Prepared by Stuart Schussler, March 2017
on behalf of the Autonomous University of Social Movements
(otherwise known as MSN)
Anti-Executive Summary
The quick-and-dirty of the report
August 2012: The team at Mexico Solidarity Network begins discussing comprehensively engaging our alumni.
June 2015: Survey of alumni, where you’re living, and what you’ve been up to. 165 people respond.
February – September 2016: Conversations with alumni about what you’ve been up to and how the program impacted you. Stuart talks with 104 people.
That’s a brief history of how a seed of curiosity, sprouting five years ago, has grown. All of us have seen the power and beauty of autonomy, and we’re all asking what it means for us here, now, thousands of miles from the caracol, in deeply troubling times. These are times of war – war on Black lives, war on indigenous water protectors, war on immigrants, war on women and queer people, war by the largest and most violent military in world history, war by the capitalists who are both finance and government – and we need all the strength we can muster to weather the storm. Those of us who have glimpsed autonomy have seen hope. We know that as community, from below and from the left, we can win. And hopefully the alumni network can be a resource in this struggle.
Who exactly is this alumni network? It includes many people organizing outside of their paid work, and others organizing through jobs as teachers, professors, with social and medical services, at labor unions and NGOs. (See ‘What you’re doing’ for more)
It includes people with wide-ranging inspiration, from engaging directly-affected communities to channeling resources where they’re most needed to popular education. (See ‘Why we fight’)
And it includes the wisdom gained from confronting many challenges, from the slow process of building community despite immediate crises, to resisting the non-profit industrial complex, to finding some kindred spirits to walk alongside. (See ‘Common obstacles’)
These are a few common threads of the many reflections people shared with me, and the purpose of this report is to begin to share those reflections with you too. But it’s only a beginning. My hope is that it inspires you to continue the discussion, through discussion groups between people with a similar focus and meet-ups in key cities. (See ‘Moving forward’)
After you’ve read the report, email me at stuart@mexicosolidarity.org to let me know how you think an alumni network can be a tool for movement building.
How it all began
An introduction
For many of us, it’s been a year since we spoke. A year since I asked you what you’ve been up to since going to Mexico with AUSM/MSN, how that experience affected you, and what your obstacles and successes have been since then. After six months, 104 conversations, and a few more months of mulling it all over (ok, many months… ), this is my thank you card to you, for taking time out of your busy lives to discuss things that aren’t easy with a guy you might never have met. It’s also a love letter, for all the hope you left me with. It’s also a revolutionary manifesto for changing the world.
This is also just another step in an ongoing exchange. In the final section I have some ideas for next steps, but please make the most immediate one responding to this report and letting me know what you think.
The idea behind this project is that the study abroad program has gone on for more than a decade, involving over four hundred students. What has its impact been? Are we doing what we set out to do? The study abroad program’s mission can be summarized as ‘reverse service learning.’ Instead of a semester of charity (‘service’) in Mexico, we seek to do the opposite: learn from groups fighting from below and from the left, looking for lessons that will nourish a lifetime of organizing work back home. So what has people’s ‘service’ actually been? This is the first of many attempts to see what it all means, and I hope the subsequent attempts will happen in dialogue with you.
In our conversations people said one thing more than any other: your experience in Mexico left you with a determination to build community wherever you are, in whatever sort of work you’re doing. But this commitment plays out in many different ways. Below, I try and draw some commonalities from our 104 conversations.
First, I discuss what areas of political work (which is sometimes also paid work) people are involved in and the class and identity positions you’re coming to that work from.
Second, I look at what gets people excited, what their goals, dreams, and areas of focus are.
Third, I look at common obstacles people are having in pursuing these dreams and ways they’re overcoming those obstacles.
And finally, I put forward some ideas of where we can go from here.
What you’re doing – A look at people’s organizing focus and jobs
Autonomy is about community control in all aspects of our lives, from our education, to our health, to our work, to how we come to agreements. And the exciting thing about this incipient alumni network is there are people working on all these things too. People’s paid and organizing work truly runs the gamut, including:
Collectives, affinity groups, and study circles (24%)
Higher education (15%)
Primary and secondary education (12%)
NGOs (9%)
Social work and social services (8%)
Labor unions (8%)
Social enterprise (8%)
Media (6%)
Healthcare (3%)
And many people who are in transition, or whose work is none of the above (7%)
So if you’re having a hard time finding others who share your politics and vision for change, or if you feel like you could use some fresh ideas, know that there are other alumni looking for more connections too. One initiative we hope to launch going forward is to convoke discussion groups for people in the same sectors. The public school teachers can share ideas on popular education and evading administrators’ surveillance. The social workers can talk about radically channeling the system’s resources in an age of hateful austerity. The labor union folks can share tips for empowering the base. And on and on.
I’ll be reaching out to people over the coming months to get these discussion groups rolling, so keep an eye out.
In terms of paid-versus-volunteer organizing work,
The place of greatest political engagement for 66% of people was also their job, while 29% aren’t paid for the political work they’re most dedicated to. The other 5% don’t consider their paid work political, nor are they currently volunteering.
Just who are these alumni?
Some common intersections of class and identity
My interviews weren’t a demographic survey, asking people to check off which categories they identify with, but instead focused on how your experience in Mexico influenced what you’re doing today. Nonetheless, who we are as people, what we do with our time, and how we want to change the world – identity, work, and politics – are all closely tied. So it’s possible to make some generalizations about the positions from which people came to the study abroad program and from which they continue fighting for change, so that we have a better feeling for who makes up this supposed ‘alumni network.’ But any generalization also leaves a lot out, which is why it’s so important to meet each other in person.
As was the case during most of your semesters, there are more women than men and more white folks than people of color. The people of color are mostly Latinx, mostly from Mexico, and some are also indigenous. There are people with many sexualities. Some are living with physical and mental disabilities. Folks reside in all areas of the US (and a few in Mexico, Canada, and beyond), but few are in the South and most are in urban areas instead of the countryside. Some are parents, but most aren’t. This is all consistent with study abroad programs across the US.
There are also large class differences that are frequently also differences in race. Some people’s family members are earning minimum wage or less, while others have investments and second homes. In terms of your current jobs, some folks are scraping by, caught in the grind of unpaid internships and student loans, spending most of their income on rent, while many others have stable jobs and own homes. This is often a question of age too. Some people battled structural racism to achieve credentials and careers despite countless obstacles, and for others, their activism involves working with people who are poorer than they are. But despite this difference, everyone I spoke with has university education, everyone has immigration status, nobody has been incarcerated, and no one is at risk of homelessness.
The point is that class matters, but it’s a position and identity I didn’t explicitly discuss with many of you. So as we continue our conversations, I’m interested to explore how class (in all its racialized, gendered, sexualized, and embodied complexity) affects people’s everyday organizing experiences. For now, all I can say is that, just as you would expect, people have privilege and people are fighting discrimination, exploitation, repression, and dispossession – always some mix of both. But the key question is ‘What are people doing about it?’ To try and answer this, I group people’s paths into three categories: Searching, Subverting, and Slogging.
The Searchers are looking for a good fit. Maybe they have left an organization that felt shitty and haven’t found another that feels like home, maybe they’re new to town, or maybe they’re in a small town. The Subverters are going under the radar. They’re in NGO, social service, or teaching jobs that pay the bills, and they’re looking for ways to engage the community and do more radical work without losing their jobs. And the Sloggers feel fulfilled (although often exhausted) by their work. It’s openly and explicitly the sort of organizing they want to do, but sometimes progress feels incredibly slow since every day there’s a fire to put out, or simply keeping-on with zero budget and zero free time gets tough.
Across it all, there’s movement – geographic, political, and professional. People are moving to new cities, looking for new jobs, and beginning or ending organizing projects after months or years. The snapshot I got from the survey I sent in 2015 and the conversations we had in 2016 has already changed greatly. But despite the constant change, there are many points of unity. There are many people who will find your work and insights inspiring, for whom you can be the spark that brings their engagement to another level. There are people asking the same questions as you, wrestling with the same problems. And some of them live one bus ride away from you. Let’s look at the hopes and the dreams, the obstacles and the lessons, that people share.
Why we fight
Things that get people excited
Before talking about what the people I interviewed have been up to, let’s talk about why you all do it. What is the vision? What’s gets you out of bed in the morning? And what sort of goals come out of this vision?
‘In the world but not of it’ is one way to describe why we fight. We dream of a world worthy of the beauty of our loved ones, a world that fosters freedom and joy instead of profit from hatred and oppression. Some people call this a revolution, and others talk about love conquering fear. The crafty ones talk about a world where we have the collective empowerment and resources to be artists of our lives, making what was once a dream into a physical reality. Others talk about our social services being sources of liberation instead of schooling, surveillance, and exclusion. For others the dream is a horizon, something we’ll always walk towards without ever reaching. Whatever the vision is, most agree it’s something that must begin right here, right now, in our own communities.
This is the world that lives in our hearts but not the world beneath our feet. Being in the world but not of it, people look for different ways to walk towards this horizon:
Work with directly affected people. These folks are responding to immediate needs that can only be solved through radical change. They’re reaching out to people who don’t usually come to rallies because they’re working or don’t use academic leftist vocabulary. To do this work we share personal stories, build up ‘leaderful’ movements, and create working solutions to things like police brutality, immigration raids, lack of healthcare, evictions, and food deserts.
Mobilizing resources in a crisis. With immigration officers and riot cops making arrests on one side and calls for no borders, decolonization, and reparations for slavery on another, these folks are bringing together material support in times of need. The situation is daunting and they’re not sure they’re prepared, but they’re doing the behind-the-scenes work that makes movements stronger.
Shifting the institutional focus. Whether it’s within a university, large NGO, or a publicly-funded social service, these people are getting their colleagues on board and getting outside of the bubble. They’re emerging from silos by connecting the dots and convincing people the true foundation of any activism is community building.
Popular education and circle building. This is the power of storytelling, of getting to know people on a human level, of learning through the expertise we each have in our everyday lives. Often this also involves engaging personal traumas so we can bring our whole selves to the work. These folks are finding the confidence and techniques to enter this intense, interpersonal space that is so key to building collectivity.
Sounds great, but it’s not that easy
Common obstacles in making the dream a reality
Zapatismo was obviously a common reference point, the shared point of arrival and departure on all our respective journeys. For some it was a major eureka moment, and for others visiting Oventic was a touchstone along a path of radicalization that had begun long before. Whatever the case, the Zapatistas’ message to ‘support us by organizing in your own community’ rings loud and clear. Without a doubt, it’s the strongest lesson alumni have carried with them.
Across the diversity of sectors and issues you’re dedicated to, many people told me you were looking for ways to orient the work more towards building community. Many of you are looking for ways to walk alongside those most directly impacted by systems of oppression and to do this in a way that emphasizes both movement building and relationship building, beyond the limitations of advocacy, short term campaigns, ‘objective’ research, or sterile, institutional relationships. In some of our conversations, people spoke excitedly about these intentions finally clicking, finally bearing fruit, after years when they seemed to be a hopeless dream. Others spoke of a longing to do more community-oriented work, but were still feeling lost. Many expressed a mix of both. But before we get into people’s most common obstacles please remember that, whatever you’re facing, there are other alumni out there who have faced it too. And their experience, connections, wisdom, and lessons from trial and error can be a resource for you.
‘Organizing in your own community’ is tough. The Zapatistas refuse to dictate a recipe for revolution, and many people said they had few examples to turn to back home. Furthermore, the obstacles of someone who can’t find a collective that feels right are different than those of the person who is limited by the scope of their school or NGO’s ‘mandate,’ or from the difficulties of the person who loves what they’re doing but is also broke and exhausted. These are the three general conditions I found: searching, subverting, and slogging. Any categorization leaves a lot out and won’t fully explain any individual’s situation, but these categories also express many commonalities across the 104 conversations I had. They’re meant to give you a general sense of what many of your fellow alumni are experiencing.
Slogging – the aches and pains of the hike
You’re part of a community-based organizing project, working for immediate needs and also a radical long-term vision. Sometimes it feels like you’re at a sprint and other times it feels like pushing a boulder up a hill, but you’re making progress. Slogging is the foot, back, and neck pain of walking with others towards the horizon.
Some concrete examples of the difficulties of slogging have to do with building autonomy: creating urban agriculture, women’s health networks, student-driven education, worker power, sanctuary neighborhoods, or fighting gentrification without being beholden to rich donors or bureaucracies. Money is always an issue, and it’s tough to build the confidence necessary for people to work together on these projects when there isn’t a pre-existing sense of community. Plus, people are working as much as they possibly can at exhausting, underpaid jobs, have children to take care of, and being poor, undocumented, a person of color, or oppressed in other ways means a crisis can appear at any moment. So sometimes it feels like we’re running around, putting out fires instead of doing long term organizing. It’s a slow process, and everything can go to hell all too quickly, often in very heartbreaking ways. So keeping the faith despite so much uncertainty is hard. It’s easy to fall into apolitical service provision, or to ignore your own spiritual, mental, and physical health because of the crisis. Bad interpersonal dynamics, often rooted in racism and sexism, get pushed aside and build up over time.
These are some of the difficulties with slogging, but many people also spoke with pride about their successes: celebrating and taking a step back to recognize how far you’ve truly come, or a big win in opposing pipelines or offshore drilling projects. And in community building, the means are also the ends. A common struggle can bring people together and show them ‘who am I?’ is about ‘who are we?’ and ‘why we fight.’ It builds the greatest source of power we have as everyday, working people: each other.
Subverting – radical work under the radar
You’re at a school, university, social service, or NGO where you’re able to do good work that makes positive changes in people’s lives. The organization is stable and gives your life some steadiness, and it has access to material resources, something the folks doing community organizing are always struggling to find. But the institutional limitations you’re up against are also clear: radical dreams are limited by the grant cycle, common core standards, institutional policy, delivering the deliverables, or the sheer workload. ‘Autonomy,’ ‘anticapitalism,’ ‘colonization,’ or ‘rape culture’ aren’t part of the conversation. Furthermore, some people see every day how their universities, social services, and public schools perpetuate systemic racism simply by complying with policy and procedure, yet the possibilities for change seem bleak.
For those looking to subvert, to go against the political grain, these were common obstacles I heard, but there was also celebration. Alumni found colleagues with the same critiques and aspirations, and began commiserating about how to change things. They found safer spaces, where they could do one-on-one work with students/participants/members and get at the deeper questions so often ignored. Others even carved out spaces in their schools and organizations where they could connect with parents and wider networks to do community organizing beyond narrow mandates.
After all, in these difficult times more and more people are looking to build long term responses to neofascist capitalism, beyond false promises of ‘hope and change’ from the powerful. People are coming out of the woodwork, searching for something to dedicate their energies to, and it’s the responsibility of each of us who have been inspired to make proposals and build collectivity, from wherever we are. Alumni spoke of the slow but successful process of clearing institutional barriers, turning each ‘no’ into a ‘maybe’ and then a ‘yes,’ showing that it is indeed possible to emerge from institutional silos and redirect much-needed resources toward radical community work. Going forward, we should do more to share this wisdom amongst alumni.
Searching – turning an ‘I’ into a ‘we’
Other folks are still looking for a project that feels good and where you can show up to with your whole self. When we’re inspired by big dreams, the reality of groups can often feel small and yucky. Like when sexism gets ignored and macho activists want to confront the cops instead of building relationships, when the group is all about ‘getting shit done’ at the behest of process, or when petty political differences become raging interpersonal feuds. Even with groups that feel good to be part of, sometimes a massive mobilization ending in defeat leaves you feeling exhausted. Or organizing commitments and trying to pay the rent leave no time for mental, physical, and spiritual health. Most importantly, many of us have traumas, and being a person of color, poor, queer, a woman, or an immigrant often means even more trauma and more financial stress. So how to fit organizing in?
Apart from these problems, many of the people I spoke to who aren’t presently organizing said they’re simply isolated. They’re in a new city, or maybe their work situation has them surrounded by bougie white people. But others were happy to relate that, after being isolated for a while, they had found ways to overcome it. Some said therapy helped them locate blocks to greater involvement. Others found they needed a different organizing context: work with a different age group, in a different environment (maybe rural or outdoors), or through a different medium (art, journalism, with minimum wage workers). Others, after searching for some time, had found co-organizers they could share their personal stories with and come to know on a deeper level.
All collaborations begin with a point of unity, whether it’s the same neighborhood, the same job, a shared political analysis, or common inspiration for why we fight. Across MSN’s alumni network, this point of unity is having tasted the fresh air of liberated Zapatista territory, and there is probably someone living within a bus ride of you who, a few years before or a few years after you did, found that same inspiration. Not everyone has to drop what they’re doing and become comrades in struggle, but from talking with 104 of you, I know that some of you should. Let’s find a way to make it happen.
Moving forward
Where’s this project headed?
There’s a simple reason why the world’s richest 62 people have as much wealth as the poorest 3.7 billion: organization. We have the numbers, but not the level of sustained collaboration necessary to overcome their violent greed. That’s why community is so important in all places, across all issues. AUSM/MSN tries to play its part in this process by accompanying university students as they seek lessons from some of Mexico’s most inspiring autonomous movements, but there is always so much more to do. During our conversations, many of you gave great advice: we can draw more connections to organizing back home while in Mexico and do more to prepare for returning home; we can follow up with alumni more after the program ends; we can facilitate connections with organizations and other alumni for recently-returned students. These are all things I’ve been relaying to the MSN staff, while also respecting that they’re all at 150% capacity as it is, and adding new projects means taking away from existing ones. But it’s not all in the staff’s hands either: many of you also pointed out that it’s up to alumni to forge their own paths and that no one can do this for you. Nonetheless, we must always do the difficult work of broadening and deepening our organizing, of testing new ideas, of trying to do better.
Going forward, we’ve got four proposals for you all. First, let me know what you think of the report. Send me an email at stuart@mexicosolidarity.org, or write to the staff at info@ausm.community.
Second, let’s form monthly conversation groups so that people doing the same sort of work can workshop with each other. The teachers can discuss popular education and parent engagement. The community organizers can talk about building leadership and a base, hand in hand. The folks in social services can talk about getting around red tape to put resources where they’re needed most. The folks looking to engage more can get ideas from what others are doing.
Third, you can meet the other alumni living near you. Most major cities have a dozen or so alumni in them, plus more within a couple hours’ drive. Let’s find a time to meet up, share what we’re involved in, build collective analysis of the terrain of repression and resistance in this particular place, and find opportunities for collaboration. There are many details to work out, but maybe we can make it happen late this summer.
Fourth, let’s support each other’s organizing however else we can. It goes without saying that it’s more necessary now than ever. If the Obama years were a time of mass deportation, police terrorism, unbridled austerity, and corporate impunity, all with a smiling face, now we’re facing an unmasked violence in all its putrid vehemence. Against atomizing fear and hatred, we must build community and love. The Zapatistas aren’t a model or vanguard in this pursuit, but they’re surely an inspiration for all that a multi-generational process of building community can do. We share that inspiration, so let’s also share ways we’re making it into a practical reality.
Let’s share the paths we’re taking, and hopefully walk together. Ya se mira el horizonte.
Stuart Schussler 