We attempt to deliver our vision; a vision that depicts how theories by Gloria E. Anzaldúa can offer us ways to help people of color (whom we identified as broken under current political rhetoric) to learn, discover, understand, or solve problems that can lead toward healing. We argue Anzaldúa’s theories and her Coyolxauhqui imperative, that ongoing process of making and unmaking, can serve to aid individuals with the greater public good of healing trauma— trauma that has been historically inscribed onto what we recognize as those bodies broken by systematic oppression. So, interwoven throughout this article, we highlight a variety of south Texas community members in an effort to connect with the communities we serve as educators. We feel that the work these individuals do as artists, writers, and activists connects well with Anzaldúa’s theories and her Coyolxauhqui imperative.

The State of US

Vincent Valdez, a San Antonio, Texas native, is a Chicano artist who speaks to the current state of us and our civic culture in the U.S. Lawrence Downes contends Chicano artist Vincent Valdez has hauntingly captured “a selfie for 21st-century America” in his monumental depictions of Ku Klux Klan members, including men, women, and children gathered on a rural road and surrounded by a heap of trash topped with soiled mattresses near a barrel fire burning. Unaware of the degree to which white supremacy and the Ku Klux Klan would play in the 2016 presidential campaign, Valdez says this work of art “makes an attempt at revealing a number of societal threats that transcend the arena of white supremacy,” and Valdez goes on to say that these conditions are “deeply embedded in our American way of life, in more ways than we think or see” (qtd. in Silva 2017). There is little doubt that these were factors that not only propelled Donald J. Trump’s candidacy as the Republican nominee for the presidential election, but also that ultimately led him to occupy the White House in 2017 (McElwee and McDaniel 2017; Wood 2017). So, we can surmise that Valdez may see his duty as an artist to reflect the times and situations he—a racialized brown body in the U.S.—finds himself in at present, and as Nina Simone, a twentieth century American singer, songwriter, pianist, arranger, and civil rights activist, calls on all artists to perform: 

An artist’s duty, as far as I’m concerned, is to reflect the times. I think that is true of painters, sculptors, poets, musicians. As far as I’m concerned, it’s their choice, but I choose to reflect the times and situations in which I find myself. That, to me, is my duty. And at this crucial time in our lives, when everything is so desperate, when everyday is a matter of survival, I don’t think you can help but be involved. 

American citizens (documented and undocumented) found themselves under the leadership of Trump from 2017 to 2021, and in Trump’s divided America, White nationalists, neo-Nazis, Ku Klux Klan, and Confederate flag wearing, right-wing ultra conservatives were  granted the right, somehow, to feel emboldened to rise up. They were empowered to assert the legitimacy of their white culture openly in public spaces. Such actions and empowerment are evidenced in the “White Lives Matter” demonstrations that took place in Charlottesville, Virginia or Shelbyville, Tennessee early in Trump’s presidency. Under this movement, clearly racialized brown bodies, like Valdez’s (as well as our own), are perceived by demonstrators as physical threats to the upward mobility of “real Americans” promised in their version of a romanticized American “Whites only” Dream.  In Trump’s racialized America, Hispanics, or for our purpose, Latinx communities, are readily pigeonholed into a homogenous group and regularly profiled as suspicious, criminal, lazy, uneducated or illegal citizens. It goes without questions that Latinx are reminded of their otherness in public rhetoric constantly. Said by then Presidential Candidate Donald Trump:

When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.  

His campaign mantra (“Build the Wall!”) permeated the media as well as influenced public rhetoric in the most vulnerable of spaces: K-12 classrooms. Young White teens across high schools used this mantra to taunt brown skinned people. However, such derogatory and visceral rhetoric that characterizes Latinx individuals is nothing new, as artist and writer Ito Romo points out in “Donald Trump & the Frito Banidito.” Romo presents how writers like James Frank Dobie (American folklorist, writer, and newspaper columnist) perpetuated myths that Mexicans were cruel by nature, cowards, thieves, and degenerates. However, at present, the increasing use of such degrading and visceral rhetoric is no longer used to cultivate just stereotypes. This rhetoric has been used to instill hate and for many to ignite a call to action against all brown bodies, regardless of their American citizenship. In the state of Texas, passing Texas Senate Bill 4 was considered one of the strictest anti-immigrant laws that cracks down on Sanctuary Cities that could also lead to racial profiling (Hing 2017). We want to believe that such heinous and destructive rhetoric would not be so encouraged in our diverse nation, especially at the highest administrative office in the United States of America, but the circulation of such rhetoric in the public and/or media would suggest otherwise and would cause anyone to speculate whether if through 2016 and 2020 a divisive and racist bully occupied the White House. We can put forward that words uttered by the President of the United States Donald J. Trump and alt-right radical-conservatives are now no less racist or xenophobic. Even toward the end of his presidency, Trump’s divisive and racialized rhetoric incited his supporters to storm and attack the United States Capital on January 6, 2021 to disrupt, delay, and change the Electoral College vote count in his favor.

On a personal note, experiencing racism is nothing new for both of us. Acts of racism due to our brown bodies are acts ingrained into our core. That is the state of US. We were born and raised in the U.S.-Mexico borderland, rural south Texas to be specific. As American citizens with Mexican lineage and brown bodies, we didn’t learn about ourselves, our heritage, our history, or, more importantly, about our voices until we came into contact with works by Gloria Anzaldúa in graduate school. Like her, we struggled to know the world we lived in and to come to grips with the racism we faced. It was through her words that we developed a sense of awareness; knowledge about our social position, about our Mexican American heritage, and about us living in the U.S.-Mexico borderland region. We learned about how our language defines us: “I am my language” (Anzaldúa 1987, 81), and we understood how socio-cultural traditions, rituals, and rites of passage engender us into bordered bodies, or into what cultural scholar Oscar J. Martinez (1994) calls borderlanders, with the ability to be “multilingual and multicultural (20).

Over time, we came to see ourselves as not only diverse but versatile: negotiating various worlds, positioning and re-positioning our bodies in accordance with public rhetoric and cultural conceptions. And, like Valdez’s action in art, we want to reflect the times and situate ourselves in this narrative by identifying as Chicanx rhetoricians. Chicanx who adopt a call for social justice, and rhetoricians who understand rhetoric as both the study and the strategic use of written, spoken, and visual languages. Because we are our language, as Anzaldúa tells us, we acknowledge that language then is an embodied materiality, where “words are things,” as Maya Angelou said in her conversation with Oprah (Bonfiglio et al. 2011). Such things touch us, live inside of us, and, when used strategically, break us into pieces. And, it is due to this part, how rhetoric breaks our bodies into pieces, that we want to highlight the heightened discord in more recent day to day political and public rhetoric and how such rhetoric has led many people of color to confront radicalized language—language that has led to racial profiling, which more often than not leads to “targeting dark-skinned, middle eastern-looking, and other people of color earmarked as potential terrorist” (Anzaldúa 2015, 14). 

It is clear that the current state of political and public rhetoric is oppressive and divisive, alienating and dismembering bodies, both metaphorically and literally, especially for those bodies systematically degraded by their color (Harriot 2018). Such actions leave many people of color oppressed and historically traumatized by the complexities of color, gender, sexuality, ethnicity or class, so much so, that people of color experience, as Anzaldúa (2015) asserts, “feeling disposable, perpetually unsafe, and torn apart like Coyolxauhqui” (14). In Aztec mythology, Coyolxauhqui is the moon goddess and the daughter of Coatlicue and Mixcoatl. 

Her brother, Huitzilopochtli (the god of the sun and war), butchered and decapitated her for planning to kill her mother. Her myth was commemorated on a large stone disk, which was excavated at the base of the Templo Mayor, Tenochtitlan (Figure 1). We refer to Coyolxauhqui because, like her, we feel people of color are similarly dismembered or fragmented into pieces due to the sharp divisive discourses that take place in our political and public rhetoric, and, like Coyolxauhqui, we feel that their bodies—as well as ours—will shed light in the darkness to guide us as we transform fragmentation into wholeness. Our beliefs on the matter stem from how Anzaldúa sees herself as embodying Coyloxauhqui:

Coyolxauhqu also represents the ‘me’ tossed into the void by traumatic events (an experience of the unconscious). I disintegrate into hundreds of pieces, hundreds of separate awarenesses. A plurality of souls splits my awareness so that I see things from a hundred different viewpoints, each with its own intelligence that can ‘do’ a hundred different things (think, feel, sense, observe) in a continuously changing consciousness moment to moment. (2015, 50)

It is through experiencing that fragmentation, however, that people of color can find a sense of wholeness once again: “I cohere as the one reconstituted and restructured by my own unconscious urge toward wholeness,” Anzaldúa (2015) claims (50). Thus, Coyolxauhqui (a.k.a. the broken bodies that come to represent people of color) signifies a “complex holism,” which simultaneously serves as the “acknowledgement of painful fragmentation” and the “promise of transformative healing” (Keating 2015, xxi). According to Analouise Keating (2015), this holistic view is how Anzaldúa envisioned Coyolxauhqui and how we, as educators of color, recognize the transformative value her theories provide. 

Anzaldúa offers ways to help people of color (as bodies broken by racialization) to learn, discover, understand, or solve problems. We would argue that her works lead us toward healing and cultivating hope. To capture this position, we turn to South Texas community activists, artists, and writers who “connect their art [and writing] to everyday life with political, sacred, and aesthetic values,” as Anzaldúa (2015) defines (53).  By highlighting these individuals, we showcase the many ways people of color use forms of activism in art or writing to respond to the political and social trauma that surrounds them. Such creative acts in turn simultaneously aids them in healing the wounds caused by systematic oppression and trauma, for activism is “engaging in healing work” by “creating spaces and times for healing to happen,” as Anzaldúa (2015) claims (90). To reflect the times and situations we currently find ourselves, we underscore this conversation with examples from the current political landscape we find ourselves or, better yet, what living under a Trump presidency meant for people of color.

Confront Shadow Beasts

To begin the process of healing, we must look inward, find, and confront what Anzaldúa (1987) calls a Shadow Beast—the part of us that “refuses to take orders from outside authorities” (38). But this process begins only by first understanding your own ignorances or what Anzaldúa (2002) refers to as desconocimientos. Only then, can we develop a deeper sense of awareness of ourselves, our communities, and those oppressive powers that surround or engulf us. Powers that govern our thoughts. To help us with this task, we turn to Celeste De Luna, Chicana South Texas printmaker, who through her art helps us confront the Shadow Beasts of living in proximity to the South Texas borderland and whose work does not aim to hide or cover up the unacceptable, damaged, or faulty aspects of a self that our U.S. culture rejects. 

Border art, according to Anzaldúa (2015), “remembers its roots,” and for border artist, activist, and printmaker Celeste De Luna, this could not be further from her situated reality (53).  Coming from the Rio Grande Valley, Texas, she inhabits that “transitional space of nepantla,” the border, “the locus of resistance, of rupture, and of putting together the fragments,” as Anzaldúa (2015) contends (47). De Luna uses art not only as her medium of expression but also as her tool to understand Shadow Beasts marginalized and/or oppressed peoples encounter and to deconstruct oppressive paradigms she faces as an artist that operate within her physical environment or that inhabit her psyche. She uses art to explore the complexity of relationships of borderland people. De Luna says the post-911 militarization of her homeland has been “the catalyst of ‘conocimiento’ for her,” and as a result, she uses her imagination to create narratives, “borderland narratives [that] take on a personal and feminist viewpoint that contradicts superficial ‘border violence’ stereotypes” (“Celeste De Luna Artist Statement” 2018). Thus, like Coyolxauhqui, De Luna represents the “creative process of tearing apart and pulling together (deconstruction/constructing)” the shadow beasts that suppress her within that environment (Anzaldúa 2015, 50). And it is through creative acts that she reaches conocimiento. 

Anzaldúa (2002) views conocimiento as both a physical and metaphysical state of consciously opening all your senses and your responses to the world around you.  Conocimiento is an intuitive understanding of experiences (e.g., mental, emotional, instinctive, imaginal, spiritual) guided by a deeper awareness to make connections to the social and political realities (542).  The path of conocimiento leads us away from the path of desconocimiento, or a mental state of ignorance, and towards a more authentic self where we confront old habits that might inhibit our ability to tap into a deeper understanding of the world.  Of course, the path of acknowledging ignorance may come at a cost in that it may lead to feelings of “helplessness,” adopting a “script of victimization” which may cause you to retreat, withdraw, and Anzaldúa (2002) says, “refusing [you] to name your demons” (550). Confronting deconocimiento under a Trumpland political landscape is no easy feat for any person of color and to do so can weigh on the body with guilt, paranoia, and fear. These are the realities of such things under the current political climate. For instance, the Pew Research Center (López and Flores 2017) determined that more than a third of registered Blacks, Hispanics, Asians and other racial minority voters (34%) did not vote in the 2016 Presidential election because they disliked candidates or issues. The assumption was that the Latinx community would show up in masses on election day to oppose the candidate whose rhetoric seemed to target and racialized brown bodies; yet, in reality, this group only accounted for 11 percent of the total national vote. Of that percentage, 66 percent voted for Clinton and 28 percent voted for Trump (Krogstad and Lopez 2016). Ultimately, almost half of all eligible voters didn’t vote in the 2016 Presidential election (45-46%). Could it be that this community did not face their shadow beasts (the derogatory characterizations infiltrating political and public rhetoric)? Could it be that this community could not escape their desconocimientos (the self-inflicted loathing in the inability to name the demon that is Trump)?  

Regardless of the reasons for not voting at all, or the reasons 28 percent of Latinx voted for Trump, living under a Trump presidency quite literally impacted brown bodies and intensified the racialization and criminalization of communities of color. Several of Trump’s Executive Orders heightened the focus on brown bodies and undocumented immigrants. The deconocimientos (fears) people of color faced, Latinx communities specifically, took a toll in the various policies enacted by the Trump administration. Mobilizing funds to begin work on a border wall. Insisting strict immigration enforcement that calls for an end to the US catch-and-release policy, in which undocumented immigrants avoid incarceration. Publicizing crimes committed by undocumented individuals and stripping federal grant money from sanctuary cities that harbor undocumented immigrants. Trump’s call to rescind the DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) program affected nearly 800,000 young Latinx adults. This action alone sparked national protests and caused emotional distress across Latinx communities nationwide.  

Let us be clear: there is no post-racial America, even after the election of President Biden in 2020. Nazis march in on our streets with bats, riot gear, and tiki torches. They still want to lynch us. Such thoughts continue to invoke in us an emotional pain and represent the fearful reality that comes after paranoia subdues. As traumatizing as these events were and continue to be, nothing can compare to the verbal (and in some cases physical) assaults that came so easily to many Latinx communities due to the rise of hate crimes that surfaced immediately after Trump’s election. The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) explains how immediately after the election an increase of hate crimes and reports of harassment took place, especially in K-12 schools (“The Trump Effect” 2016). It was at this time they decided to document every incident of harassment and intimidation as a result of the post-election. They found that after the first 10 days of Trump being declared presidential-elect, there were at least 867 hate incidents and found the largest portion of hate crimes related to the election at university campuses or K-12 schools (323 incidents). After the first 34 days following the election, they calculated 37% of reports of hate crimes directly referenced President-elect Trump or his campaign slogans. With more that 2,500 educators reporting instances of bigotry and harassment directly related to the election and targeted at minority students (e.g. Immigrants, Muslims, African Americans, LGBT, Latinx), what else are we to make of the incendiary rhetorical choices that the former President Trump made and continues to make after leaving office? Acknowledge that the damage has been done. This means that we must face our brokenness, leave our bodies, and study the trauma inscribed into our bodies. So, confront your shadow beasts, and name your demons. 

Pick up the Sticks and Stones

We see over and over again how people of color, like Coyolxauhqui, are broken down into pieces, but that alone does not suggest that they are less than or incomplete. As people of color, we must ask of one another to pick up the sticks and stones that may have broken you down into pieces and to craft for yourself something new. Anel Flores (2021), lesbian Chicana artist and writer, extracts painful stories of queer, gender non-conforming, people of color to reconstruct lasting testimonios of a culture and community forgotten. She accesses “blood memory, living memory” as a way to “create narrative imagery to claim as identity” (Anel’s Writing Statement).

Shortly after the election of Trump, Flores (2017) professed, “it is okay for you to love your life, your body, your life, your brown skin, your folds, and your luscious desires they call sins.” In response to the Orlando, Florida shootings at a gay bar in 2016, she declared, “I am a Texana. I am a Chicana. I am a lesbiana mother. I am not going to be scared,” (qtd in Boyd-Batstone, 2016).  Her work underscores the plethora of recent racist accounts that have transpired, especially under the Trump presidency. Such racist accounts were documented across social media platforms and reported on national media outlets. For instance, in New Jersey, at Cliffside Park High School, dozens of students walked out of a classroom when a substitute teacher told Spanish speaking students that American soldiers were not fighting for their right to speak Spanish; they are “fighting for your right to speak American!” (Strauss 2017).  In a Reno airport, Hector Torres faced obscenities and racist slurs when another passenger verbally attacked him for speaking Spanish privately on the phone to his mother (Timko 2017).  A month after the President-elect was voted into office, at a J.C. Penney’s a woman was caught shouting racist remarks to customers in line. She called on them to go back to wherever they belong… that they’re probably on welfare… and to speak English (Bever 2016).  These were just a handful of examples captured on video. Each illustrates how brown bodies are racialized, harassed, and targeted. Anzaldúa (2015) explains that it is because of these experiences that racialized people must learn how to manage the trauma of racism which affects their very sense of identity and fragments their psyche (87). This sense of brokenness leads them into states of nepantla, a state Anzaldúa (2002) describes as being “torn between ways” (547).

Increasingly, medical research links the effects of racism and discrimination on the body. The effects include an impact on high blood pressure or stress (Brondolo, E., et. al 2008;Adam, E., et.al. 2015; Bichell 2017), which we find brown and black bodies may experience at a much more rapid rate due to trauma than White Americans.  Dr. Roberto Montenegro, who studies what repeated experiences of discrimination actually do to the body and whether if such traumatic experiences are responsible for health disparities in people of color, explains that experiences of racism might appear benign but actually “act like sort of low-grade microtraumas,” hurting “feelings” as well as “biology” (Bichell 2017). Similarly, Dr. Amani Nuru-Jeter, a social epidemiologist at Berkeley, shows how threats of discrimination lead to a “[p]rolonged elevation [and] circulation of the stress hormones in our bodies [which] can be very toxic and compromise our body’s ability to regulate key biological systems like our cardiovascular system, our inflammatory system, our neuroendocrine system” (Bichell 2017). What’s more interesting is that the research proves one doesn’t have to personally experience racism or discrimination for the body to be affected. They must only witness it. 

With the advent of social media and 24-hour new coverage, news and videos infiltrate our daily living to display acts of discrimination and racism circulated rapidly. Such content was even more prevalent under the Trump presidency. As a result, younger generations of brown and black bodies are subject to exposure of unhealthy images and videos which could result in long-term trauma on the body and mind.  Even more, trauma leaves an imprint on those who surround the individual. This leaves it difficult for them to connect with people. To Anzaldúa, the experience of trauma can keep one in a Coatlicue state, which is defined as a state of depression and despair.  Stick and stones may break bones, but what this proves is that words and images hurt more. To move through this traumatic state and reclaim body consciousness, Anzaldúa (2002) explains we need to leave our body in order to reinforce a sense of separation between our mind and body or spirit and physical matter. To do so requires a state of awareness that is fluid and in transition and where you “define yourself in terms of who you are becoming, not who you have been” (556). Under this state, re-organize your brokenness by “re-member[ing] your experiences in a new arrangement” (556). This process allows you to adjust, respond to challenges, and reshape your present by reinterpreting your past (Anzaldua 2002). 

Just like Flores, who draws on brokenness and traumas of the body as a method to cultivate her lived experiences for healing, we suggest that people of color acknowledge their pain and the current state of public rhetorics as oppressive. It’s important to see our brokenness and trauma first in order to begin the process of redefining that trauma in a way that makes us whole.  This stage plays a critical part in healing. Not acknowledging our pain or trauma only increases or prolongs the symptoms of PTSD in that we do not mourn our loss which contributes greatly with our ability to survive (Torres 2003). As Anzaldúa (2002) points out, “that something in you, or of you, must die before something else can be born” (558).  You realize that the “life you thought inevitable, unalterable, and fixed in some foundational reality is smoke, a mental construction, fabrication. So, you reason, if it’s all made up, you can compose it anew and differently” (Anzaldúa 2002, 558).  This perspective can best be captured by the intensity of activism that surfaced immediately as a result of Trump’s victory over Hillary Rodham Clinton for the Office of the Presidency.  It is particularly encouraging to see artists, like Vincent Valdez, Celeste De Luna, and Anel Flores, engage their first amendment rights and to actively display their survival abilities through public expressions of art. Also, from student walkouts to protesting the rescinding of DACA to public displays of civil disobedience from young Tejanas wearing quinceanera gowns and standing on the grounds of the Texas Capitol to debate the fight over Sanctuary cities, it is clear that a younger generation has acknowledged their sense of brokenness or the brokenness they see at large. This young generation engages forms of creativity—radical imaginations at that—as a means to assert their identity and to define themselves regardless of any undue consequences.

Dream of Radical Imaginations

Imagination can be used “to change or reinvent your reality,” as Anzaldúa asserts (qtd in Keating 2015, xxxiii). She turned to Aztec mythology as an avenue to develop what Keating (2015) describes as an “aesthetics of transformation, grounded in her metaphysics of interconnectedness” (xi). Imagination and interconnectedness are concepts that ground the collective work of Las Imaginistas, a socially engaged art collective based in the Rio Grande Valley led by Celeste De Luna, Nansi Guevara, and Christina Patino Sukhgian Houle. 

Working together with their community, they build creative projects to advance social justice and equity, tackling a wide range of community development issues, such as immigration, housing, women’s rights, and education. As an art collective, Las Imaginistas prioritizes “cultural wealth” in the community and values skill sharing. They value “placekeeping rather than placemaking,” and, lastly, they advocate for “radical imagination” (De Luna, Guevara, and Houle 2018). Their most recent program, Taller de Permiso (Permission Workshop), was awarded the Artplace America Creative Placemaking grant in 2017. This program aims “to give permission to art, and bodies, and border crossers” as well as to “forge pathways of collaboration” between vendors, artists, and decision makers for the collective co-construction of the city of Brownsville (De Luna, Guevara, and Houle 2018). According to the collective, Taller de Permiso is a “community and rasquache art-making and placemaking space where residents will grant themselves permission to express, imagine, and co-create while also actively working to navigate city permitting processes for small business owners” (De Luna, Guevara, and Houle 2018). Thus, Las Imaginistas dares us all to dream of radical imaginations, especially in oppressive or chaotic times which, as Anzaldúa (2015) reminds us “will lead to a reorganization, to a new order and a new kind of being in the world” (92). Currently, these conditions could not be further from the truth for Latinx communities, especially for Dreamers and DACA recipients at the time of Trump’s presidency. 

The Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors Act, also known as the DREAM Act, was first introduced in Congress in 2001.  This legislation proposal was introduced to provide a pathway to legal status for undocumented youth (recognized as Dreamers) who were brought to the U.S. as children. Although there was bipartisan support in Congress, this legislation and its multiple versions never became law; so, as an alternative path, in 2012 the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) was introduced by former Secretary of Homeland Security, Janet Napolitano. DACA was an attempt to provide temporary relief from deportation for young undocumented immigrants, helping almost 800,000 eligible young adults to contribute to their community by working lawfully or attending school without the threat of deportation. Yet, unlike what the DREAM act had proposed, DACA recipients must renew their application every two years (“The Dream Act…” 2017).  

Based on failures to institute the DREAM Act and Trump’s decision to rescind the DACA program, Dreamers found their path to citizenship in jeopardy as they testified: see “Dreamers in Jeopardy: Immigrant students share what college means to them, and their fears as they wait for Donald J. Trump and his administration to take office” (Schmalz 2016).  Thousands of children, teens, and young adults continued to live in the shadows when DACA ended. DACA provided a sense of hope to these Dreamers. The program helped them to reimagine their identity from outcasts to productive members in their American community without the fear of arrest, deportation, and exclusion from the only country or home they know. These undocumented immigrants knowingly placed their bodies at risk when they first applied for DACA, but they did so to redefine and negotiate their identity as both immigrants and U.S. citizens in an effort to feel whole. For bodies broken by a legislative system in gridlock when it comes to immigration, DACA offered an opportunity to piece together the broken parts. Unfortunately, these broken pieces were placed further apart from one another when the Trump administration formally ended DACA in September 2017 (Kopan 2017). The program ceased processing new applications and the Obama’s administration DACA program was rescinded. 

In the spirit of Las Imaginistas, we call on broken bodies to dream of radical imaginations, to create acts of placekeeping, and to make calls for a social justice and equity that can strengthen our collective voice and acts of activism. A voice that demands justice and engages the masses to support their plight. As an example, non-profit organizations, like Immigration Youth Justice League, Mariposas Sin Fronteras, and Jolt, aim to aggressively engage Texas politics on their behalf. These organizations mobilize young Latinos/as to register to vote and to play active roles in election cycles. Indirectly, these organizations adhere to Anzaldúa’s Coyolxauhqui imperative because they make visible the signs of re-imaging one’s identity in an attempt to create what Anzaldúa calls “spiritual activism” (2002, 572), which Keating identifies as “radically inclusionary politics,” within their community (2008, 53). Despite challenges due to the pandemic of Covid-19, the 2020 election had the largest increase in voter turnout in Texas (Dorman 2020) and nationwide between presidential elections (Fabina 2021).

Conclusion

Anzaldúa (2002) calls on us to put Coyolxauhqui back together so that our “ailing body is no longer a hindrance but an asset” (562). She (2015) asserts that the process, to make and unmake, is imperative in that there is “never any resolution, just the process of healing” (20). And, as part of the process, we must “do work that matters,” not only for civility sake but also for personal growth and healing (2015, 22). We adopt Anzaldúa’s Coyolxauhqui imperative—to continuously make and remake ourselves—as a symbolic process for individuals to construct, reconstruct, and more importantly, reimagine their identities as a method for healing and as a path for cultivating hope. This methodology will, hopefully, aid people of color with the greater public good in that it may help to heal trauma inscribed onto what we recognize as bodies broken by systemic oppression, racism, and violence. For Anzaldúa, Coyolxauhqui represents “both the process of emotional psychical dismemberment, splitting body/mind/spirit/soul, and the creative work of putting all the pieces together in a new form, a partially unconscious work…a labor of re-visioning and re-membering” (Keating, 2015, xxi). Her imperative is that we call back “those pieces of the self/soul that have been dispersed or lost” and that we engage in “the act of mourning the losses that haunt us” (Anzaldúa 2015, 2). Only then perhaps can people of color find the means “to heal and achieve integration” (Anzaldúa 2015, 19). 

We introduced Vincent Valdez, who captured the current state of our culture in his artwork. The composition titled “The City I & II” underscores white supremacy. In addition to this work, his series titled “The Strangest Fruit” highlights the historical erasure of Mexican American lynching in the United States as well as the current violence against Mexican Americans that go unnoticed in our culture. He borrowed the title from the poem “Strange Fruit” written by Abel Meripool that was then sung and recorded by Billie Holiday in the 1930’s. Valdez says that he:

adapted the lyrics and slightly altered the text to describe a Texas landscape, which sprouts ‘brown bodies’ instead of ‘black bodies.’ The title, The Strangest Fruit, suggests that this sinister portion of American history goes much further than we have been told. The subject of Latino lynchings is almost entirely unknown, unheard of, and unspoken in the United States. (2013)

Therefore, like Coyolxauhqui, Valdez sheds light on what has been left in the dark. He brings us into awareness about our broken civic culture and our brown broken bodies. Artists, like Valdez and others in our community, engage in this kind of work, which we connect with Anzaldúa’s call for spiritual activism to shift and transform bodies, especially those bodies that were broken due to the political and racial dividedness in the United States.

We introduced Celeste De Luna, who spoke to us about confronting our Shadow Beasts and about the significance in trying to understand our fears that place us on paths of deconocimientos. We found this especially crucial under a Trump presidency by speaking to all that scares us as people of color. By highlighting Coyolxauhqui as Anzaldúa envisions, we hope people of color who feel a sense of brokenness will understand that through that brokenness they also symbolize a complex holism—wholeness in our complexity. To underscore this notion, we introduced Anel Flores, a community artist, activist, writer. Her work extracts often painful stories of queer, gender non-conforming, people of color to reconstruct lasting testimonios of a culture and community forgotten, and through those actions, there is a complex holism in that she provides “both the acknowledgment of painful fragmentation and the promise of transformative healing,” like Coyolxauhqui (Keating, 2015, xxi).

Finally, in our call to do work that matters, we introduced other community members, like Nansi Guevara, a member of Las Imaginistas, who also engages in work that matters. Las Imaginistas, as an art collective, captures the socially engaged work by artists that celebrate “the community cultural wealth” from their own communities (De Luna, Guevara, and Houle 2018). Their call to “rethinking and decolonizing public space and civic art on the border” in Brownsville, Texas aligns with Anzaldúa’s call for spiritual activism (De Luna, Guevara, and Houle 2018). Their work, much like our own, is done not only for civility but for personal growth and healing. 

Paths that lead toward healing may seem, at times, narrow and never-ending, but after enduring four years of Trump’s reckless, authoritative presidency, widening and shortening these paths is vital, especially for Latinx bodies and communities broken by such destructive rhetorics. We look forward to Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s leadership as the 47th President of the United States, who promised to heal the state of us, the state of our country, and the state of our civic culture. Following his inauguration, he issued a slew of Executive Orders aimed to reverse many of Trump’s actions as president. The most prominent among these executive actions was the preservation and fortification of the DACA program. This action inspires us to cultivate hope, knowing that the healing process takes time. Our bodies may be broken, yes, but what are we to do if not continue to endure and work to cultivate a pedagogy of hopefulness?

As educators of color, we commit ourselves to enacting teaching practices of interconnectedness (Anzaldúa 2002; Keating 2010), tenderness (Thompson 2017) and visibility and the inclusivity (Alcoff 2005) to invite all socio-cultural identifications, such as color, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, or class. We engage in such practices to expose and instill in others relational understandings and the commonalities we all share with one another. These interconnections with all that lives allow us to act out our vision of spiritual activism. Such activism, as Anzaldúa (2002) asserts, instills the “ability to recognize and endow meaning to daily experience” which then “furthers the ability to shift and transform” (568). 

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