Meet Andrew Willis Garcés

Interviewed by Nico Amador

Andrew Willis Garcés was raised in Memphis, TN and Guadalajara, México and now lives in the District of Columbia, a proud Washingtonian by choice. He started facilitating meetings as co-coordinator of the Broward County Green Party at 17, after winning a scholarship to attend several facilitator trainings with the American Youth Foundation. During his time as an undergraduate and grad student in the District, he first focused on nonviolent direct action training work with anti-war and Latin America solidarity groups, and for the next several years worked with a variety of organizations fighting gentrification in historically African-American and Latina/o neighborhoods.

Since then he's helped build successful campaigns with labor unions, experimented with popular education while organizing with public housing residents and led anti-racism workshops for white activists. He's also led train the trainer and organizational development workshops in Spanish for grassroots groups in the US, Colombia and México. With Training for Change he's given trainings for organizations like Muhlenberg College and Campus Progress.

You took several TFC workshops before you became a TFC Training Associate. What were the aspects of TFC's style of training that had the biggest impact on you? What made you want to become more involved in TFC as a trainer?

I knew these were going to be good questions. Bueno.

I think one of the biggest things was the style of looking at how
groups work together.

I’ve experienced working with other groups who had an analysis of
stages of group development and really held on to that. Especially
when I was doing more directive facilitation training -- you always
had to keep the stages (storming, norming, forming) in mind. Every group goes through a linear process that you have to track as a facilitator.

But [in these other models] the diagnosis of group development didn’t go beyond that. It did not include any analysis of oppression. So TFC was really compelling to me because it came up with an analysis that incorporated so many things that seemed out of the mainstream of facilitation circles and especially self-described activist trainers and organizers.

I felt like there was something that I couldn't put my finger on that
was too limited about the life of a group. The organizing world is
all about how the group gets to the task and get a win -- these
concrete victories. In order to do that, we have to sacrifice other
considerations, including different styles of leadership or internal
oppression dynamics. I have seen that happen a lot.

It was encouraging to me to see all of that dealt with effectively
in a training setting. I have been a participant and seen trainers
freak out with any of those things and either try to shut the group
down or move past it -- whenever someone talks about being
marginalized in the group or when they put together something bigger than what the facilitators put together.

Can you say more about the kind of organizing work you do in Washington D.C. and moments where your skills as a trainer influenced your approach to organizing?

The last couple of years I have done organizing around housing with public housing residents and Section 8 holds. And sometimes with newer folks to D.C. who are sometimes wittingly and unwittingly gentrifying areas they are moving into.

There was one campaign where we were trying to stop the city from
giving away surplus properties that they were putting in the hands of market-rate developers instead of giving it to schools to create play-spaces and other things that neighborhoods needed.

There were a lot of tensions in this group because dominant in the
group were middle-class allies, mostly, but not all white. And the working class people who grew up in D.C. were marginalized.

I noticed my own perspective on the group grow as I developed as a trainer and was able to think more broadly about mainstream/margin dynamics and not just get stuck on “we need to stop middle-class people oppressing the working class people.” Instead of thinking about different mainstream and margin dynamics.

This included things like style of speaking – there were lots of funny things about the culture of this group – another was around time and people coming late, or others eating during the meetings.

These things did not fall into easily identifiable issues. It was not like middle-class people were coming late or were the ones eating during the meeting and offending folks or anything like that.

It helped me think that maybe there are dynamics outside of just
class, race, gender or sexuality – things that were just part of this group's culture.

That was helpful for me to be able to bring to the group where there was a lot of blaming going on. In any organizing campaign without a lot of success, we attack we each other. There were a lot
of times like that where we lashed out at each other due to our lack
of success.

I don't think my contribution changed our dynamic fundamentally. But this attitude helped me think about what was more mainstream and changed my political development. Instead of figuring out who was right and who was wrong and who needed to shut-up, I started focusing on understanding that different folks needed to stand up and have a fight, for example, over whether or not you needed to eat during a meeting – and that this was not necessarily about identity but about group culture and needing to create norms around X or Y or Z.

You recently returned from doing human rights accompaniment work with communities target by violence in the civil conflict in Colombia. Tell me about your experience in Colombia and your experiments with training in that setting.

It is very interesting to do training work in a place where there are
not a lot of opportunities to do that work because of so much violence that people face everyday, so much insecurity.

Even in urban areas, which is where I did my work in Bogota. In my
experience there's not the same culture of non-profits that there are in the U.S. where it's common for organizations to take several days to do internal work. I was asked to do a leadership training, broadly described, to be better leaders internally or to help communicate better. This is how it was described to me, "We need help to communicate better internally."

My sense was that they were mostly looking for space to work on "their stuff," relational work, unaired grievances, etc.

There might have been some element of developing "hard" skills in the training space, they would talk about the skills they lacked but mostly they seemed to be saying "we need a space to fight" or "talk about who is feeling left out" or "discuss future of the organization" and that kind of stuff.

I won't name the organization for security purposes. But, for example, I worked with one group that is trying to use technology to make human rights law more accessible so citizens know what their rights are under Colombian law. I did a number of intake interviews and they all talked about "skills." And once we got into a training space people who were on the margin wanted a chance to talk and talk to each other, like a group of women who felt isolated and had a chance to talk about what it was like to be women in a male-dominated nonprofit.

There was also a guy who had a more traditional leadership style and he was constantly frustrated with the pace at which the group moved. Other people didn't want to make decisions fast enough. It might not have seemed that way, outwardly, but in a lot of ways he felt marginalized. That was just one piece of a 3-hour workshop. But everyone said they did more work on the relationships in those 3 hours then in the previous 3 years!

That really struck me, because it was so similar in other organizations. Being in crisis all the time, there's no time for internal work -- to look behind the curtain.

It was also interesting to do training work with TFC's tools, and figure out how to adapt them in Spanish.

How do we adapt the materials? It’s not just translating, it was about finding the concept. Thinking about the concept in English and finding an equivalent context and cultural connection to the folks that are in the training space.

An incredible activist in Bogotá generously volunteered to translate the most commonly used tools, and to put out a draft translation of the TFC glossary. Several different interpreters/translators who had lived in the U.S. and had worked in activist and organizer circles contributed to a draft -- the goal was to develop tools that could be used in multinational, mixed-class contexts.

We had a conversation about the terms TFC uses and there are not a lot of parallels in Spanish for some of them. It depends a lot on class context, country, etc. We had to come up with basic translations and explain them repeatedly. I used a lot more repetition than usual, although in general I found it good to spend less time explaining a term vs. jumping to the activity itself.

Overall it's been a good lesson in accessibility. Just as English speakers depend heavily on formal education, class background, cultural coding, we rely on these things to communicate and understand about as much as verbalized expressions, my experience has been that the intentionality of translating,
the process you put into word selection is as important as the word you choose. I want to stress that I have no formal interpreter or translator training, but that's been my experience.

How have you brought that experience in Colombia back into your work with Spanish-speaking communities here in the U.S.?

My experience here in the U.S. is probably very different than that of, say, Spanish-speaking communities on the West Coast or the South. And so you have to look at it there. There is the experience that I am based out of Alexandria, VA much of the time where Salvadorans have been for decades now. Everything is written in Spanish in this neighborhood. People mostly speak Spanish on the streets.

But 20 miles away in Prince William County there has been a huge crackdown on undocumented people, mostly Latino/a. Even people with green cards are afraid. They feel like they need to keep their heads down more. Which is also similar to the work in Winchester, VA where, although there haven't been immigration raids in the area there is still a sentiment that there is no way to not be visible without creating cause for a backlash. Most people are still undocumented.

My goals around the multilingual training work were somewhat clarified recently working with an all-volunteer, grassroots Latino/Latina organization. They're striving to build a public voice for their communities in the Shenandoah Valley, which hasn't had a large Latina/o community for very long. I saw a lot of yearning for trying to figure out how to support that piece of trying to be public. How to hold up your culture and be visible without generating unwanted and dangerous attention.

I have seen that through the training work I've been able to do – training work is one vehicle for figuring out how to think through that piece. That was a piece of the work that we did in Winchester. It was not explicitly about that but that was a lot of what the group worked on. As far as working on visibility, there was a lot of reference to their kids, the second generation, growing up in that place where many people might feel closeted at some level.

Also I should say in the movement context, groups like that have little access to big institutions that I have access to in D.C., or that are at least visible as the self-described national organizing and funding groups.

I want to do more of the training work to support people to be out immigrants and having a space to have pride in that. And there is a lot of organizing that has to go along with that. But also multinational bridge building with the three million immigrant families here in Virginia, there is certainly segregation where there could be overlap.

Training work can be a vehicle for that, much as organizing work has and continues to be.

Last year you led a class on sustainable activism. What are the things that you’ve found sustain you as an activist?

It was called SUSTAINING activism. I am still trying to figure out how to do SUSTAINABLE activism myself.

That's a good way to start answering the question - we looked at what's working right now for each person in the class in the ongoing process of discovering sustainability, what works for each person.

One thing that was great was getting to bring in so many elders, people who have been mentors to me, and guest speakers to be able to answer that question. Some of these people I had talked to extensively but never had a chance to ask them about how they've centered their political work. I like the Spanish translation
better, "trabajo social," which translates literally as "social work."

How do you cultivate the kinds of relationships, the community you need to center that work? And it's counterposed to the U.S. definition of "social work" as a profession. That's another thing I've been striving towards, discovering passions and skill sets that can sustain me financially, de-coupled from my political work.

I think my most grounded moments as an activist have been times I've been able to focus on one primary project at a time -- like the electoral work I'll be doing for the next two months. Or two weeks. Or two years. Even if that project is one relationship. That is something else that has been useful lately, distilling down to a project or relationship to nurture for a year or a week or a minute.

And just being present with myself. That is often the biggest challenge I face. Just being asked to wear different hats, and having trouble carving out space that's just mine. Often very eagerly jumping to something new, but then losing myself because I am present to too many things and too many people.

Sitting in the morning has been good. And still as many late-night bike rides with a good mp3 soundtrack as I can fit in. And at least one weekly date with coconut ice cream. Really helpful.

Any other sources of inspiration you want to name?

Are you saying coconut ice cream is not inspiring?

Hmmm. I am inspired by being able to work with so many people discovering their own power as activists, political workers, public speakers. Maybe that's cliche. But that's not something I have had much access to in the last couple of years, it's been energizing.

The organizing happening in Virginia is inspiring, there are so many folks, lately I've been working with voters of color many of whom kicked off their own local Obama organizing drives and have been looking for ways to keep up that work, to push through initiatives that Obama promised to take to Congress. Once again these are folks without much access to mainstream progressive organizations, and who are largely suburban.

Virginia's politics at the state level certainly don't reflect the 48% of the electorate who are voters of color, to say nothing of the progressive majority that's elected Democrats to all statewide offices the last two years. So I get to watch that shift get consolidated, as local organizers build a base and hold officials accountable to a new political reality.

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