Saturday Substack -- Forced Assimilation
American Imperialism at 250, Domestic Terrorism, & another possible world
Dear Becoming Ones:
I have been away from this space for a couple of weeks.
Part of that absence was practical. I was recovering from weeks of research, travel, and the slow work of returning home. But another part of it was more difficult to name. I have been asking myself how to continue writing in the public square about possibility, liberation, and collective becoming at a time when imagination itself is increasingly censored, disciplined, and foreclosed.
I have been asking different questions.
Where do I write now?
How do I write truthfully without surrendering to despair?
To whom am I writing?
What kind of archive are we creating together?
These letters are, for me, more than a newsletter. They are correspondence. They are an archive of becoming. They are evidence that another conversation remained possible even as so much around us insisted otherwise.
I hope you find something worthwhile in this slower practice of reading one another into existence.
Over these past weeks, I have also been sitting quietly with what is unfolding around us. I have watched the steady acceleration of moral exhaustion, symbolic violence, and political fragmentation. There are moments when I find myself asking a question that feels almost too simple for our complicated age:
Is nothing sacred anymore?
Today marks 250 years since the signing of the Declaration of Independence.
Anniversaries invite celebration, but they also require examination.
How far are we from the promises contained within that declaration? How far have we wandered from its imagination? Or were those promises always unevenly distributed, extended generously to some while withheld from others?
Perhaps the deeper question is whether we have become so grafted into empire that we can no longer discern another way of living together.
Freedom has become strangely difficult to recognize.
We celebrate independence while binding ourselves ever more tightly to economies of extraction, surveillance, domination, and endless growth. We have mistaken expansion for flourishing. We have confused security with control. We have inherited an imagination so colonized by empire that many of us struggle to imagine a future that does not depend upon someone else’s dispossession.
I cannot continue living as though nothing is happening.
Policy by policy, institution by institution, our common life is being rearranged before our eyes. Empires rarely collapse all at once. They fracture through countless ordinary decisions that slowly normalize what once would have been unthinkable.
As a trans refugee living in internal exile within the United States, these realities are not abstractions for me.
They have become the texture of everyday life.
In the small village where I live and in neighboring towns, I have been stopped repeatedly by law enforcement. Sometimes it is my tinted windows. Sometimes my registration. Sometimes there is no clear reason at all beyond suspicion itself.
I have come to call this policing by suspicion.
Suspicion becomes its own justification.
Suspicion becomes permission.
Suspicion becomes a technology through which certain bodies are continually reminded that their presence is conditional.
There is a particular terror in knowing that an ordinary traffic stop can become something else entirely.
I know that many people never return home from such encounters.
I did.
For that, I remain profoundly grateful.
One encounter still lingers with me. I was arrested in my own driveway. I was asked whether I was a citizen. Officers searched for something—anything—that would justify the encounter. The only thing they ultimately found was a terrified human being having a panic attack.
Living with panic disorder while standing before armed agents of the state is not merely stressful. It is a collision between mental health and institutional power, between vulnerability and coercion.
Many people do not survive that intersection.
I did.
And I refuse to mistake survival for justice.
As I write these words on a day devoted to celebrating freedom, I cannot ignore the carceral logics that continue to shape so much of our public life. These logics do not merely build prisons. They teach us to police one another, to fear difference, to confuse domination with order, and to mistake obedience for belonging.
Yet even here, I remain unwilling to surrender the imagination.
Because imagination has always been the first territory empire attempts to occupy.
If another world is possible, it will not emerge because power grants us permission. It will emerge because ordinary people continue cultivating forms of life that exceed the boundaries empire has drawn around what is considered possible.
Perhaps liberation begins there.
Not in the mythology of perfect independence, but in our willingness to become interdependent differently.
Not in innocence, but in truth.
Not in domination, but in relationship.
So on this Independence Day, I find myself asking a different question altogether:
What forms of freedom remain possible when we refuse to let empire define either our fears or our future?
May we become people capable of imagining beyond the architectures of suspicion.
May we become people who practice freedom before it is recognized.
May we continue becoming together.
Perhaps this day could become something more than a celebration of independence.
Perhaps it could become a day of interdependence.
A day when we ask ourselves what it means to live in right relationship—with one another, with the land beneath our feet, with the creatures who share this world, and with the generations who will inherit whatever we leave behind.
What if this became our work as one empire slowly fades into the sunset of another possible world?
Empires teach us that freedom belongs to the individual. Wisdom traditions remind us that freedom is cultivated together.
Forced assimilation is always beckoning us toward sameness. It asks us to become predictable, manageable, and legible to systems that mistake conformity for peace. Yet every movement toward liberation has required something else entirely: communities rooted in mutual understanding, mutual support, and shared responsibility.
Perhaps the future is less about accumulation and more about cooperation.
Perhaps cooperative housing, community land trusts, shared tables, neighborhood gardens, restorative economies, and networks of care are not nostalgic dreams but practices of survival. Small acts of interdependence may become the seeds of another political imagination.
Another world will not arrive fully formed.
It is cultivated every time we turn toward one another rather than away from one another.
This turning is what I have come to call daily metanoia—the ordinary practice of changing our minds, softening our hearts, and widening our moral imagination. Metanoia is not simply repentance. It is learning to perceive differently. It is allowing ourselves to become otherwise.
James Baldwin once reminded us that “not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”
The courage of our time is not certainty.
The courage of our time is the willingness to face what we have inherited without becoming captive to it.
Before I close, I want to return briefly to the question of assimilation.
Recently, Matthew Vines argued in a New York Times opinion essay for a vision of queer life that, to my reading, places increasing emphasis on assimilation into existing social norms. I worry that this vision mistakes inclusion within dominant institutions for liberation itself.
The greatest threat to queer flourishing has never been queer theory.
The greater danger has been the enduring alliance between white Christian supremacy and political power—a partnership that has too often sanctified exclusion, normalized domination, and baptized hierarchy as though it were holy.
Until we disentangle religion from its investments in empire, we will continue mistaking conformity for faithfulness.
Queer theory, at its best, is not an ideology demanding uniformity. It is a way of reading. A practice of questioning. A discipline of refusing those norms that insist there is only one faithful way to inhabit a body, a family, a community, or a future.
Its invitation is not chaos.
Its invitation is freedom.
Difference has never been a problem to solve.
Difference is the condition that makes life possible.
Forests flourish because of biodiversity. Healthy ecosystems depend upon variation, adaptation, and mutual exchange. Human communities are no different. When every voice sounds alike, when every body is expected to move the same way, when every life must fit the same script, we do not create unity—we create fragility.
Difference gives communities texture.
Difference gives us new languages for hope.
Difference gives us unfamiliar music, unexpected friendships, recipes we have never tasted, stories we have never heard, and futures we could never imagine alone.
May we resist every force that asks us to become smaller than our becoming.
May we protect the beauty of irreducible difference.
And may we discover, together, that liberation has never required our sameness.
It has always required our willingness to belong to one another without asking one another to disappear.
Happy 4th of July, becoming ones!
Paz, —Roberto Che Espinoza+