over the past two weeks we have been moving… a lot! if i cared enough about adding up how many hours we’ve been sitting in our cars watching landscapes change as they pass by i would but let’s just say it’s like 100 hours.

we managed to get to central ‘texas’ and to our friend’s apartments last week where we took some time to rest and figure out a day to see the camper trailer they’re gifting us. then we decided to plan an impromptu visit to ‘new mexico’ because we had the perfect amount of funds that were donated to us to visit the lands we were interested in moving onto.

we learned so much about what we do and don’t want out of the desert valley landscape and after spending time in the valley of the ‘manzano mountains’ we are setting our sights to that area.

we’re now back at our friend’s apartment taking another rest while we figure out what the camper trailer needs. our friends showed us that there is water damage in various walls of the trailer including the bedroom so our first renovation tasks will be to tackle the bedroom so that it can be suitable for sleeping in while other things get taken care of.

thank you to everyone that has donated to our project so far. the effects ripple outwards from you to us and to everyone who we build our life with. right now we are dealing with a special kind of grief of leaving our friends in the east coast but we have huge hopes of inviting them to see our project in its various stages (and even bigger hopes of having them live with us!).

i want to share a few thoughts about the act of ‘moving onto land’ or the concept of ‘settlement’ and ‘settling down’ as someone who identifies with decolonial and anti-capitalist praxis. i grew up in central texas where the hand of spanish colonialism was felt heavily. and not even necessarily in my own ancestral line of enslavement by spanish colonists in colombia, but just on the land i found myself on as a kid.

i grew up around many kids and families who either came into the ‘US’ from south and central america or for whom the border crossed against (in all its forms and changes). i grew up seeing the ruins or preserved ‘spanish missions’ that were built by enslaved native peoples to convert them into christianity/catholicism. i saw the ways the land was changed for colonists, i saw the effects of spanish being forced onto people as a colonizing language and how it later became a racialized and prejudiced language just some generations later.

getting older, i learned about the concept of land-back and the efforts of decolonization that has been fighting against settler-colonialism for as long as the latter has been around. in ‘purchasing land’ from landlords who are only looking to hoard the earth to make a good few thousand dollars, i want to do my best to steward the earth as healing not only the plants and soil, but also my own on this miracle of a earth and water marble. i want to be able to honor the ancestors of mine who were forced to work. i want to be able to honor the ancestors and future generations that are not my own, but whose pasts i am touched by and futures i am affecting. i want to be able to materially support land-back praxis by finding ways to offer living Indigenous communities in the area i am in.

that’s all for now i think.

again, thanks to everyone who has helped us so far and in the future as well anyone reading this, and our camping host who met us with a mask!

– cielo azul