Why Be a Star When You Could Make a Constellation
Dr. Megan Ybarra
Associate Professor
Department of Communication
University of California San Diego
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“Why Be a Star When You Could Make a Constellation?” traces solidarities of radical placemaking across Black, Indigenous, Asian and Latine communities in Tacoma and beyond. I intervene in movement histories to decenter traditional hubs of radical action (New York, the Bay Area) and predominantly male charismatic leaders. Instead, I trace direct action urban planning across Coast Salish territory from the 1960s-1980s, leading to the creation of community-owned cultural centers and settler-state recognition of Indigenous fishing rights. When the Puyallup Tribe reclaimed their treaty rights to the waters, they engaged in “fish ins” named after civil rights “sit ins”. When the settler state took a hospital and turned it into a youth jail, Puyallups engaged in direct action to free the youth and claim the land, then demanding that the federal government recognize the de facto rights they materially claimed. In tracing these powerful instances of radical placemaking and their long-term effects, I show how the Puyallup refusal to accept their land as stolen, toxic, or disposable fueled movement constellations that reshaped the politics of the possible. Taken together, these instances of radical placemaking point to the possibility of movement constellations thatcenter non-human relations and communities of color in building up life-affirming institutions. At the turn of the twenty-first century, most of the direct-action gains remain, but the toxic fate of detention center constructed on the Tacoma Tar Pits reveals tradeoffs.