A two-part workshop for elementary and middle school students to “grade back” their school—not through test scores or behavior charts, but by creating their own report card rooted in collective power.
Through roleplay and storytelling, students will explore the everyday realities of school and ask critical questions about power: Who decides the rules? Who doesn’t? What happens when students don’t follow the rules?
We’ll connect these experiences to the concept of adult supremacy and how this system is a part of colonial and imperial rule, training young people to obey, not to question.
Affirming their right to struggle, students will practice writing a collective letter of demands to name what they want to see change at their school and what they know they deserve.
Albert Einstein Academies
April 24th and July 8th, 2025
2-4pm PST
In collaboration with Project Yano, Secret City SoCal, Palestinian Youth Movement San Diego, and Veterans for Peace.
An intergenerational community workshop and film screening connecting the violence of militarism and young people’s resistance to militarization in the San Diego Tijuana borderlands, past and present.
We will be screening two powerful short films: “Connie Stay Home,” which explores the anti-Vietnam War campaign in San Diego that mobilized thousands of people to vote against sending the USS Constellation aircraft carrier back to Vietnam, and “Yo Soy El Army,” which takes a critical look at military recruitment targeting Latino communities, particularly young people. Alongside the screenings, we will be countermapping the military presence in our schools and neighborhoods through a series of activities. We will also hear from youth organizers and elders from past and ongoing anti-imperialist and anti-war movements.
Centro Cultural de la Raza
January 25th, 2025
6-8:30pm PST
An ongoing study/working group on a people’s history of education and people’s schooling.
Using readings and archival material, we will be exploring the relationship between education and settler colonialism, prisons, war/militarization, labor, and imperalism to develop a material analysis of historical and present day conditions of the US education system and colonial/neo-colonial education internationally. How have people used militancy and popular education to resist subjugation and organize themselves toward self-determination?
As a working group, will also explore how we can translate our study to political education programming within our communities, particularly in the context of the US-Mexico borderlands in which Homegrown’s work has been rooted.
November 2024-February 2025
Tuesdays, 6-7:30 pm PST
An Allied Media Conference session through the Youth Liberation for Education Justice Track.
This session exposes how the colonial capitalist school system divides and alienates our communities and consciousness. Schools separate us by race, class, language, and ability, policing our bodies and controlling how we learn and move through the world. They sort students into rigid categories — tracking some as “winners” and others as “failures,” disciplining youth with surveillance and punishment, and erasing Indigenous, Black, and working-class histories and ways of knowing.
We will analyze how schools enforce borders between young and old, public and private knowledge, English speakers and multilingual learners, able-bodied and disabled students all to maintain capitalist social relations and control over labor and bodies.
Through collective analysis and creative brainstorming, we’ll reclaim intergenerational and community knowledge that resists capitalist alienation and state violence. Together, we’ll strategize how to dismantle these oppressive borders—physical, linguistic, generational, and epistemic—to build collective, abolitionist educational spaces grounded in solidarity and self-determination.
This is a call to disrupt, sabotage, and overthrow the schooling system that trains submission and reproduces capitalist domination so that our youth can learn to resist, organize, and build a world beyond empire.
Allied Media Conference - Virtual
July 1st, 2022
11-12:30 am PST
A three-part cross-border workshop and listening praxis rooted in our collective fight against settler-colonial borders and capitalist extraction. This intergenerational program, led by youth facilitators Ana Cossío García and Daniela Sandoval Argüelles, centers the San Diego–Tijuana borderlands as a frontline in the struggle for community sovereignty and liberation.
We will deep listen to the multilingual sonic landscape of our communities—labor, movement, memory, and survival—that the colonial state and capitalist forces try to silence and control. We will expose how these oppressive systems fragment our communities and erase histories.
Using sound as a weapon, we will dismantle the logistics of control by learning to build and wield pirate radio and autonomous media platforms. These tools disrupt imperialist communication regimes, reclaim stolen space, and stitch together ruptured networks of power and solidarity.
This series is a practice in anti-imperialist solidarity, cultivating insurgent networks through sound.
Tijuana - 18 de marzo parque
San Diego - 99 cent store
August 6th, 2022
10am-1:30pm PST
An intergenerational teach-in with Radical History Club and Homegrown youth educator, Sophie. They will guide us through the histories of violence of the US education system and how schools operate as a means of assimilation to the status quo and as a factory worker training ground.
Libélula Books & Co
February 12th, 2022
4-6:30pm PST