Learning is not a circle. It is a spiral.
I was raised inside Aymara life. The practices are not a costume I put on; they are how I grew up. And still, I do not believe identity is an inventory of practices. Practices get interrupted. Migration interrupts them. Poverty interrupts them. History interrupts them. If belonging depends on a checklist, then anyone can stand at a gate and tell you that you no longer belong. The diaspora knows that gate. The immigrant knows that gate. I refuse the gate.
My ground is older and closer than any inventory: the body. The body is wise. It carries who we are, and it reminds us. My own life keeps teaching me this. I do not arrive anywhere as an abstraction. Who I am makes me be there. My presence carries its history, its language, its politics, whether or not anyone names them. No one can extract that from me, and no one can certify it for me.
This is why I do not describe our work as decolonial. I acknowledge the colonial structure and I study it deeply, because what you do not understand keeps power over you. But I refuse to organize our being, our goals, or our worth around what the oppressor has done. That refusal is not denial. It is the end of the dialectic. We are not the antithesis of anyone.
We do not need recognition to exist. We engage recognition to build, because funding, policy, and the future are negotiated in rooms of power, and we intend to be savvy in those rooms. But the work itself happens on our ground. We build where we stand, and we make the center travel to us.
Not survival. Not only self-determination. Self-actualization: the practice of a people who know themselves as creators. That is what healing is. That is what education is for. And that is Zera.
