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Land Reform School — Summer 2025

Summer School

Free political education on land justice, agrarian reform, and movement building — drawing from indigenous-peasant movements in Bolivia, Guatemala, and Chile.

📅 Every Thursday 6:30–8:00 PM PST  ·  July 10 – September 11
Sign Up (Free) → View Curriculum ↓
About

10 Weeks, 105 Organizers

105 participants have already signed up for this transformative 10-week journey exploring land justice through the lens of plurinational organizing and international movement lessons.

This summer school provides free political education to clarify why land ownership is so unequal and develops strategies for building a movement to transform this inequality. Drawing from indigenous-peasant movements in Bolivia, Guatemala, and Chile, we analyze California's land conflicts and explore pathways for change.

Every session is recorded for those who cannot attend live. Reading materials are freely available in our shared drive.

📚 What You'll Learn

  • Historical analysis of US land policy and racial hierarchies
  • Case studies from successful land reform movements
  • Political economy of agroecological transitions
  • Gendered dimensions of food production
  • Extractivism and green energy land conflicts
  • Financialization of agricultural land
  • Indigenous-peasant organizing strategies
  • Legal frameworks for land reform

🌍 Movement Connections

  • Bolivian 1953 Agrarian Reform lessons
  • Scottish human rights-based land reforms
  • Guatemalan territorial defense organizing
  • California farmworker movement history
  • Indigenous land sovereignty movements
  • Community land trust development
  • Agroecological producer networks
  • Anti-displacement organizing

🔧 Skills & Tools

  • Participatory research methodologies
  • Land ownership analysis techniques
  • Coalition building strategies
  • Political education facilitation
  • Movement history analysis
  • Policy advocacy frameworks
  • International solidarity building
  • Organizational power development
Instructor

Meet Elias

Born in San Diego, raised in the Inland Empire, schooled in the Bay Area, and working mainly in the Coachella Valley, LA, and the Central Coast — Elias is a lovechild of California dedicated to learning from indigenous-peasant movements in Latin America.

Through mentorship with movements in Bolivia, Guatemala, and Chile, Elias has developed deep analysis of land conflicts and strategies for defense and redistribution. This personal journey — from witnessing his grandmother's experiences as a farmworker to seeing warehouse displacement in the Inland Empire — transformed through political education and organizational power into the curriculum you'll experience.

01Provide free education on land inequality and movement building in California and beyond.
02Learn from participants' experiences and dreams for justice.
03Create seeds for an organizational network committed to land reform across California.

10-Week Curriculum

Click any session to expand readings, key insights, and access recordings and slideshows.

01
July 10
Our Current Moment & Past Land Policy in the United States
Ft. Dr. Anthony Pahnke — Examining how the US state created and now confronts racial hierarchies through land policy, setting the foundation for understanding contemporary land struggles.
Details ▼
Required Reading
  • "From creating to confronting racial hierarchies: The evolving role of the US state in land policy" by Anthony Pahnke
Key Insights
Redefining Land Reform: We began by contextualizing the recent "Big Beautiful Bill" proposal to sell off public lands as land reform — establishing that land reform describes any restructuring of property regimes and land ownership, not inherently progressive policy. This critical framework shaped our entire historical analysis.
Civil War & Reconstruction Analysis: Using W.E.B. Du Bois's work, we examined how enslaved people launched a general strike that crippled the Confederacy's economy while joining the Union army to directly confront their oppressors. This pivotal role generated political will for progressive Reconstruction policies like the Southern Homestead Act, which could have redistributed plantation lands to formerly enslaved people.
The Reactionary Alternative: Instead of targeting Southern plantation owners, land reform moved westward through the Homestead Acts and Dawes Act — a coalition between settlers seeking "free soil" and northern industrial corporations. Rather than building alliances with enslaved peoples for Southern land redistribution, this coalition chose indigenous dispossession.
Core Lesson: The direction of land reform depends entirely on which political coalitions advocate for it. 19th century American westward expansion was reactionary land reform because it emerged from an alliance between settlers and transcontinental corporations, choosing indigenous dispossession over challenging existing plantation wealth structures.
▶ Session Recording ◼ Slideshow
02
July 17
From Union to School to Revolution: The 1953 Bolivian Agrarian Reform
Deep dive into Bolivia's successful land reform process, extracting lessons on effective organizing strategies and revolutionary transformation.
Details ▼
Required Readings
  • "Peasant Wars in Bolivia: Making, Thinking, and Living the Revolution in Cochabamba (1952–64)" by Jose M. Gordillo
  • "Peasant Mobilization for Land Reform: Historical Case Studies and Theoretical Considerations" by Gerrit Huizer
Suggested Readings
  • "Fields of Revolution: Agrarian Reform and Rural State Formation in Bolivia, 1935-1964" by Carmen Soliz
  • "Political Economy of Land Reforms in Korea and Bolivia" by Hochul Lee
Key Insights
Conditions for Peasant Revolution: Five key conditions where successful peasant movements emerge: (1) Areas with growing development discrepancies; (2) Easy access to urban centers; (3) Increasing absentee land ownership; (4) Rigid negative reactions from landholders to moderate demands; (5) Small emancipatory efforts that built organizational capacity.
Historical Development of Peasant Autonomy: In 1700s Cochabamba, economic crisis forced landlords to rent out hacienda parcels. Families pooled resources to create the first "piquero" smallholder class, establishing the foundation for peasant autonomy through strategic economic adaptation.
Modern Political Strategy: We examined the 16-year period of political instability following the Chaco War, analyzing how peasants strategically capitalized on political openings while protecting themselves during reactionary periods — creating the first peasant union, establishing schools as underground organizing centers, and making land purchases when openings allowed. The 1952 revolution succeeded through miner-peasant alliances.
California Application: The Coachella Valley fulfills organizability conditions with high absentee ownership, strong urban market connections, and stark development inequality between Eastern farmworker communities and Western desert resort towns. We concluded with our working group's vision for an agroecological school in the region, with dedicated funding to begin implementation.
▶ Session Recording ◼ Slideshow
03
July 24
Who Are We Organizing & For What?
Ft. Emma Harden — Critical analysis of agroecological transitions and alternative agricultural movements. Who is the central organizing subject and why are they not agricultural/food chain workers?
Details ▼
Required Readings
  • "The political economy of agroecological transitions: key analytical dimensions" by Ben M McKay
  • "Grounding the U.S. Food Movement: bringing land into food justice" by Tanya M. Kerssen and Zoe W. Brent
  • "On the Present-Day Shaping of Alternative Agricultures in the Willamette Valley" by Emma Harden (Thesis Summary)
Suggested Readings
  • "Land Justice & Land Trusts: A Toolkit"
  • "Healing Land, Collective Power: Possibilities, Barriers, and Visions of Transforming Land, Work, and Ownership Towards Cooperative Agriculture for Ventura County Farmworkers"
  • "Neoliberalism and the making of food politics in California" by Julie Guthman
  • "Food crises, food regimes and food movements" by Eric Holt Giménez & Annie Shattuck
Key Insights
Class Analysis of Progressive vs. Radical Movements: The concentration of resources from urban-based environmental organizations creates a fundamental disconnect from working-class rural populations. Progressive movements are characterized by college-educated, middle-class leadership, consumer-led analysis, and access to philanthropic networks rather than independent working-class power.
Historical Food Regime Evolution: Three distinct food regimes demonstrate the evolution of global agricultural control: the colonial First Food Regime (1870-1930s), the US-dominated Second Food Regime with Green Revolution expansion (1950s-1970s), and the current Corporate Food Regime (1980s-present). The 2008 Global Food Crisis exposed systemic contradictions with record harvests alongside record hunger.
Alternative Organizing Models: The Bolivian peasant model (216 families organizing collectively to purchase land) demonstrates independent fundraising strategies that build power from below rather than relying on philanthropic largesse. Current USDA cuts, while harmful, create political openings for independent organizing to fill institutional gaps.
Political Education vs. Education: The session emphasized developing analytical capacity to respond strategically to emerging conditions rather than merely absorbing historical facts — crucial for building effective organizing capacity, as demonstrated through the working group's concrete initiatives including the Centro Campesino de Formacion Agroecologica ($10,000 committed).
▶ Session Recording ◼ Slideshow
04
July 31
Social Reproduction and the Gendered Labor of Food Production
Ft. Carmen Cortez and Melissa Acedera — Exploring how gender shapes food production systems and the essential but often invisible labor that sustains agricultural communities.
Details ▼
Required Readings
Key Insights
Chemical Weapons Heritage in Agriculture: Modern pesticides share identical mechanisms with WWII nerve agents (organophosphorus compounds), directly linking contemporary farming to Nazi chemical weapons research. The VX nerve agent originated from pesticide development work, exposing the military-industrial-agricultural complex's shared toxic foundation.
Women's Embodied Knowledge as Organizing Foundation: Female farmworkers' direct experience of chemical harm through pregnancy, nursing, and daily exposure creates specific demands for land reform that center community health over market access. 80% of Mexican and Mexican-American women farmworkers experience sexual harassment, demonstrating how land control becomes a matter of bodily autonomy and dignity.
Land Reform as Primary Defense Strategy: Given the systematic failure of pesticide regulations to protect farmworker communities, land redistribution emerges as the most effective mechanism for eliminating agro-chemical exposure. Communities that control their own land never voluntarily choose to poison themselves or their children, making land reform a direct path to chemical-free agriculture.
▶ Session Recording ◼ Slideshow
05
August 7
Extractivism — From Mining & Drilling to Wind & Solar Farms
Ft. Sarah Reyes — Analyzing how "green" energy transitions can reproduce extractive relationships with land and communities, using case studies from Mexico and global perspectives.
Details ▼
Required Readings
  • "Transnational Capital & Wind Farm Rent-Seeking in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec" by Sarah Reyes
  • "Peripheral labour and accumulation on a world scale in the green transitions" by Max Ajl
Suggested Reading
  • "Theories of Political Ecology: Monopoly Capital Against People and the Planet" by Max Ajl
Key Insights
Climate Transitions as New Colonial Frontiers: Renewable energy projects like wind farms in Oaxaca demonstrate how climate action can perpetuate extractive relationships, dispossessing indigenous communities while generating profits through rent capture. The Eoliatec del Istmo wind park's 81% profit margins reveal "green" colonialism operating under environmental rhetoric.
State-Facilitated Corporate Land Access: Mexico's transition from nationalized energy (1938-1960) to privatization enabled transnational capital access to indigenous territories. The systematic legal transformation of ambiguous land tenure into private leasing systems reveals how state policy creates conditions for corporate accumulation through territorial dispossession.
Indigenous Resistance as Anti-Colonial Knowledge: Zapotec, Huave, Mixe, and Zoque communities' organized opposition to wind mega-projects demonstrates how territorial defense creates alternative development models. Their banners declaring "El Istmo es Nuestro" articulate collective sovereignty against both corporate extractivism and state-imposed modernization.
Land Reform as Climate Strategy: Communities controlling their own land never voluntarily choose to poison themselves or surrender territorial sovereignty, making land reform essential for both chemical-free agriculture and just energy transitions — a People's Green New Deal rather than a corporate one.
▶ Session Recording ◼ Slideshow
06
August 14
Financialization of Agricultural Land & the Unaffordability Crisis
Ft. Dr. Madeleine Fairbairn — Understanding how financial markets have transformed agricultural land into investment commodities, driving up prices and displacing farmers.
Details ▼
Required Reading
  • "Fields of Gold: Financing the Global Land Rush" by Madeleine Fairbairn
Key Insights
Definition of Financialization: The tendency for profit-making to occur through financial channels rather than productive activities — "rentier capitalism" where success is based on what you control rather than what you produce. Seven institutional investors alone owned 1,001 properties worth $16 billion as of Q2 2024.
Investment Appeal: Farmland appeals to investors as a hedge against inflation and food security concerns. Bill Gates becoming America's largest private farmland owner highlights this trend. Some regions are marketed as "the treasury bill of farmland."
Barriers to Addressing Financialization: Land ownership data is expensive and difficult to access; companies use subsidiaries to obscure ultimate ownership. Investors engage in greenwashing by framing acquisitions as promoting sustainability, but case studies like Harvard's California vineyard operations suggest environmental concerns may be secondary to financial returns.
Contested Future: The financialization of farmland remains contested, facing obstacles from data opacity and misleading investor narratives — raising critical questions about whether treating essential agricultural resources as financial assets serves broader social interests regarding food security, environmental stewardship, and rural community stability.
▶ Session Recording ◼ Slideshow
07
August 21
Citizenship, Race, and the Colonial Creation of the Agricultural Worker
Examining how colonial land relations created racialized categories of agricultural workers, with focus on Texas borderlands and Jamaican farmworkers.
Details ▼
Required Readings
  • "Blood Oranges: Colonialism and Agriculture in the South Texas Borderlands" by Tim Bowman
  • "'In America Life Is Given Away': Jamaican Farmworkers and the Making of Agricultural Immigration Policy" by Cindy Hahamovitch
Suggested Readings
  • "Ernesto Galarza, Mexican Immigration, and Farm Labor Organizing in Postwar California" by Stephen Pitti
  • "Property relations: Alien land laws and the racial formation of Filipinos" by Eric J. Pido
Key Insights
National-Popular Theory Framework: Antonio Gramsci's concept of the "national-popular" expands beyond industrial workers to include broader popular classes — working class, peasantry, urban poor, lower middle class, and marginalized groups. This framework became central to national liberation movements from the 1960s-1980s where land control was consistently identified as the foundation of both economic exploitation and political domination.
Historical Exclusions Through Alien Land Laws: California's 1913 Alien Land Law prohibited "aliens ineligible for citizenship" from owning land, using race-neutral language while specifically targeting Asian immigrants, particularly successful Japanese farmers — demonstrating how legal frameworks have historically determined access to agricultural land based on citizenship and race.
Institutionalization of Foreign Agricultural Labor: The 1942 Bracero Program was literally "penned" by the American Farm Bureau Federation, expanding farm labor supply while explicitly prohibiting federal funds from improving wages for American farmworkers. The program prevented braceros from striking while protecting employers through the "Texas Proviso."
Contemporary National-Popular Politics: National-popular politics has re-emerged across both left and right movements as a response to neoliberalism. The MAGA movement defines its national-popular constituency by explicitly excluding BIPOC and LGBTQ+ producers from federal agricultural programs — demonstrated in USDA policy language about serving "the American people" while terminating programs for marginalized communities.
▶ Session Recording ◼ Slideshow
08
August 28
Law and Land Reform in the Global North: Scotland Case Study
Exploring how Scotland has used human rights-based approaches to expand community land ownership and agroecological practices through legal reform.
Details ▼
Required Reading
  • "Using property law to expand agroecology: Scotland's land reforms based on human rights" by Adam Calo
Suggested Readings
  • "Back to the Basics: Lessons from U.S. Property Law for Land Reform" by Shelley Cavalieri
  • "The moral economy of land: from land reform to ownership society, 1880–2018" by Alexander Dobeson and Sebastian Kohl
Key Insights
Historical Legacy Creates Political Foundation: Scotland's Highland Clearances established extreme land concentration (430 people owning half of private land) while embedding narratives of dispossession in national consciousness. This historical grievance became foundational to modern land reform politics.
Devolution as Transformative Political Structure: The Scotland Act 1998 transferred legislative authority over land law to Edinburgh, creating space where Scottish priorities could predominate. Proportional representation empowered pro-reform parties that remained marginal at Westminster — demonstrating how institutional design shapes policy possibilities.
Market-Based Reform Reinforces Financialization: Scottish reforms use human rights discourse to legitimize state intervention while requiring full market compensation, creating fundamental contradictions. Despite land reform legislation, forest ownership has become more concentrated (164 entities now own 75% versus 199 in 2012).
Federal Constitutional Constraints Limit California Adaptation: Unlike Scotland's devolved authority, California faces Fifth Amendment Takings Clause and Fourteenth Amendment Due Process protections. California's Sustainable Agricultural Lands Conservation Program (194,000+ acres conserved, $373M granted) represents significant climate innovation but doesn't address underlying ownership patterns.
▶ Session Recording ◼ Slideshow
09
September 4
Territory vs Land: Indigenous-Peasant Convergences & Divergences
Analyzing different approaches to territorial defense and food sovereignty, examining both convergences and tensions between indigenous and peasant movements in Guatemala.
Details ▼
Required Reading
  • "The Defense of Territory and Food Sovereignty: Two Paradigms for Radical Territorial Restructuring in Neoliberal Guatemala" by Nicholas Copeland
Suggested Reading
  • "The State of Nature: Country Folk, Conservationists, and Criminals at Yellowstone National Park, 1872-1908" by Karl Jacoby
Key Insights
Territory vs. Land Distinction: Plurinationalist thought frames territorial reconstitution as fundamentally different from land redistribution. Territory encompasses collective rights, cultural autonomy, and Buen Vivir ("living well, not better") — an alternative to extractivist development models that prioritizes community wellbeing over individual accumulation.
Political Instruments vs. Political Parties: Bolivia's innovation of the "political instrument" represents a counter-hegemonic electoral vehicle controlled by social movements rather than professional politicians. Unlike traditional parties, political instruments prioritize political education that develops critical analysis and strengthens grassroots organizations.
Co-optation Through Development: Guatemala's experience reveals how imperial powers can co-opt plurinational language while gutting its radical content. USAID's collaboration with Indigenous authorities promotes "Food Security" and "Energy Resilience" programs that maintain privatized markets while diluting demands for energy nationalization and commons recovery.
Collective Land Tenure Models: Bolivia's Tierras Comunitarias de Origen (TCOs) demonstrate alternatives to private property regimes, converting national parks into collectively-owned Indigenous territories showing significantly lower deforestation rates. However, applicability to California contexts remains constrained by different levels of integration into global capital markets.
▶ Session Recording ◼ Slideshow
10
September 11
Synthesis: Building Organizational Capacity in California
Final session synthesizing the school's analytical frameworks and five foundational principles, with a concrete call to action for sustained organizing in California and beyond.
Details ▼
Five Foundational Principles — Amílcar Cabral's Framework
1. US Settler State Formation Analysis: Understanding the role of US settler state formation in determining who has land and how land is used provides the historical foundation for contemporary land struggles. Land policy structured around compounding interests of financial, corporate, state, and working sectors, with the choice to move west instead of redistributing concentrated Southern land representing settler goals misaligning with Black and Indigenous visions for America.
2. State & Land as Contested Spaces: The state and land are contested spaces requiring strategic analysis of how to contest them effectively rather than accepting existing power relations as permanent. The relationship between the state, land, and business/financial actors demonstrates that land reform direction depends on political coalitions with power.
3. Politics as Strategic Terrain: Politics is not a bad word but "the struggle over who decides how we live" — the very terrain where our future will be won or lost. This reframes political engagement from moral appeals toward strategic analysis of power relations and organizing capacity.
4. Organizational Precision Over Cultural Romanticism: The success of Global South agrarian movements stems from organizational precision and clarity, not cultural factors. This requires serious strategic thinking about capacity-building, political education, and infrastructure development rather than romantic appeals to traditional practices.
5. From Defensive to Offensive Positioning: "We do not need to remain on the defensive but can claim our right to determine history." Moving from reactive to proactive political engagement means building capacity for advanced struggle rather than simply responding to immediate crises. Even amid fascist attacks, people are "more ready than ever to be offered a struggle to engage in."
¡Vamos hacia la reforma agraria integral y popular!
Concrete Next Steps: Bay Area cohort hosting in-person winter sessions. Interest in LA, IE, and SD for similar programming. Vendor-matching program expansion with student residential cooperatives. Engineering brigades with struggling agricultural producers. Fundraising benefits for landless workers' trust and agroecological school network: Sept 20 DJ Benefit in Oakland, ongoing prints via HadleyGrassPrints, December 2025 LA vendor market benefit.
"This school emerges not merely from 2-3 years of research and dedicated study to these questions, but a lifetime of struggle which only recently, I have been able to articulate on my own terms. It is here where I encourage you all to pull your political power from, as it will guide you towards the popular future we all want."
"You all have deeply impacted me in ways I am still trying to figure out. What I can say is you have alleviated me of my loneliness in thinking through these questions, and have provided me with an insurmountable hope for what we can build in the midst of this fascist attack on our communities… We shall be victorious in our struggle for dignity."
▶ Session Recording ◼ Slideshow

Join 105+ Organizers This Summer

This free political education program brings together students, farmworkers, organizers, and land defenders from across California and beyond. Every session is recorded for those who can't attend live.

How to Participate

📅 Schedule

Every Thursday
6:30–8:00 PM PST
July 10 – September 11

🔗 Join Online

Google Meet
meet.google.com/ukw-sbiu-gst

📞 Call In

+1 682-235-5592
PIN: 644 248 237#

📚 Materials

Reading drive provided
All sessions recorded

Privacy Options: Uncomfortable being recorded? Join with camera off and an alias, or watch recordings and email pluricalifornia@gmail.com for one-on-one debriefs.

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