This post considers what anthropological educators committed to abolition can learn from a community-based liberatory curriculum called Telpochcalli. Telpochcalli, which means ‘House of Youth’ in Nahuatl, was developed by staff at MILPA, a Chicano-Indigenous healing and justice collective based on the Central Coast of California. It is a grassroots abolitionist curriculum that counters carcerality in part through offering a safe and affirming space for meaningful relationship-building and transformative learning.

While Telpochcalli draws primarily on Chicano-Indigenous history and teachings, youth of all demographics can participate. Participants (typically ages 13–24) join a cohort run once a week, two hours at a time, after school in a community space. There is no teacher, but a small set of facilitators who themselves have been through the curriculum. Braiding together an appreciation of participants’ culture and ancestry, development of critical consciousness, and engagement in movement-building, Telpochcalli fosters young people’s kinship, belonging, and commitment to community. It was designed for and by youth impacted by carceral systems: juvenile detention, probation, foster care, and schools, which, as part of the “school-prison nexus,” are key sites in which the logics and technologies of surveillance, control, and punishment are disproportionately used on students of color (Sojoyner 2016).

In research collaboratively designed by MILPA staff, including Desiree and George, alongside coauthor Megan, we have been gathering stories about the impacts Telpochcalli makes on participants. Our research team has heard dozens of stories from young people from the agricultural regions of Salinas, Watsonville, and Yolo County, who largely identified as Mexican American and from low-income migrant families (Building Justice Podcast 2023). Many directly contrasted their participation in Telpochcalli with a pattern of disciplinary and diminishing experiences in public schools: students sanctioned for swerving from white middle-class norms of language, knowledge, bodily comportment and adornment; disproportionately punished for perceived transgressions through zero-tolerance policies; misunderstood and underestimated as needing remedial work or being steered away from AP [Advanced Placement] classes. Stressed and alienated, some students felt disconnected from the purpose of what they learned in school. In Telpochcalli, they thrived in learning what many articulated as “the real history” of the United States as well as deeply, disarmingly resonant concepts like the school-prison nexus. While many cited this as a paradigm-shifting realization for them, it was also how it was imparted that was arguably so impactful.

Here we distill a core strategy of Telpochcalli’s abolitionist pedagogy: establishing horizontal relational norms through what MILPA calls ‘the circle process.’ “Getting into different relation,” as Mariame Kaba has argued (2021), is fundamental abolitionist praxis, experimenting with new forms of accompliceship and accountability. By horizontal relational norms, we gesture to a realignment of conventional educational relationships (teacher > student; student vs. student) to be more equitable and mutual, where students are encouraged to see themselves and each other as producers of knowledge. We further consider if and how the circle process might be adapted to other settings in higher education. Though we caution against extracting pedagogical techniques developed to meet the realities of a particular population—one that typically shares a set of cultural resources as well as intergenerational experiences of detribalization and state violence—we should nevertheless learn from what the youth in our study disclosed about their experiences with carcerality in their schools.

Consider how your own students may carry with them similar or different histories. For those who work in comprehensive state university settings, junior/community colleges, and/or serving high numbers of first-generation students from working-class families and minoritized communities, it is especially critical to consider what experiences and associations they maintain from their time in public school. From there, whatever the focus of your course, they can potentially serve as a place where students can realize alternatives to, and liberation from, those deep-seated disciplinary and diminishing strictures.

Circling Up: Horizontal Relational Norms

Across our approximately fifty interviews, participants told us in a variety of ways that they considered Telpochcalli ‘educational,’ but it felt radically different (and vastly better) than their public schools. This was in part because each session of Telpochcalli is held as a circle, drawing on Chicanx and Xicana feminist legacies of talking or healing circles as spaces of re-humanization and justice (Caporale 2020; Zepeda 2021).

In circle, chairs are organized into a loose ellipsis, and an altar with herbal medicines, elements of water and fire, and other objects is set up somewhere in the center-ish. Both participants and facilitators are able to see each other, speak, listen, and be heard. But ‘the circle process’ is more than a seating arrangement. A crowdsourced set of community agreements is established early on, and each circle begins with a round of ‘gifts and baggage,’ a check-in where all can disclose how they’re feeling as they start their weekly after-school session. Facilitators have latitude to adapt the curriculum to the specifics of their cohort (5–20 people), and thus participants have an important role in the shape each cohort takes. These practices scaffold a more horizontal set of relations where everyone is prompted to contribute ideas, experiences, and feelings throughout their time together. Importantly, facilitators draw out participants’ idiosyncracies and intersectionalities. As Alexis put it, reflecting on his experience as a facilitator, youth learn that “we can answer the same thing in a completely different way from our [different] lived experience and have the space for vulnerability, to ask questions about things you may not have known about, without feeling like oh, you didn't know this?” As affective strategies of abolitionist pedagogy (Zembylas 2021), these practices rework the silencing and shame youth of color experience in schools, and instead support participants in building relationships and familiarity (conocimiento) over time, developing the sense of safety required for deep reflection, connection with other realities, and transformative learning; “in order to learn differently, we have to feel differently” (Hemmings 2012, 150; quoted in Zembylas 2021).

Our interviewees shared the profound impacts of this horizontality: how it healed the fear and degradation they experienced being policed in their schools and helped them realize their own capacity to contribute to powerful collective understandings and even social change. For example, Valeria told us that “I never felt I belonged in any of my schools.” Despite being an excellent student, she felt constantly diminished by her teachers and school administration, who reproduced values and sentiments that she characterized as white-normative and racist. She felt her Brown skin was not appreciated and her monolingual Spanish mother was disrespected. But at Telpochcalli, in circle, “I just have never felt valued like that,” she said. “I’ve never seen other young people who were Brown […] be valued and given the space to really like just bare ourselves and our souls to each other… and [now] I think even when people aren't willing to listen to me, I know that I know, and what I know is valued. And I know that now I have confidence in myself because of what I've learned.”

When we first interviewed Valeria in 2021, she talked about developing a critical anti-racist and anti-carceral vocabulary and speaking out against a racist incident and its aftermath at her high school, when the administration and district consistently failed to create a safe environment for students of color. She further told us how important it was that Telpochcalli had helped her “have pride in my identity” as Indigenous, reworking the shame she had previously felt. In our second interview in 2024, Valeria noted how she drew on her ancestry as a source of power as she began attending classes at an esteemed University of California campus. Her imposter syndrome was renewed with each class, as she was generally the only Brown woman in her STEM classes. But remembering that her ancestors “did hard things” and survived, she sees entering STEM as “doing work for my community as well, because we're finding the little pathways for someone else to feel like they can do it, too.” For Valeria, Telpochcalli’s horizontal relational norms catalyzed the revision of her relationships with her peers and educators in both her high school and university, speaking up for herself and her peers and so her mother wouldn’t have to risk belittling for her language, and more recently asserting her own belonging in white-dominant and STEM spaces as grounded in her ancestors’ endurance and a trail-blazing service to those who will come next. She is not just an individual making her way, learning for its own sake, but part of a lineage that refuses its oppression and makes its own space in institutions designed to exclude or diminish them.

Another participant (and later, facilitator), B.G., noted at length how being in circle and sharing experiences with peers connected with realizing one’s sense of power and catalyzed strategies of carceral refusal:

I think a lot of the impacts [of Telpochcalli] were like… just people really realizing their own power, their own will in in the world, and how they can make decisions for themselves, and they can go against the grain, like they don't have to accept the conditions that they're dealt… I think is like a really core thing that I saw among people, just the light up of like, Wait a minute. This shit sucks. And actually, we don't just have to accept it, whatever. That shit specifically was our system of mass incarceration, or the communities that we come from, and how marginalized they are. And how even just by being in that circle together, even just by sharing our stories about our community, we were already doing something different than what we had kind of been raised to do or raised to think.

The horizontal relational norms established through Telpochcalli, “the circle process” of connecting with and learning from each other, is the foundation for all kinds of engagement and transformation, evident in the wide-ranging directions participants take upon their graduation from the program. Critically, this horizontality rearranges relationships in an educational space into novel arrays of collaboration, mutuality, belonging, and changemaking, grounding the everyday work of abolition. Kaba writes that being part of a collective “helps to not only imagine new worlds, but also to imagine ourselves differently” (2021, 4). That is, nothing actually otherwise could be built without individual dispositions and social re­lations changing as well. Young people like Valeria and B.G. reflect on and rework their role in their lineage and their community, revising their relationships with those around them; they become accomplices in each other’s healing and liberation, rather than siloed students working in parallel to produce the same knowledge determined by top-down criteria.

Becoming Co-conspirators in the Classroom

Can we hold classes like a circle? The circle process entails creating and holding a space where students’ realities and experiences can be shared, centered and honored, creating an educational otherwise that can repair and rework experiences of carcerality in such settings and create the conditions for transformative understandings. Applying aspects of the circle process in higher ed settings makes space for students to build novel relationships with each other and ourselves as educators, inviting them to become co-conspirators in knowledge generated together (Love 2019). As these classes might be both bigger and more striated in experience and privilege, implementing these strategies requires care, humility and contextualization; educators should reveal the “hidden curriculum” that a shift in emphasis from individualized achievement to collective knowledge production is part of an abolitionist praxis of visioning and building otherwise in mutuality.

Teaching Tool: Scaffolding Horizontality

Creating an environment where all can equitably contribute to the knowledge produced is a powerful pedagogical technique that disrupts carceral logics of compliance, isolation and dehumanization that linger in conventional pedagogies. The results are found not only in profound understanding and application of class material, but in the relationships reworked in the process: students become accomplices or co-conspirators in each other’s learning and can develop a sense of themselves as capable producers of knowledge. This is a foundational shift in imagining oneself that can lead onto new social roles and relationships, building otherwise in grounded ways.

This horizontality needs to be scaffolded, cultivated, and maintained. Here are a few tools for doing so distilled from the Telpochcalli approach:

1. Establish the class as a community of knowledge in which you will be reflecting, thinking, visioning, and applying powerful understandings together.

• In your syllabus, first class, and throughout, remind students: “In this class, we are all working together to understand our world and imagine and build it otherwise!”
• Brainstorm a set of community agreements early in the semester to together hold a space that is safe for students to share their experiences. Let them offer their ideas for these agreements (think of them as a set of norms rather than rules). Come prepared with a few, like:
  • You are encouraged to use your authentic voice in this classroom—don’t feel you have to tame your tongue or speak a certain way, if you are speaking of your own realities and experiences!
  • Practicing humility, consider your own social positions and how they shape your experiences and perspectives.

2. Consistently do a check-in to start each class, such as sharing gifts and baggage. Model this yourself. If you have a small class, all can contribute. If it’s a larger class, let students volunteer to share, and encourage new voices to chime in. Plan to cover less content in your class so you have time for this important check-in and take seriously what they share with you to ensure this is a praxis of mutuality and care, rather than a performative exercise. This means perhaps adapting your class or course plans or following up individually or collectively as appropriate.

• Suggested verbiage: What are your gifts (things you’re happy about) and baggage (things you’re dealing with) today? You don’t have to have baggage, but you do have to have a gift.

3. Create ways for students to connect their experiences with class concepts.

• Leave ample space in your lectures for their input, especially with concepts that impact their lives. Build on what they share. Ask open-ended questions like:
  • How did [topic] resonate with you? Is this something you recognize? Have you seen similar or different dynamics in your own family/school/community/etc.?
• Design reflective assignment(s) that encourage students to share their own cultural practices and/or personal experiences, through their own preferred format or modality (essay, poster, recording, etc.).