I have been handwriting since kindergarten. And for most of my life, I was ashamed of what my hand produced on paper. It looked ugly and messy; my teachers were never proud of me.

My mother has the most beautiful cursive handwriting I have ever seen, very elegant, flowing, effortless, at least in my view.

Image 1: My mother’s message August 21, 2026.

She barely finished second grade, yet her letters flow across the page with a grace I could never replicate. I, on the other hand, sat through years of caligrafía classes in Spanish primary school, tracing loops and strokes, always coming up short. The teacher was perpetually displeased. I was perpetually frustrated. She always telling me “Que letra tan maluca tiene usted”[what an awful handwriting you have].

Now that I know I have ADHD, it all makes sense. The impatience, the racing thoughts that outpaced my pen, the disconnect between what my mind wanted to say and what my hand could actually produce. it was never a lack of effort. It was a brain that moved faster than my fingers could follow.

Image 2: My own handwriting.

But let me tell you something, I have come to understand: my handwriting is me. It is messy, uneven, sometimes illegible. It is also hum[x]n, alive, imperfect. And I have stopped apologizing for it because I know this makes me who I am.

The Art of the Hand

I have always admired beautiful handwriting. I love the connection between mind and hand, the way thoughts become visible through the movement of a pen across paper. There is something almost sacred about it, it is like a translation of the invisible into the tangible. On a trip to Istanbul a few years back, I sought out a person who can write nice and I found famous one in the streets and had him write my name by hand. I treasure that piece of art not because my name looks particularly stunning, but because it represents an art form that is slowly disappearing, but also my great millstone, I am a doctor now.

Image 3: A calligraphic handwriting of my name.

And yet, for all my admiration of beautiful script, my own remains tangled and chaotic. You can see the evidence in the photos here, the scribbles that look more like abstract art than language. But I have made peace with them. These are my scribbles. They carry my thoughts, my urgency, my humanity. They are proof that a person was here, thinking, feeling, creating.

What Happens When We Write

There is science behind why these matters. When we take notes by hand, we are not just recording information, we are building neural pathways. I recently read a study that recorded brain electrical activity in different university students as they wrote words by hand using a digital pen and typed the same words on a keyboard (Van der Weel & Van der Meer, 2024). When writing by hand, brain connectivity patterns were far more elaborate than when typing, as shown by widespread theta/alpha connectivity coherence patterns between network hubs and nodes in parietal and central brain regions (Van der Weel & Van der Meer, 2024). These indicate that connectivity patterns in these brain areas and at such frequencies are crucial for memory formation and for encoding new information. That is why whenever I look at my handwritten notes, I immediately remember the moment I wrote them, it is like a spark to the past.

I enjoy taking notes on my notebook rather than on the laptop. Mueller and Oppenheimer (2014) demonstrated that students who took handwritten notes outperformed those who typed their notes on laptops, as handwriting encourages deeper information processing through reorganization and conceptual understanding rather than verbatim transcription. I have seen students struggle to take the pen and write a couple of sentences and I am sometime worried. Furthermore, Wong and Lim (2023) demonstrated that students who take longhand notes not only retain lecture content better than those who take photos, but also experience less mind-wandering, pointing to key attentional benefits of the handwriting process. I do believe that putting pen to paper is not just about recording information; it is a cognitive exercise that engages the brain in a way that typing and passive recording simply cannot replicate.

The Fear

And this is where my fear begins. We are living in the age of artificial intelligence. My students, perhaps your students, our students, are increasingly not writing by hand. Many are not even typing anymore. They are simply asking AI to do the work for them. Why struggle with a pen when a machine can generate a perfectly coherent paragraph in seconds? Why wrestle with your own thoughts when an algorithm can arrange them for you?

I understand the appeal. I really do because the machine has now written all my work without showing my awful handwriting to the world. But I worry about what we are losing.

When you pick up a pen and a notebook and just let go or when you allow your thoughts to spill onto the page without filter, without editing, without the cold perfection of a screen, I believe that what you get is you. Your humanity. Your voice. Your irreplaceable way of seeing the world.

That messy handwriting in the photos? That is a record of a human being thinking in real time. Every crossed-out word, every ink smudge, every slightly crooked letter is evidence of a mind at work. AI can produce beautiful prose, but it cannot produce your prose. It cannot capture the hesitation, the sudden insight, the emotion that shapes your words as they leave your hand.

A Small Rebellion

I am not suggesting we abandon technology. But I am suggesting that we not abandon ourselves. Pick up a pen. Find a notebook. Write something by hand. Let it be ugly. Let it be messy. Let it be unfinished. What matters is that you did it. That you created something that did not exist before, something that could only come from you.

In a world that increasingly values speed and efficiency over depth and meaning, handwriting is a small rebellion. It is a refusal to let our thoughts be processed by machines before they have even fully formed in our own minds.

My handwriting is awful. But it is mine. And that is worth more than all the perfectly generated text in the world.

Image 4. Handwriting as rebellion.

References

Mueller, P. A., & Oppenheimer, D. M. (2014). The Pen Is Mightier Than the Keyboard: Advantages of Longhand Over Laptop Note Taking: Advantages of Longhand Over Laptop Note Taking. Psychological Science, 25(6), 1159-1168.

Van der Weel, F. R. R., & Van der Meer, A. L. H. (2024). Handwriting but not typewriting leads to widespread brain connectivity: a high-density EEG study with implications for the classroom. Frontiers in psychology, 14, 1219945. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1219945

Wong, S. S. H., & Lim, S. W. H. (2023). Take notes, not photos: Mind-wandering mediates the impact of note-taking strategies on video-recorded lecture learning performance. Journal of experimental psychology. Applied, 29(1), 124–135. https://doi.org/10.1037/xap0000375

I have lived this scene more times than I can count. Since my arrival in North America 25+ years ago, the invalidations, the rejections, and the racist comments have followed me into academic spaces that I had earned the right to occupy through years of study, research, and lived experience. Yet, in the eyes of that woman, the only possible role for me was the person who sets up the equipment for the real presenter. This is what has been defined as a racial microaggression: brief, everyday slights that communicate hostile, derogatory, or negative racial insults toward people of colour (Sue et al., 2007). Microaggressions can be intentional or unintentional, but their cumulative effect is deeply harmful. The person doing the microagression often remains unaware of the injury they inflict, yet the message is unmistakable. She saw my brown skin, my Latin American features, and immediately spoke to me in Spanish as if I could not possibly speak English, as if I were somehow inferior. The real message was clear: you do not belong here; you are here to serve me.

In my reflection, I realised that this incident was not an isolated act of rudeness. It was the enactment of a long‑standing social hierarchy. The dyad of perpetrator and victim in microaggressions often follows patterns of power imbalance: the perpetrator tends to be white, Anglo‑Saxon, or born in North America, while the victim is racialised, immigrant, or otherwise marginalised (Campbell & Manning, 2014). Some might argue that this framework can be reversed, claiming “reverse racism” or that victims sometimes perpetuate their own marginalisation (Nelson et al., 2018). But in my experience, the power imbalance is structural, not personal. The woman at the conference did not know me; she saw only my body and assigned me a role based on centuries of colonial and racial ideology.

After that incident, I began a long process of introspection. I asked myself: Why does this keep happening? Why does history keep repeating itself in my family? I am the son of a single mother, who was the daughter of another single mother, who was the daughter of yet another single mother, women who worked for generations as servants to rich Spanish colonisers. My mother served the elite in Colombia. My great‑grandmother served the landowners of Spanish descent. And now, here I am, a Latinx immigrant in North America, serving the white European Anglo‑Saxon empire. The history repeats itself.

To make sense of this, I wanted to see if there was any theory explaining my experiences and thus I turned to the concept of the culture of poverty, Lewis (1959) argued that poverty, once entrenched, generates its own way of life, a set of values, beliefs, and behaviours that are passed down through generations, making it difficult for individuals to escape poverty even when opportunities arise. A culture of poverty was a concept is define as producing “strong feelings of marginality, of helplessness, of dependence, and of inferiority” (Lewis, 1966, p. xlvii). This framework gained considerable legitimacy in the 1960s as an explanation for urban poverty in the United States, though it has also been criticized for fostering a blame‑the‑victim perspective and for denigrating poor communities, particularly Black and Latino populations.

I learned how me, as a Latinx living in North American experienced these things. I am aware that this mode of thinking has been used to justify deficit thinking and to obscure structural causes of poverty. Yet, I find value in the idea that poverty is not merely a lack of material resources but also a subjective reality that shapes how people see themselves and how others see them. I started mapping this cycle in my mind on as a cycle of poverty and how it is often defined as a phenomenon where poor families remain impoverished for at least three generations, trapped by limited resources, low‑quality education, and social exclusion. In my family, that cycle is in my body and my blood. My grandmother and great‑grandmother never had formal Western education; their ancestral knowledge was always deemed less valuable. They were destined to serve those at the top – los de arriba – while we remained los de abajo.

Drawing on decolonial theorists and on the work of Oviedo Freire (2020), I visualise this hierarchy as a triangle (see image below). At the top are those who live in North American countries, white people of European descent, or in Colombia, the wealthy white mestizos who own the land. At the bottom are immigrants, refugees, and racialised communities or those who serve. The red arrows in my diagram point upward: from my grandmother serving the Spanish colonisers, to my mother serving the Colombian elite, to me serving the white European empire in North America. This is not a simplistic binary; I have gained education and mobility, so I sometimes move between these worlds. But the structural position remains.

Image 1. A cycle of Colonization

The cycle continues. Even when an individual escapes poverty in economic terms, the social and psychological weight of generations persists. I earned a PhD, published research, and stood in that conference room as a scholar. Yet the white woman did not see a scholar. She saw a technician. She saw a servant, at least that is how I felt. She saw one of los de abajo. This is the insidious nature of microaggressions: they are not just rude comments or minor slights; they are the daily enactment of a centuries‑old hierarchy that determines who is seen as intelligent, worthy, and human. Sue et al. (2007) note that microaggressions contribute to a hostile climate that can lead to depression, anxiety, and decreased self‑esteem among racialised individuals. Over time, these cumulative experiences reinforce the very social boundaries that keep the cycle of poverty in place.

Critics of the culture‑of‑poverty framework argue that focusing on cultural traits distracts from systemic issues like discrimination, unequal education, and labour market exploitation. I agree. However, I also believe that culture matters, not necessarily as a cause of poverty, but as a lens through which we can understand how trauma is transmitted. The generational trauma of colonisation, slavery, and forced labour is not just economic; it is psychological and spiritual. Now, at my middle age, I learned how my mother’s submission to her employers was not merely a job; it was a re‑enactment of the servitude her ancestors endured. And when that white woman spoke to me in Spanish, she was unconsciously re‑enacting the colonial script that positions brown bodies as servants.

Yet, I am the one who broke the cycle or at least partially. I earned an education. I travelled. I now teach and write. But the cycle does not break overnight. Even as I stand in academic spaces, I am still perceived as the technician, the janitor, the helper or the Uber Eats driver. The cycle persists in the minds of others, even when my material conditions have changed.

So what do we do? We name it. We theorise it. We tell our stories. By sharing this experience, I join a long tradition of those who refuse to accept the roles assigned to them. Microaggressions are not inevitable; they are learned behaviours rooted in ideologies of white supremacy and class hierarchy (Campbell & Manning, 2014). We can unlearn them, but only if we first acknowledge that they exist.

That day in Orlando, I helped the woman with her cable. I was polite and professional. But I also made sure she knew who I was. I told her: “I am presenting about social justice in language teaching.” I did not let her erase me. And I will not let the cycle erase my ancestors.

We, the children of los de abajo, carry the weight of generations. But we also carry the hope of transformation. Each time we speak, each time we present, each time we refuse to be invisible, le quitamos un pedacito al triangulo [we chip away at the triangle]. The cycle of poverty is not eternal. It can be broken, not by individual grit alone, but by our collective recognition and structural change. And that change begins with moments like this: when we tell our stories, when we cite our ancestors, and when we demand to be seen as we truly are , again not as technicians, but as scholars, as humxn beings, as the ones who belong.

References

Campbell, B., & Manning, J. (2014). Microaggression and moral cultures. Comparative Sociology, 13(6), 692–726.

Lewis, O. (1959). Five families: Mexican case studies in the culture of poverty. Basic Books.

Lewis, O. (1966). La vida: A Puerto Rican family in the culture of poverty – San Juan and New York. Random House.

Nelson, J. K., Hynes, M., Sharpe, S., Paradies, Y., & Dunn, K. (2018). Witnessing anti‑white “racism”: White victimhood and “reverse racism” in Australia. Journal of Intercultural Studies, 39(3), 339–358.

Oviedo Freire, A. M. (2020). Qué es el Sumak Kawsay: Más allá del antropocentrismo de derecha e izquierda (4th ed.). Sumak.

Sue, D. W., Capodilupo, C. M., Torino, G. C., Bucceri, J. M., Holder, A. M. B., Nadal, K. L., & Esquilin, M. (2007). Racial microaggressions in everyday life: Implications for clinical practice. American Psychologist, 62(4), 271–286.

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Glitch as Decolonial Praxis

Rivera Cusicanqui’s sociology of the image (sociología de la imagen) proposes that visual culture (photographs, murals, drawings) be treated as primary historical documents rather than mere illustrations (Rivera Cusicanqui, 2015a). In her seminar, I learned that her methodology seeks to decolonize the gaze, to free visualization from the bonds of [written] language, and to update the memory of experience as an indissoluble whole, in which the bodily and mental meanings merge. This resonated profoundly with my use of glitch art through my artistic practice Signal//Noise (http://signalnoise.ca/).

Glitch art is an aesthetic practice that intentionally uses digital or analog errors, malfunctions, data corruption, and system crashes as creative material rather than dismissing them as failures. By embracing these ruptures in visual and sonic coherence, glitch art critiques the illusion of seamless technological perfection and exposes the underlying materiality, biases, and power structures embedded within our media systems.

For me, my art and my scholarship, the glitch or the rupture in systems of coherence and meaning can be theorized as a resistant aesthetics, a tactical revolt of the material that is confronting systemic standardization, bias and institutionalization. My video work, as an output from this seminar, deploys glitch not as aesthetic novelty but as a political intervention ( Dekker, 2023). The corrupted pixels, fragmented frames, and disrupted flows mirror what Rivera Cusicanqui describes as the Ch’ixi, an Aymara concept designating that which is and is not at the same time, without implying a deep or total mixture of those differences (Rivera Cusicanqui, 2015b). Throughout our conversations and listening to Silvia carefully during the seminar, I understood Ch’ixi is gray with small patches of black and white intermingling, a constitutive heterogeneity where differences do not fuse but complement each other, as a myriad of colors within a pluriverse of experiences (Escobar, 2018).

My video (see below) represents my glitched body on screen is precisely this: a Ch’ixi body, motley and contrasting, refusing the smooth coherence that colonial visual regimes demand. It is a body that says no to the expropriation of the body, that violent extraction of corporeal sovereignty that capitalism and colonialism have perfected over centuries.

Contar historias no es lo mismo que contar pasos

One of Rivera Cusicanqui’s most powerful provocations during the seminar was her insistence that contar historias no es lo mismo que contar pasos [telling stories is not the same as counting steps]. This distinction between narrative meaning and mechanical enumeration cuts to the heart of what my artistic practice attempts. My experimental video poem “Corpo-Realidad” speaks of a body that is “a plural set that collides / In a pluriversal cosmos where pasts, presents and future realities converge.” This is not a body that can be measured, counted, or mapped onto colonial grids of legibility. It is a body that tells stories, the stories of a 50-year debt, of capitalist pain, of memories held in flesh.

In my view, Rivera Cusicanqui’s ontoepistemological approach to research has long lead oral history as “a dialectical or plural cycle” that disrupts linear Western chronologies. The epistemological potential of oral history, in her argument, lies in its capacity to recuperate knowledges silenced by official written documents. My embodied practice functions similarly: the dancing body, the glitched image, the spoken word poem, these are forms of oral and visual history that refuse to be reduced to data points. They are historias, not pasos.

The Visual Language to Discover Pain and Live Fully

Rivera Cusicanqui argues that images carry “those meanings not censored by official language, since from her perspective words do not designate but rather cover up”. The visual, for her, is a terrain where subaltern memories can emerge, a space where “the senses of sight, hearing, touch, smell and bodily movements” come into play, “allowing the updating of that memory of experience that resides in the events of daily life”.

My poem names this precisely: “The pain of my memory is catalyzed by my body / The pain of a capitalist debt that has resisted for 50 years / This body keeps those memories through art.” The visual language of glitch and performance becomes a tool to discover pain and not to aestheticize suffering but to render it visible, tangible, and ultimately survivable. Rivera Cusicanqui teaches us that decolonization is not an abstract intellectual exercise but a daily practice of living plenamente [fully, completely]. My Corpo-Realidad is an attempt to inhabit that fullness: “The art of a raw, ruthless reality but also a reality full of hopes.”

The Body as Visual Archaeological Artifact of the Self

If glitch art reveals the fractures within dominant visual regimes, my body in performance reveals the fractures within me, the internal colonizer that Rivera Cusicanqui, somehow follows what Ashish Nandy (1983) calls the internal/intimate enemy. She contends that “the internal enemy (colonization) is within us all, from elites to the oppressed”. Internal colonialism operates as “a structure that shapes mental categories and social practices”.

My artistic practice is an archaeological excavation of this internal colonization. Each glitch, each fractured movement, each spoken word is a trowel scraping away layers of colonial sedimentation. The body becomes a “visual archaeological artifact of the self” a site where the scars of colonialism are both exposed and transformed. This is and has not been a comfortable process for me. It requires confronting what Rivera Cusicanqui calls “the mental conditioning that takes place as we interpret the visual images around us,” which “often unconsciously reinforces forms of discrimination and perpetuates the oppressive social order”. My art is the work of disempowering those images.

Pluriversality and Experimental Contemporary Dance as Communication

I truly believe that Rivera Cusicanqui’s work is animated by a commitment to what has been called pluriversality (Escobar, 2018), a world where multiple epistemologies coexist without one subsuming the other. Her Ch’ixi epistemology considers that which is and is not at the same time”, refusing the either/or logic of Western modernity. This resonates with the broader concept of pluriversality, which challenges the domination of the white logic of art and design and shifts away from the Anglo-European one-world system towards the pluriverse (de la Cadena & Blaser, 2018).

My experimental contemporary dance in the video is una forma de comunicación [a form of communication] that does not rely on the colonial languages of academic or aesthetic legitimacy. It speaks in the language of the body, of (non) rhythm, of affective transmission. As Rivera Cusicanqui posits, decolonization requires “our capacity to work with other relations of the imaginary, capable of including difference, instead of appeasing or hierarchizing it”. In the seminar we talked about dance as a social healing practice and for me, my dance is an attempt to work with other relations to create a choreographic space where difference is not erased but celebrated, where the pluriverse becomes palpable in every movement.

El eje de partida/llegada es mi subjetivación: Mi existencia.

Finally, Rivera Cusicanqui’s seminar taught me that the starting point [el eje de partida] is my own subjectivation, my own existence. This is not narcissism but political necessity. To decolonize the world, one must first decolonize oneself. As Rivera Cusicanqui herself states, she “does not negate her mestiza existence” but also “will not deny her Indigenous roots”. This is the Ch’ixi stance I learned: embracing contradiction, refusing purity, living in the motley space of multiple inheritances.

My Corpo-Realidad is that stance made flesh. It is the image of a body that is not one but many, “an image made of my reality / My reality in connection with other animate beings, non-human and more than human.” It is a body that remembers, that feels, that dreams, that senses. It is a body that refuses expropriation and insists on its own sovereignty. It is a body that tells stories rather than counting steps. It is, finally, a body that has found, in Rivera Cusicanqui’s sociology of the image, a language to name its own decolonial struggle, and, in so doing, has begun the work of living plenamente. I hope you enjoy these words and the video I made for you.

References

de la Cadena, M., & Blaser, M. (Eds.). (2018). A World of Many Worlds. Duke University Press.

Dekker, A. (2023). The politics of glitch in online networked images. Philosophy of Photography, 14(Photography and the Glitch), 229–249. https://doi.org/10.1386/pop_00084_1

Escobar, A. (2018). Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds. Duke University Press.

Nandy, A. (1983). The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self Under Colonialism. Oxford University Press.

Rivera Cusicanqui, S. (2015a). Sociología de la imagen: Miradas Ch’ixi desde la Historia Andina. Tinta Limón.

Rivera Cusicanqui, S. (2015b). Ch’ixinakax utxiwa: Una reflexión sobre prácticas y discursos descolonizadores.

My mother tells me I was very young when she found this plastic tricycle. Like many things in our home, it did not arrive new. It had been discarded somewhere, broken and forgotten. She brought it home and asked someone to repair it. A piece of wood was fitted where plastic had snapped, and somehow it became whole again.

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As a child becoming a teenager in the 1990s, I learned quickly that many friendships among boys were built around futbol. The excitement of a goal, the arguments about referees, the jerseys, the stickers, the dreams of the World Cup (Colombia vs. Alemania) all of it created a shared culture. For a while, I wanted to be part of that world.

But one experience changed my relationship with futbol forever.

One day, I went to a futbol game with friends expecting excitement and community. Instead, I encountered aggression, insults, bullying, and violence. What surprised me most was how quickly camaraderie could transform into hostility. The same energy that united people could also divide and intimidate them. I remember feeling uncomfortable, almost out of place, as if the emotional intensity around me demanded a version of masculinity that I could not fully inhabit.

After that experience, I stopped going to games. Gradually, I distanced myself from futbol altogether…and liked baseball instead (go Cubs, go Blue Jays). And yet, strangely, I never stopped loving the World Cup.

The World Cup felt different. It carried a softer memory for me, one connected not to violence, but to friendship, gathering, and imagination. During those weeks, entire countries seemed to pause. Families watched games together. Friends met around televisions. Streets changed rhythm. Even people who did not care about futbol suddenly became part of the conversation.

As someone born in Colombia and now living in Canada, I realize that the World Cup still gives me a strange feeling of collective belonging. It reminds me how sports can create temporary communities across borders, languages, and generations.

This small artifact (see below) brings me back specifically to the 1990 FIFA World Cup. During that time, we collected tiny Coca-Cola bottles with the logo printed in different languages, Chinese, Thai, English, and many others. I remember the excitement of finding a new bottle to add to the collection. Looking back now, I think those bottles represented something much larger than futbol itself. They were my first encounters with the beauty of languages and the feeling that the world was much bigger than the streets I knew.

Perhaps that is why this object still matters to me today. When I see it, I do not immediately think about goals, teams, or championships. I think about the texture of the 1990s, the friendships, the collections, the afternoons spent imagining distant countries through tiny words printed on glass bottles. I think about how objects become containers of memory.

This artifact reminds me that sometimes what stays with us is not the event itself, but the atmosphere around it.

And now, decades later, the World Cup arrives here in Toronto. The child who once collected tiny Coca-Cola bottles during the 1990 FIFA World Cup is now living in one of the host cities for the 2026 FIFA World Cup. There is something poetic about that. Toronto will host six matches, including the first men’s World Cup match ever played on Canadian soil. Walking through the city now, I can already feel the anticipation building, not only around futbol itself, but around what the tournament represents: migration, languages, memory, and temporary moments of collective belonging. In many ways, Toronto feels like the perfect city for the World Cup because it already contains so many worlds within it.

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What I am doing in this space is not assembling a perfect record, but attending to what lingers, the fragments, the movements, the traces of meaning that emerge over time. If creation begins in uncertainty and depth, then perhaps a life, when written honestly, must begin there as well.

This project is my attempt to stay with that process. To notice what takes shape, what remains unresolved, and what, slowly, comes into being. This space is an experiment in writing a life, my life, slowly, deliberately, and in public.

Over the next five years, I will be sharing one piece each month as I work toward a finished memoir in 2031. Not a chronological record of everything that has happened, but a series of moments, places, relationships, and questions that have shaped who I am and who I am still becoming.

Each post will focus on something specific, perhaps a memory, a walk, a conversation, a rupture, a return. I am interested in the textures of experience: what we carry, what we inherit, what we resist, and what we learn to name.

This will unfold in stages: beginnings, fractures, searching, integration, and becoming. You won’t get the whole story at once. Instead, you will encounter fragments that, over time, begin to speak to each other.

If you choose to read along, you are not just witnessing a finished narrative, you are accompanying a process, you are my partner in this creation. One that is still uncertain, still shifting, and still being written.

Thank you for being here at the beginning.

Soon you will get the chance to follow me or subscribe to get a copy of my memoir once is assembled in 2031. You will also get a unique piece of printed art with it.