In the last blog, I wrote about the romance of further breaking: the tendency to treat collapse, disorientation, and fracture as universal thresholds of growth, even when many communities have already carried generations of imposed rupture.

That question does not stop at the border.

Diaspora is often discussed through longing, identity, remittances, food, language, memory, cultural celebration, and the ache of being formed across more than one place. All of these matter. Diaspora can carry extraordinary devotion. It can preserve kinship across distance, sustain households through remittances, protect memory when official histories erase it, create openings for children, and keep a people connected across migration, exile, displacement, and political violence.

Diaspora can also carry power.

When people move to the United States or other wealthy countries, they may gain access to income, citizenship, mobility, institutions, credentials, professional networks, media platforms, philanthropy, and political legitimacy. That access does not remain only with the person who has gained it. It travels through families, churches, business relationships, hometown associations, electoral campaigns, WhatsApp groups, land purchases, nonprofit organizations, universities, social media, professional networks, and the many ways people make decisions across borders.

The question is not whether diaspora should have influence. Diaspora already has influence. The question is what political worlds that influence helps make possible.

Money sent home can keep a family alive. It can help pay for food, medicine, schooling, housing, migration costs, and care for elders and children. It can also create new hierarchies of authority within families and communities, especially when the person sending money becomes the person who expects to decide where people live, how land is used, who receives support, what political choices are acceptable, or which future a community should pursue.

Citizenship can offer protection, mobility, and access. It can also create distance from the consequences of decisions made elsewhere. A person living in the United States may be able to support a political figure, invest in a business, encourage a development project, or circulate a narrative about a community without having to live with the land loss, surveillance, militarization, displacement, labor exploitation, or social fracture that follows.

Professional success can create opportunities for people who have been excluded from institutions. It can also make diaspora figures especially legible to the systems that continue to determine whose knowledge matters, whose stories travel, and whose political analysis becomes fundable. A person who learns to move fluently through foundations, universities, nonprofit institutions, media platforms, and leadership spaces may come to be treated as the representative of an entire community. Their access can then be mistaken for collective authority.

This is one of the ways flattening moves across borders.

A community becomes a story carried by the person who has learned how to speak institutionally. A people become a demographic. A political history becomes a personal brand. A language, spiritual practice, memory, or cultural inheritance becomes content. A person’s survival across migration becomes proof of resilience. The institutions that reward this kind of legibility may believe they are amplifying marginalized voices while continuing to concentrate recognition, authorship, funding, and interpretive authority in a small number of people.

There is another consequence when movement language is captured: people can lose the ability to tell who is acting in relationship and who is using the language of relationship to gain access, legitimacy, or control.

Words such as solidarity, decolonization, autonomy, healing, community, care, liberation, and justice can travel easily through institutions, campaigns, philanthropy, media, and professional spaces. They can be used by people who are building collective authority and by people who are extracting from it. They can describe work that protects land, memory, and self-determination, and they can be used to market projects that weaken all three.

Language alone cannot be the measure of political alignment. The question is not who has learned the right vocabulary. The question is what relationships, material practices, decisions, and consequences sit beneath the words. Who retains authority? Who receives resources? Who carries risk? Who is displaced, silenced, or made more dependent? What remains with the people whose histories and knowledge make the language meaningful?

When language is captured, discernment has to become more rigorous. We have to learn to read beyond declarations of values and toward the worlds being built through money, governance, representation, land, institutional exit, and the distribution of consequence.

Communities living under sustained pressure have long understood this. When danger intensifies, they take account of who remains, who withdraws, who becomes silent, who changes position, and who continues to use the language of solidarity while stepping away from the consequences of relationship.

The question is not only who calls themselves an ally. The question is who stays accountable when there is risk, when resources are needed, when public support becomes costly, when institutions retreat, or when communities refuse the terms being imposed on them. This is how people distinguish between relationship and extraction, between solidarity and capture, between those who share language and those who are willing to carry consequence.

The work of discernment belongs to communities themselves. Communities are not waiting for outside institutions, celebrated changemakers, or professional allies to determine who is trustworthy. They are reading the record of relationship: who has remained close, who has carried risk, who has moved resources, who has respected authority, who has disappeared, and who has continued to speak the language of solidarity after withdrawing from its obligations.

Diaspora communities are not politically uniform. They carry the same racial hierarchies, class interests, religious commitments, political formations, anti-Blackness, anti-Indigeneity, patriarchal structures, aspirations toward Whiteness, and relationships to extraction that exist across the hemisphere. A person can carry the memory of displacement while participating in the displacement of someone else. A person can send money home while supporting political worlds that weaken Indigenous authority, criminalize Black communities, endanger migrants, or make land more vulnerable to extraction.

This is especially important for Terrenales.

Terrenalidad names a structural position shaped by the intertwined histories of Indigenous dispossession and Black enslavement across the Americas. Terrenales living in the United States may gain forms of access that relatives, communities, and people in their places of origin do not have: money, documentation, mobility, institutional language, philanthropy, education, professional networks, and public visibility.

That access can strengthen continuity. It can support land defense, family survival, collective education, political organizing, community infrastructure, language, memory, and the authority of people rooted in place. It can also deepen rupture when access becomes detached from responsibility to the people, territories, and histories through which it became possible.

Philanthropy is not building Terrenal power. Its work may reach Terrenal communities, draw on Terrenal knowledge, fund people carrying Terrenal histories, or use language developed through struggles shaped by Terrenal consequence. Yet it fails to recognize Terrenales as a hemispheric political formation with the capacity to build collective authority across borders.

Instead, it often works through fracturing frameworks: nationality, issue area, racial category, sector, migration status, program portfolio, organizational type, and fundable campaign. Each of these may name something real. But when they become the primary frame, they break apart the larger field of relationship through which Terrenales can recognize shared histories of Indigenous dispossession, Black enslavement, racial ordering, forced migration, labor extraction, land loss, and interrupted continuity.

The result is that resources may move widely while power remains diffuse. Terrenales become grantees, representatives, advisors, storytellers, cultural workers, recipients of programs, or evidence of impact. We remain visible in pieces while the collective political formation capable of building authority across the hemisphere remains unnamed, unsupported, and structurally underpowered.

This is not an accidental omission. Fracturing frameworks preserve the intermediary’s role as the place where communities must be sorted, interpreted, connected, funded, and made legible. A direct Terrenal structure of relationship would make a different kind of power possible: one in which people shaped by related histories can recognize one another, develop analysis together, move resources directly, and determine political priorities without waiting to be assembled by an institution.

A responsible diasporic practice actively builds direct relationships among Terrenal communities across national boundaries. It does not treat nonprofit organizations, foundations, intermediaries, or professional networks as the necessary route through which people must know one another, exchange analysis, move care, or recognize shared consequence.

This does not mean that organizations have no role. It means they cannot become the substitute for relationship. When every connection must pass through an NGO structure, those structures can determine which communities become visible, whose stories travel, whose political analysis is translated, and which forms of solidarity are considered fundable or legitimate.

Terrenal communities across the hemisphere already carry related histories of Indigenous dispossession, Black enslavement, migration, racial ordering, labor extraction, land loss, and interrupted continuity. A diasporic practice worthy of that history creates conditions for people to meet one another directly: to share memory, compare political conditions, recognize common patterns, exchange strategies, mourn together, move resources, and build responsibility across borders without requiring institutional permission.

The purpose is not to create another transnational network that speaks for people. It is to widen the relationships through which Terrenales can recognize one another, strengthen collective authority, and build continuity across the boundaries empire has imposed.

Terrenal relationship must also be organized through allegiance to future-oriented Indigenous movements. Terrenalidad emerges through the intertwined histories of Indigenous dispossession and Black enslavement across the Americas. It cannot become a political formation that draws meaning from Indigenous loss while leaving Indigenous authority, territorial struggle, governance, and future-making at the margins.

This allegiance does not mean speaking for Indigenous peoples, claiming Indigenous political authority, or treating Indigenous movements as a source of cultural legitimacy. It means recognizing that Indigenous peoples remain primary political authorities in struggles over land, territory, language, collective governance, memory, and the conditions of life across the hemisphere. It means orienting Terrenal relationships toward the futures Indigenous communities are building and refusing arrangements that use Indigenous knowledge, imagery, or struggle while weakening Indigenous self-determination.

A Terrenal structure of relationship must therefore ask: does this strengthen the authority of Indigenous communities over their own lands, knowledge, governance, and futures? Does it deepen relationship with Indigenous movements carrying forward collective life? Does it move resources, attention, and protection in ways that support their work without absorbing it, translating it into someone else’s institution, or making it serve a broader political brand?

Terrenal power has integrity only when it helps widen the conditions through which Indigenous futures can be carried.

This is inconvenient to the superclass because it requires Terrenales to become builders of the structure of relationship itself. It shifts us from being recipients of programs, sources of knowledge, cultural symbols, representatives, or evidence of resilience into people who can convene one another, develop shared analysis, move care and resources, determine political priorities, and build authority across the borders empire imposed.

Such a structure reduces the power of institutions, intermediaries, celebrated changemakers, and professional allies to act as the necessary bridge between communities. It becomes harder for them to control access, determine visibility, translate experience into institutional language, decide which stories travel, or position themselves as the people through whom solidarity must pass.

This is not an argument against every organization or intermediary. It is an argument against any arrangement in which Terrenales are expected to provide meaning, legitimacy, and lived consequence while someone else retains the authority to organize the relationships, interpret the struggle, distribute resources, authorize exits, and determine the future.

Diaspora power matters because it can either reproduce that arrangement or interrupt it. The question is not whether people remain connected through identity, language, memory, or origin. The question is whether our relationships, resources, and decisions strengthen the capacity of people to remain connected to land, memory, authority, relationship, and collective life.

The future of the hemisphere will not be determined by language alone. It will be shaped by who holds authority, who moves resources, who carries risk, who remains in relationship under pressure, and whether people closest to consequence can build the structures through which their own futures are carried.