A Letter to the Graduating 2024 Class — by Clelia O. Rodríguez
What follows is a letter written by Clelia O. Rodríguez, PhD. A global scholar, mom, interdisciplinary educator and inquisitorial seed, she is the founder of SEEDS for Change and a Global Gender Advisor. Her published work includes Who Are You Without Colonialism?: Pedagogies of Liberation (2023, co-edited with Josephine Gabi) and Decolonizing Academia: Poverty, Oppression and Pain (2018).
Every day we open our eyes we have the gift of change, to change. Changers rise to a rhythm of higher consciousness which is not the same as higher learning. Diplomas do not grant us warrior status. These administrative papers are part of politicized and socialized educational campaigns that brings the temporary illusion of “success.” The prize to achieve the goal of the consonants and vowels of B.A., MA, PhD is and has been at the expense of genocide and stolen land. This is the truthful scenario and background where also the denying of pluriversalities of Knowledge have all one shared affinity: Violence.
In the past, I have taken a lot of pride sitting at the main stage of the Convocation listening to the names of graduating students in a feast of proud communities that witness the miracle of students “making it.” This year I didn’t even get the email with the invitation to attend the ritual. Self-explanatory given that Orwellian times are the norm in full scale. I was once also a student who crossed stages carrying on my back the responsibility that was bestowed upon me from a community that was supposed to be destroyed. I remain rooted in the solemn cry for Humanity knowing that this journey of struggle is echoed in each of the voices of students whose breath, and spiritual presence is now the why of our Being. Yours and mine. Ours.
As part of the requirements to fulfill the completion of your degree, you were asked to read, write, reflect critically, and to engage in endless discussions. All the violence I speak about is also part of that box-shape paper to be framed in a box-shape frame. As the nerves, excitement and adrenaline subside, you’ll arrive to a moment of silence when you’ll have to come to terms with Truth: How critically oblivious are you or were you to the violence of silence? To join a program, you were probably asked to write a statement of interest, and/or a statement of diversity in the newer programs catching up with performative tactics and strategies of DEI. How were you able to maintain your professed values to Social Justice in the practice beyond just wanting to get the reading lists from the only Black, Indigenous and racialized scholar in your department? This question is assuming you were able to because the loud rumour in the hallways, in the green and parking areas, in bathrooms, in cafeterias, in the drop-in mental health facilities, in the chapels, at the libraries and across the campus is that most couldn’t. That is an F for the institution and not you. How did you confront the inequalities when you were in a room full of silence? That is if you did at all. Return to those moments that your silence caused irreversible harm. That is also what’s in the Diploma. What changed in you? What and who was spiritually murdered in the name of professionalization as you remember to remember? How many land acknowledgements did you read or were read to you in a room full of well-read colonialists who are well-versed in decolonizing ways, allegedly? The “what now?” question is between you and the Creator now. It is between you and the next land acknowledgement.
To the graduating political class of 2024: You are the reason why many of us go on our knees with ancestral gratitude when we wake up in the morning. Without your fervor of demanding Dignity and transformative ways of learning and teaching beyond the likes, we in the multidimensional responsibilities we embody as professors, Tías, political mothers, and Ancestors-in-the-making, our ceremonies wouldn’t hold the real threats to our right to Sovereignty Knowledge.
To the graduating political class of 2024: Your senses, thirst, hunger, and unapologetic demand for the creation of dreamt spaces of Liberation is already here. The Palestinian textile, as another emblematic text, is woven to the sacred geometry of my braids. The memory of today is tomorrow’s fire for the ceremonies that heal the womb. We are co-existing in a world that feels many times as an episode of Black Mirror. The absence of moral leadership is present. We know it. We see it. We hear it. We witness it in real time. To speak of hope while a genocide is happening is THE Hope. Do not become used to the false claims of “navigating the system” or “changing the system within.” Next time someone says that tell them you are the water and can’t be drown. The next time someone attempts to shift your pain to numbness tell them you can’t be burnt because you are fire. The next time you see a person taking up space with their whiteness, their patriarchal violence, their heteronormative ways of behaving and their minimalist colonialist discourse to write off from the historical record of their violence tell them it ends with you.
To the graduating political class of 2024: Every child matters. Remember to remember! You don’t get flowers, applauses, congratulatory banners, cheerful messages, or abrupt changes of plans to make it to your graduation in person this year. You get spiritual seeds from my sacred maíz mother that have existed in the kitchens of the world made up from red clay. Your Fire has literally awakened the energy of many of our ancestors of Abya-Yala, Amaru Kancha, the Pachamama, Turtle Island or what is known as the Americas. The presence of our multi-dimensional, infinitely epistemological sources of knowledge and the love of our seeds is with you as you scream for Dignity.
As an active member part of a faculty community at an institution that is referred to as my Alma mater, a Latin phrase that’s been around for 956 years as per the Gregorian Calendar, what is nourishing, mothering, honoring, and lighting up my relation to knowledge is literally you, graduating student. June 2024
