What will be left when this empire falls?

We started MUCK as a way to answer that question for ourselves. MUCK is a mutual aid farm + land collective in Piro Tiwa lands, Central ‘New Mexico’. We are currently in our beginner stages as we’re building small earth homes and nursing the land after decades of over-grazing.

We are hoping MUCK will grow into a high desert food forest and tiny earth home community where we can provide for those who need food and/or a place to stay (for however long they need).

MUCK is an open collective! If you are interested in joining, please reach out 🙂 Down below is intros from the current members.


Ebony:

Black, disabled, 3rd generation New Yorker displaced due to gentrification, desperate optimist + dreamer

After years of chronic housing and financial instability, I knew that couldn’t continue to live this way. We were fed up with paying thousands of dollars that we didn’t have just to be mistreated and pushed out of our own homes by negligent landlords. We were tired of . And most of all we’re tired of watching every other Black Indigenous POC disabled community member experience the same exact thing and having my energy be so limited from fighting as well that I couldn’t do much to help. I knew that something had to change.

For me, MUCK comes from my aquarius stellium + aries mars stubborn determination and calls upon Black enslaved maroon ancestors to help create a place where we can be free. Creating a food forest from scratch in the desert isn’t easy, but neither is the 40-hour work week that is the main capitalist alternative. MUCK is the struggle that I choose to pick and I hope that it is the struggle that will provide for me long after this system falls.

My prayer is that MUCK can be a place of refuge for fellow disabled QTBIPOC. MUCK is for those that are undocumented, those that need affordable or free food and herbs, those that need a place to stay for however long, those that want to experience another way.

The items we sell on this shop helps make this dream possible.

Azul:

Mixed Afro-Latine with roots in the southwest ‘US.’

Like Ebony, I have moved around constantly and have built my life around the “just in case I have to leave” mindset of living with come-and-go roommates, in crumbling houses, with toxic family, and under greedy landlords. It is extremely exhausting to always be on my guard and I have often found myself wishing I could just have a home-base, something I can make my own and know it will be there if I take chances to leave and then want to come back.

When the opportunity came to fulfill my childhood dream and adulthood need, I said “Fuck it. Let’s do it.” Because when else can we start but now?

Going from a childhood where my interests were sparked by colonist-centered media about how life ‘used to be’ and growing into an de-colonial, anti-imperial, pro-liberation mindset and knowledge base has shifted my reality and needs so much. I don’t desire to time-travel to a time where life was supposedly simple, or to live an isolated life in a cabin in the woods, or to find ‘uninhabited’ lands I can call my own. I desire a realist approach to living in this world that is not being shaped with us in mind, but that can be changed by me and the people around me.

I am proud to continue learning how to survive through the nightmare of the ‘American Empire’ and I hope that MUCK will be a testament to survival through adversity.