Parenting as a Social Justice Movement
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Summary
In this conversation, Leslie Priscilla shares her journey as a Latinx parent, discussing the complexities of cultural identity, the importance of unschooling, and the intersection of parenting with social justice. She emphasizes the need for compassion, understanding generational trauma, and the role of imagination in healing. The discussion also touches on the impact of the political climate on parenting choices and the importance of community support.
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Read the Transcript:
Adrienne Miller (00:00)
Hi, Leslie. It’s so nice to meet you.
Leslie Priscilla (00:01)
Hi, Adrienne. It’s really nice to meet you too, finally.
Adrienne Miller (00:00)
Thank you. It’s been a long time coming. Tell me about you and Latinx parenting and where that started when that started. And, and then we’ll dive into unschooling a little bit.
Leslie Priscilla (00:01)
Yeah, yeah. So I am Leslie. I’m Leslie or Leslie Priscila. I am a daughter of two Mexican immigrants. First and foremost, I am currently on Tongva, Ahashamun and Quiche territory in Southern California. I’ve been here my whole life. I live in a city called Santa Ana, We are about 78 % Latin, mostly Mexican, Mexican-American, a lot of undocumented community here.
And I started this journey to kind of like building, I think, what Latinx parenting has become, I think, just as a kid. ⁓ people, you know, even my first parenting experience, I always say was like parenting my younger sister who was 10 years younger than I am. And I feel like a lot of us in Latina culture kind of have this experience where if you’re the oldest daughter and other cultures, obviously, but you really take it upon yourself to like care for the younger ones.
And so I obviously loved my little sister. I never fought with her. wasn’t that kind of dynamic. I always felt very protective of her. And my mom wasn’t very like, I’m going jump into the trauma. No, I’m not going to.
Adrienne Miller (01:20)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, No, we’ll
get to it. I promise we’ll get to it.
Leslie Priscilla (01:28)
But she struggled. I think a lot of Mexican parents who have very little resources, very little support with the trauma that is assimilation and immigration and all these things. So she really struggled and that was felt in our relationship.
And so I had initial resentment about that when I was a teenager and I didn’t really understand all of these dynamics and, you know, the historical things that I know now. but I kind of grew into a place of compassion, I think once I became a mom and I started, so I was in child development from the time I was in community college. I knew I wanted to work with children. I became a preschool teacher. did the entire master teacher certification at the community college. It took me six and a half years to complete. And then I finally transferred to university to do child development and family studies. And that’s where I found family life education, which is parent education. So I double majored. But in the meantime, I was a preschool teacher. I had my own classroom. I was Miss Leslie. My preschoolers are graduating this year. They’ve just…
Adrienne Miller (02:39)
my god.
Leslie Priscilla (02:40)
Not to age myself, but I…
Adrienne Miller (02:42)
No, but it’s a thing. I see my students around too and they’re like post-college and da da. I’m like, my gosh, K, time is passing.
Leslie Priscilla (02:48)
Oh my gosh, they’re so precious.
If anybody’s listening to this, that was one of St. Olaf preschool back in 20, what was it, like 2009, 2010. But no, I’ve always had this love for children and I’ve always been very playful myself and I’ve never taken myself too seriously. So I was a preschool teacher, I got pregnant. I was like, oh my gosh, I’m not going to be able to send this one home.
right? And I need to start kind of learning more about what this means for me because I didn’t, I knew what I didn’t want to do in my mothering. I knew how I did not want to behave, I guess, as a parent. And so I committed to doing things differently, but I didn’t really have a template for what to do differently, right? So I started reading all of these amazing parenting books, many of which I still have. But the perspective was always lacking my story. That makes sense. So the perspective was very white. It was very Western. It was very even attachment parenting, right? Like I dove into attachment parenting and I was like, this is amazing. This actually sounds a lot like what my family did where we would sleep with our babies. I slept with my mom, like even into my adolescence, right? So
Adrienne Miller (03:45)
But no, white people invented gentle parenting.
Leslie Priscilla (04:03)
Right, right. And I wore my baby and I all these things felt very into a breast until my kids were four. Right. And so all these things felt very intuitive for me. But all of the groups that I was a part of other parents that were parenting this way, they were all white. Right. Except for maybe a couple here and there. And so I started just kind of seeing this like massive gap between the way that I grew up, just in terms of like the pain that I saw in my family, the generational trauma that I was witnessing and how that manifested in different things going wrong for a lot of my family members, right? There’s like a lot of, one of my cousins currently is missing, right? He’s been in and out of incarceration. Like I remember him and Juby. So there’s just like a lot of things in my family that were very heartbreaking for me to experience. And I wanted to understand why that gap existed between what I experienced growing up in my family. Mind you, my family is beautiful and we’re passionate and loud and like many of the things that make me me are because of my family. At the same time, I saw, especially having gone to Catholic school, Catholic high school and seeing the level of privilege that white families had, the level of privilege that having enough money to do all of these amazing, enriching things. Sports, like I could never have afforded sports, right? We were on second aid housing. we, my mom was on food stamps for many years. so I was like, this is not making sense to me.
Adrienne Miller (05:19)
Hmm.
Yep.
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
It’s a different world. Yeah. Yeah.
Leslie Priscilla (04:03)
It’s a different world. And so, you know, even as I was reading all these parenting books when my daughter was born, I was like, there’s something that is deeply disconnected here from the struggles that I have lived and witnessed in my family and in other families in my city of Santa Ana. And so I started exploring that, right? I was just like, okay, what, know, and different teachers came into my life at different times. And so I started learning about indigenous cultures. Initially, you know, the indigenous people, the Maori people of New Zealand, their treatment of children. And then I started kind of turning over here to the Maya treatment of children. Oh, actually, this gentle parenting stuff, it seems like these people have already been doing it forever and ever. Then I started learning about my indigenous heritage, and that’s the Rarámuri people of Central Chihuahua. And I was like, wow, right? Yes.
Adrienne Miller (06:20)
Mm-hmm. The parallels. Yeah. Yeah.
Leslie Priscilla (06:35)
So I think I just really set out to reconnect with my identity after so many decades of rejecting it because it was a source of pain for me and a source of rejection sometimes, right? Because I was doing things so differently, right? So my aunts and uncles, my dad even would say, you really should spank your kids, right? It was like, I don’t feel like…
Adrienne Miller (06:39)
Right, right. Well, and you’re in between, you’re finding yourself in between worlds. Yeah.
Leslie Priscilla (07:05)
Right, right.
And so I kind of like have existed in this like, liminal identity, right, where I’m like, always in between these two worlds, and I’m able to kind of like see the dynamics at play. And, and I have to alchemize that, like I have to metabolize it, and I have to alchemize it. And I feel like Latinx parenting kind of grew out of that process of alchemizing the disconnections and the connections that I was making.
Adrienne Miller (07:10)
Okay
Leslie Priscilla (07:29)
That came about in 2018. Before that, I was working with parents. became a certified family life educator. I was trained as a parenting coach in 2013 by my teacher Ruth Beagle-Hole, who passed away a couple months ago, but I’ll flash a picture of her. She’s a wonderful, wonderful. She and I fortunately kept in contact pretty closely. So I’m just very grateful for having had her as a teacher.
Adrienne Miller (07:47)
good Nana.
Leslie Priscilla (07:57)
when she came into my life, know, a lot of the, a lot of things started making sense for me. And she was actually the first person to say that parenting isn’t about parenting. It’s a social justice movement for children, right? And that really stuck with me. And I was like, yes, this is how I feel, right? Like children need to have their needs met just as we did when we were children, just as my mom did when she was a child, right? My mom grew up in poverty, like that did something to her brain, right? She deserved better. My grandparents deserve better. My ancestors, like generations behind me, deserved better, right? And so I feel like that really has charged me forward. And then to start to recognize all of the parallels and patterns that my ancestry has with other ancestries and other lands, right? In terms of the effect that colonization has had on us and the grief that we experience at recognizing that it’s an ongoing attempt.
And so we see ourselves in people like the Palestinian people, you know, and we see that this has happened before. It’s just never happened in this way where there’s been so many cameras on it, right? ⁓ But I see myself as responsible ⁓ for my own lineage, you know, to be able to fight for other people’s as well, because it’s all the same struggle. ⁓ And my work is really about helping parents recognize that, right, and helping them understand that they’re worthy of having their needs met and their kids are too, right? And it’s a playful process, right? We do a lot of inner child work and things like that. But yeah, I think that there’s so much work to do and I’m just very fortunate to be able to do it through Latinx parenting and then also through my mothering.
Adrienne Miller (09:42)
Mm-hmm. Have you unschooled from the beginning, then?
Leslie Priscilla (09:51)
On and off, so we did do public school for a couple of years. So when the pandemic hit, my daughter was in second grade and we had been at that school since kindergarten. But before that, we were a part of a cooperative called Unidos Public Schooling Cooperative. And it was Waldorf-based, but it was also very fluid and there wasn’t a rigid structure to it.
When the pandemic hit, were like, this online stuff is not gonna work. Like we need to actually be outside with other kids. And so we ended up finding, what were they called? the pods, like we ended up having pod. And so in that pod, we would still go out and see friends and we would go out hiking or to parks or whatever it was. So that kind of, you know, began like my unschooling, like officially began my unschooling process. I had known about unschooling from people like Akilah Richards, and I’ve been on her podcast years and years ago. And so I’ve drawn a lot of inspiration from people like her who are, you know, people of color, right? Like, because just as I was saying that attachment parenting and all those things, like those spaces are very white, ⁓ even in the homeschooling, unschooling communities, right?
Adrienne Miller (10:48)
it’s rough.
It’s rough out there. She’s really like she’s the first one to have named unschooling as liberation work and not just as kids running feral and wild out in nature and being free. I feel like she’s really the one who brought in the context of, well, we’re leaving the system because it’s actually not safe for black and brown kids, right? It’s not just this luxury that we have and it’s a completely different context for black and brown families leaving the school system. White families don’t have the prison to pipeline reasoning, or they don’t have the racism and discrimination happening in schools, or they don’t have, you know, the Palestinian kid who’s told, you’re not from Palestine. That’s not a, that’s not a state. That’s not a country. It’s not a place or any of these other examples. She’s definitely the OG, at least she was for me too. And I’m really glad I found her at the beginning because so many other voices are white.
Leslie Priscilla (12:00)
There’s another author, her name is Zakkiyya. I’m forgetting her last name, but the book is called No Dream Deferred. That’s called, or the subtitle is Why Black and Brown Families Are Starting to Home School. And it’s just testimony of Black and Brown families and like what their journey was and how they feel about it still, right? Because there are people that name like this can be really lonely. Like in order to able to like join other families who are aligned with our values, like we have to kind of be in this liminal space as well. You know, I still don’t feel like I fully connect with or relate to a lot of the families that are a part of the groups that we’re in, right? As homeschoolers and unschoolers. So yeah, it’s been slow to build, but I think that conversations like this, the work that Akilah’s doing and more books being written about diverse experiences in homeschooling and on schooling, I think it’s going to grow.
Adrienne Miller (12:53)
Mm-hmm.
Well, and especially with the political climate the way that it is, we’re just seeing people leave in droves and trying to look at things like, like, I think there’s the extremes of, well, I really don’t want my kids doing active school shooting drills but it’s also seeing, you know, I actually want my kids to learn about queer and trans families. I actually want my kids to learn non whitewashed history or whatever. And so we’re really seeing this awakening for more people. And you know, you’ll always have the luxury of, we like we want to travel, we want to not be in our nine to fives, we want to liberate ourselves from those things. But I’m seeing more and more of that deeper inner work happening and our whole generation unpacking mother wounds or childhood trauma or other stuff. And I feel like once you start pulling on that thread, you then start to realize how everything’s connected.
Leslie Priscilla (13:58)
Yeah, I agree with that. think it’s interesting because I’m co-parenting currently with my kid’s dad and he’s more of a homeschooler, like traditional homeschooler. There’s like, you know, we have to sit and do our work and like study in that way. And I’m very much not that like I’m very much like, okay, we’re going to go to this place and we’re going to explore all aspects about it. You know, we’re going to be in our city and we’re going to be explaining things to you like the entire time. Even last week when we were driving to their dad’s house, isn’t a very, very wealthy, actually the wealthiest area of this city because Santa Ana in general is like, has a lot of poor people and it’s a very impoverished area. And so we’re like going from one part of the city where you see a lot of unhoused people, right? And then you drive through one of the main streets and to the right, you see the tanks, the National Guard tanks in our downtown.
Adrienne Miller (14:35)
my god.
Leslie Priscilla (14:50)
Right? And then we drive a little further and we’re in this very wealthy, affluent part of this. And so it’s like, you don’t have to, like, I don’t know. I think we, you know, I don’t necessarily have the privilege to not explain these things to my children because of where they live and because of what they’re seeing in front of them. And I take a lot of time and a lot of intention to make sure that I know how to convey some of the information because I don’t want to confuse them. I also don’t want to overwhelm them.
And so, you know, I’ll take them to very small protests. I won’t take them to like, you know, some of the larger protests where people are getting tear gassed. And we try to kind of create some distance because I do want to protect their childhood, knowing that they already are a witness to so much, right? They’re very aware of what’s happening in Palestine also. It’s not just what’s in front of them here in the city. I’m letting them know, hey, this is the situation. this is where I, you know, this is how iPhones are made. You see this iPhone? You see this iPhone? That’s like, this is the material that is made with it and this is how it’s mined, right? And so again, I’m not trying to overwhelm. think it’s obviously important to be mindful of the ages, right? I’m able to talk to my 13 year old and my partner’s 10 years old at a different level than I’m able to talk to my 7 and my 6 year old. And so those conversations are all growing, but they’re building a really strong foundation for them to also understand what their responsibility is to their fellow human. And that’s really important. That’s why I think the unschooling is really powerful because you can flow with that, right, as the intention. Yeah. ⁓
Adrienne Miller (16:18)
Yeah. Well, let’s talk about, since you brought that up, let’s talk about ICE and what’s going on with that and how we approach it with our kids. So what do you feel like Americans are getting wrong? What is the unpacking that we need to do around? I’m not going to even use the word illegal, but you know what I mean?
Leslie Priscilla (16:45)
I think it’s a really, really hard, hard issue, right? Because I think ultimately it comes down to needs. And I think that what people are not recognizing is that nobody would leave their home country unless it was to meet a need, a basic need for safety or stability or whatever it is, right? In every single group, there are people, in every single group, there are people that do cause harm, right? And so, I think what the current administration is doing is trying to make it seem like that’s the monolith, like that’s everybody here. I think it’s fear-mongering. I think it’s ⁓ playing upon people’s white supremacist values also. ⁓ So it’s all very, it’s curated, it’s intentional. And so I think for us who are seeing these things happen in our community, literally like around me, there was a map that came out that showed which areas in my city were the most targeted and it’s just this whole area, right? And so I think in sanctuary cities, in places like LA, Chicago, like with high immigrant populations, there’s heavy, heavy fear.
And so those of us that have the privilege are trying to figure out the ways to address the needs of our community members so that they don’t have to come out at this time, right? We are encouraging people to not come out if they don’t have to. I have a friend whose father is a construction foreman and she called me last week and was saying, we’re telling him to stay home. We don’t want him to go because he’s a legal resident, but I mean, that doesn’t matter at this point.
Adrienne Miller (18:07)
Well, they’re deporting citizens. So like, it doesn’t even matter. Yeah. Yeah.
Leslie Priscilla (18:25)
So we’re dealing with that. And yeah, I mean, it’s very, very enraging. I’ve had to have like full on sobs, you know, just to release some of it. I’ve had to dance a lot to release some of it. ⁓ We’re trying to figure out ways to ensure that the community is still being supported financially. We went to a fundraiser a couple of nights ago that was for the day laborers who are not going to work currently because of the fear. And so I see people getting very creative. I see people getting very united, which is very hopeful. I also see people still operating out of the wounds. There’s a lot of lateral violence happening also among groups, which is very difficult because that side’s pretty united, right? I know that there’s criticism of Trump on the Republican side, but for the most part, they’re just down to you know, make their dollars together and like, yeah, yeah.
Adrienne Miller (19:20)
Yeah, and they’re aligned and yeah organized.
Leslie Priscilla
And so, you know, on this side, people are like, I can’t take you seriously because you use the word Latinx. I’m like, really? Right. So, ⁓ so I think we have to navigate with those like interpersonal things as well as we’re doing the work, right? Because we want sustainability and we want things to be able to, to support the community long term. Yeah.
Adrienne Miller (19:20)
Yeah, well, and I mean, it’s so it’s such an important part of I don’t know how deep you go into this with your kids. But I talked to my kids very unabashedly about the state. So you have Brits who came over stole land, built an entire empire using stolen people took over what was indigenous land, indigenous peoples who were 100 % the quote unquote illegal immigrants themselves, now being completely hypocritical and trying to act as if they were here first. I don’t even know, I don’t really understand the logic there at all, trying to deport people that they don’t want in their country on like arbitrary borders that they created and just made up and ignoring the fact that there are legal ways to come into the country that include asylum and refugee status and completely throwing out the Constitution when it suits them, of course. Now, again, this like a little bit over my kids heads, but I’m pretty plain to say to talk about British Empire to talk about the US Empire to talk about whose land we’re on to begin with and you know indigenous beliefs about being connected to the land and who’s actually destroying the land here who is controlling the resources who you can when you describe it like that it’s very plain to see who is like collectively working together to stay connected who’s offering mutual aid who is causing the harm and violence and who is literally just trying to survive.
Leslie Priscilla (21:29)
Yeah, and like what our role is in that, right? Like that’s very explicit, because we do, we map it out in exactly the way that you’re saying. We’re like, this is what has happened, right? And I have a book coming out in September 26, and the second chapter is about colonization. I start off the chapter just by saying a tragedy has happened, and then talking about what happened,
Adrienne Miller (21:32)
And continues.
Leslie Priscilla (21:56)
and it continues, right? And so I think, you know, for me, my daughter is my three children are half white, my ex husband is full, you know, German, Scottish, whatever. And so they they need to know who they are. Right. Like, it’s really important for me to know for them to know who they are, what they came from in both from both lineages. And to find what their role is in the healing of that lineage, in whatever way they’re here to express that, right? So maybe my daughter will be an artist and that’s how she finds that, right? But I think we have to be really explicit and say, no, we are responsible. Like we’re responsible for making sure that these people are not being oppressed in this way right? We’re responsible for making sure that this genocide stops. I’m not putting it on you now as a six-year-old, a seven-year-old, right, but I’m modeling what it looks like.
Adrienne Miller (22:59)
And you’re laying that groundwork, right? This isn’t something that when they’re 20, you’re like, OK, now dive in to learning accurate history and social justice like I kind of did, right? Where my whole entire world was turned upside down and I had to unlearn every single thing that I knew. But we’re starting, you and I are starting from a place of unpacking this from the beginning, which I think is so good.
Leslie Priscilla (23:02)
Yeah, I grew up really religious. Like I went to yeah, K through 12. Like I was very, I was like Jesus, you know. And then I had a, what’s the word, a journey with that afterwards.
Adrienne Miller (23:27)
Because that’s cultural too for you. Yeah.
Leslie Priscilla (23:49)
Totally, totally. And so when people are like, you know, are you Catholic? I’m like, culturally, like I’ll still. I like Vita en la Guadalupe like metal sometimes. But I’m like culturally it’s fine. But that was like, I had to get to that because for a long time I was like very much rejecting of everything that had to do with Christianity and Catholicism. I was like, ⁓ no, bullshit. Like I understand what happened here. And like, this is not okay, right? And now I’m like, wait a minute. It’s the interpretations of the teachings of Jesus that went awry, the teachings of Jesus are actually these which are so aligned with abolition, right? Which are so aligned with all things around social justice and standing with the poor and the oppressed. And so I’ve had to really kind of like come to my own understanding of those things, which has, which to me it’s like, okay, well, Jesus, you know, Jesus loves little children, for example, right? Those little children very much aligned with like the work that I’m doing. And so I don’t call myself a Christian, but I do see that in history, there have been people that have practiced these values of social justice. Jesus just happens to be one of them. Martin Luther King is another one, right? There’s people that we can draw from and say, okay, this is coming from a really deep place within us of recognizing our sacredness and recognizing our divinity as maybe, you know, a Catholic or Christian person would say, but it’s all inside us. It’s actually not you know, everything outside of us, the wealth and the golden cows, right, to keep it on that Christian field.
Adrienne Miller (25:13)
Yeah, yeah. Well, and it’s seeing how governments and empires used Christianity to tie it to oppressing people in white supremacy in the same way that we’re seeing Israel co-opt Jewish, like as a religion, Judaism and their values and using it in God’s name to perpetuate violence and cause harm. And any, that’s like my problem with any oppressive religion, not beliefs and maybe practices. And as you’re saying spirituality, it’s so different.
Leslie Priscilla (25:47)
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Adrienne Miller (25:48)
I also want to get into bringing it back full circle, because when I think about my mom too, so she’s Hawaiian Chinese, taken away from her family and brought to my white dad’s city and area and religion of Mormonism and how your mom and my mom, like they’re operating under the patriarchy, as we all are, they’re operating under, you know, 1980s therapy is for crazy people and it’s super shameful to do it. And we don’t talk about our emotions because we were raised by emotionally immature boomers as well. So they have this trauma that they haven’t processed, trying to parent maybe not in a marriage that they would have necessarily chosen. Maybe they were raised with this heteronormativity that they never got to question, trying to parent in an oppressive society environment, whatever. And we get the brunt of that, which makes no sense to us as kids because we don’t have the wherewithal to understand what the patriarchy even is or, you know and they’re in survival mode, they’re dysregulated.
they’re suppressing their own trauma, their own needs most likely, and then coming around to us then becoming parents and having to navigate that really difficult space of I’m so angry at how I was raised and I grieve my childhood and grieve the parenting that I did not receive and my needs not being met while also trying to come to a place of understanding and compassion. And I find it really difficult to oscillate between those two spaces and have really had to find my way of sitting with that grief and sitting with that anger, because those are all negative emotions that I wasn’t allowed to have. And those were ugly, don’t want that in your life and, you know, personality and whatever. And so, and as you said at the beginning, we’re doing this without a blueprint. And so we’re simultaneously trying to parent, which is already difficult. It’s already physically demanding and emotionally exhausting and mentally draining on top of trying to parent in a way that’s completely different from how we were raised while also trying to understand our roots and our culture and our ties to our ancestry while also trying to embrace feminism and the Me Too movement and Black Lives Matter. while also like it’s, it’s a lot for us, for our generation. So I just wanted to you to speak on that a little bit and how you approach, I guess, healing from that mother wound while also trying to understand where they were coming from while also leaving those, allowing those feelings to wash over us and not just forgive and forget as we were taught to do or dismiss the real pain and wounds that we experienced because they 100 % affected our DNA and with us and are in our brain and our bodies and the way we get triggered. Like I have had to go through a lot of why our parenting should be this amazing, beautiful thing without the added on getting triggered by my own kids and having to heal from my childhood wounds and all these things that I try to name as being really unfair.
Leslie Priscilla (29:39)
Yeah, there’s so much there. ⁓ my gosh. Yeah, I think you know, what’s coming to mind is the intensity of like the grief that comes up, right? Sometimes like I remember I was writing my book and I was writing on colonization and I was like, I was just like, you know, my friend walked in at that, at that moment, we were showing an office and I was just like fuming. I was like staring into you. I was just like,
Adrienne Miller (29:47)
Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. Yes, it’s enraging.
Leslie Priscilla (30:06)
you know, smoke coming out of my nostrils just staring at the floor. She’s like, what’s wrong? I was just like colonization dude. Like it’s really visceral, the sensation. I think for women especially, because what I have found is that a lot of times men, cis hetero men are able to compartmentalize some of these things. And I don’t know how to not allow it to move through my body first, right? Because I have spent so much time trying to reconnect to my sensations. And so now that I’ve been able to do that and practice that, like now I really feel them like really intense, right? Like was easier when you couldn’t associate and not feel my feelings.
Adrienne Miller (30:38)
It’s a double edged sword.
Leslie Priscilla (30:59)
⁓ yeah, and so I think for me, like, again, that the heavier it feels and the more that it feels like, you know, the more I tried to integrate another element into that, right? And so I use the indigenous framing of the medicine wheel, the Mexica medicine wheel, which is very simple. It’s very much like, you know, I like using Avatar, the lost airbender because so many people have watched it, but we have to balance our fire, our air, our water and our earth, right? And so sometimes when that rage is present and it’s starting to feel like it’s burning me, I either need, I probably need to cry. I probably need to shed to release. If I’m not going to cry, need to either take a bath. I need to take a long shower. I need to find the ocean or a body of water. I need to make sure that I’m replenishing with a lot of water physically, right? Physically replenishing with these things.
If I’m in a lot of sadness, right? If I’m deep in my grief and I can’t stop crying, like what are the things that are going to bring earth into that emotional process? How can I ground? What are the things like, can I go and walk barefoot for a little while, you know, in some dirt? Can I get some kind of like love on my body? Can my partner give me a massage or something just to like ground, right? Just to really be like and we’re here present. So it’s been really helpful for me to be able to identify which emotion corresponds in each of those quadrants of the medicine wheel, right? And to bring in the balance in a really intentional way. my gosh, I feel super hot, right? I need to make sure that I bring in these other elements. Sometimes we have a lot of water, a lot of fire, and we’re not bringing in a lot of air, right? And the air is like the dancing, it’s the joy, it’s the laughter, it’s watching a comedy show, it’s watching, so it’s art, it’s music, it’s like all of these beautiful things that we can really consciously begin. So we were at a protest, we’ve been at the protests for the last week and I’ve been feeling really hot, right? Really hot, I feel like hard inside my body, which means that I need longer walks, like I need to make sure that I’m getting that bilateral movement in. I’m needing to make sure that we’re still being playful, you know, we’re spending a lot of time outside. So that balance is really, really crucial. It’s never going to be in a perfect state because that’s not what it is, but it is a striving, right? It is an effort that we’re making and it is something that we can teach our children to even through Avatar, ⁓ right? Like use those things.
But it’s easier said than done. I think it really helps to have people who can remind you of the balance that needs to be brought in. I think that we need to be aware of the ways that we might be trying to protect our inner child as well from feeling this like crushing fear that maybe at one point we felt. And so that requires us to try to be in balance as much as possible so that we can be really good at discerning like what’s coming up and why and with, you for what purpose and how can we alchemize it? How can we metabolize? How can we alchemize? How can we build around it? So I think that’s been what I’ve really been trying to do for myself. It’s really, really hard, but I feel very grateful for my partner, my kids, even like my daughter will come up to me and just kind of like rub my shoulder, she can sense and she’s like, are you okay? And I’m like, I’m not okay. Like there’s people that are getting abducted off of the street right now and I’m feeling really sad about it. And so I’m transparent about that with them. And they are now right, my 13 year old is in a position where she feels like she can take care of me a little bit more. And so I think I don’t expect that from her, but I’m noticing that that’s kind of how she’s been able to step in.
And it’s beautiful. I feel grateful, right? I feel grateful overall to see the ways that this intentional kind of parenting and raising them is making them truly empathetic, right? Is making them feel so. So all the effort that I’m making to heal my lineage, to heal my ancestry, to heal my inner Nina, like it’s so worth it because I feel like my relationships are so rich. I feel like the conversations that I have are so just beautiful. Like even this one in this moment, right? I’m just like, oh my gosh, like I have such deep gratitude because we can get to a depth that I think is necessary to get to in order for us to build on this foundation that we’re creating, right?
And it’s just catching. it’s just that there’s people that we are seeing get political that we didn’t know that they would, right? didn’t, there’s people even here in the city, there’s like some pages that have really large followings and now they’re wanting to work with us to be able to educate more people. And so that’s powerful, you know? And so.
Adrienne Miller (30:38)
The only silver lining to come out of all of this has been the mutual aid, the community building, the politicizing of so many people and their relationships and the connections that we’ve made that just doesn’t happen when people are just posting about their personal brand and products to buy or whatever, right? Like all this making sure our values are really visible and really loud and all of the passion coming through and the music coming through and then you realize how much you share with so many people, not enough people, but so many people.
Leslie Priscilla (36:41)
Yeah, I love, I love like in general, right? Like I choose to love and I feel like there’s a paradigm. My teacher Ruth would talk about it in terms of this paradigm of power over and power with, right? And so that’s of the foundation of nonviolence is to understand your role between these two paradigms depending on what relationship, right? So sometimes we’re in a more nonviolent parenting dynamic with our children than with our partners, right? So.
But it’s these two paradigms, right? It’s these two paradigms. And so what we’re doing isn’t necessarily saying, I’m not violent, right? But it’s understanding the ways that I can sometimes be a part of that paradigm and then really actively rejecting it and really moving into this paradigm of love and moving into the paradigm of power with and moving into the paradigm of liberation is what ultimately it is.
Adrienne Miller (36:31)
Whenever I hear that parenting isn’t political or that, you know, parenting is a refuge from politics in the world, whatever, it’s like nails on a chalkboard. Kids are born into an inherent power imbalance with their parents. They’re 100 % dependent on you from day one. So automatic imbalance there. You are older, you are more experienced, you are more powerful, you’re physically bigger, you get to make decisions. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Adultism all over the place. And so just by nature, even if you didn’t get involved with anything in the outside world, you’re still automatically put into that position and they’re born into that position into a life that they didn’t choose. You chose to bring them into this world, like many, many things from the get go. And you either continue that status quo and continue to uphold that oppressive system, or you have to proactively push back against that. And that’s completely ignoring the fact that how you raise your kids with gender roles and how you dress them and pronouns and what you teach them. That’s every single parenting decision you make is political. if you just, yes, yeah. And even just choosing to continue
Adrienne Miller (42:48.098)
not processing your trauma and having that projected onto your kids, that’s political. All of it is. And I think people have this aversion to the word political or the idea of what it is. They just don’t want to be involved. in reality, politics are part of everyone’s life from how we use resources on this planet to how we’re voting to how we’re spending our dollars and which companies you’re supporting. Like, you’re not in a cave. No one’s in a cave.
Leslie Priscilla (36:43)
Yeah. I think that there is two like categories that are coming up for me. And there’s people that don’t have to care, right? That live on the top of the hill and they don’t, they’re like, I don’t know what’s going on down there, but it doesn’t matter to me because I’m like happy for now. And then there’s another category of people. And that’s like, when I think about my community and like a lot of them don’t have the privilege to be able to think about these things, the ways that maybe you and I have and have been able to. And so a lot of people live in food deserts, for example. And so when we’re thinking about healthy organic foods for people, like we can’t necessarily look at that and say that’s an individual problem on this person, right? And even the inner child work, and I say this in the workshops, I’m like, this is not me saying like, you know, that what our parents did was like something that we have to heal from and stop there. It’s like, no, they, again, they deserved to have their needs met. And their parents deserve to have their needs met. And so the reason that they didn’t have their needs met was because of all of these systemic oppressive factors that came in through these systems of patriarchy, of toxic religious dogma, of toxic individualism, and of capitalism.
Adrienne Miller (37:56)
Yep.Yeah, yeah, all of it. Oh, okay. Well, you were just so beautifully eloquent. I could talk to you forever. I wanna end with, what I appreciate about your page, there aren’t a lot of people that I can do this with is whenever I talk about anything abolitionist,
there’s so much pushback. So I get a lot of people who are on board with being liberal and they’re like, well, I don’t vote for Trump, so I’m a good person and da da da. But if I ever say that the Democratic party is the same as the Republican party, obviously there are some differences, but like whenever I try to talk about imagining a world without this bipartisan system or talk about how voting is a tool of the oppressor that they use to make us think that we have a lot of control. And I say this with like, obviously a complete understanding that there are policies that are put into place that affect real people for sure. Like there are differences between Dems and Republicans. I’m not naive to think that if, if Kamala was in power that things wouldn’t be different, but there’s also so many things that would be exactly the same. And there’s also the very real case that it’s still nationalism. It’s still a country based on genocide. And so I do want to just open up as we finish here, like, how do we talk about this while acknowledging the fact that there are anti-trans policies put into place that maybe wouldn’t exist if Dems were in power, but also recognizing that we’re still so heavily oppressed by both parties, that they both perpetuate such harm and violence that maybe people choosing to not vote for Kamala either because they didn’t want to support a genocide in Palestine doesn’t make them monsters or you know
Leslie Priscilla (38:05)
I’ve had, I started the page in 2018. And I went through having a platform in 2020, a large platform in 2020. Similar dynamics, people hated, I was saying, people like, so I’m privileged because I see myself as having had a really good self-taught education, right? Like I, from the time, even in high school, like I went to a Catholic high school and for all of the bullshit that exists in Catholic high school, there were a lot of really good conversations that we had, right? And a lot of topics were brought up in that school. And then thereafter, you know, just as I was exploring Palestine when I was 19, 20, I was marching at that time. This was like 2007. At the time, at the time, there were no one really, there was no one really like protesting. I would say, I have been boycotting Israeli products since about that time, right? Like I really try not to fuck with anything that is like adjacent to Israel. Since then, I’ve learned so much about like the depth of involvement that like so many companies and so many institutions have. but I remember like I remember when Rachel Corey was bulldozed, right? Like I remember. So I think it’s really powerful to know your history, right? Like I think it’s really powerful for people to do the reading because there’s so much bullshit online.
And so people are not at this moment, like doing the reading. think even YouTube videos could be doing the reading. Like there’s so much out there. Like we have the ability, the time. you’re writing me a paragraph about why you think I’m wrong when I say that the Dems are just as harmful as the Republicans and that genocide is my line, period. Right? Like I cannot just in my heart, in my body, I don’t have it in me to have voted for Kamala. And that’s not because I wanted any of this to happen. But I think that people would be asleep right now to a lot of the things if Kamala was in place. There were some signs at the protest last week that said, you know, if you’re, yeah, the brunch guy, and I’m just like, this is exactly the problem with this way is that it’s completely acceptable to abdicate your responsibility as long as your party is in place. And so, you know, I’ve seen, I’ve seen the ways that these things happen have unfolded, especially online. And I’m just like, I can’t, I think I’m at the point now where I don’t see it as my job to necessarily educate people to the level that they might need the education.
Like I want to create the conversation. I want to be very intentional with the ways that I convey what I want to convey. And sometimes I mess up, you know, and sometimes I’ll say things where I’m just like, oh, wow, I was really pissed when I said that. Like that might have gone wrong way. I’m a human being. Like I think that the things, the amount of importance sometimes that we place on social media as a source for what you should know exclusively is the problem, right? And so I, know, there’s been people that have said like, you need to stay in your lane, but again, because everything is political and because if you’re a parent, every choice that is made for you is going to impact your children. We don’t necessarily have a choice, but to talk about these things. And I’m okay with that, right? I’m grateful to have a platform. I think I’ve been able to do a lot of really good work with it. I think that there’s a lot of beautiful connections made through it. It’s not the end all be all of the work. A lot of, and I would say most of the work that I do is offline, right? It’s in my mothering and it’s also in the organizing that we’re doing here in my community, so you’ll see on the platform like we are really amplifying kind of what’s happening in Santa Ana. We’re telling people, hey, we’re not your heroes, we’re not your gurus, like you don’t need to turn to us, you need to turn to yourself and you need to go find out what’s happening in your city and who the people are that are supporting this or at least the ones that are keeping their head down when all this is happening, right? So I really think it’s incumbent on us to kind of turn the mirror back around and say, what are you doing? You know, like lovingly and like if you need the support we’re there for the support but we’re not at the point where you can turn away anymore and that’s kind of where where you know i’ve made my stance.
Adrienne Miller
I think as unschoolers too, because I’ll talk about this, that it’s not about pouring more money into schools. And it’s not about reform. I talk about how the whole system for one is working exactly how it was designed. It was designed as a factory, it was designed to perpetuate nationalist propaganda and capitalist ideals. So it’s not about, if we just put
better teachers in or if they just have more money or smaller class sizes. But as soon as I talk about getting rid of that system, all hell breaks loose and everyone’s like, well, no, of course you can’t do that. Like we have kids who need to be in public education. We have parents who can’t afford to homeschool their kids at home. And there’s all these arguments that are absolutely valid. It’s just a separate conversation. It’s re-imagining this world in a way where the education is more in co-ops or we’re looking at non-Western modes of education and we’re looking at, you know, educating kids and raising kids in such a different way that I think is just so unfathomable because we’ve been conditioned and programmed to think that the way things are is the only way that it works. We couldn’t possibly abolish the police because what’s that going to look like? It’s going to look like the apocalypse or we can’t possibly have more than two genders because the whole world is, you know, going to implode or whatever the argument is. It’s always keeping this narrow binary white supremacist idea of how the world has to function. We can’t possibly function without capitalism when in fact we have cultures from across time and history and across the globe who have very successfully lived in harmony with the earth and with its creatures and its resources and each other, right? That’s right.
Leslie Priscilla (43:09)
It’s not that far back. know what I mean?
I think about how in Mexico, so my parents are from Mexico, but it’s only been in the last 100 years that the majority of the people in Mexico started to speak Spanish, a European language. And so I’m like, we’re not actually that far removed from a collectivist way of living, from a matriarchal way of living. And so a lot of my work is reminding the parents that I work with of that knowledge, right? And knowing that that knowledge is valid and that the imagination is the power, right? As you were saying, like, imagine other solutions, but that is a function of the colonial machine. to eliminate your imagination, to let you know that there’s only two boxes and you have to fit within one of these two boxes and one of them is right and one of them is wrong. And so that linear mentality is what limits our imagination. And so
That’s why I encourage people in the inner child work to also play, right? And like do some art imaginative and like start actually visualizing and support each other and visualizing what could be because this was all built, this could all be destroyed, right? And something else could be built. And so we can’t.
Adrienne Miller (43:38)
Within just a few generations, like we saw colonialism topple matriarchal societies and turn them on their head in one generation, maybe two. And if it could happen that way, it can happen the other way.
Leslie Priscilla (43:51)
And it will, and it is in this moment. And so that’s what I can tell Fernando. He’s like, oh, we have so much work to do. like, are actively doing it. We are losing liberation. We are trying to as much as possible. Of course, I still get caught up in my bullshit and my linear ideas of doing it. But at least I can kind of turn it back around and say, oh, OK, that’s actually not aligned with the paradigm that I want to be aligned so, but that takes privilege for a lot of us. And so we also have to be really slow about the process. I have this tattoo, this nail tattoo to remind me like, this is a very like slow, you know, I’m not going to heal. Yeah. I’m not going to heal tomorrow. Right. Like they’re, I’m going to die and I’ll still be wounded in some way. that’s all right.
Adrienne Miller (44:47)
Yeah. I truly think about how one generation of kids being raised the way we’re raising ours literally changes all of society, right? And so that’s what I’m hanging on to.
Leslie Priscilla (44:52)
I hope that people are able to just be in joy and keep fighting, keep laughing.
Adrienne Miller (44:47)
Okay. Thanks for being here. I appreciate you so much.
Leslie Priscilla (44:52)
likewise. Thank you.
Adrienne Miller (44:47)
Good, okay, we will chat soon.
Leslie Priscilla (44:52)
lSounds good, thank you.
