a superclass of change makers tasked with leadership and representation, while constrained from holding what the conditions require. This is not a question of individual capacity. It is a question of how leadership is selected and retained. Representation is maintained. Capacity is constrained.

The impact of this is significant. It shapes who leads, what forms of responsibility can be carried within institutions, how communities experience those institutions, and how effectively we are able to respond to the conditions we are living through.

At a moment when the world is becoming more complex—across seams, corridors, and insulation zones—these are precisely the capacities that are needed. What Terrenales carry is not marginal. It is increasingly what the terrain requires.

And yet these capacities remain consistently misrecognized, underdeveloped within institutions, and filtered out of positions of leadership.

If we are to meet this moment, this requires structural shifts.

For philanthropy, it means funding work that does not resolve within grant cycles, evaluating based on what is sustained over time, and resourcing in ways that reduce risk rather than redistribute it. It also means not structuring funding around individual leaders when the work is collective, and recognizing refusal or exit as signals of misalignment rather than failure.

For governance, it means recognizing that those who understand long-term consequence often do not hold formal authority, and creating conditions where that orientation can shape decisions rather than be overridden by short-term timelines or administrative logic.

For movements, it means understanding that refusal is part of alignment, that leadership will not always take individual form, and that continuity often depends on collective rather than individualized capacity.

These are not marginal adjustments. They are necessary shifts if we are to respond to the conditions we are now in.

This is part of what Terrenales names. And it is part of what is being asked of us now.