Equity Statement

Alternative Field is based in the unceded and still gentrifying area our Tongva kin call Tovaangar (Highland Park, Los Ángeles). This area is the hometown of founder Jessica Ceballos y Campbell, who has been impacted by her own histories associated with being a daughter of migrants and granddaughter of Indigenous Americans. But her experience has connected her to today's struggles and the efforts that guide us through.

To support a sustainably equitable literary landscape, Alternative Field commits to championing not just policy but practices that empower a just, inclusive, equitable environment, cultivated by incorporating equitable actions into the fabric of all components of our organization.

Alternative Field was founded with the intention to widen relationships within various communities fighting injustices throughout our Los Ángeles. In this allyship, we continue to understand our connections to the city and the needs we have to use arts as a tool for communication. At the birth of Alternative Field is the recognition that together, our communities face four significant threats to our shared existence and connected to that marginalization: a global pandemic; militarized state and vigilante violence significantly directed at Black and indigenous peoples; environmental degradation; and an economic crisis. All of these have been shaped and exacerbated by racism and white supremacy. Black, Indigenous, Native American, Latinx, Chicanx, Arab, MENASA (Middle Eastern, North African, South Asian), Asian, Pacific Islander, and other communities of color, especially those who are Disabled/Deaf and/or LGBTQIA+/Two-Spirit, are dying of these threats — by disease, police/carceral and racial violence, and the health and social inequities that force us into premature death.

Alternative Field was founded as a means to use poetry to bring our communities together for a common cause, whether through curated workshops, discussions, interdisciplinary events, and artistic partnerships with local organizations to help community members re-associate their environment to that which is culturally familiar and relevant, to emerge from this era moving forward toward a more just, shared future, guided by worldviews that foster collaboration and mutuality. We incorporate this idea of reassociation to all of our programming and to the curation of our poetry collection within the library itself.