Volume 23, numéro 2, 2024 Desirable Futures

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In this special issue, we propose the letter as a form with geographic potential. Building on prior work on letters in geography, Black feminism, and Indigenous studies, we draw on a collection of sixteen letters in the section to build a case for letters as time travel, anticolonial epistemology, feminist geographic method, and worldmaking praxis. We bring together letter writers who speak to their ancestors known and unknown, to future generations, to ideas, to activists, to places, and to strangers—and weave them into a messy and generative conversation on the kinds of spaces that letters make between and among us. Our intention is to build on recent work in geography to experiment with what the letter makes possible for us as geographers.

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Orlando Ochoa and León Ozuna write to each other and reflect on the details of their friendship, love, loneliness, and sex across distance. This epistolary/poetic exchange is an answer to the question of how Ochoa and Ozuna—Mexican poets and lovers from the Rio Grande Valley of South Texas—keep alive in the world.

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In this poem-letter the speaker addresses their hometown, a place of familiarity and contradiction. Through exploring the dark past of Southern North Carolina an intimate account of living in community is illustrated.

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In this letter, I delve into my family history and sharing my grandmother's stories through the tales of this city that is so close to my heart. I take you through my memories of having shared food with neighbors during special occasions. Through my interaction with the place, I show Kalimpong's multiple layers of transformation. With the transformations to the city in mind, I ask us to rethink what future we are looking for and who we are including and excluding in the process. Ultimately, this letter is an ongoing conversation that I am having with my hometown for a better, brighter and more desirable future for everyone.

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In a series of three letters, Pavithra describes to their unborn child what it’s like to be pregnant. The first conveys the terror of carrying a new being into a violently homophobic and racist world. The second and third letters recall the desire and beauty that the unborn child sparks in them. In the fourth letter, Pavithra writes to Noor Momo, now six years old, reflecting on the realities of parenting amidst ongoing violence and the uncertainties of the COVID-19 pandemic. In this final letter, Pavithra invokes Noor’s aunts: her sister Raksha, and her dear friends Kriti, Batool, Mabel, and Marie. The words Chitthi, Masi, Khala and Chyama refer to “mother’s sister” in Tamil, Hindi, Urdu, and Nepali, respectively.

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“Preguntas y frases” is an imagined letter from my grandmother. It is composed of Spanish words and phrases (including missing accents and misspellings) as my grandmother, Esther, wrote them in 1983 in a series of letters she sent to my mother while my mother was living abroad in Ecuador. In those letters, Esther spoken plainly with her daughter—principally, by questioning her decision to leave the United States and asking that my mother back home to Calexico, California.

Many years after my grandmother’s death, my mother found these letters tucked away in the house attic. When my mother shared these letters with me, it was startling for me to see and hear so clearly my grandmother’s voice and way of speaking after so many years since her passing. In response, I wrote “Preguntas y frases para una nieta americana.” The title is inspired by Teresa Palomo Acosta’s poem “Preguntas y frases para una bisabuela española” in which Acosta reflects on her Spanish heritage by writing a letter to her great Spanish grandmother. In contrast, “Preguntas y frases para una nieta americana” reflects on American assimilation and what is lost, protected, and honored across three generations of Mexican American women. The letter is my imagination of what my grandmother would say to me today if she were to write me—and speak plainly—as she had with my mother all those years ago.

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I address this letter to myself on November 25, 2014, the day after the non-indictment of Michael Brown’s murderer, when a resounding silence in my college physics class sparked a fire in me and a journey of awakening and action. Somewhere between a love letter and a condolence, a reassurance and a forewarning, these words serve to soften my stumble towards empowerment and insight as I grow as a young organizer in the Black Lives Matter movement.

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This open letter to the promotoras de salud (community health workers) of Long Beach, California explores the multifaceted demands placed on low-wage, highly skilled health educators within the nonprofit industrial complex, and exposes the geographies of Latinx health precarity from the perspective of urban health care feminized labor. The letter also shares and celebrates the deep commitment to justice that promotoras struggle toward through their care work.

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This letter is an expression of gratitude, from two students of social movements in India who are currently working in the USA, to the thousands of unknown Indian kisans (peasants). In 2020-21, peasants from across the country protested and participated in a movement widely known as anti-farm law movement—which was, in turn, triggered by the passage of three laws, together known as the farm laws, that aimed to liberalize agricultural commodity production and marketing. But what started out as a movement with a limited purpose soon morphed into a statement against the high-handedness of the Indian state. Through this letter, we pay a tribute to the farmers who drew inspiration from diverse intellectual strands including Gandhiism and Ambedkarite philosophy to craft a profound statement to highlight the precarity experienced by the farmers and in defense of India’s democratic ethos.

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This letter takes place as a conversation with my newborn about the struggles and desires I see on the horizon at the moment of writing. The letter’s simple style and straightforward language invite you to immerse yourself in an intimate sharing between myself and my one-year-old and consider the perspective of a young child coming to grips with the world around them. I draw on past conversations with my mother about her illness and her ecological work, as well as elements of our family history working and living on the river Clyde. Falling somewhere between a poem, a story and a letter, I explore themes of change and hope, ecological precarity, health and illness, and a path towards more livable worlds. Two photos included with the letter share intimate moments with the reader related to my writing – the moment Clyde reaches for his grandmother at the water’s edge, an ode to the river on which she grew up and after which he is named; and the moment my mother unfolds her hand letting an edible flower sit delicately along her hand’s life lines as an offering of nourishment and interconnection.

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Harriet Ann Jacobs, born enslaved in North Carolina, was more than a fugitive freedom seeker. She was also known, loved, and held by Black South ecosystems of witness. Michelle Lanier archivally and ecologically roots the epistolary poem, ‘terraqueous,’ in an effort to shrink the distance between the commemorative echoes of Jacobs’s story and the soils and waters that held her first breaths and acts of resistance.

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A letter written to future generations of Anishinaabeg expressing my desires for what they can accomplish, and how we can help them get there.

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The letter charts my relationship to geography through a letter to Donald Deskin Jr. From Black geographer junior scholar to pioneering Black geographer, this letter uses Black geographies as an analytic to think through Black geographical knowledge, practice and kinship.

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This letter remembers the writer's father, considering the disquieted contexts of his life and early death. These contexts connect to histories and conditions far more extensive than any individual life, and suggest difficult questions about inheritance, relationality, aftermath, settler being, and more, with which the writer continues to grapple.

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In this letter, Elspeth Iralu initiates a time-travelling correspondence with her paternal grandfather, Vichazelhu Iralu, about his dreams for the Naga sovereignty movement. The letter grieves the loss of personal and political archives that were stolen, disappeared, and destroyed through processes of colonization. Iralu offers letter-writing, shaped by Naga modes of storytelling, as an anticolonial epistemology that enacts Naga sovereignty in the here and now.

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In the wake of her uncle’s 2021 death from COVID-19 in a Michigan prison, Danielle Purifoy reflects on what his life and art taught her about abolition, and what kind of place could have given him a different life…and death.