Revolutionary Mothering

Love on the Front Lines

Alexis Pauline Gumbs, China Martens, Mai'a Williams, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, China Martens, Mai'a Williams

• Publisher: PM Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781629631103
• eBook ISBN: 9781629632452
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Feminism & Feminist Theory
• Index: Social Sciences

Inspired by the legacy of radical and queer black feminists of the 1970s and '80s, Revolutionary Mothering places marginalized mothers of color at the center of a world of necessary transformation. The challenges we face as movements working for racial, economic, reproductive, gender, and food justice, as well as anti-violence, anti-imperialist, and queer liberation are the same challenges that many mothers face every day. Oppressed mothers create a generous space for life in the face of life-threatening limits, activate a powerful vision of the future while navigating tangible concerns in the present, move beyond individual narratives of choice toward collective solutions, live for more than ourselves, and remain accountable to a future that we cannot always see. Revolutionary Mothering is a movement-shifting anthology committed to birthing new worlds, full of faith and hope for what we can raise up together.

Contributors include June Jordan, Malkia A. Cyril, Esteli Juarez, Cynthia Dewi Oka, Fabiola Sandoval, Sumayyah Talibah, Victoria Law, Tara Villalba, Lola Mondragón, Christy NaMee Eriksen, Norma Angelica Marrun, Vivian Chin, Rachel Broadwater, Autumn Brown, Layne Russell, Noemi Martinez, Katie Kaput, alba onofrio, Gabriela Sandoval, Cheryl Boyce Taylor, Ariel Gore, Claire Barrera, Lisa Factora-Borchers, Fabielle Georges, H. Bindy K. Kang, Terri Nilliasca, Irene Lara, Panquetzani, Mamas of Color Rising, tk karakashian tunchez, Arielle Julia Brown, Lindsey Campbell, Micaela Cadena, and Karen Su.

VI.

Between the Lines

Introduction

China Martens

I made my first zine, The Future Generation, in 1990, because motherhood was the impetus to communicate with others outside the lines like myself. I set out to help create an information-sharing network with others as we lived in this world and tried to build another world we wanted. My zine’s influences grew from the Reagan era “No Business As Usual” actions and anti-apartheid divestment sit ins, Rock Against Racism punk rock shows, those concerned for ecology, gender nonconformists, and anarchism in its many forms. I watched others make subculture media in the form of flyers, zines, records, and distros so I knew what to do when it was time for me to start something of my own. I wanted to create new alternatives and seek out new ways of living as well as many of my peers. As my daughter grew, the world changed and zines went through different periods of popularity, waning and waxing. At a certain period, zines seemed to me to lose some of their radical edge of understanding independent media made from those who seized control to print what the mainstream would not, but the creation of zines was always a small connection, a letter, not always hearing back, taking some dedication to remain part of and then on other days worth it. Over time, I made more connections until I found myself; through the internet, connected to others, and then one day connected to a whole new generation of radical mother of color bloggers. I learned about networks and communities they had been building for decades. My respect for these media makers renewed my faith again in the media we make. When I met her at the 2009 Allied Media Conference, Maegan “la Mamita Mala” Ortiz (Vivirlatino) told me, “We all move towards mediums of information sharing that feel organic to us and they are all valid.” Noemi Martinez (Hermana Resist) has been another influential media maker in my life, a zinester that helped me make the leap from zines to reading blogs. It is predominantly radical women of color media makers who have made the most use of the blogosphere, in my opinion, whose work has helped make greater connections as well as to give the best tools to fight against white supremacy, as well as racism, sexism, classism, and other injustices in this country. It has been women of color bloggers and other marginalized media makers who have most helped inform my rebel path, expanding clarification in continuing explorations of race and class to build the worlds we want and to reject what is killing us. So many letters and conversations, works, and efforts in a world where often for a mother there is no time to spare. No time to oneself to use the bathroom, no heaven of a morning alone, and no time to read beyond a short magazine article or online snippet.

Time traveling is a necessity. We need to tell our stories. Sometimes in a patchwork fashion like my grandmother’s patchwork quilt across my parents’ bed, we read each other’s words in different places and times—and read between the lines. This is essential for us to communicate with each other, to break our isolation into movement as well as to fall back into the spaces between space, now and again.

The purpose of writing, the sacred nature of writing, of self-expression via print, manifesta, collective testimony or theatrical script—to witness heal, resist, and build another way; shifting paradigms and universes—of creativity in its many forms, of exploring and organizing thoughts, making discoveries about yourself and the world, growing and communicating—this is for you. Respect, dignity, justice, this is for you and for everyone. Everyone has their part to play; we can do more together than alone. Actions and words, practical deeds and dreams, this is how we build tomorrow.

Collective Poem on Mothering

Mamas of Color Rising (Austin, Tejas)

It’s Hard

It’s Tiring

It’s Painful

But

It’s Love

It’s Joy

It’s Peace

Mothering is an act of social justice

Creating a community of solidarity and support

That models the way we want the world to be.

Using that collective strength to challenge

Injustice

And build alternatives for ourselves and our communities.

How are the children?

How are the weakest in our society treated?

Parenting socially just people.

There is enough for each of us.

Let’s share

Stories

Food

Hugs

And laughter.

If we can embrace

Ourselves

Our children

And our community

Give and find comfort and safety

Without hiding truths.

Mamas of Color Rising

Our Core Values

January 25, 2009

This poem was created through a collective process in which the members of Mamas of Color Rising individually and without knowing what the Mama before her had wrote, expressed what Mothering is.

Telling Our Truths to Live:

A Manifesta

tk karakashian tunchez

1. Telling our truths to live

In telling this, I am bearing witness to my own experience as a single, teen, welfare, queer-femme m/other at a private, liberal arts college, and I am bearing witness to my own experience as a student at a community college, because both of these experiences are equally important and valuable and are pieces of a larger, universal narrative. In telling this, I am bearing witness to mama-love, to days spent behind books and hands wrapped tight on steering wheels while the sun burns down, building worry filled pockets on foreheads cuz you can’t afford to pay the late fee at the childcare and your professor won’t let you leave that class early and the electricity got shut off because your student loans ran out and you got just enough money to afford some gas to get to class today but not enough for heat this month.

I am bearing witness to the joy that comes from finally telling our truths; to sisterhoods and brotherhoods that form coalitions; to phamilies with a ph, that are chosen and stronger than blood; to life-sustaining networks full of our tribes, our communities, our peoples, the ones who “get” it and don’t need no theory based language to express it cuz they can say it with their eyes.

2. Offering recognition

I sing praises and thank the sisters and m/others and mamaz who have paved our way, because they are so often overlooked, silenced and written out of our institutionalized histories.

Yet they haven’t given up, and refuse to hold their tongues at institutions that will use voyeuristic lenses to construct elaborate ethnographic (read: anthropological) studies of “single-mother subcultures,” rather than support the actual m/others that are part of the institution and then question why retention rates aren’t higher.

I give praise for mamaz, because we keep on “showing up” with our kids. We do more than discuss the theoretical value of liberation. We practice lived, beauty-full and fragile liberatory models in our daily lives, constructing curriculums far more intricate than anyone will ever use in any classroom and practicing on the very most precious relationships we hold, our families, our communities.

3. Honoring our collective histories

We know that many of us come from long-lines of storytellers and folklorists and artists and community builders who used popular education models, long before that phrase even existed, to subvert and resist. We come from a long legacy of community and individuals who knew how to survive. It is in our blood. We are prophets, future-readers, story-keepers, media-makers, and builders of schools with dreams. We hold graduations through ceremonies under stars, and in our legacies we are educators that hand down centuries-old knowledges.

4. Naming the ongoing work that m/others and mamaz are doing wordwide

We believe education is liberation.

We work to free ourselves.

We create our own models of lived educational structures.

We encourage and support each other and create communities and movements that include crafting, healing, transforming, liberating, and reclamation of agency through truth telling.

We do not distance ourselves from our personal truths while in academic settings because our personal is beyond political, it is quintessential.

So, we craft community classrooms, and serve as mentors, recognizing there are so many of us participating in these educational settings and that we won’t allow “opting out” to be the only option. We won’t be squeezed out or silenced anymore.

We embody and model our vision for shared power and equity through being our sisters’ (and brothers’) keepers. We create our own grassroots childcare systems, caring for each other’s children and bearing witness to our sisters and brothers struggles. We accompany each other to medical, advisor, welfare, housing, court or any other form of bureaucratic appointments to advocate with each other and then provide each other the space to tell our truths and heal afterward.

We stand up for each other, straight, queer, gender variant, and trans when we are harassed by campus police who frequently are not held accountable for their actions and mirror the city and state police brutality that is so often found in our commu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Praise for Revolutionary Mothering
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface—Loretta J. Ross
• Introduction—Mai’a Williams
• Organization of This Book: Roots and Branches
• I. Intergenerational Introduction: Foremothers for Mothering
• II. From the Shorelines to the Front Lines
• III. The Bottom Line
• IV. Out (of) Line
• V. Two Pink Lines
• VI. Between the Lines
• Editor Bios
• Contributor Bios
• Acknowledgments