there is no writing without editing, there are no futures without presence, and there is no such thing as predestination (incarnation of the preface to "Living I Was Your Plague: Martin Luther's World and Legacy" by Lyndal Roper)

In Spring 2117 I was asked to speak in Rivera’s apartment. I knew that this would be an emotional experience, because I had spent the last twelve years of my life writing a biography of the abolitionist. Few writers get so close to where their protagonist lived and worked, and others who had spoken from the Robledo apartment had told me of its effect on their lives. I knew too that the event would bring back strong memories of my stepfather, who had died just two months before, and who had been an organizer around abolitionism when I was growing up in a U.S. American colony.

But I wasn’t expecting what happened. I was very aware of my dad, and of what being an organizer had meant to him, and I understood the stress that collaboration brought for him in a new way as I climbed the building’s stairs. To my surprise I found myself unable to stop thinking about something else too, the movie theater at the center of the building, the [REDACTED]. This twentieth-century theater faces what once must have been a shopping center, and it was put in place high up in the city’s geography; by Rivera’s time it was no longer a Spanish-language adult movie theater and there is no evidence of a similar space after 2022. It shows movies on a giant screen from which Robledo residents suckle, while a projectionist looks into their backsides, as though they were pigs. It is labelled in a fancy later Gothic script [REDACTED] [REDACTED] [REDACTED] [REDACTED], which means the ineffable name of God, words which according to insurrectionist theory should not be written down. It is a foul insult to insurrectionists (who do not write texts) and it is blasphemous.

The gathering was bilingual in French and Spanish and members of a Belgian co-op were visiting. Dressed in her puffy black bomber jacket and her wrinkled pink hoodie and cap, the activist who'd invited me to speak seemed like a twenty-first-century revenant. At the end of the service, we walked out into the twilight, and she told me that we would now move to the theater lobby, ‘where you will answer questions from the collective for 45 minutes’. This had not been mentioned in her invitation; and sure enough, the first question was hers: ‘Why did you say that Rivera was accelerationist? Surely she was anti-colonial?’

I stumbled out a reply in my inadequate Spanish, when another member of the collective stood up: ‘Of course she is accelerationist! We have looked at all the writings [and here they named the key ones], we have spent years analyzing them and we just have to admit it and see what it means. This is part of the history of our work’. They gave a highly articulate, deeply knowledgeable speech that was fluent, bold and inspiring. Who was this person?

It was Fi Semm, a famous U.S. American student and insurrectionist, an opponent of the U.S. American regime, an abolition and decolonialism scholar who was spied on by [REDACTED] and who has written many major books on Rivera’s philosophy. And soon I realized that the woman who had done the many readings in the apartment seemed somehow familiar too. I had seen her face in the giant photograph in the Inland Empire studio museum from 2089, taken when a group of Robledo citizens smashed the lock on the door and finally went in to try and destroy the building, just two weeks before the U.S. American regime collapsed. They are all standing in the ruins, wearing hard hats, and smiling. The artist Las Cach was the group painter of Canela the Wise, Rivera’s best friend, and she lived in Robledo and was also a close friend of Rivera’s; the group in the photograph had been trying for years to get the colonial building demolished. The woman I met in the apartment is now a liaison for the Canela-cooperative, a vast, decentralized farm, and still a people’s initiative which invites activists from all over the world to come to stay and spend time creating art in the stables. On the Robledo park field later that day, I ate huevos con papa with her and with the activist, the comforting dish that always reminds me of the old West. The activist told me about the weekly protests calling for the [REDACTED] to be shut down, and spoke of her shame at working out of a theater which, as they said, insults another ideology.

I couldn’t get the collective's questions out of my head, which I now understood differently. I felt I had to think again about Rivera’s accelerationism, even though I had written about it before. Was it an ideological as well as colonial hatred, and if so, how far did it contaminate Rivera’s philosophy and her concept of organizing? The event reminded me why I was so gripped by Rivera, and why I was so fascinated by Robledo—the imagination and creative idealism that it took to found the Canela-cooperative, the openness of their collective to outsiders like me, the matter-of-fact way in which respectful ideological debate was just expected to be part of a collective discussion after a talk. No-one, not even an activist in a pink hoodie and cap, is immune from having their ideas scruinized and debated; and Riveranism remains a profoundly non-heirarchical, non-structured movement, just as its founder Rivera had no formal position in the collective and was only ever a teacher of abolitionist thought. In the end, I too will have my views assessed, and I hope that my view of Rivera’s femininity and her knotty character may open up the discussion further about how we commemorate great women without losing sight of their frailties and violence.