GET TO KNOW YOUR FOODSHED PEOPLE! MEET CSA MEMBER AMRAH
Tell me a little about yourself and your roots.
I grew up in the bay area. My family is originally from Yuma Arizona and we are indigenous to that area and we do have a lot of extended family here in San Diego. I moved to San Diego in 2011 to go to grad school and be closer to my grandparents who were living down here at the time. I think they’ve been here since the 1940’s. So, that’s how I got here and a lot of my cousins are still here. I recently finished grad school and I’m getting ready to transition up to Santa Barbara. I got a job there at UCSB in the English department. While everything is still remote, I’m trying to stay in San Diego as long as I can.
How did you come into doing what you do?
So, I’m a poet, that’s why I'm moving to this job in English, working with media and creative writing. The other, sort of, hat, is that I do a lot of activist work which has gone through a bunch of weird, complicated trajectories. When I was up in the bay, I was involved with an organization called Poder which is an environmental justice organization. I was also doing a lot of union organizing and involved with a worker-owned cooperative and just getting involved in a lot of different things. And, you know, one trajectory coming out of that was that I saw a lot of toxicity within our movement spaces and so, I’ve kind of moved into the world of anti-oppression organizing and that’s some of the work that I do in San Diego as a consultant for transformative justice mediation and anti-oppression facilitation and organizing and that just comes from really intense experiences with toxicity as an activist myself and trying to think about different ways that we can work together. And coming out of that experience with organizing with Poder and then getting kind of back to my roots here along the border, I’ve done a lot of thinking about what it means to be involved in the environmental justice kind of world.
So, right now, the way that looks is, I support a lot of indigenous land protection and land descent efforts. And I’m part of the Center for Interdisciplinary Environmental Justice (CIEJ) which is a crew of scientists who support indigenous land protectors and water protectors with data and science. That’s one of the things I like to do. And through that we’re thinking about different questions of how to, you know, be with the land in a better way. It means something different for me depending on where I’m at. If I’m in Arizona, it’s different because that’s where my people are from and we have a lot of different relationships to that land, and that’s sacred land for us, it’s ancestral land and I feel I know how to be with it. Here, in California, I’m a visitor on other indigenous land, so, to me, I’ve been trying to do a lot more collaboration with California native folks and supporting their efforts in land protection, and their cultural work and cultural revitalization and sovereignty. And, yea, so that’s some of the other stuff that I do. I’ve been working a lot with the Rincon Youth Storytellers, which is a Luiseño and Kumiai youth group up in Rincon. So we do a lot of fun stuff with the youth, you know, supporting their growth and leadership development.
What makes you feel connected to the land that you inhabit today, to this foodshed?
I think, a couple of different things. One is supporting the Rincon Youth Storytellers, I do support and go out with them gathering and getting to learn about the land and learn about some of the traditional things that we do on the land. And I’ve also done some work supporting kumiai folks with similar projects in some land defense work that they’ve done out in El Monte Valley. So, I have these, kind of, more activist projects like that. But then also, I think about just how am I living on this land and am I doing it in a good way. And part of what I try to do with that is really just be very mindful about my own consumption habits. I’m not trying to plant a lawn nowhere. Unfortunately, I rent a house where I do have one and I’m trying to, like, you know, fight with my landlord all the time because I’m sticking native plants in and she gets mad because she wants these water-guzzling tropical plants that don’t belong here. So, we are always battling about that. But, I think part of what I try to do, too, is think about where I’m getting my food from. Can I get things locally? Can I try to have as small of a footprint as possible.
The word Regenerate can be defined as:
to improve a place or system so that it is active or producing good results again
to renew life or energy or spirit.
What are your regenerative practices?
I think, I come at regeneration from, maybe, a different context. It’s funny. This is something I actually write about a lot right now with my academic work. It’s becoming a really popular word with permaculture networks and environmental networks here in the U.S. But it has a longer history as a discourse, particularly, in Spanish. So those of us who are connected with Mexico, it has a whole different set of discourses and relationships in Mexico. (inaudible 324-326 sec) one of the concepts and rallying cries coming out of the 1910 Mexican revolution. In that context, it initially meant what we would think of now as abolition. It was started by folks who were critical of the police state, of the military, of the criminal justice system, of the dictatorship. And they were thinking about it as also, a reaction to white supremacy. Because, white supremacy logic, at the turn of the century, were talking about, there were all these languages of racial purity and mixed people and black and brown people were thought of as less than human and framed in this language as hybridity as being something detrimental to the human evolution. And so like, mexicanos were kind of critiquing that and saying, no, we are interested in regenerating our indigenous traditions, our indigenous politics, our ways of resistance and building our autonomy beyond colonialism. They framed it as first, abolition against the dictatorship and the state. And then it became, through the course of the revolution, more expansive to include indigenous resurgence. Particularly indigenous autonomy and former enslaved autonomies beyond colonialism. So, all the different politic, culture, practices, ways of living with the land that weren’t being on a plantation or being a worker or being colonized, you know. And so it has this really different context, I think, in Mexico, than the way people are using it here--It can be depoliticized, in the sense of it being something that is just talking about economies where in this more radical history in Mexico, it was really anti-colonialism and abolition.
And that if we want to be in the land in a different way, we have to center that. And, I think that’s what regeneracion or regeneration means to me. And I think native folks in Canada are thinking through it really similarly right now, about it being a move towards decolonization that’s really critical of extractions, really critical of consumption and all of these colonial frameworks that we relate to each other and to the land.
And so, regeneration has to do a little bit with pruning meaning. You need to cut off the things that are no longer working, the diseased parts of the plant if we’re thinking of the agricultural metaphor, and then allow the plant to regrow so you don’t have those damaged areas. I think that’s how I think about the radicalism, kind of more abolitionist and revolutionary parts of it--is that work of cutting and pruning so that we remove what’s been harming us and allow us to regrow, and not in this romanticized way. You know, being pretty aware that 500 years or more of colonialism has harmed us, it’s harmed the land, you know, and we’re going to have to heal from that.
And I think, that’s why I like Solidarity, too, because, you know. I’ve talked to them and we’ve gone out there with our son, too. You know, just their whole structure, having the relationship with Pauma that they have, the organic practices they’re using on the land, that they’re also involved in this anti-racist work with refugee communities. It’s just a very different way of being with land and place that they’re exemplifying that we really like to be connected to.
