Transcript: YOALLI RODRIGUEZ on Grief as an Ontological Form of Time /306
Ayana Young Hello and welcome to For the Wild Podcast, I'm Ayana Young. Today we are speaking with Yoalli Rodríguez.
Yoalli Rodríguez How can we imagine other forms of life? And how can we imagine other forms of relation with the land, with water, with our communities, with our bodies as territories, with care, with solidarity, with love, with tenderness, but also with rage because rage is also powerful, and with grief, and with sadness?
Ayana Young Meztli Yoalli Rodríguez Aguilera is an educator, vinyl selector, and writer born and raised in Mexico but currently based in the U.S. They are currently an Assistant Professor in Anthropology & Sociology and Latin American and Latinx Studies at Lake Forest College, Illinois. They are interested in subjects of anti-colonial, anti-racist feminist struggles, political ecology, and state violence.
Well Yoalli, thank you so much for joining us today.
Yoalli Rodríguez Thank you so much for having me. And I'm also looking forward to this beautiful and fluid conversation.
Ayana Young Me too. Well, to begin, I want to start by introducing listeners to your study of land specifically. What brought you this work and can you give us a glimpse into the importance of grounding critiques of state control and violence within conversations about geographies?
Yoalli Rodríguez Yeah, of course. Well, for me, while I was doing my research, I was like, “why am I always coming back to the land, and to geography and to human/ non-human interactions?” And I think it all has its roots in my own family. My grandfather, on my mother's side, was a farmer, and he was a farmer who was organizing for the conservation and for protection of communal land in the northern part of Mexico. So my mom grew up also as a farmer, and so I feel that that connection to the land has always been in my family, they were organizing to have communal land for people, and growing food, and growing in nature. So I feel that in the end, in those cycles of life, I ended up doing my research about land and this intimate, emotional, affective connection between land and, in this case, water because I did my research in Mexico, in the southeast part of Mexico in Oaxaca, on the Pacific Coast, in a Black Indigenous community, and communities around the body of water - lagoons.
And when I was doing this I started realizing, once I was having conversations with a lot of local people, that when we think of geography, especially racialized geographies where Black and Indigenous people that have been communities that have been also erased intentionally by settler states, such as Mexico… because I think usually we think of settler as the US, Canada, Australia, where these Native American theorists have thought about this, but I would also try to think of how Mexico and Latin America has also settler colonial states that also erase and also try to displace racialized communities. And that is the case that I was working in these Chacahua lagoons, that's the name of the lagoons, is a body of water that for the past 20 years has been basically facing ecological degradation. But this ecological degradation of course not only affects the lagoon itself, which is a body of water that is so beautiful, full of life, with mangroves, with so many non-human species that live there, but also it is the primary source of living for all the communities around the lagoon. So if you are intentionally not paying attention to these lagoons, even if local communities are demanding solutions, then you're also doing another form of erasure of Black and Indigenous communities and in this case of state responsibility of environmental racism against Black and Indigenous communities in the now so-called nation of Mexico.
Ayana Young Thank you for starting us off in that way. Well, this reminds me of your article “Everyday Resistances to Environmental Racism, Mestizo Geographies, and Toxicity in Oaxaca” you write “propose the term “Mestizo Geographies” to refer to the Mexican nation State’s material process of slowly erasing and trying to eliminate Black, Indigenous, and non-mestizo people and territories through dispossession, displacement, as well as through pollution, tourism, and toxicity.” How does the very concept of the nation-state enforce politics of displacement and dispossession, and how is Mexico uniquely positioned as a settler-state?
Yoalli Rodríguez Thank you for that question. I think that would be one of the core thoughts and ideas of my research and future book. Basically, what I'm trying to say with this mestizo geography is basically when the Spanish colonial power was in Mexico which was known as New Spain, and then Mexico finally became an independent nation. So when basically the Mexican state was founded as a nation by itself, independent from the colonial power of Spain, there was a continuation of these colonial legacies and colonial powers, even though it was now an independent nation. And part of this construction of Mexico as a nation was trying to build a nation that would unify all these diverse populations of Indigenous people, Black people, etc, mestizo people, European descent people that were leaving there, Spaniards that were basically settled there, also the children of them, the descendants, so basically all these diversity of people were there.
So when the nation-state was founded by itself, it was this big question of how are we gonna unify or homogenize this nation called Mexico. So there were a lot of thinkers, and philosophers - one of them, his name is José Vasconcelos, is one of the architects of this ideology of mestizaje. Mestizaje means mixture - a mixture of people and races in his words. However, this mixture of mestizaje meant that within time, Black and Indigenous people would disappear because the idea was the white population. So in the end, mestizaje can be thought of as a whitening project, where mixing of all these races, the five races that he was describing, in the end, Black and Indigenous will disappear either to acculturation or integration are also just by elimination.
So if we think through that, then mestizo geographies, what I'm trying to say with this is that this is only a continuation of colonial legacies, where also Black and Indigenous people up until now 2022 are being constantly dispossessed, erased, trying to be erased and invisibilized from the nation just as when Mexico State was founded. And I say that it is also a settler colonial state because the settlers also came to Latin America, and specifically to Mexico, and they stayed and they took over land. And that also happened when it became an independent nation and the Mexican government basically said this is the territory from this limit, geographical limit to this limit, this is federal property. And with this, basically ownership of the land by the Mexican state, you're displacing Black and Indigenous people, you're also trying to control sovereignty that Black and Indigenous people have over their land and over their own cultures. And this has been only a colonial legacy.
So the things that we saw in the colonial past have evolved in different mechanisms and strategies but the violence continues, and racism continues. And the other big, complex thing about Mexico is that when this ideology of mestizaje was created, it was also created in the context of trying to have an anti-imperialist agenda. They were trying to compare Latin America and Mexico to the US saying, “we're not like the US.” In the US the Jim Crow law was happening, and segregation was a big thing in the US at the same time. So Latin America, and specifically Mexico, were trying to say, “we're not like the US, we're not racist like the US. So in our case, we are not segregating people. We are not committing “genocide” against Indigenous people. What we're doing is basically mixing all of us and because we're mixing all of us, we will be one big, “race,” the cosmic race - that's what Jose Vasconcelos was referring to - then racism is not possible in Mexico because we will all be mixed.
So that has been a narrative that up until now, people still believe - that in Mexico or in Latin America, racism doesn't exist. Because in this myth, we are all a mix of all the races. And that has created a big problem because people don't like to talk about racism in Mexico. Nowadays, the conversation has been opening a little bit. But that has been part of the complex conversation about racism. And even there, in regards to the environment, a lot of the environment conversations in Mexico and environmental struggles are mostly around class or like farmers' organizations based on organizations, but racism is usually not at the center of the conversation and I think that it is urgent. Because now it's not a coincidence that in Latin America and specifically in Mexico, almost all the land that has been dispossessed by transnational projects, mega projects, mining, gas, but also tourism, and pollution is in Black and Indigenous territories. That is not a coincidence. And that is part of the environmental racism that has been denied but yet it exists, and we have proof of it, just like in the Chacahua lagoons.
Ayana Young The framework you’re using recognizes geographies outside of state-controlled mapping and narratives. This makes me think of the power of recognizing Black geographies. In an article for the African American Intellectual Historical Society, Romy Opperman explains that Black ecology, “means Black thinkers, movements, and communities that have refused the ruse that capitalism, the state, heteropatriarchy, and the domination of more-than-human nature are the means and ends of justice and freedom” What does it look like to refuse these ruses, and how do we best honor the legacies of such resistance?
Yoalli Rodríguez That's an excellent question and that is something that I also have been thinking through with the communities. It is important also to say that I position myself as a mestizo woman in the context of Mexico, so I'm not Black or Indigenous, so that has been also part of the complex conversation with them about how racism and racialized communities have been constantly dispossessed, and how in my personhood as a mestizo woman, I have these conversations with the communities. So I think that politics of refusal is a big thing in communities in Oaxaca and across Mexico. And this politics of refusal is a refusal of erasure, is a refusal to cede the land to the settler colonial state of Mexico, and this politics of refusal is not only by actively doing, as you would say, like legible acts of resistance such as protest. The case of the Chacahua lagoons has been brought to the Inter-American Commission of Human Rights. There are also national reports of human rights made by local people.
So not only legible forms of resistance, but I'm also interested in this everyday illegible, for some people, forms of resistance and refusal. And that is, for example, taking care of the lagoons, taking care of the community, taking care of the children. How is the relationship of the women in their communities with these lagoons that are almost dying in front of their eyes? And many of these are in regard to grief. When I was asking people, local people in the communities what do they feel? Because that was very important for me to think about affect and feelings. How do they feel about our lagoon that is dying in front of their eyes? They would say nostalgia, sorrow, anger, rage. So all these feelings that in the end describe grief. So they were grieving and they are grieving the possible loss of their life.
So these politics of refusal are not only by acknowledging there is an ancestral land of existence of their own people, Black and Indigenous ancestral lands, but also by taking care of their land by, for example, cleaning the lagoons, by going to some canals that are connected to other sorts of oxygen, by trying to grow some fish, they say cultivate fish, and also regrow mangroves in the lagoons. So I think the politics of refusal to the settler colonial state are not only in the legible ways, but also in these everyday acts of resistance in defense of life, and how more political is basically defending the life of your own community and your land and the water that you live by.
And I feel that grief is, I would say, anticipated grief because the lagoon is still alive, but it is at great risk of dying soon. And this lagoon is dying because of several government decisions. For example, they created two breakwaters that were connected to the lagoon supposedly to create a balance between the lagoons and the ocean. Local people said don't put those breakwaters there, because maybe that is going to change the course of the water in a negative way. Here first, we saw first epistemological violence, or violence in regards to knowledge or not recognizing a local knowledge has value, because these people from the government and companies said we have titles and engineers, so we know what we're doing. And what happened was basically exactly what the local community said. These breakwaters they built basically permanently disconnected the lagoons from the ocean. So now the lagoon is an isolated body of water that is not receiving the oxygen that it needs to receive.
There is also a factory of lime oil, a transnational factory that is US owned, that is throwing all the waste into the lagoons to canals. So that is highly acidic and toxic. And also we have pesticides that are being used around the area - there's a lot of growing of papaya, lime, and all these pesticides, in the end, come to the lagoon. So, there are so many factors. But the fact is that the politics of refusal are going not only in mainstream ways but also in the reproduction of life by taking care of each other in the community, by taking care of the lagoon. These little acts of care and of love between human and non-human. But this is mainly, as I say and I am trying to explore, fueled by grief, because there's grief that they feel makes them feel rage, make them feel sorrow, make them feel nostalgia about how the lagoon used to be.
And it's very painful to see a loved one in front of your eyes that smells bad, that you cannot touch, even though it's very hot in that area, you cannot touch it because you can get allergies in your skin. So all this kind of sensory body-to-body water body to another body of water that is the human body, all this interaction that is sensory and sensual. Also, it is being limited by all of this institutional violence against racialized Black and Indigenous geography. So this grief that they're feeling, I feel that that is also the fuel to mobilize not only in mainstream ways but also in the everyday life of care and love for the community for the children but also for the lagoons.
Ayana Young I want to stay on this topic of grief a little bit more. I was talking to a friend last night and I could tell that he was uncomfortable with ecological grief or rage, sadness because he felt that it wasn't healthy, or kind of questioning what is that doing for us to have these feelings or be frustrated or full of anger for those who are making the decisions to destroy our lands, our lagoons, our oceans, etc. And I definitely had a pretty strong response that was also compassionate. But I'd love to hear you speak to what you see the necessity of grief being. Why do you think it's important? Do you have a sense that people are afraid to feel grief? And why?
Yoalli Rodríguez Yeah, that is a very intimate topic for me. So, while I was doing my research, that happened from 2017 to till 2018, so I was for a year in the communities in Oaxaca doing this research. Then I came back from my research in August 2018, back to Austin to write my dissertation. One day, I received a call from my mother, and she was like, “they found something in my medical tests, and I don't want you to worry, but yeah, there's something that they're trying to figure out.” And I felt something and like, I was like, “No, this is not good.”
So basically, I took a flight back to Mexico because of intuition. So I felt something. And I went, and unfortunately, she was diagnosed with liver cancer in basically an advanced stage of cancer. So from the day that she was diagnosed til the day she passed away, there was like seven weeks, she was 59. So that put me in a very, very… it has been a life-changing experience. My mother, as I said, is my connection to land because she comes from farmers, ancestors… I'm even getting emotional. And so that changed everything for me. I entered into a year of grief, where I was trying to just survive because the pain was so deep that it was hard for me to think of anything else. And I was full of all these emotions that people in the community told me - I was full of rage, I was full of sorrow, I was full of nostalgia. And I was full of just pain, pain, pain, like that you feel in every cell of your body.
And while I was doing all this grief work that I now know was necessary, I needed a space to slow down. We live in this capitalist system where we also become very self-exploitative, we were not exploited by others. And I feel that grief gave me a moment and it obligated me to slow down. So I feel that grief is basically another ontological form of time. When you are grieving, you are living in another form of time, you don't care about these very linear timelines. I think that when you're in grief, it is a more fluid, cyclical form of time, where you disconnect from this other modern capitalist notion of time, and it is a time for slowing down because basically all the energy that is happening in your body is used for survival but also to think about your life, also to think what are you going to do next.
So I shared this with the people in the community. I was like, “I'm going through this,” I needed to stop writing and I needed to pause my research for a second because basically, I was just trying to survive my own grief and loss. And once I felt a little bit better, I was able to read again and to center myself again and grounding, I felt I was also mirroring the people in the community - in a different way, of course, this was my personal grief and that is also a collective grief. But in the end, I felt so many similarities mirroring collective grief, what home means - my mother meant home for me, for them, the lagoons mean home. So now I start theorizing about grief as a necessary way of resistance, but also I feel that it's also an anti-capitalist strategy. Because as I said, when you are grieving, you slow down, you go back to a slow life. Of course, you need to take care of the everyday necessities - you have to nourish yourself, you have to feed yourself, you have to work, to eat, to do whatever you need to do to cover the basic needs. But in the end, I feel that you're living in another form of time that is not the capitalist neoliberal time.
So I feel that the grief that people in the community live, this ecological grief, is necessary because it actually is a moment of slowing down, slowing your life in this spinning time that almost is an imposed time where you always have to be spinning and running around, going to the next thing, your agenda full of things, worrying about food, about the world, like all these systems of oppression, heterocis patriarchy, all of that. But I feel that when you're grieving, when you have time for grief, it's just another form of resistance. Because you are, again, refusing. It is another politics of refusal to an imposed time that doesn't allow us time to feel.
I feel that in these times, there's not even time to feel. You have a loss in your family, you have a loss in your land, and it's like, “Okay, move on. You will have one week, and then move on, go back to work, or you'll go back to your life.” So I think our politics of refusal, and anti-capitalist practice of refusal, an anti-colonial form of resistance, is how you have time to slow down and feel. And I feel that when you feel this grief, that of course is scary because I feel that we are in general scared of death even though it's going to happen to all of us. But we don't have a lot of talks about that. Is it scary, it's painful, but I think it's necessary that we start talking more about death, especially when it's affecting collective communities that have been historically erased, and tried to be displaced.
So for me, grief is necessary and is also an act of refusal to slow down, to go against a fast life. And yeah, just create another cyclical form of time where you have time to feel, and what is more resistant than in these times just to feel, feel and cry, and feel rage, and feel nostalgia. And I feel that that can be a fuel because once you have all these feelings and you're feeling them as the communities are doing, then is the time to act because as I said, in their case, the lagoon is not completely there. So there's still hope. So there's this connection between grief and hope. Because while the lagoon is still dying, it is still alive. So you are having all these emotions of grief, of sorrow, nostalgia, rage, all these things that are bombarding your body, and you slow down and you're feeling them and you are trying to understand what is happening, but at the same time, you will know that you want to make the lagoon, or the body of water or the land, to survive to live again.
So you embrace that hope and you're like, okay, I'm gonna try to do something to stop this ecocide, to stop this environmental racism that is happening to the community. So that grief and that act of refusal of “No, I'm gonna just deny what I'm feeling. And I'm just gonna keep going.” I feel that stopping feeling the sorrow, the grief… and what and when I say stopping, I don't mean that they stopped fishing, or that they stopped doing the everyday life - they need it. But what I say is that they actually actively are in tune with their emotions, and slowing down to think and feel what they're feeling in relationship to our non-human body. When you have that time, then you can think, “okay, what are we gonna do about this?” So there is a direct connection between grief and hope. And I think that even for me as after my mom passed away, and it was deeply painful, after all my grief I permitted myself to have the time to slow down and have a slower life and grieve.
After that, I had hope because I was like, okay, what can I do in honoring my ancestor now and my ancestors? Like why do I need to do? What do I need to do in regard to my work? How can I connect my own work and my own experience and my own ancestors on a connection with land with these communities? So that gave me another sense of life and another sense of existence in this world but also another sense of hope for the future
Ayana Young Thank you so much for sharing such personal bits of your life with us. I really felt your words. And I could imagine a lot of folks listening will tune into their own grief and hopefully, let go with us a bit in this moment. And yeah, there's so much in your response. I want to take a moment too, to recognize how do both land and humanity in relationship engage in practices of fugitivity and resistance.
Yoalli Rodríguez Yeah. I feel that, as you said, and that is something that I've been thinking too, that there's a lot of work about ecological grief but also I feel that sometimes it doesn't engage a lot with… you know, sometimes it is like this isolated like lamp without actually saying what are the intersections in between this grief. Like basically, who is causing this ecological damage? And I think it's important that when we have an intersectional analysis of who is also being oppressed, we also have an intersectional analysis of who is doing it.
And those have names, those have qualities. In the case of Mexico, and obviously, the Mexican state also has transnational companies. So I think that that is important to analyze and I think that this fugitivity - I mean, first of all, these Black communities that are on the coast, they were literally fugitives from slavery in Mexico. So they went to the coast where there were maroon communities that were escaping from slavery in Mexico, and Indigenous communities were also trying to escape from colonial power. So we have one first sense of fugitivity. If we connect that to what is happening now, I think that fugitivity is not only in terms of fugitivity of the Mexican state geography as they want to create it in a limited space. But a fugitivity of how Black and Indigenous geographies are fugitive. They're trying not to be contained, they're trying not to be owned. They try not to be capitalized, and all those things are fugitive to settler colonial states such as Mexico.
Another thing about the fugitive is when we have the time to feel, when we connect our body with our land, or what Lorena Cabnal from Guatemala says cuerpo-territorio, body territory, meaning these intimate connections. When we have the time to feel grief, love, care, and sorrow in regards to the land, but also to ourselves and our communities, I feel that that's another sense of fugitivity because you are also being fugitive from these modern impositions of only thinking or centering the rational of the human, the reason, the rational. And I think that when you connect to spiritual life, to feelings, to affect, you are also being a fugitive of these capitalist, colonial impositions. When you are being fugitive, also, I mean, there are a lot of trans/non-binary people in these communities. So when you're also… me myself, I identify as a non-binary person. So when you are also embodying, I'm not a cisgender person, I feel that you're also being fugitive of all these colonial impositions.
So I feel that there's so much to be valued in politics of refusal and fugitivity. And this huge activity is part of the resistance, but I feel that at the center of it is that we have to have time to feel and to connect to the Spirit in however form we think of it, or we feel a bit or we sense of it, but I feel that it's necessary more than ever in these times.
Ayana Young In your article “Dying Lagoons Reveal Mexico's Environmental Racism” written with Jayson Maurice Porter, you explain “In 1938, the Chacahua-Pastoría lagoons were declared as a National Park, a federally protected area by former president Lázaro Cárdenas. However, this protection has been exclusively symbolic given the current polluted conditions of the lagoons. When “conservation” and “protection” of natural areas in the country entail federal property regulations, Black and Indigenous communities are left without “legal” ownership over the land and consequentially limited in their abilities to practice traditional relationships to land.” In what ways should we remain vigilant against certain narratives of “preservation” and how do cases like these show the insidious state power over both human and more-than-human life?
Yoalli Rodríguez Yeah, I'm glad that you asked that question. So I think that national parks, in many cases but also in the case of Mexico, are a huge paradox because, as you read, the National Park of the Chacahua lagoons was created in 1938. It was supposed to preserve and to be protected as an area of “natural conservation”. But what I feel is the paradox is that you have this mainstream discourse of natural conservation and natural preservation. But almost all these discourses erase the local communities that live there. So is this almost like a colonial tropical fantasy of pristine nature and wilderness, and I think that is very dangerous because you're doing another erasure and annihilation of the local people that live there because you're basically again, doing a colonial binary of nature and humans.
And so in all these conservation policies that happened in Mexico, all these national parks, first of all, they became federal ownership. So that means that the state is the owner of these lands. So that means that all Black Indigenous and mestizo populations that live around the Chacahua lagoons don't have legal rights over the land. They don't have titling. They don't have - so basically, they're living inside “federal property”. So you are imposing with this law or the declaration of Assam National Park, you're not only basically taking the ownership, or basically dispossessing people from their ancestral land, but you're also imposing rules, because with the National Park for “conservation,” there is also a lot of rules in regards to how they use the water, how they use the lagoons how much they can fish, what plants, what animals. And, I mean, these communities have an ancestral spiritual, physical, and emotional connection to lagoons, especially Black and Indigenous peoples have traditions cooking certain food, cooking certain fish, using some mangrove.
So basically with these natural conservation discourses, one, you exclude the local population, like if they don't exist. And two, you criminalize the local people - Black and Indigenous mestizo population that live there. And they basically become bodies that are policed, racialized bodies are policed by the state. And that is a big, big, even another paradox is that you have this policing of the bodies and communities that live there, that have lived there for centuries, but at the same time, the Chacahua lagoons have become a very touristic spot, especially if people coming from the Global North, especially white people, but also national people, usually from the cities, mestizo and white Mexicans coming from the cities from the upper middle class. So while you're criminalizing and policing Black and Indigenous people in their own territory, and you are denying access to their own ownership and sovereignty over their own lands, you're also allowing international and national tourism to come here. And quote, unquote, again, and I say this in a very ironic way because the state uses this discourse of, “come to this natural paradise in the Pacific Ocean. Come be close to nature.”
So they're selling nature as a commodity, as some exotic tropical fantasy that, again, is colonial. So basically, this national park of the Chacahua lagoons has become a commodity for outsiders. And meanwhile, there's some ecocide and violence happening in the everyday life for Black and Indigenous communities that live there. And they're being policed, and they're living environmental racism, and they're seeing how fish are dying - there have been massive fish there. There was an earthquake in 2017, of a 7.1 scalar vector, so it was a really big earthquake. And a couple of days after the earthquake, approximately 40 tons of fish were found dead, floating in the lagoons. So we're not talking about a little ecocide - this is happening in massive ways.
The local community was the one who was in charge of cleaning the lagoons. I mean, they did it all by themselves. And the government, the only thing that they did was send a bus to pour all the fish that were dead. And that's it. So you have this discourse of conservation of natural protected federal areas, National Parks, but it's only for the profit of the elites in Mexico, for the elites from the Global North. Meanwhile, the local people are suffering, environmental racism, ecocide, grief, and all the consequences of this ecological degradation. So I think that yeah, we have, as you said, Ayana, we have to be very careful with these discourses of conservation and national parks because I think that national parks can be also seen as a colonial name for another form of dispossession, from states settler colonial states to Native American Indigenous communities, Black communities, in the sense that they appear as pristine nature without humans. So again, they disappear, the connections and these human or non-human everyday interactions disappear in these names of conservation. And then because of conservation, the criminalization and the policing of these communities is justified.
Ayana Young Yeah, it's reminding me of this term “slow violence” and how environmental destruction and social injustices can be really invisibilized and even naturalized, and I'm thinking through the deep connection and observation of land over time that it takes to notice things like this, like what you're speaking to. So I'd love it if you could maybe walk us through how this slow violence can keep us stagnant, or keep us from standing up, because we don't always see it so clearly, in real-time.
Yoalli Rodríguez Yeah, I love that you used slow violence by Robert Nixon, because that's something that works and also “slow death” by Lauren Berlant. But slow violence by Robert Nixon, I think that is exactly what is happening here. And I think that because this ecocide has been happening for 20 years. People don't see it, especially as outsiders - they go, surfers go, they have their time in this imagined commodified body of water. This connection from these other binaries of civilization, all these things that are deeply problematic. But I think that against that slow violence is what I'm talking about the power of slow life, while you grieve.
And I think that when you try to counter - I don't know - do our counter geography of slow life, and again, when I say is low life I mean having time to feel, to think while you're doing things. Like you don't have to actually stop because I know a lot of people are actually especially in these communities, they have to work. But you can be walking and also feeling, you can be fishing and also feeling - a lot of the women would tell me that when they're in the lagoons, the moment while they're fishing, that's the moment where they connect to their ancestors, where they feel peace, where they feel nostalgia, where they feel grief, where they feel the connection to their ancestral people that live in those lands.
So I feel that it is in these everyday forms of violence that we have to pay attention. I think that another term that could be here, “necropolitics” Mbembe, because he also talks about how necropolitics usually doesn't happen, you know, it can happen in specific moments of politics of death of targeting a population, but it also can happen in across time in a progressive time. So I think that these forms of violence is slow violence and in this case the ecocide - we have to pay attention to the everyday forms of denying life to certain populations, to denying the existence, but also I think that we don't only have to stay there and that's why I think the grief feeling is the counter resistance to what I call the slow life. If you're living a slow life or you are permitted to feel, to think, to connect to your spiritual self, to take care of your community and of the land, of the water, you're also going against this slow violence that is happening.
But I think that we need community, of course. And we need to basically… The other day, I was listening to Angela Davis in an interview, and she was saying that hope is a discipline, we have to have a discipline for hope. And I think that we have to basically embrace hope. And in these times, and I think that against slow violence, we had to also embrace hope, and slow life.
Ayana Young Yeah, I think hope is such a hard feeling to come by sometimes, and I'm happy that you're speaking to it because I think we need to be reminded that another way is possible, and that other way needs us to be slow. We can't achieve different outcomes by capitalistic or colonial ways of being. And I think so much of what hope has become, at least in the environmental world, is about techno solutions, or green energy, something really economic or some type of infrastructure, that's what we're being sold of what hope is, or where hope can be found. And so I'd love to just maybe even dive deeper into this feeling of hope because I don't want us to be duped yet again. And to hang our hope jacket or coat on the wrong hook so to speak out. That's a weird metaphor, but I’d love to hear your thoughts.
Yoalli Rodríguez Yeah, I think that that's a great point because I also see that, right, like green energy, like these initiatives that go and center the economic field of humans. And that is always risky and that is also always suspicious. Because it's like, are we also going just again with green capitalism, just like a sugar-coated form of capitalism to make us feel better. I feel that hope is spiritual, I feel that hope goes beyond the material and that it’s in another dimension. I feel that is part of this productivity that we were talking about, I think that hope is fugitive in the sense that it cannot be encompassed or framed within a material form. I think that hope has multiple forms, and one of them is deeply, how would you say, is almost chameleonic. I feel that in the case of the communities around the Chacahua lagoons, hope is really tied to the spiritual and to the emotional form of the self but also of the collective self. And I think in our case, that we are living in cities across the world, hope has to go beyond the material, and we have to - again, personally, I feel that hope for me is just thinking that we cannot be living a life like this.
I don't think that colonial, capitalist, patriarchal system that sets all these forms of oppression that we can name and that they never stop, and that they change with time. I don't think that's a way of living. So I think that we have to imagine other forms of life. And if we imagine, I think that's where hope comes from. And I think that's why imagination is so crucial for hope, because it cannot be framed or materialized or grounded in a form. And I think that sometimes these impositions that go into the economic field are trying to get our imagination to say like, “okay, the hope or the hope for environmental solutions comes from the economic field.” But that is such a limited way of thinking and imagining.
So I think part of this fugitivity is also imagination. How can we imagine other forms of life? And how can we imagine other forms of relation with the land, with water, with our communities, with our bodies as territories, with care, with solidarity, with love, with tenderness, but also with rage because rage is also powerful, and with grief, and with sadness. So I feel that hope has to come from imagination and we have to refuse to be materialized in a form, almost contained in our brand. And we have to reimagine and be capable of being courageous enough to imagine other forms of living, of reproduction of life. And life again, as in an ontological life, but also a spiritual life, an affective life, a feeling life, a felt life. In Spanish, we have this word that is called sentipensar, translated as feeling-thinking, in the sense that when we think we're also feeling, and when we're feeling, we're also thinking - you can feel with the heart, you can feel with your brain, but you can also think with your heart. And I think all these forms of escaping and refusing to these materialize forms of hope. And material life forms of hope in regards to the environment is a thing that we have to imagine. And I think that a lot of Black and Indigenous populations have had the initiatives of imagining other forms. And I think that is also our turn to also imagine other forms of living and other forms of hope.
Ayana Young That's like honey for the heart. And it's just reminding me that we need to understand alternative ways of being and living outside of state control. And I know this is such a big part of your work. So I'm wondering, what might it take for alternative ways of being like mutual aid and community support to become common?
Yoalli Rodríguez I'm very inspired by the Zapatista movement in Mexico. For the people that don't know, they're an Indigenous social movement, that on January 1st of 1994, basically said, “enough is enough. Indigenous people have been erased and invisibilized in Mexico so we're gonna create our own social organization.” So basically, their own nation within the nation-state of Mexico. They have their own government, they have their own education, they have their own health system, they have their own economic system, so basically, they escaped the state. They are autonomous communities. And there are hundreds of Indigenous communities that are part of the Zapatista movement.
And like, those are many other examples in Mexico, we have Cheran in Michoacán, and that's another community that was defending the forest. Like, there were people that were basically cutting all the trees from the forest, and there was also Narco-traffic involved with the state. So they're complicit with the state and Narco-traffic that is also huge in Mexico. And women from that community in Michoacán said “enough is enough,” and they organized, and they became an autonomous community outside of the state.
So we have all these inspirations of imagining other ways of being, other ways of organizing that are not centered on the state, I think we have to imagine stateless forms of organizing and existing. I think it is possible because they're happening across the world. But we have to first know them and know that they exist because that is what gives us hope. But also, as you said, like mutual aid initiatives, I think they're crucial to think of other forms of organization, even in our own local communities that go beyond the state or outside of the state.
I think also other forms of economies, such as in Mexico, we have this word trueque, and it means basically like an exchange, but it's not an exchange of money. But if I have grains of food, you can also give me another kind of food, or even exchange of labor like I'm gonna take care of your children if you also take care of my children - those are things that are actually in the community that I was working with. They are doing it. They're doing mutual aid initiatives without calling them that way. So these are practices that are already happening in many communities. That is basically how to create solidarity and how to embrace solidarity when you're facing urgencies of oppression.
And I think that obviously in this world, we're in an urgency. And it is urgent that we organize. But I think that in order to organize, first, we have to imagine and have hope. And I think that first, we have to see that there are other examples to have inspiration. But I think that many people are doing it, we just have to actually open our eyes, open our ears, and have a deep practice of listening. I think that's also something that we need to do a lot, listen more as a radical practice because I think that people are doing it. But we have to listen. And we have to slow down. The power of slowness as a practice to imagine, to feel, and to organize as well, because it takes a lot of emotional labor to be organizing. But I think that once you are in this other time, that you're building with others that goes outside of the modern time, that's when you have time to imagine and to create other forms of living, of being outside of the state, outside of colonial legacies.
And also, I think that just by being and also centering joy, for example, I mean, with all this grief and with all these… I mean, I also want to say that when you're going through grief, it doesn't mean that you will only live in grief, like there are many emotions that can be coexistent in your own body and in the collective body, social body. So I feel that also knowing that grief does not exclude joy, but sometimes it even nourishes it. And they mutually nourish each other. I think that that is also powerful because I think in this world, we also have to center joy and pleasure.
And that is something that is also fugitive to these times and to this world and to the state. And I think that when we center pleasure and joy in our lives, in our bodies, in our social bodies, meaning communities, and pleasure and joy with the land and the water. When we have this sensual relationship with the environment. I remember that Kim Tallbear talks about being polyamorous also in regards to plants, to trees, to nature, when we have these also sensual practices in our everyday life that is also going outside of the state because they're not controlling our bodies. No one can control our imagination, our feelings, our essential selves, and our joy. And I think to also embrace that and not let it go is a huge part of hope and organizing and building new forms of being and existing.
Ayana Young Hmm, thank you so much for closing us out with those words. I think that there's so much to overwhelm us and to feel kind of stifled by it, but to remember how to come back to ourselves and to our community and to the earth, and believe that another way as possible, and put that into action because we believe it and we have community around us who are willing to do the hard, beautiful work with us and together is really - yeah, I'm really happy to be closing on that. But before we completely close this conversation, if there's anything else that you would like to add, please take the floor.
Yoalli Rodríguez Thank you. Yeah, I would just say that, well, first of all, thank you for having me here. I think it was a beautiful conversation. And just that yeah, that we open our eyes and also pay attention to what is happening in Black and Indigenous Native American territories, that we communicate with local organizations, and yeah, I just invite everyone to imagine other forms of being, of existing outside of the state, outside of all these colonial binaries - even in gender and sexuality, and also in regards to joy and pleasure and imagination, and that we need that and we need more mutual aid. We need community. We need a collective life. And we need to keep defending life outside of our materialized form that has been imposed on us.
Ayana Young Yoalli thank you so much for spending this time with us today.
Yoalli Rodríguez Thank you so much for inviting me, Ayana
Emily Guerra Thank you for listening to this episode of For the Wild podcast. The music you heard today is by Eliza Eden, Fabian Almazan Trio, and PALO-MAH. For the Wild is created by Ayana Young, Allie Constantine, Erica Ekrem, Emily Guerra, Francesca Glaspell, and Julia Jackson.