Introduction to Keynote Speech

Introduction

Thank you for the introduction Tristan. I’m truly honored to have been invited to be one of the keynote speakers. I’m still not sure if I was the right person to invite, but here I am, after so many years since I last presented at Bergamo as a graduate student in 2017. Sometimes I even question whether the work I do has contributed in any significant way to curriculum studies or if my work even belongs in this field. And now here I am as a keynote speaker in a room full of curriculum scholars who have to listen to me speak for hopefully not more than an hour. I hope you’re ready because I’m here to talk shit about academia.

Before I begin, I want to say that when speaking and writing about genocide, I do not claim to be an expert but rather a diligent student of so many Palestinians and their contributions to decolonial thought and praxis—a praxis that entails willing to take risks by not only speaking truth to power, as the adage goes (which seems to have lost much of its meaning as of late), but taking concrete actions against institutions that are actively enabling and participating in the genocide in Gaza. The institutions I’m referring to here are universities and academia writ large.

Positionality: A Violently Entangled History with Palestine

What brings me here today, once again, is not necessarily my expertise, but my experience of being at the receiving end of institutional violence for simply speaking out and organizing against genocide at my university, as well as for my social media posts that used to go viral before Elon Musk shadow banned my account. It seems like being a public intellectual, as Edward Said wrote about and enacted in his unshakeable commitment to the liberation of Palestine, is perceived as antithetical to the narrowly focused role of the academic who should be confined to the ivory tower, that is, to the tower of ivory and steal, as Maya Wind accurately reconceptualizes academia when speaking about the ideological as well the material ways universities participate in violence. If an academic is to have a career, they must know their proper place. They must remain loyal to the broker intellectual class and its patrons. They must aspire to be the stenographers of imperialism and settler colonialism, not to mention racial capitalism and heteropatriarchy.

As some of you perhaps know, last year my employer, Texas Tech University, suspended me because of my twitter posts denouncing Israel’s genocide in Gaza, as well as the United States complicity and active participation in the livestreamed violence we’ve seen for over two years now. Despite of this or because of it, since my suspension and my reinstatement, I became a founding member of the Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine and the advisor for the Students for Justice in Palestine chapter at Texas Tech, and the founding member and organizer of the Decolonial Conference. As a primary hustle, I suppose I’m still an employee at a university.

I typically don’t share my lived experiences in settings like these, but I already did by mentioning my suspension, so I might as well continue. I think some biographical elements will help substantiate the argument I’m trying to make, which is that our struggles are and have always been interconnected. This argument is not mine nor is it new, but it is certainly worth repeating. I come from a place that had its fair share of insurgency and counterinsurgency. From the 1960s to the 1980s, revolutionary and counterrevolutionary movements (Contras) emerged in Central America. In this time period, Honduras served as the headquarters of counterinsurgency, particularly since the US effectively prevented the success of an insurrection in Honduras. Honduras became the training ground for the euphemistically termed “low intensity” counterinsurgent operations in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua. Bordering these countries, Honduras was geographically and militarily strategic in the 1980s, especially with the free range use of the Palmerola military base to train counterinsurgents, paramilitary groups, death squads (Battalion 3-16), and traditional military personnel. I mention this since the geopolitical game the US played in Central America impacted the border region where my campesino village was (and is) located (image below depicts the view near my village). In fact, Contras entered Nicaragua crossing the mountains and rivers near my village. It is this history that led many Central Americans to immigrate in the late 1980s and early 1990s. My family chose to immigrate to the country responsible for all the death and destruction in our region. My entire family lived in southern California undocumented, without healthcare or financial aid for higher education, with constant encounters with police violence, incarceration, and threats of ICE raids and deportation. The first time I was incarcerated, I was only 15 years old. This not-so-distant history is what informs my anti-imperial and anticolonial position both in theoretical and political terms.

I later learned that the technologies of violence tested on Palestinians and sold to the dictatorial regimes of Central America were used to torture and kill dissidents, including students, campesinos, and Indigenous peoples. The same technologies of violence used against Palestinians and later used against my people in Honduras were certainly used against us by the pigs who surveilled our barrios and policed and criminalized our people, not to mention the constant threat of being deported. My brother was deported when he was 21 years old. After the US-back coup in Honduras in 2009, I voluntarily deported myself when I was 23 years old.

Today, we’re seeing the same technologies used at the border, the same drones, the same fascist techniques, the same brutality.

When I speak of the entangled relationship between Palestinian settler colonial dispossession and neocolonial dispossession in Honduras or in Latin America, it’s no longer an abstraction, a metaphor that I want you to consume. It’s concrete. It’s a matter of life and death. The interconnectedness of our struggles is so deep that those who were displaced and/or forced to migrate because of counterrevolutionary violence directly linked to Israel and US imperialism are now speaking out and organizing against the same technologies of violence universities assist in producing. Many are facing consequences, punished for making connections between their histories and geographies of colonial dispossession with the dispossession and genocide of Palestinians. It is the visibility of the entanglement between our struggles across time and space that those in power fear most. From Ferguson to Palestine to Cop City and the anti-ICE LA Uprisings. It is these connections that enable real coalitions to be built. It is this transnational solidarity that historically has held most strength in the past. We know that concerted efforts to fragment movements is also always part of the long history of counterinsurgency. It’s not for nothing that time, energy, and resources are used to foreclose the possibility of insurgent coalitions to be articulated in the present. If this moment has taught us anything, it is that the uprisings we’ve seen on university campuses, against Elbit Systems, and in our communities facing deportation are a testament that our collective resistance is indeed perceived as a threat. Why else would those in power try so hard to silence us if our actions were that insignificant?