About me
I am committed to reimagining life-affirming and liberating systems while supporting communities entrapped in the current extractive system. I imagine a world free of death-making institutions, systems of white supremacist racial capitalism, and extractivism. I have deep roots and connections within Chicago movement spaces where we collectively envision and practice non-capitalist life worlds.
I have been a community organizer for over 20 years in racial justice, immigrant justice, reproductive justice, youth justice, and abolition movements. My background in organizing and my lived experience as a U.S.-born daughter of Mexican immigrants who settled in Chicago have greatly influenced my dedication to a life of scholar activism. I have co-founded several direct action organizations, including Freedom To Thrive Oak Park, the Latin@ Youth Action League, and the Revolutionary Youth Action League (ROYAL), a youth-led mutual aid organization I co-founded with my daughters.
My role in movements is to be fluid, emergent, and adaptable as a scholar-activist in Urban Planning and Policy. I have dedicated my life to reimagining new worlds internally, interpersonally, and collectively.
What I
work on.
Mutual aid & collective care
How neighbors build systems of support the state does not, and what allows those systems to last.
Gendered exploitation
Who absorbs the labor of care during a crisis, and how race, gender, and class decide that.
Abolition & radical feminism
Alternatives to punitive systems, and the political imagination it takes to build them.
Migration & homelessness
Urban governance, displacement, and how cities respond when people arrive with nothing.
Emergent strategy
Non-capitalist life worlds, solidarity economy, and organizing practice that adapts as conditions change.