Who they are

Cooperativa Brújulas is currently made up of four language workers who represent queer, trans, Black, and migrant identities and have almost the same number of collaborators with whom they often work. The group has bases in California and Puerto Rico, where some members live and farm together. They offer various interpreting, translation, transcription, and workshop services with different healing modalities. 

For Brújulas, their language work is highly political and healing. As a group based in Puerto Rico, they recognize the island's position as a colonized territory of the Caribbean, which has been linguistically divided due to colonization. Therefore, they have dedicated themselves to creating and sustaining multilingual collaborations and spaces throughout the Caribbean with other language workers from countries such as Haiti, Martinique, and Trinidad and Tobago. Beyond the Caribbean, they have also collaborated internationally with immigrants in South America and Afro-descendants in Brazil. 

The members of Cooperativa Brújulas come from a long history and commitment to various social struggles and are particularly connected to agroecological and healing work. This orientation influences how the cooperative operates. For Brújulas, the role of the organization is as important as the fact that serves as a healthy model for its participants and that the investment that workers contribute to the cooperative is not only invested in administrative expenses and legal paperwork, but also in making sure that there are funds to support  mental health and childcare for its members. 

Although they feel they could spend 40 hours a week working with the co-op, they didn't form it to dedicate themselves solely to that —they love the work of the co-op. They also do other things— they have to balance opportunities and responsibilities with members' wants and needs. An important question for the cooperative has been, "How do we make sure that we don't fall into the process where the way we work sucks our whole lives into it." 

On the road to creating a sustainable system for the group, they have developed an approach to distribute the work according to the aptitudes and interests of its members. At the same time, they create space for people to develop new skills, if they so wish, such as paying for courses for its members. In particular, they note that learning to collect payments and set their rates from an economic justice framework has been challenging. In Puerto Rico, they say, many people get used to low wages and the need to have several jobs to live. They describe it as the internalization of austerity. One of the cooperative's founders, Bruje, tells us that "... it's still been a process of supporting and guiding each other around how we have a right to live with dignity, to be able to eat healthily, and how that is connected to how our medicine is recognized and compensated."

In addition to recognizing their right to live and work with dignity, the group claims "the right to demand that if people come from the United States, they have the responsibility, within a framework of the politics and principles of reparation, of ensuring that they contribute to paying for interpretation as a form of decolonization, which is being worked on as a form of solidarity." This reparation policy is also a healing proposal for those connecting through interpretation. 

How it all came together

Cooperativa Brújulas began with a call to convene in 2019 from Bruje Fuego, a current group member, summoning people who had experience with or interest in interpretation for social justice. At that time, Bruje already had years of experience in different social movements and was in dialogue with Caracol Interpreters Cooperative and Antena Los Angeles members (both now inactive groups). Bruje wanted to connect with others and explore the possibility of forming a group of language workers in Puerto Rico. Initially, eight to ten people began to meet and share stories about their linguistic experiences, particularly stories of trauma with the English language and information about language justice. Like everything that Brújulas does, these meetings were also about healing. Then several workshops and trainings were organized to train new people in interpreting. Bruje says that this training was important to them because they had done a lot of interpreting in their life without training or support, and they did not want new people to go through the same things they did during those first years. 

During the summer of 2019, when protests broke out in Puerto Rico, culminating in the resignation of then-governor Ricardo Rosselló, the group made themselves known for the first time. They began receiving referrals from other colleagues they were getting to know. At the same time, the group started to shrink due to different personal situations that the initial members of the group experienced. In 2020, they took their first steps to register with the government as a formal entity. They needed to do this due to the number of contracts that required a bank account and merchant number. Additionally, distributing the responsibility of paying taxes equitably within the group was becoming more complex.

For a while, they considered forming a non-profit organization and were also tempted by the idea of registering as a cooperative. But after consulting with a local cooperative association, they decided that starting a cooperative would subject them to much more regulation than registering as a corporation. So, they decided to formally register as a corporation with the internal commitment to manage their operations as a cooperative. Amid this process, the pandemic occurred, and for some time, two members could not return to the island.

Currently, the group considers themselves very young, and they are excited about the collaborations they are weaving. Lately, they are very proud of increasingly working in multilingual spaces with international colleagues in favor of collective and decolonial liberation.