Courage Is Contagious: Ana Maria Archila
Ana Maria Archila is a resistance icon. She’s known by many as the “lady in the elevator” after her confrontation with Senator Jeff Flake went viral during the confirmation hearings for Justice Kavanaugh. But that wasn’t her first rodeo. Ana Maria has been disrupting, bird-dogging and advocating for human rights and dignity since she emigrated here at the age of 17.
She teaches us that disruption is essential to slowing things down and getting people in power to listen. Everyday people speaking truth to power is what this country is all about.
If this episode resonates for you, we’d love for you to take a screenshot and tag us on Instagram stories @ctznwell @anamariaarchila1 and @popdemoc, and click below to tweet:
More about this episode:
In this episode, Ana Maria shows us how everyday people can speak truth to power and how courage is contagious. We saw it in the wake of #metoo, in the wave of stories that flooded the Hart Building during the Kavanaugh hearings and, most recently, in the avalanche of abortion stories that emerged in response to the war on reproductive freedom. Our stories, each and every one of them, has been necessary for creating a moment of reckoning and making our democracy come alive.
This is how the healing happens, she says. ”We are allowing each other to see one another more clearly, we are allowing the country to see itself more clearly,” and we are weaving a fabric of community care and courage that is challenging the status quo and changing the game.
That is what real citizenship is all about. Not the kind that requires documents or cares where you were born. But the kind that shows up, speaks out and fights for justice for all. Check it out.
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+ Read Transcript
Ana Maria Archila: I kept saying this kind of afterwards, I don't think it would have made that ... The impact would not have been that if it had been just the two of us. It was the collective moment. It was the fact that he also had gotten phone calls from women in his life, who had said to him, "This is real."
Kerri Kelly: Yeah.
Ana Maria Archila: What you are hearing is not the story of one woman. This is a collective experience that she's allowing you to understand through her story.
CTZN Podcast.
Kerri Kelly: Welcome, y'all. I'm Kerri Kelly and we're here today with a special live audience broadcast with Ana Maria Archila. She's the fierce organizer and brave soul who stood up to Senator Jeff Flake during the Kavanaugh hearings and showed us all how democracy works and what it means to be a citizen. All that and more on CTZN Podcast.
Kerri Kelly: Ana Maria Archila is a resistance icon. She's known by many as the Lady in the Elevator, after her confrontation with Senator Jeff Flake went viral during the confirmation hearings for Justice Kavanaugh. But that wasn't her first rodeo. Ana Maria has been disrupting, bird-dogging, and advocating for human rights and dignity since she immigrated here at the age of 17. She teaches us that disruption is essential in slowing things down and getting people in power to listen. Everyday people speaking truth to power is what this country is all about, and courage is contagious. We saw that in the wake of Me Too, in the wave of stories that flooded the Hart Building during the Kavanaugh hearings, and most recently in the avalanche of abortion stories in response to the war on reproductive freedom.
Our stories, each and every one of us, has been necessary to create this moment of reckoning and make our democracy come alive. "This is how healing happens," she says. “We are allowing each other to see one another more clearly. We are allowing the country to see itself more clearly, and we are weaving a fabric of community care and courage that is changing the game.” That is what real citizenship is all about. Not the kind that requires documents or cares where you were born, but the kind that really shows up, that speaks out and that fights for justice for all. Check it out.
Kerri Kelly: Now for the woman of the hour. Ana Maria Archila who is a leading advocate for civil rights, healthcare access, education equity, and immigrant rights in New York state, but really nationally and I would say now globally, you're a global star. She is a co-director at the Center for Popular Democracy. She's from Queens. She's a mom. She's a deep healer, a mom of two, and she, if you don't know already, although I don't know anyone who hasn't seen this video, is the brave soul who stood up to Senator Jeff Flake in the elevator and changed the course of that conversation.
When I say that, I get chills. I get chills. Everything about who you are and how I've come to know you is just an embodiment of like who I want to be as a citizen and the way that I believe democracy should work. So, thank you, thank you, thank you for being here.
Ana Maria Archila: Thank you.
Kerri Kelly: So, I should confess as to how we first met.
Ana Maria Archila: Yes.
Kerri Kelly: Because I do think it has a lot to do with this conversation, and what it looks like to walk the talk and take risks and show up with courage. We actually didn't meet on the floor of the Hart Building during the Kavanaugh hearings. We met on Park Avenue. We were working on a campaign called Backers of Hate. It was led by Make the Road New York and Center for Popular Democracy, and it was all about confronting the corporations that were invested in and profiting from detention centers, prisons and the whole system around immigration. We and a group of people organized ourselves in front of the J.P. Morgan Building and blocked the entrance during rush hour for no employee to enter, and we stayed there until we were forcibly removed.
Ana Maria Archila: That's right.
Kerri Kelly: Ana Maria and I found ourselves paired up in a cell.
Ana Maria Archila: That's right. We met in jail.
Kerri Kelly: We met in jail.
Ana Maria Archila: We spent eight hours.
Kerri Kelly: That was the beginning of this relationship, of this love affair.
Ana Maria Archila: Yes.
Kerri Kelly: A lot of people ask me about like what civil disobedience feels like and direct action, and often what I say is that it's beautiful. So much of what happened in that cell and the way in which we connected and conversed and talked about everything, I mean we were there for 10 hours with a bowl that you pee in. Like you get intimate with one another, but it goes much deeper than even the issue. It's about relationship. It's about seeing each other heart to heart. It's about love and humanity, and I really believe that a lot of people ask me like, "What is it like to get arrested? What is it like to do civil disobedience?" I wish I could describe how it feels, because I don't think words do it justice. But I do believe that what I experience, whether it's in the streets or on the floor of the Hart Building, is way more blissful and beautiful and spiritual than any yoga class I've ever taken. So, how do we get more people to step out in community, in solidarity, from wherever they are and experience the beauty of this work?
Ana Maria Archila: It's so amazing to be here in this moment. I just want to start by saying that those 10 hours that we spent in that jail cell were the thing I needed in that moment in my life.
Kerri Kelly: We talked about all the things.
Ana Maria Archila: We talked about everything. We might touch on some of the things we talked about. They were what I needed because it was I guess that was May 1st of 2017.
Kerri Kelly: Yeah.
Ana Maria Archila: President Trump had just come into office a few months earlier, we had seen the Women's March and millions of people joining many for the first time and finding sisterhood community, a sense of hope in a moment that we all recognize was a really dark moment. The Women's March that year really set the tone for the resistance and it set the tone for how we would engage with the president and an administration that was so bent on advancing the most hateful agenda and the most aggressive kind of capitalist agenda that we've seen.
Kerri Kelly: That's right.
Ana Maria Archila: During the first months, if you remember, so many things happened in a very kind of concentrated fashion. Just a few days after the inauguration, well the day after the inauguration, the Women's March, a few days later, the Muslim ban.
Kerri Kelly: That's right.
Ana Maria Archila: Immediately after, kind of several of the roll out of a really aggressive policy agendas.
Kerri Kelly: The onslaught really.
Ana Maria Archila: The onslaught, and so we understood, they are not joking. They are dead serious about implementing this really hateful agenda. And May 1st has been a really important moment for the immigrant rights movement for many, many years, and for workers in this country and around the world. But we had yet, I think we had yet to find our footing as a movement in the onslaught of attacks.
So, I had spent all my adult life fighting for my family and my community to live without fear, for immigrants to just have the basic dignity to live without the constant fear of deportation and detention. In the early days of the administration, all these corporate leaders were standing right by him and kind of legit like playing as if it was business as usual.
Kerri Kelly: Yeah.
Ana Maria Archila: As if we didn't see what we were seeing, as if we didn't see the incredible racism and the atrocities that this administration was willing to do. So, May 1st was the day that we decided nope, we are not going to allow J.P. Morgan Chase and Wells Fargo and all these other ApplePie banks that are…
Kerri Kelly: That we work with all the time.
Ana Maria Archila: All the time, that actually have a narrative of serving the American dream and at the same time, that they're actually profiting, not only profiting but actually enabling the growth and the expansion of the immigration enforcement machine, the apparatus that is now setting up essentially kind of concentration camps at the border. So, we blocked the entrance of J.P. Morgan Chase's headquarters and found ourselves in jail, and had a lot of time to think about what it means to use our bodies to express our outrage and not just alone but in community, and not just for ourselves, but for the people we love. I think that what I kind of understood in that moment and what I have come to kind of understand again and again in the last two years is that courage is contagious, that people feel invited when they see you do something that's scary for you.
When we saw thousands and thousands of women tell their stories of sexual assault during the confirmation, the fight around the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh, it was like very private acts of courageous, of risk taking that added up to this collective moment of reckoning and that created an atmosphere where lots of new people were joining for the first time. I just came back from vacation last night and so I'm a little still kind of finding my footing, but last night in the airport as I'm going through immigration customs, I looked around and there was this young woman. I recognized her face. She said, "You're Ana Maria, right?" She had been in the Hart Building for two weeks.
Kerri Kelly: Nice.
Ana Maria Archila: She joined because she had seen other people protesting. She joined because she felt invited just by watching what was happening in the Senate building. So then she of course told me the story of how she had called the Women's March to find out what she could do and they said there might be a bus today. So she packed her things the day of.
Kerri Kelly: Oh my God.
Ana Maria Archila: And then thought she was going to go to Washington. She lives in New York. She thought she was going to be in Washington D.C. for a day or two, she ended up staying for two weeks. The thing that made her stay was that every single time, every single day of civil disobedience, every single day of joining in community, she found more power in herself and she said, "This is the most life affirming thing I've ever done. I need to stay." So, it's these moments of kind of display of courage that are both very personal and very collective I think are the things that are ... The thing that invite other people to join and the thing that gives me hope and why I'm here tonight. Yeah.
Kerri Kelly: So let's talk about that day. You confronted Jeff Flake in an elevator, just after, literally immediately after he had announced his support to Kavanaugh.
Ana Maria Archila: Yes.
Kerri Kelly: It was you and Maria Gallagher, who had never told her story before.
Ana Maria Archila: That's right.
Kerri Kelly: What I remember of this video, and I watched it again this morning as I was preparing for this conversation, is that it was heart-wrenching. Not just in like the way in which you told your story, but in the way in which y'all demanded his attention. He kept trying to duck, and you were like, "Do not look away. You will hear this whether you like it or not."
Kerri Kelly: Literally, over the span of five hours, the conversation was dramatically altered. I think in that single moment, because I remember I was at the building when that happened and then when we found out that he had shifted his position, because of that one moment, this like passing moment where you literally catch him by a hair in an elevator that that changed the entire conversation, I think taught us a lot about actually how this all works, and how actually the actions of one person can in fact create a ripple effect.
You said something immediately after. You said, "People need to know that when they take action, when we take action together, when we force our electeds to listen to our stories, that's how we actually change this country. That struggle looks like this, regular people doing really scary things, things that make them cry, that sometimes scare their families."
How did that moment for you change your understanding of organizing? Because that must have been like when you found out that that had shifted, and I also read something that your response was, someone was like, "You did that," and you were like, "Well ..." like you were shocked.
Ana Maria Archila: Yeah. So, the story of that moment is there are kind of many strands to it. So, that moment, the day that we caught him was the day that the judiciary committee was going to vote to advance the process to the full Senate and I had been in D.C. for a week going kind of in and out of the protests and I was getting ready to go home.
So I showed up to the Senate Building with my suitcase. I showed up because a friend of mine was showing up for the first time, so I wanted to see him and kind of thank him. I only had one hour and he had shown up on time and everybody else, all the people that had been going to the protest for a long time were kind of tired and everyone was kind of trailing in.
Kerri Kelly: Yeah.
Ana Maria Archila: But new people were showing up early. So Maria Gallagher showed up at 7:30 in the morning, so did my friend, the two of them met. That's how I met Maria. Maria spoke to an organizer from an organization called UltraViolet, who told her, "Go to Senator Flake's office. Find two people, and go to Senator Flake's office and try to talk to him." First of all, that was her first day in the building. I guess she had come the day before to bring coffee and then that day she took the morning off from work, and so she found my friend, Daniel, and he found me. I said, "Well, at this point I only have half an hour. This is like as good a use of my time as anything else. Sure, let's go. I know how to get us there fast through the tunnels."
In my mind, I was just kind of dropping them off in front of his office. Of course, I had been there for a long time. I knew that it was almost impossible to find these people, that it was like kind of an ... It's what we needed to do to try to find them and then kind of getting their face a little bit and tell our stories. But I didn't think that that would happen, so I kept telling Maria, "We're not going to see him, but if we see him ..." she kept asking, "Well, how do you talk to him?" I said, "Just speak from your heart. That's what we have to do, but we won't see him."
Kerri Kelly: And she did.
Ana Maria Archila: And she did. But Maria showed up because she saw people protesting, and I was there because my comrades were there and I was there because I was inspired by all the storytelling that was happening. I had never told my story before. I told it for the first time just a few days before that encounter in front of Senator Flake's office, so it felt to me like if there's one senator that I should visit before I leave the city is Senator Flake.
I mean, quite frankly, I knew after listening to Dr. Ford's testimony that emotions were incredibly high. I knew someone was going to get yelled at in that building. I just didn't know who was going to get yelled at, I didn't know who was going to do the yelling.
Kerri Kelly: There was a lot of pressure. It was like a pressure cooker.
Ana Maria Archila: It was a pressure cooker. There was a lot of kind of intensity that had been building over many, many days of protest, many weeks of protest. That's what my Maria walked into. That's what I was kind of leaving. A few minutes before the meeting was supposed to start, Senator Flake released his statement. We only happened to see it because there were reporters standing around the door of his office. So we saw them huddle, we read the headline and kind of like my heart dropped and I said, "Okay well, we lost this fight." Then I walked away, I said goodbye to my friends. That moment Flake walked out of his office running, so he was running and the reporters were running behind him, we were running behind them, and like children run around all the time. As adults, we usually do not run behind people. It is not a thing you do. So it was just like kind of the adrenaline of that and the fact that kind of we had felt this intense kind of disappointment that fed what happened, like how the interaction happened.
I think Maria had never said the words, "I was sexually assaulted." She had never uttered those words ever, and her family didn't know, I had never talked to my father about this. I knew kind of right after the interaction that this was going to get out, and both of us, I reached out to my dad right away. Maria's mom heard it on the news. I think that we ... I don't think that it was ... And I kept saying this kind of afterwards, I don't think it would have made that ... The impact would not have been that if it had been just the two of us. It was the collective moment. It was the fact that he also had gotten phone calls from women in his life, who had said to him, "This is real."
Kerri Kelly: Yeah.
Ana Maria Archila: What you are hearing is not the story of one woman. This is a collective experience that she's allowing you to understand through her story. I understood something that has stayed with me. There is a passage in Ta-Nehisi Coates's book, Between the World and Me, where he writes to his son about being a black man in America and there's a little passage that says, "You cannot understand kind of the reality of slavery by trying to think about it as something that happened to a mass of people." You have to think about it as something that happened to one person. You have to think about that person in her full beauty, who was she? Whose shoulder did she cry on? What made her laugh? What made her smile? How did she feel at the end of the day without her children? What was it like to wake up in that reality day after day after day? You have to try to get to a collective experience through the story of one person.
That's what I think was so powerful about the way that the fight to prevent the nomination of Kavanaugh happened, is we all intuitively understood that our stories, each one of us, not just one person's story, but each one of our stories was necessary to create this moment of reckoning and to invite other people to feel the power that their stories have, and to make our democracy come alive. It was really a moment of kind of making democracy come alive.
Kerri Kelly: I love that nuance, because I think sometimes we're either oriented to like the individual, like the hyper ego individual, or we're oriented to collective. It's all the collective, but I feel like what you're saying is like naming the interrelationship between, Adrienne Maree Brown calls it like the fractal, right? Like the personal experience, the individual being in relationship to the whole. So, it's not like a binary, either or. It's not either individual or collective. It's actually like the individual experience in relationship to like the bigger thing that's larger than all of us.
Ana Maria Archila: That's right.
Kerri Kelly: I want to ask a little bit more about sort of this idea that you had mentioned around shared experience and collective power, and really reference what you had just named about like you had never told your father that you were sexually assaulted as a child. So on that day, you texted him and you said you're going to hear something that we haven't talked about and I want you to know that I'm okay.
I had a similar situation a few days earlier where I posted about why I didn't report, the #WhyIDidn'tReport on Instagram and I got a call from my mother who's an Italian woman and she said to me, "Kerri, do you have something to tell me?" I also said to her, "Mom, I'm okay."
Ana Maria Archila: Yeah.
Kerri Kelly: But I do think that a lot of us who have had an experience like that can relate to having kept it to ourselves because somewhere deep down we harbored a belief that it was our fault.
Ana Maria Archila: Yep.
Kerri Kelly: I don't think that's just like individual. I think that's the way we were conditioned, right? That's our culture indoctrinated in all of us. So, I just wonder about healing, because you were saying courage is contagious, and I know that there was so much storytelling going on, radical storytelling and it was a little bit scary too, like what are we unleashing here?
Ana Maria Archila: Yeah.
Kerri Kelly: How do we tend to the way in which people are telling stories? They're excavating memories. They're touching on feelings maybe that they haven't, or memories that they haven't acknowledged for a long time, and how do we tend to that? What do you think is the relationship between doing this work of embracing a shared experience, and embracing shared suffering, but also like ...
And Tarana Burke talks a lot about this, with Me Too, but also really acknowledging the need to heal, right? That it's not just about telling our story and taking action and getting policy reformed, that there has to also be a part of the work where we actually invest in one another's healing.
Ana Maria Archila: I mean, quite frankly, I also in the days, the many days of protest was at times both incredibly moved and inspired and incredibly worried and stirred. I wasn't sure. I kept asking myself, "Am I going to say something? Am I going to join in this?" I think it's because I wasn't sure that I had the space, the kind of internal resources to do the healing, and it's not just my healing. It's like once I release it, it's like my father's pain, my mother's pain, the people who love me.
I think I didn't share it initially because the sense of guilt, it's my fault, it must be my fault, it has to be my fault. And then recognition that if I dare to share, it would be their pain, not just my pain. I found my experience was that in the sharing, I felt held by this community of people that had been sharing in this experience as well and seen and not just as ... And seen in my power, it was ... I don't know that I would have released this story in any other way. I had kind of managed to stuff it away, like put it in the darkest, furthest, messiest corner of my closet and leave it there for 30 years. I had done that pretty well. I don't know that I would have shared it in any other context. It was for me the fact that it was both an incredibly personal act and incredibly political and that it was about building the country of my dreams, that allowed me to feel like I can find power in this.
I think that was very healing. I remember talking to a friend, a colleague of mine at the end of that day. She was saying, "How are you feeling?" It was a whirlwind I had, the day had been insane, right after the confrontation with Flake it was like a million cameras and phone calls from all kinds of reporters.
Kerri Kelly: You were still fighting.
Ana Maria Archila: And politicians, like it was just crazy. I never made it back home to pick up my child from school, of course, but the thing that I said to her was, "I'm so relieved my father knows. I'm so relieved I'm not holding this anymore," and that he was able to kind of both revel in the amazingness of the moment, the political moment, and also say I am sorry I ... Say what he needed to say and that I kind of understood that I had confirmation that my fear that he would be in pain was correct, and that in some ways, that it was important to understand that my fear wasn't an irrational fear that he would feel pain, and that he was also kind of able to hold it and hold me.
Kerri Kelly: Hold it for each other.
Ana Maria Archila: Hold it for each other. So, we haven't really been able to go back to that conversation. I don't know that I can speak from experience about how the healing happens. I just remember feeling held by this collective of women, women I didn't know, and not just women. Women and men and people of all genders who've also shared this experience of violence and the people who surrounded us and held us. I remember thinking we are allowing each other to see each other more clearly. We're allowing the country to see itself more clearly, and we are kind of together creating this kind of supportive fabric for each other. We're not alone.
Kerri Kelly: We're going to take a break, and we'll be right back with Ana Maria Archila.
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Kerri Kelly: I was with you when the final vote came down on Friday, and we all huddled down at the floor of the Hart Building. And it was a combination of pure exhaustion and heartbreak, and people were holding each other and crying, and you just stepped right into the center of that circle. I don't know if you remember this speech, but I got the whole thing on video. I'm going to read a couple of things that you said, because you were not just the catalyst of that week, but you were the salve. You said, "We forced a question in this country about whether this is who we want to be. What we have been able to do is show the country that politics can and should be centered around all the stories of our life's experiences. Our lived experiences are never one. It is a personal experience that is collective in nature.
That's why the solution to all of it is collective power and people power and we will continue to build people power. That is the only way we can build the country that we all want to live in every day, that we want all of the children to live in every day." And you had the whole place bawling.
Ana Maria Archila: I said all that?
Kerri Kelly: And holding each other and shaking. But I just wanted to reflect that back to you. Because you said I don't know and I'm like, oh, no, but you know, because you're living it. And maybe you don't have to have the words or preach, but the way in which you move through the world is already embodying so much of that. So I just wanted to read because I watched that video today and I wanted to make sure I pulled an excerpt from it.
Ana Maria Archila: Thank you.
Kerri Kelly: So before you were speaking out about sexual assault, you were speaking out about immigration rights.
Ana Maria Archila: Yes.
Kerri Kelly: And you moved here at 17.
Ana Maria Archila: Yes.
Kerri Kelly: From Colombia, and have been engaged in that fight really ever since. I imagine that over the last two years, the work has felt really different given the circumstances under this administration, where like citizenship is about what country you were born in, or what document you have, and we're building a wall that feels a lot more like a monument to white supremacy.
Ana Maria Archila: Yes.
Kerri Kelly: That's actually what we're talking about, as opposed to, like, how do we thrive together? So, where do we go from here around immigration? What's next for us, given where we're coming from? And then what is the role for allies in this work who have the privilege of documentation, and of not worrying about being separated from their families or being deported? Like what is their specific role in all of this?
Ana Maria Archila: So, I never thought we would be here. I built roots in this country by joining the fight for immigrant dignity and it's been almost 20 years of doing that work. I never thought we would be in this moment of so much darkness. What Trump has done is kind of beyond our worst nightmares. Ana Maria Archila: He has rolled back so many protections that were kind of sacrosanct and like understood as permanent, temporary protected status for hundreds of thousands of people who've been here decades. He rolled back DACA. He is aggressively kind of pursuing examinations of naturalized citizens kind of creating denaturalizations.
Kerri Kelly: It's like a roll back on the roll back.
Ana Maria Archila: Incredible, and I think as the immigrant rights movement, we found ourselves just on defense of the most basic things. Do not include a citizenship question in the census, like basic things that you think would never be questions to examine, or defending kind of the system that has already caused so much pain. I think that being on such defense and just finding ourselves like in this moment where the government is shut down around Trump's obsession with building a monument to xenophobia and white supremacy with the wall, and the democrats finally kind of saying no. But they have a terrible history on enforcement.
Kerri Kelly: No ish.
Ana Maria Archila: And actually enabled a lot of the growth of the immigration enforcement apparatus and under many administrations both Republican and Democratic. So, for a long time, the immigrant rights movement was focused on a framework, the Kennedy's idea of legalization. That was the unifying demand, let's get as many undocumented people to have some status in this country and kind of our political analysis was that in order to get that, we need to accept a lot of horrible things.
The expansion of detentions, expansions of deportations, more militarization of the border, and that framework has not worked. We fought for it, and we haven't been able to win that. I think we're in a moment where we think, well, what's the point of defending a framework that already, we don't like? Let's think big, let's dream big. Let's think about what we want. I think what we want is resonant with what everyone wants. We want the freedom to stay in the place we call home, whether it is this country, whether it is the neighborhood that's gentrifying under our feet, whether it is the island of Puerto Rico after a hurricane. We want to be able to move across state lines without losing our health care, across borders in search of community and family, in our streets without the police breathing down our backs.
We want to be able to move and we want to be able to thrive, to have the basic things that allow every single person to advance towards her dreams and her best aspirations, education, health care, time to sleep and time to rest and to play with each other, music, right, Bread and Roses and I think that we have to get more. So, it's more of us have to see ourselves in this vision of wanting to have the freedom to move and the freedom to stay and the freedom to thrive, and wanting to build a country that allows those freedoms to be real for all of us, including for immigrant families.
So, for allies, I think this is a moment where immigrant families are terrified, truly terrified. It is not easy to do what we used to do four years ago, like coming out of the shadows and telling our stories and saying I'm undocumented and unafraid, the risks are much higher. So, showing up for people really like with your bodies, showing up to moments of struggle is really important. And then I think really lifting up this vision of the freedom, the kind of dignity that we all deserve and the freedom that we all want.
In some ways we can lean on the history of this country and the ways in which people have moved out of necessity, and have moved to escape bondage and have moved to seek opportunity within the borders of this land, and how moving has actually been essential to the building of this nation and staying has been essential to the building of this nation.
So I want us to join together in imagining what we all want and to find common purpose in that and to show up for each other, and to recognize that the fear for immigrant families is unlike anything we have confronted. That is true for people who have some status. It is true for people who have been without status for years, who now feel that much more under attack and vulnerable.
Kerri Kelly: I also hear you talking about sort of like a political, philosophical split between folks who allow us to over and over and over again, consent to policies that only get us halfway there that aren't working, and actually standing in a place of like, break the table. This isn't working, like we have to start complete, because there's something around like, as allies, we have to be like, we will not comply with these like low hanging fruit Band Aid solutions that people think are winnable. And I have like air quotes, like kind of "winnable" for some short term, that never get us to the goal line.
Ana Maria Archila: Yeah, I mean, yes, we have to understand what our oldest imagination looks like. and we have to be in the world as it exists, right? Even these policies have not been attainable, like we have not been able to win the realization. I've been at this for 20 years and just like, we haven't found the way. The biggest victory in that kind of along those lines was DACA.
Kerri Kelly: Right.
Ana Maria Archila: And it was a victory that was won through like sweat and tears and a lot of risk taking from a lot of young people, and it's a victory that was obviously very vulnerable to an authoritarian, anti-immigrant, dictator type, like Trump. So, I feel hopeful that we have voices inside the Congress that actually can speak in very clear moving ways about how important it is for us to actually try to advance towards our boldest aspirations. Because without them, the tide is always against us, the kind of tendency of elected officials, Democrats and Republicans to kind of find the lowest common denominator as the form of, as the kind of terrain in which they shape policy is terrible, and it plays against us all the time.
So, I feel more even though it's like terrible dark times, I feel a sense of hope in the voices of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Ilhan, and Rashida Tlaib and Ayanna and Pramila and all these women leaders who are choosing to just speak about our dreams and say those dreams can become policy. They're not policy not because they can't be, but because you're being kind of lazy in your imagination. So I feel like the time to dream is now, at the same time that we actually defend and create sanctuary for each other.
Kerri Kelly: It's funny, I read something that Rebecca Solnit wrote in her latest book, and it said something like, before they could take away our dignity and our safety and our freedom, they had to take away our imagination.
Ana Maria Archila: Yeah.
Kerri Kelly: And how important it is to reimagine, like beyond the limitation of our minds, beyond what we see, beyond what we know, the more beautiful world that you keep describing.
Ana Maria Archila: Yes.
Kerri Kelly: And how it really does require not just new ideas, but new people, and I'm just thinking about this new Congress and how refreshing that is. And like, right out of the gates, we're already seeing so much power and boldness and courage and guts. And also like, there was a great article last week that was talking about how women just don't care anymore. They're not tiptoeing. They're not being cautious or not being palatable. They're just like, fuck it.
Ana Maria Archila: Yeah.
Kerri Kelly: We're just going to get the thing done.
Ana Maria Archila: Yeah.
Kerri Kelly: No matter what it takes, and I agree with you, like, that has been the most energizing thing for me in a really long time. I think that too, is contagious.
Ana Maria Archila: That's right. Yeah, yeah, no, I think that this kind of impatience with the niceties is totally necessary in this moment. We are not in normal times.
Kerri Kelly: There's no Marie Kondo in Congress.
Ana Maria Archila: No.
Kerri Kelly: No neat and tidy. It's a mess.
Ana Maria Archila: It needs to be messy, yeah.
Kerri Kelly: But we women, we know how to deal with that.
Ana Maria Archila: That's right.
Kerri Kelly: Maya Angelou said, "Each time a woman stands up for herself, she stands up for all women." And I think we've learned that over and over and over again, especially since the 2017 Women's March.
Ana Maria Archila: Yes.
Kerri Kelly: We've been riding that momentum for a long time. I do think that that is connected to what we were able to accomplish in the 2018 midterm election, for sure. There was ...
Ana Maria Archila: For sure. I think that not only when a woman stands up for herself, she stands up for all of us. I think the other thing that happens is that she creates a window into seeing the world from a different place. A lot of what has happened over the last couple of years is people being invited to look at the world through the eyes of women. And it looks different and the imagination is different and the priorities are totally different, and the voices and the impatience is different. So, when women tell their stories, they create this new reality, and when women stand up and demand that we think about climate change not in this very incremental we will never get their way, but actually we only have 10 years way.
Kerri Kelly: Bold.
Ana Maria Archila: Bold and urgent and rooted in not in like, kind of robotic way but in the experiences of real people. That just kind of explodes the paradigm and creates a different possibility. One of the things that I am most grateful for, for the kind of existence of the Women's March, the fact that that's how we got started in these moments of Trump, or that it set the tone is that for me, it really demonstrated really like, how essential it is to make every effort we can to have women in leadership roles. Because we are in a moment of warring factions and it's not surprising that Trump is so obsessed with the militarization of the border and the construction of physical barriers. In some ways it exemplifies the worst of masculinity, and the voices of the women that are now in Congress that speak about their lives, and that kind of showcase their lives in a very human way, and that speak about like our interdependence and our need to see each other and imagine a world where we can all have healthcare and where our planet is not destroyed and where our schools are all working.
That way of seeing the world I think that really kind of catalyzed and like given so much momentum with the Women's March. Just like it gave so many of us the lived experience of what it's like to be led by women, and created a political moment, and I think a real kind of shift in consciousness.
Kerri Kelly: I think we've learned through that experience and ever since, and especially I think in this particular moment right now that women are not monolithic, right? So we're not just talking about women, we're talking about all kinds of women.
Ana Maria Archila: Yeah.
Kerri Kelly: I think a lot of the women's movements, they're always heartbreaking moments of divisiveness, and we're experiencing one now around the Women's March. I don't know that I even understand all of the debate around it, but I know for me, I came to D.C. because I was committed to showing up for the struggle. Because I know that this work of actually like trying to figure out how we be together in America and how we imagine better, not just for white folks, and not just for rich folks, but for all folks is messy. And it requires kind of lifting the veil and seeing the world through different eyes, and it's clunky, and it's confronting, and it's vulnerable. I was like, I want to be there for that. I feel like that's where the juice is at, and that's where the transformation happens, and that's why I chose to come here because I was like, no, I actually think we're at a moment where we can actually show up and learn and grow together and march together and struggle together and move forward. As opposed to what I often see what happens is getting wedged in division and separation and isolation and going our separate ways and weakening, like dismantling the collective power that we've been building over time. I say that also acknowledging the nuance, and the harm and the pain that inevitably happens when we build movements together. I'm just wondering like how ... And we're here. We're all here.
Ana Maria Archila: Yeah.
Kerri Kelly: We've all showed up for this. We've said yes for this. We've said yes to this conversation. We've said yes to the struggle. How do we navigate this messiness, so that we can move forward? Because it's never going to be neat and tidy. It's not going to be simple. The more we, I think, come into proximity with one another and come to understand each other, the more rocky it might get. It might get harder before it gets easier. And I'm just wondering, like, what is the practice of showing up for that?
Ana Maria Archila: I actually think that there is no way around it but through it. There is no ... We cannot build the country of our dreams if we don't actually experience how uncomfortable it is to not know each other's history, and to not understand each other's pain, and to not be confronted with the ways in which we have failed, both as individuals, as groups of people, each other.
In many ways, that's what I actually find really profoundly important about the Women's March, both as an organization and kind of as a political experience and a moment. It has been a space that has both the leaders of Women's March and the every moment that I've experienced with what we call the Women's March, which is beyond the organization, I've always felt like there was this invitation and this urging to come and see others, and recognize what's common and what's different, and really see the power dynamics and see the ... Not turn away from the reality of the hierarchy of race and class and gender that exists in our society. I don't know that we get to build a country where we all live with dignity if we don't actually confront that, and that means we're going to fight and there are going to be moments when we're going to turn away. This is one of those. I feel the experience that I go back to is like a really personal experience of ... And I think about you all the time because, so one of the things that we talked about in that jail cell was my marriage was actually kind of under. It was beginning to kind of come apart at the seams in that moment.
I remember the thing that I learned from that, from like having to confront the person I love and hear her truth was that truth is really an offering of love. When you share what's true for you, you're actually loving someone really deeply and taking a risk. It's a dangerous thing to do. It's dangerous because it evokes, it's uncomfortable. It's hard to hold each other's truths. You want to run away, you want to take it back.
Kerri Kelly: There's pain.
Ana Maria Archila: You want to react. It's very painful. But when you do it, there is almost nothing as loving as sharing your truth. And we can't build a movement without sharing our truths and without confronting the pain and the discomfort and the rage and the reactions that happen with that.
Kerri Kelly: That's probably why we're here in the first place is we built a country on non truths and mythology.
Ana Maria Archila: Totally. We have this idea of the melting pot, as this like seamless amalgam of people
Kerri Kelly: The American dream.
Ana Maria Archila: Who are happily living together, bullshit. Not true, has never been, not one day. Not one day.
Kerri Kelly: Yeah.
Ana Maria Archila: I remember kind of talking about truth. And then I remember one thing you said to me a few months later when we saw each other at court, when we had to show up for our court date. You said to me, I just came back
Kerri Kelly: So glamorous.
Ana Maria Archila: From this yoga retreat and there was an infestation of like larva, of butterflies and you said like this lesson that I got from like all these butterflies, like all this larva, these cocoons, they're so like nasty and sticky and horrible. Like, transformation is horrendous. Actually it's not nice to look at, it's not nice to be in it.
Kerri Kelly: Brutal. It's brutal.
Ana Maria Archila: It's sticky and horrible and messy. You don't want to be it, you don't want to be around it. You don't want to be near at.
Kerri Kelly: You just want the butterfly, but you want to skip the larva.
Ana Maria Archila: Right. But in order to get to the butterfly, actually, there is no way around the messiness of the cocoon and the melting away of that. I just think we're in it. We're like deep in it, and the thing that we have to do is not turn away, not give our backs to this offering of love that people are doing, giving to each other, with all the feelings and all the very righteous legitimate, kind of forcing each other to confront and connect.
Kerri Kelly: Well, and I just want to say also about that experience of transformation because I also know this in my relationship with you is that as much as we throw down together, and we went deep together, and we cried together, we have laughed hysterically.
Ana Maria Archila: Yes.
Kerri Kelly: We've been silly together. We've had also like, there's a place for both the heartbreak and the hope, right? There's a place for the joy and the pain and actually that can exist simultaneously inside of that cocoon.
Ana Maria Archila: Absolutely.
Kerri Kelly: That is like the transformational bubble that we are all in.
Ana Maria Archila: Yeah.
Kerri Kelly: And so we can also like celebrate the mess.
Ana Maria Archila: We have to celebrate the mess. And this might last a long time.
Kerri Kelly: And we can laugh about it, and we can cry about it, but we can't bail.
Ana Maria Archila: Yes, we can't bail. It's so funny how I really think the most important lessons of my life, some of them have come through moments of like struggle and courageous action and collective spaces and some of them have been just about negotiating love with the person I love. The other kind of really great, amazing piece of advice that my dad actually gave me when I was going through the process was, you can't ... It's the same thing, the same idea like you can't actually get around the pain. You have to sit in it and let it be and let it go. You don't have to hold on to it. You can actually allow the joy to be in your body and laugh and have silly moments, in a moment of great pain too. You can have both. You have to be present for both. Turning away and resisting that experience is not going to help you get to another place faster, it's just going to cause you more pain. So, I think we just have to really sit through these moments of incredible discomfort and in fighting and really try to hold the truths of different people and dig into what is true for us and give each other the space to show up.
Kerri Kelly: Well, I consider it a great gift that I was thrown in a jail cell with you.
Ana Maria Archila: It was amazing.
Kerri Kelly: A serendipitous like, miracle.
Ana Maria Archila: Yes.
Kerri Kelly: I am so willing to be in the cocoon with you for however long.
Ana Maria Archila: Excellent.
Kerri Kelly: Yeah. Thank you so much.
Ana Maria Archila: Thank you.
Kerri Kelly: Yeah. Thank you. Let's keep going.
Ana Maria Archila: Thanks everyone.
Kerri Kelly: Thank you, Ana Maria.
Ana Maria Archila: Thank you.
Kerri Kelly: Thank you, Christine, Carolina and the whole Lululemon crew.
Kerri Kelly: While this episode is coming to an end, our work in the world is just beginning. This week's call to action is to speak truth to power, to share your stories, unleash your power and let your courage be contagious. You can get more involved in issues of equity, opportunity, and dynamic democracy by going to populardemocracy.org, and follow Ana Maria's work on twitter @AnaMariaArchil2.
Special thanks to our producer Trevor Exter and DJ Drez for the amazing soundtrack. You can check out his music at djdrez.com, and thank you for being here today. You can stay in the know and engaged by subscribing to our weekly newsletter WELLread at ctznwell.org.
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