This past spring, a single mother/writer/activist/organizer named tk (tanya karakashian) tunchez took a road trip across the U.S. called The New Mythos Tour. Drawing on the work of Gloria Anzaldúa and her notion that we need a new mythos—”A massive uprooting of dualistic thinking in the individual and collective consciousness”—to begin a process “that could, in our best hopes, bring us to the end of rape, of violence, of war,”1 the New Mythos Tour was at once a means to raise funds to bring radical mothers and community caregivers together at the Allied Media Conference in Detroit this summer, and an attempt to do some consciousness shifting, community building, learning, and organizing in places from Philly to Albuquerque.
In San Francisco, the members of POOR Magazine, a poor-and-indigenous-people-led organization, are doing much more than publishing a magazine. They are making media and doing media-skills trainings as a form of anti-poverty organizing; they are hosting poetry readings, reclaiming education, organizing take-back-the-land actions, performing plays, and fighting cuts to public assistance. They are also developing a project called Homefulness, a collective-housing experiment that will offer a solution to houselessness that shouldn’t feel so novel (but does): housing. It will be not money but sweat equity that entitles people to live there. And Homefulness will provide housing for currently and formerly landless people on their terms, not the terms of class-privileged, liberal social-service providers. These homes, private residences connected to shared spaces, will include community childcare, space for political education and art events, shared gardens, and more. POOR’s community, whose members identify as descending from African, Cherokee, Jewish, Filipino, and many other cultures, is rooted in multiple traditions and practices. Together they share a holistic vision that includes intergenerational caregiving and rituals involving singing and dancing and prayer right alongside, and as part of, political action. The group’s co-founder, a key organizer of all this, Tiny aka Lisa Gray-Garcia, is a woman who fights for gender justice as part of her holistic political struggle but doesn’t call herself a feminist because of mainstream feminism’s racist and classist legacy.
On blogs, a multiethnic, rooted-all-over-the-place network of radical women and gender-nonconforming people of color are sharing stories and organizing strategies, doing community-organizing work, making art, and building community that is not limited to a single geographic location. These media makers, artists, and organizers are making blogs “not for career-boosting, but for survival,” writes the North Carolina-based blogger and organizer Alexis Pauline Gumbs. And when one of them needs a new computer or financial support during a health or relationship crisis, online appeals to each other and their readers have continually turned up resources to meet the need.
At the Pachamama Skillshare, I met Pa’ti Garcia, a body worker whose vision and practices blew me away. She led a DIY gynecology workshop that celebrated the feminine without essentializing it, that centered queer possibilities and pleasure, and that offered a vocabulary for talking about genitalia beyond the gender binary. She recently co-founded Ticicalli Yahualli, an L.A.-based collective of people-of-color birth workers. As we talked about bodies and California cities and time and other things, she mentioned that writing’s not her thing, and she’s been dreading updating the copy on her website. I quickly offered to help with that. When I needed a temporary place to stay recently, she made me dinner and offered a bed for the night.
Of course we can, and should, and do share resources.
- From the New Mythos Website, see http://truthandhealingproject.wordpress.com/the-new-mythos-tour/. Original from Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1987. [↩]
