Creative Change 2024 Goes Punk

by Sughey Ramirez, Director of Cultural Strategies and Networks, and Jade Wilenchik, Program Strategy and Cohort Manager, The Opportunity Agenda

Baby chicks feasting above our heads in the arc of an iron light fixture turned nest armor. A majestic double rainbow warming the already dramatic skies of monsoon season. Speckled horses. For a little under five days, approximately 50 artists, social justice advocates, supporters, and other creative leaders embraced these sights with a joy and unbridled tenderness that would soon come to characterize the spirit of the collective. Our group of filmmakers, visual artists, comedians, organizers, and researchers traveled from 10 different states to come together on the lands of the Santa Ana Pueblo in New Mexico. We’d gathered for The Opportunity Agenda’s 12th Creative Change Retreat — long-known as a space for rest, relationships, and innovation — and the theme was PUNK! Namely, how can we lean into the ferocious, non-complacent, and pioneering elements of the culture to build and sustain a true multiracial democracy? And, to paraphrase Creative Change alum advisor Josué Ramírez: what’s more punk than nature?

Over the course of a few days, we heard that…

• Changing our laws to meet our evolving needs calls on breaking to build. Punk is about rejecting the things that don’t work for us and collectively rebuilding to meet our real needs.
• An honest and accurate history requires unapologetic truth-telling. Punk has historically been a place for us to expose truths and histories that are marginalized by the mainstream. The need to center these stories to create an honest and accurate view of history is necessary across all the interventions we create. (We even ended up screening mini documentaries by a few participants during open hours that uncovered and centered many critical experiences!)
• An informed and engaged citizenry necessitates connection. Not just to each other but to the land we inhabit. Staying connected to the innate needs of nature as a way of finding our own path to liberation and peaceful co-existence.

At this year’s retreat, we witnessed and participated in a radical suspension of judgment and the construction —and protection — of our own iron nest of sorts. One where we could embrace softness and get close (or “Puerto Rican,” as our beloved longtime friend and retreat facilitator Gibrán X. Rivera would say). And through this, we worked to pitch, refine, and present new narrative and cultural interventions that shape the world we want to experience – one where we center care, celebrate plurality, and take lessons from the natural world.

In punk fashion, we’re sharing these findings with you as a step towards modeling the community and world building that we at TOA believe a full-fledged democracy requires.

I leave you with some wisdoms from our collective mural, created by artist and ‘22 TOA Culture & Narrative Fellow Annie del Hierro:

Punk is evolution!

The binary needs to be smashed! Punk is not rooted in the black and white. It exists in the gray. The discomfort in the in between.

Punk is about liberation and our commitment to not only imagining the possibility but being willing to fight for it.

Punk is serving the collective, not the individual.