Journalist, newspaper creator, war correspondent, filmmaker, bar owner, cannabis farmer and activist. These are just a few titles that the 46-year-old Ana Nogueira has claimed in the last two decades. She phones me from a California cannabis farm called Redwood Terrace, where she’s been working on and off for the previous fifteen years and where she says she moved to be “with the love of her life,” something she tells me with what sounds like a soft smile. In 2006, Nogueira started working at a farm there called Redwood Terrace, which she now co-owns. She needed a way to fund what would eventually become a slew of political work without using corporate sponsors.

Back In 2001, Nogueira would get her first apartment in Bushwick, over on Starr Street, between Irving and Wyckoff Avenue. Her landlord had rented her a single floor between two stories that belonged to an army tent factory. 

“When the factory rolled a big cart of army tent material upstairs, it sounded like an airplane landing. When they dropped the material on the floor above us, little bits of debris would drop down on us,” Nogueira remembers. She and her landlord converted the floor into five lofted rooms and Nogueira would invite her friends to live, collectively with her. Each paid $400 in rent.