An Interview with La Loba Loca - PART II

Photo Credits: lalobaloca.com

1. Can you speak a bit about what motivated you to start the online knowledge share entitled: Radically and Consciously Mooning.

I started making moon pads last year and started blogging about reusable menstrual stuff. People were responding to my posts and saying how the moon pads changed their lives. I was like, really? the moon pads changed your life? How? Then I started thinking about my journey of discovering and reclaiming my body and I realized how mxnsturation played such a big part of it. There is something powerful in understanding the connection you have with the universe, the connection your mxnsturation has to the power of the moon, the connection your blood has to your lineage. To understand this wholeness about you is so powerful. It really can push you to do the things you thought you could never do.

The online knowledge share came from the feedback I got from people, I thought that everybody knew about reusable moon products, or secretos de abuela for cramping or herbs that can aid us through the cycle. In my mind, we all knew about this but when I started getting word from folx, I started to realize that much of this info is not shared or it has been forgotten. I started googling and looking up other Brown Queer Tortillas doing similar work and I did not find much so I decided to start this project and then when I saw the response I was extremely surprised. The town where I am from in Peru used to be way smaller and rural. When I moved to Chile, I grew up with “small-town” values, my grandmother and mother were vegetarian cooks, my mom was super against pain killers and she had all this believes about moon time that I still carry. I did not understand how important, sacred and real this ‘believes’ and cultural practices were until a couple of years ago when I began to do that very important work of unlearning western education values and realizing that the knowledge that I get form stories, anecdotes  cuentos from my elders, aunts, mom, grandma, señoras is way more important and relevant than all this other shit that is pushed to us through ‘modern’ education.

Radically and Consciously Mooning also comes from this urgency that I feel around menstrual education. I have been involved in abortion access and abortion companionship since I was in my early teens, and I also think that menstrual health is another tool that we can use to make sure people learn how to relate to their bodies, sexuality and fertility.  The knowledge share will be mixing art, because I feel a lot of creative artistic energy in menstruation, as well as videos and writing. However, a good amount of the work will be assignments that will push  participants to be actively participating in the knowledge sharing. The goal of the knowledge share is for participants to research their own traditions, and encouraging people to think of the remedies their chosen or blood families and ethnic groups use for mxnstrual cramps. It is about reclaiming the medicine your family and community already knows.

When I started thinking about the knowledge share I wanted to create a curriculum not only for people who mxnsturate but also people that are friends or family members to folx that mxnsturate. Ultimately this information is not only for bleeders but also for everybody, we all come from the womb/creative center and for all of us to be here there had to be a cycle happening inside of that person sustaining the pregnancy. You can read more about the knowledge share in this interview, and also the main website.

2. What advice would you give to other QPOC healers and activists?

Keep doing your thing! When I started La Loba Loca, I wanted to have an outlet to say whatever I wanted and share whatever I wanted, honestly I was not expecting it to turn into this internet alter-ego… I think it is important for folx to take over online platforms and start using media to spread our messages and thoughts, we are so polluted with mainstream media the it is refreshing to see more blogs and (QT*)POC online media popping up.  I’ve thought about deleting La Loba Loca so many times because it is scary to put your life out there and have people look at it and read it, what has stopped me is people that have contacted me or reached out to me to say ‘hey, thanks for writing that’ or ‘that is exactly how I feel!’- I know there is a lot of power on seeing each other reflected on someone else. So keep doing your thing, keep it autobiographical, speak from your experience, value YOUR experience, document it and realize that you know SO much already that we all know SO much together!