Retrieving to Radicalize: How Home is My Starting Point to Everything

Anti-Capitalist

Before diving in, I want to step back and define home. To me, it is an expansive
concept. I include “home” as not only including my direct living space (a mobile home
park in Los Angeles) and the motherland (Mexico) but also my cultural ancestors, blood
ancestors, my immediate and/or living family, and any communities I am a part of. I
encourage you all, before starting this, to take a moment and consider the entities that
are included in your home.

Cultural Ancestors
As a Chicana with Mexican immigrant parents, acknowledging my inherent connection
to my cultural ancestors (those within our culture, not necessarily connected by blood,
who lived before us) has helped me navigate some of the dissonance I feel as to finding
a history I belong to. I can draw from my parents, grandparents and beyond-- but there
is only an extent I felt I could authentically connect to those histories seeing as I simply
did not grow up in Mexico. Similarly, connecting to Chicano history used to be difficult to
me because my family’s time on this land has only been of a mere generation. The
concept of a cultural ancestor, an ancestor who watches over me and I can talk to, has
greatly mended this divide and doubled the amount of connection I feel to the people
who came before me.

Particularly, I resonate very much with Las Pachucas of the 1940s—the female
counterparts to zoot suiters.

Before talking about Pachucas, though, it is important to discuss ​their​ cultural ancestor:
La Malinche, historical traitor turned Mexican nationalist archetype. Knowing Nahuatl,
Mayan, and Spanish, she acted as translator, concubine, and guide for conquistador
Hernan Cortes. She had at least two children with Spaniards, and as such is branded as
the literal and mythical mother of mestizos, of conquered Mexico. While the true story of
her existence is contentious and rich, I am more interested in talking about Malinche
within the context of herself as an archetype.

Applying the Madonna/ Whore complex to Mexican nationalist discourse, La Malinche

(nicknamed “La Chingada,” literally meaning “The Fucked One”) is the Whore
counterpart to The Virgin of Guadalupe’s Madonna. As such, her archetype is upheld in
a manner that enforces Mexican and Chicano nationalism— she is first and foremost a
sexual deviant, the epitome of “woman’s inherent unreliability” (Rita Cano Alcala),
everything that respectable Mexican families fear their daughter will become. Naturally,
the comparison between Malinche and Pachucas suggests that they were a subject of
contempt within the Mexican/ Chicano L.A. community at the time. But this open
defiance of Mexican and Chicano nationalisms is precisely what makes Las Pachucas
such a compelling symbol of liberation for me.

Las Pachucas were a threat to the nuclear family, a unit upheld through the 1960s even
in radical Chicano activism, in ways that transcended the boundaries of what it means
to be Chicana. Catherine S. Ramirez in ​The Woman in the Zoot Suit ​writes that
“pachucas were condemned for being dangerously masculine and, at the same time,
monstrously feminine,” (20). Pachucas donned hyper-feminine, exaggerated makeup
and hair, tight underclothes and sometimes practiced sexual promiscuity while also
wearing baggy coats, pants, and taking on an assertive demeanor. They were also
often gang members or leaders, and, even more excitedly, either participated
exclusively in homosocial communities or were explicitly queer.

In these ways and more their threat to the nuclear family can also be interpreted as a
means of anti-capitalist praxis— the fear they aroused in Mexican immigrants and
Chicanos alike can partly be attributed to the threat they posed to assimilation into the
American capitalist lifestyle, which for women at the time indeed was rooted in being the
backbone of the nuclear family, supporting the single laboring husband and rearing
children to become wage-makers themselves. And for this to have occurred in the midst
of WWII, a time when the ethos of American patriotism, cultural reverence, and
capitalistic economic duties were particularly strong, is quite remarkable.

However, because of all this, the Pachuca is either underwritten or completely left out of
Chicano history. Ramirez writes that “…in the context of World War II and the Chicano
movement, the pachuca, as malinche, gangsterette, pocha, alien, whore, and lesbian,
failed to reproduce the ideal subjects of normative gender and sexuality and U.S. and
Chicano nationalisms— hence her absence in much movement-era cultural production,”
(23). This erasure has affected me particularly as a Chicana— it was not until very
recently in which I was able to learn in-depth about the cultural significance, existence,
even, of pachucas.

But when I did, it was epiphanous. Around that time I was barely recovering from
chronic anxiety, which mostly manifested in a severe identity crisis. As I stepped into
womanhood and began deviating from my identity as a good student, daughter, and
woman, I began to experience a lot of what I thought was dissonance with who I was. It
was extremely distressing, and I carried an immense amount of guilt because of it— so
much that I went to the emergency room four times for anxiety attacks and physical
symptoms, and had a particularly memorable panic attack on move-in day. Learning
about pachucas meant so many things to me.

It meant that there was space for complexity in my Mexican womanhood, space that is
historically supported by ancestors who love me. It meant that the way I am evolving is
not a series of big mistakes as I had thought, but a natural trajectory informed by the
politics I hold. It is okay and even revolutionary to defy the expectations of capitalist life.
Right now, as I edge slowly into my queerness, I keep this in mind.

Cultural Ancestors: Onto Brujas

Brujas, witches, and spiritual workers are also another cultural ancestor of mine. And as
a white-presenting Chicana, I look not only toward Mexico but to Europe for the women
who hold me ancestrally.

While Pachucas can be posited as anti-capitalist figures through their mere existence,
witches as an identity are defined by a practice that is inherently anti-capitalist. It is the
difference, to me, between a passive set of politics versus an active one— although this
is not to compare either’s importance. However, in a digital world where words are over
saturated and revolutionary existence materially diluted, I think this distinction is
important to note. Witches have a powerful history of radical resilience and resistance,
one that is often watered down and constricted in the way it is taught to us. Witches and
other spiritual healers’s struggles were not singularly European, but prominent in
indigenous communities in the fight against colonization-- both intrinsically tied to the
history of capitalism. They were most subjugated at the cusp of ushering in capitalism
precisely because their practices, and any belief in magic, were not conducive to an
economic system dictated by living for a wage.

One of the most fundamental ways in which witchcraft opposes capitalism is in its
situation of women. Marxist Feminist Silvia Federici poses a compelling theory about
this in her book ​Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation.​
Something that accompanied the shift from previous economic orders to capitalism was
how the body was characterized. In summarizing Federici’s argument, Sarah Lyons
puts it best: “Before the commodification and and mechanization of the world, the
metaphor doctors and healers would use for the human body was that each was a
garden…the combination of capitalism, the scientific revolution, and the Protestant
Reformation changed this metaphor. Suddenly, your body wasn’t a garden anymore, it
was a machine.” This mechanization of the body, in turn, defined women by their ability
to reproduce— particularly, reproduce the workforce. And the ways in which witches
and healers often controlled the means of (re)production in this area, through
women-centric, holistic, personal, and spiritually grounded ways of providing birth
control, abortions, and midwifery, were averse to these new capitalist modes. As such,
it was important to take these powers out of the hands of witches (women) and into
those of “the male-controlled state.”

And, as you can deduce, power was taken through things like witch trials. Lyons’ makes
the interesting observation that one of the ways in which witches were demonized,
justifying their ordered banishments or executions, was by accusing them of eating or
killing children. This characterization pervades in the imagery we associate with witches
even today— think Hansel and Gretel, think fornicating with the Devil. Thus, through
erasing witches and the way they practiced healing, capitalism gendered medicine as
masculine. And to this day, we still see the violence this gendering brings toward
women and their healthcare— especially black and brown women.

Witchcraft also had to be stomped out to herd in capitalism because of the way it
conceptualized land, nature, and beings: as entities with inherent value, deserving of
reverence and respect. In an economic system defined by violently and arbitrarily
commodifying these things, it was important to diminish the power of this belief. As
such, it has been noted that one of the first things to be completely destroyed in the
process of stealing, dividing, and selling land (be it the Enclosure movement in Europe
or the colonization of the Americas) was magic--- however, this does not mean that
witches and the world of magic was squashed without a fight. Witches often played
prominent roles in anti-feudal and anti-capitalist movements in Europe, as did many
women in indigenous movements against colonization. Witches were community
members, they displayed camaraderie. To be a witch was inherently to be
anti-capitalist, and it was the active participation in all fights against it. You cannot
divorce this history from them if you want to practice magic authentically and correctly.
(It is also for this reason that I will strongly assert that we need not purchase any crystal
or herb bundle to practice witchcraft— it is more authentic if you decommodify your
practice as much as you can!)

Personally, practicing magic is one of the main ways I am learning to practice (and not
merely believe in) anti-capitalism. I talked about witchcraft quite generally, but for myself
in particular my work is informed by Mexican Catholicism and brujeria. (But, more
distantly, I do consider European witches as cultural ancestors). From my knowledge,
my ancestors have been practicing and believing in magic for several generations— my
great aunt died of a curse, my parents grow an array of plants for healing purposes, and
my sisters and I often go to sobadores and other healers ourselves. And the very
existence of Mexican Catholicism, with its traces of indigenous styles of worship like
polytheism and emphasis on nature-based ritual, shows how resilient magic can be.
Even through the brutal devastation of colonial genocide, magic persists.

And, again, it is our duty to practice it wholeheartedly in a way that actively seeks to
combat the forces that have threatened to destroy it for centuries. All magical practices,
when done thoughtfully, are inherently anti-capitalist. The emphasis in connection to all
things, sentient or not, is quite antithetical to the philosophy capitalism espouses, one of
assigning varying degrees of value to objects and compartmentalizing them. A lot of the
ways I personally practice magic, naturally, follows this theme of connection: I make
altars to honor my ancestors and the elements, I spend time outside meditating in an
effort to reconnect with the land underneath me, I use locally sourced herbs in all my
rituals for the same reasons, and I find connection to land and family in the plants I grow
and use in my family’s medicine. Of course, any good witch who preaches the doctrine
of “connecting with the land” also acknowledges all the things this (in the case of the
United States, stolen) land has gone through— genocide, segregation, malnutrition. It
means playing an active role in indigenous resistance movements (included in this, land
conservation), food sovereignty, and more. (And in regards to new-age Internet
witchcraft, this absolutely means not using sacred indigenous plants like white sage. Or
participating in surface-level nature worship by being a vegan without cross-analyzing
indigenous means of engaging with land, the burden of popular vegan crops on
exploited workers, etc.)

Another bonus way to actively channel magic into our political practice is by using a
meditation technique coined by Sarah Lyons in her aforementioned book. Lyons
describes magic as “the power of belief,” and that in order to talk about a utopian world
we must meditate on everything we bestow belief on that, otherwise, we might think
inherent to the world (money, borders), as well as expand our imaginations to believe in
what we thought not possible. It more or less follows what many of us know as
“manifestation”: once we bestow belief in the possibility of something, we operate under
the premise that it will happen. And everything then follows. This also digs into
something more practical about the fight: so many hone in on the destruction of the
world as we know it, but do not have any visions of what we can build. (People love to
talk about anti-capitalism, but only a fraction of those folks talk about communism.)

So, the meditation is as follows: meditate on utopia. That’s it. Sit or lie down for 5-10
minutes, and imagine yourself in your perfect world. What does it look like? What
infrastructure does it have? Under what philosophy are we living out our lives? What do
you eat in the morning? Do it, and do it and do it, until there is simply no way to live
without at least fighting for this vision. (For more, definitely check out Sarah’s book,
Revolutionary Witchcraft: A Guide to Magical Activism​. It is a more robust and
well-explained guide to magical activism that uses real examples, from the Zapatistas to
those at Standing Rock.)

In these ways, magic exercises the muscle of connection— and it is my very strong
belief that acknowledging that we should have a stake in each other’s liberation (and
that includes that of sacred grounds, buildings, land and all nature) is one of the most
powerful ways of approaching the work we do. The magical recognition that everything
on this earth has an inherent value and deserves respect and love expands the
meaning of liberation from something a personal matter to one that is in solidarity with
all the beings of this planet. I have as much stake in the liberation of Palestine, global
black liberation, and queer liberation as I do in matters of Latin American liberation, and
vice-versa.

***
On the topic of magic and connection and land comes in gardening. It was not until
recently that I realized how much my love for gardening and the right to nourishment is
carried in my blood. Through both my father and mother’s family lines, I am descended
from small-time farmers, communal ones, or campesinos— serfs. And because of this,
there is so much embedded in my gardening practice.

My family and I both grow at home, and with others in our local community garden.
Again, there is magic to it in the way it espouses connection. I feel connected to the dirt
underneath my hands that I sow, the leaves I turn, the plump fruits I pick. I feel my feet
planted in the land beneath me. In my labor, I feel connected and practice empathy
toward my ancestors, toward farmworkers who are exploited today, who cannot even
afford to enjoy the fruits of their labor (For more: ​Das Kapital​ by Marx, ​Tomatoland​ by
Barry Estabrook.) And, in a more active sense, gardening (especially at a community
garden) is a powerful anti-capitalist and communist practice. When I’m at the community
garden, I feel the magic of what a communist world could look like. Where we are not so
entrenched in consumerism and working to the bone that we feel the need to buy things
we can make. Where we talk to our neighbors and feel a stake in their lives, materially
supporting them— sharing our bounty. Every day when my family returns home with figs
or plums or strawberries or tomatoes from our neighbor, I believe more and more in the
goodness of a communist society. It is truly, truly healing.
And I find it important to note that it is the doing of my own parents that I am able to
experience this. Not through my assigning them political narratives as their
first-generation child, something many of us are guilty of doing.

Our Parents
Unpacking the way I perceive, present, and engage with my parents has been one of
the most compelling ways I’ve come to radicalize myself. Bottom line, we must unlearn
the capitalist modes in which we understand our immigrant parents.

By default in this country, our parents are units of labor, political identities without
agency, susceptible to be commodified and exchanged for whatever agenda. This
sounds like the work of politicians but it is something we entirely participate in,
especially in the ways we celebrate them. Be it graduation or mother or father’s day, a
lot of what our captions and think-pieces consist of is a glorification of their political
situation as immigrants, their bone-breaking labor, and their selflessness. We
contextualize all this as admirable and necessary to our own sole destinies as students
or workers or whatever. We then conclude by positing ourselves as the most
enlightened of our ancestral lines, as beings who stand atop a mountain of ancestors
instead of alongside them. And we infantilize our parents, our ancestors— we take their
votes and use them for our own agendas, we co-opt their stories and profit from it. We
make art without their consultation.

***

A lot of my canvassing experiences have involved going into Latine communities, and I
remember being astonished by the amounts of cynicism expressed toward our
government. And I regret the way I engaged with this, because I remember just digging
within myself for reasons to explain away this cynicism in a way that would secure the
vote I wanted. Dismissing these very real feelings by over-marketing my candidate. I
wish I would have just shut up and realized that there was something deeper there.

How, when taking my father’s job for itself and listening to his stories about working
since 14, I acknowledge that he has been exploited by capitalism. That the tears in his
eyes when he retells the story of seeing his childhood home for the last time before
immigrating did not have to happen--that it happened because of the failings of a
system we must destroy. That this cynicism points to how politically volatile my, and
other’s, parents' home countries are— an instability caused by American intervention,
colonization, exploitation. How the cynicism is absolutely, undeniably valid when applied
to the American establishment.
How it points to a need for more radical, sweeping change.

Mobile Home Park Living

Ultimately, I think that all of the ways within me in which I can find anti-capitalism—
brujeria, communal gardening— are present in my neighborhood. I think it was last
summer, when I’d walk around my trailer park community and observed so as to absorb
every detail before moving to college, when I realized the way in which growing up in
this place has primed me for communism.

I grew up in a mobile home park in a suburb of Los Angeles that was (and is) on the
brink of gentrification. We are low-income, working class, mostly immigrants. We share
laundry rooms and streets to play on. I know the names and lives of all my neighbors,
and I feel that the stakes of my existence are intrinsically linked with theirs. I grew up
sharing food and plants with my neighbors, I grew up playing with the children beside
me and being reared by their parents as much as mine. My dad always had small extra
streams of income because our wealthier neighbors never outsourced their handyman
jobs— they gave them to him. I grew up finding the existence of babysitters strange—
deep within me as a kid, even though I couldn’t articulate it, I knew there was something
viscerally abject to the idea of turning something as natural and communal as
care-taking into a commodity. Same goes for retirement homes. I’d always had a ride to
school, a home to stay in if my parents were working, someone keeping an eye out for
me when I was on the streets playing. Just last week, we got gifted zucchini, cilantro
seeds, a papaya tree, and a telescope. Yesterday we shared an afternoon snack with
our local postal worker, and the week before that a dinner with our local paletero. In this
home I was always, to quote ​Midsommar​, held.

And I almost feel emotional just writing about it, because I can genuinely say that so
much of my musings on communist utopia is informed by my small mobile home park.
We have a ways to go (mostly the product of still being in America)— getting rid of the
threat of being sold out by our landlord to some developer, meager wages, immigration,
drugs and gangs— but I think the ethos is so, so strong. Even if only in a small bubble, I
lived out a framing of labor that existed before capitalism: labor where we can see our
fruits. Labor toward the collective good of our community, not the profit of a single
capitalist. Because during one of the worst times of my life, home was often the
antidote. And I didn’t realize until very recently that home’s roots in communism were
antidotal precisely because they cancelled out the capitalistic roots of mental illness.

Notes on Anti-Capitalism and Mental Wellness

Now more than ever we are seeing more conversation about mental health and the path
to recovery— and that’s good! But I think, in many ways, the conversation is slowly
being usurped by an individualist and consumerist ethos, one that tells us that “the
causes of suffering are disproportionately inside us. [That] The underlying cause of
dissatisfaction is our chattering mind,” (​Bruce Lerro, 2020​). That it is not a plethora of
systems embedding itself into our psyche, but simply a personal problem.

This co-option of wellness has been dubbed McMindfulness-- you can read more about
it in Ronald E. Purser’s book of the same name. As someone who lives with severe
OCD and anxiety, I admit that I, too, have been victim to this framework of treating my
conditions. But, in retrospect, I can say that it is not the answer. And I urge you all to
consider the deep-rooted ways in which it is ​capitalism, ​and outside force, that further
estranges us from a held body and mind.

Relative to human history, capitalism is a recent invention. Invention. There is nothing

inherent about this system. For so long, the way we as a species have survived and
thrived is through relationships— to each other, land, food, the things we use. We do
not do well alone. And how capitalism destroys our human nature is through precisely
the opposite: atomization. We are compartmentalized into purchasable entities. “In
effect, humans have dragged a body with a long hominid history into an overfed,
malnourished, sedentary, sunlight-deficient, sleep-deprived, competitive, inequitable,
and socially-isolating environment with dire consequences,” (Sebastian Junger, ​Tribe​).
No community, no solidarity, no touch, no connection to most of the things we do and
consume. We do not know the histories of our lands and products beyond the place and
time in which they were purchased— we do not think of the rape this land has
experienced, we do not think about the well-being of the hands that pick our food. We
even atomize our babies, making them sleep alone and depriving them of human
touch-- Junger describes this as traumatic, and the reason why attachment to stuffed
animals is a recent Western phenomenon. We are disciplined to auto-function in ways
that our bodies and minds were never meant to function. And, beyond that, we suffer
from direct abuse at the hands of a government that denies us material survival
(healthcare…), a heteropatriarchy and racism that kills everyday, a dying planet.
Compound that with ancestors who were too victims of such things, and we come out
with legions of people with trauma.

One of the simplest and most accessible acts of healing I practice right now is talking to
my mother, who also has a charted history of mental health troubles. From listening to
her story and that of her mother’s, my grandma, I am continually astonished by how
much of this they carried, are carrying, and have passed onto myself to carry. How
compounded trauma has sent me to the emergency room so many times, made me
contemplate dying, weakened my body, made it so I would self-medicate with melatonin
every night so I wouldn’t have to live real life. And how much of that trauma indeed was
a result of capitalism. The abuse my grandmother experienced, the trauma of
immigration she and my mother went through, no access to healthcare. And I look at
their own frail minds and bodies, so much like my own, and I find incredible anger and
revolutionary conviction.

Indeed, it is in the daily rituals of healing where I find the most powerful source of
communist zeal. It is in treating my body in the way it is supposed to where I have
begun to reap my energy for revolution.

In always seeking connection. Ancestors, land, community. Always seeking connection.

Always.

***

“Alienation is the most oppressive tool of the Disenchanted World. If we are all atomized
and alone, without relationships to other people, food, objects, and even our bodies,
then how can we fight to change the world? Capitalism gets its power from alienation,
while witchcraft gets its power from relationships.”

Sarah Lyons, ​Revolutionary Witchcraft: A Guide to Magical Activism

***

Bottom Line
I know the idea of looking to home as a means of radicalizing isn’t very new. Especially
as poor children of immigrants, I know that simply growing up and looking around was
enough to embed the idea of liberation in us forever. However, I think there are many
different ways of framing such. I was certainly very liberal in high school, but as soon as
I started decentering myself from my perception of home, I became exponentially more
radical. I guess the simplest way to describe this shift is one from seeing home as a
reason to radicalize, to stepping back and seeing home as a practice.

If I sit very still and observe, I realize that my ancestors and neighbors have been
practicing radical politics since before I was born. If I stop assigning home narratives,
the act of which is inherently egotistic, I realize I do not lead them toward the path of
liberation, but they lead me. It is so easy to buy into the ego when American society,
sometimes even our own families, posture us as more worthy humans for attending
whatever institution. I’d even say this is the default. This all feeds into the idea that we,
as newly initiated heirs to the wealth of American capitalism, are the pinnacle of our
ancestral lines. But we are not. If we just shut up and listen, maybe we can find ways to
use the term “I am my ancestors’ wildest dreams” in a way that is authentic and sincere.

And, spoiler alert: that almost always means being an anti-capitalist. And anti-colonial,
anti-imperialist, anti-racist— communist.