Rooted in Mutual Aid

The Burrito Brigade began operations in November 2024 and has since made close to 4,000 burritos (80 a week) for Santa Fe’s unhoused and food-insecure communities. We have also begun handing out hot drinks, basic medical and hygiene supplies, and clothing. In December 2025, we are starting a second weekly cook and distribution, as well as providing a wide variety of other community support services.

The idea is simple and rooted in the principle of mutual aid: when there’s a crisis, we pool our resources and care for the most vulnerable among us. Rather than waiting for city approval, or negotiating lengthy grant processes, we use what’s available right here, right now to begin solving some of the big problems we face.

Mutual aid’s history is longer than humanity’s. Human and non-human communities everywhere have, do, and will respond to crises (earthquakes, pandemics, state violence) by forming networks of care, sharing food, transportation, and information. Mutual aid has also been a critical means of resistance to colonization, racism and capitalism. Indigenous communities have long shared resources to survive and combat genocidal erasure. In the modern day, oppressed communities have built mutual aid projects such as The Black Panthers, the Young Lords, The Jane Collective, or Mutual Aid Disaster Relief to protect and energize their communities.

Mutual aid is rooted in caring for our communities, but it is also about building power and mobilizing together. In the United States, we are surrounded by top-down political parties and hierarchical, nonprofit-led social movements—systems built around charity (givers and takers), rather than liberation (collective equality). These structures tend to prioritize goals that are palatable to elites rather than what communities actually need. We see the dangers of this culture in the Democratic Party’s anemic response to the rise of fascist, white-supremacist Christian nationalism. In top-down structures, power is given to the most comfortable, and therefore the least likely to act.

Mutual aid provides an alternative model of engagement, one which engages everyday people and builds social movements that respond to the needs and concerns of communities. Mutual Aid can also begin to create new realities, serving as both a path toward individual freedom and as a creative incubator of new ways of relating to and caring for one another.

“Mutual aid gives people a way to plug into movements based on their immediate concerns, and it produces social spaces where people grow new solidarities. At its best, mutual aid actually produces new ways of living where people get to create systems of care and generosity that address harm and foster well-being.” — Dean Spade