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WHAT DOES THE LAND KNOW? RICARDO LEVINS MORALES ON ART AND ORGANIZING
 
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Amie Stager |
August 21, 2025
Workday Magazine
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_ People are hungry for truth telling, but truth telling has a
smaller audience because it’s not within people’s realm of comfort
or familiarity. That’s how the Right came to dominate, by
continuously telling their story. They didn't water it down. _

Ricardo Levins Morales Art Studio can be found at local art and
neighborhood festivals in the Twin Cities, as well as at more national
events like the Labor Notes conference in Chicago, (Photo by Amie
Stager).

 

“We organize first and foremost, so we can live, and second of all
so we can live well,” writes visual artist and organizer Ricardo
Levins Morales in his first book, _The Land Knows the Way: Eco-Social
Insights for Liberation_. It is an ambitious tome for the social
movement organizers, activists, and artists of our time who are
seeking to unite the global working class against the many
interlocking, spiraling systems of oppression that are exploiting
people and the planet.

You won’t find specific answers, solutions, or roadmaps to the many
challenges we face today, but you will find strategies, tactics, and
organizing tools rooted in history and memory that can help shift the
narratives in our everyday lives. An organizing manual that is also
memoir, you can flip to any page of this poetic, meditative, and
meandering text and find an exploration of the questions, What is
solidarity? What is liberation? What does the land have to do with all
of this? “Sometimes, meandering is the point,” says Levins
Morales.

Born in Puerto Rico and hailing from an activist family that moved to
Chicago in the 1960s, Levins Morales left high school early. He began
working in several industries and started to make art devoted to
building social and political consciousness. His work has supported
farmers and activists such as the Black Panthers and Young Lords, as
well as environmental, labor, racial justice, and abolitionist
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movements. In 1979, he helped found the Northland Poster Collective
[[link removed]], a
grassroots silkscreen print shop and poster distribution center that
operated in South Minneapolis for 30 years.

The Northland Digitization Project
[[link removed]] has been working on
the Northland Poster Collective Archive
[[link removed]], which
includes art and oral histories. Ricardo Levins Morales, “The Labor
Movement,” _Northland Poster Collective Archive_, accessed August
21, 2025,
[link removed].

In the past five years of reporting on workers and their struggles,
I’ve learned how his work, especially his _Tending the Soil _zine
[[link removed]],
has had a prominent role in helping to build a more inclusive visual
language and solidarity. In his book, he mirrors a critical and honest
analysis of the history of our political and economic systems with his
personal history of scrappiness and creativity, survival and
resilience. Far from romanticizing suffering and loss, Levins Morales
shows us that change, or adaptation through hardship, is an essential
part of creating healthy soil that grows movements. 

More than 300 pages, the book’s lessons are easy to consume, and
reading it feels like talking to your favorite teacher or neighbor.
Levins Morales says he is working on an audiobook version. 

“I wanted to be able to invite hard-nosed shop floor organizers,
veterans of labor battles, with people whose pathway into activism is
through spirituality, or people who have come in through adrienne
maree brown’s emergent strategy, people from different narrative
streams who are comfortable in different ways,” says Levins Morales.
“I wanted to throw in enough hints that if you keep reading, I see
you, I know you’re here, I have some treats for you.”

_Workday Magazine_ sat down with Levins Morales at his studio in South
Minneapolis on a warm, summer day, to talk about his journey making
this book, the power of art and stories, and our current moment of
social and political consciousness. The following interview was edited
for clarity and length.

_WORKDAY MAGAZINE_: THANK YOU FOR WRITING _THE LAND KNOWS THE WAY_.
WHO IS THIS BOOK FOR? 

Ricardo Levins Morales: The most important strata of folks are the
people who themselves have constituencies, whether they’re artists
or teachers or leaders or shamans. People who are in a position to
disseminate. It’s partly “healer, heal thyself.” If one of the
big underlying conditions in the culture is a kind of hopelessness,
you can’t spread a positive vision that stimulates hope if you
don’t feel hope yourself. So partly, this is a way to shift some
perspectives, both in analysis and in emotional chemistry, for all of
these people who are the people who organize, who preach, who teach.

_WORKDAY_: THAT TERM, “EMOTIONAL CHEMISTRY,” STUCK OUT TO ME. HOW
DO WE CHANGE THE EMOTIONAL CHEMISTRY OF COMMUNITY AND MOVEMENTS? I
THINK OF THE METAPHOR OF THE SOIL, AND HOW YOU POINT OUT THAT
CONSERVATIVE THINK TANKS AND POLITICIANS HAVE PREPARED THE SOIL FOR
GENERATIONS THAT WE’RE IN RIGHT NOW. THEY’VE EXPLOITED THE
EMOTIONAL CHEMISTRY THAT WE HAVE, THE PANIC AND THE FEAR. 

Levins Morales: As somebody who came of age in a time when there were
radical movements, I’ve always looked skeptically at the blurring of
the lines between radical and liberal. You have a dominant liberal
narrative, which is, “We need to secure our borders, just not that
way. We need more police, just not quite as mean. Corporations are
over-regulated, just not as much as the Republicans say.” It’s not
a compelling counter argument.

_WORKDAY_: IT’S NOT. DOES IT MATTER WHAT SEEDS YOU’RE PLANTING IF
THE SOIL ISN’T HEALTHY?

Levins Morales: The right wing accuses the Democrats, extreme radical
Marxists that they are, of wanting open borders. Well, what would open
borders mean? It would mean friends of mine who came here and got
stuck here would have been able to come here and then go back to their
families. It would mean that they’d have to raise wages in Mexico in
order to keep workers. They wouldn’t have this two-tier wage system
here because of people’s vulnerability. If you’re worried about
criminals and smugglers and drug dealers crossing the desert, make it
legal to cross at checkpoints for everybody. Then the only people who
are crossing the desert are the people who have something to hide. I
mean, it’s just shifting the narrative in ways that can’t even get
a wedge into the conversation among the main people who hold sway in
the public square.

_WORKDAY_: THERE’S SO MUCH LOGIC TO SHIFTING THESE NARRATIVES! THE
BOOK IS FILLED WITH HOW TO DO THAT. I WOULD LOVE TO KNOW MORE ABOUT
THE WRITING AND EDITING PROCESS. HOW DID YOU DECIDE WHAT TO INCLUDE?

Levins Morales: One of the ways I decided what to include is by
running out of time. When I came to the realization that sometimes
people actually finish books, I realized I would have to put a stop on
it. So there are multiple sections that are partly written or started
that I just had to drop. I had this crazy idea that I was going to try
to get it out by the election. So I kind of rushed some of the editing
and proofreading process, but ended up not coming out then anyway, so
there was an unnecessary hurry based on a false urgency. I should have
read my own writing. The writing process started out with intermittent
time spent really writing the thoughts, writing down explanations. But
I didn’t have a voice, I didn’t have a rhythm. I wasn’t sure how
to do it. I’m not an academic. I didn’t want to imitate the
authority on high telling you how things are.

Four or five years ago, someone who had walked into my shop once and
had a conversation approached me at a public event and said, “Do you
want to be writing accountabili-buddies?” I’d never heard of it
before. Elle, who’s in the acknowledgments, is a playwright, and we
would meet once a week over a cup of coffee. I’m an introvert, which
means that I don’t generally share half-done things I wanted
polished, but this was really lovely to be able to share that level of
raw stuff that’s in process. I hired a local editor, hired a
proofreader, and I found an indexer who was very excited at the
content of the book, who’s down with liberation, who came up with a
great index.

_WORKDAY_: YOU WRITE ABOUT LEARNING HOW TO READ THE LANDSCAPE. WHY
OPEN THE BOOK WITH THAT?

Levins Morales: There was a time when I was working with groups,
working with organizers, sharing some of these ideas. And some people
would attend these events and say that they made their head explode.
Then the next day they’d go back to work and still not know what to
do. There was no clear way to translate between that and their to-do
list, all the calls they needed to make and the logistics they needed
to arrange. So I started trying to morph it more in a way that it’s
not a prescription of what to do, because there is none, but as people
absorb it, it gives more of a sense of guidance. Highlights some of
the dilemmas that people face, and tries to demystify them so that it
wouldn’t be just back to the grind.

_WORKDAY_: YOU WRITE ABOUT HOW ORGANIZERS AND REVOLUTIONARIES HAVE
THOUGHT DIFFERENTLY ABOUT HOW TO REACH THE AUDIENCES THAT THEY NEED TO
REACH. THERE’S SO MUCH THAT ARTISTS CAN DO ON THAT END BECAUSE THEY
CAN SPEAK TO A LARGER AUDIENCE.

Levins Morales: And organizers who learn how to speak in artistic
terms. I don’t know if you’ve heard my snarkiness about the two
kinds of organizing—the kind that puts narrative and story at the
heart of organizing, at the tactical, strategic and vision level, and
then there’s the kind that hasn’t figured it out yet.

_WORKDAY_: ONE OF THE MOST IMPACTFUL CHAPTERS FOR ME IS THE ONE ON
TIDE POOLS. THE SECTION ON LIVING THROUGH MOMENTS WITH HUGE PROTESTS
HAPPENING AND MORE PEOPLE WANTING TO BE PLUGGED IN. DO YOU THINK
WE’RE IN ONE OF THOSE MOMENTS RIGHT NOW?

Levins Morales: I find myself, a lot of the time, trying to convince
people that the moment that we’re in isn’t the way it’s always
going to be, when the tide is out. Yes, movements will return when the
tide is in. This is not going to last forever. In fact, we’ve gone
through several of those since I started writing this book. The George
Floyd uprising brought people into the streets who had never been in
the streets before. Most of those people, given the scale, all these
little white towns marching for Black lives, means that some of the
changes in consciousness are real, but the people have nowhere to go.
They don’t know what to do, they don’t have experience, they
don’t have organizational structure. They’re waiting for
opportunities that will once again engage them and allow them to do
something with what they now feel deeply about and what just happened.

_WORKDAY_: I STARTED REPORTING ON WORKERS IN THE FALL OF 2020, AFTER
THE UPRISING. AND A LOT OF THE ORGANIZING THAT WAS HAPPENING WAS
WORKERS SAYING, “WE WERE IN THE STREETS, AND NOTHING REALLY CHANGED.
SO WE HAVE TO GO INTO THE PLACES WHERE WE SPEND MOST OF OUR LIVES AND
CHANGE THINGS THROUGH UNIONIZING OR OTHER ORGANIZING EFFORTS.” SO
MUCH RESULTED FROM THAT, AND THE VIOLENCE THAT CAUSED THAT. AND
ESPECIALLY RIGHT NOW, IT’S SUCH A SCARY AND HARD MOMENT, AND THERE
ARE SO MANY CONNECTIONS AND SO MUCH COMMUNITY BEING MADE, RIGHT?

Levins Morales: One of the few silver linings of fascism is that they
attack everyone at once. Solidarity starts looking like an attractive
option. We’re seeing more and more people stepping forward with real
passion and commitment in defense of communities that they’re not a
part of, starting to see those connections in a way that have not been
front and center for a long time.

The workers of RLM Art Studio, located in South Minneapolis, are
represented by the Newspaper and Communications Guild/CWA. Photo by
Amie Stager.

_WORKDAY_: YOU TAKE US ON JOURNEYS THROUGH SPACE, FROM MICROSCOPIC
COMMUNICATION BETWEEN THE CELLS IN OUR BODIES TO GLOBAL PATTERNS OF
EXTINCTION AND RESISTANCE. THEN YOU TAKE US THROUGH TIME, INCLUDING
DEEP TIME AND ANCIENT HISTORY ALL THE WAY UP TO RECENT MEMORY. AND
THROUGH IT ALL, THE STORY OF PLANET EARTH AS ULTIMATE LIBERATOR.
HUMANITY HAS AT TIMES LIVED WITH THAT STORY AND LIMITED THAT STORY.
HOW DID YOU GET A SENSE OF THAT? HOW DID YOU BALANCE SCALE?

Levins Morales: There’s a question I can’t answer, except to say
that we live in all of these scales simultaneously, right? I think
partly it has to do with curiosity being something that was encouraged
in my family and nurtured. Thinking about the stars, thinking about
the dirt that I played in, thinking about the parasites I got into me
from the dirt that I played in. Thinking about all these things, and
then over time, seeing the connections among all of them. I didn’t
grow up writing poetry or anything. But I did remember in my brief
stint in high school, there was a class assignment where we had to
write a short poem. And what I wrote, what I chose, was something
about a little bead of glass being formed on a beach of sand under the
pressures of heat. This tiny little fragment reflects the stars at
night. That juxtaposition between entirely different scales coexisting
has always fascinated me.

_WORKDAY_: YOU WRITE ABOUT YOUR SISTER A LOT TOO. I FEEL LIKE THAT
SIBLING RELATIONSHIP IS IMPORTANT. THERE’S A KIND OF SOLIDARITY
THERE, WITHIN THE SCALE OF A FAMILY HOUSEHOLD, HAVING SOMEONE
ALONGSIDE YOU HELPS.

Levins Morales: When you’re in alignment!

_WORKDAY_: AND OF COURSE THERE ARE TIMES WHEN YOU’RE NOT IN
ALIGNMENT, AND THAT’S WHERE I’VE LEARNED A LOT ABOUT HOW TO REPAIR
THINGS. WE’RE ALMOST FORCED TO LEARN HOW TO DO THAT, BECAUSE WE’RE
IN THIS ENVIRONMENT TOGETHER.

Levins Morales: In the organizing world, I have often described family
as a gift to organizers, because you often end up in relationship with
people who you disagree with on everything and you still either love
them or have to at least tolerate them and remain in relationship. You
can’t throw them away.

_WORKDAY_: THERE’S A LOT OF LABOR HISTORY IN HERE THAT I LEARNED
ABOUT, BUT ALSO, CRITIQUES OF THE LABOR MOVEMENT AND UNIONS. THERE IS
A LOT OF RESTORING, OR RE-STORYING, THAT NEEDS TO HAPPEN. WHAT ARE
YOUR THOUGHTS ON HOW THE LABOR MOVEMENT CAN BE BETTER AT BUILDING
SOLIDARITY WITH THE LAND? HOW DO WE RE-STORY THOSE RELATIONSHIPS?

Levins Morales: It comes with that same formula that I keep drumming
like a rhythm throughout this book. You ask a bigger question. If your
mission is defined narrowly, then you’re in competition with
everybody. If it’s performed broadly, you’re in solidarity. The
classic, engineered conflict between environment and jobs, right?
That’s totally manufactured. Why do we want jobs? So that our
children can be fed, so that we can have a better life? Okay well,
what else contributes to a better life? How do we bring those things
into alignment, rather than choosing one over another and paying a
heavy price for it later?

I want to give people permission to think unthinkable thoughts. To go
there and try out different ways of questioning the orthodoxies
we’ve inherited. Sometimes after that questioning, we realize how
wise they were, sometimes not so much, or that there’s a kernel
that’s worth salvaging and other things that need changing.

_WORKDAY_: THERE’S A PART WHERE YOU WRITE ABOUT DEMOCRACY AND HOW
EXPLOITATION HAPPENS HAND IN HAND WITH “ELITE DEMOCRACY.”
THERE’S A LOT OF FRUSTRATION IN THE MOVEMENT HISTORY YOU WRITE ABOUT
REGARDING DEMOCRACY. WHY ARE WE PROPPING UP A SYSTEM THAT STILL
DOESN’T SERVE THE NEEDS OR DESIRES OF THE MAJORITY OF THE PEOPLE OR
THE PLANET?

Levins Morales: It’s about diagnosis, right? If you misdiagnose,
you’re going to come up with a treatment plan that doesn’t get you
where we’re going, and the outcomes won’t be good. So if you’re
diagnosing that these things need to be tweaked so the system will
work, then you’ll forever be tweaking the system. I say in the book,
the way the system actually works is, after enough tweaks, it triggers
a reset. Which is something that is a new idea to most organizers.
They think that it’s this back-and-forth pushing and whoever pushes
hardest. I think it has to do with clarity, one of the three essential
elements of organizing. You have to have that clarity in order for
your interventions to go to the root of the problem. Because if you
don’t go to the root of the problem, of course you’re going to
still keep experiencing the same struggles. Well, duh, the same empire
is in place. The same substructures are in place. It’s interesting
to live in a time where it’s actually possible to talk at least
somewhat about these things. For much of my organizing life, you
couldn’t hold a rational conversation that mentioned the word
“capitalism.” And now even the mainstream talks about it because
it functions so badly. They don’t talk about it being inherently
problematic, but they do talk about it being in crisis.

It’s partly about communicating on multiple frequencies. At this
moment, I think something as broad as “No Kings” is a good thing
to bring the maximum number of people into the street. But on top of
the Palestine movement, on top of the Black Lives movement, the seeds
of deeper analysis are there. A lot of people are at, “No, let’s
just return to a rational, well administered Empire.” But a lot
aren’t. People with a deeper analysis have to keep drumming that
deeper analysis. Doing that while simultaneously blocking a fascist
coup is important because fascism is nothing to trifle with, and
people just think “oh, well, we’ve lived through that before.
We’ve lived through police repression.” No, it’s not like what
people have lived through. When you have a real fascist state, you
have very little room to breathe. And if you read the lives of people
who have lived clandestinely in struggle, you know, you can spend
three weeks setting up a clandestine meeting with somebody in a public
place. Be sitting there for the rendezvous and just get a creepy
feeling at the back of your neck and jump on the next bus and go away.
All that effort is lost because there might have been somebody
surveilling you.

Hundreds of thousands of people have participated in “No Kings”
and “Hands Off” rallies across the U.S. this year to protest the
Trump administration’s policies targeting of working class
communities. Photo by Amie Stager.

_WORKDAY_: THERE ARE SO MANY NUGGETS OF WISDOM I’M GONNA TAKE WITH
ME. THERE’S A PART WHERE YOU UNPACK THE SAYING ABOUT THE DEFINITION
OF INSANITY, DOING THINGS OVER AND OVER AGAIN AND EXPECTING A
DIFFERENT RESULT, AND ALSO YOUR MOTHER’S SAYING ABOUT PREACHING TO
THE CHOIR, “THAT’S HOW YOU GET THEM TO SING!”

Levins Morales: Notice that both of those examples that you gave are
flipping something that’s very well known and widely accepted
frameworks. 

People are hungry for truth telling, but truth telling has a smaller
audience to begin with, because it’s not within people’s realm of
comfort or familiarity. That’s how the Right came to dominate, by
continuously telling their story even when it was a story that most
people didn’t take seriously. Instead of watering it down to be more
widely accepted, they just kept up the drum beat.

_WORKDAY_: WHAT KINDS OF ART SHOULD WORKING PEOPLE OR UNIONS BE
LOOKING INTO AND MAKING?

Levins Morales: The answer is, whatever’s needed and whatever’s
useful. Possibly as far back as the 1980s I’ve been doing workshops
on creative organizing at Labor Notes. For a long time, we had a
parallel sub conference called the conference on creative organizing,
which was trying to bring organizers, not just artists, in to use that
kind of creativity. What about working with union members to create
art about their workplace? Tapping into creativity where it is
embedded in the workplace, and not necessarily getting these outside
artists to do big, showy stuff. 

Ricardo Levins Morales, “ABCs of Organizing,” _Northland Poster
Collective Archive_, accessed August 21, 2025,
[link removed].

_WORKDAY_: YOU WRITE ABOUT PEOPLE OF DIFFERENT STREAMS AND LINEAGES OF
THOUGHT, THE HISTORY OF PEOPLE WHO HAVE ASKED THESE QUESTIONS BEFORE
AND HOW THE QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS HAVE EVOLVED. A LOT OF THE QUESTIONS
WE’RE ASKING NOW HAVE BEEN ASKED BEFORE, RIGHT?

Levins Morales: They might have found answers that had a shelf-life.
That’s also an ecological sensibility. The plants that grow in a
newly disturbed area create the conditions for the next wave of
plants. Weeds that grow by a roadside that’s been disturbed or after
a fire need sunlight, which means that their own seeds can’t grow in
their shadow. They have to be blown away by the spores and then the
next succession. The answers that were found by one generation were
the right answers, as right as they could be at that time, but
they’ve created conditions that have changed. The answers need to be
different now.

_Amie Stager is the Associate Editor for Workday Magazine._

_Workday Magazine holds the powerful to account while bringing the
perspectives of everyday workers, and the organizations that defend
their rights, to focus. We emphasize long-form investigative
journalism to unearth the concealed and buried. Our publication is
based in Minnesota and covers the greater Midwest, along with
international issues that affect workers, like climate change and U.S.
militarism._

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