El Centro, Fabián Pavón: Online Activism and Brown Death
El Centro, Arnulfo Casillas: A Chicanx/Latinx Serving Institution (Not to Be Confused for an HSI)
Located just behind the library and almost completely protected by Mother Earth (or being slowly consumed by it; it’s all perspective, really), El Centro, Arnulfo Casillas adamantly refuses to be removed from its earned position as the University of California, Santa Barbara’s first cultural resource building and has been in operation since 1970.
Being a settler colonial institution, it was not meant to support, educate, or provide opportunities for students of color. Understanding their position and how they were expected to navigate the United States and taking place during the height of the Civil Rights era and the Chicano movement, students at UCSB protested and took over buildings, demanding that the campus address institutional racism. Students demanded increased recruitment and support for students of color, the hiring of more professors and counselors of color, and the establishment of Black and Chicano Studies departments. After the historic El Plan de Santa Barbara conference took place at UCSB in 1969, Chicano students outlined a plan for higher education for Chicanos.
“We were worth being exploited for our labor, we were worth being sent off to Vietnam war, but we were not worth any time or investment when it came to pushing us towards higher education so that we could become leaders in educational setting and/or United States society” - Fabián Pavón, Graduate Student Coordinator for El Centro.
Chicanx/Latinx students demanded concrete support from the same institution that claimed itself to be a Hispanic Serving Institution (HSI), stating that to truly support UCSB’s Chicanx/Latinx population, students needed, and rightfully deserved, Chicanx/Latinx departments, recruitment, and retention programs that addressed the specific needs of the Chicanx/Latinx student population, and a space for all student activists to be united under one umbrella. From these demands emerged Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán (MEChA), a Chicanx/Latinx student movement for higher education. To help make the vision of the plan become reality, in January of 1970, William Villa, EOP's first Chicano counselor, opened the doors to El Centro, building 406. At that time, the building was home to Chicano EOP, La Colección Tloque Nahuaque, the Chicano Studies Department, the Center for Chicano Studies, and Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán (MEChA). Today, El Centro is home to numerous student organizations and provides spaces for EOP counselors, THRIVE: Basic Needs, Counseling and Psychological Services (CAPS), Early Academic Outreach Program (EAOP), Education Abroad Program (EAP), and the UC Immigrant Legal Services Center.
Students often describe El Centro as a safe space. In the past year alone, students received services at El Centro 1,154 times. During the Winter and Spring Quarters, students used their ID cards to access El Centro about 492 times per month. Most ID card door swipes take place after regular hours of operation, emphasizing the ways that El Centro has come to be more than a settler colonial institution. Students who populate El Centro describe El Centro as holding a sense of community, a feeling of having a home away from home, and especially appreciating the cultural aesthetic and study spaces. 60% of students who utilize El Centro do so three or more times a week. Services students use the most are the snack station (63%), school supplies station (51%), EOP Counseling (34%), and THRIVE: Basic Needs (31%). Student organizations like El Congreso, Comunidad Latinx Celebración - CLG, Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), Generos Marjinalizades, for Justicia, Educación, y Revolución, Los Curanderos, and many other student organizations also hold their meetings at El Centro, and keep utilizing the space for its intended purpose: fighting institutional and systematic racism within the academic space through education and creating a Chicanx/x school of thought in a predominantly white institution.
Unfortunately, students have also continuously expressed their beliefs that El Centro could be improved by expanding and modernizing the building, increasing amenities, and keeping up with general maintenance requests. While students did reemphasize their love for the space, they have been adamant about insisting on the need to expand and keep up with maintenance requests. It is not a surprise to anyone aware of the history of El Centro why such demands seem to be repeatedly ignored. El Centro itself is a leftover, discarded building from World War II; included in the UCSB’s Long Range Development Plan, any buildings that were World War II army barracks were set to be demolished by the 90’s. When El Centro opened its doors to students in 1970, it was with the knowledge that the university already had an expiration date for the building that was meant to cultivate a sense of belonging for Chicanx/Latinx students all across UCSB. In 1973, UCSB announced its plans to defund Chicanx/Latinx programs, which included the Chicanx/Latinx department and Chicanx/Latinx EOP. In 1975, Arnulfo Casillas, along with other members of El Congreso, drawing inspiration from Black student organizers and activists and their efforts to have a Black Studies department and Black faculty and staff (amongst other demands), took over North Hall and protested the defending of programs they had fought for just a couple of years ago. Arnulfo Casillas and some El Congreso members were successful in ensuring such programs were not defunded, but not without first being sent to jail for their efforts.
In the 80’s, there was another attempt to defund Chicanx/Latinx student support, this time through support programs and grants like AS/EOP Emergency grants which benefited students of color, first-generation college students, and low-income students on campus. AS voted to defund the program, and students from the Black Student Union, Congreso, and other student-of-color organizations met at El Centro marched through the library, and disrupted an AS meeting, successfully convincing them to rescind their vote.
In the 1990s, the university proposed demolishing El Centro to expand the library. Luckily for El Centro (/s), Governor Pete Wilson's budget cuts to education halted the demolition of El Centro. Chicanx/Latinx students felt that their presence on campus was once again in jeopardy. In 1994, students from El Congreso went on a hunger strike to demand that El Centro become a permanent space - among other demands. The university only agreed to make the "concept" of El Centro permanent. However, students were able to get the university to rename building 406 to El Centro, Arnulfo Casillas, after the founder of El Congreso.
By the early 2000s, most of the departments, programs, and services had been moved out of El Centro. In the winter quarter of 2017, Congresistas received a notice from the university informing the students that they had 45 days to vacate El Centro. The reason was that there was dry rot under the building, and students were at risk if an earthquake were to occur. Students understood this as yet another attempt in the long list of attempts to remove Chicanx/Latinx students from El Centro. Students from El Congreso, MUJER, Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), and other students who utilized El Centro rebutted with a long list of unfulfilled service requests to the building. As a result of the student's rebuttal and refusal to leave the building, the university agreed to fix the dry rot, renovate the activities room, and reinstate El Centro under the umbrella of EOP.
On April 28, 2022, student leaders from El Congreso presented a list of demands to address gaps in the university’s approach to its Hispanic Serving Institution (HSI) status, El Centro Arnulfo Casillas, Comunidad Latinx Graduación (CLG), EOP Cultural Resource Centers (CRCs), and the housing crisis - particularly the plan for Munger Hall, among the numerous demands made regarding El Centro, Arnulfo Casillas, one of the demands called for the creation of a full-time Director position for the space. In January of 2023, Fabián Pavón was hired as a part-time Graduate Student Coordinator for El Centro, Arnulfo Casillas. Pavón, alongside student leaders from Mesa Directiva and the departments and programs housed at El Centro, gathered specific information about how El Centro, Arnulfo Casillas has been utilized, how students have been served, and how students experienced El Centro during the 2022-2023 academic year.
Fabián Pavón, Graduate Student Coordinator for El Centro
Fabián Pavón was born and raised in the city of Pomona CA. (Tongva Village of Toibinga). He identifies as a Chicano with Native Purhepecha roots. He is also a first-generation, formerly incarcerated student. He received an Associates in Arts to Transfer in History from Mt. San Antonio College. He later received his Bachelor's degree in Chicana/o/x Studies from the University of California, Santa Barbara (Chumash Village of Heli’yuk). After graduation, he returned to Mt. SAC as a Project Expert, where he established and developed El Centro: Latinx Student Support Program. He recently served as a board member of the Latina/o Roundtable of the San Gabriel and Pomona Valley and as a Parks and Recreation Commissioner for the City of Pomona. He successfully led a movement for a year-long Ethnic Studies graduation requirement at Pomona Unified School District and was successful in getting the city of Pomona to increase public investment in parks and recreation facilities and programs. He is currently attending UC Santa Barbara as a PhD student with the Chicana and Chicano Studies Department and is a Racial Justice Fellow. Using his hometown of Pomona as a site, his research takes a decolonial approach to studying local community struggles against anti-immigrant policies, educational oppression, and the coloniality of Chicana/o/x people. He hopes to become a professor of Ethnic Studies to continue to serve his community.
Dedicated to El Centro, its mission, and the students who receive its services, Fabián Pavón has given much of his first year as a graduate student to El Centro. In his short time and with the limited resources that El Centro has to fund his position, Brown Consciousness has gone above and beyond what his job description requires of him to ensure students at El Centro feel nurtured, cared for, respected, but most importantly supported throughout their academic journeys at UCSB. From creating flyers that show all the services offered at El Centro, developing and implementing tools for program evaluation and assessment, and developing a system for communal kitchen cleaning at El Centro, to establishing a structure for an endowment fund for El Centro, working with others to put in place current youth funds at El Centro, listening to students and ensuring maintenance requests are finally honored and up to date, as well as holding facilities and maintenance crews accountable and in compliance with their tasks el Centro, mentoring undergraduate students with archival research, running activist tours, getting a basic needs vending machine up and running at El Center so students in need can access free food and beverages, making office space available for all students of color, low income, and first-generation at the graduate level to allow for in-person office hours for undergraduate students, and hosting one of the most attended EOP events to date.
Much like the Chicanx/Latinx activist and organizer before him, Favi has poured his mind, body, and soul into El Centro and is unapologetically stubborn about ensuring El Centro receives the recognition it deserves. Part of that laborious task involves consolidating, creating, and increasing methods of communication between all departments responsible for el Centro. The other part is connecting with different organizations all over campus to build more community. This year, during Hispanic Heritage Month, the official UCSB TikTok account reached out to Favi to highlight El Centro.
Online Activism and Brown Death
El Centro’s debut on UCSB’s official TikTok page occurred the Friday before Jeanne Umana, who had previously been employed as a (law…) lecturer at UCSB, went viral on TikTok for being recorded by a construction worker she was harassing. Los Angeles–based activist Edin Alex Enamorado held Umana accountable by sharing the two videos of her being a racist bigot. What followed was a demonstration of organizers and activists both in and outside of Santa Barbara showcasing solidarity, anger, and love by blocking the corner of Garden and Micheltorena streets and shutting down an intersection for several hours. Enamorado’s call out for a “religious gathering” at 8:00 p.m. that Sunday night gained traction on social media and brought together a community of over 250 individuals all dedicated to showcasing their love for ‘Luis,’ the victim of a hate crime rooted in racist bigotry, all of those who he reminds us of, and those we cherish who navigate similar spaces in somewhat interchangeable positions. It is undeniable that social media, TikTok in particular, aided in these efforts by providing a space that transcended geographies and connected more than 250 individuals, all dedicated to similar social justice issues.
After attending the “religious gathering” the night before, Fabián noticed that the comment section under El Centro’s TikTok video he and other students dedicated to fighting institutional racism at UCSB had worked so hard on was flooded with the public’s concern about UCSB’s connection to Umana. UCSB’s connection to Umana catching up to them was to be expected, they did sign her paychecks at one point. Added too was the inevitable way that the internet tends to cause people to jump into action blindly and quickly fall into extremes due to negligence and ignorance. Under the first and only TikTok video UCSB has posted about El Centro, its history, and resources, the comments redirected and centered the attention to a white racist woman who had not been employed by the institution since 2004. I want to be clear when I communicate this: to center a white woman and her racist bigotry under a video highlighting a geographical space existing within a physical settler colonial institution that has historically been persistent in removing that same space that is dedicated to fighting back against said institution and providing students from communities like the ones over 250 people gathered to support the day before is a concrete example of the way that social media activism can be harmful. As always, individuals often belonging to communities that are being “fought for” in the name of social media activism end up getting caught in the crossfire, bearing the brunt of the burden and the aftermath of the consequences that carry over.
“Finally being posted meant that we were getting one step closer towards the right direction in terms of actually supporting and acknowledging a space that arguably made UCSB an HSI…and see these are things the Chancellor would not acknowledge, things that administration wouldn’t acknowledge, that is that what made UCSB an HSI was El Centro.” - Fabián Pavón.
For Fabián, it was a step in the right direction towards acknowledging a legacy of student struggle and dedication to unapologetically demand space for freedom-dreaming practices. Finally, getting that recognition meant, means (present tense always) that student struggle is being recognized even though they should not have to constantly deal with the burden of creating a space for themselves within an institution that claims to be an HSI. Unfortunately, the majority of the comments under the video demanded UCSB to answer for Umana’s actions and completely disregarded a Brown, previously incarcerated abolitionist activist dedicated to El Centro and the students who make it a safe space within a violent environment.
While within the scope of social media, a lot of ideas that float around can be easily collected, social media tends to conflate these concepts and treat them as trends to consume, regurgitate, and discard. The darker side of social media activism necessitates an understanding of the ways that Gen Z and even some younger millennials have been educated by and through a peer-to-peer framework, and how vital social media is to the practice of that framework. What emerges from peer to peer framework with social media access is a type of education that is based on an algorithm that is, on the one hand, specifically curated for the user based on their engagement on the app itself, and on the other hand, the people that are active on the app have no control over. Both of these unfortunate concrete ways of engaging with a peer-to-peer form of education through social media platforms feed into the echo chamber we as a society already navigate. Social media activism almost always inevitably falls flat in nuance because nuance is not appealing, nor is it very trendy. But ‘Luis’ and Fabián Pavón are not trends, and what happened to Fabián in this particular case was an example of the ways social media activism discards the same individuals they claim to care about, fight for, and want to protect.
I say all this to note the following: wanting to hold UCSB accountable for its actions and participation in colonial settler violence is not wrong, it’s encouraged. Trying to point out the hypocrisy in celebrating Latinx Heritage Month while having historically (and, allegedly, currently) hired racist professors is valid but misdirected. We all know what the intention of the comments was, and that does not excuse the harm of the consequences and aftermath. It is not our job to “understand” people’s activism journeys, nor is it our obligation to entertain weaponized incompetence. If someone is on social media claiming to hate racism, they should also care about the well-being of individuals existing within a place practicing colonial violence through methods of capitalistic exploitation of labor (my Venmo is plugged, btw jeje), racial discrimination, housing inequities, and the list keeps going but weaponized incompetence is the point because google is free. Contributing to Brown's death by discarding Fabián Pavón and his dedication to El Centro, which would have benefitted the public as he holds activist tours damn near 25/8 and El Centro has archives tracing their history at UCSB and across geographies, and centering a white woman in the name of social justice is weaponized incompetence at best, (re)produced colonial violence through active disregard for Brown struggle and resistance at worst. Though, the Venn diagram is a circle.
“It felt a bit disheartening… felt a bit invalidating… felt like I got some dirt kicked in my face a little bit. I felt like the hard work I been putting in, the hard work that a lot of student leaders at El Centro have been putting in throughout the decades, was kind of overshadowed, and I felt sad about that… [as a Brown scholar in a PWI] I’m glad that the public is holding UCSB accountable, but I also want them to understand that UCSB can be racist, but there are spaces within UCSB that are actively anti-racist and both exist in the same place at the same time. I feel like a lot of the public don’t understand that that can happen, I feel like they think that all of UCSB is racist, and there aren’t people actively challenging the racism on campus.”
I previously stated that the ideas being engaged within social media spaces centered around activism and social justice issues impact people in concrete, material ways outside of social media. While the ideas being engaged with may be consumed, regurgitated, and discarded like trends, the people these inequities impact are not trends. Similarly, UCSB the institution is not entirely an accurate representation of the UCSB community which includes many individuals who have backgrounds in activism and desire more from the ivory tower at the same time, they demand more from it. It may not be a philosophy the public understands or agrees with (and we can unpack those ideas together!), but if the public is claiming to care about and fight for Brown life, then they should have watched the video for longer than 5 seconds, Fabián shows up on the 9th second. I am not asking for pardon on my delivery: my material reality, like that of Fabián and ‘Luis,’ demands the public to hold itself accountable. I demand a nuanced understanding and similar fashion action if the claims are that we are loved, cared for, and protected.
Tumblr and the (Re)introduction of Social Media Activism
I grew up on Tumblr and I don’t think I ever entirely grew out of it, I just transferred over to Twitter.
For those unfamiliar, Tumblr became a more popular platform during 2015/16 when more mainstream social media platforms became increasingly amused by Tumblr’s intensity, dramatics, and, more importantly, the dialogical exchanges amongst platform users. Tumblr caught me at a perfect time; I was an adolescent barely entering my teenage years. I had angst, anger, frustration, thoughts that were not fully fledged out and adults that had no financial, physical, or emotional energy to entertain the ideologies I was consuming on the internet and working towards understanding and dismantling simultaneously. Tumblr, as a space and place allowing for individuals across oceans, borders, and geographies to connect, opened the doors for new possibilities of engagements and imagination for future tool development, utilizing similar platforms for numerous ways of engaging with those outside of our immediate geographical reach and epistemic knowledge. Tumblr provided 13-year-old me with one major opportunity: get all my thoughts out in an uncensored, unedited, raw way that could be deleted, edited, worked on, and fleshed out all within the comforts of my downstairs bedroom somewhere in the East side of Salinas where inside a laptop, I was Diotimalogy, and outside, I was Caramela.
Tumblr adopting the aesthetic and reputation (again, in the eyes of mainstream media) for being an anonymous site, more similar to Reddit, provided its users with a spam-like account that was public to all those who followed the rule of thumb: no face, no case. What came from this, too, was a generation of adolescents being immersed in spaces filled with all the positive, negative, and in-between that a material world existing with boundaries could and could not offer. Tumblr informed, socialized, and, to some extent, radicalized me. I would not be the scholar I am today had I not been discussing my (very watered down and sometimes flat-out wrong) understanding and interpretations of ideologies, practices, philosophies, and interpretations of the world I was co-inhabiting with those existing on the same platform as I. Again, regardless of our positionality in the material concrete world around us, Tumblr connected us across boundaries and in ways (presumably) unable to be imagined within the confinements of geography.
Anyone who also grew up on Tumblr will mention how bat shit chaotic it was. Tumblr seemed to have endless communities within larger communities under the umbrellas of more communities, and it would expand itself just as it would narrow spaces down. I am convinced some of the first people in need of touching grass included my Tumblr cohort (with luv, respect, and concern). I was 13 on Twilight forums fighting for my life every day— because I was 13 — and developing a sense of self, sue me for giving a fuck about the way I was perceived on a platform I would spend all my nights on. It was the site where I made many intellectual breakthroughs as well as mistakes. While I felt as if I was being burned at the stake every time I discussed an unpopular opinion, time seemed to move at such a fast pace on Tumblr that my anonymity and desire to just move on, jump, and add some form of contribution to the next topic of discussion pushed me towards neglect. I actively neglected to demand the nuance of myself and others. For all of these reasons, the internet allowing for more accessibility also allowed for a dangerous pipeline whereby adolescents poured all of their neglected emotions and quickly fell into extremes. We followed each other blindly and did so for a multitude of reasons, but particularly because of the ways we felt disconnected from the world and as if our confined geographies were removed from our sense of belonging. I was first introduced to terms I engage with in my doctoral studies on Tumblr, some of the terms during their first drafts or debuts on online platforms. Many terms and ideas and concepts and connections were made inside online spaces, good and bad, and all that is in between.
During the peak of COVID-19 and the Black Lives Matter and #MeToo movements in the United States, I was (re)introduced to the ways social media could connect individuals across barriers. It’s also important to recognize how the disability community specifically developed the framework of online activism and implemented this praxis in and across social media platforms. Social media activism as a theoretical framework provided activists and organizers with the tools, knowledge, and an understanding of how to utilize their social media platforms as means of sharing resources and information, fundraising, making academic jargon, politics, and discussions on race, gender, class, sexuality, disability and more digestible, accessible, and able to be discussed amongst themselves, peers, and new audiences wanting to be informed. Social media activism also fell victim to the never-ending hunger for the internet and was quickly adopted by individuals who were interested in being involved in the makings, imagining, and changing of a world they had always lived in but were understanding in a new light. From that desire emerged a new group of individuals across all intersectionalities having the same discussion at multiple stages, creating a disconnect due to lack of nuances (because of the limitations posited on nuances due to the increase at which information is shared, commented on, dissected, abstracted, pulled apart, and like trends, discarded after it’s been beaten to exhaustion.) Unfortunately, the (re)introduction of social media activism in a platform that seems to exponentially surpass Tumblr’s speed at which information is shared, digested, discussed, and discarded also introduced a new way by which individuals from historically alienated and erased communities were being (re)traumatized, (re)consumed, and (re)discarded. The darker side of social media activism when utilized in certain social media platforms, engendered a group of individuals who quickly fell into extremes with misdirected anger in the name of social justice.
Final Thoughts: Okay… Now What?
I know that it can be much to grapple with the desire to be involved in conversations and practices dedicated to eradicating inequities in the world, and I understand that if you read this and see much of yourself, it can be deterring. I want, and hope, you understand that should not be the case. I had Tumblr, dawg. I was posting my 13-year-old understanding of WATERED down Marx, getting laughed at by ivy league scholars (who, like, low key…, were also being taught watered-down Marx, but one of them shared with me my first PDF copy of The Communist Manifesto while commenting something along the lines of “this is the stupidest thing I have ever read, read the fucking text please,” and while I kept some of my initial critiques and thoughts, and in true Aquarius fashion don’t think it was the stupidest thing they had ever read, I’m sure it was stupid). I had never even read The Communist Manifesto, but after I did, I picked up adjacent readings. Outside of social media, I dove myself into what I was reading, and my understanding of the world as I was viewing it (through the lens of a 13-year-old) (re)imagined and informed the ways I was interpreting what I was reading. I took all of what came out of my interactions on Tumblr and other social media platforms and became a graduate student; it is undeniable that early access to that type of information deeply influenced my personhood.
However, my personhood has been severely impacted by my concrete positionality. My material body requires a nuanced understanding of the world already because of the way it is consumed, imagined, and understood by the white lens of reason, and rationality posits my death as a premature promise where the negation of it often seems improbable. The way my body is understood positions me in spaces and places where social, emotional, mental, and physical premature death is seemingly always a promised possibility. To truly interact with these ideas meant to also engage with the reality that I was part of a practice of theoretical abstraction that much of the world was, and to some extent still is, unable to comprehend, and I am not okay with that.
I demand self-proclaimed allies, activists, organizers, educators, and all who utilize social media platforms as mediums to encourage discussion and action around issues revolving around social justice to engage with nuances because the lives of those discarded in the name of social media activism are always those who belong to already historically alienated communities.
I also demand that I never give criticism without providing a new way of imagining the possibilities of a collective aim at eliminating social injustices rooted in white supremacist ideologies. These ideas and concepts are heavy, and I am also growing as I practice my methods of (re)imagination and desire to exist in a world where I am free to dream of an earth absent from preventable, premature, Black and Brown death. Here is how we can start small:
It begins with looking within and asking what is most calling, important, and vital to one’s being. What screams when reading about social, emotional, mental, and physical, premature, preventable death?
Following the process of inner work is looking for communities, organizations, or individuals who are working within that sphere.
Keep up with those who bring inspiration, sign up for alerts on their latest posts, read, and take time to take in what is occurring both within that sphere, outside of it, and in between.
Background work is necessary because the next step after background work is action. Both are vital to the aim of liberation, and we seem to have forgotten the former and just went ahead with the latter. Frightening times have made this step seem unimportant, but when engaging with the lives of those who have always been at risk for premature elimination by the state, it is a necessary component. Emphasize love, care, and nurture in your practices, and be kind to the earth, yourself, and those around you.
Focus on skills already within your scope of knowledge, what are you good at and how can that skill be utilized to benefit exactly what it is you are trying to be involved in? The possibilities here are endless and there are many ways to be involved in creating change.
Follow youth groups, activists, and organizers like Fabián Pavón and demand a nuanced understanding of the world. The lives being claimed to matter deserve this much, at the very least, the absolute very least.
