Last year about this time, I was in the middle of preparing to sell the family house that we built and owned for fifty-five years. It was a time of huge change for me since I had lived in it for about forty years of the fifty-five of its existence.
I was painting ceilings and walls as I had learned from painting houses with my father, Domingo, who had learned from his father-in-law, my maternal grandfather, Hyrum; learning on my own how to refinish the recently uncovered, but nearly pristine and gorgeous hardwood floors; gradually donating and selling all the furniture and much of the memorabilia that had never seriously been sorted and valued before; and starting to worry about preparing to fill the one-year lecturer position in Chicanx Studies at the University of Minnesota I had recently been offered for the 2018-2019 academic year.
I was a bit concerned only because I had been an irregular academic, filling only a couple of one-year visiting assistant professor positions since graduating with my American Studies Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota in 1999. Instead, I had primarily been a full-time family caregiver for over a decade.
Long story short, I finished my work on the house and made my move to teach about Chicanx and Latinx culture, history and politics in the Chicano and Latino Studies Department at the University of Minnesota.
I made the transition back into teaching full-time without experiencing any major traumas. I adjusted my approach here and there with each of my classes once I got to know each class’s personality quirks and once they adjusted to my unconventional style. Fall semester was good; I felt like I was back.
And then Spring semester happened.
What happened was my class on Latinx social movements happened. And I’m still pondering what happened in that class that was so unusual and positive. As the kids these days might ask, why it was so “fucking awesome!” All we did was read and talk and watch some videos. Mostly we read and talked. But how we read and talked was to me what most impressed me about my teaching and learning in this class with six other committed students of history, culture and power.
I’ve taken classes and taught classes with plenty of bright folks, but before this class I had not experienced the depth of critical and thoughtful engagement with the radical, ideological implications of power and its effects in everyday social relations. It was not just the depth of engagement, but the human feeling of the classroom, that we were actually participating in a human, humane social practice; not some educational/corporate exercise in abstract, disembodied “objectivity” that required SLO’s and course evaluations to somehow justify its existence and provide evidence of actual teaching and learning in the classroom.
Sure, they knew I was teacher, I knew they were student, but we all understood that to develop a radical understanding of power and its function globally, we had to process how power functions from our various positions including in the classroom as teacher and student.
I believe, I hope, that’s what they got from me in the classroom. Unmasking the power relations in the classroom mimic and parallel the relations of power in society at large and the constant need to unmask them regardless of who we are and where we find ourselves.
I won’t be returning to CLS at the University of Minnesota, but I have the powerful experience and memory of “Randy’s Radicals” to bring with me to this site and to carry on the liberatory struggle. What I learned that was so powerful from my Latinx social movement “Radicals” is that there is an urgent need to talk about the brutality of abusive power and how it operates to create and perpetuate inequality and, ultimately, suffering globally.
Of course, an important reason to identify how abusive power creates needless suffering is that one can also begin to imagine how creative power can liberate positive human creativity and purpose. This is what I hope this site is ultimately about, the positive struggle to dream liberation, what it looks like and, most importantly, what it feels like. How it feels to be fully, positively human.
(Thank you to Tim for allowing me to use the name “Randy’s Radicals” he created for the class group chat to identify this site. I was honored and pleased they would name their social space after me regardless of its alliterative power.)
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In a country where more than 90 percent of television news media is under the umbrella of five corporations, and social media sites like Facebook are using data to show only the posts and promotions that fit with individual profiles, it seems the “information age” has become a bit of a misnomer. We are often told that there is an infinite wealth of information available at the tips of our fingers, waiting to be studied and reviewed and crosschecked. And yet, despite the popular narrative, Google has not become the top 5 tech giant that it is today through a dedication to providing a free and unbiased stream of search results; there is always a cost. For the companies that shape our online lives and the information we have immediately available, revenue comes from advertisements that are tailored to our tastes based on countless avenues of data collection that frequently operate without our knowledge. For us, the everyday consumer of media, the cost is privacy, the cost is perspective, and the cost is ultimately freedom.
Dearest reader, you have found a rare and hidden gem. If personal bias as informed by these sources is increasingly dictating the scope and skew of readily accessible public information, then we believe it is becoming ever-more critical to generate the correct bias. That is to say, introduce people to a perspective that champions liberation and understands the necessity of speaking truth to power. Randy’s Radicals was born out of a small Chicanx Studies class on mobilization strategy – more specifically, it is the name of our group chat. The wise and grizzled leader Randy Rodriguez has provided a platform for Radicals like us to fight back against the imperialistic war machine and its hold over media with fearless writing that casts the veil of hegemony to the shameful bin of history in which it belongs, but we can’t do it without your help.
Welcome to the site. Let’s get to work.
Tim