Not1More
Responding to hatred with faith In Action
What drove me to organize formally with community around immigrant rights was the removal of the Violence Against Women Act in 2012. When the pendulum swings one way and you are shown how little importance you are to people “running the country”, you are pushed to act. As an undocumented person, I felt the call to take my future into my own hands with a community of directly impacted people like me.
The lessons of organizing in Chicago during this period of time influence and impact the way I view and navigate the world today. For that and to all my co-organizers, trainers, and fellow believers, I will forever be grateful. On my 23rd birthday, we were arrested a second time for blocking Michigan Ave (2nd and 3rd picture). Now as I enter my 30th Golden birthday tomorrow and the world is reaching it’s tipping and boiling point, I lift up my energy and open up my capacity to hold space for those that are entering their own front lines.
How Not1More became a song
Three years after my direct action arrests with Undocumented Illinois, just a few days after we arrived to Los Angeles (well, really North Hollywood), Donald Trump was elected President. For the next few months I carried my heart like a pile bricks. I was moving pain from within after years of empowering and simultaneously toxic organizing experiences, but this news made my empath self channel more spirit and emotion. In desperation, need, and for my own self/mental health care, I needed to write this song with my partner DC. This song is a chant, a wish, an intention, and a continuation of a dream and movement we will be continuing until it is true.
Continuing the campaign Through Co-creation & Collaboration
The photo on the left was taken by Lola Perez and turned into a drawing and poster by Bo Thai creator of Illegal Drip. Together with undocumented people, we are creating new meanings, messages, and creations in honor of our experience and our alliance to demand an end to state violence. We dedicate our our and co-creation to sending a message of applying practices of transformative justice. We look to movements as much as to nature, our cultures, family, friends, and this changing world for inspiration for what we are mxnifesting into the world.
I dedicated the release of Not1More to Arizona when I performed for Aliento AZ’s first Open Mic Una Luz Un Aliento in January 2017. I offered it up to people whose relatives and whole families were deported or were under deportation proceedings. Experiencing deportations in the Metropolitan and rural midwest is much different than witnessing the impact of the Secure Communities program and border expansion practice of this decade on children, families, and entire communities.
Songs As Spells
Here is the meaning behind the words on Genius & below is the Soundcloud link to our music.
Words from an ancestor
While in Arizona, I met the amazing Ileana Salinas-Mireles and Celso Mireles. Their music together is powerful and still resounds in my heart. I invited them to co-create on Not1More though it never came into fruition because of family and life changes we were going through. I share this last email I received from Celso before he passed in August 2017, to ground this sharing in the wisdom of an ancestor whose memory motivates me to continue and open up this song again and follow through in this time of deep need to cleanse our world of what is not necessary (harm, violence, punishment motives) and replace it with healing, justice, and community sustaining practices that benefit us all. Because of all the people we have gained and lost on this journey, we continue in our ancestors’ name and memory.
