Rev Left Radio - Discussing Popular Education and Social Movement Work (w/ Ultra-Red)

Episode Date: October 6, 2025

In this episode, Alyson joins members of the Ultra-Red collective to discuss their recent trip to Central America where they learned first hand about popular education movements of the past and present. The discussion gets into the history of popular education, existing social movements in Central America today, and what we can learn from these movements in our organizing work. The journal of Ultra-Red can be found here:  https://www.rabrab.net/titles/urvol1?utm_campaign=as-npc105112516   ----------------------------------------------------   Learn more about, follow, and support Rev Left and Red Menace here: https://revleftradio.com/  

Hello and welcome to Red Minus. My name is Allison Escalante, and I am here without Brett today for an episode that is a little bit different than what we usually do. We've obviously recently been trying to get back into engaging with more texts, but for this month, we are doing something I think it's going to be really exciting, which is that we are actually talking to a number of organizers from the Ultra Red Collective about a trip that they recently took to Central America and some interesting conversations about popular education that I hope will be valuable for our audience. So we're mixing it up a little bit and I'm hosting solo, but I'm pretty confident that if you've listened to the show for while and you're familiar with the themes that we talk about, you'll find a lot that is resonant

with, you know, what we do on this show. So really excited for this interview and I'll go ahead and just ask if the folks on the call would like to introduce themselves, just who you are, what you're organizing kind of background is, just setting that up for our audience. Awesome. Thank you. Thank you so much, Alison, for having us. Thank you to Red Menace. My name is Christina Sanchez-Juarez. I am an organizer with the Sacramento Valley Tenants Union, a member of the Altruet Collective that is working on research for this journal about Central America. I'm also a former member of LATU, the Los Angeles Tenants Union. I lived in L.A. for about nine years and was part of the formative years of that tenants union and have been doing everything I can to inject

some of the lessons learned, particularly in terms of popular education, up here in a Sacramento, California. Thank you again also for having us. I'm very thrilled. Daniela Leah Quintanar, and I am a member of the Syndicato of Inquilinos of Los Angeles, and I am part of the East Side Local Union of Vecinos. And I've been, yeah, I'm originally from Mexico City, and when I arrive here in Boy Heights,

I right away, when I connect with the School of Echoes and Ultra Red, and then when the L.A. Tenance, you know, I start. So, I've been collaborating for a long time now. And I am also a curator and work in contemporary arts. I'm Tony Corfellow. I'm part of the L.A. Tenants Union for the last decade and have been working with everybody here before that in the buildup to the Tenants Union.

And then as the union has grown in the last number of years have focused my energy in my neighborhood in Los Angeles, the Koreatown. And so we have the Koreatown local of the L.A. Tenants Union. And that's where most of my work is committed to. Thank you for inviting us, Allison, and it's great to be with you and Red Menace. My name is Don Rhine, a member of Ultram Red and also founding organizer, as well as Tony and

Christina of the L.A. Tenants Union. I've been a part of the Hollywood local here since 2017, and I've been with Ultra Red from the beginning in 1994, and it's great to be with you all today. Thank you all for introducing yourselves. And yeah, I'm super excited for this conversation. I'm really glad you all were able to come on and join us. So like I said, we're going to get into some conversation about this trip that several of you came back from recently. But before we do that, I was wondering if we could address one of the terms that's going to come up here, which is popular education. So on our show, we actually have not done very much conversations about popular education, what it is. We haven't done a ton of work developing it besides a very cursory

introduction to pedagogy of the oppressed as a text. So our listeners may not have the most kind of fleshed out framework for understanding what we mean when we're talking about popular education. And I want to make sure before we get into the details of your trip, we can kind of provide some framework for understanding that term and what it means in practice. So is there anyone that could kind of just provide an overview of what popular education is? Yeah, I'll get us started. First, I'd like to say that my understanding of popular education comes from, and I think maybe this is true for Tony and also for Don.

And Don has a longer history, of course, engaged in this work. And for Daniela, my understanding of popular education comes from directly, you know, from engaging in the work. in as tenant unionists. So I'll give a description or a definition of popular education, but then I want to end with a kind of like an example from from our work in the union. Yeah, popular education is a process of bringing people together to share their lived experiences and to build collective knowledge.

It's a process of reflection and action for transforming the role. Its purpose is to challenge oppressive structures, unlike, you know, traditional Western education that molds you or that forces you to contort yourself, right, to capitalism or to the status quo. Our dear mentor who's on the call with us today, Don Ryan, likes to continually remind us that the word popular in popular education means the poor. So popular education is a liberatory process of and for the poor. I'll share a couple of like just kind of key characteristics of popular education. Everyone's knowledge is valuable and important. There's this idea that we can all be teachers and learners. We aren't stuck in one role. These roles are fluid. Another key

characteristic is that you begin from people's experiences and produce knowledge from those experiences rather than solely beginning from external sources or from experts in whatever topic you're trying to understand. Popular education was developed in the global south by a number of different educators. One of the most well-known, of course, is who you mentioned, Alison, Paulo Friere, who in the 1960s developed new methods for teaching, reading, and writing to adult learners. He was actually hired by the Brazilian government to do a literacy or alphabetization campaign. And through that work, He started to talk about and theorize this idea of, you know, not centering the teacher. He would talk a lot about the banking model of education, which is what we probably all grew up in where, you know, the teacher deposits all the knowledge and you are just the one who internalizes that knowledge, but you're not really taught like what, you know, what to do with it.

And instead, Balafredi said that, you know, that the construction of knowledge should come from people's lived experiences. Popular education was also heavily influenced by liberation theology and central American mass movements in the 1970s and the 1980s. Liberation theology essentially said that the church, you know, should serve and empower the poor. And so in the case of our work as tenant unionists, one example I could give of how we engage in popular education is, let's say you're having a tenants association meeting. You're gathering a bunch of tenants together to talk about really bad habitability issues or a landlord that's trying to do a mass eviction or what have you. The way that we would engage folks would not be as like, for example, like service providers where we just come. in and we tell people about their tenant rights and we, you know, give a presentation or something like that or we refer them to attorneys. Instead, what we do is we begin from people's experiences.

We might sit in a circle and everybody will go around and share what's happening in terms of that specific landlord or what issues they're having. And then we collectively come up with a plan. And everybody kind of gives a little bit based on their own expertise as tenants, or as people who had just lived and tried to survive in our, in our capitalist world, right? And so that's kind of how we in the Tenants Union have, like, historically, you know, embodied popular education is that we were engaged in collective reflection, analysis, for action.

Perhaps some other folks can also kind of chime in here and add some to the definition. Yeah, thank you so much for that, Christina. This is Don. I appreciate the different. aspects to the practice that you're sort of weaving together. I think one thing that might be useful to mention, perhaps Allison for a future episode of Red Menace, but to think about the sort of political context in which popular education in Latin America was developed in the 60s and 70s. There's a number of references that at the time were just, were shared, understood,

presumed, that might be unavailable to most folks here in North America and the U.S. So Christina mentioned the banking method and this idea of depositing education. And if you can think about like the late 60s and 70s, those would be very loaded metaphors, particularly in the context of developmentalism and dependency theory. Much of Ferreides' articulation development around Pedigogy the Oppressed was when he was in exile in Chile. And at his time in Chile, he was in a conversation with a number of people who were really at the center of articulating an analysis, a critique of imperialism in the context of dependency theory. And so to think about us now today in the attendance movement and other movements, where we're understanding, practicing, experimenting with popular education.

What is our relationship to developmentalism? What is our relationship in our movements to this idea that extraction and accumulation and monopolization of capital are the primary goals of development, particularly the role of the poor? So it's useful for us to keep that framework because I think that that problem, that question, remains present in popular education, particularly, you know, you go back a couple of years, just a couple decades, when a real big debate within popular education was its relationship to the formation of political subjects around resistance movements. Is popular education detached from that? Is it

sort of auxiliary to that, or is it the same? And again, it speaks to this ongoing question about what is the role of forming subjects, forming political subjects, in a context of extraction and developmentalism? Yeah, thank you both. That's very, very useful, I think, as this broader overview. I'm really appreciative of two kind of aspects of those answers to. One, I think the practice side of things is really useful for our listeners, especially since we're often engaged in kind of analyzing a text on this show. And so hearing not just in the abstract, what are these principles, what are their characteristics? But also, what does it look like when you are actually engaged with, you know, the popular masses essentially engaged in this type of education? That's

very grounding, I think. And I think in the Tenants Union, you definitely see these ways of applying popular education, often, like you said, Christina, trying to avoid this sort of service model of just passing down know your right style information and resources, but actually starting with experience in a way that builds this collective struggle for. tenants. And so I think that's a really helpful framing. And Don, I really appreciate the kind of political context as well. Again, tying this into the tenants context, since I think that's what we all have in common in this call, I think we do see like this very sort of urban development kind of idea related to finance capitalism and extraction of value through properties on the market within the

cities that we live and work in. And so that connection feels very relevant for why this is an important kind of political intervention as well. So I'm super appreciative of both of those. And I'm hoping, you know, that can provide some of that framework so that our listeners just know what we're talking about as we're going into this. The next part of this conversation, and this is really what I'm excited about, is that several of you recently just returned from a trip to Central America where you interviewed popular educators. And before we started recording, I was hearing just like how extensive the amount of recordings that you all have is, which sounds quite overwhelming to parse through, but I'm very excited to hear a bit about this. So while traveling, you all had the opportunity

to meet with Luis Senabria, who leads an archive of what was a network of popular education centers called Al Forre. And I guess my question for you is, can you tell us a bit of the history of that network and set that up for us before we get into the details of, you know, where things look today and what you learned on your trip about the present situation? Awesome. Yes, I'll get a start. This is a Christina. Let's see here. So at first, I would like to say that it's, I feel a little, a bit overwhelmed by answering this question, you know, giving context for Al-Fordha. It's like a 40-plus year history. And, but yes, we had the, we had the pleasure of speaking to Luis in front of the center at the University of Costa.

that houses the Alforja archive. We sat with him for about a three-hour conversation outside of this little cafeteria where we ate some of the best college cafeteria food that I have ever consumed. And so he commenced and told us the story of Al-Farja, which I'll try to give some of the highlights, some of the key things that came up during that conversation. So Al-Farja is a network of popular education centers that emerged during the Sandinista Revolution in Nicaragua in the 1980s. Popular educators from across Latin America gathered in Nicaragua to support these government adult education initiatives. There was one of the biggest initiatives that the government had was a mass alphabetization, you know, a literacy campaign. I was reading that it was like

100,000 volunteers taught 400,000 people how to read and write within these first couple of years. There were the popular educators that descended on Nicaragua were from all over the place, from all over Latin America. There was Oscar Hada, who I'll talk a little bit more about in a moment. He was a Peruvian popular educator specializing in literacy. Raoul Lays from Panama, who was a theater of the oppressed educator. There was folks from El Salvador, from Mexico, from Guatemala, from Nicaragua. So all these folks were getting together in Nicaragua. They were doing the work.

They were sharing information from their context and their countries and the different things that they were trying. And then they started to kind of plant the seed and think about, okay, what if we were to formalize this? So in 1981, Oscar Hara, who was the popular educator from, Peru started to gather folks together and officially formed Al Forja. And so in this initial convening that happened, they had some kind of central like principles that they decided that they would kind of lay, that they laid out collectively, which was

that they would be centered in a revolutionary context. They decided that this would be a regional group for Central America to support you know, popular education, popular educators from across Central America, not just focused on Nicaragua. And Oscar describes it as like a crucible where all of these different popular education ideas could be fused, you know, together, such as popular theater, popular radio, folks who are doing conjunctural analysis processes, et cetera. So then as Lees describes it throughout the 1980s, Alforja began to host out of Costa Rica. So they ended up being based out of Costa Rica because, you know, it was a very kind of tumultuous time in Nicaragua and to be able to have some

stability and also access funding and stuff like that. They made the center of Alforja, Costa Rica, but it subsequently moved to other countries. We learned about that a little later on. And so Alforja throughout the 80s begins to host these annual convenings where they bring together popular educators from across Central America to exchange ideas, began to theorize, etc. And they also, you know, support a lot of popular education processes in Costa Rica itself. Through that work, Al Forja begins to, you know, categorize, document, and write about these popular education processes. They produced a ton of books and manuals. And that's really what we went to go and look at. We had no idea what the state of the actual archive was in. Hopefully

Tony and Danielle can share a little bit more about what we found once we were there. Luis kind of shared with us that the 80s were like this time period where people were really articulating the political dimension of education and that there was kind of like these three key kind of branches of popular education that emerged during that time. One was obviously Paolo Frere's ideas around popular education, another was participatory action research, which was written about by Orlando Falsborda, and systematization. I can never say that word very fast, of experiences, which was a process that was developed by Oscar Hara.

So I'll talk a little bit about that because Oscar was kind of like a seminal figure. in Al-Florhas, you know, 40-year history. And what I understand in terms of systemization of experiences is just essentially that Oscar was like, okay, community groups are engaging in these processes of reflection that lead to action. We need to start documenting and writing about these processes so that we can learn from them, you know, adapt them, critique them, etc.

So that was kind of one of his key contributions to popular education. Luis also shared with us a little bit about another organization that emerged in the late 80s called Cial, the Consejo of Education of Adults of America Latina. This was a popular education network that kind of cast a wider net across Latin America and Paolo Freddie was actually its first president. And then he talked to us a little bit about what happened. in the 1990s and the 2000s and about how suddenly, you know, popular education gained notoriety and popularity.

And so then NGOs and government bodies and the university were starting to pay attention and how there was essentially like a period of time where popular education began to be co-opted. And so like anyone who was, you know, doing popular theater, or sitting people in a circle suddenly was supposedly doing popular education, but not everyone was using it to actually challenge power or in a liberatory way.

I think I'll pause right there and kind of let Tony and Daniela maybe kind of start to fill in some of the different ideas and lessons that Luis shared with us. Yeah, I thank you, Christina, for that explanation. I will add a little bit about the context of that time in Central America and in Mexico, you know, in the 80s when, I mean, in the early, the late 70s, of course, when the Sandinista revolution was happening. And there were all these important moments of in Mexico, of guerrillas, of organizations, of organization and social movement, and that's actually the 70s is also the moment where

the Sepatista movement start the seed that will come later in the 90s. But I think it's just like important to imagine that time where Latin America was really pushing for a different politics, a different forms of understanding society and organization. Of course, It was like, you know, this moment where the U.S. was targeting all kind of projects, socialist project and communist projects and red projects. You know, it was always like the stigmatization of thinking differently. And also it was like the moment of the Theoria de la Liberation too, that, you know, we will touch different moments. We cannot go very deep into that. the liberation theory of the liberation so I think like just kind of understanding which I'm sure

much of much of our audience knows this but it was like really a moment of like liberation and thinking through a different Latin America and Central America of course was playing a really really important core moment. And I think that's why Alforja really come through into this network that still exist in different forms. And also it was a network that influenced here, the social movements. And that's also something that Don't has, you know, point out and highlight. And that's why our interest in looking back into that time,

and also in what has developed, Alforja. And also something very interesting that Luis was mentioning to us in the 80s. You know, like Alforja, as Christina mentioned, has going through all these different moments. But the 80s, he was talking about, like, when they start this network, they were more

influenced with the text of Martha Hannigan which was also about popular education but very focused on militancy and militancy through parties and I'm afraid it was

just finishing his book so the influence was arriving a little after that but he kind of like point out that moment that kind of like with a for her, really they like kind of push to just not thinking to Marxism and like theory and like but really thinking how to practice that and how to like do popular education and think

about a political dimension in popular education. I would stop there. I'm sure Tony has something to add. I can just add that, you know, little bit of focus of, you know, when we met with Luis and in particular kind of approaching this history from our work within the tenants union. I mean, there's, you know, I relate this a lot to when we look at other kind of big movements, you know, especially in Latin America, we look at things like MST in Brazil or something, where it's just, the scale is sometimes hard to wrap our heads around from the work that we do very locally in Los Angeles and other cities in California and we communicate with other tenants unions, you know, in North America. And it just

it seems so, you know, so nascent in comparison to these, you know, massive developed networks. And one of the great things about kind of Luis was because we went to, you know, Costa Rica thinking about, you know, Al Forha, but also understanding at this, you know, 40 years of big impact of this, you know, nexus point of all of this work happening. And the great thing with Luis, and I think as Christina described, we're all still sorting through it and learning about it is to just have some insight into the development. This is this big network and all of this development of popular education techniques, whatever. It didn't start that way, just like anything else. But we couldn't access until we finally had someone to talk to.

we couldn't access a sense of those origin points and those kind of, you know, steps that ended up forming this, this cumulative huge impact. And so part of why we were particularly at the University of Costa Rica was that then Luis has coordinated to, you know, getting a lot of the materials from, you know, Al Forha's publications, you know, and then Al Forre as a publisher, he's got a lot of that material then put. into the library there and into their archives. And so we were able to access that with him. And, you know, and spent a day there with him, all four of us, kind of just getting introduced to what was there going through the catalog, you know, for everything that had been kind of connected to Alforja. And then Christina and Daniela had gone there other days too to kind of dig deeper into this.

and, you know, it's a lot of photos on our phones documenting these publications. But the best part about it, I mean, you know, in seeing then this publishing here is then we also see the practical records of these early points. And like one of the documents that I remember photographing this, you know, record cover to cover was just, you know, all the records of a workshop, you know, that was about kind of the formation of the, you know, the liberatory. educator in the Sandinista model and it was it was you know a booklet really from the from the 80s and it just went through in hyper detail you know every kind of discussion that was part of this this this workshop training program breaking down all of these like exercises and then even the kind of event planning for making the workshop and reference to kind of okay and here's how we'll do it next year. It was interesting stuff, and it was also the kind of dry records of just this,

you know, we're doing this work here right now, you know, not thinking that we're going to make this 40-year-long massive, you know, project because you can't plan things like that. That's how stuff works. And it was, it was great to get an insight into that. And there's just like the, I think one of the things that was most exciting too in going through the archival material is the overlaps and just seeing these kinds of, you know, ways that they were dealing with talking about the general subject of popular education that, you know, Christina and Don were describing, and then the role in pushing that ahead and that, you know, where is the individual that, you know, and in the, you know, embedded in these

movement spaces who is contributing to that expansion and keeping it from becoming this sort of, you know, spaces that just repeat exactly what the project is trying to avoid and or keeping these people ground in the movement so they don't end up in the kind of co-opted version that was described. Well, thank you all for that answer. There's a lot of history getting covered here, obviously. And Christine, I'm very sympathetic to the idea of being overwhelmed by trying to provide all of that summary. But I think this was really grounded and very useful. I mean, in particular, you know, Tony, I'm very interested in this idea that you put forward of these documents that in the moment, no one's really thinking about this is going to be

in an archive of this project that's been 40 years in length and how they're produced in that moment. And I think it speaks to the value of archiving that sort of document as well, because its importance might not be so obvious in the moment. And later on, those of us who are still trying to engage in these sorts of struggles need access to that information. And so there's a really interesting component there. The other thing that I really wanted to just shout out that I appreciated from the summary, especially Daniela emphasizing that revolutionary context that this emerged in, because one of the things that I think I've experienced and that I've heard from some of our listeners when we've tried to lightly touch on popular education before is encountering

this co-opted version that all three of you kind of alluded to. And I know my background is like somewhat academic. And in the academy, you find all sorts of people who say that they're doing popular education, really just kind of in this watered down liberal, apolitical way that is not actually engaged with movements of liberation whatsoever and becomes rather abstracted. So I think it's interesting to, you know, hear about the moment that that kind of co-option emerged in that history and to see how earlier before that there was this emergence of this concept and this practice in this very revolutionary context. And I hope that's useful for our listeners who have also encountered that experience of co-opted popular education. So, you know,

all of that is very useful. And I appreciate that background and that history. And I hope that can kind of color things as we move forward to. But the other thing that I wanted us to get into a little bit is now that we know some of this history, could you share some of the other experiences of your trip with us? What other networks and contemporary groups did you have the opportunity to interact with on this trip. Well, I can start us off in particular. So, you know, I think we're all going to share a little bit. And it's important to say that we're sharing not in our, not in the chronology of our trip.

But I want to name that in particular because there was, you know, in part of doing this is putting ourselves, they're putting ourselves in contact with people. And then it was by the end of the weeks that we were there and had met with all these people, there's this desire to almost do it again because there's so much more info that was you know revealed through the the process so it's just important for me to name that because what I wanted to talk about is kind of in the middle of our time there we uh christina and I and Daniela were in Togousigalpa in Honduras after we had left the the city of El Progresso in Honduras which others will talk about more

and we were into Gulsigapa and one of the key meetings that we had set up was with an organizer named Christopher Christio who was, we were put in touch with through the people from El Progresso

which we will talk about more in a second but he was an organizer from a group called Arcan Alternative of Reindindication Comunitaria and ambientalista

of Honduras and so it's a movement for alternative in Honduras that is primarily targeting their work and focusing their energy on fighting against the various exploitative capitalist forces around Honduras and with a special emphasis on what are called the Zeres. And the Zeres are basically the special economic zones.

So, you know, the zone of the employment in economic zones that were developed by the previous government in Honduras. In the 2010s, in the government that took over after the U.S. supported coup, this idea of the charter city or sovereign city that had been circulating in the kind of libertarian tech worlds for quite some time. And basically it found a buyer. Within the post-coo government in Honduras, this idea that had been the subject of like TED Talks and, you know, a lot of, again, kind of libertarian-focused, capitalist tech world-focused press found a market and found a willing government in Honduras. And what that meant? What did they find?

Well, they found a government that was going, that was okay with the idea of. basically making a kind of extreme version of what we can think of as a special economic zone or the kind of free port idea, where there's special sections within a national territory that then are subject to a different taxation. Usually, you know, you find this around taxes, subject to a different taxation, in part to, you know, encourage commerce or stimulate commerce or whatever. And as you find this around, like the Freeport idea, so you find this in, you know, coastal areas where then there's a different or total elimination of kind of, you know, tax burdens to move things through there. And that's meant to then be this, you know, sort of

catalyst for local development. And the idea in Honduras with the charter city idea was basically that the city would, you know, or the country would make land available. Then these formations could develop to, you know, to run their own private cities. And, you know, they would, at the end of the day, the, the model is that they would still be subject to, you know, on, on during criminal law and, you know, like, protected by the Honduran army, but they could set up their own civil law systems. And, and essentially, they're, you know, their own civil law. And it was a gift. basically to the people who'd been pitching this idea from, I keep repeating tech, but that's really been a big driving force of the kind of people who are behind this.

This is one of the reasons why, you know, one of these places that we'll talk about more brand itself as a crypto city. And so these places then they operate, you know, in kind of impunity, that there are these territories that are taken over by private companies, managed privately, and they're run as think of the kind of like extreme exclusive country clubs that are meant

for international money to come into Honduras and gain they're you know they're not developed for Honduras but they use a lot of that language of you know

this is a you know we're getting around government bureaucracy and then we're going to help the people of Honduras this way through the wonders of of privatization. And there's three of them that Christopher kind of walked us through.

So it was this incredible time that Christina and I had where we got a two and a half hour lecture from Christopher, where we had gone into it thinking, okay, we're going to learn about the kinds of whatever legislative or bureaucratic rules that I just described now. And with Christopher, it was like, no, I'm going to walk you through the entire kind of history of capitalism and United States exploitation of Honduras for quite a while first

before you understand the context of the Zadis because you need to know what these come out of and it really did help us kind of see it more so and so there's one of the most famous one of these is called Prospera and it's on the island of Roatan which is a sort of touristy island off the northern coast

of Honduras and it's a nightmarish libertarian tech a privatized country club city space that benefits from basically being within Honduras and having this legislative permission to not actually, quote, be in Honduras. It gets to act as if it's in another country. And so we walked through this and we learned about it.

And I'll share a little bit more specifics about some of them in a second, but that really key thing for our work was you know, and I think this was a kind of a consistent around this whole trip, but key for our work in the only tendency union was to see these future extremities of a lot of what we fight against in our work. I mean, from our position in Southern California, or all of us in California, you know, we watched the, we watched Silicon Valley gentrify San Francisco. We watched them gentrify other parts of the state. And then we've also heard them

endlessly complain about, you know, regulation. And we've heard ideas of, you know, buying, you know, new land up northern California and making these new sort of Silicon Valley areas. We remember that before, you know, Venice in Los Angeles kind of became the official Silicon Beach area, cities in Southern California were competing to have that stupid moniker, you know, for years and offering these massive kind of tax breaks, massive sort of open permissions for Silicon Valley to try to lure their money out of the valley in particular. And so we've watched the kind of tech industry crawl all over California, endlessly pushing for more and more kind of special treatment.

And in the kind of 2010s, even as gentrification is rampant in the state, we're also, you know, that was the era where the kind of floating city ideas were being pushed a lot out of Silicon Valley. This whole kind of, you know, California's not taking care of us and, you know, and we're getting too much regulation. So we should start developing these barges that float around that technically, you know, can become our own cities. And there was the Seasteading Institute, which Peter Thiel was connected to. The thing in Honduras, what we spent this time with Christopher learning about was there's a place where this actually happened, where it actually got to develop, they got to make the kinds of places that they wanted to, where the, the, the, the

laws of these places are the laws that the private companies running them want them to be and the open permission to do what they want and construct their you know their cities free of regulation there was a real place you know there is a real place where it's happened the zeta's rule was struck down by the supreme court in induras in 2024 with the change of government to Omar Castro. But nonetheless, the ones that the three big ones, Prospera, Morazan, and Orchidia, still, they still are there. But there's kind of a question mark about what's going to happen next with them. You know, we think about kind of our gentrified cities. We think about kind of the neighborhoods where, you know, gentrifies, real estate, local city government weaponizes, you know,

everything to make this image of their perfect city. We think of West Los Angeles of, you know, the kind of sweeps against, you know, unhoused neighbors and this sort of effort to kind of make this perfect ideal city space that's, you know, that meets our upper middle class standards at all times. It's essentially a private country club. That a lot of the energy behind that is tech money. You look at who's the ones driving the, the, the ones driving, this kind of, you know, increasing militarization of the police and of public space in San Francisco,

it's the same people who are, you know, involved in Prospera, people like, you know, Peter Thiel, Mark Anderson, et cetera. And I don't want to go on too much longer with Christopher, too. He also then kind of explained the differences of each of these ZE spaces and kind of, you know, their different focuses in their own little specific. libertarian nightmare cities and Prospero was the one that was the most kind of jaw-dropping

because it was using this really like glossy architectural development, this whole idea that it's this like architecture, urban destination that they're developing. Because they're on this island where a lot of surfers go already, then they're trying to amplify the

tourism element of it. But it's also a place where they're putting a lot of money into genetic study of the types of the kinds of like, Cone Valley, you know, finding the right formula to live forever. And so then we're hearing all these weird stories about, like, you know, collecting blood from local women and, and just these kinds of, like, quasi on their way to sort of mangola kind of experiments happening there that are all part of this, this, you know, what can we do in our, our, you know, our, our, our, our, our, our, our, our, our, our, our, our, our, our, our, our, our, our, our, our, our, our, our, our, I can

up the next hour with it but it was it was it was it was one of the most incredible kind of parts of this that all we could read about from the u.s is like you know a few posts here and there some new york times coverage of prospera and a lot of like reason dot com like articles mourning the supreme court you know ruling against these things so it's like all we could get from here was this you know incredibly superficial kind of view of what is this really important thing that people in California driving the changes of gentrification California we've seen like the Silicon Valley types whatever they know about this and they're already excited about into it and that's what they want for arsonies so this was a

long way to kind of make this connection but i'm going to shut out yeah before we pass it off to someone else i want to just touch on that because this actually hits very weirdly close to home when i was in undergraduate i was on the debate team and one of my debate coaches was a author who wrote for the C-studding Institute. So I actually unfortunately have a lot of exposure. Sorry to make those hairs stand up. Yeah, right. So it's interesting because I've seen some of the development that has happened,

again, reading some of the articles in the U.S. around this because I followed that conversation after having that weird relationship with a former debate coach who comes from that. But I really appreciate this idea of seeing like the extremes that what we're seeing here are going towards, right? I organize the Marvista Palms local of the L.A. Tenants Union, so we're right here in West L.A. And I live very close to Playa Vista, which is where most the Google employees live. And it, yeah, and it is a bizarre place to drive through. There are just these walls of condos that basically close off an entire neighborhood that is inward facing. It has

private parks that are like primarily for the employees of these tech companies there. It has its own little farmer's market, like, basically, yeah, sealed off by this wall of buildings. And it is this strange little attempt at a part of the West Side that's cut off from everything around it. So, you know, we see, yeah, a lot of this developing with that Silicon Beach idea here on the West Side and the extremes of the displacement that are still occurring, right? Our local organizes quite a few, you know, buildings where we have these Wahacken families that we're organizing alongside to try to prevent evictions for these developers who want to build that Silicon Beach idea here. And so that tie into what the struggle still looks like at home,

I think is really useful. Yeah, no, exactly. I mean, the, I mean, one of my, you know, one of the most ridiculous lines that I have found in some of these, you know, libertarian tech, like English language, US-based blogs and whatever journals, mourning these things, you know, one of my favorite lines is like, unlike other cities, which must accept anyone who wants to live or do business there, including criminals, Ciudad Morazan, selects the residents through an application and vetting process. And saying that as a really celebratory point. Right. How horrific, honestly. Yeah. Awesome. Well, I really appreciate that. Would anyone else like to report back about other aspects of the trip as well?

Yeah, sure. I want to, yeah, I want to like jump into another big chapter, which was in El Salvador. We have the fortune to visit the Museo of La Palabra and La Magan, which is in San Salvador, and it's a museum that was founded after the Accords of La Paz, the agreements of the peace in the 90s,

and it was founded by Carlos Enrique, who is Carlos Enriquez, who is also known as Santiago that was his name in the guerrilla and he also was the founder of Radio Ben Ceremos and you know this radio

that was the voice of the Fronte Faramundo Marti of National Liberation and it was like you know just like in terms of like this place is like an amazing place because they

have their of course, focus on the memory and that was something that we talk a lot Christina, Tony and I about the preservation of memory but also like the understanding of memory

and the learning of history which I think every person that we met in Central America, they were so well known, they known so well their own histories and they can articulate

the moment with the past, the present moment with the past, and they can articulate history also, like, not only locally or, like, focus on Central America, but, like, globally and with the U.S. And so this museum has that, you know, focus on memory,

specifically from the people of El Salvador, like they have the archives of the thousands, and thousands of cassettes from the radio from Radio Ben Ceremos. They have like the archive of a photographic archive of Monseigneur and all kind of like, you know, different, different archives, but they create exhibitions that are connected with the reality, but also with the history of the past. So we have the opportunity to interview Santiago a little,

be digging a little bit in also popular education. And he was selling us, of course, that Radio Encelemos was an instrument of education for them. And one of the biggest questions was like how you guys were able to produce, analyze, distribute information while you are in war, right? Like when you are like creating this revolutionary moment. And, and it was just like, you know, they were like totally dedicated to that moment. And he was telling us about a school, La Scuela, which was like part of the movement.

And in the camps, they will like meet to analyze history, but also analyze their own realities. So the radio and Ceremos will, produce all kinds of historic series from before the colony, you know, really analyzing when the Spanish came. He told us a really awesome story about a group of musicians. I can remember the name now, but from Mora San, which is the area where the revolution start there.

And it was like a group of musicians that they decide to do. theater and in order to kind of like do like a type of popular education and like pass these histories and the story is is really awesome because they were musicians and they were already kind of like writing songs about the gorilla and then they started doing theater and went to a church and abandoned a church and then grabbed the clothes of the saints and then wear it to produce theater, which I find very fascinated. So it was just this thing, again, of like, I think popular education in that time was being tested and it wasn't that co-opted because they didn't have like all these big systems around them. So they will say like

in the camps every day at 5 p.m., they will sit down and listen to the radio and they have all these kind of discussions and other places where he pointed out popular education important moments was the refugee camps and the refugee camps were mainly were lead by women because the woman you know escape with their kids and there's in our first journal of ultra red we actually have an article called Ilando El Memento within the moment that talks about these refugee camps specifically the embroideries that were being produced there

to reproduce their stories and tell the world about the massacres and the horrible violence that El Salvador was suffering and it was perpetuated by the Salvador an army backup by the U.S., you know, and just like, kind of to say it again, we know this story, but it's like the U.S. intervention. But something very interesting, something that Tony was saying, like by the end of the travel, we wanted to go back to connect because we did so many connections later.

So something very interesting is that before the travel, we produced this text. don't wrote the stakes with, I can remember who's the other person? Is that Christina? So the, and then later we met with Santiago from

El Mupi and then he's pointing out this important moment of popular education in the refugee camps and he pointed out Teresa Cruz. Teresa Cruz is like a popular educator that starts learning in the

refugee camps that later she also were part of alforja to the red alforja that we just talked and she is also still very active so this embroidery is that usually are like napkins to cover the tortillas they were being used to send messages but also to like really embroidering a story kind of retelling your story So now she's using this technique to pass these stories through younger generations. So she's going back to right now she's working in Chela Tenango in El Salvador. And these workshops, she invited ex-refugee woman to tell her stories. And then other participants and younger people or their own family come and embroider the new stories.

So that's, that was like something that I really want to point it out. And I'm going to do a common visit, an exhibition that I have right now, that I curate right now in Red Cat of Guadalupe Maravilla. We have also five embroideries from the museum that belong to these workshops. So it's just like very important kind of like to point out this like, you know, we're talking about popular education and some. something that Louise always was highlighting was also like the producing or encouraging the capacity of creativity and how like art in other ways can can participate in popular education. And then he also talks about they have manuals they will produce, I think like every week like small manuals with the analysis of the reality.

and that was like really, really important. And yes, again, like kind of connecting this understanding of your history, I think it's still very present in all Central America. We talk also just also to connect this museum that now is, you know, like a very important center or not because it doesn't really function as like the museum that we imagine in the United States. the community museum. This is a place of encounter. This is a place where activists and people come to learn. And so just like connecting that energy, we also met with very young

artists and activists that I will not mention her name because her, you know, vulnerability eating right now. And I think that's also important to say that, you know, Tony was talking about the tech companies, the Bitcoin, all this thing that Buckel is like also involved with the US and that also is affecting El Salvador. She was part of a group called Reverdes, kind of like Rebellion of like Green Rebellion. and that was like a group of youths like very very young people i will say from their 20s and most of them artists and also people that were stored people that were storing art and at law school and this group also comes from similar traditions like all these people come from

similar tradition of like Jesuits that I know Christina is going to talk a little bit more about Eric in Honduras and they is a group that how they describe themselves they accompany social movements and what they have been doing these past years is working also with people that has been displaced like with like tenants too And in a totally different way, but I think that's important to highlight that now the difficulties of migrating and, you know, like environmental challenges are really provoking a lot of like displacement and evictions and the big developments that we are talking, of course, these big developments are also happening in El Salvador, you know, like they're developing the tourism and the all the coast and it's such a small place that is like causing causing like all this violent displacement of people.

So they, for example, she was very careful because by that time, there was. were already, like, three persons from her group, incarcerated, and criminalized for organizing and helping a community that was, it was like a building that was going to be evicted, and they were doing a type of process, and I would say it wasn't more like a gathering, like a manifestation and Buckele repressed them and they were, you know, accompanying them. So just kind of like that those moments that for me were very important because we feel that we were so connected in many ways and our struggles are connected with them. And I think like the importance of being in solidarity, even if it feels so far, Central America is so close, as we know, just because not only because the communities are here, but we are, yeah, like our histories are all with.

And yeah, I will, I will let it let it there because maybe I talk too much in this section. No, not talking too much at all. I think that was really wonderful. And I appreciate calling up those international connections and hearing about fighting displacement and eviction in Central America is, I think, very useful for us here in the U.S. who often think about our struggle, you know, in these localized contexts within the tenant union, within our city, within our individual locals. But that international kind of solidarity aspect of it, I think is so crucial. So I really appreciate you calling attention to that. Christina, I'll go ahead and let you add, you know, some of your thoughts about other aspects. the trip. Oh, yeah, it continues. So yeah, I think I'm going to talk a little bit more about our time in Honduras and just start by saying that, you know, obviously we wanted to go to Honduras because we had, you know, we had the connection to the Bordados and to understanding that popular education

work in Honduras through the first edition of the journal. So, you know, over a year ago, I was listening to a podcast about liberation theology. And towards the end of the podcast, they mentioned, they went through, they gave contemporary examples of people who were still living and breathing, you know, the ideals of liberation theology. And they mentioned this Afro-descendant Jesuit priest from Honduras named Padre Mello. Right away, you know, I started reading about Padre Mello's history in Honduras, he has a great, long track record of accompanying the poor. And from there, I learned

about his work in this social center, this Jesuit social center called Eric. And then I learned about Radio Progreso, which is a Jesuit community radio station that exists in this, in Progreso in the northern part of Honduras. So I'll give a little bit of, a little bit of framing about what Eric the social center is and talk about the radio station. But the key thing that we, as we started to dig more, that we wanted to learn more about was on one of these, I started listening to a ton of Radio Prorezzo, and on one of these shows called La Casa Common Home, are a common house. It was a show about environmental defenders. They mentioned this political formation school for young people. And Tony, Daniela, and Don and I right away were like, oh, finally, maybe we can

learn about what this looks like, what popular education actually looks like on the ground in the current moment. So that was like the key thing. Like, we have to go to Honduras and figure this out. So I'll give you a little bit, I'll give a little bit of framing about Eric and Rayo Progreso, and then I'll maybe open it up a little bit to Tony and Daniela to share maybe some of the different things that pop into their minds or memories of our time with the youth that we spent with, or our time of the youth there. So Eric, which is the Equipo de Reflection, investigation and communication, that's the acronym for this Jesuit social center, was founded in 1980. It has these three branches. One of the branches is this whole, like,

human rights wing where they do a ton of legal accompaniment work. They support investigations for environmental defenders, land defenders, human rights defenders. There's a ton of extractivism and environmental, all these, you know, all these corporations that try to extract goods from Honduras. And so there's like, so that's a huge, huge problem in Honduras. They have this other branch, which is what they call territorial articulation. And within that branch, they do a ton of accompaniment work in, like, has a very huge umbrella. But some of the highlights are they focus on indigenous rights, land defense, environmental defense. Within that branch, they have three different formation schools.

They have the youth formation school, which I'll talk about in a little bit more detail. till in a moment. They have a human rights and environmentalism formation school, which is mostly for land defenders, helping them with their developing their campaigns, helping them understand the legal frameworks, et cetera. And then they also have one that's all about like ecology and a different formation school that's all about ecology, connecting to the land, small producers, preservation of native seeds, farming without, you know, synthetic fertilizing. all that kind of stuff. And then Eric also has this other branch,

which is the communications branch where Radio Progreso exists. Radio Progreso is a community radio station that has all kinds of programming. But one of the key things that they do is that they broadcast the work of Eric. So they have all kinds of radio shows that are about social justice

and different kinds of branches of social justice that Eric is engaged in. But they also have, like sports and gossip and music and all kinds of other stuff as well. And Radio Progoso, I should say, was, it's long, long, long history. It was started in 1956 and it has always, you know, accompanied these different social movements to the point where two different coup military governments have like attempted to shut it down. Let me dig in a little bit more into the youth formation school.

So just to give you kind of paint a picture for you, we had a main liaison that we communicated with that works for Eric. Her name is Natalie Ventura. And when we, you know, we were having these conversations with her. And we were really nervous up until the last minute, like what was going to happen? Like, were we really going to get to talk to all of these young people or not? And then, you know, like a week before we left, she hit us with. with this like three-day itinerary

that was completely stacked with youth in three different contexts and three different towns where we got to hear from graduates of this formation school. It was just, it was incredible. So the youth formation school is called Esquelas de Formation Politica and Ciudana. It was formed in 2008.

Schools of political and civic education the translation. Our shorthand for it has just become a youth formation school. It started in 2008. They accept 25 to 30 young people per year, ages 18 to 35. Anyone who applies needs to be a part of some kind of social justice or community-based organization to be invited to apply. The youth come from all over the country, from both rural and urban communities. Eric, the social center provides transportation, food, housing, et cetera, for the workshops. Originally, the school was going to be, was more intended for people who were connected to the church and people who were from rural communities. But over time, there was like, you know, an internal analysis of whether or not

that was going to continue to work and whether they were going to be able to recruit enough people, you know, to form. And they realized that that just wasn't working. And so about five years ago, they opened up the school to a wider, to more communities. And so now you don't have to be affiliated with the church. And some of the main reasons why they did that was because, well, young people aren't going to church as much or they're not part of these church communities. And many young people have migrated, right? They've migrated to the United States or to other countries, other necessity, so they wanted to, you know, cast a wider net. So I'll just talk a little bit about one of the people that we met during these, like every, so we met with different groups of

graduates and current students of the formation school in these three different towns. And in one of our visits, we went to the town of Kimistan. And we met a young person named Kevin Ramirez, or a person who had participated in the formation schools when he was younger, and Kevin Ramirez, he's from Kimistan, and he talked to us about how, you know, having the formation school be a part of his life, had completely, you know, had transformed his life. He actually is a land defender and has formed an organization with a bunch of other former graduates of the Eric Formations of the Youth Formation School to fight against a hydroelectric dam project. You know, he's been threatened with imprisonment and I think even temporarily

imprisoned. He has had threats made till his life and he is doing everything that he can to, you know, to defend his land, to defend his, his, where, you know, where he comes from. One other quick thing I think I'll share is kind of like we're still kind of trying to understand the different all the different like what do what are the young people formed what are the different topics or different kinds of things that they you know that they engage in so the formation schools happen once a month across a long weekend and they have a bunch of and there's eight different modules. There's a psychosocial module. There's a feminism and masculinity's module. There's a module that talks about the intersection of faith and politics. There's a human rights module,

construction of publics. There's one about like learning how to speak through the media, et cetera, et cetera. So maybe that kind of paints a picture. But I'll, I'll kind of turn it over to Tony and Daniela to see if they can kind of fill or talk about maybe some of the different things that kind of, that they remember from our time with all these different groups of young people. I mean, just going a little bit off of where you ended, I think one of the things that was, you know, so interesting when we got to the level, you know, it's one of these things where also, by the time we got to the third formation school that we were introduced to, our questions were a little bit more pointed about the how this actually runs. What's the curriculum, so to say?

you know, just because it's like we were able to ask sharper questions because of what we'd been introduced to in the first two. So it was another moment of wanting to sort of go back in time and do it again while we were there. But like I think one of the key things, too, that we kept hearing that was a real consistent point from the participants was that nobody felt that they were signing up for a program to be convinced. of something else by someone else like that and i know that that's vague sounding but what i mean is that it was like there was a there was some sensitivity about the idea that they're you know are these kind of like indoctrination sort of focused programs that that that could be around or that they people might have encountered and you know from other directions and so there was a kind of appreciation of the formation schools in that um people felt that

that they could participate and really speak freely within them. And even as sort of differences of opinion would come up or differences of experience, that they made spaces to then sort of think about those things together from a group perspective. And especially even if those kind of differences, opinions, were really important structural things or really, you know, pointed to different, you know, oppressions.

But that seemed to be kind of a really key thing. that people expressed to us regularly was that it's like, you know, here I'm participating in something where I'm getting to be in dialogue with people. I'm not just going and kind of being told what to what to think. And two, I think it was that, you know, while some of the things that Christina was, you know, naming at the end of these kind of different modules, like, well, you know, like we can kind of nod our heads along. Like, oh, yeah, that sounds great. Like it's, it's, and that's true. It's also that like the focus of conversations or the modules for like this. weekend we're focused on this and this session we're focused on this it's like it's rooted in

the experience so it's again another kind of like obvious sounding thing to say but back to where we began and this sort of like popular education is the is the you know non-profit popular education you're putting you in a circle and then you know this is the discussion we're going to have like everything that they're focused on is is really is directly informed by like what are the things that make poor people's lives in Honduras difficult and And let's go through those things and let's go through them at different levels. So it's like learning about, you know, extraction and, you know, large forces that affect the environment, but then also looking at it at the interpersonal level. Let's look at, you know, machismo and sexism, you know, within our society and talk about that too.

And so it's it's a program that's responding to the potential, you know, the world that the potential future. participants are coming from really directly. And I think that's one of the really influential parts of kind of seeing and learning about this model that we want to think of. And in some ways, it's going to points to things that we already do in the Tenancy Union of the ways that we, you know, build our education work,

for lack of a bit of phrase, you know, out of people's experiences in, you know, housing. Nonetheless, it was really important to see this more advanced model, essentially. yeah i'm trying to think what i can add um because there's so much but yeah i would say also like seeing something that i was very impressed and why these meetings were three hours it was because everybody was like so critical the discussion was like really you know they were like really good discussions people were like able to participate and you can feel that

agency on each of the very young people that we met in the discussions that we were having and we were asking. And definitely this thing that Tony was pointed out, it didn't feel that it was a doctrineation. Is that how you say? Doctrination? A doctrineation. Me coming from Mexico, of course, always is like the Catholic, when I see some Catholic thing, whatever thing is always like suspicious and of course here it's

it's all there is out of you know like there are Jesuits and they have like all this history behind and ideology but they definitely are like focusing on like this kind of like

creation of the subject I mean I'm trying to like you know like really I feel like everybody was able to analyze who is the oppressor, why is happening this, how you can like spike back. So I think that that was like very impressive. And I will say maybe just kind of to add something more anecdotic. It was like all these people that we met were like fabulous and beautiful human beings and, you know, like Natalie and her team were driving us around all Honduras and we went to the coast. We met with some students or alumni from the

school that were Garifuna, you know, like in different areas and also like collaboration with other radios and other communities. So there was always like this sense of like we are organized and this is our school, but also we are collaborating with other organizations and other radios and other groups. And it never feel that we knew and they will sometimes point out the differences between them, but there was never like, like, oh, I'm not going to work with them. you know there was a kind of like we need to work together this sense of like of again of this solidarity network that goes back to alforja and also you know central america and yeah this

this sense of like if we want to transform this society and our world we also need to work together even if there's some differences so i was like also very impressed about that network that also it was present in every in every moment in Central America I also was doing research with artists and it was always the same thing

I will like meet one artist and that one artist will create a whole agenda of like similar agenda of like meet these other 20 artists that are doing you know there are also like I will say like artists they're so rooted in social

movements and it's like because there's not like a very capitalist contemporary art system there. They are like able to work along with the social movement. So that was like very important. And I will say that something that would like to see more in the tennis union, working more with youth, thinking more in the next generation. And not only because it's like, I feel like this idea of leadership wasn't like, oh, we are passing our knowledge to the next generation and they are going to take over.

I mean, of course, there's like that knowing of preservation, but also I think it was like, we need to bring all the different generations together to understand our reality and we need to work together because every generation has a different tool. Luis from Alforja will point out that the podcast now it's like the radio was something now is the podcast how the new generation is addressing so yeah can I just add one quick thing to kind of paint a picture of of our time and yeah go for it yeah I mean I just kept thinking about and this has really stayed with me I think we're going to talk about it a little bit more in the next section, is everywhere we went, there were, I'm already getting emotional just like saying it, but there were commemorations to Honduran martyrs, right? Particularly folks who had fought back against extractivist projects. In every, inside of the offices

or the center where Radio Progreso and Erika is, there were posters. and banners and texts about Berta Caceres, eight months or so before we landed in Honduras, Juan Lopez was killed. He was a land defender that was also fighting back against a hydroelectric dam. And yeah, and so that was like really, that was like a big lesson for us.

And the day we landed there, there was also a big, there was going to be like a film showing a film screening related to the, to a massacre that had happened. I don't remember how many years previous. And so that was like a continual thread, I think, in our time there, was that there exists this tradition of these commemorations and not letting go of the sacrifices that these people, you know, the ultimate sacrifices that these people made for their, for

their communities. Yeah, that's a really important aspect, I think, to remember. And part of that building memory that has been talked about, I think, throughout this conversation, not just of the projects that have happened, but the people who put their lives on the line and, yeah, made that sacrifice for it, I think is really something important to highlight. So thank you for bringing that up, Christina. At this point, I think for the sake of time, I'm going to try to transition us to our next question. And it's something that really has been gestured at, I think, throughout a lot of what you all have talked about already. But one of the things on the show that we're always trying to do whenever we have any sort of conversation is ask, like,

what does this mean for the struggles and for the organizing work that we're involved in where we live today? And sort of what lessons are there that you all learned that are relevant for our struggles in the U.S. today? And I think, again, with particular attention paid to tenant organizing, since that is, again, sort of the common thread for the people participating in this conversation. Is there anyone who would like to share on that side of things? You know, just to kind of, yeah, to note that it's, you know, what Christita had ended with about that film, for example,

you know, film, you know, talking about these martyrs and about a fight from the past. And just how regular commemoration was. And of course, we're in a Jesuit and Catholic, environment and and and that's a you know kind of a really regular part uh within you know those sort of spaces uh but like you know when christina was describing the the radio pro you know like listen to to you know radio progress so and like you just hear you know some chill songs and they have like the like kind of you know jit z targeted pop hour kind of like did you just you know like

mixed into that just the way that, you know, like a, uh, uh, whatever like insurance commercials come up on the radio in LA, you know, it's just mixed in like, you know, we remember the martyrs from like it's, you know, and it just, just regularly put into it is this, this sort of constant commemoration and also not just the sort of making it generic and that while we were there, there was a particular anniversary of, uh, I believe people were marted in the 70s while were there. And so it was coming up on a 50th anniversary. And so then that was repeated. And in almost every space that we were in around El Progresso or where we were driving to these other formation schools, it was mentioned. I mean, basically a three-hour period did not go by

where we didn't somehow encounter mention that we were in a period of that anniversary. And like, you know, one key thing within the tenants union is, that, I mean, and speaking from the perspective, the L.A. Tenants Union, it's like, you know, we, there are, there are people who we've lost in this struggle. And there are people who's passing is directly related to the toll of the, that these fights take on them. And so just in that very direct way, it's key for us to treat their memory, you know, as a, as a more regular kind of part of our just general consciousness within the work, you know, in that very kind of one-to-one way. But also just this notion of the way that the, you know, the calendar is full of anniversaries that we encountered. Again, this very particular one being prominent while we were there. But just that it's, you know, there have been big moments and there are dates of significance, especially in 10 years of the LA Tenants Union

that, you know, we thought it would be really key to make more regular space for acknowledging, hey, we've passed a year since that thing, we've passed five years since that thing, et cetera. We, you know, we didn't get to do it to the extent that we wanted to with our 10th anniversary this summer because the city's under attack by the federal government. But it was, I think, at least the energy around,

that before the ice invasions began was in that direction. It was a real conscious, at least intention of an effort to make this kind of space that we saw that was folded into really everyday life. And so that was one key thing that is maybe a little narrow in focus,

but just to get us going from where Christina was talking. Yeah, thank you. That's super helpful. I think, yeah, you know, obviously things in L.A. took a turn this summer, like you said, that wasn't necessarily expected. But I do hope that we are able to create those kind of spaces and that memorialization within the Tenants Union. Because definitely, like, as a newer member of the Tenants Union, like trying to figure out some of this history and these important historic struggles and the people who did, you know, past in relation to this work, I think would be very powerful. So, yeah, thank you for that contribution. Danielle, were you going to add something as well?

Yeah, I just adding with what Tony say, it's something that also in every person that we talk about, there's always like, no matter there was a war, there were on crisis, somebody was more there, you know, there was like a coup de tat, like they will keep going with this memory, this preservation of memory. And I think that's something that is a muscle that we need to just like train.

Because they, you know, even like Luis will talk about like their big assemblies is like there was always a group dedicated to like put together the information that happens there, analyze what happened, what we say, how are we going to move forward? And that information will be redistributed again. And I feel like that it's something that we need to do because sometimes we have this awesome moments where we are like arriving to specific conclusions and then it just disappears or it just go into the laptop of somebody. And I feel like that that's like a very awesome lesson to learn from there that is like this capacity of like we need to preserve even what we are doing now. Awesome. Yeah. No, thank you for that. And yeah, I think. that preservation has been like a theme throughout this conversation that is very important to emphasize because it's so easy to forget the necessity of it while you're just actively involved in what the present struggle is. So I appreciate the intentionality around calling that

out. Christina, I'll go ahead and pass it over to you as well. Yeah, on the very first day that we arrived in Prorezzo, the first thing that was on our itinerary was to go to La Milpa. How do you translate the milpa? Is it the corn? Is that right, Daniela? Kind of like the corn field or the field, right? The field. And it was, it's this, Eric has a land reclamation project.

And every week they get together to, community members get together to tend the land and to engage in different kinds of agricultural, like attempts and experiments. And it's also a place where they eat together, where they, yeah, were they cooked together and while we were there we made these fresh tamales the entire process from like chucking the corn to grinding the the the mass to filling the the corn shell the the the corn skins and and putting the tamales together and during and it was it was a really beautiful window into how people reproduce their

lives, right? And how people share and and spend time together. And so I think that that's another thing, you know, looking at looking within our tenant union spaces or like within our tenants associations, you know, looking at the different ways that people reproduce their lives. Like when we engage in those collective like actions of like cooking together, making art together, et cetera, and how important those things are to sustaining our movements. I think that that was also a really, really important lesson for us. Yeah, no, I mean, I think that also hits very close to home. Our local recently, we had a protest at the house of some of the landlords for one of the

buildings where we're fighting an eviction, and we did an art date leading up to it to create signs, and it was actually, I think, like, one of the most beautiful moments we've had as a tenant association coming together, all the kids who lived in the building, came out and participated and really just spending all day together in the courtyard, eating, making art, talking, just being together as people who are involved in that struggle really, I think, was this incredible moment that really strengthened the TA too, and it strengthened, you know, a lot of the connections and their resolve in the fight. So I think calling that out really does just hit close to home for the kind of work we're doing here and, you know, trying to be more

intentional about creating more spaces like that as well. All right. So I'm, I'm, I'm going to go ahead and take us to the next question, just only because we've been together for almost two hours now, and I do not want to keep you all all day, although I absolutely feel like we could just keep this conversation going. There's just so much here to dig into. But sort of as a final question, you all undertook this trip as a part of the Ultra Red Collective, and we've talked about that a little bit. But I was just wondering if you can tell us a bit about Ultra Red, what its history is, and sort of what its current projects look like as well. I think I've been designated to speak to this.

Perfect. This is Don, and thank you for that question, Allison. So, yeah, so like any collective work, the story about what a collective is typically begins with where you entered into the collective. So for a lot of folks that have participated in the work of Ultrured over the last couple years, the focus has been very much on the creation of a journal. A journal, we subtitle the journal is a journal of militant sound inquiry, which is a way of thinking about the relationship between militancy or political engagement and listening, collective listening, and learning

together. But the collective itself is older than the last couple of years, started in 1994, with myself and one other person. Both of us were involved in ACT UP at the time, specifically the needle exchange, working with drug users to give access to services and supplies to keep them safe. We were based on the street, and we were making recordings of those exchanges.

We were also a techno band, and we were performing chill-out rooms and raves around Los Angeles. And this kind of weird combination of these two worlds, world's trying to figure out what was the relationship between those two worlds, not just drug use, but also what are the other ways that these worlds speak to each other? Over the years, the collective has brought in, attracted people involved in different social movements, including anti-genderification, defense of public housing, anti-racism, gender queer movements,

and so forth. And the collective has grown to be international with folks in Europe, specifically the UK and Germany and Serbia. The inquiry of the motive of the collective has shifted, of course, as well, but primarily thinking about the practices, the praxis of political education and our popular education. What is that practice? What is it? What are we learning together. And a key component to this for many years for Ultra Red has been to think about collective work as having multiple sites of experimentation, of trying things out, trying to put things into practice to understand them, trying to develop things around organizing political education, so forth. And by having multiple sites, then we learn together, we challenge each other,

we inspire each other. And that kind of iterative and simultaneity of our collective has kind of continued in multiple spaces. And so encountering Al Forha, which for some of us, It was back really in the early days of Ultra Red, encountering the iterative and simultaneous work of a network where it's not simply about connections and relationships, but it's also learning together and challenging each other, particularly around experiments and things that we're trying out. I'm thinking about how through the work of our three comrades

going down to Costa Rica and visiting the architecture, and visiting the archive, like encountering the just enormous amount of materials that was produced by a photo over those 40 years, including a journal called Le Pedagua. And that journal ran from 1989 to 2018, had 45 issues, and it was all about sort of critical engagement of education,

popular education, adult education, but also then the political context of those experimental projects around education. And it just inspires us to think about, like, what's the role of a popular education collective like Ultramed? The relationship that that collective has had historically with art, art practices, but then also how we organize in our movement.

So the Tenants Union in Los Angeles, it's very much a network of different local chapters, no one will give you the same answer about how many chapters we have, but I'm saying 16, and how we learn from each other. We look at what each chapter is doing and how that inspires other chapters. Oh, we should try to do that. So if one chapter starts doing commemorative memorialization of people we've lost, that will inspire other chapters to do that.

Some chapters start actually documenting what they're doing, either in writing or podcasts, that will inspire other chapters. Oh, we should do that. And same thing within the network of tenant unions across the United States and Canada, the Autonomous Tenants Union Network, which we started in 2018.

Now you've got a conversation that's going on with people who are organizing in different cities, different municipalities, very different contexts. Christina and I are part of a project called Kitchen Table where we get together once a month with people who, who are organizing different tenants unions across the states and Canada.

And we just, you know, learn from each other and support each other, but also understand the experiments that each group is getting involved in and how that can sort of push our movement beyond simply a kind of rights-based framing of what tenants rights are tenant movement is to thinking more about, oh, we're actually reproducing our lives and reproducing community. in the process, resisting those forms that are trying to destroy our communities. That's been ongoing work to try to have that kind of moving us past a kind of tenant movement 101 into something that's more political and more radical.

But the collective of Alter Red is very much alive, and now, like I said, it exists as this journal. So other things that we're looking at with the journal, we have an issue that's going to be coming out soon talking about Palestine Solidarity and how Palestine Solidarity has really shaped, reformed, a lot of political movements in the U.S., Canada, and parts of Scandinavia. We have another issue that's looking at poor people's movements, specifically what you might call Lumpin movements. So the unhoused, sex workers, trans folks, and how. the political education, popular education practices in those movements really helps to begin to think about the formation of resistant subjects within super-marginalized, super-exploited communities. A lot of this is, you know, trying to understand where we're at right now in our moment in terms of fascism and how fascism has really named its front for consolidating

its power, its social power, and targeting Palestine solidarity, targeting trans folks, targeting immigrants, and targeting the unhoused. So how do we think about what the learning is in those movements as they form that resistance? Because that would be then the vanguard of a kind of revolutionary project. And not the kind of vanguard that's being conceptualized, I think, in a lot of political projects here in the North America. But how we look at the actual work of forming subjects, forming movements, forming knowledge, and forming networks for resistance. I don't know if that gives you kind of a sense of the scope of what we're doing. Yeah, I think that does, and I think that's super useful.

And the interventions into, again, I think like you just said, those spaces that fascism has declared is where it's going to be pushing its fight with increasing repression feels like an extremely valuable analysis, right? to be able to respond there and be able to push back in those spaces. I think, you know, I also feel very thankful for your point about setting examples within the tenant work and, you know, being able to push some of these practices that we discussed here today in a way that can cause it to spread to other places. And I know I will take this as a challenge to try to think about a lot of what you all have

talked about and how I can bring this to my local and how we can try to integrate some of this. And I hope our listeners around the country will do this. same. I know we hear from people who listen to the show who are involved in tenant organizing and other parts of the U.S. as well. And so I really hope this episode will be a valuable resource and contribution for the work that people are doing. Yeah, I think I'm going to go ahead and wrap it there. I want to say thank you all so much for coming on. This has been, again, like really powerful, I think, just for me to hear, but also I hope for our audience. And I'm really thankful that all of you took the time to come and talk with us about all of this.

Thank you, Allison. Thank you, Allison. Thank you. You know, Thank you.