CHAPTER 5

Compassionate Solidarities

I first met David Levenson at a party. He was on the dance floor, and I quickly noticed that the man had some major moves. He danced to salsa, merengue, R&B classics, and soul with such finesse and ease. I thought to myself, who is that white man, and where did he get his moves? When I was introduced to Levenson, I realized that he was a volunteer doctor at Street Level Health Project, the free medical clinic and community resource center where I volunteered for so many years when I lived in Oakland. He told me that he loved the work at Street Level because it reminded him so much of the work he saw growing up in the 1960s—actively involved in neighborhood improvement projects in Oakland and Berkeley alike. Levenson’s family was an important facet of Bay Area activism.

Levenson, like so many people at the party in honor of the eightieth birthday of one of the godfathers of the Chicano Movement, Carlos Muños Jr., were all veterans of some kind of 1960s social movement.¹ There were people of all shades and colors and different age groups, showing us how social movements are often translated to the next generation. In his youth, Levenson had been directly involved with the Black Panther Party (BPP), played on a Black Panther Band named the Lumpin, and helped his family run Committees Against Fascism, which carried out some of the major principles of the BPP. After years of studying 1960s social movements, I never expected to meet a white man who claimed to have been a part of the BPP. Yet meeting people like Levenson, a white Jewish man who was connected to Black movements of the 1960s and present-day immigrant rights projects, moved me to ask, what makes people want to mobilize collectively to care, especially across the divisions that liberalism builds between race, class, and gender?

People become engaged in social movements because they learn to care about a particular cause. Yet care often escapes the realm of the political. Following the work of feminist geographers and related fields, I challenge the notion of care merely as a private affair reserved for analysis of labor in the home or biomedical facilities. In this essay, I reflect on my work with 1960s activists in Oakland to think about how movements mobilize to care for populations. To do so, I focus on how activists experienced movements. I contend that experiences take shape in specific places and through spatialized practices. In my forthcoming book, I show how Chicano Movement activists measured the impacts of their social movement activism not solely by how many protests they attended or by how many state reforms they helped to engender. Their metric for measuring social movements was anchored in how their mobilizations helped to care for specific communities and ensured the delivery of resources for disenfranchised groups. They also highlighted how they learned to care for the broader world and for struggles taking place across the nation. Social movement activism was fundamentally a process of learning to care for specific populations and places.

Activists asserted that learning to care entailed a complex understanding of how we as human beings relate to others, relate to our environment, and navigate difference. I utilize the relational thinking of the late Chicana theorist Gloria Anzaldúa to think critically about how her work encouraged us to be attentive to the relationship between self and other, and with the environment and spirit world (2015). Anzaldúa introduced an identity category, nos/otras, that proposes a methodology by which to bridge divides among humans and how we relate to our environment. Anzaldúa utilized the Náhualt concept of nepantla to name a place or space between two colliding cultures. The term refers to a specialized set of skills that border dwellers, or nepantleras, develop as a result of surviving the violence of being caught between multiple systems and geographies of power (Blackwell 2010). Subjects who have the unique ability to navigate the cracks of power develop a set of strategies and tactics that enable them to move in and between prescribed societal confinements of difference. I demonstrate how this nepantla ability to see across difference helped forge a unique—and ongoing—social movement praxis of care.

As a scholar of race and social movements, I aim to challenge the focus on telling solely those stories of domination that shape racialized experiences. As Katherine McKittrick (2011) has questioned, how do we write about issues of inequality and racism without “overtaxing the suffering Black body”? By this she means that if we solely focus on the experiences of suffering, we are left without an analysis of Black humanity. I am moved by McKittrick’s assertion that instead of exclusively focusing on the geographies of domination produced through racism, we can also think about how “our racial pasts can uncover a collective history of encounter—a difficult interrelatedness—that promises an ethical analytics of race based not on suffering, but on human life” (2011, 948). An analysis of social movement caring practices, their longevity, and the way in which they structure contemporary forms of living might offer us some clues about how to move beyond this notion of overtaxing suffering bodies of color and their respective spatialities. Putting forth such an analysis of encounter requires acknowledging the role that identity categories take in shaping group dynamics and learning to work through those differences to mobilize for social change.

In this essay, I first underscore some of the important ways in which care has been employed in geography and related fields. I then outline an alternative genealogy of care that draws from social movement politics and a long tradition of BIPOC radical organizing. I highlight the work of Chicana theorist Gloria Anzaldúa to understand how her category of nos/otras shows us a critical methodology and social movement praxis of care. I underscore how social movement activists employed nepantla strategies to build a more socially just world that values the complexities of human life. They did so by building places committed to enacting a praxis of care that included educational centers, community-based organizing and politicization projects, and activist study groups to forge a commitment to social justice. This also included an internationalist relational praxis of linking their localized struggles to those of other disenfranchised groups throughout the world.

Care and the Political

Care is not exclusively delivered or experienced through social movements. In our everyday worlds, we engage and benefit from a whole array of practices of care. Political theorists Joan Tronto and Bernice Fisher define care as a “a species activity that includes everything that we do to maintain, continue, and repair our world so that we can live in it as well as possible. That world includes our bodies, ourselves, and our environment, all of which we seek to interweave in a complex, life-sustaining web” (Tronto 2013, 19; see also Tronto 1993). Although broad, most of Tronto’s notions of care are intimately linked to political theory that tethers care to state liberal politics. It also bounds care to a political nationalist framing, therefore missing the global dimensions of how care structures forms of politics. I build on her work by highlighting how activists I interviewed drew from a different genealogy of care. Their community-based notions of care were a response to the uncaring practices experienced by marginalized populations in the United States. As this collection lays bare, liberal framings and makings of poverty in fact serve to reproduce white supremacy, a North American institutionalization of global lethal liberalism (Baldwin and Crane 2020). In fact, most postwar activism in Oakland and the rest of the United States sought to show that liberal orders rely on the further subordination of racialized and impoverished subjects. This made me ask, what does it mean to care from a subject position that has been understood as the constitutive outside of liberal forms of citizenship? What new methodologies can be learned from this unique subject position?

Care has become a kind of black box in scholarly analyses that encompasses so many aspects of human activity including state social services, child and adult care, and biomedical procedures conducted at clinics and hospitals. Scholars have been concerned with theorizing the capacity to care and how caring takes shape through spatialized practices (E. Power 2019; A. Power and Hall 2018; E. Power and Williams 2020). This relates to the sites where care takes place, including places like drop-in centers and homeless shelters (Conradson 2003; Evans 2011; Parr 2000, 2003; Williams 2016), with respect to health and illness (Parr 2003), or in relationship to underserved cities that have been previously wounded (Till 2012). Scholars have also underscored the importance of racialized workers in the delivery of child care and elder care (Hondagneu-Sotelo 2001; Glenn 2010; Parreñas 2001).

Care takes shape within a field of power relations contoured by racialized forms of difference. It is therefore essential to understand how care is unequally distributed based on the geographic organization of power. European colonization of the Americas created unequally positioned categories of the human species, creating what Sylvia Wynter (2003) aptly describes as the coloniality of being/power/truth/freedom. Katherine McKittrick, following Wynter, demonstrates how geography powerfully shaped constructions of human difference.² Through colonization, our modern world was divided into spaces designed for us (inhabited by secular economically comfortable European and Euro-American man) and spaces designed for them (underdeveloped and impoverished geographies occupied by the marginalized and BIPOC populations) (see also Mignolo 2000; Fanon [1963] 2004; Gupta and Ferguson 1997; Wynter 2003). This organization of space constructs people of color and the enslaved more specifically, as ungeographic, denied a sense of place, and left behind (McKittrick 2013, 9). Colonial normalization of racialized forms of difference also hardened divisions along axes of gender, sexuality, and class. In order for the oppressed to achieve a better life, or a “normal” existence, they are expected to strive to achieve entry into the spaces and modes of being designed for us, in other words, privilege European aesthetics and features, culture, socioeconomic standards, and forms of knowledge while disavowing those that do not fit with this mold. This teleological expectation reifies the ontological differences between us and them, thus reinforcing white supremacy and naturalizing these inequalities. McKittrick challenges this teleological imperative and instead proposes that the oppressed can choose to construct alternative forms of livelihood and spaces that value our collective humanity.

Divisions between us/them contour an unequal terrain and practice of care. Milligan and Wiles (2010) argue that care does not escape power relations and therefore we need to account for uneven geographies of care. Although these scholars assert that unequal frameworks of care exist, we are left without an examination of how race affects the making of spatialities of care. In these assessments, scholars overwhelmingly agree that “racially and ethnically marginalized groups are overburdened and under-rewarded for their care work” (E. Power and Williams 2020, 4). In sum, racialized people are framed almost exclusively as laborers in care relationships, as opposed to theoreticians and practitioners enacting alternative relations of care.

The activists I worked with took part in long-term BIPOC mobilizations that challenged the violence of liberalism by providing alternative care networks removed from the liberal state. Furthermore, these care networks challenged white supremacy and notions of capitalist accumulation that perpetuate lethal us/them divides in our modern world. These movements, therefore, provide fertile ground to envision alternative, more nuanced ways of valuing all forms of human life and trajectories.

Scholars of the Black Radical Tradition show us how Black populations, living in an illiberal anti-Black world, constructed alternative systems of care. Clyde Woods, for example, demonstrated the power of attempts by working-class African Americans to establish social democracy within a plantation-dominated economy (Woods 2017). W. E. B. Du Bois’s important work provides a rich history of the alternative social organization of care for African Americans in Philadelphia (Du Bois [1899] 1969). Steven Gregory’s (1998) Black Corona constructs a history of Black organizations and institutions in the borough of Queens in New York City in a context of African American exclusion from white institutions. Joe Trotter’s (2007) study of Black Milwaukee shows a similar pattern whereby as early as the 1890s, the Milwaukee Afro-American League explicitly enunciated the philosophy of self-help and racial unity. As sociologist Alondra Nelson (2011) reveals, African Americans founded hospitals in underserved Black communities, inaugurating public health initiatives, and established schools to train Black medical professionals (25). These alternative avenues for delivering health care services and health education also reveal how social movements advance a politics or care rooted in the improvement or construction of specific places. Freedom, as Ruth Wilson Gilmore so powerfully reminds us, is a place (2017; see also Heynen and Ybarra 2020).

These anticolonial and antiracist movements—which strengthened by the mid-1900s—sought to abolish the material violence and suffering created by colonial us/them divides. According to Sylvia Wynter, these movements challenged what were thought to be truths—that divisions between colonizer and colonized, white and Black, European and native were natural due to the inferiority and eugenically dyselected status of the non-European (2003). She asserts that such movements unsettled the neatly naturalized categories that laid the groundwork for modern liberal humanism. Such a challenge and break of these ontological divisions between us/them as emblematized by calls such as “Black is Beautiful” and “I am Man” of Civil Rights and Black Power mobilizations laid the blueprint for how other movements challenged the normalization of divisions that liberalism builds between race, class, and gender.

Women of color feminists therefore powerfully remind us that us/them divides are not solely about race. These scholars and social movement activists critiqued approaches and responsibilities of care as it relates to their experiences as women in predominantly BIPOC spaces. These arguments were at once about their exclusion from care within the women’s movement, which was predominantly white. They were also about the exclusion of gender and LGBTQ critiques in predominantly BIPOC coalitions. Women of color feminists challenged the notion of what it meant to be a “woman” while also simultaneously being “Black” or “Chicana” and also being “lesbian” or “queer.” This challenge to rigid identity categories required the development of a skillful ability to weave in and out of spaces and construct alternative intersectional spaces of care. These movements built alliances across difference and challenged the neatly defined us/them organization of the world.

Building from this tradition, the activists I worked with theorized their own approaches to caring across racial, spatial, and gendered divides. This included thinking beyond their own localized experiences and enacting a more global dimension to their activism. In so doing, they challenged nationalist forms of liberalism that constricts a global framework of struggle. They also enacted a unique methodology for navigating between those differences and to mobilize a caring sensibility. This is the dynamic that I turn to next through the work of Gloria Anzaldúa. Nos/otras is an identity category stemming from challenges to the universalism of whiteness and the presumed singularity of any particular identity category. This challenge comes through a praxis of thinking relationally and across difference, which activists did through their social movement activism.

Nos/Otras and a Relational Approach to Challenging Us/Them Divides

In order to better understand the caring practices from what Fanon ([1963] 2004) called the wretched of the earth, I build on recent work by Latinx feminist geographers who employ theories developed by the late Chicana theorist Gloria Anzaldúa to analyze experiences of communities of color through racial, gendered, and classed relations (Cahuas 2019; Ramírez 2020). Anzaldúa wrote against the limitations of binary categories. She, for example, was concerned about divisions between men and women, white and BIPOC, straight and queer. Her writing, however, also explored how divisions between individuals that compose a similar identity category such as woman, Chicana, Indigenous, or queer can also result in feuds between equally positioned members of an identity category. She sought to theorize an identity category that would facilitate a seeing across difference and an ability to accept, celebrate, and nourish multiple perspectives and ways of being in the world.

The Spanish word nosotras simply means “us.” Yet Anzaldúa thought critically about inserting a slash between the nos (us) and otras (others) to theorize her relational identity narrative of nos/otras. For Anzaldúa, an understanding of “us” can include “us” and “them” and does not have to be obsessed with reifying the divide between self and other: “We disregard the fact that we live in intricate relationship with others, that our very existence depends on our intimate interactions with all life forms” (2015, 76). This is especially the case in the United States where we live in a multicultural society and have to negotiate difference all the time. As she detailed, “We live in each other’s pockets, occupy each other’s territories, live in close proximity and intimacy with each other at home, school, and work. We are mutually complicitous—us and them, nosotras y los otros, white and colored, straight and queer, Christian and Jew, self and Other, oppressor and oppressed. We all of us find ourselves in the position of being simultaneously both insider and outsider” (2015, 79). She found within the identity of nos/otras an ability to negotiate the cracks between worlds, an ability to accommodate contradictory identities and social positions, and a unique methodology for navigating difference.

In Anzaldúa’s conceptualization, those people who have the ability to think differently and to weave in between identity categories are called nepantleras/os. Following Mesoamerican Indigenous traditions, she utilizes this word to describe a threshold people, those who move within and among multiple worlds and use their movement in the service of transformation. Nepantleras construct alternative roads, creating new topographies and geographies of hybrid selves who transcend binaries and depolarize potential allies. Nepantleras are not constrained by one culture or world but experience multiple realities (2015, 82). Anzaldúa’s concept of nepantla is especially useful as a framework for understanding how social movement activists mobilize to challenge us/them divides. A person who mobilizes a nepantla sensibility engages in a kind of point of contact between worlds. This entails bridging divisions between identity categories, nations, imagination and physical existence, ordinary and extraordinary (spirit) realities. Nepantleras/os mobilize to bridge the fissures among humans, to connect with each other, to move beyond us/them binaries (men and women, queer and straight, able and disabled). Nepantleros therefore endeavor to construct new places where identity differences can be appreciated and in which a nos/otras sensibility can be activated.

These new place-making practices require productive filtering: urging us to maintain our heritages’ useful, nurturing aspects but release the unproductive and harmful components. According to Anzaldúa, the aim is to undertake transformative work that processes and facilitates evolving as a social group. She believed that in order to do so it was important to negotiate alliances among the conflicted forces within the self, between men and women, among the group’s different factions, and among the various groups in this country and the rest of the world. It is precisely this praxis of thinking relationally and across difference that underscored so much of the activism in Oakland. Activists learned to negotiate alliances by constructing new spaces of learning and working across differences and geographical boundaries. They enacted nepantla strategies to weave in between identity categories and learn to care across difference. In so doing, they collectively built a nos/otras identity and methodology for activism. They did so by using their social movement activism to build new spaces of care, learning, and politicization.

LEVENSON AND WHITE SOLIDARITY

Solidarity is a process by which an individual becomes aligned with a cause that affects another group of people or person. It is essentially a process of creating compassion for fellow human beings and blurring the us/them divide. This was especially relevant for activists like David Levenson who came from a family deeply affected by the anti-Semitic violence. These experiences of violence equipped Levenson and his family with a unique ability to understand the violent effects of drawing deep divisions between us and them. His family survived the Holocaust, and this experience forever marked them for generations. His parents organized so they would never allow fascism to thrive again. Levenson’s father was first involved in Civil Rights struggles in the South. He remembers growing up in an antiracist environment filled with interactions with different groups from across the nation. The Levensons valorized Black historical contributions to social justice struggles. Instead of merely seeing Black populations as victims of a racist system, they learned from their radical attempts to remake society and envision an alternative future.

Once the family relocated to the West Coast, the Levensons became rapidly affiliated with the BPP and other social justice causes. Levenson recalls how the BPP organized a conference to create awareness against fascism and then called for the formation of committees on a local level. Levenson’s family formed the first one, the National Committee to Combat Fascism (NCCF). As he told me: “We set up a community center along the lines of what the Black Panthers did in their own communities, they had community centers where they carried out political education and community-based survival projects. We became an effectively functioning branch of the Black Panther Party but in a community in West Berkeley which was mostly a blue-collar kind of a mixed community. We functioned, as I did, as members of the Black Panther Party” (Levenson interview, August 28, 2019).³ Levenson’s family not only supported the BPP party but took part in their own community-based survival and organizing projects modeled after the party. The economic and resource inequalities that plagued many African American communities were also common among other groups. The committees against fascism sought to learn with the most oppressed groups in order to marshal better opportunities for other disenfranchised groups and for humanity more broadly. As Levenson remembered, “We took direction from the central committee of the BPP. We believed that they were sort of in the vanguard of the struggle at the time, the Black community is the most oppressed community, carried the potential to lead in the broader multi-ethnic, including white people, struggle for justice” (Levenson interview, August 28, 2019). The committee went to the same political education classes with BPP members, sold the party’s newspapers, and participated in all the survival programs. Levenson’s family set up a number of services modeled after the BPP, including a breakfast program, health care clinics, and education centers, even community plumbing services. They constructed a community center in a two-story building that families collectively bought in West Berkeley.

As we can learn from Levenson’s examples, solidarity entailed learning to care about social justice causes by bridging the divide between self and other. Through this process, the Levenson family, along with other white, Black, and poor communities, built new community spaces and resources modeled after the BPP. Levenson demonstrates how his family deployed nepantla strategies that allowed them to weave between the cracks of identity categories and struggles in order to transcend the “us” versus “them” mentality. Through these practices, Anzaldúa believed that we could be carried into a nos/otras position bridging the extremes of our cultural realities, a subjectivity that doesn’t polarize potential allies. This subjectivity also included building new community spaces that fostered a sense of collectivity. Activists constructed actually existing geographic spaces built on validating different kinds of social relations and accepting difference.

SEEING ACROSS DIFFERENCE AND PLACE MAKING

Anzaldúa’s understanding of the relationship between self and geography was rooted in her analysis of how human beings interact with the environment. For Anzaldúa, geographies literally become mapped onto every aspect of a human’s body and sense of self, creating what she conceptualized as geographies of selves (2015, 68). As a result of racial segregation in the United States, racial minority groups often live alongside one another. This is most true for places like Oakland, where Latinx spaces are proximal to Black neighborhoods. However, geographic proximity doesn’t necessarily generate solidarity and alliances between groups. Anzaldúa reveals that enacting solidarity and alliances between different groups requires specific subjects who embody the nepantla ability to see across difference and to literally “feel” the geographies they traverse. Social movement activism provided a critical methodology by which activists worked between the cracks of identity categories or divergent political positions and engaged in a process of societal transformation.

Beatriz Pesquera came to the Bay Area from Los Angeles and grew up in a family household with a strong tradition of pride in their Mexican heritage. In retelling her background, she admitted that it was not difficult to become politicized: “As a Mexican young child coming into the U.S. was very traumatic” (Pesquera interview, August 30, 2019). She recalled that she was called a dirty Mexican and people would commonly treat her as if she was dumb. Given her light skin, some people told her she could easily pass as Italian. She, however, vehemently refused. In addition to these experiences, she credited Black radical thinkers for truly awakening her politicization: “The first way I think I became politicized was reading the autobiography of Malcom X and a book by Claude Brown Manchild in the Promised Land. I made the connection between African American experience and oppression and struggle and my own” (Pesquera interview, August 30, 2019). For Pesquera, her own politicization relied on a relational analysis of the effects of racism in the United States, inspiring her unique nepantla subjectivity. This politicization emerged from seeing the shared experiences of racism experienced by Mexican Americans and Black populations in the United States.

Pesquera’s ability to link the oppression experienced by Mexican Americans and Blacks was fundamentally a nos/otras practice. This was not just a relational acknowledgment of shared oppression but also a call to action, or a praxis for collaborating with African American groups. She enthusiastically remembered her engagement with different groups as a student at Merritt College. There were few Chicanos around, so they didn’t have their own Chicano Student Union. Pesquera and other Chicanos made an alliance with the Black Student Union and ran on what they called the Soul Ticket. She was the only woman in addition to a Black man who ran on that ticket, and she was successfully elected. As Pesquera told me,

We had these very strong alliances. At one point we were trying to develop a Chicano Studies department and the African American students banded with us, and we locked the faculty in, the faculty senate, and we were all there together working on this. I think what’s also important about that particular historical period is that we may have been focused on Chicano or Black but there were alliances. I think that’s really significant to say that today given the political situation that we’re facing, that we have historically struggled together. The Mexican community has struggled with other communities historically. I think that’s very important to recognize, that kind of alliance. (Pesquera interview, August 30, 2019)

These forms of alliances were forged as a result of a shared geography of struggle and a social movement ethics of solidarity. By joining together, Black and Brown students had greater power to push for their demands. Through social movements, activists like Pesquera learned how to enact the nepantla ability to see a different way and to accept different opinions and perspectives and collaboratively build a space for us/them to come together within a single lens.

The proximity between Black and Brown communities in the Bay Area also meant that both groups shared the experience of overpolicing. This is one avenue that catapulted both groups into action. One of the biggest causes that activists spoke about was the Barlow Benavidez case, which galvanized the entire neighborhood. Benavidez was violently killed by a police officer who mistakenly thought he was a murder suspect. A fundamental practice of the nos/otras imperative also entails blurring the boundaries between caregiver and the person who is being cared for. Social movements fundamentally seek to empower others to be their own advocates. Andrea Benavidez, sister of Barlow, remembered how an entire group of people helped her to gain her voice as an activist against police brutality. She admits being nervous at first and wanting other people to speak for her. However, soon she became more comfortable speaking in front of large crowds. She became her own advocate and grew to love giving speeches. Andrea Benavidez now lives in Texas and credits this activism for awakening her to the ability to speak back against police brutality and to see the commonalities among different groups who experience this form of state violence. She recognizes that as someone who experienced and took part in this type of activism, she must be vigilant on its effects on other disenfranchised groups. Although she is no longer an activist, this past experience allows her to continue to deploy a nos/otras methodology for understanding the commonalities as well as differences that link Black and Brown struggles.

LEARNING TO CARE

The nepantla ability to weave between spaces and identity categories requires a deft navigation. It fundamentally calls for an educational process to understand other ways of knowing and being in the world. BIPOC student activists contested the Eurocentrism of educational systems and fought to create a more culturally relevant education. At the university level, students mobilized a Third World strike that led to the formation of departments like Ethnic Studies. But outside of the university, entire movements created more culturally relevant and revolutionary educational systems.

One of the first services that activists envisioned for the care of their community was alternative educational spaces for children and youth. A set of activists contributed to the establishment of La Escuelita (for pre-kinder) and the Street Academy (for students who had dropped out or were on the verge of dropping out from high school). Activists and teachers educated the youth not just about their own particular culture but about the local and global movements that they were linked with. Education, as activists envisioned it, would equip the next generation to be nepantleros and be able to diagnose oppression and work collaboratively to dismantle divisions.

Teachers and students both learned from these alternative educational programs. Connie Jubb came to the Bay Area from Ohio because she wanted to help with the cultural and social revolution that was happening in the region. After studying and working at Stanford at a bilingual program, she was interviewed and subsequently hired to be one of the first teachers at La Escuelita. She excitedly told me that she was interviewed not by the formal staff but by the parents themselves. Jubb loved the fact that a school would give tremendous authority in hiring to parents and open up the possibility to reimagine power relationships. For Jubb, working at the Escuelita required her to shift gears a bit in how she understood Latino culture: “I learned a lot of things through my first years at the center because I knew more about Mexico because I worked in the bilingual program and worked with Chicanos at Stanford but I didn’t know so much about Latin America” (Jubb interview, August 30, 2019). At the height of 1960s social movement activism, many groups took on a strict cultural-nationalist approach that narrowly focused on nationalist framings of struggles, focusing solely on the Chicano experience for example.⁴ Activists in the Bay Area, however, took on a more internationalist approach that incorporated people of many different nationalities and expanded the realm of possible collaborations. There were Anglos like Jubb and Levenson and other members who were from Latin American countries other than Mexico. Like Anzaldúa’s conceptualization of nos/otras, these activists challenged constricted and closed-off constructions of identity. To do so they took up a global relational framework that linked the experiences of struggles at home with those of other nations and movements.

The school’s internationalist framing introduced students to the broader world and its various revolutionary social movement struggles. Jubb recalls that on the day that she first arrived, Berta Canton, who was in charge of the program, reminded everyone that it was the anniversary of the Cuban Revolution. She asked the new teachers to work together to commemorate the important day. As Jubb remembered, “We only had a small group of kids so we ended up taking a boat ride on Lake Merritt and talking about the Granma, the ship used to begin the Cuban Revolution” (Jubb interview, August 30, 2019). In the process the students learned about the importance of the Cuban Revolution and the changes that it had offered to the island.

The Escuelita also taught students about the importance of supporting movements closer to home and the struggles of disenfranchised agricultural workers. For example, during the grape and lettuce boycott headed by the United Farm Workers, Berta Canton and the teachers collected all the grapes and lettuce that the school district gave La Escuelita. Jubb described how all the little kids hauled wagons filled with lettuce and grapes and returned them to the school district headquarters in protest. The students subsequently learned about the farm workers’ struggle, how they could support their plight, and how to ultimately care about people and causes far away. Many of the teachers at the Escuelita had been directly involved with the UFW and so the students received an intimate portrayal of the movement. This sense of consciousness inspired a relational connection between Chicano struggles in rural and urban areas and engendered a nos/otras praxis of action and solidarity.

Activists linked educational experiences with community-based organizations in order to foster a greater sense of care among the students for the community in which they lived. The Street Academy was a school developed to help students get back into school and finish their high school education. The school was created to provide more individual attention to each student and to teach them an education that affirmed their cultural backgrounds. It was inspired by the activism of the time as many of the staff were involved with the Third World strike at San Francisco State. The youth were partnered with different community-based groups in the neighborhood where they conducted internships and service. They were therefore mentored by the various leaders at each of the organizations. By facilitating these connections with community organizations, the students became familiar with the various neighborhood needs. These kinds of programming initiatives helped students to make the connections to care beyond their individual needs.

In order to facilitate student learning, the teachers designed their culturally relevant rendition of the curriculum. Betsy Schultz taught science and told me how she worked diligently to bring back Aztec and Mayan knowledge. Although her focus did include Western health, she also inserted material on more traditional healing practices among Indigenous communities. In her classes she taught about the famous African American scientists and about the work of the BPP in the screening and treatment of sickle cell anemia. As a white woman, she relied on other people for inspiration in the way to frame things and especially the partner organizations. She usually mentored most of the Native American youth because the other students gravitated to mentors of their respective racial group. She relied on the community organizations to help with the mentorship of Native American youth. As Schultz recalled, “We were across the street from the Native American youth center so we got a lot of students through them. We had a lot of native students. It is still an area that is fairly native” (Schultz interview, August 27, 2019). Schultz asserted that designing a new culturally relevant education framework required active collaboration between different community groups. These interactions were central to how students were educated about the broader social movement landscape they took part in and about the multicultural nature of the community they lived in. By not only learning about these issues but also actively participating in different organizations, they learned to activate a nos/otras praxis based on relationality and care.

Culturally relevant education was not just about learning through the incorporation of Black history, Chicano literature, and Indigenous forms of knowing. Activists did not envision a kind of liberal humanisms akin to our contemporary form of neoliberal multiculturalism. Through education, activists fortified a nos/otras sensibility that allowed students to question the inequalities existing in the United States and the world and the presumed benevolence of U.S. liberal practices. It also included an analysis of inequalities at the community and global levels and the inculcation of the need to be involved in major social causes of the time. These alternative forms of education fundamentally sought to build a new culture of care and a praxis of activism framed through a relational and internationalist understanding of global inequality. This was nos/otras sensibility and praxis facilitated by diminishing the divide between “us” and “them” and creating a shared understanding of our mutual co-constitution on this earth.

ACTIVIST EDUCATION

In addition to helping to educate the next generation, activists also educated themselves. They did so by forming study groups in which, among many other topics, they engaged with Marxist theory and applied it to their own organizing and conditions of inequality. Learning through Marxism and global socialist struggles made these activists question organizing strategies centered solely on race that did not include a critique of capitalism. Analyses like this amplified their terrain of struggle and their relational understanding of inequalities and global struggles. Like in the youth and children’s education, activists centered their own education to sensitize themselves about the causes that animated global struggles and that fortified their endeavors at home.

Mariano Contreras moved to the Bay Area from Los Angeles and was politicized by hanging out with his brother’s college friends. He moved to Oakland and quickly got linked up with the leftist organization CASA, a Chicano group that prioritized a working-class analysis. As he learned in his work at CASA, “The Chicano Movement came and it was led primarily by students and then academia. What it lacked was a working-class perspective” (Contreras interview, August 29, 2019). Mariano and others developed this working-class perspective by learning the limitations of one of the greatest movements of the time. CASA organizers had a heavy critique of Cesar Chavez’s approach in the United Farm Workers. As he told me, “That’s when I was first exposed to a criticism of the United Farm Workers and Cesar Chavez because at that time he was very reluctant to organize immigrants because they couldn’t vote. CASA worked to organize all workers, and you organize immigrants, you provide a service for them, and then you organize them, and the service was documentation” (Contreras interview, August 29, 2019). CASA prioritized working with undocumented immigrants in neighboring factories. They organized to protect their rights as workers and helped them to become naturalized as U.S. citizens. As Anzaldúa reminds us, “When an individual realizes that she doesn’t fit into a particular collective-conditioned identity and when the tribe cannot contain all that she is, she must jettison the restrictive cultural components and forge new identities” (2015, 75). Activism is a process of building new identities and finding new positionalities by which to create broader avenues for collectively working with people. Contreras’s experience with CASA opened him up to new avenues of collective organizing that also required him to think more broadly of the international and local struggles confronting marginalized communities. Being Chicano was not just about pride in Mexican American culture but also about realizing how domination works through racial, class, and national differences. In order to combat these forms of domination, collective action required better ways of linking the dynamics of all of those struggles and required the creation of new political identities, such as the Third World left that CASA identified with.

Social movement activism constantly evolved as new strands of activism emerged. This evolution of struggles was enabled by a nepantla relationality and a nos/otras praxis of bridging the gap between distinct portions of the world’s population. As Contreras explained, CASA brought an anti-imperialist and working-class perspective that led to organizing and working with other groups. This meant coalitions across racial and gendered lines. This included leftist groups that were white and advanced an anticapitalist perspective, and African American women’s groups that did work around the advancement and recognition of women’s rights. Activists were constantly educating themselves about different causes of the time and about how global forces were taking shape throughout the world. As Contreras detailed, “There were coalitions, there were coalitions that taught us how to see, recognize principles of unity when you do work with coalitions and then abide by them” (Contreras interview, August 29, 2019).

Contreras told me many of the coalitions were facilitated by the organizing strategies of the radical left. These coalitions were built on the concept that members of the working class could rise up as a collective and change the world. They learned this by studying Marxism in collectives. As Contreras told me, “We would read it, I would pair up with somebody, and then during the study groups we would discuss it and made sure things sunk in. You know, what is to be done, all that all of it. The one that really sticks is the criticism, self-criticism” (Contreras interview, August 29, 2019). For Contreras, one of the most useful practical aspects of this Marxist teaching was the process of self-evaluation. Pesquera clarified how useful this strategy was for self-reflection and the spirit of supporting one another: “‘Last month I had a task to x, y, z, I think it could have been better executed if. . . .’ And I would say to you, ‘You know I think that part of the work that you’re doing is really great, but I may have an addition that you might want to consider.’ It was done in the spirit of moving the project forward, not looking back to trash people or trash you, the idea is you wanted to move the project forward, so how do you move the project forward?” (Pesquera interview, August 30, 2019). As Pesquera narrated, activists learned to be accountable to themselves and to others, and this relational form of thinking was integral to learning to care about the self and others. Pesquera credited this approach to the Cuban Revolution, which demonstrates how activists borrowed from organizing strategies from around the world and applied them to their own local conditions. Of course, this was not always a smooth application, as Pesquera told me that some groups became far too critical and internally divided.

Entire groups of people converged to study Marxism and supported one another in collective learning. Pesquera detailed that one of the most prominent study groups was led by Henry Chan, who was himself Korean. As Pesquera told me, “He was brilliant and he led these study groups. . . . You had to be selected by your organization to go. . . . We read Das Kapital and we had meetings and then we had subgroups” (Pesquera interview, August 30, 2019). As she explained, these study groups focused on applying abstract theoretical concepts to daily practices of organizing work.

In the time before the internet and social media, these activists relied on magazines, newspapers, and journals to stay abreast of the major events of the time. They maintained these connections through many publications from Cuba. Pesquera especially recalled the work of the Tricontinental Newsletter organized by the Organization of Solidarity with the People of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. This newsletter brought together important news from these different continents in order to engender global solidarity. Activists like Pesquera looked forward to receiving their newsletter each month to stay abreast with the newest developments in revolutionary movements across the globe. Pesquera credits these kinds of publications with helping to create modes of exchange that allowed them to bridge their activism to distant places, a key component to praxis of learning to care for the broader world.

Activists also traveled extensively to support various international causes, especially the Cuban Revolution. For Pesquera one of the most transformative and politicizing experiences was actually going on the Venceremos Brigade to Cuba:

In that I got to see a society that functioned at a very different level. You can read all you want about this, that, and the other right. But when you’re actually there on the ground experiencing the kind of solidarity, the kind of discipline, the kind of passion, that and they were building a new society. There’s a lot of problems with Cuba, there was problems then, it wasn’t all rosy, I didn’t think everything was wonderful and everything. But it was such an amazing experience to actually see something different, and you felt it, you heard it, you lived it. (Pesquera interview, August 30, 2019)

Pesquera’s intrigue with her experience in Cuba was not just about supporting the Cuban Revolution. It entailed imagining and experiencing alternative frameworks for social relations and seeing the ability to construct new forms of relating to one another as humans. This kind of imaginative potential is key to a nos/otras identity and methodology. Although she initially envisioned the people of Cuba as her subject to care for, through transnational solidarity, the interaction resulted in her own act of learning. As Connie Jubb added, “You just got this perspective on being outside of your country and in a situation where there’s so many other models. It doesn’t have to be that way, it doesn’t have to be the way that we do things in the U.S., there’s other ways of organizing a school or a group, there’s other ways of human relations” (Jubb interview, August 30, 2019). The idea to care for others in such a profound way, according to Pesquera and Jubb, came from experiencing other models of doing things.

In a similar fashion, this learning from abroad was also evident in the perspectives brought by the BPP. David Levenson was interested in medicine at a young age. In fact, as a member of the BPP he had to ask the central committee permission to head off to study medicine. But prior to that, he was sent on a delegation with the BPP to China to learn about acupuncture and other forms of Chinese medicine. The BPP forged these connections with communist China as a way of supporting revolutions abroad and to learn from non-Western forms of medicine. As Levenson recalled, “Huey Newton came up to me and asked me, ‘Do you want to go to China?’ because China asked for, and invited, a delegation from the Black Panther Party to come” (Levenson interview, August 28, 2019). The BPP was one of the first to use acupuncture in community-based programs. As Levenson recalled, they were using it to treat opioid addictions on the East Coast. As he retold me this story, Levenson regretted that things had not turned out so favorably for the people of China as a result of the Cultural Revolution.

By learning through a global perspective activists realized that they needed to adopt a broader stance against the oppression that they saw in their local communities. As Contreras told me, “You had the antiwar movement that was taking place, the Chicano Moratorium that was saying that many of our Latino youth are being sent to Vietnam and killed. That led to the development of an anti-imperialist perspective” (Contreras interview, August 29, 2019). Many of the folks who got started in the Chicano Movement were also initiated because of their participation in the mobilizations against the War in Vietnam and in support of the United Farm Workers. And being a part of these struggles sensitized them to issues at home and abroad. As Pesquera elaborated, “The Vietnam War was also very significant in the way that we became politicized, and particularly around issues of not only the struggles of the Vietnamese people, but the fact that we were so overly represented in young men going over there and being killed or coming back pretty devastated. That was a really important aspect of our politicization and radicalization” (Pesquera interview, August 30, 2019). This kind of activism reveals that anti-imperialist struggles engendered forms of making connections between conditions at home and abroad. These connections facilitated processes of caring for others not just at home but also in faraway places linked by U.S. imperialism.

As we can see, activism was fundamentally about learning to care across difference and geography. Activists became the agents who cared for a group or a cause and in many instances also the recipients of care. For example, children and youth received educational programming. The education was also intent on bringing actionable skills to the children and youth. Children grew up learning to care for others, to understand the social movement causes of the time, and to be willing to treat others as they themselves were treated. As the activists show us, they learned to think of themselves as nepantleros of sorts, being able to not just inhabit the spaces in between or to see the relationship between us and them but also to go the extra step and initiate modes of activism to build nepantla spaces such as educational and community resource centers. These activists show us that activism is a process of building new identities and finding new positionalities by which to create broader avenues for collectively working with people. In order to do so, activists initiated a nos/otras praxis through harnessing nepantla abilities to bridge divides and sensitize themselves to the struggles of others.

Nepantla Praxes and Care

To conclude, I return to pivotal questions that animated this essay on care and the political: What does it mean to care from a subject position that has been understood as the constitutive outside of liberal forms of citizenship? What new methodologies can be learned from this unique subject position? First, activists featured in this essay show us that bringing care into the realm of the political does not mean reifying a U.S. liberalism premised on white supremacy, inequality, and suffering. Activists argued that making care political is a project of refusal of us/them divides that structure global constructions of liberalism. In so doing, these activists constructed an internationalist, anticapitalist, and globally relational framework by which to understand human difference. They also activated unique nepantla strategies to navigate differences along national boundaries, gender, race, and difference. In so doing, they set forth a form of social movement activism fueled by a nos/otras praxis of relationality. This form of relationality radically unsettles the coupling of global frameworks of lethal liberalism, white supremacy, and extractivist capitalist accumulation.

This process of unsettling requires radical forms of disruption, discomfort, and disorientation. I suggest that activists featured in this essay took part in this disorienting process. This is the same experience I felt upon my first encounter with David Levenson. I still remember that moment of seeing him on the dance floor during the birthday celebration of one of the icons of the Chicano Movement. This white man in a sea of people of color, with such eclectic moves. He stood out, but he also blended in with so much finesse. This encounter and my subsequent interview with Levenson made me think critically about a major call by Katherine McKittrick to imagine how we are tied to “broader conceptions of human and planetary life, which demonstrate our common and difficult histories of encounter.” She proposes that “we might reimagine geographies of dispossession and racial violence not through the comfortable lenses of insides/outsides or us/them . . . but as sites through which ‘co-operative human efforts’ can take place and have a place” (2011, 960). Activism entails learning to take part in these cooperative human efforts that mobilize beyond and within rigid identity boundaries. And in so doing they help forge new identities of commonality and shared humanity, and new spaces that foster these relationships.

In this essay, I have demonstrated how “those without” have forged caring practices and traditions that are outside the terrain of liberal democracies. In fact, their construction represents the constitutive outside of these liberal democratic practices. In order to enact practices of solidarity and alliances, activists learned to care across multiple identity categories. They also learned to care across national boundaries, therefore contesting naturalized borders and hardened divisions between allegedly developed and underdeveloped countries. Anzaldúa’s concept of nos/otras as navigated by nepantla subjects offers a meaningful way to understand how we maintain this caring capacity while working through differences and forming alliances. As Anzaldúa so strongly believed, “the future belongs to those who cultivate cultural sensitivities to differences and who use these abilities to forge a hybrid consciousness” (2015, 85). This hybrid consciousness must deploy nepantla strategies in order to transcend the “us” versus “them” mentality. Through these practices, Anzaldúa believed that we could be carried into a nos/otras position bridging the extremes of our cultural realities, a subjectivity that doesn’t polarize potential allies.

Nos/otras is an identity and a practice that activists continue to employ. Levenson is now a doctor and works with primarily disenfranchised groups. He also volunteers during his free time to provide free medical screenings at Street Level Health Project in Oakland, where he mainly works with recently arrived immigrants and the uninsured. Pesquera went on to become a professor at UC Davis, where she taught about the Chicano Movement and other radical mobilizations of the 1960s. She also headed a program that took students to Cuba for a number of years to support and learn from the Cuban Revolution. Jubb went on to work in education and has been an advocate for culturally relevant education. Contreras owns his own printing business and is now part of the Oakland Police Board, a committee made up of residents who monitor for cases of police violence. All of them have continued to be socially active in some capacity. Levenson became a volunteer doctor during the civil wars in Central America. He also went down to support the Zapatista uprising in 1994. Contreras and his wife were involved in the anti-Apartheid movement and joined an international and multiracial group to end Apartheid in South Africa. As Levenson so eloquently told me, “I carry with me still, the true 24/7 commitment to social change. We considered ourselves revolutionary in the sense of wanting to transform the world into a better place” (Levenson interview, August 28, 2019). This is the selflessness of nos/otras, of breaking down the barriers between self and other in order to imagine a more equitable and just society and articulate a caring praxis. Instead of solely seeing BIPOC communities as laborers in the care industry, it is important to underscore the long legacy that BIPOC movements offer us to envision and work toward a more caring world. In so doing, we can envision alternatives to global lethal liberalism.

NOTES

1. Carlos Muñoz Jr. is an emeritus professor of ethnic studies at UC Berkeley. He and others led the student walkouts in Los Angeles for which he was unjustly imprisoned. He is the author of the seminal book of the Chicano Movement, Youth, Identity, Power: The Chicano Movement.

2. Katherine McKittrick is the preeminent scholar in what has become a field of study dedicated to analyzing the critical work of Jamaican writer and cultural theorist Sylvia Wynter. For one of Wynter’s most explicit analyses of colonization and the us/them divide, see Wynter (1995). See also McKittrick (2015).

3. All interviews were conducted by the author.

4. For an extensive analysis at the limitations of a cultural-nationalist framing of Chicano Movement activism, see Blackwell (2011). See also Pulido (2006) for a geographical reading of radical activism in Los Angeles and the importance of a relational racial analysis of social movements.

REFERENCES

Anzaldúa, Gloria E. 2015. Light in the Dark / Luz en lo Oscuro: Rewriting Identity, Spirituality, Reality. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Baldwin, Devarian L., and Emma S. Crane. 2020. “Cities, Racialized Poverty, and Infrastructures of Possibility.” Antipode 52(2): 365–379.

Blackwell, Maylei. 2010. “Líderes Campesinas: Nepantla Strategies and Grassroots Organizing at the Intersection of Gender and Globalization.” Aztlan: A Journal of Chicano Studies 35(1): 13–47.

——. 2011. ¡Chicana Power! Contested Histories of Feminism in the Chicano Movement. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Cahuas, Madelaine Cristina. 2019. “Burned, Broke, and Brilliant: Latinx Community Workers’ Experiences across the Greater Toronto Area’s Non-profit Sector.” Antipode 51(1): 66–86.

Conradson, David. 2003. “Spaces of Care in the City: The Place of a Community Drop-In Center.” Social & Cultural Geography 4(4): 507–525.

Du Bois, W. E. B. [1899] 1969. The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study and History of Pennsylvania’s Black American Population; Their Education, Environment and Work. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania.

Evans, Joshua. 2011. “Exploring the BioPolitical Dimensions of Voluntarism and Care in the City: The Case of a ‘Low Barrier’ Emergency Shelter.” Health & Place 17(1): 24–32.

Fanon, Frantz. [1963] 2004. The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove Press.

Glenn, Evelyn Nakano. 2010. Forced to Care: Coercion and Caregiving in America. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Gregory, Steven. 1998. Black Corona: Race and the Politics of Place in an Urban Community. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.

Gupta, Akhil, and James Ferguson, eds. 1997. Culture, Power, Place: Explorations in Critical Anthropology. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Heynen, Nik, and Megan Ybarra. 2020. “On Abolition Ecologies and Making ‘Freedom as a Place.’” Antipode 53(1): 1–15.

Hondagneu-Sotelo, Pierrette. 2001. Domeśtica: Immigrant Workers Cleaning and Caring in the Shadows of Affluence. Oakland: University of California Press.

McKittrick, Katherine. 2011. “On Plantations, Prisons and a Black Sense of Place.” Social & Cultural Geography 12(8): 947–963.

——. 2013. “Plantation Futures.” Small Axe 17.3(42): 1–15.

—— (Ed.). 2015. Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Mignolo, Walter D. 2000. Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.

Milligan, Christine, and Janine Wiles. 2010. “Landscapes of Care.” Progress in Human Geography 34(6): 736–754.

Nelson, Alondra. 2011. Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight Against Medical Discrimination. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Parr, Hester. 2000. “Interpreting the Hidden Social Geographies of Mental Health: Ethnographies of Inclusion and Exclusion in Semi-institutional Places.” Health and Place 6(3): 225–237.

——. 2003. “Medical Geography: Care and Caring.” Progress in Human Geography 27(2): 212–221.

Parreñas, Rhacel Salazar. 2001. Servants of Globalization: Women, Migration, and Domestic Work. Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press.

Power, Andrew, and Edward Hall. 2019. “Placing Care in Times of Austerity.” Social and Cultural Geography 19(3): 303–313.

Power, Emma R. 2019. “Assembling the Capacity to Care: Caring-with Precarious Housing.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 44(4): 763–777.

Power, Emma R., and Miriam J. Williams. 2020. “Cities of Care: A Platform for Urban Geographical Care Research.” Geography Compass 14(1): e12474.

Pulido, Laura. 2006. Black, Brown, Yellow, and Left: Radical Activism in Los Angeles. Oakland: University of California Press.

Ramírez, Margaret. 2020. “City as Borderland: Gentrification and the Policing of Black and Latinx Geographies in Oakland.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 38(1): 147–166.

Till, Karen. 2012. “Wounded Cities: Memory-Work and a Place-Based Ethics of Care.” Political Geography 31(1): 3–14.

Tronto, Joan. 1993. Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care. New York: Routledge.

——. 2013. Caring Democracy: Markets, Equality, and Justice. New York: New York University Press.

Trotter, Joe. 2007. Black Milwaukee: The Making of an Industrial Proletariat, 1915–45. Chicago: University of Illinois Press.

Williams, Miriam. 2016. “Justice and Care in the City: Uncovering Everyday Practices through Research Volunteering.” Area 48(4): 513–520.

Wilson Gilmore, Ruth. 2017. “Abolition Geography and the Problem of Innocence.” In Gaye Theresa Johnson and Alex Lubin (Eds.), Futures of Black Radicalism, 224–241. London: Verso.

Woods, Clyde. 2017. Development Arrested: The Blues and Plantation Power in the Mississippi Delta. London: Verso.

Wynter, Sylvia. 1995. “1492: A New World View.” In Vera Lawrence Hyatt and Rex Nettleford (Eds.), Race, Discourse, and the Origin of the Americas, 5–57. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press.

——. 2003. “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument.” CR: The New Centennial Review 3(3): 257–337.