I recently had the pleasure of being on Mijente’s La Cura Podcast as the first guest of their Community Care Series that feature how different community healers, health practitioners, community leaders are tending to themselves and their communities during the current Covid19 global pandemic. Below is a blog I wrote for it.
**All information and recipes on this blog are offered to lift up traditional, cultural folk remedies and are not prescriptive, please consult your health care practitioner for advice**
Water is our first medicine! Water, steam, and sweat are medicines that Aboriginal people worldwide have used for healing since the beginning of time. In these days of fever and global burning, hydration is imperative. Water is of course also a medium for the goodness of our plant medicines, delivered in soups and teas, diffused through steam, saturated in poultices and wraps. The plantitas in your kitchen make foundational, supportive medicine for these times. Use what you have on hand, like rosemary, thyme, oregano, and mints. A simple tea infusion can be made by adding a tablespoon of herbs to a cup of boiling water, or add these herbs in your cooking. Water holds memory and stores vibrational imprints of its surroundings. When you cook with and drink water today, pray to your water, offer thanks, imbue it with messages of love, healing and ease.
My interview with La Cura Podcast is here, part I in the community care series for holistic support. Below are the recipes offered for part II.
Diana Inlak’ech, ND is a licensed naturopathic doctor at the intersection of social justice, spirituality and healing, specializing in somatic bodywork, integrative mental health, and decolonized healing modalities within a politicized framework. Learn more at her blog Holistic Support for Immunity and Viral Prevention.
We’ve been in covid-tena since last Friday. I got tested for covid-19 on Tuesday due to possible exposure to confirmed cases, ensuring we were most informed for my team that was exposed to me as well, and experiencing symptoms. We are still waiting for my results; B has not shown any symptoms (yay!).
I am feeling a lot better today physically, but I am in full rage mode for many reasons right now. This crisis is fully exposing how rotten all of our systems are for the 99% of us and if that doesn’t make us flip some tables, I am worried about what will? If this is not bad enough to wake the majority of us up, than what will? AND I am also feeling the transition period that we are in. It is crucial to pause and feel it all, that’s our first point of connection, those feelings, our humanity, the compassion.
AND that alone will not be enough AND each of us will need to figure out what we are willing to do? How are we willing to do that? With whom will we be willing to do that with? When is the moment to take action? I am sitting with all of these questions to myself.
All of these things can be true all at once, the urge to keep our nuclear family and friends safe, to expand to our neighborhood being taken care of and feel like that’s all we can do at this moment that is so big and overwhelming. That’s been my first thought, but as I have been feeling better physically my spirit has also been feeling anxious and the sense of something is not right, has been growing, the restlessness is more palpable.
So I am also allowing myself to sit with that, and that’s what has led me to this:
My plea to us, is that we allow ourselves to sit with the feeling that this is NOT OK, and really sit with it. That you do whatever it is to act on that feeling. That we don’t let this crisis pass us by like it’s normal, or let it further desensitize us to human pain and death.
That you let your feelings drive you to action beyond ranting about it (like I am doing now, I am fully aware of my action) over social media. That we be bold, be brave and push for what seems to be impossible because our rage and solidarity are powerful ingredients.
That we come out of this stronger, clearer, and sharper because the powers that be, will come out of this with the playbook of how to deal with a global pandemic and economic crisis by keeping the status quo, IF WE LET THEM.
I am sending you all love and agitation.
Update: This post was written on March 19th, 2020 and yesterday, Neidi’s results came back negative!
Mijente is a national digital and grassroots network of Latinxs y Chicanxs in the US who are pro Black, pro queer, pro migrant, pro worker y más. Ahora más que nunca, we must organize for everyone to get the care and basic resources we need to live:
“Sin El Estado” takes the work of resistance and moves it one step further into the realm of imagination and transformation: as gente living under state capitalism, white supremacy, and heteropatriarchy, we are often asked to define ours our existence in relation to the dominant structure. Often we find ourselves in what we can call a “1st space.” That is, living under the conditions mentioned above. As organizers, activists, and resistors, we tend to also live in a “2nd space” where we are forced to react en contra or against these conditions. “Sin el estado” work offers a “third space” that allows us to be more than passive participants of state capitalism or as victims/people in struggle against. This frees people up to explore other, liberatory ways of existing as individuals and communities–right here, and right now.
Sin el estado work differs in the ways it relates to existing power structures. The Zapatistas, for example, talk about dual-power: the necessity of contesting for power from above (within the existing structures) while simultaneously building power from below (the grassroots). Because of this, sin el estado work often overlaps with the existing structures anyway, and thus sin el estado work can overlap with “desde el estado” and “contra el estado” work.
Those overlaps can look like:
New ways of carrying out “contra el estado” work–such as direct actions and organizing tactics that show us a version of what the new world we are fighting for could look like and how it would function.
Long-term organizers in Jackson, MS have taught a lot of us what is possible when you elect your candidate but continue to carry out peoples’ assemblies and caucuses to discuss important community issues–not just to make sure the mayor checked the box of receiving input, but because the mayor knows the people will hold him accountable during his term, not just every four years at the ballot box.
Sin el Estado projects answer “yes” to one ore more of the following questions:
Here are some examples of sin el estado work across various sectors:
Alternatives to Governance
As more of our gente gets elected to office, we must ask each other: what are the mechanisms, structures, and behaviors that allow us to co-govern and do not replicate the dominant culture of governance? As activists and organizers, we often get trained in differentiating from the mainstream, in building power to win against. However, to be generative while in power, to implement different mechanisms for community input and manifestation requires different muscles altogether. Some of these strategies and tactics are simple interventions around authentic community leadership development, meeting facilitation, and building aptitude for productive conflict and principled struggle.
Public institutions–such as schools, hospitals, libraries, and public transit–if they are even adequate, can often perpetuate the dominant culture’s narrative. We must experiment with “third space” projects that attempt to replace these institutions in our lives altogether.
Examples: Projects such as childcare cooperatives, unschool/freeschools,and alternatives to community policing/911.
Alternatives to Capitalism
The ways in which we are beholden to capital keeps us tied up in innumerable ways. From jobs that don’t pay enough or don’t schedule enough hours, to lopsided profits for billionaires who do nothing for us. From the financial/banking/credit system to supply chains that poison the environment, most of us are affected by capital’s grip on our communities. Experimenting with alternative financial institutions can create spaces away from our mainstream economic system. Some of these are informal and/or quite distanced from our economic system, like tandas or people bartering bread for eggs in a neighborhood, and some of them are heavily formalized and have high proximity to capitalist economies, like the food co-op you don’t even realize is a co-op that stocks all kinds of major national brands.
It’s not just about creating opportunities for sharing or alternatives to oppressive structures, although that is certainly part of why we do the work. Dominant culture is constantly shaping and reshaping our brains into conflict-averse, self-blaming, anxious beliefs and behaviors that make us poorly equipped for winning and for being generative about what happens once we’ve won battles for power. Sin el estado projects can help individuals and communities get a taste for radical democracy, pro-conflict, confidence-boosting, trust-building new beliefs and behaviors that can help us get the goods and keep them.
Why is Mijente tackling this?
Because it’s part of our framework! However, in US organizing spaces, it’s often the most ignored work. Sin el estado work actually builds skills that are necessary for the battles ahead. Latinx people can be among the lowest-paid workers in the US. We can organize for greater wages but we can also just make our own way. We can hustle. In particular, our undocumented gente are often excluded from mainstream democratic processes (voting, collective bargaining, etc.) Lastly, we do this work because our people often have few, if any, safety nets to just try some shit and take risks.
We know our gente has what it takes to experiment and try new things out. We’re excited to provide an opportunity to seed new work and see what grows!
Nikki Marín Baena is Director of Finance and Economic Development at Mijente. She has about ten years of experience working in co-ops, helping people start, finance, and scale worker-owned co-ops, and sometimes talking people out of trying to start them.
