This paper analyzes the lives of whom I call poli-creatives and how they reimagine space making and urban autonomy across greater Los Angeles through a queer and feminist praxis of collective care. Using women of color feminisms, queer of color critique, and transnational feminisms, this paper introduces the concept of mycorrhizal assemblages. As a theoretical and analytical tool, it draws from subterranean webs of mycelial fungal strands to conceptualize how poli-creatives use their work to navigate their everyday socio-political economic conditions by building interconnected spaces and nurturing local queer, feminist, working class, immigrant communities. Drawing on ethnographic observations and life-history interviews with five key poli-creatives, this paper discusses one kind of mycorrhizal assemblage rooted in informal spaces and practices; intimacy, trust, and vulnerability; and anti-surveillance and -policing. I show how these spaces do not depend on visibility and representation in public space, gayborhoods, nor the neoliberal state and formal institutions. Instead, I argue that although they are decentralized and ephemeral, they stay connected by a transnational and queer politics of local community building through DIY practice, holding spaces for embodied trauma, and divesting from institutional and settler-colonial state power. This study responds to the limitations within urban studies and discourses about queer communities by centering how poli-creatives use their transnational experiences, intimate communities, and embodied traumas and knowledges to lay down new soil for collective survival across greater Los Angeles and a future otherwise.
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