Letter Writing as a Time-Traveling Method for Other World Making

This paper proposes letter writing as a method to elicit visions of liberation and identify everyday acts of resistance that breathe life into these visions. By creating a liberatory space for the letter writer to reflect on the past and envision a socially just world, letter writing becomes a time-traveling method. To illustrate an example of the use of this method, the paper shares results from a study that used letter writing to explore the relationship between freedom dreams and everyday resistance. The participants were nineteen Latina women who were each instructed to write a letter to a loved one about their desires for social change and their daily efforts to achieve those visions. One of the major themes identified was that women in the study were engaging in a daily pedagogy of resistance to (re)connect their children to roots-that is, histories of oppression, their cultural heritage, and the Earth, in order to create a more socially just world. We conclude by suggesting that letter writing offers seeds of possibility to articulate new ways to breathe outside of the logic of racial capitalist settler coloniality.