Dorian Payan
- Title
- Location
- 2021 California Political Leadership Fellow
I’ve been a campesine for about 5 years now, though I carry a deep ancestry of campesines in me. I was born in the contiguous space between El Paso, Texas and Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua. Despite hopping back and forth, my life’s work is committed to transgressing the borders around us. I have been practicing community in the East Bay for a couple of years now, where through the network of students of agroecology, I have had the honor of relating to land there. Aside from California, I have also farmed in New Mexico and New York. When I am not farming, I work at the Sustainable Economies Law Center in Oakland, California, where I am supporting what we call “radical real estate” projects that are seeking to shift the relationships we have with the land as we know it. My goal and calling is to support a translocal network of land projects as they despeculate, decommodify, and democratize our relationships to land so that we may live more meaningful and intimate lives.