North Stars of Emancipation: Food & Farming Movements

Antonio Roman-Alcalá
in conversation with Audrea Lim

How greater racial inclusion can propel movements forward and help realize sustainable change, from a longtime political organizer and researcher.

How we grow, harvest, distribute, and consume food is bound up with how we use (and abuse) environmental resources, and how we achieve (or undermine) collective well-being. In North Stars of Emancipation, Antonio Roman-Alcalá finds in the radical experiments of new food movements the seeds of a world liberated from old, extractive systems, where a more equitable way of eating and living is possible.

The book traces the transformation of California’s diverse food movements as Black, Indigenous, Latinx, and other people of color have come to play a larger organizational role, especially at a time of toxic national politics. A new vision now guides these movements, rooted in the radical traditions of anarchism, Black radicalism, and Indigenous resurgence, yet focused on pragmatic solutions to the problems of market and state. In pursuing a North Star political ideal that rejects capitalism, colonialism, and state violence while prioritizing survival, California’s food movements have achieved greater collaboration among sectors, workers, and consumers, pointing toward a promising future.

North Stars of Emancipation takes the rare step of analyzing movements as interconnected wholes. From their collective success, we learn how to move past an untenable present.

“Set against the backdrop of right-wing resurgence and deep racial reckoning, North Stars of Emancipation offers a critical and hopeful path forward for social change. Drawing on years of experience as an activist-scholar, Antonio Roman-Alcalá provides a vital analysis of California’s diverse food and farming movements, unveiling the long anarchist as well as socialist traditions behind some of the most influential and urgent movements for decolonization and liberation. These politics offer a radical and practical framework for change—as urgent as the crisis facing us all. North Stars of Emancipation will be helping scholars and activists compass the food movement for a long time to come.”

—Raj Patel, coauthor of Inflamed and A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things

Antonio Roman-Alcalá is Assistant Professor at California State University East Bay, where he teaches geography and environmental studies. He has worked on sustainable food systems and radical political change for more than 20 years.

Audrea Lim is a Brooklyn-based freelance writer and journalist whose work focuses on land, energy, and the environment. Her writing has appeared in the New Yorker, Harper’s, Rolling Stone, the New York Times, the Guardian, the New Republic, and The Nation. Lim is the editor of The World We Need and the author of Free The Land. She is a visiting scholar at the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at New York University and was a 2022 Macdowell fellow.