“Many Shades of Brown”
Another Gulf Is Possible Collaborative is a people-of-color led, grassroots collaborative of eight core members from Brownsville, Texas to Port St Lucie, Florida. We are built upon decades of organizing resulting in a strong and rooted ecosystem of relationships between individuals tied to a multitude of organizations, networks, communities, and alliances from the US Gulf South to the Global South.
Our collaborative centers cultural organizing, arts-based healing, direct action, advocacy, transformative justice, education, and locally-led capacity-building training as our core areas of work. We also explicitly center the leadership of brown women with anti-racist, decolonized, and abolitionist frames and lenses for the work we undertake together. In particular, we bring indigenous, latinx and desi perspectives to a region split physically, politically and socially on black and white racial lines. We see our lived experience of marginalization within this context as a strength and strive to honestly and authentically put into practice the principles we hold around sustainability, equity and justice.
ANOTHER GULF IS POSSIBLE’S PRINCIPLES OF ENGAGEMENT
IMPACT: We believe we must be transformative, not transactional, in our approach.
JOY: We believe joy is resistance and increasing joy is part of our mission.
RESOURCING: We believe in fair and equitable compensation for all types of work in radicalizing and mobilizing, moving resources towards building the regenerative economies our communities need including emotional, artistic, creative, and healing services, care work, accessibility provisions, and space holding/presence/activation.
AMPLIFYING MARGINALIZED COMMUNITIES: We will not be tokenized in spaces, however, we understand the value in bringing voices of the marginalized in mainstream environments.
CAPACITY BUILDING: We are committed to building up the skills, abilities and talents of ourselves and our communities across the Gulf South to the Global South.
Jayeesha Dutta is a Bangladeshi-USAn water protecting mermaid and artist born in Mobile, raised in New York, aged in Oakland and New Orleans, who now calls Port St Lucie home. A co-founder of AGIPC, she is the Program Director at Windcall Institute, Co-Chair/President of Eyewitness Palestine’s Board, and a caretaker for her elderly parents and dog, Zorro. Over the last 25+ years, Jayeesha has served as a co-executive director, teaching artist, community organizer, facilitator, project manager, designer, producer and chief of staff. Her efforts span education justice, youth and labor organizing, arts advocacy, climate justice, racial equity, and healing justice, collaborating with local to international groups and networks.
Rebekah Hinojosa is an artist and community organizer from the Rio Grande Valley borderlands of Texas. Her latinx family has lived in this region, along the banks of the Rio Grande River and the Gulf coastline, since before Texas statehood. For the last seven years, Bekah has facilitated art builds for community campaigns and civil disobedience actions on issues such as fracking, keystone XL, BP Oil Spill, mountaintop removal, migrant justice, and climate justice. She is currently organizing with her community to prevent the construction of three liquefied natural gas export terminals (LNG) on indigenous sacred sites and nearby latinx families and to stop the continued construction of the U.S./Mexico border wall. She is particularly interested in bringing resources to her border and gulf coast community and is inspired by building art with people of all ages.
Yudith Nieto is a queer organizer and artist born in Mexico who grew up in the fence-line refining community of Manchester in Houston, now living in Huntsville. Out of necessity to mobilize her community she joined the environmental justice movement and dedicated her media making skills, advocacy, and art to confronting the petrochemical industries that perpetuate environmental racism in marginalized communities of color. She attended the Four Directions Inter-generational Youth Exchange of Los Jardines Institute in Albuquerque, NM, in 2013 where she learned how the Chican@, Mexican American, and Indigenous cultures are intrinsically linked. Yudith now serves on the planning committee for Four Directions and is currently working with other youth, nationally to create youth leadership and art in activism trainings where she is able to contribute to the discussion on the many issues they face because of the fossil fuel industry, as well as other human rights issues that impact their way of life.
Liana Lopez is a multimedia communications professional, independent media maker, community organizer, and digital media artist based in Houston, Texas. Her media career is deeply rooted in environmental justice, social justice, and cultural education work across communities in the Gulf South, the Amazon Rainforest, and North and Central America. She is a recipient of a Houston Arts Alliance Emerging Artist Grant and was the co-host and producer of the Nuestra Palabra: Latino Writers Having Their Say radio show broadcast. Liana holds a B.A. in Communications from the University of Houston and is passionate about using media as a tool for change and helping others use media to tell their own stories.
Bryan Parras is a co-founder of Texas Environmental Justice Advocacy Services (t.e.j.a.s.), co-founder of The Librotraficantes and now works as an organizer for the Sierra Club’s Beyond Dirty Fuels campaign out of Houston. Bryan has been working with local partners, policy makers and local governments to identify potential Health threats to vulnerable communities living in high risk areas like the Houston Ship Channel which has already been identified as a health threat by local research institutions and health professionals. He is a trained facilitator of Theater of the Oppressed techniques, a graduate of The University of Texas at Austin. He has worked as an organizer, a journalist and as an artist.
Ramsey Sprague was born in Houma, Louisiana, raised in Arlington, Texas, and has lived in Mobile, Alabama since 2013. Sprague is an enrolled tribal member of the Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw Tribe and currently serves as a coordinator with the Mobile Environmental Justice Action Coalition. They take heart in the ways that systematically disenfranchised communities throughout the Gulf South are embracing the environmental and climate justice movements. Ramsey’s faith and ethic drive their resolve to help develop a fairer economy via a just transition from fossil fuels for the benefit of future generations and to honor both the living and departed traditional caretakers of our lands.
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Another Gulf Is Possible/Otro GOLFO ES POSIBLE 