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'll analyze California's land conflicts and explore pathways for change.
Meet Your Instructor: Elias
Born in San Diego, raised in the Inland Empire, schooled in the Bay Area, and working mainly in the Coachella Valley, LA, & 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.
School Goals: (1) Provide free education on land inequality and movement building, (2) Learn from participants' experiences and dreams for justice, (3) Create seeds for an organizational network committed to land reform in California and beyond.
📚 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
10-Week Curriculum
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.
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 in winning the Civil War 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. This represented a coalition between settlers seeking "free soil" in the West and northern industrial corporations (especially railroads) with financial interests in land grabbing. Rather than building alliances with enslaved/formerly enslaved peoples for Southern land redistribution, this coalition chose indigenous dispossession.
Paramilitary Violence: Progressive Reconstruction efforts were systematically sabotaged by organized white supremacist, paramilitary violence in the South, demonstrating how reactionary forces actively work to prevent redistributive land reform.
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.
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.
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: Building on Session 1's framework, we identified five key conditions where successful peasant movements emerge: (1) Areas with growing development discrepancies (not necessarily the poorest regions); (2) Easy access to urban centers, mines, and industrial areas; (3) Increasing absentee land ownership that weakened traditional landlord-peasant bonds, making exploitative aspects clearer; (4) Rigid negative reactions from landholders to moderate peasant demands that awakened peasant consciousness; and (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 to survive debt. Families and wage laborers pooled resources to create the first "piquero" (smallholder) class, establishing the foundation for peasant autonomy through strategic economic adaptations.
Diversification Strategies: Bolivian peasants developed sophisticated survival strategies: Highland "Verticality" - assembling land parcels across different ecological zones to grow complementary crops (potatoes/quinoa at high elevations, grains lower) as insurance against localized failures; Valle Bajo Intensification - using permanent irrigation for double maize harvests annually with hired labor; Cliza Valley Mixed Farming - combining maize cultivation with livestock and potato production adapted to drier conditions.
Beyond Agricultural Diversification: Peasants developed comprehensive "livelihood diversification" including local and distant marketing, creating retail networks and ferias (markets) for barter/cash exchange, and non-agricultural activities as artisans, traders, and small-scale moneylenders.
Modern Political Strategy: We examined the 16-year period of political instability (10 administrations) following the Chaco War loss to Paraguay, analyzing how peasants strategically capitalized on political openings while protecting themselves during reactionary periods. Key developments included the creation of the first peasant union, strategic renting of land from haciendas, establishing schools as underground organizing centers, and eventual land purchases. These tactical actions corresponded directly to the political openings or closures offered by each administration - peasants advanced their organizing during progressive moments and consolidated gains during conservative periods. The 1952 national revolution succeeded through miner-peasant alliances, fulfilling the urban connection condition.
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 (where many absentee landowners now live). We concluded with our working group's vision for an agroecological school in the region, modeled on Bolivian examples, with dedicated funding to begin implementation.
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?
Required Reading:
- "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:
Key Insights:
Class Analysis of Progressive vs. Radical Movements: The concentration of resources and funding from urban-based environmental and conservation organizations creates a fundamental disconnect from working-class rural populations. This urban, philanthropic influence shapes the Progressive trend's dominance over radical, peasant-led approaches in the US context, with progressive movements characterized by college-educated, middle-class leadership, consumer-led analysis, and access to philanthropic networks rather than independent working-class power.
Strategic Limitations of Market-Assisted Approaches: Contemporary land justice tools prioritize "landowner persuasion" and market-based solutions rather than organizing landless peoples for redistributive land reform. Emma Harden's research on hobby/backyard farmers reveals how individualized, plot-based organizing leads to isolation, abandonment of political commitments, and local-scale impact without regional/state/national coordination.
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) characterized by structural adjustment programs, trade liberalization, and unprecedented corporate concentration. The 2008 Global Food Crisis exposed systemic contradictions with record harvests alongside record hunger.
Contemporary Land Justice Achievements: Nine land justice tools have achieved significant measurable success: over 61M+ acres protected by land trusts, 1,300+ active land trusts nationwide, and the Uniform Partition of Heirs Property Act passed in 23 states to address African-American land loss. These tools include Community Land Trusts, Buy-Protect-Sell strategies, Land Back movements, and cultural easements for Indigenous nations.
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 and termination of Regional Food Business Centers/DEI initiatives, 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. This distinction between education and political education is 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) and Cooperative Development Vendor Matching programs.
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.
Required Reading:
- "Women and the Gendered Politics of Food" by Vandana Shiva
- "Born without arms or legs, the young man who symbolizes how America neglects its most vulnerable farmhands" - El País
Key Insights:
Herbicidal Warfare as Colonial Strategy: Israeli use of herbicides to destroy Palestinian border farms demonstrates how chemical weapons systematically target both land and people to undermine indigenous food sovereignty and territorial control. This colonial tactic parallels domestic industrial agriculture's assault on farmworker communities, revealing agriculture as a continuation of chemical warfare by other means.
Chemical Weapons Heritage in Agriculture: Modern pesticides share identical mechanisms with WWII nerve agents (organophosphorus compounds inhibiting acetylcholinesterase), 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.
Profit Over Nutrition Systems: Herbicides that systematically eliminate nutritious milpa weeds (traditional polyculture biodiversity) expose how industrial agriculture prioritizes market control over feeding people. This destruction of biodiverse food systems reveals corporate agriculture's intent to maximize profit rather than nourish communities, creating artificial scarcity amid abundance.
Regulatory Theater vs. Corporate Power: Despite existing pesticide laws, systematic enforcement failures demonstrate how corporate power supersedes worker protection. The gap between regulation and reality necessitates land redistribution as the primary community defense mechanism, moving beyond reform toward structural transformation.
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 that bypasses the regulatory capture dominating government agencies.
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. This embodied knowledge of industrial agriculture's violence against social reproduction informs distinct organizing strategies that prioritize collective protection over individual equity.
Memory of Harm as Anti-Chemical Resistance: Communities with lived experience of agro-chemical violence become natural allies for chemical-free agriculture, making land reform not just about access but about collective self-defense. Guest speakers demonstrated how territorial markets and social organization create economic alternatives that bypass corporate control, building farmer autonomy through independent food networks rather than philanthropic dependency.
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.
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 rather than genuine ecological transition. The Eoliatec del Istmo wind park's 81% profit margins reveal "green" colonialism operating under environmental rhetoric.
Extractivism Theory and Competing Theories of Political Ecology: Latin American indigenous extractivism theory emerged in the 1990s responding to neoliberal policies, focusing on how communities become "sacrifice zones" for capitalist/imperialist profit or national development. While critics say that extractivist theory misuses concepts such as the "appropriation of natural resources" (since all production requires initial extraction), we clarified that extractivist critique is not opposed to development & production. Instead, it specifically targets how accumulation modes—even by national-popular, South-led governments—disregard local community perspectives. This territorial focus reveals frontier communities most primed for land reform organizing, complementing rather than contradicting national-popular transformations while highlighting how governments may undermine their own political coalitions by creating sacrifice zones (recently: Bolivia and Ecuador).
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.
Technological Fixes vs. Structural Transformation: Climate change creates massive land transitions that generate new sites of struggle, but technological and bureaucratic solutions often reproduce existing power relations. True climate justice requires moving beyond corporate-led renewable energy toward democratic control over land and resources.
Land Reform as Climate Strategy: Given systematic failures of both pesticide regulations and green energy policies to protect communities, land redistribution emerges as the primary defense mechanism. 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.
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" (The Isthmus is Ours) articulate collective sovereignty against both corporate extractivism and state-imposed modernization.
Global North-South Land Reform Connections: The presentation's linkage between Oaxaca wind parks and California extractive industries reveals how similar dynamics of land dispossession operate across the Global North-South divide. A People's Green New Deal framework positions land reform as fundamental to achieving climate solutions that serve communities rather than capital, creating new economic relationships through territorial markets and farmer autonomy.
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.
Required Reading:
- "Fields of Gold: Financing the Global Land Rush" by Madeleine Fairbairn
Key Insights:
Definition of Financialization: The presentation defines financialization as the tendency for profit-making to occur through financial channels rather than productive activities, and connects this to "rentier capitalism" where success is based on what you control rather than what you produce. This represents a fundamental shift from productive to extractive relationships with agricultural land.
Scale of Institutional Investment: Seven institutional investors alone owned 1,001 properties worth $16 billion as of Q2 2024. Investment has grown dramatically since the 1990s according to the NCREIF Farmland Index. Farmland is being marketed as having attractive risk-return characteristics compared to other asset classes, with fund managers using financial terminology to describe different land types.
Investment Appeal and Market Positioning: Farmland appeals to investors as a hedge against inflation and food security concerns, offering relatively stable returns with low volatility. Bill Gates becoming America's largest private farmland owner highlights this trend. Investment materials show farmland positioned alongside traditional financial instruments, with some regions described as "the treasury bill of farmland."
Historical and Cultural Opposition: Deep cultural attachment to farmer land ownership in American agriculture has created resistance dating back to 1970s Congressional hearings about pension fund farmland investment. Representatives argued that land ownership lies "deep within the soul of a farmer" and that financial investment was "tinkering with the virtue of country America." Ongoing protests continue against institutional "land grabbing."
Material and Technical Challenges: Land is inherently illiquid and location-specific, and agricultural production faces climate risks, pests, and market volatility. Companies are responding by using AI and machine learning to manage vast, geographically dispersed portfolios. New financial instruments including REITs and crowdfunding platforms attempt to make farmland more liquid and accessible to smaller investors.
Barriers to Addressing Financialization: Land ownership data is expensive and difficult to access; companies use subsidiaries to obscure ultimate ownership, making it challenging to track institutional investment. 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 of Agricultural Land: The financialization of farmland is still in early stages and remains contested, facing obstacles from data opacity and misleading investor narratives. The presentation raises critical questions about whether treating essential agricultural resources as financial assets serves broader social interests, particularly regarding food security, environmental stewardship, and rural community stability.
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.
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: The presentation introduces Antonio Gramsci's concept of the "national-popular," which expands beyond traditional Marxist focus on 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 across Latin America, Africa, and Asia, where movements consistently identified land control as the foundation of both economic exploitation and political domination.
Historical Exclusions Through Alien Land Laws: California's 1913 Alien Land Law and subsequent legislation prohibited "aliens ineligible for citizenship" from owning land, using race-neutral language about citizenship eligibility while specifically targeting Asian immigrants, particularly successful Japanese farmers. These laws expanded across western states and were strengthened in the 1920s, demonstrating how legal frameworks have historically determined access to agricultural land based on citizenship and race.
Filipino Exception and Territorial Status: Filipinos held unique status as "US Nationals" due to the Philippines being a US territory since 1898, allowing them to challenge alien land laws by leveraging this racial ambiguity. This facilitated effective agricultural worker immigration to Hawaii and California even when other Asian immigrants were barred, until Philippine independence in 1934 ended this exception.
Institutionalization of Foreign Agricultural Labor: The 1942 Emergency Labor Importation Program (Bracero Program) was literally "penned" by the American Farm Bureau Federation and Associated Farmers, expanding farm labor supply while explicitly prohibiting federal funds from improving wages or conditions for American farmworkers. The program prevented braceros from striking while protecting employers through the "Texas Proviso," which stated that employing unauthorized workers would not constitute "harboring or concealing" them.
Jamaican Resistance and H-2 Program Development: Jamaican agricultural workers' organized resistance shaped the institutionalization of temporary worker programs. Their struggles to stay permanently led to the creation of the modern H-2 visa structure through the 1952 McCarran-Walter Act. Jamaican resistance also forced changes in recruitment practices, including screening for "character and efficiency" and requiring workers to agree to the "Jim Crow Creed" before southern deployment.
Contemporary National-Popular Politics: The presentation argues that national-popular politics has re-emerged across both left and right movements as a response to neoliberalism and financialization. It critically examines how the MAGA movement defines its national-popular constituency by explicitly excluding BIPOC and LGBTQ+ producers from federal agricultural programs, as evidenced in USDA policy language about serving "the American people" while terminating programs for marginalized communities.
Strategic Questions for Movement Building: The document concludes with critical questions focused on political effectiveness and building resilient power structures. These include whether to engage in national-popular versus communitarian-popular struggles, how to resolve internal colonialism for Black, Latino, and Filipino communities without reproducing settler colonial land relations with Indigenous communities, and how to build sovereign economic development while organizing popular classes rather than persuading policymakers. These questions are explicitly framed around tactical considerations for ensuring the movement can withstand right-wing provocation and sabotage, rather than concerns about ideological purity.
Law and Land Reform in 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.
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, distinguishing Scotland from other UK regions where concentrated ownership lacked similar political salience.
Devolution as Transformative Political Structure: The Scotland Act 1998 transferred legislative authority over land law, planning, agriculture, and rural development to Edinburgh, creating space where Scottish priorities could predominate. Proportional representation empowered pro-reform parties (Liberal Democrats, Scottish Greens, SNP) that remained marginal at Westminster, demonstrating how institutional design shapes policy possibilities.
Crofting Tenure Creates Ownership Paradox: The "three F's" (Fair Rent, Fixity of Tenure, Free Sale) established through the 1886 Crofters' Holding Act created tenant rights so extensive that croft tenancies can be more valuable than freehold ownership. Modern crofters enjoy regulatory protections, development rights, succession privileges, and public support unavailable to ordinary landowners, effectively creating quasi-hereditary holdings that challenge conventional property categories.
Market-Based Reform Reinforces Financialization: Scottish reforms use human rights discourse to legitimize state intervention while requiring full market compensation, creating fundamental contradictions. The approach criticizes land financialization yet reinforces it through compensation mechanisms, advocates community ownership without demonstrating agroecological outcomes, and challenges property absolutism while preserving liberal legal frameworks.
Greenwashing Undermines Reform Objectives: Despite land reform legislation, forest ownership has become more concentrated (164 entities now own 75% versus 199 in 2012). Carbon credit markets attracted oil giants and private firms developing projects that critics argue enable greenwashing while inflating land prices, suggesting market-based environmental policies may contradict democratic land access goals.
Federal Constitutional Constraints Limit California Adaptation: Unlike Scotland's devolved authority, California faces Fifth Amendment Takings Clause and Fourteenth Amendment Due Process protections that restrict state intervention in private property. California cannot replicate Scotland's universal right to roam or intervention powers over "problematic ownership" without facing federal court challenges that could invalidate transformative elements.
Timeline Reveals Strategic Divergence: Scotland developed unified land reform framework addressing ownership concentration and community rights, while California's efforts remain fragmented across environmental programs. California's Sustainable Agricultural Lands Conservation Program represents significant climate innovation (194,000+ acres conserved, $373M granted) but doesn't address underlying ownership patterns or democratic participation that characterize Scotland's approach.
Scotland's Property Law Innovations: Scottish land reform created novel property rights categories that challenge conventional ownership models. Community Right to Buy (2003) established pre-emptive purchase rights allowing qualifying communities to acquire land before private buyers when it comes to market. The 2016 Land Reform Act expanded these rights and introduced transparency requirements for large landholdings. These innovations work within liberal property frameworks while creating exceptions based on community need and public interest, though they require full market compensation and don't fundamentally alter capitalist land relations.
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.
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 that seek votes through pandering, political instruments prioritize political education that develops critical analysis and strengthen grassroots organizations rather than channeling energy solely into electoral politics.
Academic Elite vs. Base Disconnect: Chile's failed constitutional reform demonstrates how plurinational concepts can remain trapped within academic and political elites. The Mapuche plurinational proposal failed because it wasn't effectively translated to address immediate material concerns like housing, healthcare, and pensions that rural and urban Indigenous populations prioritized over abstract constitutional changes.
Co-optation Through Development: Guatemala's experience reveals how imperial powers like the United States 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.
Extractivist Contradictions: Bolivia's MAS government illustrates the tensions between plurinational aspirations and global economic pressures. Their strategy of redistributive neo-extractivism - financing social programs through resource extraction - represents a constrained response to peripheral position in the world economy rather than genuine decolonization.
Agroecology as Political Strategy: Critical agroecological thought reframes sustainable farming practices as territorial reclamation from global capital. Food sovereignty becomes central to self-determination, with Bolivia constitutionally encoding these principles while struggling to implement them against extractivist pressures.
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 that show significantly lower deforestation rates. However, the applicability of such models to contexts like California remains constrained by different levels of integration into global capital markets.
Critical Framework for Analysis
The Constituent Assembly Strategy: Plurinationalist movements prioritize constitutional transformation through elected assemblies that rewrite foundational laws, rather than working within existing institutional frameworks. This represents a fundamental challenge to liberal democratic assumptions about incremental reform.
Indigenous-Peasant Alliance: Successful plurinational movements combine Indigenous territorial claims with peasant class consciousness around land access, credit, and markets. This convergence challenges both ethnic reductionism and class reductionism while building broader coalitions for structural transformation.
Imperial Adaptability: The presentation reveals how imperial powers adapt to and co-opt radical movements by adopting their language while maintaining extractive relationships. Understanding these dynamics becomes crucial for movements seeking genuine transformation rather than symbolic recognition.
Building Popular Power for Land Reform in California
Final session synthesizing lessons learned and developing concrete strategies for building a land reform movement in California. From theory to practice.
Required Reading:
- Our Lives will Lay out the Answers -- Summer School Reflection by Elias Aceves
I. Foundational Framework: From Moral Appeals to Embodied Analysis
Land Reform is Directional, Not Inherently Progressive: The "Big Beautiful Bill" public lands sell-off demonstrates that land reform describes any restructuring of property regimes, not inherently progressive policy. Direction depends entirely on which political coalitions advocate for it. Settler-corporate alliances produced reactionary westward expansion rather than Southern plantation redistribution to formerly enslaved peoples. As the school established: "this process goes in whatever direction those with political power sway it towards."
From Moral Frameworks to Embodied Experience: The school distinguished between approaching land reform through abstract moral appeals to "fairness" versus analysis rooted in lived experience of structural violence. As the reflection demonstrates: allowing oneself to be "guided by anger, rather than moral abstractions" revealed how land reform addresses the crystallized question: "why must those I love struggle for a dignified life?" This distinction became central across all ten sessions.
Personal Journey to Political Clarity: At nine years old, watching the stock market open on CNBC while parents lost their home during the 2008 crisis, the word "economy" first appeared as a source of inexplicable stress. Weekly border crossings between San Diego and Tijuana, the "geography of a divided life"—created embodied knowledge that would later guide political development. "At nine you cannot capture the full nuances of these things. You can only follow the pull of the question."
II. Historical Conditions and Revolutionary Potential
Conditions for Peasant Revolution: Historical analysis reveals successful rural movements emerged not in the poorest areas, but where: (1) development created growing discrepancies, (2) easy access to urban centers existed, (3) absentee land ownership modified feudal relations, (4) rigid landlord reactions to moderate demands awakened peasant consciousness, and (5) small emancipatory efforts played crucial catalytic roles. The Bolivian experience in Ucurena demonstrates these dynamics.
Economic Upheaval Creates Opportunity: As Potosí's mining economy weakened, Cochabamba landlords faced reduced profits, leading them to rent portions of estates to tenants. This created opportunities for forastero and mestizo peasants to establish smallholdings, developing sophisticated survival strategies combining traditional Andean practices with market activities. Wage employment in mines provided financial resources enabling peasants to transcend hacienda servitude and become private landholders.
The National-Popular Beyond Class Reductionism: Gramsci's concept expands movement-building beyond industrial workers to include peasantry, urban poor, lower middle class, and marginalized groups. However, the MAGA project's exclusion of BIPOC and LGBTQ+ producers from their "American" national-popular demonstrates how this framework can be weaponized for reactionary purposes. Who constitutes "the people" becomes the central political question.
Property, Citizenship, and Racial Hierarchies: California's 1913 Alien Land Law prohibited "aliens ineligible for citizenship" from owning land, specifically targeting Asian immigrants, particularly successful Japanese farmers. These laws created durable exclusions that persist today—"we discussed the very reason why I and everyone I know are even in this country in the first place (the bracero program)." Land access remains structured by racial hierarchies established through citizenship regimes.
III. Contemporary Challenges and Strategic Analysis
Financialization and Waste Accumulation: Beyond traditional extraction, imperialism now profits through "waste rent"—the systematic creation and management of destruction. The Bolivian tin mine example demonstrates how environmental destruction becomes integral to maintaining extractive relationships. Imperial capital shifts from productive investment to profiting from management of decay, with poisoned rivers actively preventing agroecological alternatives and reproducing conditions of dependency.
Lessons from Bolivia - Imperial Carcasses: In Rodeo, Bolivia, witnessing agriculture in a valley poisoned by an American-owned tin mine revealed new forms of accumulation. The mine employs no one but acts as "a living carcass of American imperialism," renting access to desperate miners seeking tin for Oruro markets. "The American owner's income comes from rent earned on desperate miners seeking quick cash, not from actual tin export... Imperial capital shifts from direct extraction to what Kadri calls 'waste rent'—profiting from management of decay rather than productive investment."
Chemical Violence and Embodied Knowledge: Pesticides and chemical weapons share identical organophosphorus structures and mechanisms, both developed by Nazi chemists. Women farmworkers carry this violence in their bodies through pregnancy and nursing, creating embodied knowledge that demands land reform centered on community health rather than 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.
MALR Limitations and Alternative Approaches: Market-Assisted Land Reform prioritizes landowner persuasion over landless organization, cannot match speculative value increases in trillion-dollar land markets, lacks coordination for real political transformation, and serves philanthropic allies rather than working-class people. Patchwork initiatives unable to leverage real political power necessary for social transformation through lack of regional, state, and national-level coordination.
Green Extractivism and False Solutions: The Isthmus of Tehuantepec wind parks demonstrate how "green" energy projects reproduce dynamics of dispossession in one of Mexico's most indigenous regions. 29 wind parks built since 1994 illustrate that solely-technological solutions often preserve existing power relations while claiming environmental benefits. Climate transitions become new sites of struggle requiring popular control rather than corporate management.
IV. Political Education and Organizational Strategy
Political Instruments vs. Electoral Parties: Bolivia's innovation represents counter-hegemonic electoral vehicles controlled by social movements rather than professional politicians. Success depends on political education that develops critical analysis rather than conformity. CODECA's approach demonstrates this through three fundamental questions: "Why are we poor? Why must we organize ourselves? Why is it important to construct the political instrument?"
Political Education as Protection Against Manipulation: Understanding financialization and structural processes provides "words and foresight when encountering new information" and "prevents manipulation toward reactionary ends." This analysis reveals current terrain of struggle and enemy incentives rather than simply rationalizing predetermined positions. As CODECA's Thelma Cabrera explains: education should "provoke analysis and help identify the problem and propose solutions [on our own terms]."
Political Infrastructure Must Precede Demands: Chile's failed constitutional process demonstrated that "organizational capacity did not match the scale of proposed transformation." The Mapuche plurinational proposal failed because academic elites couldn't translate abstract constitutional changes into immediate material concerns like housing and healthcare that rural populations prioritized. Building coalition capacity and strategic articulation must come before making major political demands.
Elite Capture and Imperial Co-optation: Guatemala's USAID collaboration reveals how imperial powers co-opt radical concepts. Traditional indigenous authorities increasingly align with government institutions and international actors, promoting "Food Security" and "Energy Resilience" programs that maintain privatized markets while diluting demands for energy nationalization and commons recovery. The future of plurinational movements finds itself "caught between the claws of American influence and liberal reformism."
Political Memory as Organizing Foundation: Individual experiences of "humiliation, disrespect, underestimation, stress, overwhelming tears" become the basis for political memory that transforms into collective recognition. The most powerful organizing conversations occur when people recognize shared struggle—when "individual political memories enmesh and become collective" around the demand for dignity for ourselves, our families, those we love.
V. Strategic Lessons and California Applications
Context-Specific Strategy Over Model Replication: Global South movements offer insight on "how to respond well to contours that bound our political-economic experiences" rather than providing direct solutions. The task is not copying tactics like mística but developing equivalent capacity for advanced struggle. Scotland's devolution success resulted from political autonomy allowing Scottish priorities to take precedence, offering lessons about institutional design and political space creation.
Translation Without Replication: "When we ask how to translate these lessons to our context, notice we are not directly applying solutions. Most often these cases—Bolivia, Guatemala, Chile—offer not solutions but insight on how to respond well to contours that bound our political-economic experiences... Our job is not copy-and-pasting but building capacity to engage in the same advanced levels of struggle which the case studies we have dedicated time to study exemplify."
Conditions Shape Strategic Horizons: The contradiction between food sovereignty and agroecology (fish farming in contaminated glacial waters) illustrates how "avenues of struggle are contoured by conditions people respond to." Strategic analysis must account for how accumulated imperial waste creates material barriers to alternative development paths, requiring response to existing constraints rather than ideal conditions. People's ingenuity emerges within these constraints, not outside them.
Popular Ingenuity Within Constraints: At the mountain's peak, a shrinking glacier fed Wallatani lake hosting a village food sovereignty venture in fish farming. This created contradictions between food sovereignty and agroecology, yet demonstrated how people respond to conditions: "how to feed oneself facing environmental degradation prompted by an American-owned tin mine." We must return to seeing how avenues of struggle are contoured by conditions people respond to.
Collective Land Tenure Alternatives: 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 and accumulated environmental destruction from historical extraction.
VI. Building Organizational Capacity in California
Concrete Organizing Initiatives: The working group implements practical capacity-building: Bay Area winter sessions, vendor-matching programs with student residential cooperatives, engineering brigades with struggling agricultural producers, fundraising benefits for landless workers' trust and agroecological school networks. These initiatives demonstrate movement from analysis to concrete organizing infrastructure.
Multi-Regional Coordination: Interest in LA, Inland Empire, and San Diego for similar in-person programming indicates potential for statewide coordination. This addresses MALR limitations by building regional networks capable of matching the scale necessary for political transformation rather than remaining isolated local initiatives.
Popular Education Infrastructure: The summer school model demonstrates how advanced political education can be implemented outside traditional academic institutions. Ten sessions covering historical analysis, contemporary case studies, and strategic applications created shared analytical frameworks for participants across California, establishing foundation for sustained organizing.
From Individual to Collective Political Memory: "The most powerful conversations happen when I look a farmer or farmworker in the eyes and say what I have struggled with, then wait for their response. There is a moment before they speak when you sense they have felt the same way. In that moment our individual political memories enmesh and become collective. Recognition that what we want is dignity for ourselves, our families, those we love. This is when anger becomes hope, when we understand that we do not need to remain on the defensive but can claim our right to determine history."
From Defensive to Offensive Positioning: The school's central principle: "we do not need to remain on the defensive but can claim our right to determine history." Politics becomes "not a bad word but the very terrain where our future will be won or lost." Even amid fascist attacks like the Supreme Court legalizing racial profiling for ICE raids, people are "more ready than ever to be offered a struggle to engage in" rather than being complacent or placated.
Summer School Methodological Framework
Five Foundational Principles from 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 choice to move west instead of redistributing concentrated Southern land representing settler goals misaligning with Black & 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. This means building capacity for advanced struggle rather than simply responding to immediate crises.
Call to Action: ¡Vamos hacia la reforma agraria integral y popular!
Current Moment Analysis: "Today, as I write this, the Supreme Court legalized racial profiling (particularly of Latinos) for ICE patrols and raids. However, as we have discussed throughout this school, this is not a moment to retreat. In fact, people are more ready than ever to be offered a struggle to engage in. People are not complacent or placated, but are simply waiting for a clear path forward."
Vision for Dignified Life: One which offers a dignified life for us all; a right to work, land, housing, and food. A life which the fascists miserably cannot comprehend. It is at this moment when we too can launch a counteroffensive to protect those we love.
Foundation for Sustained Struggle: "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."
Collective Commitment: "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."
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 20th DJ Benefit in Oakland, ongoing prints for sale via HadleyGrassPrints, December 2025 LA vendor market benefit.
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
Every Thursday
6:30 - 8:00 PM PST
Google Meet Link
meet.google.com/ukw-sbiu-gst
+1 682-235-5592
PIN: 644 248 237#
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.
Questions?
Email us at pluricalifornia@gmail.com or connect with us on social media below.