Forging Connections

Tecolotl, a language justice consulting collaborative based in Houston, Texas, takes a transformative and holistic approach to language justice work. The collective partners with public works firms  to design a multilingual engagement strategy for community input, collaboration and accountability in shaping the outcomes of public works projects like roadways, parks, housing, and more. Tecolotl develops strategy, conducts outreach, facilitates meetings, as well as provides interpretations and translations at all stages of the process. Having language workers involved throughout the entire life of a project means that the interpreters who provide services for community meetings, for example, already have a deep understanding of the project and have been in the community talking with residents about their concerns and opinions. 

The three pillars of Tecolotl’s work are language justice, popular education, and relational infrastructure. The idea of relational infrastructure comes from the research of Danielle Slabaugh, who was describing the work of West Street Recovery, “a horizontally– structured and worker–directed disaster recovery nonprofıt, which uses Hurricane Harvey home repair and community engagement to build more broadly towards social justice and an equitable recovery,” which Tecolotl member Jade Flores co-founded. When it comes to public projects, oftentimes the outcome of community engagement is supposed to be a plan or a report, which is produced over a period of months using a “drop-in” approach. There’s an over-emphasis on the physical infrastructure that is produced. However, Tecolotl takes on the task of developing the relational infrastructure that is needed to ensure the proposed project “actually happens and that it's sustained and that it continues to be responsive” to the communities a project is supposed to serve. 

How the group works

Tecolotl is registered as an LLC, but all members are co-owners and there is a shared decision making structure. Internally, the group functions like a collective and has incorporated various elements that appeal to them from cooperative structures. The collective is continually evolving and is committed to transparency and ongoing dialogue about its members’ needs. Members check in about how they are doing financially from month to month and shift work according to who has more capacity or who has more need, etc. Similarly, they check in regularly about their mental health and organize themselves and their work so as to support each other’s needs. This dynamic of deep care is something JES and Jade say they have rarely ever encountered before in a group and are proud to have cultivated within Tecolotl.

Because Tecolotl focuses on long-term engagements with partners, a majority of the interpretation and translation they do is for the needs of the projects they are working on and they rarely take outside requests for language services. In keeping with their commitment to sustainable and long-term engagement with communities, they also invest in building up and hiring local community leadership whenever possible. For example, they recently held an interpreter training for community members involved with one of their projects. That way, when the contract for the project ends, the community still retains its own trained language workers 

How it all began

Tecolotl grew out of the language justice work of another Houston-based collective - Antena Houston. The collective began to get a lot of requests “from architecture, landscape architecture firms or urban planning firms to come in and interpret at the town halls or community workshops.” However, most of the time, after hiring interpreters, these firms found that only English-speakers showed up to their meetings. JES recalls that the planners were “baffled” by this, which led them to have conversations with the language workers about this dynamic. Gradually, the planners realized they should have been planning a different type of engagement strategy from the beginning and invited language workers to become a part of their project team and apply for a bid together in 2019. This project for the Pasadena Healthy Parks Plan became Tecolotl’s first. JES was lit up by this work, which “just made so much sense” to them as a role for language justice workers, however there wasn’t much capacity from other Antena Houston members to do this, hence the creation of Tecolotl. 

In forming Tecolotl, JES brought in lessons from their participation in the Antena Houston and Los Angeles collectives. Their experiences underscored the importance of centering and uplifting the leadership of immigrants who come to language justice work as a survival tool. With Tecolotl, JES was committed to countering the ways that white supremacy often shows up in language justice work. They also found that they preferred moving in a strategic and intentional way when building a collective, which included the creation of internal processes and structures, while still creating room for organic growth and iteration. 

Tecolotl gradually gained members out of connections from organizing and language justice networks based in Houston and they built their collective structures.  As the group worked on their first project, they encountered a steep learning curve. They found that even though they had a seat at the planning table, they were very unfamiliar with the jargon and processes that moved public projects forward. Essentially they were challenged to put language justice into practice and get planners to break down inaccessible processes and practices so that all the stakeholders could work together.

After the first project, their work grew by word of mouth. They have never had to seek out clients, and have been able to sustain themselves while turning down work that doesn’t align with their values. JES attributes this success to two things: 1) the thought, intention, energy and love that they put into “working with these groups and really transforming this ecosystem” and 2) the enormous need for work at the intersections of design justice and language justice. While Tecolotl is forging ahead with their work around public design, they feel able to pivot if the future shifts and other opportunities or intersections make more sense. Their experience has given them “so much hope” for all kinds of possibilities and interventions.