A cross-continental reflection on militarization and colonial control shows how mutual aid and community care—from Minneapolis to Puerto Rico—become the infrastructure of collective survival and resistance.
This essay is part of an ongoing Gender & Democracy series, presented in partnership with Groundswell Fund and Groundswell Action Fund, highlighting the work of Groundswell partners advancing inclusive democracy. You’ll find stories, reflections and accomplishments—told in their own words—by grassroots leaders, women of color, Indigenous women, and trans and gender-expansive people supported by Groundswell. By amplifying these voices—their solutions, communities, challenges and victories—our shared goal is to show how intersectional organizing strengthens democracy.
In each of our communities, every day seems to announce itself. Whistles and shouts for our neighbors punctuate each hour, as blades of helicopters and flight drills slice through the air into the night. Increased military and federal government presence is visible, splitting images between the corners of our everyday lives and active battlefields.
We write from two different places, often discussing them separately. We do, however, live as part of the same story.
One of us is transmasculine, queer, white and living in an occupied Minneapolis.
The other is Boricua, queer, a cisgender woman living in a re-militarized Puerto Rico.
… Both of our homes have long been a testing ground for what happens when people are denied sovereignty and told to endure.
Though we are shaped by different geographies, histories and identities, the conditions we navigate are bound together by the same forces: federal control, militarization, racialized violence, and the steady erosion of safety and self-determination.
As those forces cling to their roots of violence and hate, we keep to our own: We resist, and we survive.
Right now, daily life in Minneapolis is shaped by an unprecedented federal enforcement surge. Thousands of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents flood the streets, deployed across the metro. Helicopters buzz overhead and armed agents, brazen in their lawlessness and paramilitary cosplay, congregate at transit hubs, parks and places of business. (Editor’s note: In response to tremendous pressure and backlash, the Trump administration this week withdrew roughly 700 immigration personnel—ICE and CBP—from Minneapolis; about 2,000 agents remain.)
In Puerto Rico, life under colonial control means decisions about daily life—energy and utility services, food security, housing, emergency response, healthcare and education—are made by a federally appointed fiscal oversight board. Businessmen and investors call the final shots on life-defining decisions made to ensure vulture funds are paid up after buying up debt bonds for pennies on the dollar.
Meanwhile, the illusion of a sovereign government succumbs to the authoritarian demands and ideologies of the Trump administration. We face the largest military presence in the archipelago since the early 2000s, the visibility of boots on the ground increasing, insisting on itself. Our rights continue to erode, criminalizing bodily autonomy and dismantling accountability and transparency; our land and our natural resources stripped for investors and live practice; our neighbors torn from their families and communities, stripping us of our right to agency and welcoming in the place we know to be our home.
While seemingly unlikely, both of our homes have long been a testing ground for what happens when people are denied sovereignty and told to endure. In Minneapolis, the 2020 uprising following the police murder of George Floyd exposed the depth of state violence—just blocks from the murder of Renee Good and not far from the execution of Alex Pretti—and the scale of collective resistance it provoked. The world now sees militarized occupation, mass surveillance and the criminalization of dissent.
It also now knows that neighbors can organize at speed: Mutual aid networks, community defense and care infrastructure built in real time, asserting that safety comes from one another, not armed control.
Occupation attempts to shrink us, hoping to carry us off in surrender. … Our lives are linked by these systems through their harm, but also by the ways we resist them.
As in many parts of Minnesota, this has been Puerto Rico’s lived reality for generations. Our homes, our bodies, our resources have all been used as a training ground in the imperialist agenda for power and control. During our over 100 years of occupation, Boricuas have endured forced sterilization, unconsentual testing for medical birth control trials, 50-plus years of bombing and displacements to military practices and live-fire exercises, federal oversight and control of the economy and international trade, and ongoing gentrification and sale of the islands to the highest bidders. All in exchange for a second-class citizenship without political representation, yet equal opportunity of being kidnapped by ICE during an afternoon stroll. We live and survive in our home, now more than ever, reminded of the outsider who claims our land through policy and bullets.
This is an authoritarian occupation, lived in the body. It pulses through in the scan of the streets before stepping outside, in the checking of the community, in Signal chats to scope out ICE locations. It seeps through the quiet calculations families make to stay together, and in the way neighborhoods shrink under the weight of surveillance and threat. We live through the predictable violence that accompanies it—grieving Renee Good, mourning Keith Porter, lamenting Alexi Pretti, and all the others whose names we know and do not know killed by ICE, and even the silence that now sweeps across the plazas that made up our communities, like in Barrio Obrero. Occupation attempts to shrink us, hoping to carry us off in surrender.
These deaths, this silence are not anomalies; they are the foreseeable outcomes of systems that treat certain lives as disposable in the name of “order” and “security,” even when the violence is captured on camera and witnessed by the world. In both places, the message is the same: you are on your own.
And yet—we are not.
What has given us hope in these dark times is the presence of each other. Organizers, neighbors and mutual aid networks are showing up for one another by sharing food, providing rides, circulating information, watching out for one another’s children, and showing up when someone disappears, naming the harm when the state refuses to. Regardless of geographical location or weather conditions, we tap into who we know we are and fight back against occupation and violence done in our name. Community-led responses, a necessity rather than a trend, have filled the gaps left by abandonment. Mutual aid, cooperative economies and grassroots organizing have become lifelines in a landscape shaped by extraction and neglect.
This is not charity. This is survival infrastructure. This is new world-building. This is the future.
As fascism tightens its grip—through detention, disappearance, criminalization and fear—it confirms:
Our ability to endure does not come from top-down solutions. It comes from relationship and trust—from the refusal to let each other face violence alone.
What happens in Minnesota is inseparable from what is happening in Puerto Rico, at the border, in detention centers and in communities under constant surveillance around the world. The same logic that justifies occupation in one place makes it possible everywhere else. Our lives are linked by these systems through their harm, but also by the ways we resist them.
In a moment defined by authoritarianism and abandonment, our connection to one another is not just solidarity … it is the difference between disappearance and survival. Survival, then, has never been an individual act. It has always been collective.
From Minnesota to Puerto Rico, our struggles are one and the same. So is our strength. We are still here—not because the system is working, but because we work for each other. Maybe this is finally how we usher in a new world order.
Great Job Wen Brovold & the Team @ Ms. Magazine for sharing this story.
