76% of Americans say democracy is under threat. How 2 AZ activists use joy and anger to resist

NPR and Marist are out with new poll numbers which suggest that over three-quarters of Americans view democracy as under threat. While Democrats and Republicans differ sharply on the nature of that threat, there seems to be broad agreement that resistance, of some kind, is an urgent matter.

But how best to resist? In recent weeks, we’ve seen hundreds of thousands of people take to the streets, from the so-called "Tesla Takedown" protests to the standoffs with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Los Angeles, to the wave of "No Kings" protests. Many of these protests were peaceful, featuring lots of music and dancing — but some turned violent, highlighting an unmistakable cultural undercurrent of outrage and anger.

Conversations about the virtues of joy and anger feel urgent in activist communities, and so for today’s Culture Cap, Marisa Mata Avalos, an artist and community organizer in Phoenix, who recently organized a Pride party with the tagline: “Joy is the protest,” and Jo Haas, a curator, facilitator and multimedia artist, and the creator of the Anger Project, have both thought deeply about both approaches.

Avalos and Haas joined The Show to talk about it.

Full conversation

SAM DINGMAN: Marisa, let me start with you. A very simple question. How was that party?

MARISA MATA AVALOS: It was so fun. We had a mix of very close friends show up, family members, and also just random strangers that saw it on the internet. So it was really cool to have new people in my, in my front yard and in the, in my house.

DINGMAN: Oh, it was at your house. OK, very generous of you.

MATA AVALOS: Yeah, thank you.

DINGMAN: Tell me what this, what this joy looked like at the party. How did that manifest itself?

MATA AVALOS: We had an open mic segment and people offered up poetry. Some people brought their instruments and played music, about love and about, queer experience. Yeah, we just, we had a lot of rainbow decorations, a lot of people smiling, embracing each other. And, laughing, my dogs were, there's a lot of joy from the dogs.

DINGMAN: Dogs are definitely keystones for joy, I find. Haas, can I ask you how much has Pride been a context for the anger work and workshops that you've been doing recently?

Rachel Marie Photography

JO HAAS: Well, I think that I'm not really sure actually. I guess I've never thought about it in that way, in terms of Pride. I do want to say that I think that the event that, with the joy event sounds phenomenal. I think joy is really important, especially in this time when, you know, so many terrible things are happening.

But in terms of anger, one of the reasons that I think it's so important to talk about anger and engage with anger in ways that are boundaried and also community-oriented. I think it's because it's difficult to feel Pride if you're, if you're dealing with a lot of suppressed emotions, and I think that anger is a very taboo emotion. I think it's often racialized and classed and gendered, and I think it's so often used as a way to suppress and silence the truth.

And so my desire to talk about and work with and engage with anger is really rooted in a desire to get to all of the emotions that are kind of suppressed within places that are stuck, right, because there isn't always an ability to talk about and express our emotions in a way where we're validated.

DINGMAN: Yeah, yeah. Well, let me ask you, Haas, if you could introduce us a little bit to what the anger project is. How do you work with folks on kind of connecting with these emotions that many are encouraged to keep suppressed?

HAAS: Sure, well, there are many different components of the anger project. One of the biggest components is workshops. So there are workshops that are facilitated where we talk about and engage with anger, and we go through different kinds of embodiment activities to help us work with our anger.

In the workshops, we might scream, we might dance, we might sing, sometimes we paint, write, play, sometimes we smash things. A lot of it centers around sharing stories as well. So there are always opportunities for usually at least one time and sometimes even two times during a session where we go around in a circle and everyone has an opportunity to share their own experiences.

And again, you know, it's really important to have boundaries in these spaces. So the way that it's facilitated. Hopefully we'll create as safe a space as possible. I don't think there are ever any safe spaces, but the objective is really to allow everyone's space and time to be able to speak about their experiences in a way that feels good, which can even be opting out.

Part of this process is about paying attention to how you're feeling inside and learning how to listen to the emotions that are happening within your body. So you might come into a, to this space and decide that you don't really want to share, and I think that's wonderful.

DINGMAN: Yeah, yeah, that's something I really hear in your reply there is this idea that it's not as much about encouraging people to be angry as much as it is about letting them be angry if that's what they need to be. Is that fair to say?

HAAS: Yeah, yeah, and talking about that and expressing it in a way where you're not doing harm. You're not harming anybody in the space, you're not harming yourself, but you're able to work through it.

I think one of the things that has always, I think just confused me about the, spiritual movement, and I know that there aren't, I'm I'm talking about this as a monolithic coal, which I know isn't accurate, right? That's not realistic. But in a lot of those spaces I've heard people say things like, you know, don't be angry, you shouldn't be angry, which is not realistic, you know, if you're human, you're going to feel all of the emotions, right?

They're just there to tell us what we need to do in our lives, right? But sometimes I'll, I'll hear people say, oh, just, you know, go meditate, and I'm like, wow, you know, if you're really angry, meditating is probably the, the last step you want to do.

Like, really, your nervous system is just vibrating. You need to be able to get it out. So go for a walk, you know, punch in the air, dance in your house, do something so that you can actually move the physical energy through your body in a way that doesn't hurt you, doesn't hurt anybody else. And then when your, when your body is finally relaxed, your nervous system is actually regulated, then meditate, right?

So I think it's really about the way we talk about anger. I think there's just the way we talk about anger and the way that we engage with it can often be harmful because of this cultural, this kind of overarching cultural, which I really think is part of, you know, systemic oppression.

DINGMAN: Sure, sure. Marisa, let me ask you, joy strikes me as something particularly in difficult times for a given community as an emotion that can also be somewhat shamed, somewhat stigmatized, sometimes people can feel like it's irresponsible to feel joy when there is so much suffering. How much does that come up in your work?

Matty Steinkamp

MATA AVALOS: Well, actually I was thinking one house was speaking about the people's spiritual practice and, yeah, that, that I have heard that also in spiritual spaces that, anger is like a lower emotion, a lot of, like guru people or like raise your vibration, good vibes only, so I, I definitely, want to echo what Haas is saying that, meditation can take on different forms and you can running could be a meditation, and creating or creating art is half destroying, right? So like smashing things I think can also be meditative.

And to your other question about joy, I think in the spaces where I am, people understand that it's hard to find that in them, like the joy because there's so much wrong, with the world. So I think people appreciate the space to be happy and to be OK in community.

There is like a boundary, and I think the word self-care comes up, when I'm thinking about this, it's like the, the, the balance between taking care of yourself and making sure that your, your soul and your being is, is joyful. But also, balancing that with not completely detaching from what's going on and yeah, I mean, it's it's hard, but we, we gotta stay human.

DINGMAN: Yes. Marisa, I wanted to pick up on something you were saying just a moment ago, you mentioned community. And something that I left out when I was introducing you and talking about this event that you recently threw where one of the taglines was Joy is the Protest. The second part of that was Community is the Shield, if I'm not mistaken. Tell me what you mean by that.

MATA AVALOS: So I, I do a lot of volunteering with different organizations, and recently I was in a neighborhood that had a lot of political flags. I'm not sure if I can can say which ones, but I was feeling very unsafe in this neighborhood, and it just kind of got me on like a little angry, also a little territorial.

In the area where I live, there's been a lot of gentrification, a lot of the community building that we've been, we've been working on for the past 10-11 years, a couple years ago started, we started to see people slip out, people get pushed out. And new people come in, which of course, like, we welcome the foreigner, but also like, we don't want our friends to get kicked out, you know, so, just thinking about the shifting in my neighborhood and what my, what my home looks like to passersby, I thought about getting a Pride flag.

Or, my family is of Mexican descent, so getting like a Mexican flag. There's also been pushback on protesters carrying the Mexican flag, right? So thinking about that and feeling resentful that I have to feel that like hesitation in my own neighborhood about doing that, especially since, you know, there's like, Supreme Court justices who have no, no qualm putting up their political flags.

So yeah, just a little bit of anger, a little bit of like wanting to stand my ground and, and say like this is my neighborhood and this is our, our culture here in my neighborhood, and we are welcoming people, we are happy, joyful people. We are loving people.

And, so that's part of the reason why we wanted to have the event be, partially in the front yard, and we put up a bunch of like rainbow balloons and all of that stuff and, yeah, I guess. Just wanting to make sure that we are visible and that we are seen in numbers and that we internalize that we are not alone.

DINGMAN: But critically, it seems like what you're saying is not just visible but visibly joyful, visibly not mourning or bemoaning necessarily, although obviously those are emotions that I'm sure are present, too. But if I'm hearing you right, there is a power in a mass of people demonstrating a certain relationship to other pressures in the community.

Haas, I wanna ask you, you know, you were speaking a moment ago about the importance on an individual basis for people in discovering a connection with anger, if that's what they feel they need to express. 

But what do you think is the importance of showing anger? I know part of what you do is put together these showings of the work that comes out of your workshops. Why is it good for people to see the anger of others?

HAAS: Well, I think it's, it's helpful for people to see their anger so that it doesn't continue to be this taboo way of expressing what's within ourselves, because when we're not allowed, like when it's pushed down and when we're suppressing it, I think it can come into our lives in ways that are really harmful, and I think that having the ability to express how we're feeling and our emotions, I think it's very important.

I also want to speak a little bit to what Marisa just said, and one, I think that what you're doing sounds so amazing because I think that finding pleasure and joy in a world that profits from our brokenness and dysfunction is a radical act in itself, right? I think that's also very important.

So I don't see these two ideas in opposition to each other at all. I see them as ways of working with emotion, and I also think that the anger project isn't about isolation. I think maybe I've talked about it in that way a little bit. But I don't mean it in that way.

It's definitely a community-oriented project, specifically because I've been dealing with my anger and isolating myself, and it's not helpful, you know, at a certain place in my life I'm, I'm, I was wondering like why I felt so stuck, and I think because I was so afraid to say how I felt. I was so afraid to express my feelings around anger and so it's felt very important to make this a community-oriented project as well.

DINGMAN: Yeah. Well, let me ask you both, I, I mean, I hear in the way that you're talking about this, a real fluency with the broader cultural context in which your work is taking place. You've both been doing this work for some time.

Marisa, let me start with you. How would you characterize this particular moment of community organizing, putting on events like the Pride party you were just describing, as compared to previous administrations, previous cultural pressures that you have felt a need to engage with through protest of some kind?

MATA AVALOS: I think I'm, I'm most closely connected to the Hispanic-Latino community here in Arizona. I think people are quicker to get it. Like, oh, that's interesting, yeah, you sharing like, hey, like I'm doing this event. It's important for us to be together in solidarity. Let me know if there's anything you need and please come through. I think people are like, they, they get it, like they're like, yeah, a bit of a shorthand, it sounds like, yeah, that's very interesting.

DINGMAN: Haas, what about you? How do you feel that people are quicker to get on board with the mission of anger than they have been previously, or has it shifted?

HAAS: Well, I think it might be similar to what Marisa was just talking about. I think that as a person who's gender queer and who's moved in some more marginal spaces, I think the people who are generally attracted to this work are people who have some level, if not multiple levels of marginalization, on their bodies, being put on their bodies.

So I think the people who are attracted to this work. are people who want to have safe spaces to speak about and explore and engage with anger.