I am new. History made me. My first language was spanglish. I was born at the crossroads and I am whole. - Aurora Levins Morales

I am thinking of the year I tried to teach the history of Western feminism on a North-South axis-U.S., Latin American and Caribbean feminism, not U.S. and European-and first heard the names of these women you rubbed shoulders with, Bertha Lutz, Clara Gonzalez, Elena Torres, Minerva Bernardino, Amalia de Castilla Ledón, Paca Navas, Irma de Alvarado. No one in my class had ever heard of any of them, not a single one. Not the Latin American delegates who put women into the U.N. Charter and saw to the creation of the Commission on the Status of Women; not the women who openly balked at the militarization of the continent in 1947; not any of the writers, thinkers, and agitators who had struggled not only for suffrage (which came far later to them than to women in the United States and kept them militant through the lull between our first and second waves) but also for divorce and child custody, nationality independent of a husband's, national self-determination, and living wages, and against dictatorships and fascism and the arming of the Americas.

disability justice is asking a lot of different kinds of questions about the nature of our bodies, and part of what I put forward to disabled student groups is to not settle for fighting for inclusion in existing movements but to really look at the ways in which disabled people have leadership to offer. For instance, our bodies don't comply with the demands of capitalism; what could we bring to the labor movement, which looks for better pay and better working conditions within a structure of work that is highly oppressive? Well, we can question the whole nature of what work is.

Land and blood. Mystical powers that never change their identity so that a speck of Mississippi mud and an individual red blood cell are both seen as carrying unalterable identity, permanent membership in human cultures. This is the mysticism that allows fascist movements to call up images of long-dispersed and -recombined ancestral peoples like the ancient Aryans and Romans, or entirely mythic genetic strains like White Race, and then scream for genocide to return them to a state of purity. The reality is that people circulate like dust, intermingling and re-forming, all of us equally ancient on this Earth, all equally made of the fragments of long-exploded stars, and if, by some unlikely miracle, a branch of our ancestors has lived in the same place for a thousand years, this does not make them more real than the ones who have continued circulating for that same millennium. All of us have been here since people were people. All of us belong on Earth.