 Good evening everyone. My name is Camila Curie, and I'm a public programs fellow here at the Brooklyn Museum. I am very honored to be introducing tonight's program as a woman and a Latina myself. I feel very empowered by the presence and the voices of the women with us tonight. Iris Morales, Rosa Clemente, Victoria Barrett, and our moderator, the Brooklyn Museum's very own director of education, Adra Jones-Jomeda. In a time when hundreds of women are still being unjustly punished for raising their voices against the injustices facing their communities and the world at large, it feels very pertinent for us to be joining in tonight's conversation. I want to acknowledge the life of a woman in particular, Marielle Franco, who was murdered in Rio de Janeiro in Brazil on March 14th, 2018. She was a politician. She was a human rights activist and all-around an incredible woman. And I just want to say that Marielle Stomps dos Presentes. This conversation tonight is presented alongside the new exhibition Ritical Women in Latin American Art 1960 to 1985. If you haven't seen the show yet, please do not miss it. The museum is open until 10 p.m. tonight, so you get a chance to take a peek. But it's an extensive show, so make sure you come back and take your time to look at the incredible work by all of these Latin American women. Tonight, welcoming to the stage and introducing the speakers are the Brooklyn Museum's very own Alma and Evian from the teen staff. So without any further ado, I want to welcome to this stage to get the show going, so please. Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Alma Rodriguez. I am a teen council member here at the Brooklyn Museum. Tonight, I have the honor to introduce to you Rosa Clemente. Rosa Clemente is a doctoral student in the W.E.B. Du Bois Department of UMass Amherst and an organizer, political commentator, an independent journalist, and a freedom fighter who has spent her life dedicated to scholar activism. Rosa has fought her way to provide support for the Black and Latinx community through the founding of Know Thyself Productions and the first ever national hip-hop political convention. She's even run for vice president. I admire Rosa Clemente for all the incredible work she has done to help and promote representation to communities that are often underrepresented. Her hard work inspires a lot of people, just like me, to keep on advocating for what is right and well-deserved. Please welcome Rosa Clemente. Next, I would also like to introduce to you Victoria Barrett. Victoria Barrett is an Afro-Indigenous, Garifuna-Underren climate change and human rights activist. A current student at University of Wisconsin, Madison, attending with a full tuition scholarship and a Brooklyn Museum teen alumni. She has been an active member at the Alliance for Climate Education Action Fellowship and is a plaintiff in the current Altrugans Trust lawsuit against the federal government for the role in failing to protect the rights of young people in an environment threatened by climate change and uncertainty. From traveling to Paris for the COP21 year-end conference on climate change and speaking at the United Nations headquarters in New York City, I am completely inspired by Victoria Barrett. Since I first met her here at the museum, she has exhibited a deep passion for environmental activism and has accomplished so much at such a young age. She is brilliant and cares deeply about climate change, justice and human rights and is advocating for better changes for the protection and improvement on our environment. Please welcome one of my good friends, Victoria Barrett. My name is Avias Darrell. I'm a senior in the Museum Apprentice Program. Next we are going to welcome Miss Edis Morales. This amazing woman has dedicated her time and energy to the advancement of the Puerto Rican community, women's rights, workers' rights and social justice. Organizing in East Harlem, she was the first woman to join the Radical Young Lords Party and became a leading member. Edis Morales took action and always fought to better her community. Furthermore, Miss Morales got her law degree from NYU and she worked as a drug rehab educator, created youth media organizations and worked to challenge stereotypical media portrayals of Latinx communities. I feel personally connected with Edis Morales because I too strongly believe in helping people around me the best way possible. Sometimes it takes one person to inspire many. So ladies and gentlemen, here is Edis Morales. If not at least, I will be welcoming, Adra Jones de Almedia. If you don't know her, get to know her. Graduating from Brown University, she received a full bright scholarship to research community schools and cultural identity in Bahia, Brazil. Moving to Brooklyn in 1996, she worked as a high school teacher and helped to create Sister the Sister, a woman's collective dedicated to the personal and community power of young women of color. She earned her master's degree from Columbia and international education and educational development. She co-founded a community-based organization, Diaspora Solidaria in Brazil. In 2013, she began her work at the Brooklyn Museum as museum educator and now director of education. Anytime I see Adra, she has a big smile and gives a such a warm, welcoming energy. Hearing about her strong foundation and academics to help the youth inspires me to one day inspire others just like that. Now please put your hands together for Adra. So, hi everyone, welcome. I am so honored, so truly truly honored to be here with the three of you and to have this opportunity to have a conversation, a public conversation with the three of you and hopefully with all of you as well. The four of us sitting here, one of the things that I've just been reflecting on as I've been preparing for this conversation is how we represent so many interesting, different perspectives. We represent multiple generations, different cultural traditions, perspectives, approaches to both organizing and to even maybe the idea of art. So, I'm excited to bring all of this wisdom, all of these interesting intersections and perspectives into this conversation. Our point of departure for this conversation is the exhibit that was just mentioned in the introduction, which is the exhibition upstairs right now. If you haven't checked it out, please do. You might have to come back because there's a lot to see. And that is Radical Women Latin American Art from 1960 to 1985. And as was mentioned, it's an exhibit that, it's the first art exhibition to explore the groundbreaking contributions to contemporary art by Latin American and Latina women artists during a period of extraordinary conceptual and aesthetic experimentation. It features 123 artists from 15 countries, and it focuses on their use of the female body for political and social critique and artistic expression. Many works were created under harsh political and social conditions, some due to U.S. intervention in Central and South America, which were compounded by the artist's experiences as women. So many of these artists were working under military regimes and under the continued threat of torture and violence. For me, one of the things that I think is really powerful about this exhibit and some of the artwork is in a loop behind us right now is the way in which the exhibit makes this point. It really pushes us to understand how each artist's individual location in her society and her identity within that society pushes her to embrace a radical point of view, both in terms of her politics and in terms of the medium, the artistic mediums that she is exploring, which I think is a really interesting and a powerful kind of combination. So I wanted to begin the conversation by hearing from each of you a little bit about this word radical. We see it a lot lately. It pops up everywhere. Everybody is talking about something being radical. So there's a sense that there's a yearning for this idea, but also there's this way in which sometimes it's used in a very sloppy way, just any old kind of way, anything is all of a sudden radical. So my first question for all of you and feel free to jump in as you feel it is around this idea of what is this word for you? We know that the word radical comes from the word root, which implies the idea of getting to the core of something, like pulling out a weed by its root or maybe for some people the idea of being grounded. What does this idea of radical mean to you? Maybe I'll start. First of all, I want to thank you for hosting this conversation. I think it is timely and I want to welcome everyone in the audience. I see a lot of women and also men, and I think it's a good time to have these talks and the fact that everybody is attracted to the word radical, I think is a good thing. But as you said, there are some pitfalls. I also want to clarify that I was not the first woman in the Young Lords. I was among the first, and that's been a frequent mistake that people make, but I don't want to take credit where it's not due. So in terms of radical for me, I think about time and place and as you suggested, radical is both content and form. And so when I say time and place, I became an activist in the 60s by protesting against the war in Vietnam. So I place it there because I think we have to understand the conditions that we're living in order to understand the word radical. And the conditions will then dictate to us what looks radical and what doesn't. For example, I recently was speaking to some students in California and I said to them, Puerto Rico is a colony. And I said, I'm not saying anything to you that you don't know. And as a matter of fact, I saw sound kind of mainstream. I said to them, and I said, and they nodded that indeed I did. And why? 50 years ago, when you said that 40 years ago, when you said that Puerto Rico was a colony, it was radical, right? Because it challenged the norm of what was accepted by society. I also said to them, maybe to liven up the conversation a little bit, I said to them, we have today in the White House thieves, criminals, rapists, murderers, and they nodded. And I said, I'm pretty mainstream. Again, if I had said that at another point in time, which in fact the young Lord said things close to that about different presidents, we would be considered radical. So I think it's important to understand the conditions that we live and our relationship to that word. But also it's important for us to know that radical for an organization like the Young Lords or the movements of the 60s meant a transformation of society. And that we were talking about, as Richie Perez said, a top to down transformation of society. And so we struggled a lot with what is the relationship between reform and revolution. And the word radical somehow mixes up in there. Again, for us, I think you have to understand your conditions in order to be able to organize your community for revolution or reform for either one. You have to really understand your community. And when you don't understand your community and the conditions that you live in, you can have a social movement. I want to leave it there. I mean I think at this point even language like radical is unattainable to most brothers and sisters or non-gender conforming people in the neighborhood, in the streets, working to a three-job. So I see it as a very now academic leftist term. And I mean I would say we're living in radical times of xenophobia and white supremacy, but we don't have radical organizations on the left or I don't even, you know, there's a black left and a white left and a Marxist, Leninist left. And I think none of that is addressing these times. You know, so when Iris said about time and place, the exhibits from 60 to 85, right? That exhibit is amazing, but there's a complete erasure of blackness. It's visible, but then when you look at who most of the artists are, what they look like, what they might have represented more around addressing class conditions and the condition of the woman as opposed to maybe like a global black liberation ideology or radical imagination like how you had said earlier that Robin Kelly has talked about. So if I think of radical, that's what we need to be like. What is a black radical imagination that envisions a complete new system of living and how we live as a people, as a global black people? So I think a lot of terms now can be trendy and are very academic-y and they can be in journals and panels, which is quickly important because I think when you're seeing a country go towards fascism, that discourse and debate and the sharing of ideas is the most critical thing we could be doing now. But on top of that we need to be building true organizations and institutions that are addressing the material conditions of our people. So I see that now as how are we as organizers, I don't use the term activists to describe myself, activists or people who can maybe donate or sign a petition or might show up at something, but as organizers we learn to become leaders and what failure looks like in a movement, what a win looks like in a movement. So I think all these things are necessary if we're going to move towards a radical revisioning of what the world should be about. And I think that's what we need now, like radical visionaries. I would say when I think of the definition of the word radical or what I see it used to describe, a lot of the times it's used to explain people or movements that are outside of the box of what a general society considers normal or average or typical. And when people outside of that start fighting for their own necessities is when it's usually depicted as radical, instead of considering the fact that, you know, when black people are fighting for their liberation, instead of it being considered radical, that's people fighting for their necessities, for their humanity, for their existence. And I think that there's a lot of erasure of that, you know, people turn it into policies and laws and things that exist in a more tangible way and take it away from the actual emotion of what creates this radicalness is coming from pure human necessity and survival. And in a lot of situations that's what the main runner is and that's what's mainly motivating people and that no one's considering that. And a lot of movements are considered radical until maybe the typical middle-age white liberal picks up on it and then all of a sudden it's mainstream. I think you could talk about black students who forever have been fighting against gun violence in their schools and in their regular day-to-day life and as soon as a different type of person picks up on it, all of a sudden it's less radical and more mainstream and more able to access it and usually once those people co-opt it, you're forgetting actual things that the community was fighting for in the first place. Like for example, I think of how radical it could be considered that students for years, black students for years have been fighting against having school resource, safety resource officers in their schools and then all of a sudden when we look at gun violence in a different context or maybe in a white context, white students are talking about having extra police officers in schools, something that doesn't even scratch the surface of what gun violence is to a black person but seems to embody how we can protect young people from gun violence for a white person. So that's really interesting because then you're also bringing up this idea of the gays, right? Depending on who's doing the looking, for those people over there, those people over there are saying that that's radical, right? Yeah. So, I mean, Drossa, you started, you touched on this idea and I know, Edis, we've talked about this a little bit also. You know, we're here in Art Museum and we think a lot about what this thing is that we call art. I think this museum has been more open than others to opening up a little bit that concept beyond just something that you put on the wall, although of course we have lots of things on the wall here also. But, you know, both Robin Kelly, Angela Davis, many folks talk about this idea of the black radical imagination and how essential it is to help us imagine liberation. This idea that if we're not just going to be reacting to oppression and reacting to it by, you know, fighting against it. I mean, that's important. We need to do that. But then how do we also practice this imagination muscle so that we can even think of something else instead of constantly just being defined by the thing that we're fighting against? So, I wonder how this connects to this idea of art, this idea of creativity. And, you know, if we think about these ideas beyond just the walls of a museum, how does it intersect to your understanding of radical politics and organizing? The idea of creativity, the idea of art, the idea of culture, that realm of things. How does this connect to the work that you do on the ground and to how you understand organizing? To be an organizer, you have to be creative and you have to be innovative. Again, I was thinking of something that happened recently and then I'll talk more specific, more generally or more theoretically about it, but I was supposed to make a presentation at a church recently, or earlier this week, I think, I've lost track of time. And there was a young organizer, a 23-year-old organizer who had put the whole event together and it was supposed to be in exchange with some young environmental justice activist. You know, you don't like the word. In any event... In any event, so we're standing outside the church and they had food catered, you know, rice, benedict, a bunch of Puerto Rican food and the young woman was very anxious because it was like ten minutes to the church opening and the church wasn't open yet. So I knew she was a new organizer and I was trying to calm her so that she wouldn't feel bad and she said, so I said to her, maybe they're late people. I said, but even if they're late people maybe we should have a backup plan and across the way was a museum with a big wide open space and a section for children to play in the park and I said to her, if you want, we can set up and do the event across the way. Let's see if we find the opening and she says, well, what if the police come? I said, well, we'll deal with it when the police come. I said, because there are people here for the event and you have the food, we've got the people so let's go for it and the only thing that we need to do is to vary the program a little bit because it's open space and we couldn't have a conversation like this. So that's what we did. So that's creativity and that's flexibility and people accepted it and I welcomed everyone and I said organizers and activists have to be flexible and have to be creative and that's what we did. The young lords were successful and many movements of the 60s, if you look at the Black Panther Party, our success was based in creativity and whether it was the taking over of a hospital or taking over of a TB truck and I've often said that some of these actions were performance art. If you look at the photographs with all the posters of all the iconic figures of that time and the berets and the performance art and the people loved it because it's a way of communicating and creativity is about communicating and reaching the soul of people. That's really what art is about, it's about reaching the soul of people and having people think about things differently and that whole era was creative because we went against the official story, the official story that said we were inferior, we were nobodies, we were supposed to be work horses, you know, spicks and niggers, that's what we were and we flipped it and we say we're black and we're proud, right? And we changed the way we dressed, we changed the way we spoke, we thought about values in a different way, what was important to us, we taught ourselves our history, that was innovative and that was artistic and we spawned creative movements, we informed each other, the people that were on the front lines doing the so-called political work informed the people that were so-called the artistic work which is really a western division, right? Because everything around us is art and sometimes something can be artistic or it can be functional. So the role of creativity and art is very integral to organizing and to art. Yeah, I mean I think that question is interesting especially because part of what we do is tell the truth or we have to even when it's uncomfortable. So when the Brooklyn Museum, there's been controversy, right? Like the truth is that it's not only the controversy of Brooklyn being completely gentrified and like 10 years there'll be hardly any black or brown people in Brooklyn, New York and that's the truth and so-called white allies which I hate or white accomplices are gonna have to come to the realization that they've created this mess and then they're reaping and enjoying the benefits of it and now they're go-to models calling the police any time they feel uncomfortable. That's happening everywhere but the Brooklyn Museum and the controversy around who gets hired to curate what essentially comes down to these institutes. We think that at this point these institutions have let us be part of their institution that we've progressed and to me until we no longer as black and brown people see ourselves through the white lens and a white gaze as Toni Morrison that we're not progressing and part of it is that what we have is not enough because now we're a people that have consistently now for over 100 years, 150 years in this American failure of a project have been in this mode of survival we've never been allowed to thrive. So what would it mean for all these institutions to finally just let black people lead them where they need to go? If the majority of the world is black then why aren't the majority of our institutions from top to bottom run by black people run by black and brown women run by non-gender conforming queer folks all the folks that already been marginalized but yet we still keep giving chances to white mediocrity like white people could do whatever and still within three years ascend to run something you're like that's crazy just on the level of you have to have some knowledge at least put five years in the game before you get promoted to run things that are going to literally impact the imagination of young people that's not to say that the majority of the people working here at the Brooklyn Museum were like really that's what we told y'all there's like 20,000 people who are black and Latino with MFA's and been doing and curating and all this what makes then you know what is that I mean that's the essence of white supremacy and how it controls anything and everything in that way so I think one of the things is we always have to acknowledge that and we have to be very clear with young folks because then young people feel let down and that's why in the last five to seven years you've seen a new wave of what black and brown organizing looks like young people challenging gender norms and questioning certain things and saying you know what does this leadership look like the flip side of that has been because of this white gaze even these young people that have broken some of the old stagnant ways of organizing they actually believe that visibility at you know awards and adulation from the system means they've broken something so they actually think they're doing stuff radical and it's like look you know and this is coming from me I went to the we're going to the Golden Globes but it was crazy the amount of people the next day that were like oh you got money now like you making the move I'm like what are you talking about the stuff that we're still talking about on that red carpet it's not getting into some invited the next day though the couple times you're in a magazine and all that that's just visibility that's not power and sometimes the system rewards in order to absorb radicalism and that's what we have to be telling younger folks when you're doing this work the ego don't get caught up what does language mean how does it translate what are you doing that's actually shifting the power paradigm are we still creating the same things in a hierarchical sense instead of vertical organizing or using democratic principles or pushing past these old lenses or too many my generation and younger generations have this romanticism about the 60s and the 70s without understanding that the minute that the Black Panther Party for self-defense or the Black Liberation Army the Young Lords Party or those Machathedals first these were paramilitary organizations they were not civil rights organizations they weren't petitioning the courts to change conditions they were doing that because they also were paramilitary organizations the state literally put its entire weight of the government amongst them so when J. Edgar Hoover says that the Black Panther Party for self-defense is the greatest greatest internal security threat to the United States of America the second organization was not even an organization it was the Puerto Rican independence movement that they targeted so anybody working and why because we're a colony but what does it mean and militarily all of this stuff like young people have to understand that a lot of what happened between the 60s and 1985 was a purposeful destruction of movements that were radical so if we're going to move into that radical phase we have to start with true telling and then we have to prepare for the weight of the United States government coming at us because that's how they've always operated and that was in secret in 2018 there's no secret there's no secret to who they're targeting with these ICE raids there's no secret to what Muslims they might want banned there's no secret to who they're incarcerating there's no secret now that last week the FBI had to admit that it's been surveilling so-called Black Lives Matter activists over 580 that they have yet to name because they redacted but eventually we'll find out so the FBI for three years started on the Barack Obama has been surveilling 585 Black Lives Matter activists seven connected to Black Lives Matter and the last year have been murdered or died mysteriously like this is real and I don't say all of that to scare young people what I'm saying is that bad then begins at least to have younger people who are doing this work not only to like Richie would always tell us to up the ante Richie Perez would always be like you think what you're doing is radical get to the next level and what that means I think it also is going to require psychological leadership of how we think and who we're doing the work for you know I think it's psychological a lot of this right now and again that connects to the idea of like where the imagination and working the imagination why that's not just fluff on the side how that's actually essential Victor you want to jump in there yeah definitely when I'm thinking about art and activist movement so a lot of what I think about goes to the fact that art is a really good way for people who don't necessarily have the coded language and the academic language to talk about their movements could represent their feelings art is a way to portray raw emotion and raw feelings and I think especially when you're talking about experience and this idea of experience we have to consider that people's lived experiences are like a qualification people's existences are a qualification being a black woman in America makes you qualified to you know talk about topics that deal with black women in America and you don't necessarily need to have a PhD in African-American in gender studies to be able to talk about the experience of being a black woman in America and you know I think about going to college and everything and going to school a lot of that is so that people a lot of the reason that people of color strive to get into these institutions is so that we could access this guarded coded academic language that western society has told us is necessary in order to be successful in today's world and what's going on today and then you need a piece of paper to prove that you've got those words and you have that language to do that and art is a great way because communication like language communication word communication is flawed there's not always a perfect way to portray what you're saying or what you're feeling in a way that people understand and I think that art puts a lot of the ability and capability into people's hands to be able to portray whatever they're feeling and whatever their experiences are and however they're existing in the world in a way that could impact people because we've seen that words aren't enough and especially if you don't have access to the type of words that people consider elite like I think of the environmental movement a lot of the environmental movement has always been dominated by white students who go to private schools that go to Ivy League institutions because they have that academic language to talk about how complex climate change is but they don't have that experience of living in a flood zone because you're black or having poisoned water because you're black or like understanding these concepts of environmental racism and environmental justice because that's not their lived experience they want to talk about the academics of it and they want to talk about why it's ethically unfair but they could just talk to somebody who's actually experienced the ethical unfairness or look at the art that somebody's created out of that unfairness and have a way better picture of what's going on Yeah, so it's also about epistemology like what do we consider our ways of knowing and what are valid ways of knowing and kind of blowing that up to include more ways of knowing as legitimate, yeah Woo, okay So I had for the, you know the next question that I wanted to throw out to you is kind of a natural a natural sequence to the question of radical politics and I had pulled out this quote from Frederick Douglass that I always returned to and I wanted to share to set up this question and Rosa was like well if you're going to share the quote you got to share the whole quote because that's not the whole quote and so I want to actually share a bigger chunk of the quote because I think she's right in that to get to kind of the full concept that he throws out there which is this idea that if there is no struggle there is no progress those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing up the ground they want rain without thunder and lightning they want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters this struggle may be a moral one or it may be a physical one it may be both moral and physical but it must be a struggle power concedes nothing without a demand it never did and it never will and in fact if we think about any major significant social political transformation that we've experienced or our parents have experienced in their lives whether it's abolition of slavery eight hour work day end of apartheid segregation down south whatever it's never happened without struggle never happened because somebody felt bad someone in power felt bad and decided to change it and so the radical question I mean the next question with that then or is that if we really intend to radically change society expect pushback expect the force of the state and government and full force as Rosa pointed out and that means the threat of violence that means violence, imprisonment and other forms of intimidation so I didn't want to ask you all what have you learned about fear in your organizing work beyond just the theoretical like how do you actually confront this idea of fear and what is your relationship to fear in your day to day life and in your organizing work yeah I mean I don't say this because I think I'm like super human I don't fear doing the work and I don't fear that because I know of the sacrifice particularly of our political prisoners right so Herman Bell who by all that is good will be walking out of prison tomorrow after 43 years locked up you know Oscar Lopez Rivera the former Puerto Rican political prisoners not just the ones in the 90s the sacrifice that Lolita Lebron and Rafael and Oscar made before I mean especially as a bodigua like what I always tell especially young like third generation Puerto Hicans is we're the only people that have had three generation of political prisoners and now with the struggle in Puerto Rico potentially four right and you know you and that I've met most of the Puerto Rican political prisoners not because I'm super human because I'm part of movements and I've sat at the feet of Lolita and Rafael is still here and I remember being in college at SUNY Albany first finding out that there were political prisoners I grew up in the Bronx and I didn't know that they were Puerto Rican I had to go to college and take a black studies class and meet a professor by the name of Dr. Gordon who then was like you need to know who Richie Perez is it's crazy it's crazy and then now to have seen who came out and then to know that Oscar Lopez could have gotten out in the 90s but he didn't want to leave one of his comrades behind so he stayed behind while the other comrades came out and then Oscar comes out last year and I named that just because at any time I think like I'm a little bit I'm like f that and then that's just the Puerto Rican I'm gonna talk about Mumia Leonard Peltier Marilyn Buck Herman Jalil who's still in prison you know those that are still in court David Gilbert gave up his to make sure Asada Shakur is free Asada William Morales we really need to look to like when we make these altars or like who's that guiding light because a lot of times and you know we'll say Sojourner Chu Ida B. Wells, Fannie Lou Hamer and so many of the Puerto Rican independence leaders but I think of these people who have literally sat in the dungeons of hell for four to five decades now so that's to me that's why I'm like I don't necessarily have that type of fear but what I will say is that I've become very aware of the consequences of being very politically stringent in how I roll and the first time I really felt the impact of the consequences of what I felt was the right political choice when I did accept the nomination to run as vice president with Cynthia McKinney when we ran in 2008 we were the first and only woman of color taking American presidential politics and I was living in Brooklyn and you know I was struggling with my family and she called me and I was like I need a job y'all giving me a stipend and she was like yup and I'm like let's go and the other reason too was because I had been one of the co-founders of the national hip hop political convention my great mentor Richie Perez had passed by now and I just remember she asking me and I'm looking at the Green Party platform and I said if you would all accept that Puerto Rico needs to be decolonized the Palestinian writer return and something around mass incarceration and climate, racial climate stuff into your platform taking it from the national hip hop political convention platform I will run and they accepted that in a meeting around the platform. All that being said we were nominated and I really thought that my comrades people that I had gone to jail with been in rooms with, been in organizations founded organizations with and I mean my comrades my peer group my hip hop generation I just automatically assumed people would be like yo Rose is running she's running on a hip hop political platform let's go and that didn't happen I have friends that call former friends or they weren't really ever comrades that day called me and said my life was ruined and I've never heard from them since for almost two years me and Cynthia could not work. Like imagine anybody else running for vice president or whatever and not being able to find a job and I remember I was all down depressed I'm living in the Bronx I'm like my husband's formerly incarcerated I'm like I can't believe I have these degrees this debt I did all this and all of this and Pam Africa I don't know if you all know who Pam Africa is from the move family called me and she said I know something's wrong she's like but remember this game of politics and a revolution it's a long distance struggle and consistency is the name of the game you're going to get through this what do you want to do I said I want to go get my PhD she said apply and the next year I was in my PhD program I say that because I think especially for young women of color like politics in general is one of the most treacherous games after that is that academy try being a woman of color finishing your PhD and the amount of men around you who you thought should be your brothers don't want to see you succeed and I had to deal with a lot of I had to let go of a lot of romanticism and being naive I didn't have to let go of my politics I just knew that now at this age you have a daughter you've made choices you're going to have to always deal with the consequences of your choices and then how are you going to get through that financially how are you going to get through that to the next level how are you going to make sure that what you believe and even if everybody's leaving you to the side is in line with what your ancestors and your elders have taught you and actually what history employs and I know I took a little time with this answer I often see too many young women of color by the time they're like 28 like I'm done with the movement I'm like what are you talking about you don't need self-care you don't need a massage right now like what are you talking about you want self-care after being 3 months as an organizer try being now Fannie Lou or Harriet being like I'm going to keep going back you know more people would have been free try spending 40 years in jail you got to have part of this work too requires you have to have you have to be tough there are times when you're just like I have to shut all this down this is not about me liking you and wanting to go to the bar with you later or dance with you at the next gala this is about like are we comrades do you have my back when it's bad can I talk to you when my mental health is not doing good or my physical health what does it mean to have comrades say to you you know you're doing too much now now you're killing yourself we don't need martyrs in all this it took me I'm telling from about 2008 till I would say about 2014 that six year period I experienced so much growth you know and if I had at one moment been like I'm done it was hard it was a ten year thing I'm good I'm gonna go this way I wouldn't be where I am and you know I wouldn't be definitely modeling for my daughter what unfortunately my mom could not model for me not because of her fault just because she didn't have access to what I have had access to which is our history of resistance and our movements as a people you know so I took a little longer I mean I think it was so powerful for young sisters I need I hope that they understand that you know and I think part of what you are lifting up to is that you know when we talk about violence and pushback and it's not just about you know the threat of death and being put in jail though it's that too but it's much broader and deeper than that you know it's all the ways that that we need to survive living under systemic system like systemic oppression which is all so thank you for that because I think it opens up in a much broader way what it means to resist and what it means to be strategic when we're dealing and trying to survive under these systems yeah yeah my response is gonna make me seem really soft but basically what I think I've learned a lot about fear especially being in college now and doing that much more big picture thinking that I guess college is known for is that you know I used to think about how I would answer in interviews especially being a young climate activist and climate being a topic that is literally about like the continued existence of our planet and the human race I get asked a lot you know are you afraid how do you deal with your fear and I think I realized recently that I was always very naive in my response because I always say my fears won't motivate me you know like it's what makes me excited to keep doing things it makes me all of this and I realize now that I was just thinking about that in the context of climate change because there's this confidence in me like oh well we'll solve that but I realize that what I'm actually afraid of and I think this is what I notice being in school and especially going to the University of Wisconsin Madison which is there's 43,000 students at the University of Wisconsin Madison and I'm pretty sure about 700 of them are black so it's a predominantly white institution and it's in Wisconsin Madison Madison yeah and it's in Madison which we were talking about earlier has its own other layer of complexity because Madison is a liberal bastion and it's the capital city and you know it's always been known for being really radical with its students and everything like that but I think what I'm realizing and like seeing all these people around me and like leaving the city and leaving my small private school and like realizing how many types of people exist and how many various opinions exist and I think lately I realize what my fear is region is less of like the system or less of like being arrested at a protest and more about just the knowledge that like there are so many people who are against what we're doing and like there's might not there's not this reality that can exist where maybe like the progressive agenda wins because there's always going to be that like oppositional group like right now as a young activist I think what I don't know if this has a positive ending to this question but I think what a lot of my fear lies in is like how do you fix the disjointedness when so many people feel so strongly about opinions that they already believe in you know it's like for example I was talking to my sister about this yesterday there's yesterday night we had a conservative speaker on campus named Dennis Prager I don't know if any of you have heard of Prager University but it's an online YouTube channel that basically teaches young people conservative values so for example I tried to watch like one minute of a video the top one of the videos was the top five issues facing black Americans and of course they got a black guy to do it because like they had to do that but the first the first thing number five was victimization you know and I was like oh my god and the reason he even came to campus was to talk about Judeo-Christian morality and basically he was talking about transgender people and how you he believed transgender people exist but they only have the mental health issue of gender dysphoria and just all this messed up stuff and it's like students on my campus a club at my campus invited him to come speak you know students at my campus are going to go watch him speak and it's like and listen to him and listen to all the things he's saying and still be white and still be cis and still be sitting in that room and like not have any idea that all these opinions that they hold and all these things that they uphold it's like I'm just trying to see how you teach people to care about other people and like that's where a lot of my fear lies right now what if it's not always possible how to hold that that's where I'm at right now but yeah sorry well it's hard to follow all of that because all of those fears are real and there are different kinds of fears I guess that's what we've been talking about and there's the fear of state violence and then there's the individual fear that we may have within our community even that we face violence when we walk certain places and that reflects the oppression of our communities and our internalized colonized mentality where we take out on each other and so there's that fear and I think as young activists you may be afraid I remember being afraid for the first action like your blood starts pumping you're adrenaline and you're afraid and for me it was how to overcome the fear how to be able to act in spite of the fear and not let the fear immobilize me and part of that came from being able to rely on other comrades and see how they were dealing with it and knowing that what we were doing was bigger than all of us and that we had other people that had gone before us and that's why the study of our history is so important and of our social movements to understand that other people have done very brave things and that we have survived because of it because if someone didn't along the line we wouldn't have survived in my travels recently I met a woman from Honduras who is part of the Garifuna movement and she was talking about the fear that groups of women when they go to demonstrate feel and someone asked this question in the audience and she said you live with the fear you always live with the fear of state sanctioned violence but you also believe so strongly that it's almost like a spiritual calling and something greater than what is you know that goes back to your vision of what you imagine that we can do and that we can be the people that we can be and the road that we're on that helps you deal with your fear I wanted to add to what Rosa was saying about sometimes within our movements we become afraid from the people we're struggling because differences of ideas people turn violent on one each other again that's part of our internalized depression and about ideological struggle and I have also experienced that and that I think is the most hurtful fear because it is among your own brothers and sisters and people it's a betrayal that's difficult to overcome and yet we must we must because these are not our enemies these are among us these are not the people that have the power to exploit us really they're also victims but that's a hard one that's a hard one I was a victim of the situation I don't talk about it too much although I did put it in my book but I somehow feel I also say in there which was important for me to say that you know I forgave him and that I have actually sat on the same stage and spoken with you know to this stuff but no I think it's because you know I have this deep belief that that we can create a society and that we can if the person is still a screw up I'm not forgiven I have those in my life too but if it's someone that you know has been siled and has you know moved forward I think we also have to learn to forgive it's part of our own transformation you know the fear is going to be there at different times it becomes more obvious because you know you're in a demonstration people are getting hit over the head or thrown in prison and at other times it seems less you know the FBI my FBI file begins when I was 19 on my way to Cuba in Mexico way before the young lords and when I ordered the files when you could still get them and I saw that that's when they started following me in Mexico City I was shocked because I thought the young lords and I was nobody I mean I was really nobody I was a college student I was an organizer had been an organizer before that but in terms of the scheme of things I wasn't you know one of the leaders in the national movement which to me also indicates that people think they can get away from things and that at the end of the day I was a government and this is what the art exhibit is about women that lived in the very repressive regimes which means nobody gets away and so that's the reality why we all have to fight because nobody gets away at the end of the day I was nobody yeah and I think that moment you know there's an echo right now and sometimes I feel like we don't fully it's not quite clicking that this is the direction that that we're heading that we're already in so how are you guys doing out there I wanted to continue but now I wanted to kind of zoom in and ask each person a particular question kind of connected to your trajectory but then invite other folks and and Edis I thought that I'd start with you and there's, I think there's some images that we can put up for this particular section so Edis has come up now a couple of times and I'm sure a lot of folks know this but from 1969 to 1975 I'm a member of the Radical New York and Puerto Rican organization known as the Young Lords Party and yeah and there's some images in the background specifically of the women in the Young Lords Party just so that people have a visual sense of who was there on the ground who were Edis' comrades at that time had during that time period included being Deputy Minister of Education and co-founder of the Women's Caucus and Women's Union among other roles the Young Lords Party was inspired by the Black Panther Party and had a 13 point program and platform that as I understand it went through a couple of different iterations and I have actually the platform here and maybe I'll just read quickly the headings of the 13 points and this is the original version not the final version we'll talk about that in a minute so number one we want self-determination for Puerto Ricans liberation for the island and inside the United States we want self-determination for all Latinos we want liberation of all their world people we are revolutionary nationalists and oppose racism we want community control of our institutions and land we want a true education of our Creole culture and Spanish language we oppose capitalists and alliances with traders we oppose the American military we want freedom for all political prisoners we want equality for women machismo must be revolutionary not oppressive we fight anti-communism with international unity we believe armed self-defense and armed struggle are the only means to liberation we want a socialist society so I wanted to ask the question how did your participation in the party inform and nurture your commitment to radical politics and also how did you see the understanding of radical politics or revolutionary politics shift and evolve during your time within the party and also for yourself as you moved out of the party and joined other movements and other struggles how has your own understanding of radical revolutionary politics perhaps evolved or shifted or grown or stayed the same that's a whole lot of questions I know it's a whole lot of questions folded into one so I'll start first that the 13 point program changed changed basically I still believe in the 13 point program and if you look at the women's union 12 point program I believe in that one there were a couple of things that changed one was the Creole one that was changed to talk about Ta'ino and African heritage and culture which was an important change and the other of course was the revolutionary machismo which everybody knows about because we said the program was written by two men and we said there's no such thing as revolutionary machismo exactly so we were clear about that but it took us about a year to change the program because they were like stuck to it so then we talked about the revolution within the revolution the organization changed over time let me say that before I was in the young lords I was already I already believed the U.S. government and a capitalist system was not in the benefit was not beneficial for poor people remember I had already traveled to Cuba and so I was very influenced by socialism and the Cuban revolution but the fact that I really wanted to go to Cuba also had to do with my developing political consciousness which I always said say started because I grew up poor and so if you grow up poor you understand poverty you understand class and if you grow up poor and you grow up black and you grow up in a family that can't speak English and you become the go between the translator you get I always say that's the way I got to know the origins so I got to know the disdain with which the hospitals treated us the emergency room and the schools when they would scold my mother for not speaking English and so I became political the lived experience as you mentioned earlier and so by the time I got into the young lords I was already that's why I joined the young lords and I was part of a world I felt I was part of a world white movement which we were because it wasn't just the young lords and the black panthers but it was an international movement and people all over the world were fighting colonialism and were fighting for freedom and justice and so I saw myself as part of that and I continued to see myself as part of that but conditions changed and the things that I say to young people is that sometimes you're in the middle of history and you don't see what you're in the middle of and so we were at a point in the latter point two things that happened but I'll talk about the second one first we were in a moment when neoliberalism was taking hold when everything was being privatized when factories were moving out of the United States and the cities were being decimated and people didn't have jobs we were in that moment and in the young lords and in many organizations of the left we were sending people to organize in the factories we failed to understand the moment that we were in and that often happens when you're involved in in revolutionary struggle so that created demoralization for an entire movement because we felt like we failed you know and people went off in different directions and it took time to kind of adjust to the new reality that we no longer had an organization a movement the way that we had grown up in it and so then we each had to find our way we were used to working collectively I love collective working and I try and create collectives all the time now wherever I go let's create a collective but that meant that we were each trying to find our own way to continue the struggle you know so some people went to build schools some people went to create women's organizations some people went to I went to do all of the above created schools for young people a publishing company now is the latest thing to do a film to document our struggles so that our stories don't get lost the next generation continue to work you know I'm the oldest person on this panel so I've done a lot of different things to try and stay connected to the struggle because the basic principles I still believe in all of them including the Vendepatrias which we don't talk about too much today and you know having been in Puerto Rico and seeing the role that is being played by not only the governor but by so many corrupt upper middle class or whatever folks and we have to talk about the Vendepatrias we you know we can't not talk about them and that was the other mistake that we made that I think is relevant for us today which is the young lords took a turn to go organize the independence struggle in Puerto Rico and that was a mistake because you couldn't organize the independence movement of Puerto Rico from here and the reason that I mentioned that is very important today is because Puerto Rico is now at a crossroads and the movement that is developing is among younger folk that are talking about sustainability and some of the people in my generation say well we should be pushing independence we should be pushing this and I said that's not how I hear the young folks talking about it they're talking about self-determination, sustainability sustainability growing our own food Puerto Rico grows in ports 92% growing our own food, solar energy and remember it's the people of Puerto Rico that have to make the decision about the status of the island because I hear a lot of people from here saying what Puerto Rico needs now I do believe we need to keep alive and in this country the issue of what is happening in Puerto Rico right now colonial disaster colonialism or climate colonialism I recently made a presentation where I said you have to look at colonialism I was talking about the struggle in Penoales I know I'm going off a little bit I really feel that the issue of Puerto Rico is critical and that we have so much to learn from the activists there because they're right at the edge they're right at the edge and everything you're a climate justice activist so you know that everything that is toxic in this country gets sent to the global south and it gets sent to Puerto Rico and the ashes is some of you may have heard about the struggle against cold ash in Penoales 300,000 tons a year that they want to dump on in Puerto Rico that's in addition to the super farm the environmental issues in Puerto Rico are incredible and they tried to dump these ashes in the Dominican Republic and they did and the people got sick deformed babies and the Dominican Republic sued because the people pressured them and the company AES had to leave the Dominican Republic and then they decided well to dump it in Puerto Rico and why? because Puerto Rico has no sovereignty and can't kick them out and the governor is in cahoots so my commitments this is a long way to say that my commitment continues and it continues very strong and it will continue until I meet my ancestors wherever I meet them well since you brought up Puerto Rico and some of the environmental issues that are happening there I think I'm going to jump to Victoria and then I'll bring it back to Rosa I wanted to ask a question in particular of you and some of the work that you've been doing and when I was thinking about and looking at some of the videos and researching some of the work that you've been involved with I was thinking about myself as a high school organizer in Boston ok we're going to get to y'all prepare your questions coming your way soon and at the time I was organizing with other young people in Roxbury I was a partner in an organization called Free My People but one of the things and our thing was we were really focused on the anti-apartheid movement and connecting it to the segregation and history of busing in Boston and kind of seeing the similarities there but there was none of us really in my circle of folks that I saw really talking or even thinking about the environment and I think that for a lot of young people that were organizers at least that I was around we all kind of and I think you talked about this we all associated that like oh that's something that white people do they care about animals and the environment but that's not at all related to real issues that people deal with or something that was kind of how we thought about it and one of the things that's been really inspiring for me is to see what up and coming organizers youth organizers the ways in which there's a generation of folks that are bringing in so many different aspects of identity and of thinking of the world in general and kind of connecting those dots and so I wanted to talk with you a little bit about in particular the federal lawsuit that you participated in which was filed by 21 young Americans between the ages of 10 and 21 and on behalf of future generations against the United States government several of its executive branches including President Donald Trump and former President Barack Obama and the plaintiffs alleged that through the United States government's affirmative actions that cause climate change that it has in fact violated the youngest generations constitutional rights to life, liberty and property as well as fail to protect essential public trust resources it's an unprecedented lawsuit and some articles I've read there's a lot of kind of legal experts that refer to it as a radical lawsuit and one of the things that has struck me is that your reaction that I've read and have heard about has been that okay maybe but really the reason why I've done it is because it's necessary so I wonder if you could talk with us a little bit about why is it necessary for communities of color young people in particular young people of color in particular to address climate change as a social justice issue yeah so I'm going to start with talking about maybe your experience as a young activist and not seeing a lot of youth of color considering environmentalism as an issue of theirs is because I will be the first to admit that the environmental movement has always and still does have a huge problem with accessibility and I think that lies in a lot of places like I was talking before lies in the fact that climate change is a scientific human perpetuity phenomenon and there's a lot of academic encoded language that goes into talking about it and I even think about the idea of veganism a lot of I've heard environmental activists say things like you can't be an environmental activist you can't care about the environment and not be a vegan things like that you'd have to be you'd have to be in a very sheltered or certain type of existence to not acknowledge the fact that veganism is not accessible to everybody if you live in a food desert and you're just trying to eat your main option isn't like let me not eat milk not eat dairy or eggs it's important agriculture is a huge contributor to the environmental crisis but we just have to really question what is accessible and also question how are we going to ask people you know white society is constantly put on the forefront of climate disaster to make sacrifices to stop climate change okay so it's like I think a lot of what's important when it comes to people of color being in the environmental movement is what I was talking about before with talking about experience as something that makes you qualified it's not necessarily tangible and you can't necessarily give somebody a degree for an experience but that just has just as much worth and it's just as important when you're talking about these conversations about climate change because white college students could get into rooms and talk about how terrible climate change is and how environmental racism works and how these things work but if they don't have somebody in the room who has the experience of being a marginalized identity then it doesn't really mean anything and I think it also does have a lot to do with self-determination the fact that young people of color are like I was saying before constantly put on the front lines of climate disaster and there's so much evidence of environmental racism in the way that we zone public housing and where people of color typically live that shows that you know a lot of white power and a lot of the government has known for a while about the environmental crisis and known for a while about the effects it's going to have and they've not only ignored it to reverse it but instead put people that they don't care about the front lines of all its damage while pretending that they have no idea oh who caused that you you did so it's like it's really important that we're getting the representation of people who actually know what's going on in the arena and actually understand what's happening and I think even expanding it past youth of color in the United States because as we know climate change is an issue that happens all over the world I always try to think about it like how do we and now I'm asking questions answering this one but like how do we engage young people who and this applies to the United States too but I think specifically about hunters where my family is from and just the way my moms talk to me about climate change impacting Honduras and the direct impact that it especially has on grief in the people so that's another example of environmental racism because the darkest in people in the country are the ones who are getting so heavily impacted by climate change because they make their whole living off of fishing and being a coastal community and you know and this is an issue that's impacting their day to day their livelihoods that's impacting where their houses are but how can you ask people to be very engaged in an issue like climate change when their day to day is trying to survive and the global South country in which they're living in and how can you ask them to do that when the United countries like the United States are the main reason that they're even having these environmental degradations Honduras provides like a very small percent of the carbon in the atmosphere compared to the United States but the people that we're seeing being impacted by it the people that we're seeing in the news that are getting hit by hurricanes and whose lands are being flooded and they can't live there anymore they're all brown faces so there's no way that white people can be the face of a movement that is impacting people of color because there's not at all the same context and not at all the same urgency you could care but it's not even it's not the same idea and so you really need to have people who have that quality and that qualification of lived experience actual existence of being a person who every day sees that their government or whoever is should be held accountable doesn't feel like being held doesn't feel like caring about them and those people need to be the ones who are doing what they can and really controlling the movement in a way they can thank you so kind of connecting to that I wanted to I have one question that I really want to kind of ask Rosa and then I want to open it up to a couple questions from the audience also so connecting back to some of the conversations that we've had I want to bring it back to this idea that at least kind of in the theoretical leftist circles has been framed as intersectionality and and some of you may have heard that this term was coined or kind of and that's not to say that it was created but it was coined by an African American scholar Kimberly Crenshaw in 1989 and in her work she's a black feminist and she discusses this experience of being she was she coined the term to explain the fact that being a black woman cannot be understood in terms of being black and of being a woman considered as separate things as independent things but that it has to necessarily include the interactions which frequently reinforce each other and Rosa I think one of the things that's really powerful about your work both as a scholar and as an activist is the ways in which you continually lift up and address head on intersectional lived experiences in all kinds of ways both as Afro-Latina and being very explicit and one of the first folks that at least kind of in my realm I saw in a very intentional way talk about the experience of being black and Latina and pushing people to hold both of those things at once instead of separately but also beyond that this idea of for example looking at hip hop as both art and cultural form but also in terms of the possibilities of looking at it as a political organizing strategy and even in terms of this idea that you talked about of being both scholar grassroots organizer and politician like you know having been involved in the Green Party as a US Vice Presidential candidate like how to hold all of these different experiences at once and I'm wondering for you how do you understand this idea of intersectionality and what role does it do you see it playing in your work in your organizing work I don't use that term so first Kimberly Crenshaw is a mentor of mine and when Kimberly Crenshaw coined intersectionality it was to censor black women and also look at what she called critical race theory and the law so I think now it's super trendy and it means that everything is of equal necessity and I don't believe that so like you know I'm not saying it's not important what Kimberly has done that now it's been so watered down that now even white men are talking about intersectionality y'all don't need to talk about that the whole world's about y'all anyway like so you know and even like I don't say I'm black in Latina I say I'm a black Puerto Rican there's no and in between none of this comes because I came to this realization it was going to college being exposed to the work of Arturo Schomburg and meeting Dr. Maeta Morenavega you know beginning to even hear at that time what people were saying were African descendants and what it meant to be Afro Boricua and never hearing those and then beginning to understand that Puerto Rico was obvious it should be obvious but you know in doing a lot of my research on the Young Lords party when I was doing my masters at the University I did my thesis on the Young Lords party and in 1996 there was only one other work out there academically and that was also the same time period that Edis had made which to this day is the only documentary on the Young Lords party which is actually highly problematic because you made that in 1996 and it's 22 years later there are so many movies on which is fantastic whether the Panther party or this era of black power and there's still only one on the and I think it's important because all of this has framed my political the way I view myself and my politics right the Young Lords raised up race right but that's the lineage of a Schomburg if anything ideologically in the academy I would say I'm a black and a Puerto Rican nationalist I meant pan-Africanist and so when I say I'm a black Puerto Rican it's because Puerto Ricans are not a race and I don't like the word Latina I don't like the word Latina I don't really like the word Latina so what does it mean why was it created it was created so that we could have another frame of Hispanic but it still falls within that Latin-American context and particularly for Puerto Ricans because we're colonial subjects it made me really understand why particularly Puerto Ricans and African-Americans have always worked side by side with each other even though there was a framing of a narrative I've always talked about how black and Latina or black and brown people are against each other and all this kind of madness so with that said in me identifying as a black Puerto Rican woman I don't get upset if somebody's like you're Latina, you're Afro-British, you're African I don't get caught up in like language and that and get upset and I also don't try to ever force someone to change how they identify I think it's a very personal thing for me I feel like it literally my identity has been saving in times where I've been depressed and down and confused and wanting to be out the movement and stuff and I kind of always just will go back to history and read Schaumburg and read you know about the young lords and the black liberation army and all of that being said, I mean growing up in the Bronx you know I grew up in the Bronx in the 70s so you know I'm a hip hop baby and for a long time I believe that my generation those of us born after 1969, the hip hop generation as coined by Bakari, Katowana were going to use hip hop to move us towards liberation and again I was naive and not understanding that the rap industrial complex has really much destroyed hip hop culture and co-opted it and corporatized it and branded and marketed it as well as you know it's funny you bring up that because yesterday with all the stuff with Kanye West going on and then Chance the Rapper and I had tweeted Chance the Rapper and I was like listen like nobody's upset really like hip hop and let go of Kanye and he's in a good place for a minute there's a lot of reasons why and some of us understand that the deaf is mother and there's a lot of pain there with that said what I tweeted Chance the Rapper which then went viral I didn't even know until this morning and mad people were hitting me up was like we're not because then Chance's response was we're not all Democrats and I said nobody's talking about political parties we're talking about this dude citing with a white supremacist okay you're putting on a hat then you're with Lyle Cohen who anybody in hip hop that has a political radical voice that man has tried to destroy so I just found this like whole thing fascinating to bring hip hop and I said listen if hip hop continues to be hyper masculine hyper homophobic hyper transphobic hyper capitalist then young people will have to create something new and a lot of my homies in hip hop are like how can you say because it's true sometimes things don't work anymore sometimes language becomes not only stagnated that the system co-ops it it's not actually the fault of those of us who created it I don't think you can safeguard everything I don't think you can safeguard cultural culture but what we can do is say this speaks for me and that doesn't so when you call me Hispanic this is from the welfare poets when you call me Hispanic all my purity seems to vanish that is not who I be and I realize that the most that it really impacted me was my daughter was born on January 1st 2005 I've been really really really sick with her like I could have died during my pregnancy the doctors were like if you continue with this pregnancy you know I lost like 50 pounds my hair was falling out I had a crazy disease but she was actually born with no complications I had natural birth right there at Methodist right here in Brooklyn and the next day they brought in the birth certificate and I remember my husband was there my comrade from the Malcolm X Grasses woman was there and they were like I had already checked off Hispanic and I was like yeah I'm gonna need a new one and LaMumba was like really dude you just had a child and I'm like why are you questioning me you're my comrade my husband's like not today let's just get out of here the baby's born everybody's happy and I said no this is how it starts it starts with whoever was at that desk already identifying my daughter what a disservice I would be doing and not racially socializing from the beginning to know you're a black Puerto Rican in many ways that is a wonderful beautiful thing and in other ways the state sees you as a target so from the minute you're born I was so adamant they brought it back they were like we can't change it I said I'm not leaving until I get a new birth certificate they sent in a social worker to then be like are you having mental health issues should we run a drug screen no it was crazy and I was just like yeah I'm not leaving and they said there's not a category and I said that I'm gonna make one and her birth certificate says others is black Puerto Rican you know what I'm saying and that is not because I think I'm exceptional to this that is because I've been raised in the movements I don't mean and I think this is super important for younger folks to know that are just beginning I was not born in a movement household okay I grew up in the Bronx and then I grew up in the poorest congressional district and then 18 miles away when I was nine my dad hit a number right old school hit the number from the bodega and bought a house in westchester county I lived an experience where for five days a week I lived in the richest suburb the second richest suburb in the United States westchester county 18 miles away where every weekend I would come and see my cousins and my community living in poverty and even growing up like that it wasn't till I went to college and I found who I was because of the black student union black students Latino students professors black women then being exposed to all my my elders and finding out about the young lords in the black Panther party I hadn't even read Malcolm X you see what I'm saying so I didn't grow up in any type of movement household I grew up in a very proud Puerto Rican household proud that I knew the parade was important but I didn't know who Pedro albisucampos was I knew that our flag was important but I didn't know that the flag was outlawed I didn't know then I began to realize to oh my abuela was one of those women that went under law 116 you know that sterilized one-third of the women in Puerto Rico and I never knew when she was so angry about everything until she almost died and told me the story so all that to say is that when identity is important but how you come into this work everybody comes in when they come in and a lot of times in this work you think that people are born into it and most of us are not born into it there's something that happens an identity shift experience something wakes you up and you're like wait my whole world has changed and sometimes in that changing you also lose family you don't lose them like in death but you're like everything you're about I'm no longer about so my identity is always I guess my my thing that I always look at like as long as I have this no one could take that away from me and I pass that down to my daughter and now I see my daughter has broken whatever me and my husband didn't have we didn't grow up in movement and now she has she'll carry that on so that's how I look at these kind of things and that's what I'm doing my PhD in and when I talk lastly about Afro Latino identity it's super trendy right now you know I'm amazed because you're right years ago for some of us to say we're African descendant or don't call me Hispanic or wait do you know about slavery in Puerto Rico people would look at you like you were crazy or you just be regulated to like the one panel on black people or Africa and now it's trendy but what I caution a lot of Latino, Latina, Latinx folks that are finding this identity is first you have to not only deal with white supremacy you have to deal with anti-blackness those are two different things then you have to deal with colorism that plays out more in Latin American descendant communities or people from what is known as Latin America but just because something is trendy doesn't mean there's a politic to it and most of what we're seeing now around Afro Latina Latina, Latinx identity has to do with skin color hair dancing and food but where are the politics of blackness what does it mean right to discuss let's say Cardi B who would never identify as Afro Latina she's like I'm just Dominican from the Bronx which is fine she's not denying who she is she's not denying who she is but she doesn't have right yet the political education that will make it move same with Amara La Negra amazing to see someone like that visually represented finally in media right but where's her politics her politics are super capitalistic anything she tweets about is her wanting to be cast by Steven Spielberg so you're like right that gets back to what Edis was saying about needing to learn history yeah and that's what it all comes down to identity comes down to history you always have to look back at the past that is the requiem for how we move forward but in this moment where young people who are can now not just have to say I'm Latina and what that means and it doesn't really include race so you also have to be careful of these terms that then like get literally whitewash water down or co-opt alright y'all so who has some questions it's nine o'clock wow I was like we have two hours Edis she was like that's what you think well I think I don't know I don't see anybody kicking us out maybe we can take a couple questions too yeah over here yeah oh there's a mic right there so my question is for mainly Victoria but you guys can all answer okay so near my house there's like this empty clearing right and it's a very dirty lot and there's like a whole bed frame in the actual lot that's how dirty it is but recently I've heard that poor folk like clean streets too right which is definitely the truth but in my neighborhood getting clean I'm very scared that some people might realize just how beautiful it is when it's clean and might try to come in and take over that so I'm like conflicted that if I clean it up then people might come in and try to take up what I did so that's a very real fear especially in how real state development is looking at a lot of New York right now I would say initially what comes to my mind is clean it up and make it yours so I don't know I think about the art that we were talking about this is a very specific idea I don't know the plausibility of it being executed but just cleaning it up but maybe you have a lot of artists in your community you want to make that lot clear that this is our lot I don't know what neighborhood you live in but just make it like this is ours put some art in there really show that you own it and you know put a big sign outside that says clean put a big sign outside that says cleaned by the people of this neighborhood and not any of you wander as you stumble in here and just you know really own it is what I would say because they're really willing to take it away this reminds me of a conversation that I always have with my daughter who's 12 okay I want to talk about her for a minute and she was born you know in our house here in Crown Heights on Kingston Avenue and you know she went to a public middle school in another district in a very different neighborhood from ours and we have this ongoing struggle with her at times coming up to myself and her dad and saying things like I wish we lived in such a neighborhood because it's so clean and beautiful there why can't it be like that on our street on our app you know and of course like all the questions that myself and her dad is like what do you mean by that why are you saying that but really on a very fundamental level it's like why is it that it's that that you know I recognize that she wants to be in a beautiful place right she wants to be in a place that's clean that's not full of trash but hasn't yet had the opportunity to understand a systemic analysis that would help her to answer the question why is it that nobody's picking up the trash with the same kind of frequency in this neighborhood as they are in Carroll Gardens you know and so I think part of the question is also you know going back for example to the examples of the young lords and the Black Panthers where is the environmental organizing that's doing organizing and I mean I'm putting myself in that not to say that someone else has to do that but around basic things that impact people in very basic ways like trash right like why like where is the organizing movement around trash pickup and where's the equity in that so basic you know we probably have time for one other quick my name is Nayila I'm currently pursuing my BA in global studies at the new school and for one of my final projects this semester I'm focusing on the resistance efforts of Afro-Brazilian women as they exist in direct conflict with or resistance to gender and race based oppression and you know through my research I found that often these movements of resistance result in liberation for these women and so my question to the entire panel would be can you think of any specific moment within your activism that you felt especially liberated or is there anything about your activism that liberates you on a daily basis or what does liberation mean to you I guess maybe that's not just one question but a few is it like clear does it make sense I think I've had a lot I mean I think we probably all have a lot I would point to two specific moments which are very opposite one was being arrested at the United Nations for actions around the struggle to get the U.S. Navy out of Vieca's Puerto Rico because it was one of those times in particularly Puerto Rican organizing but New York organizing we all had one goal and we kind of never deviated from that which is to make sure that the U.S. Navy left Puerto Rico and they did on May 1st of 2003 so I was involved as part of the David Saniz Rodriguez Brigade here in New York but there were other iterations of work around Vieca's 100 women for Vieca's and other things that I know Edie's was also involved in but the reason that sticks out is because on May 1st of 2003 I was in Vieca's when this happened and I documented it right and to see the U.S. Navy leave and the exhilaration and then literally see Lolita LeBron and catch her and interview her was like because for then I also realized in 2003 how important our stories are to tell and how we tell our narrative and that's when I kind of became an independent journalist and I joined WBAI Radio and I began to do a show on WBAI and I understood really media and actually Edie's has also been a person that I looked to because like I said she made this document in 1996 where everybody was telling her nobody wants to hear that story and her work in media and then the second one which is always a reminder how much the state hates us is my Ferguson when I went to Ferguson I was finishing up my coursework at UMass Amherst for my PhD and getting ready to take a visiting professorship at Cal State LA and that was the week that Ferguson rebelled and I remember watching and I'm packing and I'm talking to people and Black Lives Matter starts trending before and I kept saying I'm in my house talking to myself my husband my daughter like this is something new these young people and I saw the militarization of the response and this hip-hop artist Talib Kuali called me and he's like yo we need to get down there and I'm like we need to go there immediately this is something different and we can't just be on the sidelines and we got there the next day and by 9 30 p.m. that night me and 14 other people had M16s to our heads where the police were like if you move we will kill you and I remember being there with my hands up and this young brother was lying down and he just you know just saw some human you're like trying to get up from the situation and I had to hold him down and I'm like don't move and the cop came close out of us and was like tell him to stop moving shoot him he put the M16 right to this kid's chest and when we left that night I wrote this story and again I don't think that experience is actually an exceptional experience I know too many people that have had that experience when protesting but these diametric experiences of like seeing victory happen and claiming victory and then 13 years later feeling like I was gonna die with my comrades for what supporting them doing what we're supposed to be doing and fighting back so I look at those experiences as like I hold them dear in that way I'll give you a different type of feeling of victory and liberation more of an internal one that happens when you're organizing women in particular and when we when I entered the Young Lords the organization was very very very sexist because the society was very sexist and so one of the leaders of the Young Lords writes later that when women first women in the organization first raised the issue of women's live that the men felt that all they needed was a good you know and that's what he wrote so that was the environment that we were organizing in and so we began to challenge that environment and those ideas by organizing ourselves into a women's caucus and so we won many things we were actually quite victorious which doesn't get written in the history books and it's still a bone of contention with some of the male members 50 years later who call it revisionist history right when we tell our own story but I'll tell you what we won that was very significant one we got that revolution and machismo out of the program that was very important I'll tell you a bunch of things before I get to the main thing that I want to talk about we got women's stories written about in the organization's newspaper and we got women to be assigned stories as writers on any topic we got the histories and struggles of women to be included in the political education curriculum that we provided both for the community and for the membership one of the most interesting that we formed a men's caucus so that men could talk among themselves about the relationship between sexism and capitalism basically but also so they could talk about their experiences how they felt about women etc. they had a space and this was something that men never talked about their feelings especially to other men but one of the most significant things that happened I think it may have been the only time it happened in the Puerto Rican movement of that era that we developed we wanted there to be consequences for sexist actions and sexist behavior and we were able to get consensus for that and so that meant that and I raised that because of the B2 movement and because people are coming out that men that commit sexist acts or abuse women should be fired from their jobs etc. etc. so it came up like wow this is a new idea 50 years ago 20 year old 22 year old women were dealing with this issue and we got consensus that there should be consequences for this type of behavior especially in a revolutionary organization so how did that play out? all of the leaders except one were demoted or suspended for machismo or sexism over a two year period all of them except one and he was 15 and so that was very that created a ripple effect in the entire movement because and we felt very liberated because we had been able to accomplish something very significant for Latina women at that time and that moved the organization forward to adopt instead of revolutionary machismo we set the revolution within the revolution so we are now officially out of time but Victoria if you have something brief you are fulfilled with some of the examples given I want to really thank each and every one of you for the honor of participating in this conversation with me it's been really incredibly inspiring and I want to thank you all for showing up and being a part of this conversation thank you thank you