the justice chronicles, a reason why

Dear Friends, Colleagues, and Community;

For months I have struggled to discover what it might mean to resist oppression and embrace love.

My name is Danielle S. Castillejo. I am an Indigenous – Mexican – German mother of four children, psychotherapist, partner, and advocate in Poulsbo, Washington. My husband is an Indigenous – Mexican immigrant, who gained US citizenship over 10 years ago. Together we are raising a young man of 18 years, a young woman of 16 years, a young woman of 14 years, and a young man of 12 years. We see the world full of pain and full of hope for the future of our children.

I write requesting your partnership, wisdom, and participation in resisting systemic violence, through love. A system which not only demands our participation in injustices, but requires us to smile at one another and pretend everything is okay. And, if we do not participate, we are meant to move through that same system to achieve an equality, which we will never arrive at. We can resist.

We resist through love, art, poetry, stories — believing the narrative of our neighbors. Love starts with us. It starts in small ways of opening the door, or smiling at a stranger, opening our eyes to humanity around us.

Gregory Boyle writes;

“The wrong idea has taken root in the world. And the idea is this: there just might be some lives out there that matter less than other lives.”

This is YOUR place. These are OUR People, in OUR community.

Together we can change, and give our children a chance to live in a society of more inclusion and unity.

Cesar Chavez said, “We cannot seek achievement for ourselves and forget about progress and prosperity for our community... Our ambitions must be broad enough to include the aspirations and needs of others, for their sakes and for our own.”

The invitation is for you to write, draw, paint, make music — to create pictures and worlds of stories which accurately reflect our joys, hopes, pains, struggles toward justice and belonging. Art in its forms has capacity to shape the worlds in which we live, as well as join with those around us through knowing more than the surface of the worlds we paint on social media.

James Baldwin said, “You write in order to change the world … if you alter, even by a millimeter, the way people look at reality, then you can change it.”

If you would like to write, draw, paint, record music to join our chronicles, please submit your work to Danielle.rueb@theseattleschool.edu or luiscastillejo@ymail.com .

Danielle S. Rueb Castillejo