This Asian Pacific American Heritage Month, we’ll be sharing stories from past and present staff on their thoughts of how organizing and art interplay. Check for a new story each week.
When Isabela, former AAOP Organizer, first joined the organizing world, activism seemed to be about sending out mailers, asking people to sign petitions, and sending them to lawmakers.
But the nature of that type of activism was inaccessible to many communities, especially communities of color.
“The people that we were door knocking were only upper middle class white people,” Isabela says. “They become the only ones who have a say on what counts as activism or what policies we need to pass because we’re only accountable to them.”
This pushed Isabela to look for other forms of organizing and in particular, organizing within the Asian communities.
“Organizing,” Isabela says, “is like a combination of deep relationships with each other and with the community that comes from and is rooted in, like being in or from or in solidarity with, communities that have been most impacted by systems of oppression.”
“Actual organizing is just steering those relationships so that we challenge and take power away — take back our power, like the power that the communities deserve — in an organized way.”
One of the ways to take back that power is to give it back to the community, which is why Isabela finds designing and facilitating workshops to be a powerful tool and artform in organizing.
The Training for Change pedagogy, which Isabela uses, focuses on bringing out community voices because the belief is that the knowledge already resides in the people. Facilitators don’t teach, but guide and pull information out of the community in a way that makes sense and is accessible.
“The way facilitators can bring out the creativity of other people and the way that they’re constantly iterating on their design and playing and constantly creating out of the endless possibilities. To me, that’s like art, that’s artistic, you know?” Isabela says.
Isabela also shares a story she read about how art plays a role in organizing. She mentions that a method organizers had used was incorporating street art, or street theatre, into the organizing work.
“One of the specific things done was creating these giant paper mache statues or puppies of corrupt politicians,” Isabela says. “Organizers would march to the capitol and they would burn these puppets with like, thousands of people cheering.”
“Imagine how powerful an image that is to the people and also how scary that is to the politicians, looking outside and seeing their effigy being burned.”
Art and imagination is also key to organizing. To organize around issues of incarceration or housing means organizers need to be able to imagine something else — something that might not exist yet.
“In Reclaim the Block, their art and action team is one team and there’s a purpose for that. As a police abolitionist organization, you have to imagine really hard what that world would look like because we’re not used to that,” Isabela says.
“We need to imagine that world first before we can think about policies and organizing and different things that will make that a reality.”
*Note: The interview with Isabela took place October 2019.