Healing Justice, Belonging, and the Land Within Us
Mirando desde el corazón — Seeing from the Heart
Healing justice is how we return to ourselves and to each other. It is the practice of tending to the wounds of displacement and systemic harm through collective care rooted in culture and relationship. It lives in the milpa, in our bodies, in shared meals, and in the ways we hold one another.
Words fall away as she describes the injustice of her forced separation from her ancestral homeland. As a displaced immigrant woman, mother, daughter, and granddaughter, she longs to be in relationship with the land that made her who she is. In her mind, she returns to the milpa with her whole family, walking the rows and using her feet to hug the soil around tender stalks of corn, squash, and beans. She shares her father’s immense amor para la tierra, ho’o ñadaní, love for the earth. As they work together, the smell of epazote* simmering in beans carries from their open air home. She holds the healing warmth of the connection to this place in her body.
Last fall, in the same room, we gathered to map our belonging—to the places, plants, and healing traditions that make us who we are, quien somos. The practice of Cuerpo Territorio is rooted in Latin American social justice movements and the Indigenous worldview that land and body are inseparable. In the Amazon, communities resisting oil extraction marked sites of harm on their body maps and brought them into court to challenge corporate access to their territories. Participants create geographical maps where the body becomes the physical landscape of belonging—tracing the emotional geographies of struggle and possibility, while holding connection to land sin fronteras and the plant medicine that sustains healing.
Together we outlined the form of our bodies and marked them with words or images where memories, emotions, and sensations live. Through this facilitated process, we created a collective narrative of embodied experience and a map of the ecosystem we nurture together.
“Esta soy yo. This is me,” she says aloud, stepping back to view the map she has just drawn of her own body. “The land is one, and I live in direct relationship with her… here, and in the place where I was born. The places are connected in me.” Her landscape is the parched earth of her birthplace, where rocks hold memory and resilient nopales* flourish.
On her body map: Nopales root in her chest; mushrooms sprout in her throat after the first rain; and black beans dance in her eyes. She shares: “We sustain ourselves from the nopales’ fleshy pads that hold water in their wombs and thrive when rain and resources are scarce. When I was hungry, I would go out into the hills by myself and feast on nopales. It was my subsistence. My body is nopales.”
She remembers sneaking out to follow her abuelo at dawn to harvest aguamiel* from the giant heart of the maguey cactus. She would appear just when he was drawing out the sweet nectar and ask for a taste, and then another. “My abuelo named me after the maguey—with sharp spines and enormous sweetness. He taught me authenticity, respect, and most importantly, how to see from the heart, n’sa ñadaní desde el corazón.”
When we came together to define our Mission Vision and Values, we crossed out the Mission aligned word Vision and find ourselves Seeing From the Heart, Mirando desde el corazón:
We envision Latine and Indigenous immigrant communities living in full equity — with freedom, dignity, and power to access healthcare and choose our own paths to healing. We co-create a future in which systems of oppression no longer separate people from the land, culture, and care that affirm our belonging. We practice community care that cultivates intercultural alliances and deepens our connection to each other and to the earth.
*Words that meanings extend beyond direct English translation:
Aguamiel — sweet water harvested as a beverage from the heart of the maguey cactus that is often fermented into an alcoholic beverage known as pulque
Epazote — a fragrant herb used in cooking and medicine
Nopales — prickly pear cactus