Mystical Mermaid Lounge
Dive deep beneath old currents in the Mystical Mermaid Lounge, where we shed limiting beliefs like ocean waves wash away driftwood. Together, we reclaim our power, rewrite our stories, and swim into new waters of healing, truth, and spiritual freedom. Come nurture your soul and rise with the tide.
🌊✨🧜🏼♀️
Mystical Mermaid Lounge
The Power of Joy in a Divided World
The lands we walk upon hold soul-level memories. The cities we inhabit were built by many hands—some working freely, many others in chains. Our very identities are shaped by histories both acknowledged and erased. In this powerful conversation with ethnic studies scholar Maria, we explore how settler colonialism created enduring structures of inequality that continue to impact our spiritual and social reality.
Details
Maria helps us understand how colonial powers systematically removed indigenous peoples from their lands while forcing enslaved Africans to work that same land—creating hierarchies that persist today. This isn't distant history. These patterns of displacement, exploitation, and categorization continue to shape our modern experiences, from census boxes that can't contain our complex identities to immigration policies that separate families and communities.
What emerges most powerfully is how we might begin healing these deep wounds. Maria shares her own journey of reconnecting with ancestry despite missing pieces, showing how we can reclaim identity through creative means—studying local histories, preserving family stories, and finding contextual understanding when direct knowledge is unavailable. She challenges the terminology used to categorize people, explaining why labels like "Hispanic" can perpetuate colonial erasure while terms like "Latino" or "Chicano" emerged from communities claiming their own narratives.
The conversation takes a transformative turn when Maria introduces the concept of joy as resistance. "If you give up your joy, you're giving up your humanity," she explains, revealing how maintaining moments of connection and happiness becomes a radical act in the face of dehumanization. This spiritual survival strategy has helped communities endure unimaginable hardship while preserving their essential humanity.
As we navigate increasingly divisive times, Maria offers a vision of healing that begins in our immediate environments—classrooms, households, and community spaces where we can practice solidarity across differences. These "microcosms of understanding" create ripple effects that gradually shift larger patterns of division. The episode concludes with a powerful invocation from organizer Pedro Rios: "What is solidarity if not love?"
Join us for this soul-stirring conversation that honors historical truth while revealing pathways toward collective healing. Subscribe now and share this episode with anyone seeking to understand how our past shapes our present—and how we might create a more just and loving future.
References
Gloria Anzaldua, author, historian, feminist, gay activist: Gloria E. Anzaldúa
Pedro Rios, AFSC, San Diego Director:
Shameless Promotions
Chloe Brown is the graphic artist behind all of the Mermaids’ delightfully whimsical branded reels, stories and picture posts on social. Contact her at MysticalMermaidLounge@yahoo.com for artistic consultation and design work.
Sponsorships
We do not advertise nor accept sponsorships so that your listening experience remains free of distractions. If you are as passionate as we are about supporting spiritual seekers, consider buying us a coffee at: https://buymeacoffee.com/mysticalmermaidlounge.
Please feel free to email us with positive and constructive ideas, questions or comments at MysticalMermaidLounge@Yahoo.com.
Thank you for listening! Please follow and rate/review if you love us. Blessed be.
Welcome to the Mystical Mermaid Lounge podcast, a space where all spiritual seekers are honored and celebrated. This podcast was born from the journeys of your hosts, who have each faced her own dark night of the sun, but they've emerged with an unshakable belief in divine connection, cosmic inspiration and her true life's calling. Join us on a journey of personal growth, transformation and magical self-discovery. Your first co-host is Chloe Brown, a gifted intuitive empath and shadow work life coach. Your second co-host is Keoni Starr, an intuitive energy worker and acclaimed past life regressionist. The Mystical Mermaid Lounge podcast starts now.
Speaker 2:Hello everybody. This is Chloe, and today I have Keone and Maria with us again.
Speaker 3:Yay, hello Hi, I'm excited to be back.
Speaker 2:Yay, we're so excited to have you here again. As many of you may remember, we definitely have had Maria here before. I believe it was episode eight perhaps. Maria is an author, historian, teacher and an animal lover who grew up in the border region. She is an ethnics study scholar who loves teaching about accepting and reframing the past to heal and move forward, so we're going to jump right on in. So in our last episode, connecting with Spirit Through Indigenous Practices and Animals, we all three discussed the energies that we felt in land and bodies of water. In many cases, we felt sadness and desperation of those who cleared the land under those others. And, as an ethnics study scholar, could you please talk about the people who have been subjugated to abuse while building on behalf of the colonialists?
Speaker 3:Yes, that is like what we talk about my whole semester, the way I teach it in my intro class, where people are introduced to the concept of settler colonialism, which means the settler or the colonial power comes into a land that is not theirs and makes it their own, meaning they don't come in and assimilate or blend with the cultures that are already there, but they come in and have to completely wipe the cultures and the people that are already there to make way for their own institutions and their own way of life to be established. And so, in the context of the United States this isn't exclusive to the United States, right, it happens all over the world. Australia is another good example. But in the context of the united states, it was the indigenous people that not just the british but also the spanish and the dutch and the french, upon arrival, had to remove by force, because people don't want to leave their homes. So indigenous people were killed, there was genocide, indigenous people were forcibly removed, put in places like boarding schools or the missions. So that's the part of removing people from the land to make way for colonialism. But you also need people to work the land, and so this is where Africans, who were forcibly taken from their homes in Africa to come to the Americas and work.
Speaker 3:By force, enslaved people were subjugated to forced labor, torture, abuse, slavery is horrific in so many ways. So that's like what creates the Black-white binary. And then the erasure of Indigenous people. And then you have the middle, which is Asian, asian Americans, latina community or Hispanic community. I'm not a huge fan of the term Hispanic and I can talk about why later, but I'll say Latinos, and this is where it kind of gets murky, right. Depending on how much whiteness you can claim, you might be subjugated as exploitable labor or someone who can be detained and incarcerated, or detained and deported or taken out of the country to be removed. There's so many different examples and I can talk about a lot of different examples. That kind of sets up a very broad but big picture of the structures we have today.
Speaker 2:How do you think the people who were being wiped out their spiritual practices to find that better mental state? Because that could feel pretty doomsday, right by definition. I think it would be.
Speaker 3:I don't know if I have the answer to that, because I don't come from an indigenous background that experienced that in that way, but I will say that I think what I've learned just from studying subjugation and violence over and over again is that hundreds of years ago, regardless of our background whether it's we're indigenous, we're Mexican, we're Black or we're white we all feel that in different ways. Whether it's we feel the violence or the displacement because we can't trace our ancestors, or we don't know exactly where we come from, or maybe we feel the guilt of what our ancestors did, we all feel it in different ways. But I think I've learned that communities who were subject to a lot of this and are still subject to a lot of this right. I want to emphasize that because sometimes we talk about it as it's only happened in the past, but it's very much still present.
Speaker 3:I think culture is really important to maintain. Culture becomes a way of resistance, whether it's people holding on to their language somehow, maybe engaging in music and like writing their own songs and singing about their struggles, like my grandfather recorded his own corridos, which are Mexican storytelling songs that now I'm revisiting as a historian because they actually contain our family's history, right so, and he was a farm worker in the 50s, so to me he was writing this probably when he was far away from his family, probably when he was under not great conditions of labor and trying to just continue so. So I think culture becomes an important side of resistance. Joy, like cultivating joy, no matter what. Dehumanization is super important. For people to be able to come in and wipe a population or enslave a population or exploit a population, they have to be dehumanized, and so if you give up your joy, you're giving up your humanity. That's why I think joy is a form of resistance in the whole spectrum of all of that.
Speaker 1:You said something really important, and we had talked about incorporating this in our discussion about people losing ties to their ancestry. We were brought here forcibly, whether we were one of the people displaced or just not even knowing our roots for any number of reasons, maybe even people who didn't grow up with their own biological family, and so we see people constantly looking to have an identity or a tie back to something. I think that's a perfect example someone who didn't grow up with their own biological family looking for that connection, and I'd love to understand whether, anthropologically, psychologically, what is it as people that we need to have that connection? Why is that identity so important to us? I'd love to hear your thoughts.
Speaker 3:That's a good question. Again, I'm not sure I have a solid answer, although I can speak from experience and that I did not grow up with my dad at all, like I didn't grow up with my dad's side. My mom never married him. It's a really not unique story, because I'm sure other people have it. I didn't know anything but I have his last name and I always felt like mom, why did you do that If you knew I wasn't even going to have a connection with him? I want your last name, the whole thing.
Speaker 3:But as I got older I realized that not knowing also gave me room to define on my own terms how I interpret that is, if there's certain connotations attached to the last name, whether we're a people who are lady or we're a people who are overachievers, it didn't matter because I didn't know I could craft my own path. All to say that, that longing to know my past didn't necessarily go away. I think I just real learned how to find more pieces of my identity another way. So I think, for example, like really rooting in the place you live in and trying to figure out the past of that place, the history of that place, and see if you connect with any of that and I also tried to lean into recovering based on what I did know.
Speaker 3:So I grew up with my mom, I grew up with my grandparents, but I didn't know anything else. I can't figure out what kind of indigenous people my family came from. I can't find their birth records because they were so poor that they're not in the system in Mexico. So I started just piecing together based on the context I could find. So, for example, my grandpa was a bracero or a farm worker in the 50s. He's not in the archive, but other braceros from similar backgrounds are, and so reading their stories helped me understand maybe what happened to him. And again, the maybe is kind of big. I'm not sure, but it at least starts to give me a picture of maybe where I come from. But it's hard. I think just part of it is also accepting. I won't necessarily know, I won't necessarily be able to trace my family like generations and generations, the way some families are able to do that. But that's okay. I think maybe that's why I've leaned into collecting the stories of people who are alive right now, to preserve that.
Speaker 2:I can relate to that so much, actually, as somebody who also had the last name of my sperm dad. So so I can relate to that because, as you all have heard my journey, I grew up being told that we were Native American and we're this specific tribe and this specific type of Native American from this specific area. And as I was growing up I realized there's so many holes and a lot of the pictures of who we were she was showing me wasn't even the tribe that I was being told we were. So I'm not going to lie, I've been a little too chicken to send my little DNA saliva thing in it's in my car, but I haven't sent it in. But I did spend months and months and months and digging in and diving and, for whatever reason, my family, for a lot of reasons, is also not documented.
Speaker 2:But what I did learn I felt so deeply in my core that I knew it were things that I was actively in this life trying to not necessarily rectify or correct those things, but trying to clear those energies. So I'm grateful that you spoke to that because I often am wondering, from a standpoint like yours, why that feels so incredibly valuable and so important. I wonder if some of it has to do with every time we fill out a form they want to know. Going back to what you said, are you Hispanic, are you white? And for me that makes me pretty angry. So, if you're okay, I'd like to kind of ask a little bit about how you feel. You touched on that a little bit.
Speaker 3:Yeah, about the boxes. Like when you apply to stuff, stuff my students this is one of the first things my students are like why does this happen? Why do they put us in a box? Yeah, there's a lot of terms, especially if you're not clear-cut. If you don't clear-cut, fit the binary.
Speaker 3:So I think what's important to understand historically is that the US census, which is what those boxes are based on, the category of race in the census was created based on, at first, who was freed and who was enslaved and then, once the concept of race is developed, because it is a social construct, meaning that the ideas of race and racial categories are created by society. And I can go more into that in a second, if I need to all to say that the census begins with free and who's enslaved and then it turns into white and black, and white is the people who are free and then black are the enslaved, and then it starts to expand as the population starts to shift. But all those categories are kind of created by society, like I said. So, for example, mexican never appears as a racial category on the census except in the 1930s. So in the 1930s Mexican was a race and then after that it's no longer a race, right? So you can see how that's shifting, based on ideas people have and how the government wants to quantify people, because ultimately that's what it's for.
Speaker 3:So I think that I maybe when I was younger, I definitely felt like oh, I have to pick. Like again, I said I'm not a huge fan of the term Hispanic, but usually that's the box I have to check because that's the one that says Latino, hispanic and or Chicano, mexican, whatever. But that's not a race anymore, right? So am I white? Am I Black? Am I Indigenous?
Speaker 3:I'm Mexican and I and in not to go too deep into another tangent, but in the history of Mexico, the blending of indigenous and Spanish, and then the identity of Mexican, has been used to or erase the indigeneity. So I don't necessarily want to claim the indigeneity, because I think that makes me complicit in that erasure. But I also know I'm not white, even though I am a lighter skinned Mexican. Depending on my context, I don't think people read me as white, especially once I start opening my mouth and my Spanglish comes out. I usually select other and I think that's my way of telling the government or whoever's quantifying me you can't put me in the box as a border person. A lot of my students talk about feeling they're not Mexican enough to be Mexican. They're not American enough to be American. Where do we fit? I've always felt very grounded in my identity in the border region and then saying I'm from the border and I am all the pieces that make me and that's just what it is.
Speaker 1:You'll have to learn how to learn that, not me having to adjust to you yeah, and you speak to the reason that Hispanic is a term that you reject, because within the last 10 years, I had noticed that Chicano was used, hispanic was used, latino was used. I remember looking up what and when we're supposed to use these specific terms. I don't remember the geographical breakdown, but I remember it was geographical. The one thing I do recall is that Hispanic was being used as an overall term to include the various Spanish-based cultures that we were talking about, and as I'm saying that, I realized that we're not recognizing indigeneity, are we? Even in that comment? So very interesting Spiritually, the words that we use have a frequency and I want to hear what's the right frequency.
Speaker 3:I love that. We should start with saying there's people from Latino backgrounds who call themselves Hispanic, so there's nothing wrong with that if that's what people choose. I think the answer to what you're saying what's the right frequency? For me is always whatever people want to claim for themselves, we have to give people agency, and so I have no issue with however people want to call themselves, as long as it's rooted in their agency. I have an issue when labels are placed onto people from outside, usually colonizing or overpowering forces. So that's my issue with Hispanic.
Speaker 3:Hispanic refers to anyone who comes from a Spanish speaking country. So exactly what you were saying, kioni Spain counts, right, spain counts parts of Latino America that speak Spanish count. A place like Brazil wouldn't count because they don't speak Spanish. Latino or Latina Latine refers to anyone from Latino America. So anywhere from Mexico down to wherever right, chile, they don't have to speak Spanish. So ideally, the term Latino would include indigenous people, although that's contested there's a lot of debate about among these terms. Ideally, it would include people from Brazil, but again, that's also contested and, to be honest, latino identity is probably. I mean, of course it's part of Latino America, but I would say it's a very US experience in that when people migrate to the United States from all these different places in Latino America and they end up finding each other, there's an ethnicity or connection that happens across groups. I have my students from Panama. Yes, I'm Latino, but it's not a big thing the way that it is here among Latinos in college, for example, where they feel like they have to come together.
Speaker 3:Chicano, because I know you talked about it, is rooted very specifically in the civil rights movement of Mexican and Mexican-Americans in the 1960s who began calling themselves Chicanos and is what I would say is like a political term. If you're calling yourself Chicano or Chicana, you probably are some kind of activist in that context, and by activist I mean that loosely. I've become a Chicana through my teaching, but teaching is my activism, right? So those were the terms. And I reject Hispanic because to me it points to the colonization of the Americas by Spain and their process of Hispanicizing the people, of putting them in the missions of erasing indigeneity, of the violence. So I just reject it because to me it speaks to that history. No-transcript.
Speaker 1:And I love it and I'm so happy to hear that someone else is annoyed by those census boxes. And I see Caucasian and I think. But that makes me feel like I'm not giving homage to a major portion, even though percentage wise I may not qualify to be enrolled on a tribal registry by bloodline. But it just made me feel culturally like I was turning my back on something that I was raised with, and so I'm always irritated at having to check the Caucasian box and I never thought to check other as a way to say a personal F you, you're not going to put me in a box, but I don't want to be considered an other, but I'd rather be an other than stuck in a category that I don't feel I belong.
Speaker 1:And the other thing I was going to say is the term joy. I love because there is a frequency to that. I have taken classes on terms and frequencies that come with terms, which is really cool, and if you listen to your body you already know it. We thought that love was the highest frequency, but then Chloe and I had been involved in a discussion with someone who believed authenticity had the highest frequency.
Speaker 1:I had my very minor life epiphany that the reason that authenticity might be the highest frequency is because that's self-love, that joy and its high frequency, or happiness, would be something we need to hold on to in moments of oppression, like people who were enslaved clearing the land. It is super important to recognize that as an act of defiance, even though defiance has a different frequency. So that's why I'm saying joy is such an important term and feeling to behold. But I also can feel that in the land where you can feel sadness, yet joy and then we had talked in the last episode also about feeling abundance as well so really, depending on how you tap into these different levels can tell you exactly what was going on at that time. I just love that. Holding on to joy is a way of happily defying oppression. How do we do that? Do we just keep remembering? That's all we have.
Speaker 3:Because there are times when joy is not something that immediately comes to mind. Yeah, and I think I don't want to romanticize, right, because I think sometimes, especially historians, or when we retell history or oh, people suffered, but they were happy about it, to quote Ron Weasley from Harry Potter but that's not what I'm saying. I'm not saying people were subjugated to these horrors and were living happily ever after. The suffering people go through and have gone through is probably worse than what you studied or learned from dominant culture, unless you studied specific classes about race or colonialism, the things you learned in high school history or from the tv movie, whatever, they're probably not as bad as they actually were, which is unfortunate, because I think part of the healing process is coming to terms with the truth. We just need to know the truth, know what happened and choose to build from that, not shame each other other. Yes, we have to process, but we have to get through the processing and then start to work together and figure it out.
Speaker 3:I guess, to speak from my own experience in the last 100 days, if you know what I'm talking about, I was completely distraught the first round of this back in 2016. I was younger and I think that was the moment that burst my bubble. And then, this time around, I wasn't surprised, but my students were in shambles, and I was too. But just seeing my students feel, in their own words, they said how are we supposed to enter a world that has voted for this and how the heck are we supposed to do anything that's going to make a difference? It just feels very dooming.
Speaker 3:But I think together in the class, it was moments where we're like, okay, this all freaking sucks. I'm teaching an immigration class, so I would walk in and all these things are happening. And then we would just be like what can we do? Maybe today we just play music and hang out with each other, right? And so I think sometimes the joy comes from survival, just being resigned a little bit. There's nothing I can do right now. This is really horrific, but I need to survive, and so to survive, I need to do something that's going to make me feel a glimmer of joy. And then I think that's how you build, and my students always tell us when we're in a moment of discussion where we're like, ah, they always remind each other, our ancestors made it far enough that we're here now, and they probably went through some awful moments. We have to keep going and I love that because to me that gives me power. That's not just in my own lifetime, but in many, many lifetimes ago.
Speaker 2:Wow, let me continue to wipe away my tears there. That was good but heavy, and I think something that our listeners can feel when you speak is the safe space that you provide. A lot of us can get really busy with our checklist of responsibilities throughout the day, and especially when you have so much on your plate, and to be able to separate that for a minute and say we're human and we just need to love and breathe together, the rest can wait. That, to me, speaks volumes. So thank you for always being that person, even with us.
Speaker 2:If I'm going to label myself, I would have to say I'm a Caucasian female, and so I also absolutely refuse to fill out those boxes, because the first time I saw them I was also much, much younger. I think it was like a Scantron in elementary school for a test or something, and at that time I still deeply believed I was part of the Indian culture, as Keone just mentioned. I felt like I was disrespecting my people if I just filled out with my number two, pencil the Caucasian spot and then, as I became older, two, pencil the Caucasian spot, and then, as I became older, it felt to me like if I fill in that white Caucasian box, which to this day, I still won't do. I will either not do it at all or prefer not to say I think is now what they label the other box, but I feel as though I am feeding into that colonization To me. It does remind me, going back to our last episode.
Speaker 2:Why do I want to try to say yes, I'm part of the white people who wiped out all the bison. To me, that's what that box represents. I'm very curious from your perspective, do you feel like those things are really even important anymore? Or what do we use that for? Is that still something we use in modern culture? I get where it came from, but is it really a valued piece?
Speaker 3:You mean like the senses and stuff? Yeah, I mean, why do they need?
Speaker 2:to know all that. I think it was the CDC that called me for a survey and how I felt about all of the medications in the world and the shots and stuff. They were very much more worried about my ethnicity, my income, my region, more so than my opinions, and so it made me start thinking. And now we're having this conversation. Is that really even relevant in today's age? Why do we need to be doing this?
Speaker 3:That's a good question. I think that the data is important important, but it's a double-edged sword in that it can be weaponized. The data is important because I think we still need to know, for example, how being working class maybe disproportionately affects the access you have to medical care or whatever right, or how many I don't know white women are getting PhDs versus white men. We need to know all these things. However, what's not helpful is that we've reduced how we think about people to boxes, and I think also what you said a little bit ago of not wanting to identify with whiteness because of what that means historically is also something that I think we need to start to work through, because I see that in my classes, right like, oh, it's an ethnic studies class and I'll have white men and white women who will be in the class, and then the first day of class, they'll come up to me after and they'll say something like I'm super excited, but I'm scared to talk because I'm white. Or I don't feel like this class is for me because it's about people of color. Or halfway through the semester, they come up to me and are like I feel guilty for everything that white people did.
Speaker 3:I always tell them in the beginning, when they give me the, they don't belong here, they don't want to talk. I tell them this is pointless if we don't talk across different identities. So you please talk, please come in and share your questions. If anything, this is where those conversations begin, in a safe space. I'm not going to let anyone yell at you, but also make sure you're respectful. We have to start talking across groups and the guilt I think people feel. I think that's what we need to move past, not to say that we need to disavow everything that happened, but to say the guilt also. Doesn't let us get together and talk to each other because we're so scared to talk to each other, but we need to start doing that to be able to move beyond the boxes and move beyond like our different partners of the world, and nothing is going to change until we are able to work together as black, brown, indigenous people and white people together. We need that. It's not going to happen if it's just one-sided.
Speaker 2:Yes, I definitely agree that can be very challenging because as somebody who feels so deeply like with my empathic skills, I guess you could say, even as you're talking about it, it brings up tears in my eyes and so it's hard to try to stand firm and understand and be that voice. But at the same time you just said it so beautifully, so I do agree this is a conversation that needs to happen more.
Speaker 3:I know there's professors who teach what I teach who will not make room for white students to process and to figure it out, and that's also a problem because then we're also never going to get to the point where white communities feel like they can talk to Black and Brown and Indigenous communities right. Just as much as I need to make the classroom a safe space for my students of color, my white students also have to feel safe with me and with my other students so that we can be in community. Yeah, I know it's not easy to feel like you can talk and stuff.
Speaker 1:Yeah, generational trauma and generational spirit that is just passed along, either culturally, dna, biologically, whatever we recognize it as that guilt is something that is just as harmful and useless as oppression and being oppressed by another people, and self-oppression is equally as spiritually devolving.
Speaker 1:And yet it is hard to know that your people were responsible for dehumanizing another group of people and felt superior. I can speak as someone who has German and English backgrounds on one side and indigenous on the other. That is a conflict that I see in myself, not just mentally but from a spiritual standpoint, because I want to connect with both sides, and there is a duality there. You can feel that from the people that have worked and toiled to make something for someone else. We were talking about clearing the land. My family had been the oppressed that had to clear, and then the other side of the family may have been one of the ones that reaped the benefit of that. I lay that really easy question at your feet, maria what does one do with this dual weight and how do you clear that spiritual trauma so that I'm not passing that down to my family or to my grandkids?
Speaker 3:I think you said something really important in all of that. You said something about healing and I think that's ultimately where we need to start. We all carry that generational whether it's trauma of both being, like you said, the oppressor, the oppressor our bodies and like in our individual self. Think about when we've all felt guilty before or we've all felt shame. It feels awful in our bodies. If you don't process that out physically, emotionally, mentally, like you said, I think, earlier, like clearing the energy, then it's always going to be there. I think that's level one on an individual level. You have to clear that and decide yes, these things happened.
Speaker 3:I personally didn't do this, even if you personally have had some kind of situation where maybe you were racist or maybe you did something that now you're like oh, maybe I shouldn't have done that. Like self-forgiveness, like you have to self-forgive to start moving forward, to start healing. I think also remembering like, like, just because someone's white doesn't mean they're evil, and in fact there was a lot of really great white organizers. Maybe turn to them. We always focus on the settler or the the oppressor, but also there had to have been white folks who were organizing, who were supporting the cause, who were like writing in newspapers, trying to advocate for the people who couldn't advocate for themselves. Pay attention to that, too, and draw power from that, or draw that sense of forgiveness from that.
Speaker 3:You've already Keone. We've already talked about Ansaldúa right, gloria Ansaldúa, who talks about the duality. Find those writers or the artists or anyone who will help you make sense of it, and to me, like it's Gloria Anzaldúa. And even if you don't identify, if you don't come from the same background as the writer, that's even more important. What are they saying that you can draw from that? You can learn from Really listening to each other, I think.
Speaker 2:So I think this kind of segues a little bit into another thing we wanted to talk about and I'm very curious about your thoughts. And there's a lot of places, major cities here in the United States specifically, that I don't believe the general population recognizes exactly how that city was built up. So, for example, we're going to use DC. Slaves built that city. Or, in my side of the country, Portland Oregon was not built by the whites. How do you think that those energies of those areas and that high emotions of all of the gambit, how do you think that affects the people in those locations?
Speaker 3:Yeah, that's a good question and just for the context of the border, of the border, the US Southwest was part of Mexico until 1848. So it's different historically than East Coast, 13 colonies, etc. Like you said, places like DC. I think it's important that we acknowledge that the wealth and the power that the US has accumulated is only possible because of the institution of slavery and the exploitation of labor, of people of color, like the Chinese building the railroads, people in the fields, the missions, and then, of course, enslaved people literally building these major cities and major infrastructure and just like plantation economies that made so much money.
Speaker 3:I lived in Boston for two years. That was the first place I went to when I left California and it always felt haunted to me. I don't know why, for many reasons, but I think that it just felt older. But then I have to check myself, because places like LA are also old. We just start quote unquote the history of the country there later, but people have always been there.
Speaker 3:I think this energy question is interesting, but I also think it's very real in that you can see poverty, the disproportionate numbers of what people have access to the built environment, like the class right, because I think sometimes I have to remind us like this isn't that long ago, it's maybe two, three generations ago. Certain people definitely built up a bunch of generational wealth, but also a lot of people were disenfranchised and are still recovering economically right or parts of the city that are just neglected for whatever reason. And so I think that's how I see it and obviously that plays into people's spirit, because it's just again that dehumanization part can really take a toll on the soul unless we really try to find pockets of resisting that. But I also think that gives us room to engage in kindness, because as we're talking this whole time, I'm just thinking we can't necessarily change the past. So what are we going to do now?
Speaker 3:If you are feeling that guilt or if you are feeling like, oh, there's so many not great things, what can I do? Start small, but start right. Donate 20 bucks a month to something or I don't know. Volunteer at the local school for unhoused children. We have have one here in downtown. There's ways to reshape the energy of the place.
Speaker 1:Something you said, maria, that I had addressed in the very first episode of Past Lives Cafe podcast that I had just started, was the prevalence of ghosts and residual energies and the percentage of those, specifically from children, who had past life memories. Many of them that had past life memories, had recounted having horrible deaths, very traumatic deaths, things that they either couldn't believe that they had died from, weren't ready to go, still felt connected with the West Coast. It's just, the history of the United States is longer on the East Coast because of colonialization, the trauma that occurred there and the ghostly haunted feeling that you picked up in Boston, where maybe you didn't feel that so prevalently in other areas of California. I'm wondering if that had to do with the longer history of subjugation and oppression and wars that had been fought. So the land holds that.
Speaker 3:I think the wars are a big part of it, because in California the Spanish arrive in 1520s, 1530s and they're already setting up missions and I'll go back to that in a second. But the fact that there were so many wars concentrated in New England during the revolution, I think that's actually what I was feeling, because that felt different. Like I've been to the south, I've been to what used to be a plantation, that also felt haunted, but I think in a different way. Yeah, there's supposedly one of the most haunted houses here in Old Town, san Diego, the Whaley House. That house, and it turns out the house is built and that whole street is built on top of a burial site where indigenous people were just thrown and buried.
Speaker 3:I mean, I guess Old Town feels a little haunted but it doesn't feel the way Boston and the South felt. And maybe it's just because those places were new to me and now that I'm saying that I'm laughing because I've been to Mexico many times and there's definitely ghosts in Mexico and they still sometimes make me a little nervous, but they feel like home. So I think maybe that's part of it. I don't know if you've been to LA or San Diego recently, but they feel haunted now. They feel dystopian now the unhoused situation that we've accepted, that this is normal. In downtown LA there's a massive luxury apartment building that was just abandoned halfway through construction and no one's living in there and it's guarded off. That feels like a graveyard. It feels haunted in a post-apocalyptic sci-fi kind of way, but I feel like it's. Everything that California has tried to hide is coming out now.
Speaker 2:I know exactly what you're talking about and then, for example, comparing that to New Orleans with that type of energy, I do believe there's something to what you're saying, as far as when you live in a certain area or region, you're a little bit more used to those frequencies. Perhaps I guess the question I have is going back to that example of DC. In history there's some arguments that during the enslaved times that perhaps those folks should relocate or go find a new place. I think it was Frederick Douglass who was the strong opponent of this and argued that his people had been forced to inhabit and work on this land to the extent that perhaps it was probably more so theirs than the others. I'm very curious about your perspectives.
Speaker 3:I don't agree that they should have been just taken and sent back, because at that point people who were enslaved probably didn't even know where they came from. In Africa sometimes we think about Africa as one big country, but I actually know there's many countries, many ethnicities, many cultures, and so the people who were free to hear had community here, had culture here. This was and is their home. Not to say that their african roots didn't matter, but if we would have just picked them all up and then shipped them off to africa, then displacement would have occurred again, and that's what we're seeing and we have seen with people getting deported. There's many, but there's people who have been here since they were kids.
Speaker 3:Someone who works with a detention center that's near me was talking about a woman who was from France, who was in her 70s getting ready to be deported, and had been here since she was in her 20s. Her whole life is here. So it reminds me of that. It also speaks to the larger structure of settler colonialism, and I always tell my students settler colonialism is not an event, it's not a thing of the past, it's a structure. Part of that structure is the need to continually remove people who are seen as not belonging. It was the Black people who were enslaved and now freed. Now what do we do? Where do we put them? It's been many people at different times Chinese during Chinese exclusion, japanese during Japanese internment and, obviously, latinos. What we're seeing now is on another level.
Speaker 2:Which is why I think it's so important to bring it up and talk about this. Unfortunately, history is truly trying to repeat itself, except each time that snowball is getting bigger and bigger and bigger down the mountain. So thank you for speaking to that.
Speaker 1:And I think there's something to be said about the way we feel when we see a building that's abandoned, that has a feeling and even if it's extremely ritzy, like the luxury building you were talking about, or an old home, there's just a sense of loss and sadness and desolation, I think, and desperation that comes with that in a human way, to be unwanted, which is what these buildings feel like You're not wanted. If we can feel that with a building, why can't we put ourselves in the position of someone who feels unwanted or who is being targeted as unwanted? I'm not sure why we can't make that leap, but regardless, that feeling of being unwanted is traumatic. I don't know how you cleanse that spiritual trauma.
Speaker 3:I think it's just like reclaiming space. There's a saying in Spanish we're here and we're not leaving, always asserting your humanity and your dignity and just doing it enough that you start to believe it and maybe shift things. I'm speaking from the experience of being a woman of color and very elite academic institutions and being the only one and then definitely feeling that imposter syndrome, which is nowhere near the trauma of people getting forcibly removed and separated from their families, to be deported, although I do come from an immigrant family. So that fear looms in my community no matter what, and that fear is what's exhausting too. To always be on your toes is exhausting.
Speaker 3:I know you all have listeners from all over the country and I have had students who come from places outside of California who are like my family really supports deportation or detention. How do I talk to them or where do we start? If all they know is what they're seeing on tv or on social media, then of course they support it, because what we're seeing on social media like makes you afraid of groups of people. I always tell them to try to find the stories of those people, find other versions of what they're hearing, other stories and I think stories for me is where healing starts, healing happens, and healing is never going to be perfect and it's never going to be complete, but at least engaging in it, I think, is important yeah.
Speaker 2:I was doing some shadow work and what I recognized is when I felt unwanted, there's such a deep is when I felt unwanted. There's such a deep despair feeling that comes from that and trying to find a reason to be motivated and a reason to do anything. Let's just be honest, just a reason to live. For me, that triggers survival mode. When I'm in survival mode, I am not thriving, I'm hardly surviving, I cannot take care of my community and my loved ones properly. The amount of energy that this has created, especially in border communities, not only is it dividing us more than ever before, which is opposite of what I believe we need as a community, but when communities are living in this survival mode, they're not living their best life and I'm terrified that this could be something in 50 years.
Speaker 3:Oh yeah, absolutely. In 50, 60 years, however long it takes, people will be looking back at this moment and we'll be talking about the horrors of it and who was on what side. It's just going to create, like you said, that divide again of now I feel guilty for what my parents or my grandparents supported. What we are living through right now is not normal. I need to start there. Of course, we've seen detention and deportation before incarceration, and we have to start talking about immigrant detention and deportation before incarceration and we have to start talking about immigrant detention and deportation. In the same way, we talk about the prison system, because they go hand in hand. But this and when I'm talking about what we are seeing now, I'm talking about people getting detained no due process and then being sent to the prison in El Salvador. That is, on another scale Everything going on with immigration, but also combining that with the attacks on education, on DEI, on medical research. I was with a psychologist yesterday, two days ago, and she was saying the lack of funding for medical research is going to have a domino effect for decades already. Even though it's only been 100 days, it's already detrimental to medicine and the advancement of medicine and all of these things. So I think all of it together is not normal. I think it's important that we talk about it that way.
Speaker 3:What the administration is doing right now is actually breaking a lot of its own laws and going against a lot of its own constitution. For example, student activists who were detained. They had green cards, they were permanent residents, meaning they were doing immigration quote unquote the right way. They have freedom of speech. Anyone who is within the bounds of the United States is protected by the constitution and yet they were taken for what they had said. So it's not that it's new, but the scale we are seeing it right now blows my mind, even as a historian, and the things that maybe have worked in the past in the context of the United States. We need to reimagine it because it's not going to get as far. We need to learn from other countries that have gone through really dictatorship-like or dictatorships.
Speaker 2:So like Hitler.
Speaker 3:Yeah, or I always think of Chile in the 70s I forget the name of the president, quote unquote but I think there's good examples in Latino America too. Yeah, it's terrifying. I am terrified, but I also feel like I just have to keep going still feel like I just have to keep going.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I am trying to figure out. What does that even look like? Where do we even start? Because I do feel that if we continue to tuck it under the rug it's just going to get worse. But as an American who I thought I've understood our constitutional rights pretty well, especially with me being prior military I'm so confused how any of this is even happening.
Speaker 3:And I'm not one to talk politics at all, I think that's what makes me nervous, Speaking from just being someone who does immigration studies like the courts have always been a place where we've been able to get a lot of justice done and in some examples I think we still have that, and in other examples, judges are being persecuted or criminalized for doing their job, and it's scary. Back in November, when the election results first came out, some of my friends that are not Latina and not necessarily in the same space as I am we were on the phone and I was crying and I was not okay and they were like it's not going to be that bad, It'll be okay. What do you mean? I always I told them this is dangerous and they were like what do you mean? It's dangerous, It'll be okay.
Speaker 3:And part of the danger that I think we forget sometimes is that energetic danger. There was a case, I think in Texas or here in California, where a second grader committed suicide because she was afraid of her parents being deported. That's horrible, right, and when I say it's dangerous, that's also what I'm talking about.
Speaker 2:So let's talk about some healing strategies, because this can be heart-wrenching for all of us, no matter where we're at on this spectrum, and we do speak about energies so often and I really don't love the heaviness of this, but I love the beauty and the depth that's coming out of it. So perhaps we can spin it around a little bit and talk about some healing strategies that all of us as humans in this environment, how we can work together and employ some healing opportunities as a country.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I love that because it's affecting all of us. Even if you're a white man, who's probably the most privileged identity combination you can have in the US you're a white man, who's probably the most privileged identity combination you can have in the US, right, you're still being affected by this, unless you're a billionaire. This is affecting everyone. Someone, a migrant organizer that we worked with closely last month, said something like they've been doing this work for 20 years, right, so they're like I've seen this before, but I also haven't seen it on the scale, but hearing their trajectory was really healing for me. Okay, they've managed to do this work for 20 years.
Speaker 3:We can keep going, but one of the things they said about our current moment is, like you said, super heavy, heart-wrenching, divisive. Like you said, super heavy, heart-wrenching, divisive, but at the same time, because we're in a what-is-happening moment, there's opportunity for new relationships and new solidarities to form, and they have to form. Like for us to get through this moment, they have to form across race, class, gender, ethnicity, like they just have to. We're not going to make it if it's just me and my Latina community and you and your Black community, and it has to be everyone together.
Speaker 3:So, yeah, and I think the energetic healing stuff, the joy stuff also has to happen together, which is why I do that in the microcosm of my classroom, because it has to start somewhere, and then I hope my students ripple out and do it with their family, do it with their grandparents, and remember I have students of all backgrounds, including very privileged backgrounds and very not privileged backgrounds, but we're all in there together and at this point we are a solidarity that has formed. So how can you do that in your own space? You don't have to go out and start a mass movement. That's not going to happen, right? But maybe you're a dance teacher, maybe you're a podcaster, whatever it is. How can you do that in your immediate locale and then go from there?
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, I like that because it allows us to look at the small moments, and I'm not talking about what you're doing. Is small for me? I'm not a community organizer. Yes, we have this podcast and I would love to think that's reaching the world, but that's next week. Right now, to the extent that I can be joyful and extend my hand and my love to people across humanity, may seem small, but it's all I can do right now and that gives me the power to say even that is helping in the microcosm of my home. Everybody here feels the same way. So I'm using my home metaphorically. So I'm using my home metaphorically.
Speaker 3:Yeah, absolutely. If it's already hard, then being kind is not a small act, like even if it's in your immediate household. It's shifting the energy, at least somewhat. If we all did that, then the energy would shift a lot.
Speaker 2:I definitely agree. I definitely agree. Well, Maria, I have absolutely enjoyed having you here. I can speak for both of us. We love you.
Speaker 1:I know.
Speaker 3:Can we keep you?
Speaker 1:Mom, can I have?
Speaker 3:her. Yes, I love talking to both of you.
Speaker 2:We can't wait. One of these days, we hope to come visit you in real life.
Speaker 3:On that note, is there an invocation, some positive energy, something you'd like to leave our listeners and ourselves with today? It comes from Pedro Rios, an organizer here in San Diego. He said what is solidarity if not love? Because we have to lead with love. I think we hinted at that a lot this whole conversation. But, regardless of your background, if you feel any sense of guilt, anything like lead with love with yourself and with other people and let's start there- yes, you said at the very beginning if you give up your joy, you're giving up your humanity.
Speaker 2:That was powerful. Thank you so much, listeners. We thank you. Had a great time. Well, don't forget to like and subscribe and give it up for maria thank you both for having me again.
Speaker 3:Okay, we'll talk again.
Speaker 1:Yes, Bye. Bye, bye.
Speaker 2:Thanks for diving into the depths with us today. If you enjoyed this episode, show your support at buymeacoffeecom forward slash mystical mermaid lounge, as every little ripple helps keep the magic flowing. Would you like some more deep, soul yearning conversations? Well then, swim on over to our sister podcast, past Lives Cafe, where Keone deep dives into those past life experiences. Also, we'd love to hear from you. Please don't forget to rate and review and drop your feedback and comments at our website, mysticalmermaideloungebuzzsproutcom. Thank you again so much, and don't forget to catch us at the next High Tide. Bye-bye.
.jpg)
