This past weekend was a biggie for my class. Saturday was a Conference on Cooperatives, put on by my professors Anne Fischel, a few classmates, and the Olympia Food Coop. The audience was a mix of community members, students, people interested in food movements, and of course, our dear companeros from Cecosesola, a forty-year old cooperative in Barquisimeto, Venezuela. I helped show a film about

This past weekend, I attended an international conference in Portland called Open Engagement. It was a fourth annual gathering calling on artists and supporters to explore the idea of “social practice”, using art in communities. Students from my program “Venezuela: Building Economic & Social Justice” and students in the student group, the Dirty Hands Arts Collective, organized vans and overnight camping, collectively to learn from local communities on issues we prioritize in our work. I think that many of our expectations for the conference were to see more of a social justice aspect, find people asking questions such as: “How can we use art to uplift our communities and work through poverty or post-traumatic stress? Why is art the most powerful medium of communication when envisioning an alternate society?”. From many of the workshops we attended, it seemed that they audience was comprised of established artists of the NorthWest, who were embarking on the idea of using their art beyond their self-interest, exploring social-purpose within their art. There was no discussion about identity of the artist, social location, or privileges of the artists. A lot of the rhetoric was inaccessible for me as “non-artist”. It was a good experience in understanding a grouping of people with specific power and talent, and the perspectives they value and are currently changing. Us at Evergreen will be ready with open arms for their talent when the REVOLUTION STARTS!

Wednesday, my class will be hosting a public presentation at the adorable and progressive Traditions Cafe downtown entitled: “Venezuela: Myth and Realities”. Hopefully, the entire community will come to hear about the real action thats taking place in Venezuela, that Chavez is not a dictator, that poverty has gone down – and start imagining a different United States and realize that they can and should demand so much more from their government or start building it themselves.

The Olympia Food Co-op is doing an exchange with the great co-op of Barquisimeto, Venezuela: Cecosesola. “Ceco”, as nicknamed by our class, is a worker-cooperative that has been around since the early 1970s and now is home to 50 smaller cooperatives with a total of 1200 employees that make COLLECTIVE DECISIONS about their working conditions. Four delegates, Jesus, Javier, Ricardo, and Sneida have arrived from hot and slow South America to live among us kombucha-brewing-hoola-hooping-shoeless folk for four weeks to learn about cooperatives forms of organization in the U.S. of A.! Talk about culture shock. They all attended our spanish conversation class today – giggles swirled as terms were found or lost in translation. Its exciting to show them the culture we have so proudly developed and live in testimony to, here in Olympia, WA.

This week our class has been reading Real Utopia: Participatory Society for the 21st Century, a text that we all agreed upon to read. Its been interesting talking about models of alternate societies. Should we have a model to follow at all? Does that take away from people being able to decide or create their own fates? Or the way about finding their fate? Should change start with just creating better relations with the people around us? Is it just learning about how to communicate with our estranged? How do we do this while being interested in a long-term solution? This was the context and lineage of my small group seminar today!

May 1st is International Workers Day. One of the only holidays better celebrated in the rest of the world than the United States – that roots from a history of the United States.

My awesome classmates and awesome professors ventured up to Seattle to partake in the General Strike. Sure enough at the clock-turn of noon, we all caught up to an Anti-Capitalism march. There were many students and independent people, but also a group of people called the “Black Block” who turned out to be an anarchist group focused on direct-action. (They all dress in black to maintain anonymity.) They ended up smashing the windows of a Chase Bank, a Wellsfargo bank, the U.S. Court House, Niketown. It was quite chaotic, people running in every direction, no one sure of what was going on, a few people struck with pepper spray.

But the afternoon emanated a much hopeful spirit. The immigrant-rights march was full of families, it felt unified, it felt like the right place to be. Latino people and others in solidarity chanted in English and Spanish, demonstrating to the public that there is something to said and addressed toward the betterment of the lives and treatment of the Latino community in the United States.

Our class had a large discussion about the day’s events the following morning in class. Many students were upset that the Black Block had been so violent. Many students wanted to make the clear distinction that the Black Block was not violent, that they had simply damaged property. We discussed what it means to protest, what it means to interrupt society, what it means to be in solidarity with each other. It was a super cool experience to have together, and be support by our professors to be engaged in current movements and action, and then have formal time to reflect on such an experience collectively.

I have just returned from the three-day 22nd Annual Student of Color Conference in Yakima, WA. This year, the Asian Pacific Islander Coalition and First People’s Advising Services sponsored twenty-five of us, and students from the Evergreen Tacoma campus, to gather with 750 others students to talk about the role of race today. There were amazing speakers who stressed a sense of urgency for change, reiterating how backwards the direction of our institutions are headed: the fact that there are more blacks in prison now than there were blacks enslaved at the height of slavery; racist patterns in the justice system such as the Trayvon Martin case prevail; our government spends more money on foreign aid and defense than domestic services, etc.

Their speeches made me realize just how valuable knowledge is, each of them could site handfuls of famous scholars whose wisdom can shape the way we encourage justice in society. Granted- they all have three letters after their names (“Ph.D.”), but it helped me better understand that my mind is my greatest tool, and is exactly what the “man” wants control of. I need to become a “warrior-scholar”; I find myself feeling most insecure about speaking up because I don’t feel confident in how much I know and don’t know. Studying up, learning the history of my ancestors, the history of poor people, the history of people of color, the history of their collaboration, theirs movements, their struggles- will overall be my fuel in life.

I have now been back from Venezuela for 10 days. It is so difficult to explain the complete culture-shock I am having. I am trying to adjust to the extreme climate change, hearing English, and having a ton of homework again. Venezuela was beyond words incredible and I feel so fortunate to have been there for two months! I also traveled to Colombia at the end for ten days.

Our class is still together this quarter and has been trying to process everything we have learned in Venezuela, and turn our ideas into useful material to educate our own communities. We’ve set up a bunch of projects collectively: a documentary, a mural on campus, a speaker’s bureau with discussion forums and workshops, participation in a conference on cooperatives, an interactive and educational website, an educational fair with art components, and a diagnostic of community resources in Olympia. This will be a big test of how well we can support each other as classmates, and provide a space for dialogue and processing.

We are also focusing on community organizing and local and ordinary histories through the texts we’re writing. We’re reading Howard Zinn’s APeople’s History of the United States, a very popular and empowering book. If you’re ever feeling small and unproductive towards a better world, read this book. Some people find it depressing, so you can always read Voices of the History of United States, an anthology of primary sources: speeches, diary entries, letters, official reports, of people that correspond with the first book. Its made me think a lot about my relationship with history, and helps me acknowledge the intellectual capacity and understanding of justice that ordinary people have had for decades – something traditional history lessons leave out. It also challenges the idea that our current situation is the most “advanced”, “intellectual”, or “civil”.

Spring quarter is always the busiest, most exciting, with really awesome presentations at the end. I know its going to go by fast!

This is my final week at Evergreen before I head to Venezuela for the rest of the quarter! The best part of it is that we are covered in inches of fluffy, freezing, discouraging Christmas-time snow in Olympia – and in less than a week, I will be flaunting denim shorts in the Southern Hemisphere, drenched in sunblock against the 80 degree heat. Hard life, I know.

I am rambunctiously gathering everything I need, signing paper work, finishing scholarships. Its pretty stressful, but will all be worth it in the end. I guess my main anxiety is my lack of Spanish language skills. But I’m continually told, and know from experience, that it always kicks in once you’re there. I also have some anxiety about the violence and robbery in Venezuela, the fact that Venezuela has the highest murder rate in the world. My friend, who traveled to South America exactly a year ago, convinced me that I might as well be prepared for it all- its going to happen to someone I know. Being robbed in a third world country is something that happens to travelers- but after it happens, you deal with it, and then you have story.

The Evergreen Study Abroad guy, Michael Clifthorne, did an AWESOME job of prepping us and listing all the important emergency info for our class. I am certain that his experience and expertise gives us student travelers an advantage. I will still be blogging from Venezuela!

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Friday night, a bunch of us students in the Asian Pacific Islander Coalition took a field trip to Seattle to see a Youth Speaks Poetry Slam. It was at the Fremont Abbey Arts Center, poets ages 13-19 wered invite to compete in three rounds of spoken word. Three slams happen over three months in anticipation of the Grand Slam in April.

The poetry was truly inspiring, the audience cried, laughed, and cheered. Some poets got upset and personal, some were raw and vulnerable, some were very matter-of-fact, and all of them definitely made me rethink the way I relate to the people around me. In addition, it was so awesome to be around lots of artistically minded people.

Although I had many friends who were a part of Youth Speaks in San Francisco, I had never been to a poetry slam before! Its these kinds of events that help me appreciate moving to a new part of the country and trying to figure out and build a new community.

That is, being back in school, winter break being over. It feels extremely familiar because I am continuing in the same program. We are preciously preparing for our departure to the big VZ next Friday. Today was our first day of class!

What’s crazy, and super valuable, is the fact that we’ve been studying and thinking and processing and discussing about the glorious and controversial country of Venezuela- the past three months. And now we are headed there in person! I honestly cannot wait to meet passionate anti-Chavista venezolanos and have my world and mind tied up in a fickle snickle all over again. Today was an intense day of reflection and sorting out of where we want to be spending our time, while we’re down there. More specifically, we get to pick which organizations, cooperatives, and collectives we want to volunteer with for three week stretches.

I plan on indulging myself with a film collective in Barquisimeto, being involved in the documentary team of our class, and hanging around the Centro Cultural San Juan. The last place is a cultural center that works with youth, with after school programs and murals, through music and sports! But I also know that any of the opportunities would be life-changing opportunities.

Otherwise, I have barely thought about being in Venezuela. I have so many things to take care of before I leave! Such as scholarships and summer plans.

It was another setting where I really appreciated the type of transparency the faculty provided, and the openness they were willing to endure about the students’ opinion of the class, especially in a class that is continuing throughout the year. At what other educational institution would faculty be so humble and so concerned about the students’ learning experience and student’s feelings about the functionality and dynamic of the class? GO GEODUCKS.

What was most exciting for me, was showing my own film piece and watching all of my classmate’s film pieces. The Flaming Eggplant Cafe film, my piece, was shown first, and received an overwhelmingly positive response. I’ll be honest, I don’t mind boasting here, as I find it appropriate. But everyone else’s also blew me out of the water. One group made a film about Movimiento Estudantil Chicano/a de Azatlan (MEChA), the latino student group on campus, it was totally heart-felt, educational, and interesting. Other groups did their projects on GRuB, Garden Raised Bounty, a farming non-profit that works with local high school students to give them experience in agriculture; CIELO, Centro Integral Educativo Latino de Olympia, a grassroots group that helps immigrant adults with literacy and access to other resources; the Olympia Food Cooperative a prominent grocery store that is consensus based and works hard to provide healthy food to low-income families; lastly a group filmed Occupy Olympia and got a ton of interviews and footage of the last ten weeks of the local movement. Overall, it was amazing to see all the hard work transform in moving art pieces!!

This did make it a little bit difficult to take myself seriously for my giant research project due Tuesday. I definitely stayed up until 4:30 in the morning trying to figure out whether to focus on Afro-Venezuelan history, forms of art, circuses, culinary arts, graffiti, hip hop, or beauty image. All week students across campus are attending their class presentations: final compilations of everything we have focused on, put into concise and expressive power points that represent our hard work. Its definitely the Greener form of “finals”.

Trucking out the last couple of essays due for class, tonight. Then I am free!!!! Can’t wait to celebrate through the weekend.