ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Victoria Lawson and Sarah Elwood

This book is the outcome of relationships of care and community spanning many years. We have been so lucky to be deeply challenged, inspired, and supported by brilliant thinking partners along our careers. We are deeply indebted to all the collaborators who created this volume together, who believed in our collective ability to argue that impoverishment can never be understood within the language and frames of liberal poverty knowledge. We are so grateful to students and colleagues/friends who generously shared ideas that opened space for many flights to the future that arise from histories of knowing and working for freedoms. We are grateful to all those graduate students who push us, both through their own work and in geography seminars on relational poverty knowledge. Some of them are coauthors in this book, and many others inspired our thinking through their brilliant interventions in our classes. Most particularly, we are grateful for the generosity of Magie Ramírez, Michelle Daigle, Yolanda González Mendoza, Katie Gillespie, Monica Farias, Tish Lopez, Eddy Sandoval, Eli Shoffner, Isaac Rivera, Austin Crane, Natalie Vaughan-Wynn, Amy Piedalue, Becky Burnett, Emma Slager, Anne Bonds, Sam Fredman, Samantha Thompson, and Aliyah Abu-Hazeem Turner. Danielle Brown inspires us not only with her thinking but also with her beautiful and prescient artwork that graces the cover or our book. We are also indebted to Ananya Roy, LaShawnDa Pittman, Jack Gieseking, David Giles, Amy Hagopian, Ed Taylor, Judy Howard, George Lovell, Tim Harris, and Jon Williams for their many insightful and supportive interventions along this journey. We are also very grateful to Mick Gusinde-Duffy for his immediate understanding of, and ongoing support for, the ethics and politics of collective recognition in the creation of our book. We are grateful for constructive feedback from reviewers of the proposal and full manuscript.

Vicky is also grateful to Dian Million. Dian engaged me in conversations that blew my mind and shifted the entire frame of my understanding and led me to this project! I am deeply grateful for my colleague Chandan Reddy who, at every step of this and many other projects, has been both the most brilliant and the most caring human. And then there is Sarah. Sarah Elwood has been my coconspirator for well over a decade. Sarah is my intellectual partner and colleague who shares all the joys and all the burdens of this work. But above all, Sarah is my dear friend who not only makes the work meaningful but makes life better through all the great meals, the trips, the hikes, the laughter.

Sarah thanks Chandan Reddy for being with us on this journey, inspiring and reenergizing us at every turn. Today and every day, I’m grateful to Lisa Faustino, whose politics, steadfastness, and generosity of spirit sustain me. For Vicky: Our collaboration has been one of the greatest gifts of my career. All should be so lucky to get to think and write, teach and learn, laugh and love so deeply with a cherished friend, for so many years. This book has come into being in the midst of joys and struggles of many kinds, and I am so grateful for you, in all of it.

Chandan Reddy

I want to express thanks to all the authors whose work and deep thinking are the source of this collective project. Above all, I thank Vicky and Sarah first for their generous invitation to think together about the critique of the political that Indigenous and critical ethnic studies thinkers of relationality chart and open up. Their vision to submit poverty studies to this critique opened the doors for the gatherings that created this book. They have been abiding guardians and sage interlocutors for us all, doing the crucial infrastructural work necessary for over two years without pause during these difficult and politically dark times to move this project from a shared set of ideas and conversations to a completed book. It is my honor to work beside them and consider myself their colleague at UW.

Yolanda González Mendoza

My multiple relations define who I am and how I make and experience communities and places across space and generations. I am of Indigenous descent from the lands of the Purépecha peoples in Michoacán, Mexico. I am also an uninvited guest in the lands of the Piscataway and Susquehannock peoples that is home to UMBC, which I joined in 2019 as assistant professor of geography and environmental systems. My deepest gratitude to all collaborators— authors/friends/colleagues, editors, and reviewers—of this collective abolitionist book. Especial thanks to Victoria Lawson, Sarah Elwood, and Chandan Reddy for your guidance, love, and energy in this project. I dedicate my contribution to my community in El Rancho (our powerful root in Mexico) who, as they wait for the return of their children and grandchildren, are aging, dying, and becoming soil alongside our ancestors. To my prim@s (cousins) who mourn at a distance—legally trapped in the United States—the deaths of their parents and loved ones in El Rancho due to the violence of white supremacists’ laws that control and criminalize our mobilities. To this illegalized community who are making relations and roots in the northern part of Abya Yala (aka the United States) as uninvited guest. Overall, I dedicate this book to my present, past, and future generations across space. To you: Arisbeth, Anelsy, mis grandes amores y gran inspiration. Yours in the ongoing struggle to abolish all conditions of oppression.

Ana P. Gutiérrez Garza and Jovan Scott Lewis

We were hired by Tulsa native Charles Stafford and his colleague Rita Astuti, both anthropology professors at the London School of Economics, to research the relationship between cooperation and inequality among Black, Mexican American, and white Tulsans. We are incredibly thankful to Charles for introducing Tulsa to us and making available to us his family there. We also thank Professor Joseph Grzywacz and his staff at the Center for Family Resilience of Oklahoma State University–Tulsa and especially the Mexican and African American women who worked with the community for the center. Without them, we may never have truly come to know Tulsa. And therefore, we are most grateful to Tulsa’s residents, who shared their lives, struggles, and hopes with us.

Aaron Mallory

I would like to thank the Houston Public Library System and the Rose Library at Emory University who provided archival support to work with Fabian Bridges’s story. Additionally, I would like to thank Atlanta-based Queers who took the time to chat with me and show me their great city. Also, I want to shout out my WASC crew who read early drafts of the chapter. Finally, I want to acknowledge Fabian Bridges and others who lived, loved, and transitioned during the HIV/AIDS epidemic.

Juan Herrera

I would like to thank the members of the Fruitvale History Project, a collective of sixties and seventies activists who continue to inspire me in so many ways. These activists, along with those featured in my contribution to this book, showed me the power of collective organizing and how social movements mobilize to transform underserved communities. I thank them for their dedication to community care and their efforts to raise awareness about the history of the social movement in the Bay Area, and Oakland’s Fruitvale neighborhood more specifically. They include Andres Alegria, Regina Chavarín, Mariano Contreras, Lenor De Cruz, Joel Garcia, Judi Garcia, Connie Jubb, Selia Melero, Elizabeth Meza, Annette Dolores Oropeza, and Beatriz M. Pesquera. I hope that more people can learn about their struggle for spatial justice. I also thank all those who contributed to this edited volume for having the courage to engage in work that is radically transforming a predominantly white discipline like geography. I especially thank Sarah Elwood and Vicky Lawson for paving the way to these conversations and for supporting us all throughout this journey. I also thank the reviewers for their generous feedback. I have learned so much through this collective endeavor and thank those who made this work possible. And I am especially grateful for the support from loved ones near and far.

Priscilla McCutcheon and Ellen Kohl

We would like to thank the members of the Wheat Street Baptist Church Action Mission Ministry and the Newtown Florist Club for sharing their time, stories, and wisdom with us. They continue to inspire and motivate our work. We would also like to thank Sarah Elwood, Vicky Lawson, Yolanda Valencia, and the anonymous reviewers for their suggestions on our chapter. Lastly, we would like to thank each other. We continue to learn and grow together in this work.

Margaret Marietta Ramírez and Michelle Daigle

Thank you to all those we have been in conversation with over the years, who have storied their relations with us with care and generosity. Thank you to Vicky Lawson and Sarah Elwood for inviting us to be in conversation on decolonization and liberation for the Relational Poverty Network’s podcast in 2019, for allowing us to build on this conversation for this edited collection, and for providing leadership and guidance along with Chandan Reddy. Thank you to Austin Crane for his editorial guidance throughout the writing process and to all contributors for their conversation and insights as we envisioned the themes and spirit of this collective writing project. Meegwetch!