INTRODUCTION: AYOU KOMENSÉ: Louisiana Creole Land, Community, and Recognition

This is a story of conscious self-determination, reclamation, and decolonization. Conceptually, this book was brought into being at a lunch table in New York City in the summer of 2016. Four cousins, dislocated in diaspora, came together to eat: two from San Francisco, one from Oklahoma, and one from Amsterdam by way of New Orleans. It was a Dominican restaurant because we all eat beans and rice. We cousins, we Creole people, we Latinidad-Caribbean people, we Indigenous people, products of French and Spanish colonization: we all eat beans and rice. After eating, we went to Lehman College, in the Bronx.