That’s How the Light Gets In

In this episode, I speak with a dear friend of mine, Mateo Nube of the band Los Nadies, which just released a new album, “Tiempo de Desembarcar,” on El Cerrito Records in August. Mateo is also a Co-Director at Movement Generation Justice and Ecology Project and a brilliant political strategist and popular educator on ecology and just transition.  In the episode, we talk Mateo’s experience growing...

This week, I share a conversation I had at the end of last year with Michelle Mascarenhas and Lisa Juachon of Mamas for a Free Palestine. We talk about the role of movement mamas, aunties, matriarchs - really folks of all genders - who play that role in our communities of deeply embodying the James Baldwin quote about all of the children are all of our children, holding life sacred, moving in ways...

This week on the pod, I speak with Patty Berne, Co-Founder and Executive and Artistic Director of Sins Invalid, a disability justice performance project that centers people of color, queers, nonbinary and trans people with disabilities.    Patty is a queer disabled author, artist, and organizer of Japanese and Haitian descent and is widely recognized for her work to establish the framework and pra...

This week, I’m joined by two of the many artists and organizers behind the "Sumud: Resistance Until Liberation” mural in Oakland, CA — Jackie Romero of the Palestinian Youth Movement and Nathaniel Moore of the Freedom Archives. We also hear audio from incarcerated artist Kevin Cooper, who contributed a piece to the mural from Death Row.  In the words of the mural organizers “In both the U.S. and P...

Brooke is joined in conversation by Movement Generation's Angela Aguilar as the two moderate a panel on culture shift at an MG retreat. Brooke speaks to what it means to come back to podcasting after a 6+ month hiatus. Brooke and Angela riff on this idea that all economies - all ways of managing home - from extractive to liberatory, create a culture which makes it make sense for people to particip...

One of my most significant mentors and photographic collaborators, my dear friend and comrade David Bacon, joins me in conversations this week. David came up as a union organizer with the United Farm Workers and United Electrical Workers, then spent decades as a photographer, photojournalist, labor reporter, and radio host covering labor, migration, and global economy. In this week’s episode, we t...

Bay Area arts organizers David Solnit and Gemma Searle with the Climate Justice Arts Project share their process for making giant murals, banners, puppets, screen printed patches and posters, and projections for the movement.    We trace David’s decades long direct-action organizing and art-making history from anti-war and anti-nuke organizing to migrant farmworkers to he and Gemma’s current colla...

The Beehive Design Collective’s Sakura Saunders and Orion Camero share about the Callegory, a Beehive sister project and mega-story trilogy of images and creative education campaign about California’s social and climate crises, and the state’s role in global justice.    The Beehive Collective is best known for its expansive narrative graphic posters and related campaigns that break down big comple...

Last week, eight artists featured in the “Bay Area Now 9” exhibit at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts altered their own artistic works live during a public YBCA show to speak out against the art institution’s silence on the on-going genocide in Palestine and to demand an end to YBCA’s censorship of artists calling for a #Ceasefire in Gaza. On this week’s episode, we speak to two of those artist...

Korean pyungmul drummers Liz Suk and Jaeeun Jun shared about the informal group of Bay Area drummers rooted in the former Korean Youth Cultural Center, Jaemaesori, Ieumsae, and other Korean drumming groups who come together to offer collaborative music and beats in the spirit of liberation from the tradition of Korean folk drumming called pyungmul. Along the way, they talk about the parallels betw...

Boomshake Music's Mitali Purkayastha and Nicole Zapata discuss the legendary women, trans, and gender non-conforming BIPOC street protest drumming crew. Along the way, they share the legacy of Boomshake’s former-musical-director / now-ancestor, teacher auntie Monica Hastings Smith and how Boomshake publicly and unapologetically grieved such a sudden, enormous loss of their leader, and what role ar...

Movement Generation Justice & Ecology Project collective members, Angela Aguilar and Quinton Sankofa discuss MG’s just transition principle, “If it’s not soulful, it’s not strategic.” In the process, they talk about talk everything from the Black Panther Party to the Zapatistas and from mass movements for a ceasefire in Palestine to land stewardship and radical imagination.    Mentioned on the...

Welcome to "That's how the light gets in," where we’ll will be interviewing artists and cultural workers here in the Bay Area and beyond who make our movements shine, who root our actions in the wisdom of our elders and ancestors, and who create and defend culture to hold us and future generations through the best and the hardest of times.