hi again dear friends

I’ve been overthinking. The days into weeks, the months into years. There’s so much I want to tell you about. So many things have happened in the last two years. I’ve learned so much, and grown and changed. I’m living alone now. I have been for the last year almost, slowly building out the space I dreamt of when moving to Valpo, the creative refuge above the sea where I can edit my videos and put my words to paper.

I have a book, mostly done. It’s called Utopia Pop Poética Neorococo Travesti lol. I don’t really identify as trans in the same way anymore, I’ve taken to saying travesti now and am studying and living out what that means, here on this land I’ve chosen to live in, which has its own histories and identities and futurisms. I’ve been writing poems in Spanish, that’s part of the reason I haven’t shared anything here, and I don’t know yet how you all, dear gringxs, fit in to my life so far away.

People this way out from the center of empire—though the center is nearly everywhere now, and Chile is the cradle of neoliberalism, after all—people here don’t really know people there like you exist. The empire’s propaganda is so strong the rest of the world often has no idea there are commies and anarchists and ne’er-do-wells in the states. They can’t believe it when I talk about leaving water in the desert at the border for the walkers, about accountability circles and transformative justice, about all the marvelous and contradictory solidarity I saw while I lived in the empire.

So I miss you all, and I even miss your ways of organizing sometimes. I want to share with you the ways I’m learning to organize here. I will say the basis of ingrained class consciousness is much stronger, that helps a lot. There’s (almost) no exceptionalism or saviorism to overcome. Despite how deeply the dictatorship broke our social bonds and our inheritance of radical, autochthonous communalism, I’ve been delightfully challenged by how much less individualistic people here continue to be. I’ve been deconstructing a lot of my gringa programming, and there’s still so much left to go.

I don’t want this to get tooo long and in the weeds because otherwise I start up again with the overthinking and the procrastination and the perfectionism. This is just a little letter to say hi, I’m still here, and I’d like to start sharing with you again, and hopefully hearing back from you, too. I’ve been working on some short films (and some long ones) that I’m planning on releasing soon. I want to write more letters, more in depth about some of the things I just briefly mentioned here (let me know what you're interested in). I want to tell you about some of the community spaces we’ve been building, some of the dreams we have, some of our nightmares. Hopefully not too many of those last ones, though that’s the way the world keeps turning.

Hasta luego, rest well and fight like hell,

xoxo Nico