Milpamérica – Fire
We send out a call: all spaces are also trenches we need to occupy and reclaim, that this is our ancestral calling as diverse people, sexual dissidents, women, children and youth from the Native peoples and from marginalized neighborhoods in resistance.
The original text in Spanish is also available at Futuros Indigenas website.
I am Leafrox, a person who Afro-Indigenous, Cimarrone, Non-Binary and a sexual dissident. I am a member of Colectiva De Pueblo y Barrio. My narrative work is very wide and diverse: I am a rapper, a drawer, a writer and screen-printer and I do all of this from a place of anti-racist, anti-patriarchal, anti-colonial and anti-academic resistance. My narrative work has been my path to reacquaint myself with my Black and Indigenous roots, to find my own spirituality, to find my own ancestors; it’s been a place to heal within myself, my childhood and my history. My skin, my face, my hair, my blood, and my feet are the roots that tie me to a land that is soaked in blood and resistance.
It is ourselves as Native peoples who have kept Pachamama, Milanum, Mother Earth in balance from all four cardinal points. Our ancestors were, are and will keep on being wise beings, scholars of space, of movement, and of the usage of plants to heal, to connect and disconnect.
When we say that it is ourselves as Native people and marginalized neighborhoods who resist before a colonial system that is still operating and has now subdivided into multiple manifestations of violence, led by patriarchy, racism and capitalism, we are also referring to the ancestral resistance we carry in our blood, in our bodies and sexualities, in our maize and crops, in our mothers, grandmothers, sisters, and in our roots.
To the big extractive megacorporations that are stealing our water, enclosing our rivers, polluting us with their plastic garbage and their agrochemicals; to the States, governments, police, military, private companies and white supremacy we say that we categorically declare that we don’t need their green capitalism or their fake clean, environmentally-friendly energy; we don’t need their classist, academic and eurocentric White Savior Complex; we don’t need their trash, the violence and death in our communities, villages and neighborhoods.
No Conference of the Parties of the UNFCCC represents us as Native peoples and marginalized neighborhoods. They do not represent us because it is themselves who are that very same monopoly of multimillionaires that place the value of money over the value of life and land and are, therefore, and in the name of this notion, ransacking, displacing and killing us.
Through the Milpamérica Resists process and from Grupo Fuego we are hacking this colonial system: we speak, tell, write, know, decode and create from an array of collectivized tools that help us strengthen our spaces of organized struggle and resistance both in the physical and virtual plane. We send out a call: all spaces are also trenches we need to occupy and reclaim, that this is our ancestral calling as diverse people, sexual dissidents, women, children and youth from the Native peoples and from marginalized neighborhoods in resistance.
Milpamérica Resists is the maize that never stopped and will never stop being sowed; it is the maize that feeds an Abya Yala that never surrendered and never surrendered its lands, its spiritualities, its cosmovisions and ways of living before the colonizer.
“I am the people who resist
We are water, land and fire
We are maize and sustenance
Sowing life and food
In our living land
We are the alternative
The self-governance
Against the legacy of Colon.”
Rap Jarocho — Ancestral Resistance
Leafrox, Afro-indigenous, lesbian, non-binary, sexual dissident, Anticolonial, Anti-patriarchal, Anti-capitalist, Anti-racist and anti any form of oppression. Writer, poet, cartoonist and Antifascist Rapper. Member of the De Pueblo y Barrio Collective in Honduras.