This October, participants in the Othering & Belonging Institute’s conference in Louisville will have the opportunity to visit La Minga Cooperative Farm in Prospect, Kentucky. The off-site experience offers a concrete place from which to explore what belonging looks like when it is cultivated through land, shared labor, food, memory, migration, and collective responsibility rooted in an understanding of the conditions and aspirations that bind us.
La Minga takes its name and inspiration from the Latin American tradition of the minga: the practice of people coming together in collective labor to sustain their community and advance the well-being of human and non-human lifeways.
Founded and stewarded by Nelson Escobar, Reverend Elmer Zavala, and Esteban Bartlett, La Minga is rooted in a Central American tradition of “collective work for the collective good.” The farm brings such knowledge and practices from across other “Souths” around the world into conversation with Kentucky’s own layered histories of liberatory place-making, agrarian cooperation, and conviviality, including those explored by bell hooks.1
La Minga therefore reflects a broader set of traditions and practices around people using land to meet material needs, sustain cultural practices, build relationships, and exercise collective agency. It also raises a larger question for conference participants and for OBI’s work and partnerships: What does a farm in Kentucky reveal about how belonging is structured and cultivated through land- and place-based movements and how such efforts are connected across locales and scales?
Belonging is experienced or expressed within a place, and also produced through the material, narrative, and relational organization of place.
In recent years, “belonging” has become a central concern within education, public health, social policy, and other fields and practices. Much of this work has helped institutions better understand whether people feel recognized and connected and whether they are able to participate meaningfully in the communities and institutions they inhabit. These are indispensable dimensions of belonging. Despite these advances, belonging is often treated primarily as a matter of perception, identity, experience, and institutional climate.
Less attention is given to the material arrangements that determine who can inhabit a place securely and participate in shaping, affirming, and benefiting from collective life. Those conditions are themselves structured through longer histories of land, power, and uneven control over territory and resources.
At the Othering & Belonging Institute at the University of California, Berkeley, we understand belonging as also structured by deeper historical and political-economic arrangements. Land and place provide a uniquely powerful vantage point for understanding and advancing how belonging is structured and cultivated “from the ground up.” This vantage point connects structural analysis with narrative and relational work that supports policy design, coalition-building, and institutional strategies for advancing belonging without othering.
La Minga and the collectivist and agroecological place-based practices it evokes and draws inspiration from—from around the world—make this proposition tangible. The farm fosters recognition and connection, but those experiences emerge through just and equitable relationships to land, labor, food, stewardship, and collective practice. In other words, belonging is experienced or expressed within a place, and also produced through the material, narrative, and relational organization of place.
Land as a structuring condition of belonging (and othering)
As Mississauga Nishnaabeg First Nations writer Leanne Betasamosake Simpson says, land is a set of felt relationships and obligations through which identity and community are constituted. And as bell hooks says, belonging to land is simultaneously material and affective, raced, gendered, and politically charged. Simpson, hooks, and others have also helped us understand how these relationships have been shaped by capitalist and colonial processes, where land, water, and other resources have been systematically enclosed in ways that produce enduring patterns of othering.2
The transformation of land into property in particular has entailed the dissolution of Indigenous polities and systems of stewardship, expulsions of many sorts, and the proliferation of exploitative and racialized agricultural, industrial, and urban labor regimes. These dynamics are not confined to the local or national scale at which property regimes are formally constituted. Under global capitalist political economy, access to land and resources is structured at the level of property ownership as well as through transnational systems that coordinate racialized labor and value extraction across multiple sites—core mechanisms through which value is extracted, wealth and power are accumulated, and unequal access to life chances is reproduced across space.
For example, for sectors such as mining, oil, and agriculture, land is appropriated or enclosed for resource extraction, often displacing local communities while integrating territories into global circuits of capital. These dynamics are intensified through processes of urbanization, where value is accumulated through the incorporation of displaced or marginalized populations into exploitative labor regimes and precarious housing, within and oftentimes outside one’s country.
In this sense, commodified land regimes constitute or undermine the conditions of possibility for belonging, determining who can remain in place, under what terms, and with what forms of collective recognition and agency.
Read together, hooks’ reflections on her home state of Kentucky in particular locate aspirations for and expressions of belonging in the dismantlement of such processes of enclosure, dispossession, and exploitation, through practices of Black freedom-making, multi-racial working-class solidarity, ecologically harmonious agrarian life, and land-based traditions that refuse domination.
La Minga enters this layered landscape and affirms such lessons and efforts through a tradition carried from Latin America, illustrating that the cultivation of belonging in a new place need not require the abandonment of connections to elsewhere and in fact that belonging is strengthened by those connections.
A web of land-based movements for belonging
Other land-based movements make these dynamics visible in concrete ways. Across very different contexts, they show how belonging is produced by recognizing and confronting locally specific forms of enclosure, dispossession, and exploitation while building new institutions, stories, and practices that better bond us with one another and with the non-human world.
In Brazil, the Landless Workers’ Movement (MST) challenges extreme land concentration through occupations of unused land and appeals to the “social function” of property. Structurally, it contests unequal ownership; narratively, it reframes land as a social right rather than a commodity; and relationally, it builds cooperative settlements grounded in shared learning, labor, and governance. Belonging here emerges through the collective transformation of relationships to land, labor, and governance that make shared life possible.
In Bolivia, agrarian reform and the later constitutional recognition of a plurinational state reconfigure belonging at the level of the state itself. Indigenous mobilization links land rights to political recognition, reshaping the nation as composed of multiple territorial communities. Yet tensions remain between constitutional recognition and ongoing extractivist economic practices, illustrating that formal inclusion does not automatically resolve structural inequality.
In Ecuador, the constitutional recognition of the Rights of Nature extends belonging beyond humans, reframing ecosystems as legal and political actors. This challenges anthropocentric models of belonging and introduces ecological interdependence as a structural principle of governance. However, it coexists with continued reliance on extractive economies, revealing contradictions between ecological narratives and political-economic structures.
In Rojava, decentralized systems of self-governance reorganize land and political authority through communes and councils. Here, belonging is produced through participation in collective decision-making rather than formal citizenship or private ownership. This case highlights that belonging can be institutionally organized outside traditional state frameworks, though always under conditions of constraint and conflict.
In South Africa, movements such as Abahlali baseMjondolo organize against evictions and for the right to remain in urban space. These struggles expose the gap between formal constitutional inclusion and material exclusion, showing how belonging in cities is shaped by housing, land access, and spatial inequality, and is asserted through presence, organizing, and collective struggle in place.
La Minga is not equivalent to these movements, nor is it simply a local Kentucky version of a Latin American agrarian project. It belongs within the same wider field of land-based practices through which people cultivate collective life and wellbeing and preserve and refine political traditions. Beyond a collection of comparative cases, the Global South appears here as a source of concepts, practices, and strategies that travel and are remade in new places and other “Souths.”
What land-based movements reveal about belonging
For us and others, using such cases across Asia, Africa, and the Americas to explore questions of land, property, and governance and the global structures and processes that shape them has revealed much about how belonging and othering operate. Namely, a land-informed and place-based perspective clarifies that durable forms of belonging require structural, narrative, and relational transformation, as reflected in our Belonging Design Principles.
What this essay adds to the principles, and what these land-based case studies illustrate, is just how integrated these aspects of change must be, and how they must address belonging at the root.
Land-based movements reveal that durable belonging requires structural, narrative, and relational transformation; studying the connections among those dimensions can help actors build the shared analysis, relationships, and collective power needed to produce change.
Through a land lens, structural conditions are made concrete: they are property regimes, land tenure systems, housing markets, patterns of displacement, and the governance arrangements that determine access to territory. These are active mechanisms through which life chances are organized and distributed.
Narratives, in turn, justify or contest those arrangements. Claims that land is a commodity, a social right, a sacred trust, or a commons shape what policies appear legitimate, what coalitions become possible, and who is understood as belonging to a place. Narrative work—from community organizing to constitutional framing—is therefore inseparable from the structural stakes it engages.
Relational dynamics determine how people experience, reproduce, and transform these arrangements in everyday life. Place-based struggles over housing, displacement, and territorial governance are among the most powerful sites at which new forms of solidarity, trust, and collective agency are built across lines of difference.
La Minga and the other examples discussed bring these dimensions together. Structurally, the farm raises questions about land ownership, rural economies, migration, labor, food, and collective stewardship. Narratively, it approaches land as a basis for nourishment, refuge, memory, cultural continuity, and shared obligation. Relationally, collective work and gathering produce recognition and connection among people whose experiences and aspirations are not identical but still connected.
Ultimately, studying and learning with such cases can help form a connective infrastructure for belonging. It can help communities, movements, and institutions identify how seemingly distinct experiences of exclusion are linked through common arrangements of ownership, governance, extraction, and uneven access to decision-making power. It can also illuminate the narratives, relationships, and collective practices through which those arrangements might be transformed.
Bridging from the ground up
Making these connections visible is only part of the work. Structural transformation also requires relationships capable of carrying shared analysis into collective action: relationships through which people can recognize their interconnected conditions, negotiate real differences, develop common aspirations, and move with trust and in solidarity to build the power needed to act upon them.
In other words, bridging is the relational work through which structural recognition becomes collective capacity and action. Understood in this way, the practice of bridging, which our Institute regularly emphasizes, gains greater precision through a land-informed and place-based approach:
Migration and displacement: When people are othered from the lands from which they are displaced and from the places where they arrive—stripped of decision-making power in both—their shared experience of territorial exclusion becomes a basis for solidarity. The Bridging for Democracy Project's work in Chicago, for example, helped immigrant and longstanding Black residents find structural parallels between the Great Migration and today's asylum seekers, recognizing their shared condition of territorial exclusion and lack of decision-making power as the basis for organizing together for better migration conditions and policy.
Housing and urban belonging: In a society where land and housing are treated as investment vehicles rather than a social need, precarity is widely shared even as it falls unevenly. The Blueprint for Belonging's work with Latinx movement organizers and Vietnamese residents of Orange County, California, illustrates this: together they passed a 2021 rent control ordinance and a 2024 ballot measure making it a permanent change. Their coalition was not built on shared identity but on shared stakes in the material conditions of belonging—the right to affordable and secure housing.
Global land reform and climate resilience: Belonging is also organized at transnational scales, through the agrarian and land systems that connect communities across borders. OBI recently supported and participated in a North American delegation of scholar-activists at the 2nd International Conference on Agrarian Reform and Rural Development in Cartagena, Colombia. As part of the delegation, and alongside civil society and governments, we learned about the structures, practices, and international solidarities that connect the experience of “landlessness” within and across our homelands and that make just and equitable land redistribution possible.
The Louisville gathering brings these local and global questions and practices into conversation with Kentucky, and with the various institutions, histories, and practices we each represent. La Minga is one such point of connection, illustrating the depth of relationship we must cultivate with one another and with the non-human world.
Image: The Second International Conference on Agrarian Reform and Rural Development brought together governments, peasant and Indigenous movements, Afro-descendant communities, civil society, and international organizations to address land concentration, territorial rights, food sovereignty, and rural development. The gathering connected locally rooted struggles over land to broader efforts toward agrarian reform and rural justice.
Implementing these lessons within our institutions
La Minga Cooperative Farm also illustrates that these connection points are not far removed from institutional belonging work. For the institutions represented at OBI’s conference, this is especially true.
Land may initially appear remote from the immediate concerns of educators, healthcare workers, government officials, university administrators, and nonprofit practitioners. Yet these institutions all occupy, govern, develop, regulate, or depend upon land and the social relations built upon it. In other words, belonging may at once be an internal question of representation, culture, or climate and a matter of how an institution’s material presence helps determine who can remain, move, work, and flourish in the places around them:
- Universities, for example, are sites of learning as well as major landholders, employers, investors, developers, and policing authorities. Through these roles, they may reproduce or contest longer histories of Indigenous dispossession, labor exploitation, housing insecurity, and unequal regional development.
- Schools similarly organize relationships to place through their locations, attendance boundaries, transportation systems, facilities, access to green space and food, and the degree of power communities possess over these resources.
- Hospitals and health systems operate as providers of care as well as major employers, landholders, and drivers of development whose decisions can reshape neighborhood housing, labor conditions, environmental health, and access to essential services.
- Government institutions coordinate many of these conditions through land-use policy, housing, infrastructure, environmental regulation, public investment, and the allocation of land and resources.
In each case, what may appear to be an internal challenge of institutional belonging is connected to a wider political economy that shapes the capacity of workers, residents, and communities to participate in and exercise agency over collective life and wellbeing.
Philanthropy occupies a distinctive position within this landscape. Foundations support communities responding to land loss, displacement, environmental harm, and regional inequality, while also helping determine which issues, places, and forms of work receive sustained attention and resources. In regions such as Appalachia, where land and development have long been shaped by extractive forces, funders can foster belonging by supporting collective stewardship, affordable housing, anti-displacement strategies, locally rooted food systems, and long-term regional organizing.
This work also depends upon networks operating across places and scales. Philanthropy can resource transnational networks through which communities exchange knowledge, build solidarity, and connect local struggles over land and self-determination to related movements elsewhere. Durable networks among funders can likewise connect regional knowledge and place-based priorities with ongoing research, shared frameworks, facilitation, and cross-regional learning—allowing local partner to remain grounded in local priorities while participating in a broader infrastructure for coordinated action.
The purpose of making these connections is to show that the constraints institutional practitioners face and the opportunities they forge are connected to wider arrangements of ownership, governance, and power. Locating that work within a larger system can clarify what is possible, where partnerships and resources are needed, and how diverse experiences and efforts share common structural roots.
Conclusion: Belonging from the ground up
La Minga and the other land-based practices explored here show that belonging is not simply experienced within places; it is produced through the material arrangements, narratives, and relationships that organize collective life. Durable belonging therefore requires more than recognition or inclusion within existing systems. It requires the capacity to remain, participate, steward resources, build collective power, and shape the conditions under which people and communities live.
A land-informed and place-based approach helps make these connections visible across movements, institutions, and geographies. It clarifies how bridging can turn shared analysis into solidarity and collective action, while challenging institutions to examine how their own material practices distribute security, resources, voice, and power. Understanding belonging from the ground up thus invites us not only to imagine more just relationships to one another and the non-human world, but to transform the structures that make those relationships possible.
At this October’s Othering & Belonging Conference in Louisville, we invite participants to explore these questions not only in conversation, but in place. The conference offers an opportunity to learn from living practices of collective stewardship, migration, shared labor, and land-based belonging—and to consider how similar connections might be cultivated within our own institutions, communities, and movements. We hope participants will join us in asking what it would mean to build belonging into the material foundations of collective life: to create places where people can remain, participate, exercise agency, care for one another and the land, and shape shared futures together.
- 1
Borrowing from Caribbean intellectuals including E´douard Glissant and Sylvia Wynter, these are, as Chickasaw scholar Jodi Byrd (2014: 609) describes, “global and subaltern Souths” shaped by diasporas, border crossings, colonial accumulation, and racialized proprietary violences.
- 2
“Othering” refers to dynamics, processes, and structures that engender marginality and persistent inequality across any of the full range of human differences based on group identities.
