Ofrenda Magazine Issue 01: Intention

L ATI NX SPI RIT UAL IT Y • A N C E STR A L C O N N ECT I O N • E A R T H + JUST I C E • H E A LI NG A R T S

ofrenda M A G A Z I N E

ISSUE 01: INTENTION

Huitzilopochtli and the Notion of Intent

In the Energy and Flow of Intention

Multimedia Feature: Seed Memory

Jorge García

Berenice Dimas

John Jairo Valencia

FROM THE EDITOR

Exploring ancestral wisdom for the healing of people and planet.

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ELCOME TO Ofrenda Magazine, a new multimedia publication that explores Latinx spirituality, ancestral wisdom traditions, and healing arts.

Our mission is to inspire holistic wellness, social and ecological justice, and spiritual creativity. We feature the teachings of traditional healers and elders along with testimonios of spiritual blendedness and transformation.

Why this magazine, and why now? We’re living in a time of cultural and historical reckoning. Many of us with Latinx heritage are aiming to decolonize our spiritualities and lifeways as we heal and offer healing. We want to interrupt injustices and reenvision relationships. We welcome the cultural shift (or return) toward one that embraces an animate cosmos: the belief that we humans are energetically connected and interconnected to all of life and the elements.

This publication—as a collection of teachings, testimonios, practices, and creative expressions—is an ofrenda, an offering, meant to be both a salve and inspiration for our extended community during these times.

Our inaugural issue is an ofrenda on the theme of intention. Many may first think of intention as a goal, aim, or purpose: the motivating idea that turns into action or the commitment to a fresh start. Some also use the word intention to name the power of the universe: the cosmic sacred energy that manifests itself in and through humans and all our relations. And the medical definition of intention is the process of a wound’s healing, the union of two parts of skin knitting themselves together again.

This issue invites readers to explore and meditate on all of these meanings. We’re grateful to have a variety of contributors in this first issue—including artists, scholars, and traditional healers—and excited to share their wisdom with you. Gracias for joining us here and for being a part of this community.

M. Carbajal, Founder and Editor in Chief

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Contents ISSUE 01: INTENTION | JAN/FEB 2021

FEATURES CURANDERISMO + PRACTICES

In the Energy and Flow of Intention | 12 WORDS BY BERENICE DIMAS COSMOVISION + CULTURE

Huitzilopochtli and the Notion of Intent | 18 WORDS BY JORGE GARCÍA ART BY CHICOME ITZCUINTLI AMATLAPANTLI ART FEATURE

Seed Memory | 24 WORDS AND ART BY JOHN JAIRO VALENCIA TESTIMONIOS

Remembering Who You/I/We Are for 2021 | 28 WORDS AND ART BY CINTHYA M. SAAVEDRA

PRACTICES / CURANDERISMO

Would you like to improve your spiritual practices? Intention may be the key. | 36 WORDS AND ART BY XTOII PALOMA CERVANTES

Seasonal Rituals for Fresh Starts | 46 WORDS BY CUAUHTLI CIHUATL

ISSUE 01 | INTENTION 03

PRACTICES (Cont.)

Making Connections: The Magical Praxis of Bean Casting | 54 WORDS BY BRANDI AMARA SKYY

TESTIMONIOS

My Father’s Ghost | 58 WORDS BY SARAH MONROY SOLIS

Ofrendando del Corazón: Queer Xicana Indígena Root Work | 64 WORDS BY SUSY ZEPEDA

ARTIVISM

Revelations: Temples Within | 70 WORDS AND ART BY SEAN GUERRA

BOOKS + AUTHORS

On Voices from the Ancestors | 76 AN INTERVIEW WITH LARA MEDINA, CO-EDITOR OF VOICES FROM THE ANCESTORS

FROM THE EDITOR

Editor’s Picks: The Intention Issue | 82 WORDS BY M. CARBAJAL

ON THE COVER

Tree of Life

by John Jairo Valencia See Valencia’s, “Seed Memory” (p. 24).

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CONTRIBUTORS

Berenice Dimas

Brandi Amara Skyy

Chicome Itzcuintli Amatlapantli

BERENICE DIMAS (XICANA) is a

BRANDI AMARA SKYY (Brown

CHICOME ITZCUINTLI

queer herbalist, birthworker,

Indigenous Xicanx) is a healer,

AMATLAPANTLI is a Mexican

and educator. She is the

writer, and Nepantlera for

American artist residing in

founder of Hood Herbalism,

folxs who are ready to make

Mexico. His work explores

a community-based herbal

(r)evolutionary change in the

pre-Hispanic spirituality and

education project. Berenice

world by living, creating, and

the Mexicayotl faith. You can

also supports people as a

sharing from the center of

find his work on Twitter @

full spectrum birthworker,

their full, authentic selves.

MiCorazonMexica and IG

centering ceremony and

Book a reading, listen to

@micorazonmexica.

Indigenous birthing practices.

her podcast The Plática

You can find out more about

Sessions, and join her free

IMAGE CREDIT: CHICOME

Berenice's work by visiting her

Mi Gente Community at

ITZCUINTLI AMATLAPANTLI

website, berenicedimas.com,

brandiamaraskyy.com.

and her Instagram pages @hoodherbalism and

PHOTO CREDIT:

@brujatip.

BRANDI AMARA SKYY

PHOTO CREDIT: BERENICE DIMAS

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Cinthya M. Saavedra

Cuauhtli Cihuatl

Ixtoii Paloma Cervantes

CINTHYA M. SAAVEDRA (Latina)

CUAUHTLI CIHUATL

IXTOII PALOMA CERVANTES

is a daughter, partner, Tia,

(Indigenous), who is also

is an elder and instructor

and professor of Mexican

known as Maestra CC, is an

(Maestra) who was born

American Studies who lives

elder and the founder of

and raised in Mexico in the

in the U.S. borderlands. Most

Kalpulli Teocalli Ollin in New

Curanderismo tradition, an

days, you’ll find her playing

Mexico. She is a Mexhika

ancient way of bringing the

with crystals. With her friend

Huesteca, Raramuri, and

body, mind, emotions, and soul

Joy, she hopes to put into

Lipan Apache ceremonialist.

back into a state of balance.

action the concept of Cinful

She holds a J.D., a Ph.D. in

She has been teaching

Joy—space for healing

public health and community

and working full-time as a

through yoga practice and

education, and a master’s

curandera (Mexican shaman)

energy work.

degree in social work. Now

since 1986. Find her at

retired, she spends her

ixtoiipalomacervantes.com.

PHOTO CREDIT: CINTHYA

energy on her Jardin Patzin.

SAAVEDRA

Her mission is to share her

PHOTO CREDIT:

Abuelita’s traditions, for “la

IXTOII PALOMA CERVANTES

medicina es para todos.”

PHOTO CREDIT: D’SANTI NAVA

ISSUE 01 | INTENTION 07

CONTRIBUTORS

John Jairo Valencia

Jorge García

Lara Medina

JOHN JAIRO VALENCIA (Xicanx,

JORGE GARCÍA (Mexicano) is a

LARA MEDINA identifies as

Jumano, Colombian) grew

PhD student in the Chicana/o

Xicanx with her ancestry

up in Boyle Heights and La

Studies department at the

originating primarily in the

Puente (Tongva territory), yet

University of New Mexico and

states of Jalisco and Sinaloa,

also feels connected to their

the founder of the Center for

Mexico. She was raised in

ancestral homelands in the

Social Sustainable Systems

the San Francisco Bay Area

Chihuahuan Desert, Central

(CESOSS), a nonprofit

where she earned a M.A. in

Mexico, and the Colombian

organization dedicated to

theology from The Graduate

Andes by way of stories. As

protecting land, water, and

Theological Union in Berkeley.

an artist, they daydream

traditional knowledge.

After relocating to the Los

about storytelling, ancestral memory, and ways to restore

Angeles area, she earned PHOTO CREDIT: JORGE GARCÍA

a Ph.D. in history from the

our “broken” relationships to

Claremont Graduate University

the Earth and Universe. Say

and has taught at California

hello on Instagram

State University, Northridge,

@elotedreamz.

in the Department of Chicana and Chicano Studies for the past twenty-five years.

PHOTO CREDIT: JOHN JAIRO VALENCIA

PHOTO CREDIT: ISTOCK/ DB_BEYER

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Sarah Monroy Solis

Sean Guerra

Susy Zepeda

SARAH MONROY SOLIS

SEAN GUERRA (Chicanx) is a

SUSY ZEPEDA (Xicana

(Chicana/x Indígena) is a

visual artist and paraeducator

Indígena) is the daughter of

writer and immigration

from the Central Valley

Mexican migrants from El

attorney in Northern

living in Northern California.

Limón, Jalisco, and Chínipas,

California. She can be found

Since graduating with a B.A.

Chihuahua. In 2014, she

reviewing books or talking

in Chicanx Studies, they

joined the Chicanx Studies

about writing, plants, and

have sought to support

Department at the University

reconnecting on Instagram

empowering and creative

of California, Davis. As a

@sarisolis.

spaces in the classroom. Art

de-tribalized queer Xicana

serves as a personal and

Indígena, her trabajo is

PHOTO CREDIT:

healing process for them

intentionally interdisciplinary,

SARAH MONROY SOLIS

in recovering a spiritual

decolonial, and feminist in

connection to antepasados

a community-centered and

through a culturally

grounded way. She is rooted

relevant praxis inspired by

in and a student of Mexican

Rasquachismo.

Traditional Medicine. Find her on Instagram @verdesusy.

PHOTO CREDIT: XABI SOTO BELECHE OF ICNO CALLI PRINTS

PHOTO CREDIT: SUSY ZEPEDA

ISSUE 01 | INTENTION 09

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IN THE

Energy & Flow of Intention “Intention is the life force between where you are and where you are meant to be.” Berenice Dimas, writer and founder of Hood Herbalism, teaches us to build a relationship with intention.

WORDS BY BERENICE DIMAS

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Berenice Dimas under a pirul tree.

Image courtesy of the author.

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life force between where you are and where you are meant to be. Where we are and where we are meant to be. It is an active energy. It is alive. It flows with you where you go. Physically and spiritually. Intention is a guiding frequency. How you interact with it is very important because intention is sensitive to and impacted by words. It is impacted by feelings. It is impacted by your state of mind. So befriend intention. As with any relationship, be honest with intention. Be clear. Be sincere, for when you consult with intention, it will change your life because intention listens. Intention brings. Intention opens. Intention reveals.

Intention will bring you closer to yourself. Closer to the memory of who you really are and what you are meant to offer in this lifetime. Intention will nourish you. Intention will protect and clear your path.

NTENTION IS THE

So, remember when you plant an intention, like when planting a seed, nourish it. Water it. Lather it with love. Be clear on what you want to experience and feel. Focus on the physical, emotional, and spiritual outcomes in that journey. Everything that comes after is a teaching. Call in what you want to learn, and then, surrender. Let intention’s energy guide you. Let intention show you the way. We are at the cusp of a new Earth. Who do you want to be? What do you want to contribute? Remember that we don’t just set intentions. We pray with them. We connect to them. We honor and acknowledge the energy within them. It is a very intimate, involved, and committed relationship.

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“Remember that we don’t just set intentions. We pray with them. We connect to them. We honor and acknowledge the energy within them.”

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HEN I STARTED deepening my relationship with intention, I used vision boards as a reference.

I started by first inviting myself to think about things I wanted to bring into my life—things I sometimes feared even thinking about because they felt so distant and impossible. Vision boards helped me visually compile these things I wanted to live and experience. Things I wanted to feel and have in my life. I spent years collaging and making vision boards.

I then transitioned into writing rather than collaging. I prefer words over images at times, so the transition was organic. I started writing out my vision boards. I separated things in categories: Home, Work, Creative, Pleasure, Family, Relationships, Life Path, Care Practices. The more I made the vision boards, the more I felt that they were taking me into the world of intention. I noticed my writing shifting, my intentions becoming

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clearer. More genuine. More grounded. More connected to my heart. When this transition happened, I noticed a huge shift in my life.

I was no longer calling anything in. I was simply accepting my path. My calling. I was being guided by the energy of intention.

I spent time reflecting on what my relationship was to asking, receiving, requesting, communicating, imagining, and feeling. I recognized how much I had been impacted by generational and colonial trauma. It was hard to connect with intention when I had shame and guilt around all of those things.

I wondered: I have to slowly recover my relationship to worth? To requesting and receiving? My ancestors had so much taken away and burned at the hands of colonialism. They experienced—and continue to experience—so much violence. They learned to feel worthless. To forget their medicine.

To hide it in order to survive. To forget how supported and nourished we were by our

unnecessary stress” to “I am relaxed when I am working,” “I feel nourished by my day-to-day life.” Focusing on the feeling was an important shift. It opened space for me to imagine beyond what I did not want.

Opening ourselves to what we want to feel takes time, especially if we have to unpack or process feelings connected to what we deserve or what we are worthy of.

relationship to the earth and to the universe, and how we nourished them in return. All this wisdom was stripped from us.

Through writing my vision boards, asking, and receiving, I started delving into a deeper journey with my ancestors. I was learning how to trust them again. How to trust me again. Unlearning shame, guilt, fear, doubt.

I explored this disconnection within me, and intention helped guide me. Intention helped me find myself. Intention helped me find all those ancestors that were waiting to connect with me. Everything became clear. I started understanding the support I needed to trust intention.

My vision boards transformed. I shifted from “what I wanted” to “what I wanted to feel.” For example, I went from writing “I want to make my own schedule” to “I am supported and happy doing what I love” or “I want a job where I don't feel so much

These ideas further transitioned into a deeper awareness of how I wanted my work to be received in the community. I started by writing “I want my work to be respected and received in the community” and transitioned to “The work I create is intentional and a genuine reflection of me.” I no longer left it simply to fate. I invited intention in. I put the responsibility of this reciprocity on me.

I was the one who would create that energy for myself and intention would guide the way. I found the frequency of my own destiny. The shift in my intentions created a shift in my life. I went from being able to describe what I wanted to how I wanted to feel. It further expanded to reflect my truth, calling, and destiny in the world.

This process takes time. It takes commitment. It takes consistency. So, commit.

Commit to yourself. Commit to your dreams and desires. Commit to your path. Commit to your purpose. Know that this commitment does not require that you exclude community. It requires a grounding in self to then have an impact in the world.

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Huitzilopochtli and the

Notion of Intent

Scholar Jorge García explains what the blue Hummingbird of the South can teach us about intention for ourselves and our communities.

WORDS BY JORGE GARCÍA ART BY CHICOME ITZCUINTLI AMATLAPANTLI

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NTENT IS A powerful word. It signifies purpose and determination. Intent is fueled by passion and persistence, enabling people to achieve what they desire to do in life. Native Mexican tribes honored this notion of intent in their beliefs about Huitzilopochtli, the blue hummingbird, and its relationship to the movement of the Sun from the Southern to the Northern Hemisphere.

Huitzilopochtli represents the intent Native Mexican people had not only when they left

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their homeland to find a new one, as the mythical story of Aztlán informs us, but also when they set out to build a city where no one else would dare. The Mexika-Technoca, the so-called Aztecs, demonstrated their willpower by following the figure of Huitzilopochtli and establishing one of the most beautiful, productive, and well-organized agricultural cities in the world, Tenochtitlán, in the 14th and 15th centuries (of the Gregorian calendar). They created the chinampas, floating agricultural fields; organized complex economic and political systems; and

© CHICOME ITZCUINTLI AMATLAPANTLI

The Birth of Huitzilopochtli

by Chicome Itzcuintli Amatlapantli

The illustration depicts Huitzilopochtli, “the Hummingbird of the South,” who is an archetype of the Sun (center); Coatlicue, Huitzilopochtli’s mother and an archetype of Mother Earth (bottom); and Coyolxauhqui, firstborn daughter of Coatlicue and an archetype of the Moon (left).

According to one version of the story in Mexica tradition, Coatlicue, Mother Earth, became miraculously pregnant when a feather fell into her apron while she was sweeping. Coyolxauhqui and her brothers, the Centzonhuitznahuac (stars), felt that their mother had been disgraced and planned to kill her. They chased her to Coatepec, Serpent Mountain, where she gave birth to Huitzilopochtli, fully grown and prepared for battle. Defending his mother, Huitzilopochtli killed his sister Coyolxauhqui, who rolled down the mountain, her body dismembered. The story represents a daily experience: the Sun is born from the Earth’s horizon, “defeating” the Moon and stars of the night. The dismembered body of Coyolxauhqui represents the segmented phases of the Moon.

Artwork © Chicome Itzcuintli Amatlapantli. Courtesy of the artist.

adopted calendrical systems that created an intimate relationship between the world and the cosmos.

Conventional scholarship, based on colonial and Western anthropological texts, informs us that “Huitzilopochtli…was one of the most important of the Aztec gods, the god of the Sun, warfare, military conquest and sacrifice, who according to tradition, led the Mexica people from Aztlán, their mythical homeland, into Central Mexico.”* Everything that we usually hear about this “god” is that it is vicious and combative; we hear that the Aztecs sacrificed captives to offer human hearts to the Sun, a sign of their never-ending lust for fighting and conquering other tribes. The depiction of the Aztecs in academic texts— whether in history, social sciences, religion, or other categories—always starts with their inscribed savage personality.

I know what you are thinking: What does intent have to do with Huitzilopochtli anyway?

My concern is that the conventional interpretations we typically hear about Aztecs cloud our understanding of them. These interpretations first emerged as colonial and post-colonial writings and impressions, which were then passed down through a process of citation and replication from colonial texts to current texts. These texts depict the Aztecs as people whose sole purpose was to sacrifice humans to “help the Sun” in its journey. What we read about our ancestral culture, for the most part, are recycled “truths” that ignore the purpose and the meaning of these archetypes as they were understood by people in their own social, ecological, and cosmological contexts.

Let me be clear that I am not insinuating that the Aztecs never made sacrifices or that they were a peace-loving society. No; they were not. They were a fierce society that accomplished many feats in the arts, astrology, psychology, engineering, medicine, economics, politics, formal education, and many other areas of human knowledge that in my view are ignored when we focus on depicting them as savages.

My point, ultimately, is that these civilizations possessed a profound understanding of time and space.

My point, ultimately, is that these civilizations possessed a profound understanding of time and space. They used advanced, complex calendrical systems to knit together the cosmos and life on earth. The archetypes they used, like Huitzilopochtli, which were not gods but rather representations of energetic forces, served as reference points so that human conditions could be understood through the movement of the Earth with respect to the Moon, Venus, and the Sun. So I pose the question again, what does intent have to do with Huitzilopochtli?

The Aztecs celebrated the figure of Huitzilopochtli during the winter solstice. We should ask ourselves, why at the winter solstice?

The Aztecs, like most people around the

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Understanding what these myths, stories, and archetypes mean is important because they have a story to tell us, a teaching about our own human condition and human capabilities, as well as our relationship to the Earth and cosmos.

world, celebrated the winter solstice because it marked the position of the Sun at its southernmost point as perceived from the Earth. The Aztecs associated this position of the Sun with a hummingbird not only because they considered the hummingbird a powerful little creature, but also because they believed it exemplified the cosmic willpower that the Sun needed to have to move back to its highest point. Once in the Northern Hemisphere, the Sun was considered an eagle, big and powerful, and thus the fulfillment of a vision made possible by Huitzilopochtli’s intent. So the hummingbird and the journey of the Sun to the Northern Hemisphere, in Aztec cosmology, represented the intent to fulfill a vision.

Why does this matter? Understanding what these myths, stories, and archetypes mean is important because they have a story to tell us, a teaching about our own human condition and human capabilities, as well as our relationship to the Earth and cosmos.

Indeed, intent is a very powerful word, not only for what it means, but for what it entails. If we can recover and use these cultural understandings about our human condition, then we can use these archetypes to teach us purpose, determination, and a collective will to find balance with the cosmos—the balance required to forge a society that preserves our natural resources for future generations to enjoy. I am sure that our ancestors thought about this as well.

NOTE *Nicoletta Maestri, “Huitzilopochtli,” ThoughtCo (October 18, 2019). https://www. thoughtco.com/huitzilopochtli-aztec-godof-the-sun-171229

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LISTEN ONLINE

Shedding © John Jairo Valencia.

Seed Memory Art and verse that invite ancestral connection.

WORDS, ART, AND AUDIO BY JOHN JAIRO VALENCIA

the wise benevolent ancestors gently take my hands and kiss my throbbing forehead, subtle whispers from the world beyond this one. as my palms lay on top of each other, they place in them seven seeds of corn… the rising sun, awaiting the spring, gently smiling, and directing me towards a piece of earth who bore harvest several seasons ago. with tears in my eyes, old stories shed away as i look through the smoking mirror of long winter nights. with seeds in my hands, i wait, hopeful, faithful, that their moment to birth us back to life will come.

Las Comadres © John Jairo Valencia.

with my pulsating heart, my breath, the aches in my gut, i remember that divine light always reemerges from the depths. the seeds in my palms carry dreams, transmuted light into matter, celestial DNA embedded into each kernel’s memory. with my palms, now shaking, i remember who i am, a child of the corn, the sun, and the cosmos. as the days become warmer, my achy heart says a prayer for beauty, and the world responds with the ringing melodies of hummingbird chirps. with my nails i crack the crust of the earth and place my seeds, one by one, in the east, the west, north, and south, and 3 in the center, setting prayers of gratitude for the above, below, and myself. and as the seasons continue to shift, i learn that with intention, prayer, and healing comes work, responsibility, and consistency. as the seeds shed their shells, as seedlings begin to emerge, and as the sprouts turn into stalks, i too begin to heal, learn, grow, and transform. the cycles continue, we continue, and the seeds of our prayers, intentions, and love continue to move through the hands of generations to come.

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Tree of Life © John Jairo Valencia.

ISSUE 01 | INTENTION 27

LISTEN ONLINE

Remembering Who

You / I / We Are for

2021

Professor Cinthya Saavedra shares her spiritual and healing journey and offers a meditative centering prayer.

WORDS BY CINTHYA M. SAAVEDRA

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HAVE BEEN on a journey of intentionally incorporating spirituality in my life for about 12 years now. This started about a few months after my Papi’s passing.

I had just moved to a city that was on high elevation, higher than I had ever lived before, and I was starting a new job across the country during the dead of winter. For about the first two to three months, I experienced insomnia, which was taking a toll on me— tired during the day and restless at night.

I knew that acupuncture might help, as I had tried it once before right after my Papi’s passing. With one session, the extreme tension I felt on my shoulders immediately melted away.

Remembering this, I asked some of my new colleagues and was referred to an acupuncturist. I had found healing. Her sessions were not only filled with poking needles but also filled with spiritual teachings and lessons in the form of everyday conversations on what was going on in the world and with myself. Through these conversations, I learned so much about my connection between body, emotions, spirit—or the mindbodyspirit. To this day I maintain in touch with my acupuncturist, Billie, and refer to her as my earth angel and spirit guide.

For over eight years, I went once a month whether I felt a dis-ease, imbalance or not.

Aside from getting me through understanding and making peace with my Papi’s passing, it also helped me experience less stress while obtaining tenure and experiencing

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many other personal hurdles. BUT perhaps more importantly was the awakening I experienced that life is more than what is right in front of me. There is all this unseen force, energy that is all around us. I started to see the connections between Chinese medicine and yoga, the Chakras, crystals, essential oils and so on and so forth. There are so many things available to us to awaken us beyond our inherited Western five senses and to connect us back to source, inner Self, god, universe or the multiple and varied ways people might label it.

My spirituality is practicing what I have found helpful in bringing me back to center—the remembering of who I am. I find solace in holding and meditating with crystals and using them to heal emotional trauma and stuck emotions that are manifesting physically. I practice and teach yoga to heal the mindbodyspirit. I follow the phases of the moon to release that which no longer serves my higher Self and to set intentions for manifesting continual personal growth.

I read the works of Thich Nhat Hanh, Pema Chödrön, and Don Miguel Ruiz. I follow socially conscious astrologers like Chani Nicholas. My scholarship and pedagogy are influenced by scholars who have embodied and grounded their work in spirituality, like Gloria Anzaldúa, Irene Lara, AnaLouise Keating, and many others.

Do I get lost, you might ask? Of course— many, many times! But through this journey, I have found that I have less difficulty remembering who I am and finding the lessons

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from the forgetting of who I am. After all, it’s in forgetting and remembering that the greatest lessons arise, and the opportunity for growth happens. And the funny thing is that oftentimes, it’s those with whom I have most conflict who become the greatest teachers, reminding me who I am. My acupuncturist, after listening to me rant about someone always says, “ahh, they are your teacher!” Then I take a deep breath and realize exactly what she means. Sometimes it’s really hard to acknowledge challenging people as teachers, but once I do, a weight is lifted. I encourage anyone to try this.

As a Latina, I wish my story was one where my abuelas, abuelos or an elder from my community taught me or passed down wisdom and knowledge from our ancestors to me. How I wish to tell that story. And then I think which ancestors would that be?

European, Jewish, and or Indigenous? Even my Indigenous grandmother and her father were already cut off from those Indigenous traditions and had been colonized as well as assimilated into mainstream values and perspectives with perhaps tiny hints of an Indigenous past. And my Jewish roots are but non-existent. It’s like we sprouted from nowhere and just appeared in Nicaragua one day. And I wonder how many feel this way?

My journey of spirituality began with seeking to heal my insomnia but realizing that my insomnia was a call to heal the pain and grief over my Papi’s passing. In this seeking, I met a healer, a white woman, who helped me to remember who I was. It was

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not about finding myself but remembering who I already was. I am whole and complete, perfectly imperfect and interconnected to seven billion others. I want to own this story because it’s the truth. And the journey each of us take to remember who we are is irrelevant as long as it is based on love and healing because the greatest threat to our world is in forgetting who we truly are. And who we truly are is One having seven billion experiences.

I’d like to end with the Namaste prayer that I used to end my graduate multicultural class at one of the universities I worked at in Utah for over eight years. This course was so tough for so many reasons that multicultural teachers know, especially when teaching mostly white students. But these students were truly my teachers and I learned (or remembered) so much about myself because of them. And now I’d like to offer it to you.

I honor the place in you in which the whole universe resides.

I honor the place of love, light, and peace.

When you are in that place in you, And I am in that place in me, We are truly one.

Namaste.

I honor the place in you in which the whole universe resides.

I honor the place of love, light, and peace.

When you are in that place in you, And I am in that place in me, We are truly one.

Namaste.

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Paloma Cervantes. Photo courtesy of the author.

Would you like to improve your spiritual practices?

Intention

may be the key.

Ixtoii Paloma Cervantes, maestra and curandera, offers step-by-step instruction on strengthening intention.

Words by Ixtoii Paloma Cervantes

ISSUE 01 | INTENTION 37

T

HE CURANDERISMO spiritual tradition that was practiced before and is still practiced today is rich in rituals, ceremonies, healings, danzas, and other events that require strong spiritual energies. These energies connect us to ourselves, to others, to the earth, and to the universe. You can improve these spiritual energies with the singular act of setting up a powerful intention.

Many times, I get questions like, “What am I doing wrong in my spiritual practice that's preventing my rituals from manifesting?

Why do I sometimes feel the strong presence of my ancestors and sometimes not?”

These situations are quite common and quite easy to “fix.”

The key is the quality of our intention. Let me explain a little bit about intention, and then I will teach you a technique to improve it. By the way, I am the kind of person who first needs to make sense of what I’m doing before I put it into practice, and I strongly suggest that you do the same. Question everything, and have an open heart; give it a try before you make any judgments.

Everyone is different, so you may need to modify what I am going to teach you here in order for this technique to work better for you. I have been a curandera since the 1980s, and also I studied science, so with both approaches I would like to share what I know about intention and how I apply it into my daily practice.

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Understanding Intention Let’s say that you want to build a fire, and intention is your fire-starting fluid. If you don’t have it, your fire may start fast or may not. It is like tossing a coin. On the other hand, if you have starting fluid and you use it every time, your fire is going to always start strong. Intention is what is going to give to your ceremony a strong start, and from there it is going to be easy for you to keep it going strong. It is important to take the time to set up intention and not rush into your spiritual practices.

When we pray, we are often asking for something—whether healing, strength, energy, or courage—and, sadly, many times we are just reciting words that have no energy because we are not even thinking about what we are saying. Sometimes what we say has no meaning to us because we have no idea what we are saying, or because these words are in a language that we do not speak. Also, we tend to rush through our prayers. All this mindlessness creates a prayer with no energy; there is a lack of power. The secret of a strong prayer is intention. It is what gives strength to our prayers, so they become alive and powerful. Therefore, the power of manifesting becomes stronger.

Energy and Emotion Everything in the universe is energy. Just think about this. We have bodies made of

Everything in the universe is energy.

Just think about this. We have bodies made of organs, and these of cells, and these of particles— which are energy.

So we can say that we, as well as the plants and animals around us, are materialized energy or energy beings.

Our ancestors understood this.

organs, and these of cells, and these of particles—which are energy. So we can say that we, as well as the plants and animals around us, are materialized energy or energy beings.

Our ancestors understood this.

With this concept in mind, if an energy being (that is, a person) is vibrating with only a little energy, or even with the ugly energy that we create when we are sad or upset, and the person puts this weak or negative energy into a ceremony, what kind of ceremony will that person have? On the other hand, if this

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person is vibrating with a beautiful, powerful, and high energy—like the one that we produce when we are in love—what a beautiful ceremony this person is going to have!

Which person do you want to be?

If we approach our spiritual practices with the idea that everything is energy, and that the goal is to add high-quality energy to our ceremony, then the tool we use is intention, starting with prayer.

The energies with the highest and strongest quality for creating a powerful intention are these: 1. Love 2. Gratitude 3. Happiness 4. Peace I like to feel and move through them in this order because I have found it easier to “force myself” into feeling the energy if I approach it this way. This is what I do: Love: I think about something super cute like a baby animal. The moment that I feel love and sense a little shift in my heart, I know I am generating the love that I need for my intention. I try to increase the intensity of this love until my whole body vibrates in love. When working in this way, it is important that we focus on something that we are not directly attached to, like our kids or our pets, because after we feel love for them, our

minds may wander and start thinking about something like whether our kids have picked up their rooms or not. We want to make it easy for ourselves to stay focused.

Gratitude: I start thinking about and reciting all the things that I am grateful for until the same thing happens: I feel a shift in my heart, and I make an effort to increase this feeling until my eyes well with tears of gratitude. This energy is the strongest that we can create. It doesn’t always happen, but with practice, it will happen more often.

And then I follow the same process for happiness and peace.

With this practice of guiding yourself through the emotions that you want to feel, you are training your body into new ways of being. Try to keep these emotions of love, gratitude, happiness, and peace vibrating in your body as long and often as you can. The more you stay in these energies, not only will your spiritual practices improve but your overall life will improve because you will be spending more time vibrating in beautiful energies instead of being worried, anxious, or depressed. You need to be persistent, as you would when training your dog, for example, until it becomes second nature.

Reasons for Setting an Intention There is something more that I would like to tell you before I share the specific technique

of setting an intention. The practice of intention has three main purposes: To clarify for ourselves what we are seeking We are not really good at knowing what we want. Usually, the prayers are “I need help.”

Ask yourself: Where? In what department you need help? What kind of help? So if you give yourself time to think about what it is you’re really seeking, you will clarify your mind, and your intention is going to be straightforward. Instead of saying “I need help,” try “I want clarity in this situation.”

To charge our prayer with high-quality, powerful energy As I explained, we want to charge our ceremony with the emotions of love, gratitude, happiness, and peace. This makes our ceremony more powerful.

For the spirits to hear us The practice of intention helps us call for the attention of our spirit helpers, ancestors, the great mystery—the source power that has many names. Intention is a tool to make our voice heard in the universe. To send our desire or petition out. To attract attention or awaken our spiritual helpers so they can come and participate in our spiritual practices with us.

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41

The Practice of Intention 1. If possible, play music that inspires you to be calm.

This is the time to look inward. Turn off any external distractions; silence your phone.

2. Close your eyes, taking a moment to “feel” how different and peaceful it is to have the eyes closed.

3. Take three very slow and deep breaths, filling out the bottom of your lungs. Inhale and exhale slowly.

4. With either hand, take a little bit of tobacco or some dry herbs—like lavender, sage, rosemary, basil, rose petals, a combination of all of them, or imagine them, if you don’t have any. In the Curanderismo tradition, it is believed that these plants have energy that can help us communicate more deeply with the spirit realm, and focus with concentration and a sense of calm.

5. Place your hand with the herbs at the center of your chest. That is the area known as the heart chakra.

Take another deep and slow breath.

6. Very slowly, start directing your attention to one or more of the emotions mentioned before: love, gratitude, happiness, and peace.

7. Then, also very slowly, start your prayer, being careful that you genuinely mean what you are saying. If you are reciting a prayer in another language, make sure you say it first in your native language and then in the other language.

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8. At the end of each sentence from your prayer, add a vibration of any of the emotions. Once you feel the emotions, move them throughout your body until it is vibrating. This is a very important step because this vibration is creating electromagnetic energy that will help you manifest what you are asking for.

9. Carry on with your prayer until you are done. Remember not to rush. By the end, your body should be vibrating, and from there you are going to send gratitude to the Universe, to the spirits, to your ancestors, to everyone for hearing your prayer and making it happen.

10. If you are conducting a ceremony or ritual, empowering a place or a spiritual tool, asking for healing, or something similar, you can cup your hands and transfer all of these beautiful energies into your hands and into the mixture of herbs. Then you can offer these herbs by placing them on your altar (if you have one), placing your hands on the part of the body that you want to heal, or offering the herbs to Mother Earth.

11. Finish by staying still for a moment, just feeling this beautiful energy that you have created.

ISSUE 01 | INTENTION 43

Practice, Practice Listo! Now you know how to empower yourself and your spiritual practices with intention. The only way to know if this technique works for you is to practice. Don’t just practice once. Do it several times until you have the feeling that you can do it without looking at these notes, and from there, feel free to make any changes that better suit you. Curanderismo is a beautiful tradition; when you practice it, you can see the results right away. Open your heart and give it a try!

Comparto esto con humildad, amor, respeto y luz . Que las enseñanzas de nuestros antepasados estén presentes en ti.

I share this with humbleness, love, respect, and light. May the teachings from our ancestors be with you, Xtoii Paloma Cervantes

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Seasonal Rituals for Fresh Starts Curandera Maestra CC offers a series of simple practices for setting intentions and focusing on renewal.

WORDS BY CUAUHTLI CIHUATL

E

VEN THOUGH WE designate certain times to begin afresh (like New Year’s Day), each sunrise and moon cycle offers that chance as well. Every season and cycle, we can welcome new beginnings, new goals, and new opportunities to evolve and un-peel what no longer serves us.

These past months, many of us spent the full and new moon cycles clearing off the sludge from 2020 and transmuting the toxicity into opportunities for real transformation in 2021. With spring approaching, we feel the need to clear, clean, cleanse and move forth with new projects, birthing our dreams.

ISSUE 01 | INTENTION 47

For example, in our casita over the last few days, my family and I have been busy clearing out, filling two truckloads full of items to donate to our local thrift shop, one truckload to take to the dump, plus a barrel full of papers ready for a bonfire. Our home feels lighter and ready to receive the mystery of life, helping us love one another and make new memories filled with laughter. Personally, the pandemic has given us insight, moments of contemplation, and lessons in being PRESENT. I am a person with a lot of energy and on the go 24/7.

I tend to multitask and overextend my energy, at times forgetting to just sit and hold my partner’s hand and listen to his guitar playing. Both the pandemic and being diagnosed with terminal cancer have given me pause, brought on the brakes, and placed many projects on hold. So I am reaffirming the RELEASING of the past with all its shades of toxicity, and I open my heart to RECEIVING the present with all its mystery filled with love, hope, and memories.

I share with a humble heart a few simple rituals that you can do anytime you might need a boost towards a new beginning or wish to cleanse the energy no longer serving your path.

Thoroughly clean the house to release and receive Sweep with a broom from the door to the street when you want to drive out bad vibes, troubles, and negative things from the home. I make a rosemary tea floor wash and use it to sweep my floors or mop them. Then I leave the broom across the outside of my doorway until the first week of the next month. This practice is not an everyday kind of sweeping; it is a sacred ritual of creating peace and order, and refilling our homes with love by letting go that which is ‘at war’ with our spirit. The broom represents the winds of change bringing us the bright energy of hope and the promise of a fresh new start. Sweep away.

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Throw out a glass of water Throwing a glass of water out towards the street symbolizes the expelling of tears, worries, and negativity. I hold the glass of water and release my sorrows into it and then toss the water onto a tree or flowerbed. I experienced many losses last year, and I honored them by placing the energy into a vessel of blessed water, and then allowing them to flow back to Mother Earth.

Open doors and windows Opening doors and windows will cause negative energy to leave and good energy to enter your home. With the doors and windows open, I smudge my home with copal, holding the incense burner in my right hand and following it all through the house, starting from the front door and coming full circle back to the front door. I let the copal burn completely down, releasing the negative energy and blessing the renewed space.

Make some noise Making loud noises drives away spirits that do not belong in your home. Put on some fun music. I like Celia Cruz’s “El Yerberito Moderno,” “Rie y Llora,” or “Aché Para Todos.” Ring bells, play a singing bowl, beat a drum, play a flute. I keep wind chimes outside by my portal porch for this purpose, but even just ringing your doorbell several times works. This year, my five-and-a-half-year-old granddaughter has been drumming the sacred huēhuē.

ISSUE 01 | INTENTION 49

Light candles For those who like candles, you can light three candles in a triangle at exactly midnight to set an intention or new beginning. If you choose, you can light one red candle for love, one green candle for prosperity, and one yellow candle for abundance.

Place these on your altar together with grains of rice, lentils, and 13 coins (no matter their value), which represent good fortune. Choose the colors and objects that feel right to you; the power is in your intention and intuition.

Create a ritual of mindful eating As I prepare for each New Year, I make sure to have a plate of grapes close by. Following Spanish tradition, I eat twelve grapes, representing the twelve months of the year, while making a wish for every month. However, I use the same idea each season, adjusting it for different purposes: for example, I might eat seven grapes for seven new goals, thirty for thirty days of envisioning a new job, six for six months of manifesting. Adapt and adjust the ritual according to your needs and intuition. Create a mindfulness ritual by eating the grapes with intention.

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Burn the negativity Once a week or month, take some time to write out everything you’d like to forget or release, and then, in a safe place, simply burn the paper up. Once you've burned it, you'll be ready to take on the new without all that weight on your shoulders!

Write out a ‘lista de deseos’ Write out a wish list. Not resolutions—just realizations or wishes.

A lista de deseos (wish list) for the new year, the next six months, or the next thirty days (adapt it to your situation) should include all those goals you’re intending to reach. Whatever it is that you put on your list, make sure to also place your heart and soul energy into them. At the beginning of the year, I plant my list in a new pot with new seeds and water it through the winter months; by spring, my plant (which is usually an herb) has bloomed along with my wishes. I then plant the herbs in my garden.

Give yourself a rose limpia You can give yourself a limpia (energetic cleansing) with white roses or any color of roses that speaks to you.

Sweep your body with the roses, expressing gratitude for the cleansing. You can then take a bath with the petals or set them free into the ocean, a river, a lake, or other body of water, thanking them again for their gift. The belief is that this limpia helps you start fresh because it cleanses and releases you from past energetic cords. Roses, a powerful companion for the heart, can encourage self-love.

Desde mi corazon, may these ideas offer some comfort and hope towards our new path together in the present.

Cuauhtli Cihuatl (CC)

ISSUE 01 | INTENTION

51

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MAKING CONNECTIONS:

the

magical praxis of

bean casting How to use bean casting to strengthen intuition.

Words by Brandi Amara Skyy

M

AGIC, LIKE OUR life, does not happen separate from the whole, in a silo away from everything else.

Magic, healing, and claiming/owning our medicine selves happen in communion, collaboration, and conversation with the universe. It is a complex, layered conversation and creation that happens at the crux of many different things—including our multi-dimensional, complex selves.

The practice of intersectional magic is the practice of no longer living, being, creating, and healing in the fragmental, dichotomous categories that modern society encourages us to bucket our lives in—this or that, work or hobby, spiritual or activist. Instead, it is born from the locus of ancestral lineage we come from, the amalgamation of lived experiences that make us who we are, and our personal agency to be the whole, radical change we wish to see.

The forging of this magic is our attention to how everything is connected and our intention to live those connections out.

In the same ways that we’re not separate from the soil and earth, the stardust of the Star Nations, or the ombre red, orange, yellow rose sitting on our kitchen table, our medicine and magic are not separate from the everyday moments and tools we have always been surrounded by.

Traemos la magia because we are the magic.

The following practice is shared in hopes of helping us live with and in the intention of our magic, the awareness of medicine around us at any given moment, and our ability and agency to be the authors of our own healing, the collectives, and our amazing planet and divine universe.

ISSUE 01 | INTENTION 55

The Ritual In our culture, food is magic, is the medicine.

Our kitchen tables have held the power, ceremonies, and rituals of our ancestors. In the following intersectional magic practice, we bridge the roots of our kitchen table wisdom to the power of our intuition by using the food of our ancestors. May our answers be a reflection of all the love and magic that brought us here.

TIME 5 to 30 mins TOOLS • • •

7 to 11 dried beans (or corn, or peas) Journal (or paper & pen) Your attention, intention, and imagination

PRACTICE 1. Gather the beans and head to your favorite magical space.

2. With beans in hand (whichever hand calls you), close your eyes and hold a question, situation, or problem in your heart.

Cast the beans, and let your eyes dance over the layout. What patterns, words, animals, or other natural elements do you see? What does your intuition show you? Write it in your journal, and pay attention to how these elements show up in your life.

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3. Let your conundrum journey from your heart, through your chest, down your arm, and into your hand.

4. With eyes still closed, bring the beans to your mouth, open your hand, and blow your that-which-you-hold-in-yourheart on them.

5. Eyes still closed, cast the beans in front of you.

6. When you feel ready and your question now centered in your heart and hand, open your eyes and let them drift to the placement of the beans.

The Alchemy Peer into the pattern of the beans. Let your eyes dance over the layout. What do you see?

What are the relationships the beans are having with each other? To you? What shape do they create? Is it a line? A mish-mash?

Gaze even deeper. Let your eyes float to the dark spots on each bean. What patterns, words, animals do you see? See if you can feel your way into a natural element, animal, and/or constellation that they create. Use your imagination to bring the arrangement of beans to life as an animal, constellation, or another natural element like a rock, river, insect, planet, or bird.

When you feel that gut-tinge of recognition, that intuitive “YES! That’s it!” spark, write that natural element—and all the other downloads you received about your question—in your journal.

NOTE: This part of the alchemy is complete. You can choose to end here or you can venture on.

Now either take a picture or draw out the pattern of beans in your journal.

on that element, what does the element itself have to offer up as answers to your question? If it was a bird, what does that bird intuitively mean to you? What images is it offering up to you? Listen to any internal words and sentences you hear.

After you’ve gotten your interpretations and downloads down, then venture to look at what traditional texts and other teachers have to say about the element.

Take a few moments to look up and read about what the element/animal/constellation means in the collective consciousness.

Pay close attention to any other connections your element has to other mystical modalities. Does it show up in a tarot card? As an astrology archetype?

Make notes of the connections and pay attention to how all the elements both your own and the collective show up in your life.

Watch, listen, and feel how all these elements as a whole come together to weave a story that offers ideas and solutions to your question. The goal of this practice is to help you build connections from yourself to the tools and the tools to the world.

When you feel complete, thank the beans and all the elements, animals, and/or stars that have shown up for you. Let everything settle in your bones while you keep your heart open to how all the elements that have shown up in your magic show up in your daily life.

Sit with your rendering, your question, and the element/animal/constellation that presented itself to you. Focusing your attention

ISSUE 01 | INTENTION 57

My Father’s Ghost A touching essay by writer Sarah Monroy Solis on the healing journey of discovering and remembering ancestral languages.

WORDS BY

Sarah Monroy Solis

I

T TOOK ME a long time to admit that my father’s ghost haunts me—even longer to figure out that his spirit was leading me toward reclaiming my identity.

He first appeared to me in a dream after his funeral. I was in my first year of college, sleeping in after another all-nighter. The dormitory was quiet, the other students eating breakfast in the cafeteria. Suddenly, the dorm room’s plaster walls faded, and I was standing on the porch of my childhood home. I could smell the pollen from the mulberry trees and felt a hummingbird buzz

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over me. It was morning, and my father measured a two by four on his workbench.

He is probably mending a part of the house, I thought. (He had built it from the ground up.) The sunrise filtered over the trees, its shadow tracing the blue line he was drawing on the wood. He finished his lines and rubbed the back of his hand on his forehead, an old habit. His hair was black like it was before chemotherapy and before he died.

“I’m lucid dreaming,” I said to myself. The shock made me still. I waited for him to look up at me.

When he finally did, he smiled.

“Utz awach,” he said. Hello.

I was about to respond when his shape faded. The house disappeared. I was alone in a dorm room again.

This dream marked one of the first moments I asked myself what I understood about heritage languages. I asked my Spanish professor in college to identify some of the words my father had spoken when I was a child. I had already taken all the courses available to me

in Spanish language and literature and was now studying Portuguese. I felt I was missing something if I did not have all my father’s words. At first, my professor looked puzzled by my question until another student who had Guatemalan parentage overheard us and came over.

“I know other words, too.”

We both wanted answers.

Our professor looked sadly at us. She did not know anything about our words, but she

ISSUE 05 | MEMORIA 59

Left: Photo of the author's parents on their wedding day. Right: Photo of the author as a toddler, holding onto a camera tripod. Courtesy of the author.

guessed they were an Indigenous dialect. She suggested we ask our parents. I didn't bring up the fact I had no one left to ask.

I left the question alone for a long time, avoiding it because it was like picking at a fresh wound. But the question came up again when I embarked on the long process of scanning all of our family’s childhood pictures.

I had not realized the mountains of photo albums from the sixties, seventies, eighties, and nineties that my family had amassed.

I think, altogether, the tower could have crushed the small scanner. If only, I thought, there had been digital cameras sooner. I began to embrace the process, enjoying memories I had forgotten in the pictures. I admired my father’s photography skills.

As a child, I took for granted that he had worked as a photographer and had an eye for

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composition. My sisters and mother’s photos in seventies garb reminded me of the film Saturday Night Fever. Then I found a carefully composed headshot of my sister wearing a Mayan textile top and head covering. There was a photo of me as a toddler gripping my first tripod and wearing my first Mayan huipil. If I had been younger, I would have still assumed all Guatemalan citizens wore these. I found a photo of my father’s mother.

It was ghostly gray, but she was also wearing the same textiles. The pieces of my identity did not come together, even after this.

I had put these questions to sleep for years, again, after asking my mother. She was not from Guatemala. She was from Veracruz, Mexico, the site that saw the arrival of Cortez. Everyone in that region had to adapt to survive. She suggested my father had left his language behind because he could not

use it here. But I could see that even she had led a life of resistance where she could.

She had learned enough English to pass the citizenship test, and then she spent the rest of her life speaking only in Spanish. It was our responsibility to adapt to her, not hers to assimilate. When I interpreted for her in public, I began to feel shame. I had absorbed the self-hate taught at school and accepted that we must shed a part of ourselves to assimilate. But the adult in me sees how deeply the resistance to this assimilation still burned within the languages my family kept. I continue to share phrases with my mother that my father used: “Quieres un kappe?” Do you want a coffee? The words hold more than just Mayan and Spanish; they contain the memory of my ancestors.

R

ECOVERING A LANGUAGE is an emotional journey. Yet there have been amusing and empowering moments. I still recall the first FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) request I submitted to ask for my father’s immigration file—it was the back and forth with the Department of Homeland Security that I had grown used to as an immigration attorney. I submitted the documentation I needed to prove that I was my father's daughter and asked for “everything.”

I had absorbed the self-hate taught at school and accepted that we must shed a part of ourselves to assimilate.

But the adult in me sees how deeply the resistance to this assimilation still burned within the languages my family kept.

The first reply was terse: “We cannot give you everything. Please be more specific.”

I responded curtly: “I am specific. See reattached document.”

They replied again. We went back and forth until frustration gave way to my replying, “I think you forget I’m an attorney. I

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know what you can give me. These are my father’s documents.”

Like the world I step into when I lucid dream, there is a world we step into when we speak and learn our Indigenous languages. Entire cosmologies come into view.

They sent me a template letter back with a disc. In it were hundreds of pages, a few redacted lightly. From this, I began to draw out pieces of my father’s journey, his parents’ names. I then found his original Guatemalan birth certificate. I found out where he was born, my great grandparents’ names, and even the finca (plantation) where they were born. I also began to research Guatemalan Indigenous languages and how Indigenous languages were discouraged through a complex history of Ladinization.

Indigenous languages were discouraged across the continent, and I saw a new piece of that. That fact sat painfully within me. I was a child of the nineties. I remembered Proposition 187 in California, English-only movements in Arizona, and California Governor Pete Wilson. I grew up on the border, where assimilating into the “melting pot” is what determines how easily you can move, with immigration officers always present.

My parents frequently took our family across the border to visit friends. They were terrific visits to the ejidos, the unincorporated, rural enclaves outside the central city of Mexicali. However, coming back was an ordeal. No matter how late into the night we arrived at the checkpoint, I needed to sit up, recite my name, date of birth, and city of birth. I remember the flashlight in my face, and the many times my parents were sent to secondary inspection because of their heavy accents. In our words, I realized, we can usually find our truths.

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I

N THE PAST year, I’ve had time to reflect on the truths, the cultural roots, hidden in my parents’ lives: how my mother used plants or the words in my father’s songs. There are truths in their words, words that don’t exist in Spanish dictionaries.

Last fall, in my first semester of Huastecan Nahuatl, I began to understand the language was not cognate with Spanish or English.

It was not parallel. There are entire world views in the words—there is no him or her, for example, and no gendered nouns.

Another example of a world within a word is cempoalxóchitl, the name for marigold, which holds ancient ties to sacred holidays, deities, and medicine. Like the world I step into when I lucid dream, there is a world we step into when we speak and learn our Indigenous languages. Entire cosmologies come into view. But the dream does not get fuzzier as you awaken. Just the opposite. You are turning the knob on a telescope, and your perception of yourself, your parents, and their communities comes into focus.

My Nahuatl teacher, Cuitlahuac Martinez (founder of Speak Nahuatl), once asked, “How deep is your love for yourself and your community?” There are many threads of meaning for me in that question. I became an immigration attorney because I wanted to help my community. But is it good enough for me to work within an immigration system built upon white supremacy? Should I not envision a different future where my role doesn’t have to exist as it does?

Our languages, holidays, medicine, and customs have survived for generations. When I started this reconnection journey, I began to see our peoples’ relationships differently.

I saw the deep connection to the land and realized I have just as much a duty to care for this continent as they do. I recognized that by reconnecting to my Indigeneity, I could better support my community and acknowledge my interculturality. I also learned to be more aware of the culture of individualism I grew up in, so I could begin to take part in a more significant collective consciousness.

As I study today, my father’s Mayan words continue to appear like small stepping stones of knowledge. The Nahuatl terms, which I share with my mother on the phone, jog her memory sometimes and lead to stories about her grandparents. Reconnecting is a lifelong process. For my part, I have felt more whole since I realized I could continue building a connection to my ancestors through language. With the same intention and love, the substance out of which my father made our family home, my son and I can continue building on his legacy.

My ancestors were resilient people, and it is a testament to them that we are still here.

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Ofrendando del Corazón QUEER XICANA INDÍGENA ROOT WORK A testimony of learning and practicing self-love with the help of Mexican traditional medicine.

Words by Susy Zepeda

I

N THE 2020 article, “Decolonizing Xicana/x Studies: Healing the Susto of De-indigenization,” I footnoted a working definition of “queer Xicana Indígena root work,” suggesting that this “root work or trabajo of decolonizing reaches for an unknown futurity, where the path is created as we are intentionally and consciously taking steps to reroot” (238). At the center of this spiritual trabajo is the wisdom passed on

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from elders and ancestors—the sabiduría that in our every step we are connected and held by the earth, the four directions, and the cosmos: “Central to queer Xicana Indígena root work is a deep decolonial remembering, activating of ancestral memory to see one’s lineages in everyday practices and experiences, rather than adhering to external colonial logics that accuse communities of appropriating. The process of decolonization

occurs over a lifetime as a path is created, paso por paso” (238).

Speaking to the theme of this inaugural issue, my intention is to walk in rooted alignment every day with clarity of my sacred purpose. That is my trabajo de cada día, my work every day, to remember why I am on this earth at this historical time, to cause no harm to any being, and if do, to be accountable, self-aware, and consistent with my own inner healing work so I can sustain spaces full of love and creativity for our peoples, in particular, as we move through intense grief and anger as BIPOC. In many ways, this queer Xicana Indígena root work is based on the practice of activating sacred tools as needed on the camino, the path, and is rooted in acknowledging our interconnectedness. A key component is remembering that we are worthy of the love and nourishment offered by la Madre Tierra and the divine guidance offered by the cosmos. Holding sacred or honoring the elements of water, fire, earth, and air in our spirit practices allows us to feel open and ready to receive.

For me, this looks like making time to slow down—to pause, reflect, breathe deeply, go to my altar, release tears, cleanse, light my candle, drum, burn medicine, pray with copal, offer tobacco, greet the sun, pray with the moon, have a relationship with plants based on permiso, hike or walk, and be present with Madre Naturaleza, offer canto to the ocean, acknowledge the original peoples

of the land with a clear heart, give thanks for the enseñanzas, the teachings, and my maestras, comadres, sistars, tías, relatives, and elders who have taken the time to create ceremonies and spaces of learning so I and our peoples can remember and walk in balance with the earth and cosmos. My practice shifts and grows daily; however, at the core is the energy of ofrendando del corazón, offering from the center of my heart, my yollotl, while aligning and re-aligning again with a vision of transformation towards justice, and while simultaneously being open to receiving blessings.

I

REMEMBER VIVIDLY a time of significant turmoil in my life, when I was encouraged by my hermano de la Luz to attend a nine-day workshop in Temixco, Mexico, with Estela Román, a temazcalera. Estela, who is the author of the book Nuestra Medicina: De Los Remedios para el Aire y Los Remedios para el Alma, is a philosopher of peace studies and a lawyer of human rights in Mexico; she became my first maestra of los 13 aires, including tristesa (sadness), susto (trauma), coraje (anger), and vergüenza (shame). Walking in her vibrant garden full of medicinal plants that summer of 2007, I started to tap into the mystery and whispers of sanación, of healing, as well as the toxic energies I had been holding since I was little brujx girl next to the intergenerational trauma my bodymind-spirit absorbed. These traumas had inflicted intense barriers to expressing my own voice, intellect, sexuality, wisdom, and overall sense of self in a confident, rooted, and healthy way as a queer mujer.

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“This...root work is based on the practice of...acknowledging our interconnectedness...remembering that we are worthy of the love and nourishment offered by la Madre Tierra...”

During those nine days, a door was opened for me to ancestral language, sabiduría, and a spirit praxis that offered medicina para el alma, medicine for the soul. Entering the temazcal (sweat lodge, or "hot house") with Estela’s blessed guidance, canto, and rezos brought me to another level of consciousness and connection. Respira, she would say. Breathe. She encouraged us to feel deeply the gift of the breath and to find peace in our own embodied life force.

Through Estela’s guidance, I started building a relationship with Tlazolteotl, la energía que recoje, or as Estela refers to her, “The Cleansing Mother” (Román, 2019, 189). Tlazolteotl was painted in bright colors on the outside of her temazcal. Through this visual representation and prayer, I felt the embrace of unconditional love that received my deep grief and sorrow with no

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judgment. The energetic exchange for this spiritual trabajo was clear: I was to rise to my purpose on Earth, believe in myself, and walk in my truth in a humble, rooted manner, with the goal of letting go of my fears daily so I could live out my dreams, the prayers planted by ancestors. No easy feat, yet it is life shifting every time I surrender to this root work.

As I developed my relationship with Estela over time and traveled with her to sacred sites, she would consistently emphasize the giving of ofrendas to the earth, spirit guardians, and land we were currently walking on, sitting on, or praying with. A powerful enseñanza (lesson) I learned from her, and keep relearning, is that we are visitors on earth and have no right to own Madre Tierra, Mother Earth, or tlalli, sacred land.

Estela would consistently emphasize that

Madre Tierra is our first mother and we, her children. I was always struck when, in prayer, Estela would ask for forgiveness for the way we mistreat our Mother Earth.

This lesson feels so significant as we face our current climate crisis and see the destruction that has manifested on the Earth due to greed, unequal distribution of resources, and global capitalism. This trabajo of giving ofrendas to the Earth, walking respectfully with all relations always, and never claiming individual ownership over what is meant for everyone, is central to queer Xicana Indígena root work. I ask: who taught us to disrespect our mother? How did we internalize the disregard for divine feminine energía of la madre, the energy of the mother? How do we unlearn the habit of feeling unworthy? How do we unlearn hierarchies of inequalities to restore the

unconditional, abundant love Madre Naturaleza has for every being on Earth?

Chicana historian and elder Yolanda Chávez Leyva ends her 2002 short essay “The Revisioning of History es Un Gran Limpia: Teaching and Historical Trauma in Chicana/o History, part ii” with a wise statement: “Chicana/o historians have taken the first crucial steps of uncovering, recovering, and documenting our histories.

Those histories have provided the basis for political organizing, cultural revitalization, and community building. It is time for Chicana/o scholars to go beyond writing and teaching Chicana/o history. It is time for us to confront the profound consequences of that history in the lives of our students and our communities and to find the ways to heal that pain” (6).

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“...this camino, this path of queer Xicana Indígena root work is part of a humble prayer for my search, my journey; it is my tracing the liberation that would allow me to feel at home...”

Almost twenty years later, Chávez Leyva’s words feel more urgent than ever. As important as it is to learn complex histories of colonization, forced migration and removal from land, de-indigenization, hierarchies of race, gender, and sexuality, for example, it is time to activate the intention of providing tools to heal from those ancestral wounds and historical traumas that we carry, particularly in thinking about next generations. As a professor and practitioner of traditional medicine, I feel the need to create spaces that can hold tensions, conflicting feelings, disillusionments while simultaneously creating an environment for truth-telling, connection to ancestors, and sacred tools for healing.

F

OR MY CLOSING PALABRAS, I offer these: this camino, this path of queer Xicana Indígena root work is part of a humble prayer for my search, my journey; it is my tracing the liberation that would allow me to feel at home, even in my discomfort from new knowledge that shifts me, my fragmentation that reminds me of the moon and her phases, finally coming home to the consciousness and contradictions of my whole being. It is realizing that my liberation means accountability to all my relations—knowing that my cells, blood, and bones hold more memory than my mind ever could. My politics and ways of being have been based on my remembering, whether I have consciously realized this or not.

We remember that at every moment we are embodied. Even when we are in flight or traveling through time, we come home to our

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bodies. I am a body. My body, blood, and flesh are my sacred home in this lifetime. I must remember to get back in my body even when I feel afraid, when los aires of susto or tristesa get the best of me.

Remembering the teachings of my ancestors and learning from maestras de la limpeza, las curanderas, I burn copal, using hierbitas, like romero and albacar; through my llanto, and with the sound of my sonaja, I call my spirit home. Susita, come home. Regresa; return. Susy, este es tu hogar; this is your home. Aquí está bonito, en tu cuerpo sagrado. It’s beautiful here, in your sacred body.

Regresa, Susy. Regresa. With the cleansing love of Tlazolteotl, my spirit returns brighter than ever—una luz illuminada—having shed what no longer serves me, especially the toxicity and violence that I absorb as I walk my path, the red road. I am no longer the same.

I am transformed each time. Remembering that just like love and joy are contagious, so are fear and doubt, so I must aim to be clear and keep myself balanced so I can project clarity and healing.

WORKS CITED Chávez Leyva, Yolanda. “The Revisioning of History es Un Gran Limpia: Teaching and Historical Trauma in Chicana/o History, part ii” in La Voz de Esperanza Vol. 15, Issue 8 (October 2002).

Román, Estela. Nuestra Medicina: De Los Remedios para el Aire y Los Remedios para el Alma (Palibrio, 2012).

Román, Estela. “El Temazkal, a Place for Rest and Purification,” in Voices from the Ancestors: Xicanx and Latinx Spiritual Expressions and Healing Practices, Eds. Lara Medina and Martha Gonzales (University of Arizona Press, 2019).

Zepeda, Susy. “Decolonizing Xicana/x Studies: Healing the Susto of De-indigenization,” in Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies Vol. 45, No. 1 (Spring 2020).

Ometeotl.

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Revelations: Temples Within Artist Sean Guerra shares their story of healing through art.

Words and Art by Sean Guerra

A

RT ALWAYS SEEMED like something I was running away from. I thought it was either too personal, unsustainable—or a dream or fantasy that was too privileged for a person like me to study. However, it was art that always centered me, from the time that I was in elementary school and growing up in an unstable working-class household in California’s Central Valley. Although I did not study art formally, I received an early introduction to Rasquachismo, the “underdog aesthetic,” from a pivotal elementary school teacher and artist by the name of Jorge Guillen, who

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always pushed me to delve deeper in my drawings and experiment more with new media for self-expression.

My passion for art remained dormant after I graduated from college, as I felt I needed to make a living in order to support these dreams and aspirations. My work led me back to the classroom, where I felt I could support the underdog, but I still felt that I was neglecting a part of myself—that is, until I recovered a book on pre-Columbian Mesoamerican codices that started me on a path of integrating and privileging a

SEEING GUIDING TEMPLES I felt lost but still connected, searching for guidance. On a jog, I looked up and saw sprawling branches illuminated by a street lamp. It felt as if even though the world around me was falling apart, staying in tune with the senses and looking within for guidance and ancestral wisdom could lead me out of the darkness.

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REVELATIONS: 20/20

RELEASE + SET FREE I felt a heavy weight, but also the levity of letting go the cargas that were not meant for me to hold any longer. At the same time, I heard about relatives and close friends losing loved ones dear to them.

Having lost two cousins in the past three years, I could empathize with the grief from the loss of a family member and wanted to give the intention of a soulful prayer for our collective journey of healing.

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This piece came about after looking in the mirror, accepting the mistakes I had made, and throwing my past selves through the portal in the hopes that I could shift and leave the baggage behind by cultivating self-acceptance.

I had also learned about the mythical land of “Fusang,” which some people believe is an ancient Asian depiction of Mesoamerica, with references to the maguey plant. It helped me embrace nuanced perspectives of pre-Columbian Mesoamerica, shedding the tired tropes of Aztlán and European “discovery,” for in truth it is possible that tri-continental migration and cross-cultural solidarity were already happening before European colonizers came. My introduction to Mesoamerica was by way of the Mixtec Codex Zouche-Nuttall, which documents the history and royal genealogies of the pueblo de la lluvia, so I was also accepting the path of reading symbols and following the rain god, Dzahui.

Mesoamerican-centric perspective over a Eurocentric one.

It was not until we were all forced to be “at home” with ourselves during the COVID-19 pandemic that I really began to reflect on my life—the missed opportunities, the potential of so many divergent pathways I “could have” gone or “should have” taken—and was moved to accept art as a healing journey. I didn’t know that confronting myself through visual language would be so painful; I had to carve away what I did not want to bring into the world anymore: the emotional baggage, the negative self-talk, the deficit-thinking mentality I had inherited from an oppressive and colonized history and society, as well as my own traumatic upbringing and Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs).

to myself is this: Am I excavating or am I settling? Because settling is for settlers, and excavation requires an examination, an unsettling; but in the end it’s a recovery process to unearth the temples that were buried underneath, just as a pre-Columbian and liberated Mesoamerica exists underneath the pavement and cement we now stand upon.

I began all of these pieces in this collection in December of 2020 as a personal and emotional reflection of the year. The reflection turned into revelations—sketching, inking, then digitizing each as they came about.

Sincerely, Sean “WAR” Guerra

Although I had been trying to focus on Social Emotional Learning and incorporate a Culturally Relevant Praxis through my work in the classroom, I had a lot of healing to do my own as an individual before I could ever attempt to implement them in the spaces I found myself.

This is why the attitude and artistic perspective of Rasquachismo were so vital for me to make peace with: they rooted me in the mindset of privileging los de abajo and making the most out of the least. I realized I was not meant to have a rich material life because I do not accept the exploitation of Racial Capitalism. I realized I was not meant to always feel “at home” on stolen land. The final revelatory question I now have to pose

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BRIDGES ARE TEMPLES: WE ARE THE SKY This piece was inspired by a print by Leopoldo Méndez of the Taller de Gráfica Popular titled “León de La Barra, the White President” (1947), in which Zapata soldiers are in the clouds pointing their rifles and bayonets downwards like lightning bolts upon the bourgeoisie.

The symbolism and title was also inspired by the revelatory writings of “third world women of color” in This Bridge Called My Back (1981), the moment and movement of artistic solidarity shown between the Black Panther Party and the Zapatistas of Chiapas as described in Zapantera Negra (2017), and the mural entitled “Women Hold Up Half the Sky” in Chicano Park, San Diego. Rain has been associated with jaguars and feminine energy since the first Mesoamerican civilization of the Olmecs, and African and Indigenous resistance has been at the forefront of social justice movements.

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THIS IS MESOAMERICA: JAGUARS IN THE SKY This piece was inspired by a 2017 article called “The Roar of the Rain: A Late Preclassic Jaguar Pedestal Sculpture from Southern Mesoamerica,” by Andrew D. Turner, which draws the connection between Mesoamerican rain gods and jaguars.

Turner states, “The Olmecs, who produced the earliest monumental artwork in Mesoamerica, associated the jaguar with rain and, by extension, agricultural fertility. The famed artist and scholar Miguel Covarrubias first noted that the Olmec rain god, which was the precursor to the major rain deities of ancient Mesoamerica— Chahk of the Maya, Cocijo of the Zapotecs, [Dzahui of the Mixtecs], and Tlaloc of Central Mexico—was based on a jaguar prototype.”

Since I had been aligning myself with the Mixtec codices following Dzahui, I found this to be a revelation that in turn helped me to flip the Eurocentric history of settler colonialism on its head and offer a liberated pre-Columbian Mesoamerica, symbolized by the maguey plant, in its place.

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On Voices from the Ancestors A conversation with the co-editor of Voices from the Ancestors, an anthology of Xicanx and Latinx spiritual wisdom.

AN INTERVIEW WITH LARA MEDINA

I

HAD THE GREAT pleasure of connecting with Lara Medina and Martha Gonzales, editors of Voices from the Ancestors: Xicanx and Latinx Spiritual Expressions and Healing Practices (University of Arizona Press, 2019). This beautiful edited volume is a collection of wisdoms worth exploring. I discovered the book shortly after its publication in 2019 and thought: This! This is the wisdom that needs to be shared! It was one of my sources of inspiration when I founded Ofrenda Magazine and will continue to serve as a compass.The following is an interview with Voices from the Ancestors co-editor Lara Medina. —M. Carbajal, Ed.

OFRENDA MAGAZINE (OM): How do you typically introduce Voices from the Ancestors to people who may not be familiar with the subject matter?

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Voices from the Ancestors: Xicanx and Latinx Spiritual Expressions and Healing Practices (University of Arizona Press, 2019). Image courtesy of University of Arizona Press.

LARA MEDINA (LM): I actually begin by saying this book is an ofrenda, an offering of spiritual wisdom for Xicanx and Latinx readers and our allies who are committed to decolonizing their lives. The book offers a collection of wisdom writings from 89 contributors in the form of reflective essays, ritual guidelines, poetry, song, and/ or visual art. It is wisdom based on our oral traditions, our research, our intuitions, and our lived experience. It is wisdom that has re-emerged over the last fifty years as we advance in our efforts to decolonize our lives, our minds, our spirits, our bodies and our relationship to the planet.

The wisdom contained in these pages is based on pre-colonized ancestral knowledges that understood our deep interconnectedness with all humans, all of nature, and the sacred cosmic life-giving forces. These knowledges are based on non-Western epistemologies so central to our process of decolonization, particularly in these most troubling times of increasing racial injustice, global capitalist greed, disastrous global climate change impacting the most vulnerable, misogyny, and violence on non-binary persons.

We, the editors, and the 89 contributors to this book believe that it is time our wisdom be shared with our peers, younger generations, and our allies, as we carry medicine in reclaiming and reconstructing the ways of our Indigenous and African ancestors and in rethinking imposed religious beliefs

that uphold a separation between religions and human superiority over nature. The writings are in accessible prose and we hope the book will be used in classrooms and community settings as well as for familial and personal use.

OM: Voices from the Ancestors is a gift to readers, and—with over eighty contributors—it’s also a massive editorial accomplishment! What first sparked the idea for the project?

LM: Over the past 40 years, I have witnessed the reclamation of Indigenous identities and spiritual practices among many Xicanx and Latinx peoples as well as an uplifting of our African ancestries, often referred to as “the third root.” Foundational to these reclamations is the embracement of non-Western epistemologies.

We have come to understand our deep interconnectivity with all of humanity as well as plant and animal life and the natural forces of the universe. So we understand that how we live our lives impacts all others and that we must live with a consciousness of balance, reciprocity, respect and gratitude. We must honor the spirits in all life forms and not consider humans to be superior. We must take care of the planet and in turn the planet will take care of us. We must also maintain our relationships with our deceased ancestors (known and unknown) who have walked this earthly journey before us “as death brings another kind of wisdom

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“I personally have experienced deep healing through Mexican Indigenous curanderismo along with Tibetan Buddhist practices and aspects of Santería.”

that they want to share with us.” The ancestors gain the power to continue to guide and protect us.

These fundamental teachings vary drastically from Western epistemology, which has taught us that humans have superior power over other forms of life and that it is our right to dominate; that as individuals we need to be concerned with our personal well-being only and not the collective; that the deceased have no power and should be forgotten. In contrast, witnessing and experiencing how living according to a non-Western world view offers deep healing for the intergenerational wounds of colonization inspired us to gather the voices of like-minded Xicanx, Latinx, and AfroLatinx so that our knowledge and spiritual practices could be documented and shared for the present and the future.

OM: As a project, the book clearly has personal meaning to you. How does the work reflect your own spiritual journey?

LM: My own spiritual journey as an indigenous identified Xicana began in the mid 1980s. Since then, I have been researching and writing on the topic of Chicana spirituality. In 1996, I interviewed many indigenous identified Chicanas who began decolonizing their spirituality in the 1970s during the Chicano movement. That research was published as “Los Espiritus Siguen Hablando: Chicana Spiritualities” in the anthology Living Xicana Theory edited by Carla Trujillo

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(1998). This essay set me on the path to further study and document the reclaimed and reconfigured spirituality of our Indigenous ancestors that I participated in and observed in our communities. My master’s degree in theology from the Graduate Theological Union and my doctorate in history (with an emphasis on Chicanx religious history) from the Claremont Graduate University also allowed me to study and research the positive aspects of Mexican Catholicism that endures in Chicanx culture as well as our conflicted history with Christianity.

their knowledges so that we do not have to rely only on Western medical solutions that often do not diagnose the root causes of an imbalance, but merely the symptoms and then treat them with pharmaceuticals.

Western medicine can definitely be useful, but I witness a (re)turning to traditional knowledge within our communities as our social and political context worsens. We can no longer rely only on Western medical institutions to respond to all our needs, and the holistic worldviews within Indigenous, Eastern, and African spiritualities are essential to helping us live balanced lives with a body/mind/spirit/nature consciousness. The persistent onslaughts on our personhood that come from the right-wing establishment necessitate that we have ways to protect our psyches and our bodies. My personal experience with female-centered and earth-centered practices also gave me the preparation to gather the knowledge from our contributors and co-edit this book.

My academic career has affirmed my interests as I have taught courses on religions and spiritualities in Chicana/o communities at California State University, Northridge, in the Department of Chicana and Chicano Studies for the past twenty-five years. Most of my published essays and academic presentations have focused on Chicanx ritual, popular religiosity, Chicana/o theology, and political activism in the Catholic Church through the history of Las Hermanas, a Chicana/Latina national organization that brought the Chicano movement into the Catholic Church. My first book published in 2004 is Las Hermanas: Chicana/Latina Religious Political Activism in the U.S. Catholic Church (Temple University Press, 2004).

OM: It’s admittedly unfair of me to ask you to choose favorites, but are there pieces or sections that have a special significance to you? For example, are there voices or perspectives you’re especially proud to have included in the book?

In addition, and of most importance, is that I personally have experienced deep healing through Mexican Indigenous curanderismo along with Tibetan Buddhist practices and aspects of Santería. I have met many healers within Latinx communities who are sharing

LM: All of the contributors offer powerful insights in their sharing of details of their spiritual consciousness and practices. It is impossible for me to choose favorites as they really are all my favorites! All are written with “thinking hearts.”

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“We must ask ourselves and the people we socialize with, what are the values we are living by? Do we value interdependency with all forms of life...reciprocity among all our relations, living in balance, respecting each other, embracing diversity?”

But I can say that it was important for us to address the significant parts of the life cycle as well as daily practices to support our relationships with ourselves, each other, and the sacred cosmic forces of the universe. A partial overview of the book chapters will be helpful to illustrate why it is impossible to pick favorites. We begin the book with morning prayers and honoring the sacred directions. We continue with how to create personal and familial sacred spaces. Then blessing our young ones is of great importance as is communing with our dying and deceased. Understanding the creation of art as a spiritual practice receives its due as does cultivating dream practices. The chapter on holistic health care includes important insights on the power of curanderismo and practices such as self-limpias in different forms and the sweat ceremony or temazkal.

Puberty rituals and a “Transceñera” ceremony offer precious ways to honor physical changes as do reflections on “mynopause” and child bearing.

All of this is within the first eleven chapters and there are a total of twenty-two chapters!

We also made a serious effort to restore the respect and honor that third-gender and transgender members of our communities held before colonization. The contributors range from university professors to professional artists, cultural workers, teachers, and organic intellectuals. Many are considered elders or “wise ones” in our communities and we include the voices of younger generations as well. We are grateful that so many responded to our invitation

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to contribute to this book and it affirms a collective awareness that our communities need this type of book.

OM: The title of the book is Voices from the Ancestors. The use of “from” struck me, since it can have more than one meaning: voices from the ancestors to (and through) the contributors, and voices from the contributors as ancestors to future generations. What advice would you share with our readers, who might be thinking about their own roles as ancestors to future generations?

diversity? The way we view the world really emerges from the values that we live by. And we must learn the traditions and rituals that nurture us, that offer us ways to support a body/mind/spirit/planet consciousness. We must learn to understand plant medicines and natural ways of healing. The writings in Voices from the Ancestors can assist us on our journey and for future generations.

LM: This is an interesting insight to the title and the use of “from the ancestors.” It really carries both meanings: the wisdom contained in the book comes to us through the ancestors, through ancestral traditions we have learned, or through the use of our intuition inspired by ancestral knowledges, and our research guided by our desire to know more about our ancestors. The intention is to pass on this ancestral wisdom in written form for the next generations.

The advice I offer is to take seriously our role as teachers and role models in our families, our personal relationships, our community settings, and our organizations. We must ask ourselves and the people we socialize with, what are the values we are living by? Do we value interdependency with all forms of life (humans, plants, animals, the elements), reciprocity among all our relations, living in balance, respecting each other, embracing

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Editor’s Picks

THE INTENTION ISSUE

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’M ONE OF those people with a tendency to recommend a book or two before I leave a conversation. To end this issue, I thought I’d share a few finds that are keeping me going this winter—not just books, but music, videos, and plant relations. Enjoy! —M. Carbajal, Ed.

YOUTUBE PICK

Ixtoii Paloma Cervantes Ixtoii Paloma Cervantes is the author of our featured Practice article in this issue. One of the things that stands out to me about Paloma is what a great teacher she is. On her YouTube channel, she offers introductory lessons on various elements of curanderismo. I recently enjoyed Paloma’s “What to do in winter from a Curandismo point of view,” which includes a calming meditation and centering practice toward the end.

Check it out.

BOOK PICK

Voices from the Ancestors If you haven’t picked up a copy yet, I highly recommend you do! Voices from the Ancestors: Xicanx and Latinx Spiritual Expressions and Healing Practices (University of Arizona Press, 2019) is a beautiful anthology of wisdoms co-edited by Lara Medina and Martha Gonzales. To get a sense of the contents, you can read my interview with Lara in this issue, and you can also read pieces by Berenice Dimas and Susy Zepeda, who contributed to the book.

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PLANTCESTOR PICK

Yarrow When I was prepping for this issue, I was pleased to learn that the medical definition of intention is the healing of a wound. Yarrow, a plant that is native to North America, Europe, and Asia, jumped into my mind. Yarrow is known as a wound healer. You can typically recognize it by its feathery leaves. The Nahuatl word for it, in fact, is tlaquequetzal, translated as “feather of the earth.”

Many people think of yarrow as a common weed, so you can often find it growing in yards and what guide books call “disturbed places”: patches of earth along the edge of roads and between built spaces. I like to think that yarrow grows in these disturbed places to bring healing to the earth itself. I sit behind a computer most days, so haven’t called upon yarrow as a physical wound healer; however, I do sometimes place yarrow on my altar to help me bring attention to emotional wounds that need healing. It's a good plantcestor to get to know.

WEB PICK

The Ritual of Mythmaking Artivists Katherin Canton and mariana IX moscoso have created an online ofrenda where the community can post creative work. They write: “As future ancestors, healers and facilitators we created a wider space for Indigenous identified people locally in California and across the world to not only create, but to exchange contemporary myths through our online art exhibition space. In doing so, it is the curators’ hope that together we can (re)envision our way into our next world.” Check them out at ritualofmythmaking.com.

MUSIC PICK

Cha Cha Palace I received Angelica Garcia’s Cha Cha Palace (Spacebomb Records) as a holiday gift, and it's been a soundtrack for January.

Songs like “Guadalupe,” “Llorona,” and “Jicama” have kept me going. You can find her work on Bandcamp.

ISSUE 01 | INTENTION 83

ofrenda MAGAZINE Ofrenda Magazine is a multimedia publication exploring Xicanx and Latinx spirituality, earth-centered wisdom traditions, justice, and healing arts. Our mission is to inspire holistic wellness, ancestral connection, social and ecological justice, and spiritual creativity.

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ISSUE 01: INTENTION | JAN/FEB 2021 (RE-ISSUED OCT 2021)

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