2025-04-06In Una lucha más / Another Struggle, I wrote about the weight of carrying history: how every day is part of a struggle that started long before us. This reflection picks up from there but now focuses on how we live while we fight.
Over a century ago, two of Zapata’s manifestos were translated into Nahuatl, a Native Mexican language, and circulated among Indigenous villagers in Tlaxcala. The texts are powerful and worth reading because of how they interpret the cultural, ethical, and political message for people with a very different lived reality. The translator didn’t use the word “revolution.” Instead, he envisioned it as netehuiliztle — the will to struggle — and revolutionaries as netehuiloani, those who come striking with stones. It was a declaration not of ideology, but of moral clarity and collective will.
2025-02-26Birthright citizenship is under threat in the United States, and Europe’s restrictive laws offer a clear warning of what’s at stake.
In the U.S., all children born on American soil gain automatic and unconditional citizenship under the Fourteenth Amendment. On the other side of the Atlantic though, not a single country in Europe grants this unrestricted right to children of foreign parents, regardless of immigration status.
As a result, many European-born non-citizens lack full political rights, making them vulnerable to deportation or exclusion from social services—even if they’ve lived in their country of birth their entire lives. The European model systematically denies these unfortunate individuals full participation in society while requiring them to contribute to the economy and welfare systems without equal and permanent access to benefits.
2025-02-20In this political moment, I’ve been finding great comfort in the fact that Mexican civil society found ways to survive and even thrive while existing under an authoritarian one-party regime for the better part of a century.