A CONVERSATION BETWEEN ANTONIO ROMAN-ALCALÁ AND DAVID E. GILBERT
COMMISSIONED AND EDITED BY KAI BOSWORTH
Kai Bosworth: For years, The Funambulist has examined land struggles in forests, urban areas, deserts, and colonial “frontiers.” Contributors have diagnosed, on the one hand, the violence of separation in property regimes, plantations, bulldozer politics, walls and fences; while on the other, highlighting the liberatory possibilities of Land Back movements, marronage, and decolonial ecologies. Though agriculture and land reform are woven into so many of these articles, no issue of The Funambulist has yet examined the central relationship between agroecological food production and movements for autonomous, collective land reform. Perhaps known most notably through the rise of the global peasant organization La Via Campesina, quite diverse agroecological movements worldwide are attending to deeply particular and local histories and ecologies while also attempting to connect and resonate their experiences and experiments into a broader alternative to capitalist food production and property-labor regimes.
I asked my friends Antonio Roman-Alcalá and David Gilbert if they would be willing to juxtapose their experiences in the United States and Indonesia respectively in a further effort to both attend to the unique and the potentially shared “direct land politics” emerging today.
DAVID E. GILBERT: Antonio, it’s me David, What’s good with you?
ANTONIO ROMAN-ALCALÁ: Hey D. Things are so intense right now. You must be appreciating not being in the USA, with the powers-that-shouldn’t-be kidnapping student activists, rolling out the ICE-stapo, and turning over state powers to the tech oligarch overlords.
DEG: I’ve been following. I am having a hard time thinking about the hundreds of students at California State Universities that could end up snatched and deported.
ARA: That’s the good ol’ fascist USA.
DEG: Right? It reminds me of all the political exiles and Internationalists that have come through Barcelona over the decades—I’m starting to wonder if I will become one of them! It’s not a coincidence I ended up here to work on land struggles. But a year ago it felt more like a choice to be here, now I wonder if I’m gonna end up without a state somehow. I feel Spain is a long way off from MAGA’s attack on leftists and the dismantling of the parts of the US state that can help keep us safe. But around the world, many people’s only choice is to survive in spite of the state. Land Back, reclaiming movements, agriculturalist-oriented territorial struggles in the countrysides and within the cities as well are the center of potential. Growing food on the land is one way to activate and create the capacity to sustain ourselves, control territories, and develop the organizations that we will need to enact liberation against capitalist hegemons.