During the month of our social media limpia, where we took a break from posting and interacting on social media platforms, we leaned into the silence. We leaned into questions around building and sustaining a political movement online, using social media as a critical tool.
La Limpia gave us the opportunity to pause and reconnect with ourselves — and understand that we have power.
In our five years as an organization, we have created spaces where Latinx organizers, movement leaders, and ordinary community members could realize, develop, and share their stories. With this empowered collective of misfits and nerds, visionaries y radicals, we have found Mijente’s sazón. And on social media, we recognized that our content that connects to the struggles on the ground, that uplifts the courage of our compas and allies, and celebrates the wins of our community are where we flourish. As we return to posting, we want to showcase more of the wins and Mijente’s history of organizing that has gotten us there — and the ways they connect to our fight for our communities’ right to thrive.
Our fight for el buen-vivir is the thread that weaves our stories.
And our stories are growing. During the limpia, our team came together to reflect and make vital assessments on the digital impact of Mijente. As we move forward, through our organizational redesign and develop the strategy around this new phase, we’re dreaming up innovative digital opportunities for impact.
The pause from social platforms gave space for us to begin to shift the way we interacted with media and planned our moves forward, like a much-needed halftime break in the middle of a game. We reflected on the reality of missed opportunities, moments when our base and partners could have used our voice in more visibility, amplifying their message and demands. In this way, the break from engaging with part of our online base was difficult. And still, it created some space for us to lean into what our communities were looking for — what they needed to hear and wanted to learn.
All this we take forward with us to shape the possibility of something new. We have been working behind the scenes to think through the ways that movement is shaped by the digital space, and how we can use our movement — our political casita, our principles, our campaigns — to transform the digital exchanges that so many in our community use and engage in every day.
Our plans for developing this process are still forming, and we will continue to trust in the importance of slowing down and taking the necessary time to sharpen and refresh our strategies. As we close out this year, we’ll be highlighting the legacy of our organizing in new ways.
Breaking the Limpia Early
We ended our social media limpia a few days early, in order to respond to the DHS release of the newly released prosecutorial discretion memo (PD memo). Since the beginning of the Biden Administration, Mijente has been calling on both President Biden and Secretary Mayorkas to lay out guidelines to ICE that provide relief from hyper-criminalization — and they delivered on some of those demands but not all.
We felt it was our responsibility to analyze and respond to this new PD memo policy, that we have dedicated over 8 months to influencing, so that we could increase the opportunities to defend our communities. The memo reflects the hard-won efforts of organizers and advocates, a shift towards more protections than we’ve had in the last 10 years. With this, there is space for organizers to stay in the fight — and we are ready.
We are excited to share this next season of Mijente with you, to continue realizing our dreams of el buen-vivir for all and innovating as we organize online interactions to offline actions.