Mi pequeño bebé, 

Con amor y ternura revolucionaria, I write to you while seated in the driver’s seat of my old and worn EV overlooking the horizon of the ocean side on West Cliff in Santa Cruz. Here is where I find refuge, courage, and faith. I return to the sacredness of the ocean when I need to clear my heart, mind, and soul. When I need una buena limpia, a spiritual cleanse. 

Photo by Jesica taken at West Cliff Drive in Santa Cruz, California (USA)

The short-term remedy to the spirit wound; the ocean helps me to reset, restore and return to the essence of living liberation. I arrive and revive here. Heading 32 miles “over the hill” through the curves of the so-called “most dangerous” road in the State: Highway 17. Driving through it is a meditation on life these days, on the passing of time, the precarity of life, and the necessity to remain in the moment—a drastic turn, swift swing, or look toward the phone, emails, news and all the impending polycrises unfolding and circulating would be deadly. I remain hands on the wheel, eyes to the road: steady speed, safe distance, sights on the path ahead. I use these mantras for how to look at the present, and the chaos that is erupting; the eradication of DEI policies and practices, LGBTQ+ lives under threat, migrant communities criminalized, folks of color dehumanized—time and time again. The mantra: may my thoughts be steady, present and free—from hate, ill-will, suffering; may my words improve upon the silence, ignorance, and fear; and may my actions and intentions be guided by the heart, with courage and faith. 

As I overlook the ocean, the clear skies, and the warm turning of the spring sun, I’m comforted for a moment in the symphony of murmurations that synchronize to convey that together we are stronger. That we are all moving “at the speed of trust” (brown, 2017). And, that “we were made for these times” (Lingo, 2021). The present moment feels far too uncertain and many futures hang by a thread in the unknown. The ambiguity, along with fear and anxiety among us in response to the oppressive policies that may come through, how institutions will be quick to acquiesce or become complicit, is jarring to the soul. Yet we must resist, and makeshift points of intervention, moments, and movements, where we radically challenge the anticipatory obedience, the totalized oppression and fascism that is emerging to crumble our lives—and souls. We must upend these systems of power even before they rise through relational, spiritual, and collective actionable forms of rebellion that reach beyond the present call, and toward the enduring struggle for freedom, dignity, and love in the everyday; every breath. Ella Baker (1969) said it best: “We are going to have to learn to think in radical terms. … It means facing a system that does not lend itself to [our] your needs and devising means by which [we] you change that system. That is easier said than done. But one of the things that has to be faced is, in the process of wanting to change that system, how much we have to do to find out who we are, where we have come from, and where we are going.” I know who I am (yet I am also always a work in progress); I know where I come from (mis abuelas, y mi madre remind me); and I know where I’m going. I’m willing you into existence, mi bebé, porque lo más radical que puedo hacer es crear vida when so many lives—lives of children and youth, migrants, people of color and more are under threat. As resources, services, and policies for gender justice and reproductive health rights are cut and overturned, we are willing you into existence. For the past 19 months H. T. and I have been on the IVF journey. 

Photo and art-piece created by Jesica; a practice of healing through nature art-making.

Why? It is a question I’ve been asked often. Especially as I was preparing to submit my tenure and promotion file, at the same time as I was starting my first IVF cycle. Why? I was asked by academics. Why bring a child into this world that seems to be so much in decay? Why am I doing this under the current political climate? Am I not afraid of the future, of the world that a child will be birthed into? Why go through this now as I await my tenure case? As the political climate seems to grow more and more intense? Would it not be better to wait until after tenure? When the political climate shifts? When the Clementine-looking person we have as President leaves the Office? Why now? You see, amor mio, I’m tired of living in fear. Of racing against time. Of justifying life, living, and the right to exist. Anchoring my desire for life, love, and liberty I am reminded of Assata Shakur’s (2001) radical mothering: “I’m not letting these parasites, these oppressors … make me kill my children in my mind before they are even born.” Like Assata, I refuse to accede to the attacks, threats, and fears. In choosing to pursue reproductive assistance to conceive, I want to birth a revolutionary. 

Because I want us to be free. Because I want us to be in relationship with one another in ways that are untethered to capitalism, coloniality, white supremacy, nation-state, and the intersections of oppressive systems with a prehistory of the present, I refuse to obey. I will not be held hostage by time, and these times. Instead, I want time to be an agent of liberation, of wisdom and intuition aligned with abolition. I refuse and resist the culture of terror, and the unfolding of fascism. I dream of a time where we can all be free. Now!

Photo by Jesica taken at the Walking Stories Exhibition by the Edge On The Square in collaboration with the Asian Americans for Civil Rights & Equality (AACRE) in San Francisco, California (USA)

So, why pursue this path toward birth-giving now? Well, because there is no better time than now to bring into this world, this blessed precious earth we have plundered and taken for granted, a life that can be shaped by the constellations of joy and love in the face of violence; freedom and liberation from suffering; and connection, reciprocity, and diversity in the trenches of division, scarcity, and hegemony. I do not consent to existing under conditions of anticipatory obedience. Instead, I choose to be in relationality with all peoples and in the quicksand. In what I can best describe as “mindful movidas” or onto-epistemological processes and practices of mindfully being and living attentive to what is unfolding. Where I can actively discern how to best use our collective energy and time to co-create, commune, enact collectivized care, and embody critically compassionate relationships of reciprocity and accountability—to hold what must be held with courage and faith as it emerges. 

The hand that I use to journal down my random thoughts is the same hand that holds a fist in the air—that hand is the same hand I use to administer the dose of injectable hormones and jot down the sizes of my follicles at each ultrasound visit—a protest sign. Theory in the flesh, as Moraga (1987) writes: “means one where the physical realities of our lives—our skin color, the land or concrete we grew up on, our sexual longings—all fuse to create a politic born of necessity.” Right-hand over left-hand I hold a prayer to the heart that we may come to see clearly, enact participatory disobedience, and heal alongside and with those who wish to see us oppressed. We the pueblo, the people—folks of color, immigrant/migrant, women, transgender, youth, neurodivergent; the abolitionist, healers, and movers of moments and minds; the teachers, youth workers, writers, and creatives—are rising. We have been rising and resisting. And we will be raising life, brewing life—corazones y personitas para crear y ver formado lo que Anzaldúa (1987) called El Mundo Zurdo. The left-handed world is in the making. 

When the time comes, you will come to me. Pero hasta entonces, seguiremos en la lucha constante, adelante, forward and onward. The world that is, as dire as it feels in my heart, is the emergence of something new that we have the blessing and the challenge to co-create. The struggle that is now are the rehearsals for living liberation (Maynard & Betasamosake Simpson, 2022). Living that is and will be because of love—love as praxical, as the embodiment of freedom from suffering. Loving in the trenches of oppression is having the courage to express and enact participatory disobedience. And, to liberate minds and actions from the conditionings of fear and hate, because like Luisah Teish (1987), I too am rooting for a world “where everybody has their basic necessities and the freedom to be who they are. The freedom to express the spirit that is inside of them.” With faith and courage, fist and corazon, paso a paso we must insist that liberation is an active practice of enacting and embodying “everybody’s rights to express the spirit that lives in them,” of being love. Let us do that together. Con estas palabras te espero en el mundo que está por nacer. Y tú, vida mía, por ser.

Te amo.