Mk: Hello, and welcome to The Child and Its Enemies, a podcast about queer and neurodivergent kids living out anarchy and youth liberation. Here at The Child and Its Enemies, We believe that youth autonomy is not only crucial to queer and trans liberation, but to anarchy itself. Governance is inherently based on projecting linear narratives of time and development and gender onto our necessarily asynchronous and atemporal queer lives.
And youth and teens are at the center of this form of oppression. Our goal with the podcast is to create a space by and for youth that challenges all forms and inspires us to create queer,
I’m your host, Mk Zariel. I’m 15 years old, and I’m the youth correspondent at The Anarchist Review of Books, author of the blog Debate Me, Bro, and organizer of some all anarchist peer spaces in my city and online. I’ve organized with anarchist archives, all anarchist punk venues, feminist mutual aid collectives, teen distros, and more.
There are divergent art spaces, trans media projects, teenage anarchist support groups, the occasional political campaign, and oh so many trans meetups. With me today is artist and activist Cate Moses. Can you please tell us who you are, pronouns, name, and where you organize?
Cate: Yes, Cate, she, they. I’m with several groups in my city of Santa Fe, Nuevo Mexico.
I’m still in Tevo, Atlanta. In my city, I work for liberation and justice in Palestine, primarily right now. Also interested in anarchist artists group where I met MK in a group called once a forest, a local group working to stop the forest service from burning up and clear cutting our forests in the name of fire prevention.
The U. S. Forest Service and the U. S. Park Service intentionally started the three worst forest fires in our state’s history. In high winds, as prescribed burns, we seek to end those, and I work with various non human animal rights projects for the liberation of other species as well.
Mk: So you founded a program for unhoused and unstably housed kids and families at a public school in your city that serves mostly Spanish speaking immigrants.
I’m so curious what it’s been like for you to organize for housing and immigration justice within this fundamentally statist education system we live in. Do you view your organizing as changing compulsory education from the inside or as expropriating its resources and resisting it in a more overtly anarchic way?
Cate: Neither, really. I work quietly in the ruptures of the system’s web in a cave beneath the system. Our program, called the CASA program, exists in a space between the state public education system, the non profit NGO structure, and anarchy. I’m literally in a cave, a partially walled off hallway in a public school that many people do not know exists.
Mk: I feel like so many anarchists can relate to that alienation of not being with any in any system, nor being overtly publicly against it and just Existing in spaces that statists have doesn’t touch and I feel like that’s a lot about what being trans is like too how We don’t really fit neatly into any gendered box or statist ideology can you talk a bit more about this program and how youth are involved in supporting one another to access housing?
Cate: Yes, it’s youth centered. Youth need driven. Every public school in the U. S. State is required under McKinney Vento law to provide equity for unhoused and unstably housed youth. I mentioned the law only because you should be aware of it in advocating for equity. However, the public education system is inherently inequitable, rooted as it is in capitalist linear narratives of development.
Gender and success. So we have to support and take care of one another in accessing housing and other needs. Youth bring their needs and their comrades and we work together to make those, to meet those needs. Youth sometimes share housing and I figure out ways to pay for it outside of the state shelter and foster care systems, which we know do not serve the needs of youth.
We work together to identify and remove barriers to equity housing. And transportation. The priority is to put direct material assistance and decision making power in the hands of youth with as few strings attached as possible. Youth decide what will be available in the food bank in our cave. Anyone of any age can access the food bank.
Parents, school employees and community agencies are involved to the degree that youth want that.
Mk: This ethic of mutual aid is so inspiring and exactly what adult solidarity with kids and teens can look like. Rather than a hierarchical parenting dynamic or like a conditional form of care based on obedience, people with adult privilege can provide us material support and emotional care as equals and inspire us to build networks of care with one another that really not only serve youth in terms of our material needs but empower us.
Soaps! Speaking of hierarchy, and lack thereof, you self describe as a recovering former academic. How has that background shaped your journey as an organizer in a society with compulsory education? Do you think there’s any way that academia can be liberationist, or is it inherently ageist?
Cate: Good questions.
I worked as a low wage teacher in public universities for about 10 years, and I was offered tenure in a place I did not want to live in. It felt like a death sentence. So I chose life outside of the system, and eventually, Found my way to serving youth in a 7th through 12th grade school. I attended a radical student centered alternative public high school.
So I knew that the possibility for doing youth centered advocacy might still exist. And. Probably in the back of my mind, that was my model. I was lucky to have had that. Can academia be youth liberationist? That possibility does exist, but student organized mutual education networks that include trades learning probably offer more possibility.
Higher education is about class based exclusion and student debt loan sharking. It’s more about those things. than ageism I think. Roughly 75 percent of college teachers in the U. S. are adjuncts, low wage workers who qualify for food stamps and other public assistance, and are burdened with huge course loads.
They’re generally not young. Students living in poverty and those working to support their immigrant families are largely denied access to higher education or saddled with huge debt. The private, public, and for profit university systems discriminate in different ways. Private academia caters to rich white 19 year olds who actually have some power in that system, where education is a consumer driven product and keeping the customer happy matters.
Poor folk and people of color are largely excluded.
Mk: I was looking at photos from when we were young Your hair is light blue and you’re smiling in one And it’s a strange remembrance brought on by this semblance That we were so serious, shy, and experienced
Cate: in state run public universities, there’s less class based exclusion, but more state control and more possibility for student organizing, I think, and meaningful advocacy. For profit colleges are the worst. They exist solely to defraud students and saddle them with debt. There is anti teacherism on the part of the state, which is also invested in controlling youth.
So we’re in this together to a certain extent. When students and teachers unionize and work together, there are possibilities, I believe, for liberation.
Mk: So I love the emphasis on how issues of labor and capitalism and how teachers are treated really affects teenagers. The school system is full of people facing governance both through ageism and labor alienation.
And often there’s this narrative that workers rights is not a youth issue because teens aren’t facing this, when in fact anyone who lives in a capitalist society should care about how teachers and other people doing feminized care work are being treated. So on another topic, you also mentioned that you’re into creating art.
So how would you say that intersects with your anarchist organizing?
Cate: That’s what I ask myself. I’ve always made art, mostly in a silo. I’m a painter. I like working alone. I’ve moved consistently toward abstract art over the course of my life. How does that lend itself toward social justice and anarchy? My work has always been about animal liberation, water protection, and social justice, but how to make it more overtly so and in collaboration with others.
That’s what I really want to explore now. That’s why I’m leaving my school job this year to find out.
Mk: I love that for you that you’re getting in touch more with like artists, activism, and what it means for media and art to be anarchist praxis. Like I think about this a lot as someone who makes radical media and it always is so meaningful when folks enter that and they’re organizing.
So can you tell us more about the plans for you once you leave? I
Cate: was raised by anti war activist parents. In the summer we went to activist camps and I want to get that vibe back. Just being a feral pack running around unsupervised while the adults were doing their activist thing.
Even now I want to get that back. And in that scenario adults We’re in organizing meetings all day and the youth were in unsupervised feral pack. It was liberating. Much of my work was spent in the woods with a feral pack of kids. Much of my youth, there was not much youth organizing happening. We lived in a high poverty rural area where parents did not helicopter.
Through my parents, I became aware of housing and other social justice issues. So I was lucky that way. And I want, now I’m I found a job, yes, where I can do that, but I want to get back to bringing my art into that. I was frequently involved in street level activists as a kid, as a youth. One of my earliest memories is of ice cream cones melting down our hands while my little brother and I watched cops beat the hell out of our father.
So I learned how to organize. We staged walkouts and protests in middle school over war and gender discrimination. I came to anarchism later, I’m still coming to it, and what I really want to figure out is how to bring that intersection, how to arrive at that intersection between the art I’m making. Make it more in collaboration and have it serve the needs of anarchy and organizing.
Mk: You sound so cool as a kid and I’m so sorry your family faced that repression. Growing up targeted by the state can really radicalize a kid and I see this in queer youth spaces all the time. Like, when me and my friends are facing anti trans legislation and it’s impossible to believe in government after being denied gender affirming care so we almost have no choice but to build.
Anarchic Networks of Care, and I love that you’re still coming to anarchism. It really is this eternal, atemporal, iterative process, not a destination, isn’t it? It is. It is. So when you were a kid, what would have made organizing spaces more accessible for you?
Cate: That’s a great question. At first I wanted to say the notion that was even possible for children and youth and the internet, and to some degree those are true, but we were organizing and enacting mutual aid, even then, without having the words to call it that.
That’s what happens organically when you’re running around the woods for the feral pack of kids.
Mk: I love that vision of youth liberation so much. The autonomous organizing and the ungovernable nature of youth and the inherent response of it all. Thank you so much for voicing this. On that note, what advice would you have for kids and teens who want to get into housing advocacy or art?
Cate: I probably get a lot more good advice from youth than I give, but if I had to give advice, make art. Make art every day. If you can, whenever you can, withhold judgment of it. Read and learn about other youth advocates, strategies, and right now, read David Vojnarovic’s Close to the Knives. That’s what I’d,
Mk: I I love this idea of art as youth liberation and housing advocacy as central to these tendencies and this kind of disruptive queer anarchy is so meaningful.
On that note, any shameless plugs for your organizing or Jess Theory or other people’s organizing that you think is cool?
Cate: I have one timely shameless plug that I think probably listeners are already doing. Get out there and do what you can to stop world war three. That’s happening in the, in Palestine right now.
And all the little side distractions of war that Israel’s enacting. That’s what I’m really, that’s what’s happening right now. And one more shameless. Plug for David Wojnarowicz’s work. Everything you’ve talked about here comes together, and did come together in his life, in his art, in his organizing.
So again, I’ll make a plug for Close to the Knives.
Mk: Thank you so much for sharing your youth liberation journey, and also for recommending Gus Fury. I’m MK Zariel, this has been Cate Moses, and you’re listening to The Child and Its Enemies.