At the Gathering
The earth is in me I am old
and clay nameless
Hoa Nguyen, Hecate Lochia
May 2023—Jen C
[Si quiere español-→vaya usted aquí ]
At the end of March 2023, I traveled San Cristóbal de las Casas, Chiapas, Mexico to participate in El Cambalache’s Gathering: Autonomies in Practice
I’m sorry it’s taken me so long to tell you about the Gathering. And so long to use words with Delisted 2023. I was at a loss for words when I returned to the U.S. in early April. And then I had to file a lawsuit because there are still forests.
Heads up! I will post a few more times in the next couple of weeks.
The Gathering
In darkness one might touch fires from the earth itself
Nan Shepherd The Living Mountain
Because I had to cancel my in-person Delisted 2023 workshop I’d planned for the Public Interest Environmental Law Conference, the Gathering was the first place I presented a Delisted 2023 workshop in person.
A temple asks Noah
“What about the wilderness?”
…
Call on the truth at the Mountain
Carlos Sirah The Utterances
El Cambalache (The Swap) is an anarchist1 space in San Cristóbal de las Casas, Chiapas, MX. It was founded in March 2015 by seven women from Sonora, Morelos and Chiapas, Mexico, and New York, U.S.
El Cambalache is an attempt to reduce poverty (here understood as a lack of access to any given resource, be it physical or psychological) not by incorporating more people into a capitalist economy that creates its own specific type of poverty, but rather, by creating or enhancing other ways of acting economically parallel to, or outside of capitalism. So while one may not have access to much money, one often has access to a wide variety of physical and mental resources that are generally not well-valued in a capitalist system.2
I too must contain the liberation of us all—because the seed is; I will be.
Brenda Iijima & Janice Lee, A roundtable unanimous dreamers chime in
El Cambalache refuses the “there is no alternative”3 of modernity, and rejects modernity's structures of capitalist, imperialist, colonialist, white body supremacy.
The Gathering brought global participants, including people from all over the americas (as they are colonially named), actively engaged in this refusal.
At the Gathering, I felt an untethering and a sense of the outer bounds of modernity as a 500 year-old, give or take a few years, hyperobject that no longer seemed to me to be inevitable. I felt the limits of my own perception and knowledge and the multitude of other knowledges moving around and through me.
The Gathering was a fundamentally different sort of “conference” and the right place for Delisted 2023 to move fully into workshop space.
I am always still learning.
My workshop built off the invitation I posted here a few months ago. I invited participants, including me, Sushil S., Marlen Muj Cúmes, Maria Teresa, Hernández Ramos, Daniela, and Rosa Fernanda Seira, into relationship with the freshwater mussels by providing some background about these creatures.We then focused on time and on the body of our last common ancestor, who lived 100s of millions of years ago.
There was a moment our ancestor and their ancestor shared space in the individual bodies of that last common ancestor. We were all in there together.
Here is what we wove:
Erin Araujo, Moneyless economics and non-hierarchical exchange values in Chiapas, Mexico, Journal des Anthropologues (April 2018).
For more information in English, see Erin Araujo, Building an alternative economy as decolonial praxis, in Indigenous Places and Colonial Spaces (September 2018),
For more information in Spanish, see
Margaret Thatcher said “there is no alternative” to the market economy. But, there have always been alternatives, they are hidden, pushed out, subterranean, right under our noses.
Vanessa Andreotti defines “modernity” as “a ubiquitous story of linear progress, development, evolution, and civilization that is all around us and that informs the ways we think, the ways we imagine things, the ways we hope, the ways we desire. That also informs our neurobiology in many ways: where we source pleasure, what we're afraid of. So modernity is that water for the fish that we're all swimming in.” Vanessa Andreatti, Allowing Earth to Dream Through Us, Green Dreamer Podcast (January 2022). https://greendreamer.com/podcast/vanessa-andreotti-hospicing-modernity