Fuego: unleashing collective Queer Chicanx/Latinx rebellion, counterpublics and imagination.

This essay is a reflection and assessment of the ConFem and faculty collective's queer Chicanx/Latinx intergenerational solidarity activism. In conversation with abolition feminisms, transformative justice practices, and queer performance studies, we illustrate the shifts the collective effected toward queerer Chicanx/Latinx feminist futurities. Our collective solidarity praxis was an intervention that actively undermined the anti-solidarity machinations of the state's social hierarchical ordering at the site of the university. This essay addresses the collective's strategic move to shift away from supplicating or engaging with the state for appeasement or resolution of violence, and instead to turn to harnessing the power of queer Chicanx/Latinx visionary artists to unleash queer feminist Chicanx/Latinx counterpublics and imagination.

Notes on growing love: Cherríe Moraga's "If," a world-making incantation conjuring collective consciousness through Chicana lesbian po(i)esis.

This essay introduces the embodied ceremonial practices of deep presence and sustained attentiveness as Chicana lesbian poetic devices that shape-shift Chicana lesbian subjectivities, socialities, and simultaneously the violence of colonial capitalist racial heteropatriarchies. My reading of the poem "If" in Carla Trujillo's rendering of Chicana lesbian desire in Chicana Lesbians: The Girls Our Mothers Warned Us About, delves into the shape-shifting and time-bending potentiation at the heart of Chicana lesbian poetics. Cherríe Moraga's "If" generously offers a map that stalls time with the magnificence of sustained attentiveness. The poet's observations entice the reader with a depth of presence that illuminate the subject, casting life-sustaining reimagined meanings onto otherwise commodified individuated bodies. Moraga's "If" refracts the meaning of loss, ghostly pasts, and unimaginable futures through embodiment, imbuing a vivid and deep presence capable of casting spells on futures yet to come. The poem posits total immersion in being-ecstasis, that blooms with the transformational potential of the ecstatic. This essay reads the poem "If" in the context of Moraga's oeuvre as ceremonial world-making incantation conjuring collective consciousness through Chicana lesbian po(i)esis.