When I stumbled onto UMiami’s campus earlier this year, it was more out of obligation than inspiration. As a fellow in the Communications PhD Program, I was expected to show up, to be present and engage, but my mind was cloudy, and my spirit felt heavy. Earlier that week, I was laid off from the job I’d taken directly after graduating from the University of Florida’s Center for Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies. In a matter of moments, I had gone from a burgeoning non-profit professional contributing to the lives of LGBTQIA+ and BIPOC communities to full-on survival mode. I was panicking, barely eating, distracted, disheartened, and unsure of how to make ends meet. As my peers, faculty, and student mentors offered words of encouragement and support, their words floated past me. I couldn’t help but think, I do not belong here right now. The thought of engaging and participating as a scholar felt like a form of betrayal—like I was abandoning the version of myself who was trying to survive for the scholar I had long suppressed.

This Pride month, I encourage my peers not to succumb to burnout or perpetually grind toward visibility but to embrace rest as an act of personal and political resistance and transformation.

As a care worker, HBCU alum, and Black Feminist scholar living and working in the South, legacies of racism, colonialism, and disenfranchisement remain deeply felt. Our current political climate only sharpens the blade of these injustices even further. Systemic oppression through various forms such as racism, homophobia, transphobia, and capitalism have long denied Black and queer folks to rest, safety and care. We often frame the Black Radical Tradition and struggle for liberation as cultural, intellectual, and action-oriented efforts. We must also make space for another kind of resistance: the slow, deliberate, and deeply necessary practice of rest.

Black feminist thinkers, such as Audre Lorde, bell hooks, and the Combahee River Collective, teach us that rest is not a retreat but a refusal. A refusal to be consumed by capitalistic notions of productivity. A refusal to abandon the body and soul in the name of performativity. A refusal to conflate worth with exhaustion and labor. This concept of rest as a refusal is a powerful tool in our fight against systemic oppression. It’s a way of saying ‘no’ to the forces that seek to exploit our bodies and minds and a way of reclaiming our humanity and worth.

I move through the world as a biracial, queer, nonbinary Southerner and a proud Spelman graduate. At Spelman, I was taught to equate excellence with relentless effort. In my current work supporting reproductive justice despite a hostile political climate, there have been countless moments where I’ve nearly become unraveled by fear, burnout, and the weight of care. Despite all that Black feminist frameworks have offered me; I internalized the belief that exhaustion was just the cost of the work. That suffering was proof of commitment.

It wasn’t until I lost my job and was forced to stop—forced to slow down—that I began to unlearn that lie. I started to reimagine what it might mean to prioritize my well-being over the performativity of productivity. I have come to understand rest not as a retreat but as a refusal to be rushed out of my own becoming.

Rest is transformative not only as self-care but as community care. When we draw upon Black queer feminist frameworks and mutual aid, we reclaim our time, imagination, and softness as tools for liberation, not as distractions from it. Our activism becomes more sustainable. Our futures more imaginable.

When we prioritize rest, softness, joy, and pleasure, we embody resistance. In doing so, we transform ourselves and our communities. It is in these moments of stillness, however brief, that we create the means to sustain ourselves and our efforts. We regain strength and fortify our sense of hope and purpose. We bloom.

Self-care, once a political imperative for marginalized people, has been co-opted and commodified into a product. The original intention of self-care, as a means of survival and resistance, has been distorted and diluted. But care cannot be bought. Rest cannot be branded.  We must reclaim the true meaning of self-care and rest and utilize them as tools for our collective liberation.

As scholars, care workers, and queer people of color, it would serve us to pause and reconsider how we define resistance. What would it mean to honor rest and softness as political praxis in our work, our bodies, and our relationships?

Prolific Black feminist scholar, lesbian, and ancestor Audre Lorde once wrote, “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.”  I urge us to take that call seriously. Rest and self-care are not luxuries reserved for the privileged; they are lifelines for those who live and love at the margins.

I do not know what the future holds for me. Like so many queer people of color, I have faced uncertainty that has felt paralyzing. I do know that I am not alone. My friends, family, and comrades inspire me with their dedication to care work and mutual aid which is always informed by great feelings of love and reverence. The unwavering support of my peers and mentors within the Communications PhD pipeline has helped renew my hope and reignite my passion for scholarship.

This Pride, I envision a future where I continue to grow as a queer, Black feminist scholar and care worker grounded in a legacy of resistance that uplifts rest and collective liberation. Although my future is still taking shape, I am prepared for it, and I will meet it with open hands and an unshakable will to dream.

Bio:
Ebonee Brown (she/they) Ebonee Brown (She/They), a Spelman College alum and graduate of University of Florida’s Center for Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies. Ebonee researches Atlanta’s Trap music genre and intersections of regional Blackness, gender, and performance in popular culture. They are deeply committed to building liberatory futures through storytelling and strategy.

By: Sarah Amira de la Garza
Emeritus Professor, Arizona State University

“We stand on the shoulders of our ancestors.”

“I thank my mothers and grandmothers and all mothers who came before.”

“The trauma of our ancestors is encoded in our DNA.”

“We honor those who inhabited the lands upon which we now stand.”

We offer many invocations and avowals of ancestral acknowledgment, of the conviction of our rootedness and connection to those who lived and survived our collective histories so that we can now, in the present, carry on. I have asked myself so often what these accomplish, if the ways in which we live our lives and make sense of the world and our choices are compartmentalized so that the ancestors, too, are compartmentalized, as in a medicine chest we only turn to when we are ill. It resonates with the form of dual authority of which Aziz Huq writes.

In the May 2025 issue of The Atlantic, Huq writes about the rise of a dual state in the United States of America, similar to those in countries that have experienced or are living the experience of dictatorial, authoritarian regimes of power and control, such as arise in our midst today. Where are our ancestors for us today? How do we hear them, listen, and discern their wisdom such that our actions are inspired and sustained?

These are the questions that I asked myself as a Chicana woman, daughter of the ancestral legacy of the Indigenous peoples of the lands we today call Mexico and the combinations of peoples who came under the flag, sword, and cross of Spain and the Roman Catholic Church. Daughter of immigrant mothers and fathers from Mexico and people who never immigrated but already lived on the lands I call home in far west Texas; I spoke the Spanish of the “conquerors” before learning the language of the southern U.S. slaveholders who were determined to create a place in Mexico where they could continue to own Black human beings to create their wealth and hold up their illusions of superiority. They chose the land of Tejas, which they called Texas, and heaped their brand of colonialism and racism, combined with that of the Confederacy, the United States, Irish Catholicism, and southern Protestant Christianity onto our bodies and minds, already heavy with three centuries of a culture born of territorial conquest and the Spanish Inquisition (Mexico continued to exist under the systems of the Inquisition for almost a century after it was no longer formally in effect). I am a Chicana, and we are a complicated jumble of identities and histories.

This is the nature of the “dual state” of which Aziz writes, but at the level of our spirits and psyches, at the level of our embodied daily lives.

And while Aziz highlights how authoritarian dictatorships employ such a split (between the systems and routines that maintain a semblance of normal daily life and the systems and routines of brutality, chaos, and control aiming to overtake our lives, resources, and our very souls), I would argue that this duality is inherent to the ways we have both been controlled and survived, within iterations of authoritarian systems of social organization, religion, and (in)justice. And this is when I call in, when I call on, the ancestors. This is when an invocation is no longer merely a tradition, a habitualized ritual, memorized words, or polite acknowledgement; this is when we invoke—when we call upon the wisdom that has been waiting in stories, archetypes, god/desses, and history. And we do so—must do so—in order to give the powerful realities that they contain the opportunity to infuse our very beings. The ancestors must be given the capacity to be our living teachers when we awaken the wisdom that arouses our inherent powers as creative human beings, when the powers of hierarchical structures have begun to show they are as real as the Wizard of Oz behind his curtain.

As a Chicana, a woman, I look to find how the power and strength we admire in the women around us in our community is not a feature of personality or having become a celebrity, an influencer, or powerful through accumulation of wealth, but because there has been a tapping into something primal and archetypal and more powerful than our breath itself. And the most important thing we can do is come to recognize this, protect it from the dilution and appropriation that can happen when we turn it into a brand, or a product, or something we attempt to control through social systems. It is organic, a life force—our  life force.

So, I study and learn from our history, not simply to know it, but to open my heart and spirit to the truth within it. We cannot afford to create a “dual state” within our souls and spiritual lives. We see the evidence of this when the teacher Jesus and his words and wisdom from his embodied life on this earth are allowed to exist, but separately from the oppressive distortions of those who would turn it into a form of social control, as during the Spanish Inquisition and contemporary efforts to create a religious state.

How do I do this? By talking to them, by writing letters to them, by praying from the depths of my heart without concern for propriety or form. I take time to read about them, to process what I am learning, to think about how that compares with what I have grown up thinking and believing. By finding the resonance and connections of the features of their stories, their actions, what they symbolize, with what is happening in my own life. I take time to notice when something in me says YES, when there is a recognition that I am finding a source of truth, not something simply to support what I want to argue or do. Sometimes the ancestors (often) will cause me to stop in my tracks, to be humble, to change course, to recognize my own arrogance and how I have sold out to the very systems and cultures that I am critiquing. And then, I share them. I do not lock them up in a closet, on a bookshelf, as a decoration, or on an altar. I use their names, I take time to notice when Coyolxauhqui, whose body was torn into pieces and we see in the moon after her revenge for betrayal—I notice when and how I am fragmented, when my responses are breaking me apart. I notice how Tlazolteutl, the goddess of love and devourer of filth, helps me to see that there is no such thing as “dainty” love for all times. Sometimes our love requires us to “devour the filth” in the world that is hurting us and those in our communities, our loved ones. I remember Tonantzin, Earth Mother, and how she was compressed and forced into an image of Guadalupe, but that her power is not in a church, but on the earth, in every created being and source of life. Tonantzin warns me not to be made a saint or a religious relic.

And then I ask myself, how does this affect how I respond in the world today? And more often than not, there is no one pattern, but it cleanses my shame and fear (it does not remove them) so that they do not cripple or stall me, silence, or disempower me.  Even in nonviolent stillness, they will resonate through my being and keep me true to who I am here to be, not only for myself, but for my people, for all who are part of the world of nature. They teach me that nothing is simple—that is the evil myth of the conqueror and dictator, the oppressor, that there is a simple “one way.” Diversity is their biggest threat, but the goddesses teach me it is not just our strength; it is our nature.

Bio: Sarah Amira de la Garza is Emeritus Professor in the Hugh Downs School of Human Communication at Arizona State University, where she worked over three decades in the areas of intercultural communication, performance studies, spirituality/ well-being, and Indigenous methodologies. She is a solo ethnographic performer who has written, performed, and directed across an array of genres and contexts, favoring the art of structured improvisation in the tradition of Teatro Campesino and Chicano/a performance artists. She writes and creates from her home in El Paso, Texas, in the Chihuahuan Desert, home of her ancestors.

Bibliography
Aztecs at Mexilore, Small, independent, specialist, artefact-based teaching team providing in-school interactive history workshops on the Mexica (Aztecs) and the Maya and maintaining an online resource library. Last accessed June 1, 2025, https://www.mexicolore.co.uk/aztecs/

Burrough, B., Tomlinson, C., & Stanford, J. (2021). Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth. Penguin Press.

Chuchiak, John IV. (2012). The Inquisition in New Spain 1536-1820. A Documentary History. John Hopkins Press.

De la Garza, Sarah Amira (2004). Maria Speaks: Journeys into the Mysteries of the Mother in My Life as a Chicana. Peter Lang.

Huq, Aziz, (May 2025). America is Watching the Rise of a Dual State. The Atlantic Monthly.

Kroger, Joseph & Granziera, Patricia (2012). Aztec Goddesses and Christian Madonna Images of the Divine Feminine in Mexico. Routledge.

Between April 3-6, 2025, I attended the 2025 Annual Organization of American Historians (OAH) Conference. I presented my academic work during a graduate students’ lightning round entitled “Emerging Voices in Queer and Trans* Histories and Histories of Sexuality.”  I discussed how police brutality in Memphis, TN, affects Black women and Black queer people, as well as how impacted communities reacted to such violence by enacting racial and social change. The presentation was well-received, and I smiled joyfully, remembering how hard it had been to craft a five-minute summary of the research I had been conducting for the past two years.

OAH was a transformative experience for me. I met scholars who shaped not only my scholarship, but fields like sexuality history (i.e., Dr. John D’Emilio), Black women history (i.e., Dr. Deborah Gray White), and history of police brutality (i.e., Dr. Elizabeth Hinton and Dr. Treva B. Lindsey). However, the most impactful part of the conference was that my brain was functioning again, and my neuroplasticity was almost back to normal.

In the summer of 2024, I was diagnosed with treatment resistant depression. I had already been diagnosed with major depressive disorder almost a decade before, but between Fall 2023 and Spring/Summer 2024, my mental health severely declined. It was one of the hardest times of my life, perhaps the hardest, and my brain became incapable of producing any kind of scholarship. For more than a year, I did not touch my dissertation, because I mentally could not.

The way I describe what I went through to someone who is not as familiar with mental health illness, is to imagine my body as an old car model, with my brain as the battery. They stopped manufacturing the car and its parts decades ago, and it is impossible for me to get any other car, or replace the battery. During those months, my battery slowly but inexorably stopped functioning, until I could perform basic functions like turning the radio or the blinkers on, but it would not drive. It could not drive. I felt stuck, and defeated, because if my brain doesn’t work, then who am I?

I had a therapist not too long ago who challenged me any time I identified my sense of self-worth with my ability to “produce.” She asked me that question over and over, “who is Paola without her brain,” and I could never answer her, because not being able to read and write and research and make connections and and and… was such a foreign thought that I never indulged it. And then it happened. And it was terrifying. I felt like all I had accomplished in 36 years was now meaningless, because I had lost the ability to do more.

Thankfully, I had friends who did not allow me to self-isolate and disappear in my misery, I was able to find a treatment that fixed my battery, albeit slowly. For the first few months of Fall 2024, I could only read and process information for about 1 hour. Then the hours became 2. Then 3. I stopped attending lectures because I could not focus. I have always been a fast reader, but I found myself looking at the same page again and again as my brain retrained itself to comprehend and summarize.

Presenting at OAH and being able to participate in scholarly conversations was a huge accomplishment. I had set a goal for myself: no matter how long my recovery took, I would present. I still tired myself more than I would have before, but my ability to fully engage with other scholars and students still represented an incredible milestone. I felt accomplished, and relieved, and I almost cried a few times out of incredulity and gratefulness. My brain was coming back, and so Paola was coming back, too.

Although I had several friends who supported me, none of them were part of my cohort. I began my PhD program in August 2020, and thus it was hard to form a community of graduate students I could share my academic journey with. Those I became close to were either almost at the end of the program, or they enrolled during my second or third year. I had heard before that graduate school can be an isolating experience, and I definitely felt the disconnect between my peers and me as my depression worsened. Thankfully, my professors understood my situation and have been in my corner, supporting me in any way they could. But it was not until I attended OAH that I realized how much I miss belonging to an academic community.

The exchange of ideas and the passionate discussions stimulated my mental agility for the first time after months of neuro-immobility. I remember talking to a scholar and delineating ways in which to find sources about the topic we were discussing, on the spot, without consulting any kind of literature, instead retrieving information and methods already stored in my brain, something I had not been able to do in so long. I almost broke down in front of him, realizing what I had done. Instead, I smiled and continued with our conversation, comforted.

It is almost June 2025, and I still don’t have an answer to, “who is Paola without her brain?” What I do have, however, is a newfound awareness of the importance of connections during one’s scholarly career. Everybody’s academic journey is different, as everyone’s struggle is different. However, there is solidarity in shared experiences, and the reawakening of my faculties I experienced at OAH made me long for a sense of belonging that can only be found amidst a cohort of graduate students. My wish is for my story to reach someone who might experience a similar struggle, and my hope is for them to find healing and embracement among their peers, so that they can comfortably seek and find the help they need, knowing that they are not alone as they battle with themselves.

Paola—Bio
Paola Cavallari is an Italian history PhD candidate at the University of Memphis, and a cat mom to Muffin and Mouse. She also holds two master’s degrees, one in Public Service from the Clinton School of Public Service, and one in Public History from the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. Paola’s research focus on the impact of police brutality on BIPOC communities, and on how those communities responded to the violence and enacted change. When she is not working on her dissertation, Paola loves traveling, reading, writing poetry and prose, and cooking for her friends.