Alejandra Oliva

Cooking when the world is on fire These days, daily tasks can feel like a...

“The work I do in front of the stove, the daily care I take with meals—this isn’t just about sustenance or being healthy. It is an expression of my morals and concerns, reminding me that the smallest of my actions is performed in a web of mutuality and care.”

– @olivalejandra.bsky.social

Getting the Flowers Yourself On a Wednesday in Mid-June

new newsletter on the 100th anniversary of mrs. dalloway and reading it from a less-than-generous lens born of my own frustrations

open.substack.com/pub/ojosdesa...

thank you so much! that’s so kind

Appropriate, because one of the worker survivors of the Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire was then deported as part of the first Red Scare.

A Way in the Wilderness Lent is a season of reflection—but also a season to prepare for the work ahead, to sweep aside everything that has not worked and find new ways through the desert.

"It has become clear to me in the past few months that the immigration legal system has dropped even the slightest pretense of its orientation toward justice."

@olivalejandra.bsky.social: 'A Way in the Wilderness'
www.commonwealmagazine.org/lent-reflect...

This is an endemic problem, by the way. Geo Group and CoreCivic regularly deny folks in detention their meds. I witnessed this practiced systematically at Krome for the 5 years I used to visit and communicate with guys there

Yes, the El Salvador “Deportations” are Really Bad and not just for the innocent people who got deported

For the Injustice Report today, my colleague @olivalejandra.bsky.social wrote a jaw-dropping, must-read post: "Yes, the El Salvador 'Deportations' Are Really Bad'

open.substack.com/pub/injustic...

This post has gotten so much traction & I’d just urge everyone to check out Pitzer’s history of concentration camps: we want these things to shout out their evil, to glow red w malign intent, but they begin as seemingly pragmatic, almost ordinary answers to mass containment & transport/transfer.

if you find yourself reluctant to support the guy at Columbia because you find some of the politics he espoused distasteful or even abhorrent, you should know that this is exactly the reaction that they hoped for in choosing him as a target for unlawful detention based on political speech.

Since Obama administration, at least, leftists/radicals repeatedly warned that Dems pouring cash into ICE and militarized police was not just evil in its own right, but laying the groundwork for open fascism.

We were dismissed, with various degrees of vitriol, for pointing this obvious fact out.

I think the more horrifying thing to sit with is this: the every-day operations of the jail, prison, and immigration detention systems are and have been dehumanizing, and we built them, and they lend themselves seamlessly to the fascist business of stealing and caging even more people

This is why we must fight for everyone. Whether they’ve been incarcerated or have had contact with the criminal legal system or are merely undocumented. When you accept that some people are deserving of detention and deportation the scope of who is eligible is always under threat of expanding.

Nature writing for ICE Detainees Figuring out what to say to a pen pal

every time i sit down to write a letter to a new pen pal in ICE detention, im struck mute. what could i possibly say to someone in such a place? here’s a reminder to myself, and an invitation to you.

open.substack.com/pub/ojosdesa...

The call of a remnant prairie I’ve seen artists enchanted and haunted by the prairie, their work changed by spending time in the...

i wrote about the remnant prairie behind the artist residency where i work

www.christiancentury.org/article/call...

The call of a remnant prairie I’ve seen artists enchanted and haunted by the prairie, their work changed by spending time in the...

“The biodiversity of the prairie, its changing face across the seasons: this ecosystem is a community, living and breathing and renewing itself, older than the houses and the trees around it.”

– @olivalejandra.bsky.social

www.christiancentury.org/article/call...

this is not to make the facile metaphor but rather to say that it feels like a lot of different networks of coexistence have been in a state of erosion and weakening of connections, and it’s all slow and unnoticeable until it isn’t

the other thing i was thinking a lot about while writing this piece was Laura Marris’ book THE AGE OF LONELINESS and this idea that entire species are just becoming rarer and rarer without anyone noticing, our neighborhoods quieter of birdsong, and no real sense of the loss in our day to day

i think the bad version of this looks like wearing a safety pin on your lapel (remember that lol?) and the good version looks like showing up for your neighbors in real ways (errands, food, yapping), making safety plans for your spaces, knowing your rights

Visibly Invisible The Trump administration hopes not only to deport migrants, but also to make them feel so unsafe they no longer participate actively in our communities.

I wrote about the ways that the Trump admin has been purposely fucking with the visibility of ICE enforcement/the increased invisibility of undocumented people in daily life/feeling called into visibility as a neighbor

www.commonwealmagazine.org/ICE-immigrat...

I think most people are intuitively aware of this but something like the official White House account posting an “ASMR” video of shackled immigrants is not just cruel for its own sake, it’s intentional envelope-pushing to ramp up to desensitization over inhumane detention, camps, and deaths

Taking Your Time is the Point And it turns out, so are other people.

I spent most of the past three years not writing and doing a lot of sewing and somehow becoming a public mender and sewing teacher—I wrote about how it changed my sense of community today in my newsletter. hedhouseman.substack.com/p/taking-you...

for Tom Homan to be threatening AOC with DOJ investigation for providing know your rights presentations just kind of shows you the level of “rule of law” that applies here

well, fuck ICE i guess

“We have a choice, these days, to be reborn into these times, to consent to change with them not in resignation to the fascist values …but in resignation to our truer, wilder selves, to shake off the mores of our time and to walk into the prairie.”
wow, @olivalejandra.bsky.social

oooh that’s really interesting and i would love to hear more! i am never writing out of like “i am tapping into the zeitgeist”(lol) but like, Feeling Less Alone is a primary motivation ngl

thank you so much Rachel!! ❤️

ROBBIE THANK YOU! I’m so proud of it ❤️

Something Rich and Strange A sea change, a perfume, and Virginia Woolf's Orlando

i wrote about dying and being reborn ungovernable

also perfume and prairies and jackson pollock

open.substack.com/pub/ojosdesa...

the ones who deign to talk to us, yes lmao

i live in sauganash and while i like my house and i could afford it i want to leave so bad, it is simply a dead zone