how networks were weaved.
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Dear ones,
I am writing to you from a cafe in Athens where Peter will soon introduce me to friends who will take us on a history tour of Exarcheia, pointing out the spots where the ghosts of riots live. We just came from Croatia, where we spent days with anarchist bookmakers discussing differences and similarities in our movements, discussing dogs and trees and our birth charts. And after this, we’ll return to Peter’s squat in Catalunya, where we will tend to his garden, where we will meet a radical elder, and listen to the songs of the neighborhood cats. This is the stuff of dreams. Or at least it was the stuff of my dreams, for around a decade, until somewhere in my late twenties, I let them go.
During my senior year of college, I traveled to Guatemala on a women’s labor union delegation designed to connect activists in the US with women workers on banana plantations and in maquiladoras. I felt magnificently inspired on that trip, committed to becoming fluent in Spanish, and made a plan to focus on adjacent research in graduate school. The year after, I went on a service trip (cringe as it sounds, I think my liberation theology/Catholic worker-rooted university actually did a pretty decent job with this) to Ecuador, and eventually when I applied to my PhD program, I proposed a project on the concept of international solidarity: What does solidarity look like, in practice, when we are geographically far apart? I felt very driven to unpack how proclaiming solidarity with different peoples — from Palestinian resistors to the Zapatistas to sweatshop workers in Thailand — might be more than rhetoric, how it might have real teeth. I wanted to know how people made ties and connections, how networks were weaved. This pull to internationalism felt natural, having been politicized by a global war and reared by anti-WTO activists; anarchists of the early 00s were not raised to be US-centric.
I abandoned that vision of a research path (and of a life) for reasons good and bad. The good ones were self-reflective humility about my role in the struggle. Would I really unlock some kind of answer to creating meaningful solidarity across continents? Probably not. I knew there were likely people better suited than a white girl from the Midwest (who was still far from fluent in any other language) to make sense of something so big. Some of that was appropriate lane-staying, but some of it was simply intimidation. By the time I made it to my PhD program, all the people doing international research seemed smarter and more impressive and were applying for Fulbrights to travel. That all seemed too confusing to add on top of my overwhelm entering into the unfamiliar terrain of R1 academia. And so I switched gears, I focused on US social movements with only slight nods to connections abroad.
Falling in love with someone who lived outside of the US for over fifteen years was never part of the plan, but it’s been a little like time travel to be doing the things I dipped my toes in all those years ago.
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