Lessons From The Garden: Practicing Vulnerability feat. Susana Victoria Parras & Alejandro Villalpando

Susana Victoria Parras & Alejandro Villalpando join Kim to discuss how, through a continued practice of communal study, they are able to renew their commitment to each other, their child, and to their community in ways that are generative and don’t engage in disposability politics or pathologizing their elders and ancestors.

This wonderful episode is the first installment of our new series, Lessons From The Garden, where Kim will be interviewing contributors to the forthcoming anthology that she co-edited with Maya Schenwar titled We Grow the World Together: Parenting Toward Abolition. You can pre-order this volume now from Haymarket or wherever you buy books. 

Susie and Alex share how their parents’ forced displacement due to political and social unrest provides the context for understanding the legacy of inherited trauma. They discuss grief, loss, accountability, and care. Susie shares an intimate view into the love ethic that she and Alex share, and Alex reminds us that this shit is hard, and that in spite of that, we have to keep trying. 

We’ve had the opportunity to talk with so many incredible people over the years on Beyond Prisons, and we continue to be awed and unsettled. Alex often says that he is not interested in inspiring folx, but wants them to feel unsettled. We wholeheartedly agree with this sentiment because inspiration is fleeting, and requires no change in thought or behavior, but when people feel unsettled they are more likely to examine why they are, and to engage in activity to address the issue/issues that have unsettled them. 

The name of the series, Lessons From The Garden, is an apt phrase that reflects the metaphor in the book’s title, and allows us to consider many issues related to caregiving, parenting, and abolition. As Lydia Pelot-Hobbs once said “our citation politics matter,” and in that spirit we want to credit Susie Parras for the series title. Lessons From The Garden is an opportunity to engage in further conversation with the many brilliant organizers, writers, and thinkers about their work, and how they practice abolitionist parenting and caregiving in their daily lives. Additionally, we will draw on some of the themes that they wrote about in the book in order to help us deepen our understanding of caregiving - broadly configured - and what it means to live collectively in a world that is designed to keep us isolated from each other. 

Susana Victoria Parras is the daughter of Guatemalan immigrants, mother, friend, partner, and a mental health therapist of color committed to generating healing, justice, and care through noncarceral practices. Before she found ethnic studies, social justice, abolition, and transformative justice, she found safety and hope in places and relationships that were imperfect, spacious, loving, and curious. Her political homes include family of origin, friends, books, and her imagination. She is accountable to ancestors, herself, her Baby Sol, her partner, teachers, and all those who cultivate her process of accountable care and growth. Susana specializes in the intersectional integration of critical race and somatic practices within community and clinical settings. She is the founder of Heal Together and cocreator of Heal Together’s Anti Carceral Care Collective and currently organizes with CAT 911 (Community Alternatives To/Community Action Teams 911) in South Central, Los Angeles, where she also lives, loves, and works. Susana dedicates her life to healing as a central component for justice, resistance, and activism.

Alejandro Villalpando is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Pan-African Studies and the Latin American Studies Program at Cal State LA. He earned his PhD in Critical Ethnic Studies from UC Riverside and an MA from Latin American Studies at Cal State LA. His work lies at the intersection of Black, Central American, and Critical Ethnic Studies. His coauthored chapter titled “The Racialization of Central Americans in the United States” can be found in the edited volume Precarity and Belonging (Rutgers University Press, 2021). He was also a cofounder, co-organizer, and cofacilitator for a yearlong political education project titled the Abolition Open School. Villalpando is indelibly shaped and inspired to be part of and contribute to the crafting of a world rooted in justice and dignity for all by his young child and his partner, who remain the bedrocks of his existence.

Episode Resources & Notes

Pre-order We Grow the World Together: Parenting Toward Abolition, Edited by Maya Schenwar and Kim Wilson

IN STORES NOV. 19, 2024!

Abolition has never been a proposal to simply tear things down. As Alexis Pauline Gumbs asks, “What if abolition is something that grows?” As we struggle to build a liberatory, caring, loving, abundant future, we have much to learn from the work of birthing, raising, caring for, and loving future generations.

In We Grow the World Together, abolitionists and organizers Maya Schenwar and Kim Wilson bring together a remarkable collection of voices revealing the complex tapestry of ways people are living abolition in their daily lives through parenting and caregiving. Ranging from personal narratives to policy-focused analysis to activist chronicles, these writers highlight how abolition is essential to any kind of parenting justice.

HELP SEND THIS BOOK INSIDE: Contribute toward sending copies of We Grow the World Together to folks in prisons and jails by donating at https://haymarketbooks.app.neoncrm.com/forms/we-grow-the-world-together

Playlist for our conversation with Susie and Alex

Butterfly Mornings - a playlist inspired by my conversation with Susie and Alex that speaks to grief, loss, care, love and not letting go even when things are shit. 

Sunrise - Norah Jones

Colors - Black Pumas

Bloom - Bonus Track - The Paper Kites

Butterfly Mornings - Hope Sandoval & The Warm Intentions

How Can You Mend a Broken Heart  - Al Green

Rises the moon - Liana Flores

Soft on Me - Lily Hayes

Come out and play - Billie Eilish

Canción Pequeña - Perotá Chingó

Someone to Stay - Vancouver Sleep Clinic

Spell - Dora Jar

I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel To be Free - Nina Simone

Look Up - Joy Oladokun

Would You Mind Please Pulling Me - Tasha, Gregory Uhlmann

Morning Sun - Melody Gardot

Take it Slow -Ayla Nereo

I Am Surrounded by Love - Beautiful Chorus

I am Light - India Arie

Making All Things New - Aaron Espe

There is No Failure - Laurent Ferlet

Stand by Me - Live at the Late Show - Tracy Chapman

For All You Give - The Paper Kites, Lucy Rose

Darling - Beautiful Chorus

Credits

Created and hosted by Kim Wilson and Brian Nam-Sonenstein

Website & volunteers managed by Victoria Nam

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