At first glance, folks walking into J. Paul Leonard Library Room 121 on Thursday greeted by students acting out school fights might have found the sight strange. 

Jazdil Poupart-Feliciano is co-director of Micelio Abolicionista, a collaboration of educators, activists and students united in proposing alternatives to conflict resolution from an abolitionist perspective.

As part of the Latinx Speaker event, “Abolition, Decolonization and Activism in Puerto Rico,” Poupart-Feliciano facilitated an activity in which students reflected on the different forms of punishment that they’ve witnessed in school. The purpose of this activity was to encourage attendees to compare and contrast those punishments and prepare a skit portraying what other solutions might look like. The different groups then acted out both scenarios for the rest of the attendees.

Carolina Prado, an associate professor for Latina/Latino studies, helped organize the event alongside the Latinx Student Center after hearing about Poupart-Feliciano and seeing a connection to the in-class discussions of her class LTNS 210: Latina/o/x Healthcare Perspectives, which was in attendance.

“I wanted [my students] to have some understanding of the ways in which incarceration and schools can be centers of punishment and trauma,” Prado said. “I feel pretty passionately that the punishment of people in prison isn’t actually making things safer.”

During their presentation, Poupart-Feliciano spoke about the attention she’s devoted to helping educators in Puerto Rico self reflect on their school system, its forms of discipline, how punishment is dealt out, and how it can be directly tied to the prison-industrial complex.

“Every time we decide, for example, to call the police on our neighbors instead of reaching out and asking what they need, every time we choose punishment instead of approaching conflict with curiosity and seeing what other options there are, those are all moments we experience in our day-to-day lives, which we have agency over,” Poupart-Feliciano said. 

Poupart-Feliciano, a former teacher in Puerto Rico, grew disillusioned with the education system there. During one of her projects she completed during graduate school at University of San Francisco, she created a tool kit for teachers to not only challenge the system they find themselves in, but to also analyze their own perpetuation of harm and punishment. 

Sara Bermudez, a graduate philosophy student, only heard of the event an hour before but found the event informative.

“It’s incredibly relevant, I think, for the Latino community in particular,” Bermudez said. “We’re dealing with a lot of violence and public incarceration with the ICE raids at the moment. We’re seeing families incredibly separated, and that disrupts how we get our knowledge. You can’t talk about education without acknowledging those things.”

According to Poupart-Feliciano, mycelium, the large interconnected roots of fungi that develop beneath the substrate, represents the work of the abolitionist movement because of the idea that both are necessary to the environment. In nature, it communicates and distributes resources and nutrients to the parts of the ecosystem in need.

“The way in which we want to work is firstly, decentralized; you can’t identify where mycelium starts and where it ends — it’s constantly expanding,” Poupart-Feliciano said. “That’s why it lends itself to a more equitable distribution.”

Arleene Ortiz, a race and resistance studies and Latina/Latino studies student, learned about the connection between education and punishments during the event.

“I’m trying to be a teacher in the future, and as a teacher, what they tell you is that, ‘You need punishment for your students, or else they won’t learn,’” Ortiz said. “That’s what we’re taught, but can’t we go from an abolitionist state that will help us grow instead of punishing?”

Poupart-Feliciano said the goal of outreach from Micelio Abolicionista at these events is to highlight the voices of those who have been incarcerated or have supported incarcerated loved ones, as they’ve often been excluded from the conversation.

“Maybe you’ve never been incarcerated or had a loved one incarcerated, but through the means in which, as a society, we continue to invest in destroying communities via incarceration is a decision that affects us all,” Poupart-Feliciano said.