Xicana/x Indígena Futures: Re-rooting through Traditional Medicines

Xicana/x Indígena Futures: Re-rooting through Traditional Medicines

Susy Zepeda

A central thread of this article is to open a dialogue around traditional medicines such as sacred tabaco (tobacco) as it connects to Xicana Indígena1 ceremonial praxis, Mexican traditional medicine, and decolonial feminist futurities. I’ve argued elsewhere, as in the case of the 2019 Xicanx Futurity art exhibition, Xicana/x people have created a digni ed path to self-determination that honors Indigenous roots and complex familial legacies and lineages across the hemisphere (Zepeda 2022, 141–153). In visual artist Gina Aparicio’s installation titled, Ipan Nepantla Teotlailania Cachi Cualli Maztlacoyotl (Caught Between Worlds, Praying for a Better Future), she creates a sacred space for collective prayer in the context of an art exhibit through tobacco ties, intentionally creating a place for pause, re ection, and grounding, before taking the next steps into the larger part of the art installation that evokes a sacred circulo (Tello 2017). These tobaccolled prayer ties in red cloth, because of their public visibility, became a site of contestation. This essay asks: what are the responsibilities and connections diasporic Mesoamerican peoples have to sacred plant medicine? Knowing that sanación (healing) arrives from working in collaboration with plants, what are the most respectful ways to work with tabaco : tobacco : picietl? What shapes the pathway of self-determination of Xicana/x peoples who are consciously re-rooting? How do we honor madre tierra, plant medicine, and ancestors?

Keywords: Decolonial feminist futurities / Intergenerational relations / Mesoamerican lifeways / Mexican traditional medicine / Plant medicine / Sanación / Self-determination

©2023 Feminist Formations, Vol. 35 No. 1 (Spring) pp. 117–131

I was a curandera before birth

And I am a curandera now

Channeling generational trauma

Listening to its voice

Feeling its pain

Helping my mother heal

Helping myself heal

Remembering

That our bodies are not disposable

That our existence is hope

That we are worth living

That we have something valuable to share with the world

That we need to heal

For our next seven generations

—Berenice Dimas, “Queeranderismo” (77)

Figure 1 Ipan Nepantla Teotlaitlania Cachi Cualli Maztlacayotl (Caught Between Worlds, Praying for a Better Future) (2019). by Gina Aparicio at the Shrem Museum

Indigenous/traditional medicine creates a relationship with nature, the place-cosmos. Through activating Indigenous values of respect, responsibility, and renewal, disconnected original peoples can restore their teachings and cultures. They can change the effects of domination. Colonization is permeable. The potential of human beings does not have to be limited by oppression or limiting paradigms that may not factor the power of prayers and ceremonies left by earlier generations or the spirits of memory in the foreground.

—Patrisia Gonzales, Red Medicine (235)

Introduction

This essay is concerned with Xicana/x peoples, as “disconnected original peoples,” the sabiduría of plant medicine, and decolonial feminist futurities (Gonzales 2012a, 235).2 At its core, this work is articulating Xicana/x peoples’ responsibility to re-member and self-determine through a conscious re-rooting in plant medicines to walk in balance with the earth and cosmos. The vision of this queer Xicana Indígena root work is to create an explicit site of analysis and praxis to connect again to spiritual roots, plant medicines, and ceremony that can lead to a path of conocimiento and sanación (healing) of intergenerational traumas for Xicana/x Indígena peoples including detribalized and de-indigenized Chicanx and Latinx communities. Through this site of analysis and praxis, I caution us not to recreate forms of violence, fear, or accusations of appropriation (Anzaldúa et al. 2003). There is an assumption that people who self-determine as Xicana/x or Chicano/a/x are not doing the work to know their respective Indígena lineages and traditions, do not follow protocols that respect the earth and peoples of the earth, and are appropriating Indigenous cultures. This essay aims to disrupt untruths that mark Xicana/x peoples as “lost” mestizos, particularly those who are at work diligently to reconnect with ancestral teachings and ceremonies in respectful and meaningful forms.

This work of re-rooting our medicines is part of articulating an evolving yet established dialogue of Xicana/x Indígena studies that is grounded and aware of the implications of reclaiming Indigenous practices and lifeways. Part of what I’m arguing for is the visibility of the social praxis and acknowledgement of right relations of Xicana/x Indígena peoples with plant medicine. There is profound evidence of intergenerational trabajo (work) to remember ancestral wisdom and traditions in accountable and reciprocal forms, holding at the root the consciousness that sabiduría Indígena is a life force that guides a balanced relationship with madre tierra. Notable examples of these critical and interconnected practices include Hood Herbalism created and led by Berenice Dimas3 and Las Maestras Center: For Xicana[x] Indigenous Thought, Art and Social Praxis

based in Chumash homeland, created and led by Cherríe Moraga and Celia Herrera Rodríguez. Yet what can interrupt the possibility of these decolonial feminist futurities, are the intellectual and political debates over who has the right to claim Indigeneity based on nation-state demarcations, and who governs the proper way to be Xicana/x Indígena, and the praxis of how to hold ceremony (Hartley 2012).

To ground my arguments, I focus on the visual storytelling of spaces of ceremony and spirit work created by queer Indígena artist Gina Aparicio (Xicana/ Apache/K’iche’), whose art was publicly spoken of as a contested form of extraction. In order to do the work of healing from intergenerational traumas of susto (fright), shame, vergüenza, and grief that have been internalized over generations due to colonial state logics of racism and projects of de-indigenization, I ask: how can art as visual storytelling re-narrate our connections to madre tierra and our plantcestors (River Rose Apothecary 2014)? Evoking Mayahuel, the Mexicayotl feminine maguey plant energía, protector of fertility and seeds, and so much more, I ask: can a deeper meditation with our relationship to plant medicines signify a pathway to attend to debates of proper protocol and praxis, accountability, and interconnectedness? Barker’s (2018) articulations about Indigenous land are helpful here and in alignment with Xicana/x Indígena logics of understanding relationships to the land that remove harsh notions of ownership or possession. She wrote in her essay, “Decolonizing the Mind,” “Indigenous land is not property or a public commons; it is a mode of relationality and a related set of ethics and protocols for lived social responsibilities and governance de ned within discrete Indigenous epistemologies” (Barker 2019, 209).

It is the rooted medicine in plantitas (plants) and madre tierra that opens the path for Xicana/x peoples to heal (Román 2012). Not one people or community “owns” what Román (2012) calls “nuestra medicina” but we do have to engage with the earth and plant medicine in ways that are respectful and accountable to the land, waters, original peoples, more than human relatives, all of which can be assessed by the praxis we employ.

In my analysis of Aparicio’s visual prayer I emphasize her methodology of creating her art as ceremony to demonstrate her political and philosophical underpinnings that stem from a Xicana Indígena vision to be in balance with mother earth. A formulation akin to Patrisia Gonzales (2012a) journey with “plantas,” she tells her story:

Long before I decided to pursue a doctorate, my journey to understand las plantas would lead me to many recetas and to medicinas such as peyotzin, yauhtli, maguey, and tobacco, and el poder de las ores, the healing power of owers in puri cation rites. To Indigenous people, the plants are medicines. These four plantas, or medicines—in fact, ceremonial plants—organize this story of how I learned their power and application. These plants are my guides in understanding fertility, pregnancy and labor, and general imbalances, be

they physical or spiritual. Plant knowledge is so important for Nahua cultures that we literally “plant” who we are, our ombligos (umbilical stubs), placentas, and names. (Gonzales 2012a, 14)

Aparicio’s generative relationship with tobacco and peyote medicine (represented in the form of clay sculptures), is directly connected to her desire to bring consciousness about pathways that honor the plant medicines as well as ways to work with their technologies to assist us in praying.

Aparicio’s Ipan Nepantla Teotlaitlania Cachi Cualli Maztlacayotl (Caught Between Worlds, Praying for a Better Future)

Through Gina Aparicio’s Ipan Nepantla Teotlaitlania Cachi Cualli Maztlacayotl (Caught Between Worlds, Praying for a Better Future) art installation an Indígena worldview is opened. Through the intentional naming and construction of this sacred space, we can see her sabiduría of the Nahuatl language, her alignment with political and cultural efforts to revitalize this language and many more Indigenous languages that are very much alive in Mesoamerica, yet always under the threat of extinction due to global capitalist structures (including the nation state of Mexico) that aim to extract from the earth and in turn displace pueblos originarios.

Aparicio offers a distinct visual prayer for madre tierra that is rooted in ceremony. Birthed in 2014, this mixed media installation has traveled and been exhibited in three signi cant geographical and chronological variations and iterations—Florida 2014, Los Angeles 2017, and Davis, California 2019.4 Aparicio’s starting point or imagined space of ceremony for this installation is Nepantla, a “zone of possibility.” Anzaldúa theorizes nepantla as a “site of transformation,” “the zone between changes where you struggle to nd equilibrium between the outer expression of change and your inner relationship to it” (Anzaldúa 2002, 548– 9).

I rst interacted with Ipan Nepantla Teotlaitlania Cachi Cualli Maztlacayotl in Florida as part of Gina Aparicio’s MFA project, at this time she herself was at the altar—at the doorway—she guided the process of making a prayer tie with tobacco for everyone who visited her installation at the art gallery. The altar was positioned below a cork board that Aparicio outlined with peyote re-kilned clay buttons and at its center the four directions outlined with deer silhouettes and a large peyote button ower at the center.5 This was the doorway to the larger part of the installation that held four nahuales in ceremony standing rooted in the four sacred directions around an 8-foot circular wooden Coyolxauhqui stone representation as the inner circle. Each nahual (standing animal gure) en las cuatro direcciones of the circle is holding a ceremonial instrument (a rattle, drum, ute) or pipe and is prepared to offer a traditional song. When we spoke about the sacred elements, I asked Aparicio where she would place the re in

her installation if the museum would allow. She replied, “If they (museum) let me, in the ombligo of Coyolxauhqui,” her center (Aparicio 2018). In her belly button, the center of the circle.

At the Shrem Museum, for the Xicanx Futurity exhibition, it was the use of tobacco plant medicine, and particularly the making of prayer ties that became contested in the case of Aparicio’s sacred offering. In part, because Gina, or another person to hold the doorway, were not there to guide the making of the prayer ties. An occurrence that was determined in relation to the Museum restrictions and limited possibilities of “organic materials” that exist within that institution. Ipan Nepantla Teotlaitlania Cachi Cualli Maztlacayotl (Caught Between Worlds, Praying for a Better Future) is, in Aparicio’s words, a “communal prayer for social justice and a better world for our future generations.” As an activista and visionary of peace, Aparicio’s aim was to create and contribute to a dialogue that can lead to a shift in cosmic consciousness that honors madre tierra. This is re ected in her raising of the tobacco prayer altar also referenced as “a tobacco prayer for peace.” Before entering the circle of the larger installation, Aparicio brings together the sacred and the political by inviting visitors to “make a prayer,” an intention, with the tobacco prayer ties on the interactive altar for “what they feel needs to be changed, where they see injustice,” for example, with the environment, the earth, relation with other human beings, internal changes, or changes in structures, governments, or nations. Ofrendas of gratitude and permiso. Aparicio builds on the teachings learned from her maestrxs in ceremony, walking the red road. In a 2022 dialogue with human rights activists and ceremonial elder Rocky Rodriguez (Xicana/Zapotec), Gina Aparicio shared a memory of rst learning how to pray with tobacco ties in 1990 when she rst met Rodriguez, in Colorado at the Chicano Youth Liberation Conference (Aparicio and Rodriguez 2022).6

Healing De-Indigenization through Plant Medicines

As mentioned above, it is the tobacco prayer altar that begins the installation, as it encourages the visitor to reconnect with an earth-centered conscious way of life and invites a practice of meditation and prayer, instead of the capitalist colonial detached entitled way of life. Aparicio invites the viewer to transform their consciousness of the moment by re ecting and making an offering with this sacred plant medicine, often thought of as a grandfather, and a small red square piece of fabric that becomes a prayer tie (see Figure 1). Placed on a cork board with peyote owers, made of red clay-sacred earth, creating a space to rest prayers. The altar held the elements of sage, a feather, and water. The four nahuales, one in each cardinal direction, follow Lakota teachings, imparted on Aparicio by elders: Bear woman in the South (yellow), Owl woman in the West (black), Jaguar woman in the East (red), Deer woman in the North (white). As part of the altar guidance, visible on the placards in Figure 1, Aparicio wrote,

“Tobacco is one of the sacred medicines for Native Peoples. Prayer ties are used to make special intentions. Take a pinch of tobacco into your left palm. Say a prayer or make an intention for the world you’d like to see. Place the tobacco onto the center of the cloth and pin it to the wall and join our communal hope for a better world.”

Ipan represents what resembles or can be understood as a peyote ceremony, where ancestors are invited to the all-night journey, in a respectful way, to join in collective prayer. Aparicio intentionally offers a place to pray: teotlaitlania and heal for a more balanced world by giving people the room to face the traumas of colonization, racialization, forced removal, and near elimination through the experience of her mixed media installation. A sacred space to re-root. Aparicio’s Mesoamerican spirit-centered structures work to shift our senses to the present moment enough to be able to time travel and visit with and remember our antepasados through our breath, prayer, and ceremony. Aparicio’s “offering” is a re-centering of memory through song, prayer, and material connections to earth. With the earth-colored lighting, she disrupts the white walls and creates the sensation of entering madre tierra, like ceremony: “It is a prayer for the healing of ourselves, our community, our madre tierra…It is an act of self-determination. It is meant to transform the white walls of an institution into sacred space. These prayers are arrows ghting for the children we will never know. The vision is to unify the red, black, yellow, white, all the races, all peoples, to be part of a new beginning” (Aparicio 2018).

As viewers walk through the installation, we hear songs on a loop, featuring Grupo Tribu, In Lak Ech, Cihuatl Tonali, and Aparicio herself reciting a spoken prayer and playing a hand drum. The song supports the feeling or remembering of ceremony as one walks through. All the music and voices heard are cis-gendered women, except Grupo Tribu. Their song “Fecundación Sagrada,” however, is about mujeres, mujeres who transform into nahuales. The lyrics prompt introspection, asking and evoking: “¿Que Mujer Eres Tu? . . . Mujer serpiente, Mujer venado, Aguila mujer, Mujer jaguar, mujer, mujer . . . Mujer de tierra, Mujer de mar, Mujer montaña, Mujer de arena, Geogra a de mujer” (Which woman are you? . . . Serpent woman, deer woman, eagle women, jaguar woman, woman, woman . . . Women of the earth, women of the sea, mountain woman, sand woman, geography of woman.). The signi cance of these ceremonial songs is that they allow for another modality to travel and open one’s heart to the memories of ceremony and the teachings of ancestors. The heartbeat of the drums, palabra, traditional song resonates as tools, as pathways, to unthreading legacies of patriarchy, colonialism, and imperialism. Aparicio’s visual art as activism is a praxis of decolonization, a visual storytelling of transformation. Remembering through song and visual storytelling of connections and ceremonies with plant medicines are particularly important in the historical context of Xicana/x and Latina/x communities who have been displaced, “de-tribalized,” and “de-Indigenized” to differing degrees across the hemisphere

(Gonzales 2012a). Colonization was a source of harmful fragmentation for Indigenous peoples of Mesoamerica and continues in the present day through racist colonial legacies that embed forgetting and misremembering. Yet our ancestors don’t forget us. We remember when we work with plant medicine in balanced ways, alignment is possible when we listen for the remedies and healing they offer us.

Bon l Batalla (1996) signi cantly argues about Mexico original pueblos, “De-Indianization is a historical process through which populations that originally possessed a particular and distinctive identity, based upon their own culture, are forced to renounce that identity, with all the consequent changes in their social organization and culture. De-Indianization is not the result of biological mixture, but of the pressure of ethnocide that ultimately blocks the historical continuity of a people as a culturally differentiated group” (Bon l Batalla 1996, 17). He continues, a “major achievement of the process of de-Indianization,” is that “it has succeeded in convincing large parts of the Mesoamerican population to renounce their identi cation as members of a speci c Indian collectivity” (Bon l Batalla 1996, 18). I argue that this disidenti cation (Muñoz 1999) is part of a susto, trauma for de-tribalized Xicana/x peoples who are actively creating ways of connecting back to a rooted path. I contend that precisely this susto requires the building of balanced relationship with rooted plant medicine for healing and a way to come back home. This invites further meditation for Chicana/o/x studies scholars to continue moving away from harmful or exclusionary identity formations, like mestizo and Hispanic, and move towards a re-Indigenization that includes lineages and generational legacies. It is a pathway that many Xicana Indígena and otherwise Indigenous identi ed intellectuals, artists, and communities have been re ectively walking for some time (Forbes 1973; Moraga 2011; Gonzales 2012a; Luna 2012; Hernández 2005; Rodríguez 2014; Alberto 2016; Lara and Facio 2014, Román 2012; Medina and Gonzales 2019; Garzo 2020).

Rooted Xicana/x Indígena Futures

The artist I feature here, Gina Aparicio (Xicana/Apache/K’iche’), consciously identi es as a Xicana Indígena that is rooted in traditions and intergenerational relations. I have argued that Xicana/x artists, activists, and intellectuals who engage in Indigenous sacred practices do so in digni ed and respectful forms. And while a remembering is happening, it is conscious and based in aligned praxis. Thus, I aim to disrupt and uproot what Saldaña-Portillo and Trujillo (2021) articulate as an “ongoing Chicanx extraction of Native American and Indigenous sacred practices for the purpose of shoring up a lost indigeneity” (Saldaña-Portillo and Trujillo 2022, 157). As a participant and witness of sacred ceremonial spaces, the mischaracterization that Saldaña-Portillo and Trujillo (2021) claim is divisive and dismissive of deep ancestral healing work. They base

their analysis on a harsh critique on mestizaje and the way it erases Indigenous communities, yet charge Chicanx people as bene ting from mestizaje (SaldañaPortillo and Trujillo 2021, 156). I argue that, like many other Xicana Indígena scholars who have done the work to see the depths of the state-imposed mestizaje, that positing mestizaje as a viable and still necessary “trope” for “Chicanx historical consciousness” harmfully freezes Chicana/o/x and Xicanx peoples who do not nd resonance with mestizaje and its racist and exclusionary logics (Saldaña-Portillo and Trujillo 2021; Zepeda 2020).

Visual storytelling through the artwork of Gina Aparicio, and other sites of wisdom that consciously work with plant medicine and ancestors, re ect an active decolonial pathway to rooted Indigenous futures (Pérez 2003, 2007; Miner 2014). Xicana/x Indígena historical consciousness is bound up in the four directions, traditional medicine, interconnectivity, and intergenerational wisdom, or what Patrisia Gonzales calls “Mexican Traditional Medicine” (MTM). Gonzales (2012a) writes, “Mestizaje is the master narrative of the Americas that was constructed to de-Indigenize peoples.” She continues,

And just what do people mean when they say mestizaje or mestizo —not Indian, part Indian, de-Indianized Indian? And if there is a part, how great is the part?

As Celia Herrera Rodríguez asks in her performance art, “What part Indian am I?” What do those parts tell us? Are the parts designated “not Indian” because nation-states have constructed a narrative that its original peoples are no longer ethnically Indian or culturally Indian or cosmologically Indian? . . . It is important to recognize that many mestizos, operating from internalized oppression, and actively participate in discrimination against Indigenous peoples and help foment the climate that breeds dis-Indigenization. Yet many ancestors of contemporary “Mexican origin” people did not have the power to publicly challenge or pre-empt the state-imposed story of a denied ancestral legacy (read nation-state-constructed mestizaje). (Gonzales 2012a, 213–214)

Gonzales ends by articulating, “mestizaje is an insuf cient paradigm or unit for analysis, particularly when working in the context of “MTM” (Gonzales 2012a, 213–214). This is a signi cant and important intervention, particularly in the debates that dismiss the immense practices and philosophies of Xicana/x Indígena peoples.

Uprooting Colonial legacies of Surveillance

In colonial Mexico, peyote medicine was so revered and useful, female midwives and healers were prosecuted by the Holy Of ce of the Inquisition for employing it, and colonial records document its widespread use among Indigenous peoples of Mexico. Despite religious persecution of its users, its medical and ritual use continues today among numerous Mexican Indians from Huichol and Tarahumara, Native peoples of the north, and detribalized Mexicans and “Chicanos indígenas” who

use it medicinally in homes with families as part of prayers or in large ceremonies. (Gonzales 2012a, 28)

Priests and colonizers used existing social networks to exact social control and surveillance. The inquisition used repression of entire families and communities, torture, death, indentured servitude, and even prison in perpetuity for repeat or gross offenders, as was the case of the midwife “madre Chepa”. . . . The inquisition and colonial authorities utilized public displays of power to repress Indigenous worldviews and replace the grand pre-Columbian public ceremonies. Public trials replaced the feasts, where the ticitl and the temixihuitiani (someone who causes to give birth, midwife) or the tepalehuiani (helper or midwife) once danced with bunches of marigolds and tobacco in honor of Tlazolteotl, the guardian of midwives, medicine, and birth. (Gonzales 2012a, 77)

Mesoamerican peoples left a constellation of symbols about life, the universe, and a cosmology that still speaks to their descendants and Indigenous people today, much as the painted rocks speak, the river spirits speak, the plants and the trees speak. These symbols on ceremonial calendars, barks, hides, and stones are all forms of communication left to us for the purpose of memory. For Indigenous and detribalized people who were interrupted from the knowledge contained within these symbols, they may read the images from the constructs created or transmitted by the media or academics. (Gonzales 2012a, 87)

In a recent article, Calderon and Urrieta (2019) included the Xicanx Futurity art exhibition in their essay “Studying in Relation: Critical Latinx Indigeneities and Education” as a form of colonial appropriation, yet in many ways their discussion could have strongly bene ted from engagement with the artists, co-curators, or museum staff to complicate their analysis. They did not provide context for the exhibition or engagement with the curatorial text such as the exhibition brochure or the wall text exhibited next to the artwork at the Shrem Museum. The only cited source used in the misrepresented analysis was the California Aggie, the University of California, Davis campus newspaper. One important question in this debate is how we navigate the surveillance in this modern colonial moment. This can manifest in the form of “Call Out Culture,” which adrienne maree brown theorizes as “a punitive tendency…within our movements” (brown 2020, 1).

Confusingly Calderon and Urrieta (2019) use the Xicanx Futurity exhibition as an example of uprooted artwork. Yet the exhibition held the work of established Xicana/x and Indígena artists, who have been walking a digni ed path, each in their own way. The artists include: Gina Aparicio, Celia Herrera Rodríguez, Margaret Alarcon, Felicia Montes, Gilda Posada and Melanie Cervantes of Dignidad Reblede. Six Indígena artists who weaved an intergenerational prayer that disrupted energies like ni de aqui, ni de alla. A migration narrative that is rootless. Yet a dominant narrative that is easily adaptable when economic

and social-political factors make it dif cult for communities to nd home after displacement due to created and imposed borders built on xenophobic policies and legislation. Calderon and Urrieta (2019) discuss the exhibit as an example of “some contemporary Chicanx production of mestizaje/indigenism” that “is also based on the appropriation and display of sacred Indigenous objects and spiritual practices” (Calederon and Urrieta 2019, 8). Suggesting that “this put Chicanx artists in con ict with local Native communities due to the lack of understanding of the cultural protocols that were not followed and not understanding how such lack of communication reproduces the historic ways museums have mishandled Indigenous cultural objects” (Calederon and Urrieta 2019, 8). This articulation undermines the art exhibition in all its formations without one single open dialogue with artists, co-curators, or museum staff to ask about communication with local Native communities, our collective knowledge about colonial museum culture and cultural protocols, or the visionary logic of the Indígena artists who intentionally created a space for the sacred. adrienne maree brown wrote and I would agree, “I don’t nd it satisfying, and I don’t think it is transformative to publicly call people out for instant consequences with no attempt at a conversation, mediation, boundary setting, or community accountability” (brown 2020, 55).

As a co-curator of the Xicanx Futurity exhibition along with Carlos Jackson and María Esther Fernández, I want to elevate the narrative of honoring plant medicine and Xicana/x peoples working with plant medicine through the story of the exhibition that was held on Patwin land, also referred to as “Wintun Homeland” by Diana Almendariz, an elder and cultural practitioner of Maidu/ Wintun and Hupa/Yurok descent and traditions. This exhibition, which ran from January 2019 –May 2019, began with Almendariz’s words, stories, and land acknowledgement at the opening day which unexpectedly brought almost 1,000 people together that January afternoon at the Manetti Shrem Museum and close to 10,000 visitors over the span of ve months. Both the opening and the run of the exhibit broke Shrem Museum records, showing the resonance of the exhibition theme, artwork and artists.

At the exhibition initial meeting, when the co-curators met the museum staff and presented the vision of the Xicanx Futurity exhibition, beyond elaborate introductions with the almost all white museum staff, a central question we answered as co-curators, was “Why now?” Our collective response was:

This is a critical point in which it is necessary to ground and advance a critical conversation about Chicana/o/x Art History, with a particular emphasis on ceremony and necessary unthinking of the imposed border. The representations we are curating in this art exhibit do the work of challenging the idea that our hxstory began during the 1960s when the concept of Chicano was asserted with a myopic emphasis on Aztec ancestors and culture. We need Xicanx Futurity now because divergent voices, peoples, lineages, practices, and

visions to the mainstream have been consistently marginalized. It is important to complicate “Chicano art and identity” by insisting that it is always in formation—in this contemporary historical moment, with our current political climate, it is imperative as responsible and accountable social actors, cultural workers, and intellectuals to name and acknowledge the historical trauma colonization has caused for over 500 years. We center ceremony as a way to gather our tools for intergenerational healing to ensure present and future generations do not repeat colonial cycles of disconnection, particularly as our current U.S. administration works to criminalize Xicanx existence. In this moment, we acknowledge that visual representations have the generative capacity to re ect our sacredness and honor our differences. Xicanx Futurity does the work to complicate pre-existing notions of Chicana/o/x Art by highlighting a vibrant visual storytelling of ceremony and political practices that pave grounded pathways to understanding the ever-shifting possibilities of Chicana/o/x Indigeneity that is invested in not replicating settler colonial practices that uproot or disregard Indigenous peoples. We acknowledge that part of trauma has been a continued invisibility of empowering representations in larger society, including contemporary art museums. This visual manifestation of a movement will bring a healing of spirit to many. (Co-curators of Xicanx Futurity, 2018)

In preparation for this meeting we also de ned key terms, one of them being decolonization, along with memory and ceremonia. As co-curators we were intentional in our every step. It is signi cant to meditate with this art exhibit as a “visual manifestation of a movement” that “will bring a healing of spirit to many” particularly as it is clear that wounds were opened. At the end of the exhibition run, witnessing the controversy over the prayer ties take ight, Aparicio was disheartened by never being invited to a seat at the table for dialogue. Aparicio kept on with her prayer and ceremony. The tobacco ties were respectfully taken down and a small ceremonial re was held on Nisenan homeland. The re was offered in the spirit of the four directions and overseen by a local elder. It held a sacred space to offer the ties so the prayers could be uplifted to ancestors with song, storytelling, and palabra.

In the praxis of continual re ection, I propose the concept of cross-pollination, as offered to me by an Otomi elder and used in ceremonial circles, as a concept to interrupt the accusation and idea of appropriation. The echoes of tensions are legacies of conversations that are not new, yet are fully aware that capitalist nation-state and racist colonial structures rooted in white supremacy would prefer we stay in a state of perpetual fear and con ict. I ask the question: how do we intentionally manifest alternative pathways? How do we move in dignity and respect as we are all learning the dif cult enseñanzas and unraveling con icting colonial histories of land and race?

Susy Zepeda is an associate professor in the Chicana/o/x Studies department at the University of California, Davis (Patwin homeland). Her scholarly work is intentionally transdisciplinary, decolonial, and feminist in a community-centered and grounded way. Susy’s research and teaching focus on: Xicana Indígena spirit work, decolonization, critical feminist of color collaborative methodologies, oral and visual storytelling, and intergenerational healing. Dr. Zepeda’s writing appears in the 2019 anthology Voices from the Ancestors: Xicanx and Latinx Spiritual Expressions and Healing Practices, and in 2020 published the essay, “Decolonizing Xicana/x Studies: Healing the Susto of De-indigenization” in Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies as part of the Dossier: Fifty Years of Chicana Feminist Praxis, Theory, and Resistance. Susy’s rst book, Queering Mesoamerican Diasporas: Remembering Xicana Indígena Ancestries, was published by the University of Illinois Press in 2022 as part of the Transformations: Womanist, Feminist, and Indigenous Studies book series.

Notes

1. See Luna 2012 for an in-depth theorization of the philosophy and possibilities held within Xicana Indígena.

2. I rst started to articulate these thoughts in 2021 upon invitation from Dr. Marcelo Garzo Montalvo’s Latinx Xicanx Indigeneities seminar hosted by the Committee Ethnicity, Migration, and Rights at Harvard University. Then Visiting Assistant Professor, Dr. Montalvo invited me to speak about Xicanx Indigeneities, focusing on queer Xicana Indígena art, healing, survivance/thrivance and futurity. This initial planting of seeds and dialogue propels my thinking in this essay to think through multiple forms of Indigeneities across the hemisphere, next to Native and Indigenous survivance as theorized by Vizenor (1999), and decolonial futurities (possibilities).

3. Hood Herbalism is an in person and online herbal education project created by Berenice Dimas, for Black, Indigenous, People of Color. “Hood Herbalism is an autonomous and community based herbal education project. We gather to unlearn and decentralize colonial ways of understanding plant knowledge.” https://hoodherbalism .com/hood-herbalism/, last accessed March 5, 2022.

4. This communal prayer, originally exhibited in 2014 at the Museum of Fine Arts in Tallahassee, Florida, was part of Aparicio’s Graduate Student Thesis Exhibition, and subsequently became in 2017, a variation exhibited as part of the Mujeres de Maiz 20th Anniversary Retrospective Art Exhibition.

5. Gina Aparicio’s prayer altar is part of her mixed media installation Ipan Nepantla Teotlaitlania Cachi Cualli Maztlacayotl (Caught Between Worlds, Praying for a Better Future) was a featured art work as part of the 2019 Xicanx Futurity Exhibition at the Manetti Shrem Museum in Davis, California.

6. In this dialogue, elder Rocky Rodriguez offers the story of being the rst Chicana granted permission to participate in Lakota Sundance ceremony by Leonard Crow Dog.

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NO

Rawiyah Tariq

I remember saying “No”

The way it rolled off my lips with the same ease as good morning, good evening or goodnight

The laughter that announced its arrival and lled the silence in its wake I remember how clean it was No regrets

No taint of “with exception” or “I’ll consider if you would only . . .”

My No was softness around me

Something warm with muscles running beneath the tuft coat of a cat like beast

It coiled around my feet licked my calves

A gentle thing to me but terrifying to others

Untethered Unleashed

I remember how I wielded it, fed it, loved it with an unconscious ease before I was told to chain it, hide it, deny it valuable resources so others could love me

No one has ever loved me in the particular way my No once had. I’m remembering her as I cry over her starved and shrunken frame

As I brush her coat, give her my tears to drink and my rage to eat

I tend her the way she tended me as a child. I pull her into my heart and beg her forgiveness.

Remind her how we were once like Calvin and Hobbes

Changing worlds, bending possibility, clearing roads

©2023 Feminist Formations, Vol. 35 No. 1 (Spring) pp. 132–133

Expansive . . . I remember her as she buries her face into my hair with relief Grown now as I am

I remember the child this beast once guarded I remember how precious we were to each other I remember And I welcome both back home.

Rawiyah Tariq is a Black, gender expansive, fat, disabled, neurodiverse artist and kink aware professional. Their roots are in queer, poly-amorous, fat community. Their tone is re ective of these roots and their work is informed by how these intersect with their Blackness. Connect to their work at ASovereignEmbodiment.org, MammyIsDead.com, or Instagram @mammyisdead.