About the group

Algarabía began with two co-founders, Aldo U. Reséndiz and Karim Elhaies. In the last year or so, the co-op has grown to include an additional instructor for Arabic, a multilingual web designer, and is in the process of onboarding three instructors for Spanish as worker-owners. Algarabía’s structure is designed to be as horizontal as possible and they do. Everyone who works with Algarabía as a language instructor is either a worker-owner or is in the process of becoming a worker-owner. As collaborators join and begin the journey towards becoming a full member of the co-op, they learn the pedagogical model that Algarabía uses and how it operates, but are paid the same amount and in the same way as worker-owners. Members all serve on committees that advance and maintain Algarabía’s programming and operations, with some of them rotating on a regular basis. When Algarabía was ready to grow, Aldo and Karim were intentional to recruit instructors who would represent the varieties of the languages that are most commonly spoken in New York City. 

The core of Algarabía Language Co-op is its Language for Social Justice Program, which is an alternative to formal language instruction serving queer BIPOC, Spanish and Arabic bilinguals (often called “heritage speakers,” the co-op defines bilinguals as members of a minoritized language community that has been systematically denied access to bilingual education in the U.S.), community organizers, political activists and community-based organizations. The group offers multiple levels of both Spanish and Arabic classes virtually and in person at Mayday Space and The People’s Forum in New York City. The classes are grounded in popular education methodologies, centering the lived experiences of immigrant and queer BIPOC. All classes are available on a sliding scale and in order to ensure that working-class and queer BIPOC communities are centered in their work, Algarabía offers a combination of classes open to a more general, but politically aligned public,  classes exclusively for BIPOC learners and private classes tailored to a specific group of learners. 

While language education has been central to Algarabía’s practice of language justice, they have also offered multilingual web design services, trainings in Community Interpretation andIntro to Language Justice, and have recently  slowly and thoughtfully expanded to provide interpretation and translation services with a cohort of collaborators who are part of a year-long self-incubating pilot project to form new locally-based interpretation coops and collectives in The Bronx, New Jersey, and Puerto Rico — an alternative to co-op incubation programs offered by non-profits. Algarabía collaborators also provide occasional peer-to-peer support to newly-formed South East Asian, African and Indigenous languages collectives and co-ops in the NYC-area that are part of their extended network.. They see these offerings  and projects as a complementary and integral part of the co-op’s language justice mission but, at the same time, they want to maintain their primary focus around language teaching and want to be sure they scale at the right speed, knowing that those services could easily spin off into a co-op of their own. In all aspects of their work, they are conscious of the ways capitalism pits individuals and groups against each other in competition for resources and clients and how to counter that drive with a spirit of abundance.   

How it all started 

Algarabía began with one class taught by Aldo in 2016 called Spanish for Social Justice, launched in partnership with Mayday Space. Aldo pitched this class after being inspired by Roberto Tijerina’s workshop Interpreting for Social Justice and by Ofelia Garcia’s work on translanguaging. They wanted to bring a language justice framework to language education and build a program for BIPOC learners steeped in political education and community-building. 

The support of a former Mayday Space collective member who identifies as Afro-Latina made it possible for Aldo, as a person of indigenous Hñähñu descent to come in, use the space (the hottest commodity for anyone founding something in New York City), and build their language program from scratch. The class was successful and as time went on, new levels were added to the class each semester as Aldo simultaneously built a pedagogical model.

In 2018, Aldo connected with Karim, who until then had mostly been teaching Modern Standard Arabic (MSA)  in university contexts. The two joined forces and enrolled in a co-op academy designed to incubate BIPOC worker-owned co-ops in New York City, a model that was increasingly gaining attention within leftist circles. While Aldo had partnered for a few years with Mayday Space, they knew that they could expand their offerings to other spaces in the city and thought the structure of a formal incorporation would help with that. (Listen to interview highlights for more on this.) They were formally incorporated as a co-op and 2022 will be Algarabía’s first year as a “fully functional co-op.”

While the group has been successful as a co-op, their model was functional before they incorporated so they don’t feel wedded to remaining a co-op. They are wary of becoming too precious about the project and have seen a lot of gatekeeping happen when people become too protective of initiatives that they treat as “their baby.” The most important thing to members is that they remain undiluted in their politics and practice, whether that remains in the form of a co-op or if the group decides it should revert back to a collective at some point. They can imagine a future in which Algarabía takes the form of even more alternative structures, like autonomous collectives of the Global South, who are creating local economies through bartering. That future will be decided by Algarabía’s worker-owners, to fit the shape the work takes as the group continues to model putting its politics into praxis.