Keynote speech: José González (MS ’09)
Founder, Latino Outdoors; inaugural equity officer, East Bay Regional Park District, Oakland, California
Reprinted with permission

Orale. Saludos to all the familias here—look at all this orgullo, bien merecido. I’m grateful to be here with you and share this time and space with you. 

Now, I had the privilege and opportunity to be the student commencement speaker when I graduated from here and one of the key messages I had back then was to “be the tea.” 

The idea was that, say you had a potato, an egg, and some tea leaves, which you would put separately into boiling water. The potato would soften. The egg would harden. While the boiling water represented life’s adversity. So would you soften like the potato? Would you harden like the egg? Or, would you be like the tea, and in the hot water change the very adversity in which you were in? 

I still find that reminder helpful AND as I’ve been STEEPING for these past years, I’ve a little more to share in how I orient myself and the work in the full spectrum of joy and adversity life has offered. I feel my list could be long and I wanted to put in everything from reminders about the Jemez Principles for Democratic Organizing to the Principles of Environmental Justice to the Four Agreements and Principles of Zapatismo, and more. But this time is limited and you can always read my online postings, so for now let me offer these pithy invitations, orientations, provocations, and appreciations emergent from my mentorship from the land. As I went back and forth in terms of how to approach this, I did find it helpful to see what advice I’ve written for myself these past few years and what has emerged from that.

First, in my opinion, you, by the very nature of your discipline here, at this school, are integral to a world that needs healing, a world that is suffering in our social and ecological landscapes. Yes, we will still need artists, chefs, doctors—and arguably even lawyers and administrators.

But you, you are the radical and revolutionary solutionaries we need at a time when so many of our harmful past practices have caught up to us and are now compounded by broken cycles, such as climate change. Let me start there. 

Radical and Revolutionary. 

See, the root of the world “radical” is “root”—la raiz—and rather than treating it like some extreme outlier, an outside agitator, I see it is as being here, at the root of what we do, grounded here in what is essential to create a better world. 

And in the etymology of “revolutionary” is revolutions, cycles. And I think about how this thriving planet is rooted in regenerative cycles, and what happens when we disrupt them, climate change being an inescapable example of human disruption of the carbon cycle. Of course, there is more complexity and nuance in that work but, again, I’m inviting you into this vision because when we are challenged, that is a time to see what values we have rooted ourselves in and to notice what regenerative cycles we have severed ourselves from, both in the social and the ecological. How to be complicit in regenerative cycles rather than in destroying them. 

In that you will also wield the power of the seed, el poder de la semilla. You will be called to action and to moments where you need to be bold and take a radicle step. As in R-A-D-I-C-L-E, the primary root—that assesses the conditions, refers to its programming, and moves with courage and imperative necessary of that first root and shoot, guided to light and nurturing, especially in moments when you find yourself in the dark. Be una semilla guiada por la luz. For so many here, it’s probably like leaving this place, taking your next steps, and continuing to manifest your potential; your apical meristem growing forth.

And what of the ways we relate to each other? Here is how the language of ecology has been in service of social justice. 

Well, from the RIVER I’ve received the blessing of flow that is not linear. Its sinuous emergence is the balance and interplay of divergence and convergence, of engaging in difference and connecting in commonality. It’s a call to hold space for that difference with the reminder of what we hold in common, what connects a community that can thrive with diversity. After all, few, if any, of us go out to a forest and say “that’s a beautiful monoculture of a forest.” We know the value of biodiversity—our social diversity holds the same strength and thrivability when we value it, when we nourish it, when we act on it, when we protect it. And the river reminds me that that is not served by a channelized process. That our individual and collective paths are more braided rivers than rigid pipelines. Remember that for your career path as well. I certainly am an example of that. (I can imagine Professors Steve Yaffee and Julia Wondolleck nodding their heads, LOL.)

Now, from FIRE comes the gift of creation, of sacredness, and of destruction. It reminds me that if we myopically suppress it to the neglect of its multiple roles, then we only increase its destructive intensity, reducing the potential of healthy succession. Our current status of wildfires out in California and other parts of the West have been one clear example of that—and we’ve been called to reconnect to the ancestral value and role of prescribed burning to remedy and rectify. Which leads me to ask “what prescribed burning is needed in our relational spaces? What is the responsibility of being a good fire tender?” What do we suppress in ways that set up a fire load that we cannot be surprised when a spark goes off? What have we inherited that no longer serves us? What must burn, so more can grow? And especially in fire-adapted ecosystems how do we set up a healthy succession of thrivability beyond just burning it all down? 

And from the ECOTONE I lean into the value of the edge effect, and how it invites us to reflect what types of borders and boundaries we set up. As humans we can create very damaging bifurcated boundaries, border walls, and forget that nature offers us additional opportunities to see boundaries for abundance. That with our differences the zone between the habitat of you and the habitat of me can be an ecotone of abundance and creativity. The margins hold strength and a connection to networks beyond our own. Las fronteras son para nuestras abundancias, no para el miedo de nuestras diferencias.

I lay this on to how we’re engaging in systemic change in ways that call for us to engage in explicit structural changes, in semi-explicit relational changes, and in implicit mind shifts. It all counts as we both envision and create a different future beyond just perpetuating the redlined realities we’ve inherited. And do we do this by investing in life-affirming systems and logic as much as we respond to the oppressive and harmful ones that rely on a mechanistic reductionist logic that finds itself in so many of our relations? 

For example, what changes when instead of saying “your team is functioning like a well-oiled machine,” we say “your team is functioning like a well-nurtured meadow?” Does that sound odd? Why? What are the values and logic we are interrogating and inviting? Of how we relate to each other, what we produce, what leadership looks like, and so on. I’d like to venture that few of us would go to a thriving meadow and admonish it for being inefficient. “You need to meadow better meadow!” I suppose especially at this school. :)

That is an example of the power you wield.

And shared power that grows from our differences and complicities in a better world for all, while noting that this comes with discomfort. Yet discomfort can be a source of learning and growth, to do better. To understand tension and address conflict with intention. To be responsible fire tenders with our prescribed burning. Because there will continue to be that which seeks to break us, and how we break together rather than break apart.

And I also want to acknowledge that this is not a pitch of pollyannaish simplicity (I can still hear Professor [Ray] DeYoung’s words ring in that way). If we seek transformation, it is as much a messy process as a wondrous one. As the butterfly shows us in metamorphosis, structural change is necessary for the next steps. The old dies in liquefaction for the building of the new. Thus, some things do not continue. Yet, as in nature, nothing is wasted.

It is in this chrysalis of space, together, that we can lean into our IMAGINAL cells during this transformation, an invitation to dream, envision, act, do, and transform. To take flight into more of what is possible. So what are we retaining in our imaginal cells? What are we imagining is possible? And manifesting that into actuality, a shared reality? From the immediate of you leaving this school to the larger call to create a better world.

Now of course, we are not butterflies. And still, a danger has been in amplifying and accelerating our disconnection from nature. A reminder to be a part of nature, not apart from nature. Yet, in reconnection, it is also not an invitation to deny the magic of our intersectional humanity, for as much as we’ve wielded our capacity and power to shape our world in ways that have harmed us, we can do the same to reshape it in ways that can heal us, to create the environments that bring out the best in us (there are the Kaplans). Just as we have become that species that is culpable, we also have the reminder and power of interdependent responsibility, of “restorative reciprocity.” 

It is what our human and non-human kin are waiting on us for at this moment. Our ecological and social spaces, our natural and human places. YOU are that leadership. Speaking for myself and I hope others here, I see the bigger picture you’re a crucial part of, I see the better world that you are here to make. How you can encapsulate the potential of the seed, think like a river, create like the fire, and more. As you thrive as your WHOLE-listic ecological self, in relation to others. 

To quote Dolores Huerta and add to it, SI SE PUEDE, pero hazlo, and if it’s meant to be, it is up to…WE. And I did mention some professors by name but trust me, they all left an impact (I see you Dr. Zint! And Dr. Bryant, rest in power.)

Now let me leave you with these words I keep returning to, that keep inviting and challenging me, especially in how I engage with people and places that have a deep accountability for the world but maybe not a deep accountability for themselves, and how we can value fluidity in each other while not defaulting to binary expectations. 

This is from the book “Joyful Militancy: Building Thriving Resistance in Toxic Times”:

"We can't all be friends, and some forms of life will never be compatible. This is the ethical basis for the logic of affinity, as well: it can never be a totally inclusive, come-one-come-all process because this would mean welcoming the worst of Empire and all of its toxic ways of relating. Some differences might mean that people cannot work together. Maybe. Differences might also signal potential practices, orientations, and priorities that are resonant and complementary without being the same. Differences might then become starting points for new complicities and the growth of shared power. If relationships are what compose the world—and what shape our desires, values, and capacities—then freedom is the capacity to participate more actively in this process of composition. Friendship and resistance are interconnected: When we are supported, we are more willing to confront that which threatens to destroy our worlds. Friendship and affinity are not things but processes and open questions, which produce partial responses, further questions, flashes of certainty and confidence, but never definitive answers."

Good luck you amazing graduates, y pa’delante, simpre pa’ delante. Thank you, gracias, y Go Blue, and BE Green.