Acompañamiento at the Kitchen Table: A Response to Mariela Nuñez‐Janes' 2023 Presidential Address to the CAE

In her 2023 Council on Anthropology & Education Presidential Address, Mariela Nuñez-Janes begins with her own personal story and an invitation to accompany activist communities around the kitchen table both as a real and imagined location to unsettle our academic spaces in order to reflect on “what we can learn from non-academic experiences rather than what our academic expertise can offer the world outside the academy.” This has always been a critical question and invitation to pose to academics. Although it often feels like these times are even more critical for this invitation, I remember the words of Walter Benjamin who correctly saw that, “the tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the “state of emergency” in which we live is not the exception but the rule” (Benjamin 1940). Let me begin with a bit of my own story and how Mariela and I came to meet and work with each other around our own and our communities' kitchen tables. I'm trained and have worked “professionally” as an applied anthropologist. Early in my career, I worked in academic research and teaching positions, but I increasingly found it difficult to bridge the academic and activist work, both of which I saw as important and connected. So, around 2010, I chose to move away from the “security” of academic institutions in order to connect and work more deeply with grassroot communities as an activist anthropologist. I still saw myself as engaged in academic work, but now at the margins of the academy and society. My work as an applied activist anthropologist has largely been shaped by this practice of acompañamiento, walking alongside our human and more-than-human relatives marginalized and oppressed by settler colonialism and capitalism. This work—and, really, lifestyle—of acompañamiento began when I was asked to accompany with my camera the undocumented migrant-led struggle for freedom and human dignity, where I met Mariela. I remember the joy I felt connecting with her, another applied anthropologist, who was engaged and committed to the same practice, people, and struggles. We write about our work and experience organizing together alongside United We Dream, the National Immigrant Youth Alliance, and many other undocumented migrant communities in our collectively written book Eclipse of Dreams (Martinez et al. 2020). This practice of activist anthropology has since grown from connections with undocumented and migrant communities through intersectional solidarity praxis to include bearing witness and joining community organizing and resistance to injustice alongside Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) led movements. This movement work included organizing for Black Lives Matter, Not One More Deportation, Free Palestine, Mni Wiconi, Abolish ICE, Protect Oak Flat, and the Poor People's Campaign. All of my lived experience in the practice of acompañamiento with movements of struggle shares in common working across diverse communities to resist structural violence and the corporate hegemonic dominance over our lives, communities, and Mother Earth. While I do not feel qualified to speak to what Mariela is unsettling in the space of the Council of Anthropology & Education, I do feel qualified to speak to the larger anthropology and academic community as an anthropologist who has done my best to embrace activism and scholarship. And so, I can join her with the urgent need to unsettle these academic and education spaces that undergird the forces of empire that are destroying our lives and the well-being of our planet. There is hope in facing and addressing the unsettling truths of the structural violence and social injustice in education and the larger world if we begin with Mariela's invitation to not only consider what it would look like to ask what we can learn from non-academic experiences, but to embrace activism by accompanying those who are building strategies for survival and resistance. This more often than not will bring us around actual kitchen tables for sustenance, fellowship and, yes, for the work that must be organized inside and outside of our institutions of education. bell hooks made a similar invitation but more strongly worded it as an intervention. “This is an intervention,” bell hooks wrote, and “I am speaking from a place in the margins where I am different, where I see things differently. I am talking about what I see … This is an intervention … Marginality as a site of resistance. Enter that space. Let us meet there. Enter that space. We greet you as liberators” (Hooks 1990). This radical solidarity and practice of acompañamiento can never be one-sided. It is always mutual and will be a very difficult thing for most of us academics to do as we have been educated to accept the illusion that we are the experts with our PhDs and scientific theories and knowledge of the world. We must unlearn this illusion to see with Paulo Freire that “the silenced are not just incidental to the curiosity of the researcher, but are the masters of inquiry into the underlying causes of the events in their world” (Freire 1982). I think this may be even more difficult for us anthropologists who have for some time now learned to come down off the veranda into everyday life and the kitchen tables of communities, but where too often we have remained at a distance and in power over the application and outcomes of the relationships of scholarship and action. We too often go into communities well-meaning in our intentions to listen and collect stories and data and then maybe will offer a community-led event for celebration and distribution of the research. What is rarely done is to enter into relationships with activists where their communities determine the important questions of inquiry and where their analysis of the stories and data are privileged. And even more rarely do we see the urgent importance of our need to take action and follow the lead of these communities we work with to resist social injustice with them. Mariela not only speaks to us of this need to unsettle our academic institutions and spaces with her words, but she also has led with her actions. As Paulo Freire warned us, “The oppressor is in solidarity with the oppressed only when he stops regarding the oppressed as an abstract category and sees them as persons who have been unjustly dealt with, deprived of their voice, cheated in the sale of their labor—when he stops making pious, sentimental, and individualistic gestures and risks an act of love. True Solidarity is found only in the plentitude of this act of love” (Freire 2005). What is needed more than ever within institutions of education and the world is for people to risk an act of love by embracing action towards a just way of life. As Freire further explains, “To affirm that men and women are persons … and yet to do nothing tangible to make this affirmation a reality, is a farce” (Freire 2005). This radical act of solidarity and love is what Mariela and I have called the praxis of acompañamiento. As Mariela calls us to embrace activism shaped by the praxis of acompañamiento, let me offer some further reflections from what I've learned from communities actively creating strategies of survival and resistance. I remember joining two dear undocumented friends who were leading a community education event on migrant detention and deportations. I had already learned they did not want to be called “DREAMers,” as they believed this terminology was used by the political-economic system of empire to perpetuate the illusion of the American Dream, that while it might be useful for personal gain or assimilation, this narrative for social change could not bring about the social justice change needed to protect all migrants in the educational and greater social and political body. We wrote of this movement organizing around the failure to pass the DREAM Act that “what passed as an eclipse, was possibly a reminder, a warning, that what was lost, if we had won, might have truly destroyed us. We might have won our rights to the American Dream, at the expense of the greater struggle for our freedom” (Martinez et al. 2020). But what I heard for the first time was their pushing back on being introduced as activists. One of them posed this question to the gathering, “What then would you call my father and mother who when faced by the unsettling realities of structural violence and survival in part caused by the U.S. supported policies of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) decided to pick up their family to cross a border to the United States as a strategy of survival?” They continued, “What then would you call my father who gets up every morning to work illegally in this country exposed to dehumanizing labor conditions in order to care for his family?” They said it was all these people like their mother and father who we should see as the real activists who are actively working every day to create community-led strategies for survival and resistance to domination and oppression. That made me realize that activism is more than the efforts of non-profits or groups organizing marches, protests, rallies and other efforts which are largely led by paid or professional activists. My undocumented colleagues were calling my attention to everyday activism of human survival and resistance to the unjust systemic violence of the reigning dominant capitalist and settler-colonial order. They did not have a choice whether to be or not be activists, they continued. Their lives depended on being activists. This perspective has made me rethink the kinds of activism that exist beyond the political systems and the non-profit industrial complex we associate only a certain kind of activism with. From this perspective I see that we are all activists already for a particular value system and way of life. The question we must ask ourselves then is what way of life are we actively supporting. And the unsettling truth of the matter is that there is no neutral space which our academic institutions like to pretend exists. In reality, our silence and assimilation into academic institutional life actively serves the ends of capitalism and the interests of wealth at the cost of deep alienation, dehumanization of labor, exploitation of the planet, and great suffering and pain to us all. Freire reminded us, “Washing our hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful” (Freire 1985). The world of the scholar, teacher and researcher cannot be separated from everyday life. It's all interconnected. We must face the illusion of objectivity and that life around our kitchen table and our professional work can be separated. Whether we are able to see it or not, we are always actively embodying and supporting a system of values which too often is the very system supporting violence and undergirding social injustice. So in many ways Mariela could also be asking us all, what kind of activism do we want to embrace? And the call I hear in Mariela's address and see in her life is to embrace the activism of siding with the oppressed and marginalized of society. I cannot think of a better place to unlearn our colonial ways of expertise and domination in order to enter into the solidarity work of acompañamiento than at the kitchen tables Mariela is inviting us to. This is where I've done most of my unlearning and where I am learning about the power of profound love. If there is one thing that we anthropologists should and can learn from non-academic experiences it is how to practice profound love. And this is the essence of what Mariela is inviting us to embrace—to risk an act of love. Freire wrote that “dialogue cannot exist in the absence of a profound love for the world and for people” (Freire 2005). Around the kitchen tables of the oppressed and our own we can begin to risk an act of love where we will be able to create relationships and more human connections as we collectively face the forces that alienate and fracture us. We can build trust. We can give and receive love. It is around the safety of kitchen tables surrounded with trust and love, that I have been able to hear critically important truth-telling. We must face the unsettling truth that academic spaces generally have not been safe places for truth-telling. And it is important “to let suffering speak,” as Theodor Adorno wrote, for “it is a condition of all truth” (Adorno 1973). We need safe places to let suffering speak, where we can be vulnerable with one another. Furthermore, the kitchen table is the place to go to embrace the activism that Mariela is inviting us to because it often is the place where we can leave our agendas (and the power attached to them) behind and talk about anything and everything that is important to those seated at the table. The kitchen table might be the best place to begin to build the just community we so desperately need and create the world anew.