Marisol is the first-generation daughter and granddaughter of a line of Mexican and Irish family raised in the Humboldt Park neighborhood of Chicago. She was also raised by her found movement family throughout the South over the course of 25 years of organizing, advocacy, and popular education. During that time, she has gathered all those lessons and struggles into language, frameworks, and tools that have guided people and organizations across the country in opening up conversations about the impacts of colonization, white supremacy and patriarchy on each of us - individually, collectively, and ancestrally. It is her strong belief that this work is most impactful when it is an intersectional, intentional, and radically hopeful practice grounded in our personal, collective, and ancestral healing. Marisol is also deeply committed to moving this work beyond "thinking and feeling about it" towards being ever more rooted in meaningful action towards subverting structures of white supremacy, patriarchy and colonization and advancing equity and liberation. Her work has become that of holding spaces for people’s visions and strategies; their conflict and healing; and their deepening analyses of power and liberation.
I want to contribute to the creation of radical spaces where we can witness ourselves and each other; spaces where we can accompany each other through our healing and liberation struggle. We work to understand where the shadows of colonization, white supremacy, and patriarchy exist - in the world around us and the world within us. And then we be bold - we dream and vision liberation. We build a way out of no way. We create yes for each other. And we add our small stones of activism to the building of an edifice of hope.
