How-to Apologize (live)

Alex will be presenting a brief version of the work showcased in this newsletter later this week, centering the images they’ve made documenting our community building.

Please tune in to the live broadcast if you are able!**

**and now, the chisme: although Alex will be presenting our work on the platform linked above, it is only to have the opportunity to study with artist Adam Broomberg. As part of a years-long pattern of avoiding accountability, the actions of PhMuseum have shown it to be an untrustworthy platform. And, as they could use a healthy dose of How-to Apologize, tune in to see what Alex shares with them.

Exploitation

When PhMuseum broke trust with Alex, their only attempt at repair was to offer Alex “exposure”. We will always choose accountability over exposure. One of the moral bankruptcies of the art world is the lie that exposure is a meaningful exchange for artists’ labor. It is exploitation. Specifically in the case of PhMuseum, and the photo world generally, it is exploitation that extracts value from vulnerable communities.

But the people who run PhMuseum are not unique in the scheme of bad actors. There is significant exploitation in agriculture, but that doesn’t mean we have to uphold the status quo. Because it is more profitable in our modern food system to simply throw food away, we work to disrupt these patterns as well as their bad actors.

We started giving away produce at the corner bar on weekends. The produce comes from whatever surplus we have on the farm, plus the “ugly” fruit that is (still good to eat) donated from a produce stand in town.

You can support this work by joining us on Patreon where we are sharing the produce we give away as Still Life drawing exercises: patreon.com/cw/EsBuenoCompartir

What is our Patreon all about? Part still life drawing exercises (demos coming soon!), part farm ASMR, part free food and agriculture support for our community.

Above video: an hour of still life fruit in 10 seconds

Community Series

With this newsletter we are beginning a new series, picking up where we left off.

Community building can be difficult to define. This series will decode the work we are doing day-to-day, to breakdown and demystify what it means to build.

If you’ve been here a minute you might remember us detailing how we fixed the community drinking water with our neighbors. By helping them bring some pvc pipe out to where the water collects, we are growing our community’s knowledge. We are the youngest in the neighborhood, someday we’ll be doing the fixing by ourselves.

To understanding the how of how we got here; we didn’t start yesterday, and we don’t expect to ever finish building community. Don’t let that indefinite timeline deter you!

We’ve seen the videos online of people frantically trying to unlock their door, before they are forced to interact with their neighbors. Those videos are meant to be a joke, but we’ve heard it from people directly, they don’t want to be obligated to their neighbors. Community building shouldn’t make you feel this way!

Privilege is power

We moved to Puerto Rico in 2021, but Steven spent childhood summers here at Abuela’s, wanting to be part of the generation to return.

Alex was born in Omaha, Nebraska where the legacy of redlining is not only still visible, but fully functional. To the extent that “well-meaning” white folks can live inside it, benefit from it, and still “not see” how their privilege is built on the inequity of literally everyone else. It is impossible to build community where people refuse to acknowledge the lived realities of their neighbors.

When Alex taught in university they would start new courses by introducing themself via their privilege, because privilege is power. Ask yourself, are you perhaps bothered to be obligated to your neighbors because of your unacknowledged privilege?

The contextual layers of our identities are not the center of this work, but engaging meaningfully with very warranted critiques of colonial-ass behavior is. Gringo GTFO.

Our Puerto Rican friend visited from where they are living in the US. Their partner at the time, a therapist, pulled Alex aside after visiting the farm and asked, “Alex, how do you do it?” This very loaded question is (a lot and) not the center of this work, but Alex’s response to it is:

Read more

Banana; a decolonial feminist zine

The bananas we grow on the farm, reflected back to us within the critical decolonial feminist pedagogy of Françoise Vergès. This zine exists at the intersection of Lara Sheehi’s feminist killjoy course thru the Psychoanalytic Hub for Online Liberatory Education, and Adam Broomberg’s concepts course asking us, among other things, to create an ethical and sustainable studio practice.

The support of Tech for Palestine makes it possible to share this zine with the world. Download the zine from Zines for Palestine

Mancheplátano

The banana and class (La mancha—the “stain” that cannot be removed)

• Independentista Luis Lloréns Torres wrote his poem at the height of the cultural creation of Puerto Rican identity. The jibaro-centered identity intended to collapse race and class for the sake of the political project. The mancha de plátano references Puerto Ricanness, but only the poor campesino and urban working class ever really deals with the sticky banana sap and resulting mancha.1

The banana and repair (Unripe banana is an outstanding source of healthy fiber and starch that can repair a damaged gut-improving the micro biome and helping the body heal itself, water-intensive banana plants act as water towers, storing water in wet seasons and then redistributing it back into the environment in periods of drought)

Read more

Reflecting on the last three years of this newsletter, we are moving into 2026 at a different, more intentional, speed. We will begin sharing our “menu” monthly (to get weekly updates of what is available from the farm, please join our WhatsApp group—to join the group chat scan the QR code below).

Our in-depth research and sensitive info about our community will live behind the paywall, and those updates will be coming less frequently. Research takes time.

This year we are prioritizing the relationships that truly support us, not just the loudest voices in the (often, digital) room. Moving at a quieter speed has allowed us to connect with our neighbors more than at any point in the last 5 years. (5 years!)

In the coming months, Alex will be sharing more of the work and research they are doing as part of the courses they are taking with Adam Broomberg and through the Psychoanalytic Hub for Online Liberatory Education. Alex’s work for these courses relates directly to the farm and to our community work.

What we’re looking at 👀

“…in a presentation of a critical decolonial pedagogy, I used a familiar fruit, the banana, to shed light on a number of analogies and elective affinities: the banana’s dispersion from New Guinea to the rest of the world, the banana and slavery, the banana and US imperialism (banana republics), the banana and agribusiness (pesticides, insecticides—the chlordecone scandal in the Antilles), the banana and working conditions (the plantation regimes, sexual violence, repression), the banana and the environment (monocultures, polluted water and land), the banana and sexuality, the banana and music, the banana and performance (Josephine Baker), the banana and branding (Banana Republic), the banana and racism (when did the association of bananas and Negrophobia begin?), the banana and science (researching the ‘perfect’ banana), the banana and consumption (bringing bananas into the home, suggesting recipes), the banana and rituals for ancestors, and the banana and contemporary art. The method is simple: starting from one element to uncover a political, economic, cultural, and social ecosystem in order to avoid the segmentation that the Western social-science method has imposed. The most enlightening and productive analyses in recent decades have been those that have drawn the greatest number of threads together to highlight the concrete and subjective networks of oppression that weave the web of exploitation and discrimination.”

A Decolonial Feminism by Françoise Vergès

Our response to the crisis of losing cupones1 might seem counter-intuitive. Precarity and scarcity make some act-out toward what they perceive as the threat or the problem. Which, often misattuned, is aimed at friends and community rather than the real culprit, capitalist colonialism.

This is because the exact same systems that obfuscate the horrors happening in Gaza, the West Bank, across the African continent, the Caribbean and beyond, created the myth of individual-fault in the case of poverty and houselessness.

As is evident by the public discourse playing out across a series of cement light poles on the drive into Utuado pueblo; our neighbors absolutely connect anti-colonial struggle with class critique.

Of 290 “major urban areas” across the US, the cost of groceries in San Juan is ranked the 17th most expensive. With the cost for our community, living in the mountains hours away from the metro area, even higher.2

Even though we are starting a farm, we are still years away from having the option to subsist on what it produces. Over the next few newsletters, we are going to start breaking this fact down; how capitalism makes it impossible for the farm to feed us and the families who have been farming in our area for centuries.

Capitalism distorts the realities of exploitation in agriculture. It is important to not perpetuate this harm, and instead, to clarify the nuances of what it takes to put food on grocery store shelves. The Caribbean intellectual Franz Fanon teaches us that to be ethical practitioners, we have to be committed to revolutionary practice. That means not functioning as if capitalism or colonialism are natural and have always existed.

Well-meaning people who have never experienced extreme poverty or houselessness simply do not understand the frequent and steep barriers to receiving assistance.

In our organizing circles afuera3 we’ve felt the sting of classist bullying—implicit in classist assumptions—thinly veiled as motivational communications. If only these individuals and organizers thought to ask their community members why they might not be able to meet the moment. Instead of making assumptions and leaning into capitalist colonial (read, classist) tropes of productivity.

Nuestra iniciativa es vender para cobrar la distribucion de alimentos gratis a los vecinos ancianos de nuestra comunidad!

And this is where our anti-capitalist, anti-colonial, anti-scarcity response comes in.

For months we have been selling produce to folks outside of our community explicitly to be able to give more food away to our elderly neighbors. (Check out our WhatsApp group to stay in the loop about what we’re producing on the farm!) We’re taking this initiative of providing produce a step farther, and are giving food away to anyone in our community who needs it.

What this looks like: setting up the truck on Saturday afternoon at the corner bar. Most of the produce finds a home before we finish our first beer.

Reminder! Click the newsletter below for all the details of our cacao fundraiser benefiting Gazan families still in desperate need of our support!

We’ll be shipping cacao out through December 15th!

We started making zines independent of each other some years ago. Alex’s first zines via an art program in high school, and Steven’s in conjunction with his food education and Puerto Rico advocacy (which are all out of print now, but you might remember his epic chicken zine).

Over the last two years we’ve focused on creating zines and art that draw parallels to the settler-colonialism we see here in Puerto Rico; we are canaries of what colonial and capitalist expansion is bringing to the world. With a particular focus on Palestine during the (still) ongoing genocide.

We’re excited to share that our zines are now joining Tech for Palestine as an incubator project called Zines for Palestine (follow along on instagram or upscrolled).

We have redesigned our existing zines to be more accessible (now designed specifically to be printed at home with regular-ass printer paper) and through the incubator we are applying for grants that will allow us to do more going forward.

Download zines ⤵️ print them at home!

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1RBFfuwmLYAoC-8k2JTOkrKDEauYLKDNf

ZINE SPOTLIGHT✨

Our Daily Bread; Starvation as a Weapon

At the writing of this newsletter, with aid trucks still being blocked by the zionist entity, we are sharing practical tools for making bread; but we can’t without first pointing to how famine is human-made.

For even more information (including all of the footnotes and research that went into this zine) check out our original sourdough bread newsletter linked below:

What we’re looking at 👀

This fall, Alex started courses in psychoanalysis, as well as a (remote) program with artist Adam Broomberg, and will share what media they’re interacting with in this quasi-reacquiring segment.

Special thanks to psych professor excerpted: carterjcarter.substack.com/p/crossing-borderlines-theory-building

Gifts of community care

For our neighborhood, community care looks like taking up the work of our vecino who passed away suddenly last spring. His spouse worried over the stray cats, she couldn’t manage to go the two miles to feed them everyday the way Toño had on his way home from working on rich people’s estates.

Toño and Juan had been working together to feed the strays. Now we exchange WhatsApp messages with Juan, almost daily—to let him know when they are fed, how many we see, sometimes to alert the neighborhood to a roving pack of wild dogs.

For taking up this work, we received a gift we weren’t looking for. One of the kittens followed us the two miles back to the farm (or hitched a ride on the spare tire). We were NOT looking to take on a cat. Still living in a tent, kittens and delicately-thin tent fabric aren’t a great combo.

We’ve decided to call the kitten Venus, because our brilliant nephew tells us she resembles the planetary body. AND because she’s taken to sleeping on top of the tent—making her the brightest, most intrusive thing, in our night sky. She is truly ruining the tent, but we’re working on coming to an agreement.

Za’atar and her sister (now named Akali) were abandoned at the church where we feed the cats. They were just babies, barely a month old. With no support from (admittedly swamped) local rescues, we turned to our own network, and found someone who wanted to adopt Akali.

(Thank you to those who could not adopt the puppies, but who offered to support our bills. You know who you are and we are so grateful for you!)

Lacking any other option, we took in Za’atar and are figuring out how to make it work. Building a new dog house and a proper dog-run will jump to the front of the line, pushing back construction projects we’d been hoping to complete this year. More on this and our progress in the coming months.

Los animales roll-call

Colibrí arrived while we were still heartbroken over the loss of our first dog, Kahlo. We hadn’t been looking to adopt another dog so soon, but the universe had other plans.

And we introduced Palestina in the newsletter below:

AND FUCK THE PIGS!

We first wrote about the wild pigs in the newsletter linked below:

It had been a dry year—which for the mountainous tropics means sunny days with some light rains—but September brought us the rain that the wet season is known for: hours-long downpours that saturate earth and explode rivers.

And the rains brought something else this year: pigs. Or better said with the acute crankiness of old farmers, brows furrowed, anxiously rocking back and forth on the front porch: fucking pigs.

Every night this month, at the height of witching hours, they come out of the woods to tromp around the farm. Their snouts plow through the soft wet earth, seeking worms and roots, and they trample what they don’t eat. They’ve hit the tomato terraces, plantain fields and citrus orchard, and they leave no trace behind.

Read more

For nearly two years we’ve been pushing against the silence surrounding the live-streamed genocide we are collectively witnessing. That silence, a violent protection of ignorance, exists in our world community, but also within our agricultural networks.

¡Liberación para todos los pueblos colonizado!

CACAO FUNDRAISER

We continue to push against the willful ignorance, with our first offering of cacao from the farm! Available only to participants in Palestinian Liberation:

1. Donate to one of these campaigns (or to both for a surprise!)

   1. gofundme.com/f/4eman

   2. gofundme.com/f/42vgc-help-my-family-evacuate-to-safety

2. EMAIL us a screenshot of your donation receipt(s): buenocompartir@gmail.com

3. We’ll send you some of our cacao!

Our cacao is “ceremonial” grade—but we’d never use that label because it completely ignores an integral component: human beings and their labor.

There is no guilt-free chocolate. Not unless you grow the cacao and process it yourself. Even the most caring brands can make no real promises; the industry would prefer you don’t think about the enslaved labor and colonialism that makes chocolate possible.

But we think about it a lot.

Our cacao is organic, a rare variety (Trinitario), it is harvested and minimally processed by us, and comes from trees older than the zionist occupation of Palestine.

People are being starved (forcibly and intentionally) in a world where most reading this have access to apps that bring food on-demand. We are doing more than just acknowledging the horrors of settler-colonialism, we are choosing to leverage our abundant access to food for the benefit of others.

Curious about how we got involved? Check out Creators for Gaza! They’ve raised over a million dollars for families in Gaza: OUR PALESTINIAN FAMILIES’ FUNDRAISERS

ZINES

We are excited to share that a number of our zines are currently on view in Speak Up! Protest Zines as Resistance at The Center for Photography at Woodstock. All of our larger zines fold out into 11 x 17 inch posters, meant to be taken to the streets.

Saturday, 9 August, 6 pm - 7:30 pm
Closing Reception for Speak Up! Protest Zines as Resistance

See all of our zines in the farm store: buenocompartir.bigcartel.com/

A year ago we wrote (and made a whole zine) about the politics of sourdough.

We’ve also written (and made a zine) about our cacao. In response to calls to disrupt business-as-usual, we advocate for Palestinian Liberation and the liberation of all colonized people by creating art that can be printed and shared.

Inspired by the tradition of the Lectores—who read to workers in cigar rolling factories—we were invited to present this month as part of a lecture series at 1708 Gallery.1

We took the opportunity to bring the farm to the gallery, through the ways our various skills and research intersect with the hows and the whys of what we do on the farm.

In last month’s newsletter we drew a line from the job of cigar factory lector to the roots of the Puerto Rican independence movement. For our lecture, we decided to carry on the tradition of speaking truth to power, standing on the shoulders of giants.

We were censored before we could even present. Without our permission, someone at the gallery redacted our biography, removing any mention of colonialism, and disconnecting the context. We were eventually able to get the text restored—their excuses were wildly unprofessional. We fought for this because acknowledging lived realities is important to everything we do.

In systems built on harm, the ones naming the sickness will always be framed as the threat.

Presenation footnotes:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1b9njpdj87xwPoXq09R_apyd1S2Wf2MKB/view?usp=drivesdk

We hope the gallery—or the artist organizing the series—will eventually share their recording of the event, but for transparency, the gallery director has yet to respond to any of our communications. Thus, we anticipate our work will go the way of our initial text—disappear without explanation—so we have chosen to archive it ourselves.

What we’re looking at 👀

We’ve fallen out of the habit of sharing what media we’re engaging with. We wanted to bring this back with something relevant to our discussion of context. Presented by Double Dummy Studio at Recontres d’Arles 2025, bringing the context missing from the festival to the public:

“We are a group of activists and artists who refuse to accept political aesthetics without the political accountability. We call for cultural institutions to align their visual language with ethical clarity and action.”

Q&A

At the end of the video presentation is a Q&A with the gallery intern (who we feel had an exceptional understanding of the work). In the future, we hope to have more opportunities to work with Aidan Phalan. Thank you Aidan!

Some of our community were not let into the zoom presentation and were not able to participate in the Q&A, so we’ve made space to answer a few more questions below.

Because publishing online requires considerable effort on our part, the majority of the Q&A is available to paid subscribers only.

Have any other questions for us?

Please leave them in the comments!

Q: How do you sustain yourselves within the community?

Short answer: The community is what sustains us.

The only reason we can charge the batteries on this and our other devices is our neighbors. The only reason we have access to water or Puerto Rican drivers licenses: our neighbors. They supported us in getting Medicaid and food stamps (being houseless, we don’t have a water or light bill required to obtain such services, but our neighbors provided the necessary “proof” of our existence). They are also how we survived hurricane Fiona unscathed. The community is what sustains us.

Q: How does poverty in PR compare to American poverty? What are some contrasts between the two?

This is maybe the most important question. It deserves its own thesis, but we’ll try to be as brief as possible. Anyone can google the stats of poverty in PR vs USA (spoiler, it’s worse than you think) so we’ll focus on the particular experience of poverty produced by American colonialism.

PR is a literal captive market. This means that everything is more expensive, and we get the worst quality and have the least choices, because: what other option do we have? There are very few jobs available beyond fast food and manual labor and so our neighbors pick coffee well into their 60s and 70s, for a couple bucks to patch the car. And because everyone is colonized, there’s even a cap on the so-called middle class, meaning that even with a cushy job, the material conditions of life (access to electricity/water/groceries/comfort) would largely be considered “poor” by most Americans.

So people lucky enough to get a job hold onto it for dear life—even if they hate it. People use everything they own until they can’t anymore, which affects comfort, safety, and health. And if we don’t share we don’t survive.

Read more

Inside of those tobacco warehouses skilled cigar rollers knocked their knives against the tables to both applaud impressive lectors and to protest oppressive bosses. From Les Misérables to Marx, lectors’ stories did more than occupy minds during monotonous labor, they explained the worker’s place in the world. A perfect combination of worker education and empowerment, tobacco led to revolts.

A direct line can be drawn from the Cuban tradition of lectors—practiced here and everywhere that tobacco work went—to the modern Puerto Rican independence movement. In Utuado, the tobacco strikes for better wages and working conditions prompted strikes across sugar and coffee workers, truck and taxi drivers, bakers, and workers in textiles and construction. Our mountain town became a hotbed for union and independence organizing.3

Luisa Capetillo,4 a lectora/journalist/anarchist from Arecibo who read to tobacco workers throughout the Carribean, in the American South and up in New York, wrote:5

Over the next few months we will be sharing in-depth research about how agriculture, worker organizing, and revolution have long been tied together, but have not come without reprisal and repression. Stay tuned to see what’s coming.

Upon losing a member of our community, we’ve all had to step in to fill the void. In these moments we look to teachings like Celeste Bembry’s Parable of the Choir:

Toño did so much to keep our little community running smoothly. Small tasks are not isolated events here, they ripple out and if unmitigated can create big problems. We’ll get into more of that next month, as we grow into our new community roles.

The immense loss that is the sudden and unexpected death of a community member, got us thinking about the macro and mirco of this experience. How do other communities cope with losing their own Toños?

The hospital is an hour drive (without traffic) from our rural community. The impossible questions in grief, of having done enough, in time, are interceded by the reality of our situation. Our local ER and hospital closed completely in January 2025.

Below is a recent piece by on Querido Boricua about living in Puerto Rico in the midst of health system in collapse and what we could do about it.

Querido Boricua

Waiting for Muchachos

Author’s note: Toño died the second week of May and I wrote much of this immediately after. Although it took a few weeks to compile the relevant data, the original references to days and times remain…

Read more

a year ago · 1 like · Steven Casanova

ZINE DOWNLOAD!

In the spirit of this parable, we are sharing a zine we made last year. As the atrocities mount worldwide, we all need to add pressure where we are able. We keep us safe.

Click-through below for PDF downloads to print at home!

English version: We Keep Us Safe

Versión en español: Entre Nosotres Nos Cuidamos

How-to fold your zine

NOT FOR SALE

This week Alex gave a presentation on photo work they began in Nebraska in 2011.

View more on Alex’s website: matzke.work/not-for-sale

FUNDRAISER UPDATE:

Eman was able to leave Gaza with a small group of students, but faced the impossible and heartbreaking decision to go without her family.

Please continue to share Alex’s fundraiser on social media, and contribute if you are able. Eman’s family, still in Gaza, are desperately in need of our support.

How to get a postcard

Please donate (at least) $14 to Eman’s campaign: gofundme.com/f/4eman

Send us a screenshot of your donation to our email: buenocompartir@gmail.com

Please include your mailing address! Alex will send you a postcard.

The above video starts with a two year old piña (pineapple) plant and developing fruit. The video continues down the line of newly planted pineapple coronas (crowns). Which, over the next two years, will develop fruit of their own.

Why are we planting them this way, in a long line along the road? We wrote previously about our green fencing, and about the wild pigs that live in the forest surrounding the farm, how they tear up the agriculture land (destroying more than a quarter acre in a single evening).

Our neighbors have resorted to trapping the pigs—keeping them in pens, raising them to produce more pigs—or inviting community members to hunt them. This makes our neighbors a little bit of extra money, and saves some of their crops, but has not completely solved the problem for them.

We decided to try deterrents before traps and guns. It has worked beautifully.

The green fencing does a couple things simultaneously. It deters the pigs and feeds us. The video shows a very long line of newly planted pineapples, but the reality of going out, buying (and eating) that many would just not be feasible for us.

So how did we do it?

Growing Community

Community isn’t as easy people wish. Life in a rural area comes with rural politics, which are often conservative, hyper local, and skew patriarchal, homophobic and white supremacist.

In a romanticized version of community, everyone helps each other in a zero sum game of trading favors. You do your thing, we do ours, and we’ll get together sometimes to help each other, making less work for everyone.

Alejos builds our fence without even knowing

Most of our citrus trees still have some years before they fruit and so once a week we stop by Alejos’ fruit stand on the highway for limes, oranges, and the occasional pineapple. We have a tendency of chatting up strangers, and have made more than a few friends because of it. When Alejos learned we have livestock, he offered us the fruit and veggie scraps to feed the animals. For him we are doing a service, saving him a stop at the dumpster on his way home. For us, alongside our citrus purchase, we are taking home boxes of bananas, plantains, avocados, oranges, root veggies, and many many pineapples. Some of it is still good to eat, just too ugly to sell, which Alejos makes sure we notice.

Just from chatting, making new friends, now we receive not only free lunch, but animal food, soil nutrients, and natural fencing. Whatever the chickens don’t eat adds to the compost heap. And every pineapple crown makes a new plant that we add to our fencing. In just a few weeks we’ve planted 100 pineapple crowns, which would have been hundreds of dollars had we purchased them. By the end of the year we may be able to line the entire farm, for free. Once-trash turned to so much abundance that we have extra crowns for the neighbors to plant, which they are very excited about.

Read more

Sharing this video of our community’s infrastructure (a bridge that cuts 30 minutes off of our drive to town—when it’s not underwater) to illustrate some of our necessary boundaries.

We started this newsletter intending it to be something we could update from the farm—given our genuine lack of connectivity, electricity, aaand infrastructure—here we are trying to stick to it. Which means free newsletters more akin to social media posts, and leaving the long-form writing we’ve been researching behind a bummer of a paywall.

For us, it’s all about creating flexible containers. What are our current limitations? How do we realistically work within those confines? What is not supporting us within existing structures? How do we honor our bandwidth while working tirelessly for liberation?

How we are making any of it make sense? It feels like a struggle because in capitalism, sharing knowledge rather than seeking profit appears irrational. So, please enjoy a roundup of (some of) the last two years of our apparent irrationality.

(an incomplete and irrational) Newsletter Roundup

We started this newsletter two years ago (!!) with our first papaya harvest:

But some of our trees are older than the occupation of Palestine:

Want to learn more about solidarity? We’ve compiled resources for you:

How did we get here? Check out our how-to on getting started:

Part of getting started is with small, manageable steps:

But another part is about listening:

Our community is really what makes any of this possible:

Especially when we don’t agree with one another:

Deterrents as a way to move with nature, instead of against it:

Read this one and ’s to get the full experience:

Making our daily bread with context instead of ignorance:

Because ignorance is a choice:

We hope you are thinking of others:

And if you’ve made it this far, we have some nosy ass questions for you (based on what poses on instagram):

Even further reading, check out our Living in the Future newsletters here:

We are still living in a tent. We do not own the farm. Nothing is promised, and nothing has gone according to plan. The stability in our life has come directly from our efforts in building with our community. This month we’re reflecting on this and the last four years of living in the future. (All of our living in the future newsletters, linked below).

Before we get going, Alex is holding another fundraiser with a series of 25 new postcards they’ve made. Donations start at $14, because last November Eman shared that this was the cost of 3 onions. Now, she says, nothing is $14 anymore.

Our friend Eman is a talented writer, and was a student of the esteemed Refaat Alareer. As the eldest sibling, Eman is leading the campaign to support her family of 8. Their home destroyed, the family requires support to rent a place, buy furniture, warm clothing, groceries, and other supplies for school-age children.

How to get a postcard

Please donate (at least) $14 to Eman’s campaign: gofundme.com/f/4eman

Send us a screenshot of your donation to our email: buenocompartir@gmail.com

Please include your mailing address! Alex will send you a postcard.

The text on the postcards is by artist Fargo Nissim Tbakhi. Part of a larger quote, “calling on you to join with the revolutionary masses across the globe in fighting for the survival and liberation of Palestinians and all oppressed people.”

Alex created the postcards with the same arch motif that they have been practicing for over 20 years. A practice which originated while working with houseless youth and young people transitioning out of foster care. At the emergency shelter where they worked, Alex held art demonstrations of different techniques, as a way to encourage a practice of meditation around creating feelings of safety and stability, where possible. (Modeled after practices of mandala painting in Buddhism).

Community building is the future

Community is why we are entering 2025 with a different energy. We mean that in the immediate sense, like how our communal drinking water works.

But also in the global sense. After seeing another sustainable ag operation embracing technology derived from oppression and land theft, while publicly voicing support for said oppressed people (hypocrisy so glaring), we decided to make a zine. Download a free digital copy to print at home in the newsletter below.

Last year we gave away a lot of our labor, but aspects of this won’t be changing any time soon. For example, our zines in Spanish: la versión en español está disponible gratis para puertorriqueños quien viven en Puerto Rico.

As we’ve gotten better about setting boundaries, people tell us who they are in how they respond. We have course-corrected as needed. Part of that course-correction will be turning off “gift” subscriptions for this newsletter. The gifts are not actually supported by Substack, creating a loophole to our privacy, and causing theft.

We will, of course, continue to extend free subscriptions to folks who have expressed a need (we’re not monsters) but moving forward, a lot less of our labor will be free.

2025 the year of the worker

Most farmers are not also farm workers. When they are not, they care more about soil health than worker wellbeing. We reject this extractive hierarchy and work the earth ourselves, developing terraces that protect both our soil and our bodies.

The goal of terraces is to catch water and hold onto soil. Neither has been important to coffee plantations and the industry has left the earth an inert, hard clay. As a result, much profit is being made from regenerating damaged soils, but at the expense of the workers bodies, as they haul biomass across steep hillsides.

Unlike the terraces usually found on mainstream agroecology operations, ours prioritize comfort, with practical walkways that make work easier. The walkways have had a secondary benefit of providing a toad highway, who come in at night to naturally eliminate insect problems.

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Clockwise from top left: rambutan from our neighbor Angel, rainbow cacao pod, both of our cacao pod drawings, timed drawing of red bananas, a coconut sprouting, our first pineapple crop, first with Steven’s in-progress drawing, a date tree sapling started in a plastic cup, and at center guavas next to a reflective silver pot.

Next month we’ll be updating our anniversary newsletter. February will be four years…

We’ll also be updating our before and after newsletter…

We’ve been here before; the end of a year, the end of a flowering cycle, the end of a season, the end of a friendship or relationship, the end of a particular type of work. None of it was really an end, end. More like, a beginning that arrived shrouded in opacity, obscuring the path ahead.

“Clarity is not easy when the force of these structures are such that we are intended to be muddled up[…] In Wretched of the Earth, the chapter on violence—which is probably one of the most recognizable chapters [Fanon] has, for many reasons—I've come back to it over and over and over again where he warns primarily of confusion mongers[...]

When he says clarity, he's also talking about a militant attention to material reality. But in the end, clarity means the starting point for us is; this is a settler colonial regime and settler colonial regimes rely on particular mechanics and have done so for 76+ years. That's why, when we locate genocide within that, we can see [it] as a logical extension of the process of annihilation, because settler colonialism doesn't come in to just buddy around, it comes in to ethnically cleanse and replace an entire people. [To] delete any memory of the fact that it actually was a settler colonial project. Like the settler colonial projects, the United States, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, so on.”

-Lara Sheehi, The Trouble with White Feminism: Ep 5 Unpacking Zionism

2024 Reading list:

The Trinity of Fundamentals by Wisam Rafeedie

Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times by Jasbir K. Puar

I Saw Ramallah by Mourid Barghouti

Neither Settler Nor Native by Mahmood Mamdani

A Theory of Birds by Zaina Alsous

The Secret Life of Saeed: The Pessoptimist by Emile Habibi

Fanzines para todos by Camila Gonzalez Simon

Sowing Crisis: The Cold War and American Dominance in the Middle East by Rashid Khalidi

Settler Memory: The Disavowal of Indigeneity and the Politics of Race in the United States by Kevin Bruyneel

Subjective Atlas of Palestine edited by Subjective Editions 

For Palestine edited by Ebb Magazine

The Power of Inclusive Exclusion: Anatomy of Israeli Rule in the Occupied Palestinian Territories edited by Adi Ophir, Michal Givoni, and Sari Hanafi

A series of pamphlets edited by Learning Palestine

Resurrecting Empire: Western Footprints and America's Perilous Path in the Middle East by Rashid Khalidi

Earlier this year we did an in-person workshop and laid out all of our research across two long tables. The other half of that research came from our 2023 reading list:

The Decolonize Puerto Rico T-shirt

This year, Yellow In Spite of Myself is part of our puzzle, people (multiple entire generations of families) bombed to toxic dust funded by our tax money is another piece, genocides driven by the rare earth minerals powering the devices we are writing you from, another. We all have to choose which fights to throw our soft bodies at, we are finite beings and can’t possibly take it all on as individuals.

One of the reasons we pivoted our efforts this year, we’ve been here before. We’ve seen folks organizing for likes, watched priority be given to white/privileged voices, seen how far zero accountability gets, and have been stunned by defensiveness in the face of open/honest communication. No gracias.

Earlier this year, upon getting back from an anti-colonial protest in the metro area, we were confronted by our neighbor, Junior, about our “Decolonize Puerto Rico” shirts—made some years ago in collaboration with Guardnflags. Junior’s response was really surprising in the moment. “¡No,” he insisted, “no voy a descolonizar a Puerto Rico!” (I will not decolonize Puerto Rico!) What followed was a 15-minute conversation that completely shifted how we organize.

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There’s a new neighbor in Puerto Rico’s forests. For the last 7 years, as a result of the destruction that Maria wrought, our mountains have been filling up with wild pigs. Hog confinements were broken open in the storm and the pigs that escaped rewilded, growing back their rough hair and quickly adapting to life in the woods. On still days we hear what sounds like wind rushing through the trees: it’s a pack of frolicking piglets, 15 babies tumbling along behind mom, searching for shallow roots and palm kernels.

Without predators, the population is exploding and while we find them adorable, they are a nuisance to farmland. Wild pigs are known to tear up 1/4 acre in a single night as they root for yautia or hunt for worms, leaving craters where crops once stood. Many of our neighbors have decided to defend their harvests with traps and guns, but we’ve been developing a more holistic response.

Pigs are notoriously smart. Once they’ve gotten out of a trap once, they won’t get caught twice. Frustrated farmers anxiously chase them through the woods and end up lining their farms with barbed wire. We’d prefer not to rely on barbed wire that can injure our dogs and needs to be pulled up and replaced once the jungle humidity rusts through it. So we’ve been working on green fencing; lining the annual growing areas with pineapples, their sharp spines proving to be sufficient deterrent to animals.

Green Fencing

Pineapple plants are short and wide. Given enough nutrition, they can become thick, robust clumps. Their spines are lined with tiny thorns that don’t bother the dogs but can break off into the skin of a pig (which is very similar to our epidermis). Each plant is spaced 4-5 feet apart and given plenty of sunlight so they can spread out, leaving just enough space for the dogs to pass, but making a dangerously tight pass for pigs. While the pineapple plants grow, we leave shiny scraps of construction material in the gaps, enough to make them suspicious of traps and look for a different route.

As we expand the green fence, the pigs are forced to go around and quickly learn to stay away from the harvests. Started from the crowns of pineapples, the green fence reproduces itself, simultaneously making food and even more fencing. One pineapple plant will reproduce itself into 5 pineapple plants in 3 years. And 80 pineapple plants are enough to fence the length of a football field. It’s a slow process to begin, but with only a few dozen pineapples we can protect acres of farmland without barbed wire, traps, or guns. No need for death when a deterrent is enough to live in relationship.

Deterrents as relationship

told us that the deer in their region have been eating everything in their garden. Unfortunately, a green (pineapple) fence like ours won’t do the trick—the deer could hop right over it. And we’ve heard of many Virginia farmers that spend a fortune on super tall fencing to try to keep deer out (deer can clear a 12 foot fence if they’re motivated enough). Cheaper options include spreading pet hair or even peeing all around the garden, but deer have a good laugh as they walk right by.

These problems are not new. Studies of deer-deterrents (even electric fencing) were published as far back as 1939. Today, the market is flooded with sprays, tools, and weapons, all guarantee a deer-free garden, but deer learn to tolerate most deterrents and constantly test for weaknesses in obstacles. In fact, according to the Natural Resources Conservation Service, “Realistically, deer predation will not be completely eliminated by any method,” and a more achievable goal is a 50 percent reduction.1

Growers are left with few options. Replant the damaged crops and the deer will come back for seconds. Fences and nets work, but are costly and impractical. Offensive smells, noise, lights, and electric-fencing shocks work for only a short time. Chemical repellents must be constantly reapplied. And hunting, while very effective on an individual basis, is a whole other world of permits and processing.

Wouldn’t it be best to leave a peace offering, far away, so that everyone could be happy? Studies confirm that yes, the most affective deterrents are to plant palatable crops that will redirect deer away from the garden, especially when mixed with gentle obstacles surrounding the space.

We don’t have all the answers, but we think there is always a better option than killing animals you have no intention of utilizing for food. Finding deterrents that function in relationship is our priority when it comes to pest control. Gentle obstacles (pineapple plants as green-fencing) and leaving offerings of food (our compost) far away from the garden has worked for us.

We do small, everyday actions to interrupt capitalism in agriculture; the parts of agriculture we’re told are normal. Like repurposing used plastic cups and spent coffee grounds—from the coffee shop we come to in order to send you this newsletter—interrupting the chain of new plastics produced for agriculture.

Up and down

Capitalism has created a situation whereby the only way to make profit (especially in agriculture) is to exploit others—and often yourself. We won’t. We have been wondering for a while, why an anti-capitalist way of treating people and nonhuman people (plants, animals, water, etc.) is so often viewed as lesser.

Why have people come to expect that ego equals experience and good business requires heartless exploitation?

We are not trying to capitalism in a way that takes any more resources from our already poor region. And because we aren’t exploiting our community for quick cash, we are not seen as reliable narrators.

If we were going hard for the coffee that already grows on the farm, we could be doing exactly what the rich folks living between here and Ohio do; pay our poorest, least privileged, and sometimes oldest neighbors $7 a day to pick the beans. Not $7 an hour, but $7 A DAY! (btw that is what Alex made per hour, 25 years ago detasseling corn in Nebraska).

The equation looks something like this: Acres deforested multiplied by the number of people exploited, divided by the degree of exploitation, minus the sky high prices of fertilizers due to the jones act, equals the potential profit to be made in coffee.

The only way to capitalism in agriculture is to exploit someone.

Putting the pieces back together

We are still having to tent like we are camping for recreation. This year the rainy season is living up to its name in fitful starts and stops. A little over a week since the municipal water came back (and seems like it won’t stop again immediately) and a little over a week since the sinkhole in the highway was finally fixed.

Since the living shelter collapsed, we have been in the process of rebuilding. Because of the precarity, we’ve had to put away most of the art supplies and haven’t been able to make time to draw; something about this feels like failure.

How do we find balance? How do we reconcile that balance with what is going on in the world? These drawings are our incomplete, and imperfect answer.

A few critiques and a thought

We’ve told people, repeatedly, that things are tough. That when we show up, we do so at great energetic and material cost. We wish it didn’t always come to us sharing some really personal shit to have a voice, to be considered reliable narrators of our own Iives. Alas.

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Living in the future means adapting to restrictions which have not yet become the norm for most of the people reading this newsletter.

Once, while our neighbors visited, their kid asked how we wash, the adults tried to quiet this curiosity, embarrassed that it wasn’t polite. But we are eager to explain how gravity powers our sink and shower, and how it nourishes the cacao planted downhill. None of our wastewater is wasted, and nothing is irrigated.

(Linked below is our March 2024 newsletter where we talk about the 80+ year old cacao trees on our farm and how we utilize all of the greywater we generate).

Each day, our “household” uses a total of 4 buckets (those are 5-gallon buckets) of water. That total includes what we use to water the dogs, chickens, and saplings, as well as the wastewater we generate from washing our bodies, clothes, and dishes.

The average American household uses 16 of those 5-gallon buckets each day—just to flush the toilet. The EPA says that toilet water is the greatest domestic usage of fresh water in America. An average American household uses a staggeringly privileged 66 buckets of water, per day.1

Our limited water-capacity shrinks what we are able to accomplish. Since the neighborhood lost access to municipal water at the beginning of the summer, the lack of water has affected what we are able to take on. It’s made working in the summer heat nearly impossible, and has completely stopped, going on 5 months, the construction plans we were in the middle of when the Fear Hole first opened up.

(Linked below is our July 2024 newsletter where we introduce the Fear Hole).

On a larger scale, localities and countries deprived of water are limited in the ways they can engage in agriculture, construction, industry, and even energy production. This is most acutely felt in drier parts of the world, wherein Israelis use water at amounts akin to Americans—20 buckets per person, per day. Yet the Zionist entity only permits enough water to enter the occupied West Bank to provide just 4 buckets per person, per day.2

More tragic yet, the Oxfam report from this summer, Water War Crimes, “finds that Israel’s cutting of external water supply, systematic destruction of water facilities and deliberate aid obstruction have reduced the amount of water available in Gaza by 94% to 4.74 liters [a mere 1/4 bucket] a day, per person—just under a third of the recommended minimum in emergencies and less than a single toilet flush.”3

(Linked below is our April 2024 newsletter where we get into the similarities between Puerto Rico and Palestine’s colonial-ass water situations).

The myth of ‘modern water’ already afflicts the US, where, contrary to the belief of equal universal water accessibility; race, ethnicity, and even citizenship status play major roles in determining access to clean water and indoor plumbing.4 Puerto Rico’s water situation is the worst in the country but other hotspots throughout the states have large populations that lack indoor plumbing, including “communities in Alaska, the Four Corners region of the Southwest and along the U.S.-Mexico border as well as the upper Midwest, the Northeast—particularly northern Maine and New Hampshire—the Allegheny region in Pennsylvania and Appalachia in West Virginia.”56

(Linked below is our November 2023 newsletter where we get into our communal drinking water and how that works for us).

Polite society doesn’t want us talking about how this single detail of restricted, limited, and undermined water access under occupation—eclipsed by countless other issues faced by Palestinians and other peoples who are colonized, racialized, and marginalized—is enough to dramatically shift the playing field over generations. It benefits polite society to avoid that discussion.

But, maybe asking difficult questions is the key to why we can’t talk to each other?

If we were more open to having the difficult discussions, that come with all the uncomfortable feels, it probably wouldn’t come as such a surprise just how many gallons of clean drinking water folks flush down the toilet, and all the people who just can’t afford to. You would have already talked to your neighbors about it. We have.

So. If you’ve found your way here only for the sustainable farming, or if you’re one of the many people who have met our lived experiences with blank stares and cool indifference, you’ll want to check back next month. This newsletter isn’t for you.

It was Alex’s birthday on Tuesday and they made a series of drawings as a birthday fundraiser for families supported by Creators for Gaza.

(1) please donate (sliding scale) $15-$150 to a campaign supported by Creators for Gaza. This link will take you to a list of families, and let you know what percentage of their campaign has been fulfilled. Click through to donate or share.

(2) send a screenshot of your donation and your mailing address to the farm email: buenocompartir at gmail dot com

(3) Alex will write a personal message on the back of the art and mail it to you.

Ahem [Steven takes the mic].

Ten years ago this summer, Alex flew into my life over scenic hilly farmland, during an art festival, zooming in on a Gator. Literally beaming so brightly that it made everyone else shine. We were both there volunteering but Alex was like A1 Volunteer putting-out-fires-with-a-smile. The type of kindness that lingers when they leave the room, that weekend was my first glimpse of their brilliance. But later I saw their art and it literally opened up a new way to see the world, showing me that anything, any situation, any landscape, is absolutely gorgeous when you look at it right. An abundance of love that ensured everyone and everything had the right to be beautiful and to be cared for and about. I hoped if I hung around them enough I might be able to see it for myself.

It’s funny how life works. That festival was the first time we hung out in a tent. And now half way through our third year living in a tent, it still feels as rich as the first weekend. But now we farm above scenic hills that shoulder the ocean, under incredibly difficult circumstances, and there’s no Gator yet, and I’m so thankful for this brilliant being that can make any day better, that I am honored to love.

Since Ernesto forced a hard restart on our entire life, it has been the hardest month in a long long time. And while we are in the middle of repairs, Alex has made sure we appreciate every day and everything we do have. So it’s no surprise that in the middle of all this, Alex is using this brief attention people get for their birthday to fundraise for the families trying to leave and survive in Gaza. You see why I am honored to love them?

Alex made every piece in the fundraiser since we lost everything. Some were water colored with the very rain water that soaks our belongings. Each piece is an invitation to join in transmuting the heaviest moments (like witnessing a live-streamed genocide) into a response carried by beauty. Because horrifically, things are only getting worse in Palestine and both democrats and republicans promise to drag their feet on ever making real change. And so all we have is right now and each other.

It’s Not Hurricane Ernesto’s Fault:

What happened to us

Hurricane Ernesto just barely became a hurricane as it passed us, gusts were unimpressive and the rain was barely more than a regular rainy day. But the bamboo and tarp shelter we patched together for 3 years was weakened by termites, rot, and repeated fractures. So since the morning that Ernesto visited us, when we woke up to the sound of wet wood cracking and snapping above us, it’s been a long month.

We have had to keep nearly everything we care about piled in the car. (I wrote about how we got here a while back). When the afternoon downpours come, sometimes we pile in the car too and drive somewhere less rainy until it’s done. Still, when I get back from filling up gas, Alex is in the passenger seat diligently at work: they’ve etched out just enough elbow space to be drawing the buildings I’d barely ever noticed, again transmuting beauty.

People struggle to understand how, under these conditions, Alex manages to shine, to constantly prioritize others, and spend no time complaining about our own struggles. It can be overwhelming how preciously they care for life, because humanity gives very us few examples. Since that first shiny encounter I’ve been watching them see the beauty where no one else cared to look and see the happiness, radiance, and brilliance that no one else was able to see.

The thing is—housed people hate houseless people. We see it on your faces. Everyone, from long time friends to new comrades, treats us differently after seeing how we have had to live for 3 years. Each time it has happened, it’s been its own collapse. When someone learns our living conditions, especially if they only experienced us when we’re wearing our big-city clothes to avoid mistreatment, the revelation is enough to topple all trust and credibility built up over years.

When our living space fell that rainy morning, years of construction, replacement, and repair collapsed in a single rain and we were catapulted from one houseless condition: mostly dry and able to care for belongings, to a houseless condition we’d thought was over: muddy and unable to wash anything. The two are treated very differently in society and have vastly different outcomes in the cultural-carceral-industrial nexus. And while we have relatively immense privilege to be able to get a better, stronger shelter put up in a few days, the literal collapse reflects the social collapse: the slippery slope between passable and too houseless, accepted and hated, harmless and worthy of punishment. A truly alarming number of houseless people in Puerto Rico die on jail cell floors, never convicted of a crime.

It feels impossible to put into words how devastating it is to be houseless. Trying to explain to people who’ve always been housed how exhausting it is to the body, mind, and spirit, through the performance of trauma show-n-tell, is itself exhausting. Even writing these words brings on a profound level of sadness because I know, as we have been shown time and time again, that almost nobody gives a shit.

People have seen how we live, they have experienced a small fraction of the hardship that is our daily life, and rather than expanded empathy, it caused rage and distance. They cannot relate beyond a media-influenced fetish or rejection of what life must be like, and our houselessness is taken as a personal insult, a rain on their parade. I can only imagine how they see the stranger sleeping outside the furniture store.

Throughout all the things we’ve had to do to rebuild I’ve been thinking about Grants Pass, “stay awake or be arrested”, and Law 67. (I’m working on a in-depth piece about the loophole Puerto Rico uses to dragnet and kill its houseless population on ). The mud makes me think about how slippery the slope is between passing in public and what happens to people when they look too houseless for the comfort of housed folk. The exhaustion makes me think of the displaced people of Gaza, Haiti, Sudan, everywhere. Alex is constantly wishing we had a way to share any lessons we’ve learned from 3 years in a tent to the all the displaced people in Gaza, but who needs our advice during a genocide?

Hence the fundraiser, happy birthday mi amor, and long live the resistance.

“Haunt the dreams of your comrades, and the nightmares of your enemies; live in a future that never came—be a specter, a memory, and a herald. Remind them that the current state was not inevitable until it came to be. Do not occupy yourself with the question of why this very possible future failed, leave the victorious to grope for answers. Be the question, and do not heed your impotence. A ghost has no need for material presence or action, you just need to shimmer.”

- Alaa Abd el-Fattah, You Have Not Yet Been Defeated

For over a month our area hasn’t gotten any municipal water (or any mail), because of what we’ve taken to calling the fear hole. No real fear involved, just a small amount of shifted earth that has completely disrupted the modern infrastructure essential for life—which, let’s be real, most people take for granted.

In response, we reconfigured our own water storage system, to put a tank in the back of the truck to haul the water ourselves from the pueblo.

Fermentation Festival Debrief

Festivals in general are difficult, in that capitalism is exhausting. We are much more interested in the conversations we can have and the connections we can make. An example, at the festival we met someone who brings food to the elderly and home-bound, and meeting them made doing the festival totally worth it for us.

Before (and immediately after) hurricane Fiona we tried to get our excess produce to folks claiming to do food sovereignty work. Unfortunately, it seems the people who say it the loudest online, aren’t actually doing much in the real world. Getting connected to someone putting the work in, week in and week out, means so much more to us than whatever capital could have been snatched away from festival goers.

If you missed us at the festival, our zines are available online in our Farm Store. All of our large zines open to 11x17 inch art posters (check out the photo below). Hang them in your window or carry them at a protest. We’re with you.

Farm Store: buenocompartir.bigcartel.com

Living in the future

Most of our neighbors are not connected to municipal water because their homes were built before the waterline from the city made it out here. Even those who are connected face sporadic shut offs due to storms, blackouts, or in this case, giant sinkholes.

So throughout the forest there are community-built concrete reservoirs that collect spring water or that store municipal water for such times of crisis. Communal water in the realist sense.

Read more about the drinking water situation:

We feel like a broken record, but we don’t have access to electricity, internet, or running water (in our case our water is not “running” because we have to haul all of our water, occasionally all the way from the pueblo). When online, we’re expending an immense amount of our literal and energetic battery.

Living in the future means adapting to such restrictions which haven’t yet become the reality for most people reading this. We reuse water as many times as possible and plant strictly with the weather, never relying on irrigation.

The next few newsletters we’ll be getting into a number of ways people all over the world are currently living in the future. We’re just privileged enough to have access to technology, digital literacy, and some time to write these to you all.

The repercussions of settler-colonialism are not a lifestyle choice; don’t call us sustainable.