COMMUNITY, SUSTAINABILITY, AND XIUHTEZCATL

For me, the community continues to be my family and school community in Los Angeles. These are the people who have helped shape me into the person I am today and continue to sustain and support me throughout my life even after graduating Anahuacalmecac. The school was founded by my parents, Minnie Ferguson and Marcos Aguilar, along with other community leaders to create a space for our youth. In the past, my school has been targeted and slandered because of who we are and what we learn. This is nothing new for communities like mine. Starting with the burning and destruction of our ancestral books and educational spaces by the Spaniards to being paddled or ridiculed by teachers for speaking any language that is not English. It has been a constant battle within these colonial education systems for us to have spaces free of discrimination and abuse due to our languages, cultures, identities, and skin color. At Anahuacalmecac academics came hand in hand with culture and a safe space to learn and grow. I graduated top of my class and was admitted to UCLA receiving a degree in Chicana and Chicano Studies and recently applied to veterinary school. I was able to explore my love for the sciences and animals at Anahuacalmecac in a way that allowed me to create a unique perspective and approach infused by ancestral sciences and cosmovision that I have carried with me throughout my undergraduate career and as a graduate student. In most contexts, Indigenous peoples are portrayed as simply spiritual, warrior-like, hunter-gatherers, artsy, and not much else. However, at Anahuacalmecac I was able to learn of my People as the scientists we are and have been since even before colonization. I loved engaging in both western and Indigenous ancestral sciences. Being connected to one's Indigenous culture does not mean you are unable to navigate colonization, but rather that you understand how to stay grounded and create impactful change through decolonization.

Throughout my life I never questioned my identity as an Indigenous person. However, for many other Indigenous people and persons of Latin American national origins and pueblos this is not usually the case. Genocide, enslavement, and other traumas have resulted in a loss of culture and identity for many. In the United States, hispanicity and latinidad have become imposed identities which have contributed to the erasure of Indigenous and Black cultures, identities, and voices. In recent years, more Black and Indigenous people who feel underrepresented within “latinidad” and Hispanic heritage month have been speaking out and sharing their voices. Alternative visions for our communities are continuing to form and be maintained as we continue to explore ways to define ourselves while remaining resilient and connected despite attempts of erasure. In mainstream Latin American media and society, Indigenous and Black identities tend to be sidelined and treated as something of the distant past and in the United States, tens of thousands of Indigenous Mexicans and Central Americans remain completely invisible for the most part. As Marcos Aguilar explains, “We are many peoples, many nations, Indigenous to this continent each with our own origins and migration stories. There is no single ethnicity for our multiple political identities. Culture is a way of life.”

This means acknowledging the hard truths and finding ways to learn and do better. The Levi’s® brand was forged during the American settlement of California. In the name of the rush for gold, a genocide of the Indigenous Peoples of California ensued. By publicly acknowledging the painful history tied to its global brand, Levi’s® sets a new standard as it works to do better by serving as a platform for us to share our voices. Through Xiuhtezcatl, Levi’s® included Anahuacalmecac to share our community’s cultures, voices, and stories. Anahuacalmecac students and leaders designed jackets donated by Levi’s®. Designing their Levi’s® jackets brought pride and joy to students as they imagined ways to tell new stories on cloth. Josue along with Levi’s® brought on my family to assist with the creative process in different capacities both my brother Tekpatl (Nawa scholar, visual storyteller, and traditional crafts maker) and myself as alumni and my parents as cultural leaders. Josue beautifully explains, “Community is a foundation for how we live on Earth and as Indigenous peoples from the Western Hemisphere we still understand that and we have not forgotten about the fact that we are not self made but that we are community made. Through that relationship and that weaving of community so much beauty and magic happens that allows us to remain for a long time and is what has sustained us since time immemorial in these lands.” Co-creating between the community, Levi’s®, Xiuhtezcatl, and Josue has served the important role, as Josue explains, of “planting seeds for the people” and it is especially important to plant these seeds for the “people we will never meet to be able to sustain not just ourselves on this Earth but all of our relations.” Filming the Levi’s® project at Otsuugna (the ancestral village name for our area of Los Angeles) included Gabrielino Shoshone Council chair Nick Rocha and his daughter Cheyenne Rocha. Throughout this experience I was reminded of the significance of being in community with the original peoples of this land. As Indigenous people who have migrated or whose families have migrated away from their ancestral lands, we hold a special responsibility to cultivate strong relationships with the Indigenous people and communities whose lands we are guests on. Anahuacalmecac was founded with blessings from Chief Ya’ana Vera Rocha, Nick’s mother. Finding common ground in the significance of a school like Anahuacalmecac, Cheyenne shared that in a way it brought her closer to the grandmother she never met in person. Native children were not always celebrated. A long history of western educational systems weaponized to “kill the Indian, save the man,” resulting in generations of youth forcefully cut from their communities and identities. In the wake of the reckoning with boarding school atrocities across Canada and the US, and many more yet to be uncovered in the rest of the Americas, recognizing the importance of spaces like Anahuacalmecac to Indigenous communities and youth becomes clearer. Spaces like Anahuacalmecac allow for native youth to just be the children they are and flourish in a space full of love, support, and happiness while also developing their minds as scholars and critical worldly thinkers.

Pain and trauma have been with us too long. At Anahuacalmecac we are able to strengthen our sense of community and engage in resilient and radical acts of joy and self-care. Youth are able to be youth and learn who they are. They gain tools of decolonization and ancestral knowledge that must not be lost but passed down to the next seven generations to come. Completing courses from elementary through high school, students engage in the study of Inidigenous languages such as Nahuatl, traditional sciences, sports, dances, and arts. They learn through Indigenous education while completing A-G University of California approved coursework, this includes the Nahuatl. The ancestral knowledge students are able to gain was not too long ago banned and made illegal to practice by colonial governments. Our dances and arts carry our stories, cosmovision, spirits, and happiness. Our sciences carry our understandings of our origins in this continent, of our relative natural beings, and of the cosmos. Youth at Anahuacalmecac learn through travel on land and on water and through direct engagement with important bodies such as the United Nations where they represent their community in leadership roles far beyond anything most students in a public school are privileged to. Youth create a space at Anahuacalmecac to engage in activism as they learn through traditional ways of living on Earth and among each other.

Levi’s® have long been a cultural staple among Mexicans and other peoples Indigenous to what is now known as Latin America. Beyond functionality, fashion has long been a contested space of self-expression. Fashion followed laborers in the late 1800s and early 1900s to the original Mexican youth pejoratively referred to as “greasers” in the 1950s and Chican@ activists in the 1970s. Reflecting our voice and story on a jacket as iconic as Levi’s® is a part of our celebration of ourselves. Xiuhtezcatl collaborated with Urban Native Era founder and designer, Joey Montoya to design a jacket for a limited 15 piece capsule collection with Levi’s®. The Monarchs on the jacket represent how Indigenous Peoples to the Americas have migrated throughout these lands for millennia, resiliently not halted by colonial borders. Maize and milpas extend and connect North and South America having sustained many peoples on these lands. We are maize. Just as corn, our people stand strong and tall ever so beautifully basking in the sun with our roots deep in the ground supported by beans (our community) and squash (our culture), gathering the three sisters. The jacket made from reused pieces is beautifully fitting with Indigenous cultures as we have ancestrally practiced using and reusing every part of something we can. We find multiple uses for everything from that Daisy Sour Cream container in the fridge now containing beans to the old tin cookie container with sewing materials inside to every piece of an animal being used after a hunt. As Tekpatl elaborates, “Sustainability is inherent to Indigenous land-based life, ways of food systems, arts, and culture. When our young people engage in the resurgence of self, they are also actively participating in ecosystem restoration and cultural preservation.” The search for community and sustainability center Indigenous families at Anahuacalmecac. “Rooting ourselves in our culture helps us love ourselves and appreciate and connect with issues that empower our communities to care for each other and the environment (Minnie Ferguson).”

The search for community and sustainability center Indigenous families at Anahuacalmecac. “Community is a foundation for how we live on Earth and as Indigenous peoples from the Western Hemisphere we still understand that and we have not forgotten about the fact that we are not self made but that we are community made. Through that relationship and that weaving of community so much beauty and magic happens that allows us to remain for a long time and is what has sustained us since time immemorial in these lands.” (Josue Rivas, Mexica and Otomi futurist, creative director, visual storyteller, and educator). Co-creating between the community, Levi’s®, Xiuhtezcatl, and Josue has served the the important role, as Josue explains, of “planting seeds for the people” and it is especially important to plant these seeds for the “people we will never meet to be able to sustain not just ourselves on this Earth but all of our relations.” Another co-creator and alumni of Anahuacalmecac Tekpatl Kuauhtzin (Nawa scholar, visual storyteller, and traditional crafts maker) explained the deep ancestral connection between Indigenous community and sustainability, “Sustainability is inherent to Indigenous land-based life, ways of food systems, arts, and culture. When our young people engage in the resurgence of self, they are also actively participating in ecosystem restoration and cultural preservation.”

Photos by Tekpatl Kuauhtzin and Josué Rivas/INDÍGENA.