Cohort Introduction
My name is Hunter. I’m 24 years old, I was born at Sparrow Hospital in Lansing, Michigan but raised in or around Austin, Texas. My family life was relatively complex, my mother and father were never together anytime throughout my life. They split before I was born which forced me to bounce between two different households in two different states. My mother was from Texas, where she thought it was best for her to live because there where she had more opportunities and more of a support system, but my father was from Michigan and thought the same about living here. Life between the two was substantial night and day difference. My single mother worked hard to provide for the four of us while enduring the struggles in today’s sexist and oppressive society, of not only being a woman, but a Hispanic woman as well.
Forced to put up with the struggles only her and other women wearing similar shoes could possibly understand, I had a front row seat to her selfless devotion to giving us the life she never had. My father on the other hand had his own set of struggles but was a lot better off than my mother and had a much more stable situation so and stayed in a safe environment around him with his wife and two children. He lived in a much nicer neighborhood and did his absolute best to keep me on a positive path as he watched me being pulled in a negative direction. But my mother and father lived in two completely different environments and financial situations. I experienced the pain that capitalism causes and the hold it can have on families across the world. I might have had more opportunities with one parent than the other. At my mother’s I was subjected to drug abuse and physical violence, as well as the struggle of a Mexican woman getting caught up in the intimate cycle of classism, Capitalism, and oppression, which perpetuated the struggle as a young single mother which unknowingly radicalized my mind at a very young age.
At the same time I witnessed the complete opposite with my father who was well off financially with a great career living in a middle class and predominantly white community. My young and impressionable mind was being in yanked in the two different directions which inevitably led me down a path of rage and self-destruction as I began to sell drugs and roll with a gang at only thirteen. I had no idea I was being caught in the entanglement of the spiderweb we call capitalism and classism but these negative experiences became the fuel to my fire, radicalized my young mind and gave me a rare understanding and first hand experience of the differences between the bourgeois and the proletariat.
Regardless of the experiences before my incarceration, I had no political identity whatsoever, but I knew that I wanted to fight against oppression and witness change. Throughout my incarceration I became involved with fellow comrade named Joaquin who became my mentor in my studies of anti-fascist, anti-capitalist, revolutionary political studies which introduced me to far left-wing politics such as anarchism as well as communistic ideologies. Throughout my time in state prison and my studies with comrades of this sort I was enlightened on the current war and fight against systematic oppression which made aware my direct involvement in a war as a captive political prisoner in modern day slavery inside the prison industrial complex.
Throughout my studies and experiences I began to to study works by revolutionary comrades such as Alexander Berkman, Octavio Alberola, Buenaventura Durutti, Kropotkin, Errico Malatesta. Each one of these comrades have given me an understanding of anarchism as well as communism and are the reason why I consider myself an anarchist. Studying their works I would define the two as the future after a true and successful modern day revolution. I believe that these comrades were brave, true, and right in much of their works, but I also believe in Night-Vision’s very first chapter: We must detox from the old, adapt and utilize our knowledge we’ve obtained from some of the old and successful, and sometimes unsuccessful, attempts at revolutionary change. We must instead use our experiences, good or bad, in our race to fuel the fire to the revolution while utilizing our ability to love one another and spread solidarity and equality.
Furthermore, I want to organize with GDC because I genuinely believe that the aims, goals, ideals and principles that GDC has been founded upon will be instrumental to the revolution. I’ve gotten the opportunity to experience what it is like to receive the support and solidarity of the GDC which made me want to get more active in the movement that much more. I am very much excited to be given the opportunity to organize in the struggle with great comrades on the outside.
With Love and Rage,
Hunter Poppenger
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