Collective Liberation & Colonial Legacies, 3 of 3
A conversation between guest collaborator sarah sao mai habib and Minnow’s Director of Strategic Storytelling, Javier Román-Nieves
sarah habib – Could you start by introducing yourself, Minnow, and your role with Minnow?
Javier Román – I am a white-passing Puerto Rican born and raised there. And I immigrated to the mainland United States four years ago. I am newly arrived here, so to say. I work at Minnow as director of strategic storytelling, which is basically long-form communications seen through the filter of organizational strategy and long-term objectives. So that's my role here. And Minnow is, well, one thing is what it is, and another is how I see it. Right? So what it is, Minnow is a fiscally sponsored project of the Sustainable Economies Law Center, and it's a small nonprofit dedicated to two main objectives: securing farmland tenure for farmers of color in California and advancing Indigenous sovereignty in the state. We do that by working in four areas: one is farmland tenure, which goes into the description of who we are and what we do, along with advancing Indigenous sovereignty. Another one is workplace democracy, which is about facilitating worker co-ownership of their means of production and land, which is again a central component. And then the last area of work we engage with is resource mobilization, which is about calling out philanthropy and helping dismantle that model of “do-gooding.”
That's, in a nutshell, how I identify my role within the organization and what the organization is. Now, how I see it, and this is my take, is the Sustainable Economies Law Center as part of these movement-wide organizations that blossomed between the aftermath of the Occupy Wall Street reckoning and the added pressure of the George Floyd summer of 2020, the Covid pandemic, and all that followed. So I see ourselves as a sort of sprout in the trenches, of something that was happening and is still happening at bigger scales. But this is just how it took form in this particular location of time and space.
sh – Thank you for sharing your perspective and what you're doing with the collective. Since this project is about intercultural and interspecies collaborations and solidarity, could you share a bit of your background and where you come from? And if you do identify with diaspora, how has that influenced your engagement and motivation to work with these huge topics and themes that are at the root of what's happening here in the US in the “polycrises”?
JR – My initial background is as a designer, as an artist, and as a troublemaker. My first master’s is in architecture, so I have a designer's mind and approach to the world and aesthetics, as well as to problem-solving in the end because that's what designers do. We solve problems in an aesthetic way and a communicative or meaningful way. So that's one important part of my background. The other thing that is very important is that, besides my second master's, which was in Natural Resource Management at Yale, I was mostly educated at the University of Puerto Rico, which is the state’s public higher education institution there. It's a very humanities-centered education at the Río Piedras campus which I attended. This is something that I also reflect on, particularly throughout my diasporic experience, because we did get a deep humanities-centered and holistic education that I feel a lot of my peers lack here in the US. Not to be reductionist, but that has been the case. I dabbled in philosophy at school and in the humanities in general, such as sciences, which is a very robust program by itself.
On top of that, many of my long-time friends also went to other programs: humanities, philosophy, music, plastic arts, and so on. I myself am a practicing artist, although I don't sell in the collectors market anymore. But anyway, that has marked the rest of my experience in the US, because just the way I write, even, it's very influenced by continental philosophy, and that’s very distinct. It's very different from what folks here are used to.
I initially set out to do what I was supposed to do, became an architect, and went into an architecture firm. But I quickly quit that route because it entailed a pyramid scheme that I really couldn't afford at that time. I was already living by myself, and it was very hard to keep up with the architecture licensing scheme and make a living at the same time. And also because in Puerto Rico, everything you do, in a way, is a collaboration with power, a collaboration with a colonial state. I have always had trouble with power because of that, and I didn't want to collaborate, so I quit. I moved to New York City to hustle for a year and eventually lived in Mexico City as an architect and design teacher for three years. And I love Mexico and its people, all of its history, food, and traditions. My Mexican friends call me a Bori-Mexican because my accent is also a little bit marked by their ways of speaking. But, after the Great Recession of 2007-2009, I returned to Puerto Rico, where I eventually quit architecture as a whole. I had been a writer for the architects all along and worked on that again, but eventually quit because of the same reasons: the expectation that you would collaborate with a corrupt government and with an illegitimate colonial system in general.
Then, I got into writing for land conservation, which led me to that second master's in Natural Resource Management at Yale. I moved to the States, and I got there as your typical liberal, pussy hat-wearing, pro-science, almost radical atheist science person. However, I learned about the history of the sciences and the history of conservation at Yale, where many of its origins are, at least from the American perspective. I quickly took that hat off, and then I started a transformative process that hasn't stopped since then.
You mentioned a continental lens in your writing and storytelling. So I'm curious about you being embedded in Puerto Rico for your whole life until recently, it sounds like. It's giving you that lens and this close relationship with understanding the ongoing occupation of the US and that relationship with PR. Could you speak more about that lens, the island consciousness, and the US-Puerto Rico dynamic?
This took me quite a while to figure out. One thing I say now that can sum some of that up is that, for example, my first master's degree was mainly based on the Situationist International, which was an avant-garde art movement, mostly European. But the underlying objective was the destruction of capitalist society. That was my first master's degree, which passed a whole peer review committee approval process. So, it had the institutional approval for a person, me, who is literally writing about and researching how to destroy the hegemonic system that we all live under. I had sort of forgotten about that. Then, when I was at Yale, which is a corporation at the heart of the beast, I took for granted that I came from this academic and artistic tradition for which this is normal stuff. So people would look at me like: who's this Puerto Rican dude talking about anti-capitalism and about destroying this, all of that, what does this mean, and at this place that stands for all that? Who is this guy? So I became, in that sense, a minority within the minority because then I was having all these very natural lenses to reality and to what the US and its history are from a Puerto Rican colonial subject's perspective. Add that I was openly anarchist, which depends on which day you're asking me, because some days I’m a commie, but mostly anarchist, right? In theory, at least. But that was very strange at Yale. I was just this weird weirdo.
It took me quite a while to understand that, for most of my particularly American peers, their education was entirely different. It's very siloed. Folks at that school mostly came from hard sciences; not everyone, but it was very marked, for whatever reason. That's something that took me quite a while to understand, the “Oh, of course you guys don't get it because you're not colonial subjects.” They didn't have to learn a second language. They don't even know the history of US foreign interventionism or the rest of the Americas, like America is not the US, but two huge continents! All this stuff that a lot of people here take for granted is just different from my perspective and the perspective of a lot of Puerto Ricans.
I think it's really illuminating to talk more about this, especially for folks who have been embedded in the US. When you were talking, I was imagining being in the eye of the storm. So it feels calm. You don't really see all the destruction happening, but you're just there, right? You're just floating in it calmly.
Considering what we're feeling now with all the systemic violence of colonialism and capitalism affecting climate, and as an outsider, witnessing what Puerto Rico has been through and some of the grassroots community-based responses to taking care of each other, I'm curious to hear more of anything you want to share about all of those relationships and the distortion happening with conservation and environmental management. How it's actually part of the problem and ultimately doing more harm. Could you talk about how, from your homeland, there's already a solution for community resiliency?
That metaphor of being in the eye of the storm that you mentioned, it happened to me when I was at Yale, because Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico while I was there. At that point, I was doing student work hours with the wonderful people at the Yale Program on Climate Change Communications and with the Yale School of the Environment’s communications office. They sent me to cover the former Secretary of State John Kerry, whose center at Yale was hosting this big climate event featuring Leonard DiCaprio and the whole bunch. Kerry had this “across the aisle” event with a famous former Texas Republican congressman the same evening the hurricane was making landfall in Puerto Rico. So I was metaphorically in the eye of the storm, in the sense that I was in a calm place but at the center of most of our evils, to be honest. These gentlemen, these old white statesmen, were discussing the future of the world, at least in their heads, while folks back home were being slammed by this perfect storm of sorts. A lot of people have said afterward that Puerto Rican history was deeply marked by that hurricane, that it was a sort of before and after. I think certainly it was a very important reference in time and something that the Puerto Rican diaspora also suffered, but to a much lesser degree, of course. It resonated across American society at that moment, at least with everyone who self-identifies as Puerto Rican, even if it's people who were born here or had close ties with the island.
So that goes a bit into that happening and also marking my view and the experience, of making me really question academia as this armchair, slow, intellectualized way of producing knowledge and approaching problems. I've come to the conclusion that academia is just too slow in the face of the things that are happening. That also took me quite a long time to understand. This production of knowledge, where things have to live in a spreadsheet or they're not real, and that you have to write papers and get them peer-reviewed and then go to conferences and symposia and then have all these conversations. It’s this almost geological time frame for how knowledges and truths are built that I think is just too slow for the problems we're up against.
But anyway, that's just parallel to the story, so, reeling it back to the Puerto Rican experience, there was this question you had about the desire to weave in wisdom and healing traditions from our ancestral lineages. I come from a Mestizo culture. My birthplace has a Taíno name, Mayagüez, and hurricane, by the way, is derived from the Spanish interpretation of a Taíno term, Juracán. But anyhow, I'm White-passing. My mother is Brown. My father is White. So, I come from a Mestizo reality and a Mestizo culture where there is still discrimination against darker-skinned folks. But it is nonetheless a culture that currently has a Taíno ethnogenesis. Now, that is very fascinating in itself, although I've always been very careful to differentiate Indigeneity elsewhere from Indigeneity in Puerto Rico because it's a different sociological and historical process.
So, this topic of solidarity and mutual aid is almost genetic to me. I thought for a long time when you asked the question first about, well, where does this come from? Has anyone ever taught me, “Oh, you have to do this or that in times of trouble?” How does this organic disaster response/resiliency work? Resiliency is a word that I have a lot of caution with and I don't normally use, but we're using it in this context. OK, how does this thing come about? Is this something that we are taught? I still wonder about it and don't have a clear answer. Some of that solidarity and mutual aid to me is simply just that. It’s just what you do. It's just what we do there when disaster strikes. It's also how families treat family members and non-family members alike.
But there's also this thing that an old friend of mine coined, which is a fascinating phrase, that corruption is the shadow of solidarity. He's not a writer but a multi-instrumentalist who does programming, but I think it was a very acute social observation that solidarity is a part of the Puerto Rican reality that is a trait amongst us, which comes with this flip side of what you do to survive, and for many that sometimes involves corruption. This is just endemic to Puerto Rican governments and to our experiences since the days of colonization because of its management of scarcity and of “whatever the boat brings,” as we say. Governments and centuries of their absence have created self-sufficiency along with smuggling and a lax rule of the law. That’s embedded. The contrabando, or contraband, has always been part of the Puerto Rican experience and of people's ways of thinking and even seeing government as a thing that is there to be bent and used to your advantage. So there is that side that we just can't ignore, which plays into Republican and conservative talking points, you know, during the Bush and Trump eras, “We’ve sent all this money to Puerto Rico, but they're just corrupt,” and all that crap! It's very bigoted and very opinionated, but it does also run on some truth, on all this old and recent history. We had a governor who was kicked out of office by popular protests because of corruption. So it's this sort of weird mix of both things, solidarity and its evil shadow, corruption.
What I'm hearing, and correct me if I'm wrong, is that there's this lineage of resistance and caring for each other, whatever words you want to use - mutual aid. And it sounds like it can come in the form of what people label as illegal. But, you know, it's so convoluted when things become decontextualized.
The US criticizing a colony for not abiding by colonial laws is a really wild thing to do. I'm hearing this lineage of affirming life with whatever means necessary. The issue in that world of Western conservation is that there's this mismatch of urgency and timing when it comes to institutional reckoning with what's happening.
Absolutely. Then there's this phrase I learned later that was used for a book title by British Indian immigrant Ian Sanjay Patel, who quoted Ambalavaner Sivanandan, "We are here because you were there." It's a wonderful phrase and really illuminating when I tell people, even before they get to the “What are you doing here?” part of a conversation. I'm here because you guys were there. That's why I speak English, and I'm a freakin' colonial subject. What can I tell you, right? The rest of that component we mentioned was resistance and just saying no, “We're going to stay here because we are here, and this land is ours, and we're going to resist no matter what.” I think the form that takes, or how you qualify it, whether inside or outside of the law, whether it's the shadow or corruption of solidarity, as my friend said, it's all written with that same thing of saying “No!” Puerto Rico is our rock between the Atlantic and the Caribbean Sea, and we're just going to make it here! We will survive because we've done this forever, and we've done it with less. We're going to stay here! We're going to be ourselves!
So, I guess that's a pretty awesome part of my lineage. The fact that we're just like, no, we're Puerto Ricans, and it doesn't matter that we have a US passport and that we're US citizens, or rather, second-class US citizens. We're still Puerto Ricans. We're never going to be “Americans.” You may have Puerto Ricans who are pro-Trump or conservatives because they adhere to the libertarian, self-indulgent small government that doesn't mess up with “their” things, but they are still never going to be Americans. So anyway, that's my take on that.
As for the complexities of conservation, that is something that also goes with this identity that I came into Yale with, of being a pro-science, pussy-hat-wearing liberal, in that sense. I was not a liberal politically, obviously, but I had spent quite a few years in the land trust and land conservation sector in Puerto Rico, and as I came here with that identity, I fully knew conservation still meant fencing off places to “conserve” what's there. That’s a mostly uninterrogated American notion of “pristine wilderness,” of an “empty wilderness,” and “virginal nature” that hasn't been touched by humans and that needs to be “conserved.” But, as I went to Yale, I discovered that it was all BS and just a cultural construct that was part of a bigger historical process of displacing and settling Indigenous lands.
Still, that memo hasn't arrived back in Puerto Rico, for example. So conservation is still viewed there mostly, even by liberals and liberal scientists as, you know, American conservation being the mainstay approach. So I think that memo, and I may be wrong, from what I hear from folks back home, is that re-interpretation and questioning hasn't been made or hasn't arrived yet. The same thing happens in a lot of white-led conservation organizations here in the US mainland, where all of those questions are seen as extraneous to conservation and as “Oh, that's just something from sociology or political science.” That's not a stable philosophy to adhere to, like “What do I care about what conservation means?”
I still see that resistance to change, and it's built on inertia. I think we do a lot of stuff just on pure inertia because that's the way we were taught to do things, and that's the way things need to get done. I have to publish this paper, and I have to get all these citations up, and I have to get my grants through, and I have to do all this stuff. “Oh my God, this is how we do stuff! Don't make me question how we do stuff!” So, a lot of it comes from that, and of course, it's very harmful. But I think what's at the heart of the matter, particularly in the liberal mind, as I have come to understand it. Liberals wish to change and to be better, but without becoming something else. I see that across the board, it's a sort of cognitive dissonance on a grand scale.
Take capitalism, for example, capitalist apologists, free-market reformers, all these people. Capitalism is racist from the get-go because it's based on the exploitation of the land, the particular view of the land as something that's to be exploited, extraction of resources, the exploitation of surplus and surplus value from workers, etcetera, and a bunch of other stuff. So, it is inherently conceptually negative, right? But then you have all these apologists saying, “Oh no, there can be ethical consumption. Oh, we can do this right. We can do carbon sequestration. We can create carbon offset markets and sell them so these people can still do what they're doing and polluting.” You know, we can keep this profit-driven system going. We can keep unlimited growth and hold growth as central to our tenets and ways of life. All this stuff is baked into what America or the United States is. So there's this dichotomy. There's all this stuff we've done poorly, and we must change, but “Oh no, we can't stop being who we are.” The Javier that's talking to you now is not the same Javier from five years ago and definitely not the same Javier from ten years ago. So, to me, being, becoming, and identity are changeable, malleable things. Whereas in the liberal mind and the modern view of nation-states, it is not, and that's deeply problematic.
There's this stagnancy that feels like a track that's laid out to disaster and more chaos than there needs to be if that makes sense. And you're perfectly zooming out to my last question. We're so conditioned to be on that inertia, right, that track. And we're so conditioned to have these blinders on. But maybe a better way to say it is; there's this myth of things existing in their separate boxes and silos. And you talked about that with, oh, what does this have to do with conservation? Or, oh, that's an anthropological or social issue, not a climate issue. So, I wonder if you could do some myth-busting with me on how you view the different issues and potential for healing, contributing to each other within the context of the US. And if you want to broaden that, how does that actually feed into liberation efforts abroad, too?
As much as we are preconditioned through our education and socializing towards what you're mentioning, we are also conditioned by those things. We are also materially hindered from doing otherwise. So there are the mental, philosophical, social, and cultural processes that lead us to this, how you're mentioning, having blinders over our eyes situation. But there's also the fact that, well, you can only sit down and think about stuff as long as you can fill your belly, pay the rent, and cover your medical expenses.
I'm also seeing stagnation within the movement sector. And I think that I don't know the reasons why that is, but I'm seeing it discoursefully. I sit in discourse, and I think that the healing processes can very easily fall into that stagnation to the point where I've come to think, well, yeah, we can all heal, but if someone is still whacking you on the head continuously there's only so much healing you can do, right? So, to me, that's a Puerto Rican running gag: I'll heal when I get my land back! Because Minnow works in the context of the Land Back movement and efforts, I don't mean that literally, but it kinda is true, right? It's a bleeding wound, at least mine is. There's only so much healing you could do if you're still bleeding.
My journey unfolded from a quasi-radical atheist and pro-science liberal to questioning all that, and I don't even know how to label myself now, a questioning post-capitalist-aspiring queer Puerto Rican? I don't know, but you can label me however you want. But anyway, whatever I am now, I think Indigenous cosmologies have gifted me, in my limited knowledge of them, a way out of that conundrum. Several authors and academics, like Robin Wall Kimmerer, Kyle Whyte, and Zoe Todd, have changed my perspective entirely. They are all Indigenous folks who write from their belief systems. They did not abandon the sciences or empirical processes of knowledge and knowing the world but complemented them with their ancestral views. The more I learn about Indigenous people across the world, I think that it is more natural and more adequate to the Earth itself and to the ecosystems of this planet than the modern or late-modern enlightenment nightmare that we are still living in. I know that is a broad brush stroke, an all-encompassing view of sorts. Well, not of sorts. It is what it is, right? Capitalism is capitalism across the planet. It's an all-encompassing view and it destroys all. It has thrived precisely by destroying the subtleties and the small differences that Indigenous peoples and Indigenous views provide, are based on, or are at their heart.
And the sciences have been instrumental in all this destruction. I like to remind people a lot that you don't find oil with one of those water-dowsing wood sticks. “The science” is also part of the fossil fuel industry. It operates with scientists. Many pro-science folks forget that “the science” is just a human tool to understand and operate on the world and that, as such, it is operated by humans and has all of the faults of humans and human societies. There's no such thing as objectivity in that sense within the sciences.
So that's a long-winded way to say that one has to destroy the idea within oneself and others that we can be better but remain the same. I don't think we can be better without becoming someone else or being able or willing to become someone else. You can extrapolate that to the United States, and you can extrapolate that to the modern nation-states of the world and to how they've been dealing with each other, with Indigenous folks, and with their borders.
I'm hearing you point to this simultaneous homogenizing and also this categorization that happens within this American colonial worldview that's really spread across the globe. And then what does that mean when people are navigating that with their understanding of place and history? And then to challenge that simply by allowing ourselves to be, and allowing ourselves to become, and also allowing others to reveal themselves to us, to reintroduce themselves as they change.
But if you could speak to when you are in these intercultural and inter-spiritual relationships or relationship building with the work you do with Minnow. There's this huge potential for ongoing healing, right? Because the wound is open and, as you said, there are so many challenges, materially and socially. So there's this potential for ongoing healing and also a potential for re-wounding. I wonder if you have any thoughts on, or experience in navigating that space because we're being asked to really engage with each other across those borders.
To land all of these almost esoteric and broad topics down to concreteness, it's about giving back the land. That's why we focus on land tenure. I think a lot of that comes from the fact that this system of exploitation was founded on partitioning and appropriating the land, the landscapes, and the places, assigning them new names, and breaking them up with a Cartesian, two-dimensional cartographic approach to space. Then, creating deeds and ownership and all of this made-up stuff. So, I guess it's easier to heal and be healthier because maybe we never heal. Maybe some folks are never going to heal entirely, but shifting a little bit the focus on healing or being healed as this stance does open the door to more of a question of how we are doing, right, to how are we “being.” Then, the focus is a little bit more on well-being, and I think that to have well-being, you need a place to be at, and to have a place, you need land. Then you also need other stuff that sort of compounds in the poly-crisis; a roof over your head, access to food, and so on, obviously, but you can't have any of that because you don't have land to begin with. So that's why Minnow focuses on the land and land tenure, because that is a prerequisite for healing regardless of whether you heal entirely or not.
I'm snapping over here! It is such an important way to end this conversation, literally ground it back in, and take action steps to go further. Is there anything else you want to share to close that you didn't get to?
Maybe about the relationship between storytelling, art, independent publishing, and liberatory change? I'm so familiar with the sense that we live in constructed boxes and concepts, and you can; as much as you can build anything off of words, you can also destroy everything off of words, right? This goes a bit to that question about independent storytelling, art, and independent publishing as liberatory change. From my perspective as a storyteller, I guess there are two functions, and that's how I see it at Minnow. There's the function of telling other people, and in our case, people of color, narratives and stories. First, there’s telling them to ourselves because we don't see that too much at all. Then, there has been a recent resurgence of Indigenous peoples in the US telling their own stories since a lot of Indigenous folks don't call themselves American, to begin with. I don't call myself American and Puerto Rican, either.
There is a resurgence in telling our own stories across the board, and I think the importance of independent storytelling and all this do-it-yourself, almost punk approach to doing it is that, hey, we're just telling our own story. We don't need a mediator to tell our story, and I think that's the kind of image that we're trying to build, this image of these folks who are just telling their own story and the story of the people they work with. I think that's where the importance of that lies, particularly in a world where we are increasingly more cynical and skeptical of this mediated reality, of social media companies, and of all these middle people who are occupying the space between us and also occupying the space that separates us from ourselves, and from the land. That's the importance of telling our own story because we are doing away with those who are just there to profit, those who are ripping us off by being in-between.
And it's creating further material separation between people and land and what people can access with resources that contribute to their well-being or otherwise. Thanks for bringing it back to material change and also narrative change and how they feed into each other. It’s so important. I don't know if you would use the words because English is a trap, and so, we're creating our own language, correcting and questioning as we go, right? But I heard this braiding of the spiritual and the material happening in many of your reflections. So I just wanted to lift that up, too.
Thank you. It's beautiful seeing that, yes.