MAINTENANCE IN DORMANT TIMES
Homegrown Youth Collaborative’s experimentations in collective unlearning. ISSUE 1: THE UN/MAKING ISSUE
The two of us envisioned an organization where youth had the agency to create their own learning environments in collaboration with adult co-conspirators. We wanted to build a multigenerational space where youth and adults could learn from one another through reciprocal mentorship. Adults with access to specific resources, tools, or networks could share those with youth to adapt as they saw fit. In turn, young people could lead their communities in collective learning, developing their own definitions of transformation and belonging.
Winter suggested we call this project Homegrown after spending that summer listening to a Neil Young song. The name felt really right, like being rooted in learning from and within a place everyone seems to want to leave, while trying to make the most of what we’ve got. We kept returning to the idea of our San Diego-Tijuana borderlands as one of the many homes we ourselves grew up in: a militarized border city sprawling from Oceanside to Rosarito, built intentionally to displace and separate. To be truly “homegrown” we had to embrace how being from this place meant learning from the flow—that our sense of rootedness also meant being in motion across border walls, language, and age. Even if we weren’t sure what it would look like, we dreamt of a cross-border, bilingual space for learning together and finding abundance in those difficult, unknown in-betweens. We wanted to encourage and cultivate a way of thinking and being that school so often teaches us to discipline and contain.
Many people helped to materialize this initial idea. While there were four of us who formed the first formal iteration of our intergenerational team, we understood that to grow a space that could truly mirror the conditions of our community, we needed to figure out how to bring more youth and community from Tijuana into the fold. This meant thinking outside the box when it came to outreach, programming, and potentially embracing a shift in our organizational structure.
NOTES
1. These projects existed concurrently around other public-facing projects and creative educational interventions, which included two live music fundraisers, a teach-in and book release for our Learning Terrarium Resource Toolkit, an Allied Media Projects session, visits to book/zine fairs across California and Baja California, and a three-part, cross-border deep listening series.
Our challenging first year was spent figuring out exactly what we were trying to build and how we could do it. We asked ourselves: How do we organize ourselves in a way that could not only sustain our work in the long and short term, but also do so through practices that reflected the fluid, multilingual, multigenerational world we wanted to build together? How could we find the sweet spot between building a framework beyond the logic of the colonial education project while still retaining the flexibility to shift and twist into something beautifully weird and unexpected?
As the organization grew, the answers to these questions became even more complex. Our collective ebbed and flowed in size, taking on different forms with people’s shifting capacities and interests. Many people floated in and out of the Homegrown sphere with each project, shaping our efforts and working structure with their unique visions, offerings, and presence.
We struggled with the murkiness of how to pay back our friends, collaborators, and ourselves for the time, labor, and money that went into sustaining this project, which far exceeded what we could afford to give in return. To address the unending challenge of securing funding, we considered the possibility of shifting to a 501(c)3 as it might have offered us easier access to resources. However, we ultimately found more agency in our cooperative, solidarity-based model that unanchored us from the legal, financial, or political confines of the nonprofit industrial complex, even if that meant an unstructured floatiness which made our leadership and funding sometimes uncertain.
Still, it was our own intergenerational friendships, which have anchored Homegrown from its inception, that brought us back to who we were in the midst of this experiment in simultaneous doing and unmaking. The relationships reminded us that though we didn’t always have the perfect language(s) for describing ourselves, nor could we ever exist in one place or dimension alone, embracing play, exploration, and togetherness amid our imperfect translations and difficult unknowns was the path for staying true to Homegrown and our mission to reclaim our love for learning (and failing)—something school so often denied us.
Significant changes in our personal lives—illness and death of loved ones, moving, and burnout from simply doing too much very fast—made large ripples in the way we worked. In the late summer of 2022, one of our core members decided to take a hiatus and others followed suit after the closing night of our final programs in Tijuana that fall. With that, our dormancy period began, where we gave ourselves some much needed rest, friendship, and reflection.
Through Homegrown, we find comfort in the fact that life refuses carceral logic: plants go into dormancy not to mold themselves into “good” plants, but to grow deeper and wilder, rerouting their networks in ways we can’t entirely see or measure.
In school, we learn that survival also means avoiding risk—the risk of embarrassment, the risk of choosing the wrong answer, or the risk of existing as a “wrong” kind of person. We learn that to survive school, it’s best to avoid punishment and error. In doing so, we often lose ourselves in patterns of containment, burying our beautifully messy selves. But when we do this, we also risk foreclosing all other possible futures.
In limiting ourselves, we risk missing chance encounters with other unruly, justice-seeking makers of trouble and wayward, daring disturbers of peace. We risk losing out on a world where our missteps are a dance and a blessing, a world where our failures are gifts that teach us how to not only make it out alive but also take our friends with us.
Correcting ourselves to fit neatly into matrices of “rightness” is how our education system, a prison by design, measures progress. Through Homegrown, we find comfort in the fact that life refuses carceral logic: plants go into dormancy not to mold themselves into “good” plants, but to grow deeper and wilder, rerouting their networks in ways we can’t entirely see or measure. In rooting themselves further and farther in place, they resist containment. For us, we risked becoming “irrelevant” or “throwing away our hard work” by shifting Homegrown away from constant production and public documentation. But the alternative was to risk sacrificing the cherished relationships we had built together, and risk compromising our principles as an organization if we had continued to work in our unhealthy, urgency-driven ways.
Part of reimagining what learning looks like for us means giving more time to the process of creation and discovery itself. It looks like giving permission to the dreamers and dreams behind gloriously ambitious projects to slow down, shelve things for later, circle back, sit with our purpose, and reorganize ourselves through our own rhythms and style.
In the gaps between what we have existed as and what we have yet to become, we are moving further away from our previous associations with nonprofit organizations and the professionalized youth arts/education sector. Instead, we are seeking out ways to be more explicitly militant in our collaborative DIY practices and political education, working to sustain ourselves in community with people most marginalized by the violence of the school system. We strive to deepen our ties to liberatory movements beyond the imperial core, stretching ourselves to not only work in solidarity across borders, but also actively play a role in undoing them. In that sense, dormancy has provided us with a different survival strategy—one that doesn’t hustle or try to make the “right” choices in the immediate now. Dormancy lets us go deep, go slow, look ugly, and take the real (and more fruitful) risk of being messy and more entangled in collective struggle.