Meet Sahar Pirzada and Traci Ishigo of Vigilant Love in Little Tokyo

Sahar and Traci, can you briefly walk us through your story – how you started and how you got to where you are today.
We are Sahar Pirzada and traci ishigo, a Muslim American Pakistani woman and a queer nonbinary femme, Japanese American Buddhist. Colleagues turned work besties, we are the Co-Directors of Vigilant Love. We often say that we were brought together by the elders of our communities, who started building their relationships after the 9/11 attacks. The experience of surveillance and incarceration of Japanese Americans before and throughout WWII directly connects to the profiling, xenophobic policies and incarceration of Muslims today. We were drawn to the importance of maintaining this connection, which honors Japanese American elders and the legacy of inter-generational resistance, while directly building out tangible pathways for cross-communal solidarity and healing today. We actually first met in the context of re-building a youth development program called “Bridging Communities” that was started by our elders for Japanese American and Muslim American youth.

We quickly realized how working together brought us so much joy, and we wanted to figure out ways to continue connecting outside of this one program. One such opportunity that changed our lives was organizing a cross-community vigil in response to the rise in anti-Muslim and anti-refugee sentiments, hate incidents and conservative backlash policies. This vigil ended up taking place the same week as the San Bernardino attack, which fueled the birth of a coalition space now known as Vigilant Love. Our co-founding big sisters – Kathy Masaoka and traci kato-kiriyama were right by our side. We continued viewing relationship building as a core component of the coalition. The coalition grew to fill a gap in Los Angeles for solidarity-based community organizing that focused on resisting Islamophobia.

Since then, we have continued organizing a Los Angeles-based community of arts, healing, civil rights, inter-spiritual, grassroots groups and individuals. Through Vigilant Love, we work on challenging Islamophobia on multiple fronts through direct actions, political education workshops, arts-based performances and community solidarity vigils.

As a woman- and non-binary femme-led organization, we intentionally create space that welcomes in people of many marginalized identities, allowing their and our full selves to be present in the work – that opportunity in a community organizing space is in itself part of our approach to healing justice.

We’re always bombarded by how great it is to pursue your passion, etc. – but we’ve spoken with enough people to know that it’s not always easy. Overall, would you say things have been easy for you?
After Trump’s election, our work in Vigilant Love felt that much more urgent, chaotic and intense. As leaders of this organization, we were called to wear so many hats – from being organizers of a thousand-person vigil after the wake of the first iteration of the Muslim Ban, to direct action strategists at the LAX airports, to stewards of our annual Bridging Communities Iftars and the Bridging Communities (BC) youth program. We’re proud to share that BC has now grow into the Solidarity Arts Fellowship, which just had its inaugural cohort of 15 Muslim American and Japanese American college students in the Southern California area. These young people went through a 6-month journey of learning about themselves, our community’s interconnected struggles, and the irreplaceable value of engaging in creative practice and building relationships in the midst of community trauma.

These relationships are necessary when we are organizing to end federal and local surveillance policies such as “Countering Violent Extremism”, which criminalizes and targets Muslims, refugees, immigrants and communities of color. We both have learned how much it takes to sustain this movement work for the long-haul, and there have been hundreds of leaders who have been with us to make everything possible throughout the way. We feel responsible to all our community, and we also realize that our roles require us to think about how to sustain the work so that we take care of those on the front lines in whatever way we can. This is our direct call for anyone reading to consider donating back to Vigilant Love! It truly matters.We want our work to be owned by the community so that we overcome the challenges of the shifting socio-political and funding landscape.

So let’s switch gears a bit and go into the Vigilant Love story. Tell us more about the business.
With both of us coming from nonprofit community backgrounds, we have never been in an organization so committed to building intentional, inter-sectional relationships of community care. Yet, building a culture that honors our own humanity is exactly what our resistance movements need. We are organizing in the face of depressing, isolating, and oppressive socio-political systems that can make us feel alone; and so often, our nonprofit movements model the larger toxic culture of capitalism. We have to practice learning and building together in another way.

In Vigilant Love, we try to create intentional time to check in, share meals, integrate grounding practices at the start of meetings and community vigils, organize safety teams at direct actions, and create many opportunities for storytelling in service of healing and social change. Our mission statement reads that #VigilantLOVE creates spaces for connection and grassroots movement to ensure the safety and justice of communities impacted by Islamophobia and violence in the greater Los Angeles Area. In the face of cyclical violence, we envision the embodiment of vigilant love amongst generations of multi-ethnic and inter-spiritual community who create pathways to liberation and healing together.

As the two of us have gone through difficult times in our own personal lives this year– with traci losing her father through a slow, painful process after a traumatic bicycle accident & Sahar suddenly losing her first child through pregnancy loss – our name, Vigilant Love, is something we are always learning from and aspiring to embody.