Much of our lives are controlled by the relationship between the state and the market, but through autogestión we take control by building alternatives that better support our communities. The sin el estado strategy is about our ability to create alternatives to what the state and the market provide, and if/when it works, we get the state to fund our project over their systems (that already don’t work for the benefit of most of us). To work sin el estado is to create systems without the state, outside of state control and market logic.
Here are some of the 2022 Sin el Estado Projects, possible through Mijente Support Committee (MSC):
El Instituto de Formación Política
Our gente need space and support to expand our range of how we participate in making change in our communities and beyond. MSC is doing this through el Instituto, an online platform that provides online and offline courses that provide popular, cultural, and political education. This project is part of our work of remembering and unlearning, always acknowledging the history we carry with us. It’s a space where we can intentionally grapple with the examples history provides us, as well as looking at global, present-day examples to shape our learning.
Tech Wars
This 5-part course is for anyone interested in learning about the dark side to the expansions of big tech in our society and how we can expose tech’s outsized role in policing and immigration enforcement. The series covers data economy, digital policing, weaponized technologies, and so much more.
Un Verano Sin El Estado
It’s important to stay curious about what kind of cooperativas, comunes, y comunidades we can build and sustain when we look to the power of our gente y historias. These trainings provide resources to learn the ins and outs so our gente can make tangible progress on mutual aid efforts.
Erotic is Power
This is a 101 workshop that weaves together concepts found in Audre Lorde’s essay “Uses of the Erotic” with basic tantric practices. Through the course, participants with understand better how to connect with their body, and how to tap into the erotic as a source of power and strategy.
Tejiendo El Futuro: Organizing Trainings
How we come together to create change is an ongoing practice. These trainings aim to build a shared analysis of the organizing landscape and train our Latinx communities on the fundamental skills needed to organize. These are efforts towards long-term base building in order to build people and political power to make change happen.
La Vida Local
La Vida Local is an initiative to resource and support groups that are building power without the state through small grants. We also see it as an opportunity to map out the different places where this work is happening — within and beyond the Mijente eco-system so that we can better support our gente.
In 2022, MSC provided 9 grants to grassroots organizations and collectives doing sin el estado work in the U.S. and in Puerto Rico that are working to build community autonomy for our gente.
2022 La Vida Local Grantees:
- Traditional Music Talleres (Lynn, MA): Building community power around youth, music, and education.
- Proyecto Gaia (Puerto Rico): Building community power around food/farming, education, and food security and access.
- FUGA (Tucson, AZ): Building community power around transportation/accessibility, sustainability
- CRECEN (Houston, TX): Building community power around women, education, training, and technical support, political advocacy, and pushing back against patriarchal violence.
- The Buford Highway People’s Hub (Georgia): Building community power around youth, political education, community resources, and learning pods.
- Divest/Invest RGV (McAllen, TX): Building community power around police accountability, combating anti-Blackness, and exposing police violence/oppression, education.
- Mirror Trans Beauty Collective (New York, NY): Building community power by empowering and resourcing transgender and transgender-nonconforming people and offering cosmetology education and training.
- Barrio Restoration (Tucson, AZ): Building community power around neighborhood clean ups and community gardening and planting.
- Huerto Escaleras (Puerto Rico): Building community power around experiential education, agriculture and farming, youth workshops, and food conservation.
