La Loba Loca is a "queer, Brown South American, community organizer, artist, researcher, body-powered tattooist, full spectrum companion, midwife student, eco-feminista and life-long student. She has been part of several projects aiming to document and provide information on autonomous and community based health and healing."
For more information on the work that she does visit LaLobaLoca.com
What motivated you to devote your life to activism and healing work?
I was born in Peru and I moved to Chile four years after the dictatorship ended. There was a good amount of migration from Peru to Chile because of the political climate. After the dictatorship “ended” (it never really ended, the political powers that are in place are not going to change unless everything burns down), Chile became very neo-liberal and Peru was going through hard economic times so there was a wave of migration from Peru to Chile. We were part of that wave, I think that experiencing migration and dealing with xenophobia and racism at a young age had a lot to do with initiating me into political work. I don’t know when I started identifying as an ‘activist’, I think I prefer the ‘community organizer’. I feel as if everyone should be a community organizer, we should always be engaged with what is happening on around us and find ways to (re)imagine new worlds.
When it comes to healing work, I think it happened naturally. I am blessed to come from a town and family that still values ancestral knowledge. I grew up with my mama feeding me human milk and then making me fruit juices and vegetarian home cooked meals and being super anti-trash food because she linked fast food to the city Chile culture. I have family members that study and practice Andean Medicine, cosmobiology, vegetarian/ancestral cooking, medicina casera, aromatherapy and more! For me healing work and political work go hand by hand, if we really want to dismantle the system and build new words where we can all fit and thrive it is important to learn how to support our wholeness and also our communities’ mental and physical health. The work that I do is called salud autogestiva - which means to take your health into your own hands- which does not mean that we completely disregard institutional medical services. Salud Autogestiva means that through studies, practices and research we are able to document and incorporate ancestral traditional and medicinal practices that are culturally relevant to each of us into our lives. Also, when we do go to the institutions and corporations that make up the modern medical system, we are actively engaged into what is happening, inquiring and making sure that we are informed clients.
Something that I often see when I talk to some people doing ‘healing’ or ‘spiritual work’ is that it tends to be very apolitical. I have had my cousin who is into cosmobiology tell me that non-heterosexual people have a hormonal imbalance and that their abnormal state was written on the stars the second they were born. I have also had people doing sacred sexuality work tell me that it is impossible to have two people of the same gender have sacred sex because their vibrations do not match according to Taoist teachings. Those are just some examples of the stuff people say sometimes, which are also extremely hilarious. I do think that the stars impact who we are, I also think there is a lot of power in sexual energy but I am not down to believe any of this cishetenormative healing stuff. Those are just two examples of the bulsshit I have encountered, that does not even go into cultural appropriation, fatphobia, ableism and other hellish things…
During the last Encuentro Feminista de Latinoamerica y el Caribe (EFLAC) in Lima, Peru I facilitated a knowledge-share called ‘Pariendo Nuevos Mundos: Utilizando la Medicina de las Abuelas como Herramienta de lucha’ which translates to Creating New Worlds: Using Grandmother Medicine as a Tool for Liberation. The folx that came and shared really vibed with the knowledge share, I see a lot of movement in South America and (what is now considered) the US spearheaded by young folx that are started to see the important connection between body, land and health. There is so much POWER and so much need to use word-of-mouth, storytelling and elder knowledge to dismantle this system from the bottom up.
The word ‘healer’ is thrown around so easily but I feel as if we are all healers. Of course some of us might have some skills and knowledge specific to our craft but I don’t consider myself a healer because ultimately... people heal themselves. I am my healer. We all have different medicine, there is people who sing that have voice medicine, others have touch medicine, other offer visual medicine, the list goes on. For me, we are all healers, we all have medicine, we all have something healing and positive to offer- the work is to tap into those abilities and gifts and use them.
What does it mean to be a person of color in the eco-feminist movement?
To tell you the truth I do not hang out with white eco-feminists or white sustainability people, in my mind the eco-feminists have always been Brown, Indigenous and other kinds of POC. It was not until a couple of months ago when I started looking at some websites and conferences on eco-feminism and it all just seemed so bland and white. To tell you the truth, I am over spaces trying to be ‘inclusive’ of POC because we can easily create our own spaces and movements and we have been doing that for a while. I wrote an article a while back titled D.I.Y & LOCALLY MADE FOOD: What the hipsters din’t tell you that kind of touches on mainstream white sustainability and veganism.
I’ve identified as a feminist for a while but I never liked how white, heterocentric and ciscentric mainstream feminism can be. I still identify as a feminist because I have so many awesome, tortilla, down ass friends in South America that make me feel like I am part of this feminismo del Abya Yala in diaspora. I learned the term eco-feminist through Vandana Shiva and I think I gravitated towards it because she was an Indian women and her writing centered soil workers, mother earth and ancestral foods. It just resonated with me and it made so much sense! Yet again, I think that this term can be expanded to fit each of our values and struggles, to me eco-feminism is about intersectionalities and also looking at relations between peoples, land and ecosystems. I definitely see a lot of spirituality intermixed into eco-feminism, I mean just the idea of recognizing earth as a living organism, an entity that breathes and that has the right to survive and thrive is so damn deep and important. So I prefer to identifying as a eco-feminist because it feels more real, encompassing and old. We might have a name for it now but people have been practicing ‘eco-feminism’ for a long time.
Feminism is always expanding and molding into the different realities that affect people depending on the territories they embody. I see a lot of work in the Andean region talking about territories - territories - which is a concept that goes beyond physical territories and it includes social territories and also looks at our bodies as territories. Feminismo Comunitario is a feminism that was developed and is practiced by Brown/Red women in the Andean region and it focuses on doing feminism starting in our body- a political space. There are people that don’t even call themselves feminists but when I look at them all I can think is feminism!
I also believe there is such powerful transnational eco-feminist potential, it is a framework that can encourage us to think global which is so refreshing because theory can be so US-centric sometimes. I think this framework pushes us to think about where our food comes from, where our trash goes, how does global warming affect people living in islands that are being covered by water, how do my actions in the ‘global north’ affect those living in impoverished countries, how does my menstrual hygiene products affect the ecosystem, how does my consumption of quinoa in the US impact Andean people’s ability to purchase quinoa at a fair price back home, and the list goes on!
In your opinion, what does it mean for POC to use technology as a means to reclaim their connection to indigenous medicine ? Do you believe it helps or hinders the role that storytelling and elder-based knowledge has been traditionally shared?
When I first started, I was more open about sharing myself and also information online but as time went by I started realizing how scary it is because you do not know who is reading you and also how people use the knowledge you share online. Cultural appropriation makes me incredibly uncomfortable, white people reading my stuff and using it for their classes and workshops makes me feel horrible. At the same time, I see the internet as a tool to (re)learn, (re)claim knowledge and connect with people doing awesome work across city, state and country limits. I do not have a concrete answer to this question, but I would never ever ever put up something in my social media that I considered to be a sacred and extremely important piece of information.
For those out there doing cultural work and documenting old healing traditions, we know how hard it is to get this bits and pieces of practices from our family members and healers. So I am careful about what I share in social media that is why I love doing knowledge share in community centers, groups, universities and homie’s spaces because I get to see who is receiving the info and i get to choose what to talk about. I call them knowledge shares because I learn SO much through the gatherings, I might be the one presenting and facilitating but I am always so grateful to learn from folx that come and share through stories and experiences. I value story sharing, specially when it comes from groups of people that have traditionally been taught to share knowledge through stories. Having said that I encourage people to get together with other folx and tell stories and share knowledge that way! Sometimes I get messages and email form people asking me about ‘how can i learn about plants?’, ‘is there a book that I can learn from?’ and I always tell people that they might find something but ultimately you need to get some soil and seeds and start learning from the root up.
I am currently working on my first online knowledge share called Radically & Consciously Mooning and I have been asking myself questions about how to use the internet effectively when translating information that I feel so passionate about. After lots of thought I have decided to leave some of the knowledge I have gotten from abuelitas and healers out of it. On top of that, I will be having an application process and also making sure to talk about cultural appropriation in the knowledge share. The thing about the internet is that it gets to people all around the world that have internet access and it also reaches people that are unable to leave home from a variety of reasons.
For those available, I am facilitating a knowledge share on radical mooning in Los Angeles during May 9th and May 10th only for POC folx where I hope to include all this abuelita tips, recipes and story telling.
