Brujeria

So I spend a lot of time talking with fellow witchy folk, pagans, practitioners of nature spirituality, and the plain old curious, about how we define things like witchcraft. I talk to my college students about this too, as we analyze and deconstruct representations of witchcraft in classic literature, pop culture, and other media.
Like being mestiza, being a bruja means different things to many different practitioners.

As with all communities, witches are not a monolith. There are Wiccans and pagans, natural witches and practitioners whose craft developed out of popular culture representations of powerful women. Then there are those who practice culturally specific forms of their spirituality. It takes all types. Some go deep down the rabbit hole of esoteric occultism, other just hoard too many mason jars and acknowledge the divinity in every living being. Likewise, there are those whom mainstream culture would consider witches, but identify more as folk conjurers. I could go on about all the nuances here but for the sake of brevity (this is only a blog post, after all), I’ll keep it focused on what practicing Brujeria means to me.

First, I specifically use the term bruja here and not witch (although I use that too) because I want to make it clear that my cultural identity as mestiza is an important part of my magical practice. I can’t separate one from the other. And while there are many things I do that are in alignment with general witchy practices (like hoarding all those mason jars), there are some aspects of my bruja identity that are singular to the mestiza culture and my relationship to it (again, we’re not a monolith so I’m not speaking for all mestizx or brujx here).

At the end of the day, being a bruja for me is about celebrating my interconnectedness with the earth, the spirit realm, and those who want to live more soulfully. It’s about reclaiming my right to joy and acknowledging that there is more to this life than we can readily see with the naked eye. It’s about healing generational and ancestral trauma and developing narratives beyond systemic oppression. And it’s about recognizing that I have the power—the magic—to shape my own story. I am a writer as well as a bruja, after all, so I know that there is power in words, that stories are healing spells, and that book magic is the most powerful form of conjuring.

Social Justice & Brujeria

I can’t talk about being a bruja without talking about social justice. The term bruja or witch has been used throughout history to suppress marginalized identities. In New Mexico, Spanish colonizers, aided by the Catholic church, applied the term to shamans, curanderas (folk healers), Indigenous people, midwives…the list goes on and on. Basically, if someone represented a threat to the church, meaning they had access to knowledge beyond the scope of the colonizers, then they were villainized. It was a classic case of silencing any and all voices that challenged authority or posed a threat to white Catholic patriarchy. This lead to white-washing history and ongoing cultural erasure, assimilation, and appropriation. Anyone whose family has been in New Mexico long before it was an official state is a product of that history of colonization. We have two choices when it comes to grappling with that history: We can perpetuate the trauma or we can push back against lateral and systemic oppression.

Enter the bruja. She is an archetype that reclaims the once negative term witch and finds power in her otherness. Brujeria is about taking our power back and honoring our divine right to joy, pleasure, hope, happiness. We refuse to perpetuate those histories of trauma and break the cycle by crafting our own healing journeys that go beyond performing our culture or our violent history for mass consumption. We make marginalized identities more visible and pushing back against white supremacy, toxic patriarchy, and anything that tries to limit our joy. We center the mestizx identity. We reclaim what we can of our folk magic roots and mixed-race heritage, and forge ahead with new stories, new ways of being. Integral to those new stories are a celebration of inclusion, sustainability, equity, and radical self-care. How we go about all this might look a little different for every bruja, but it’s something we all do.

Natural Spirituality & Everyday Magic

Here’s where my bruja practice might different from other witchy practitioners. I’m all about what I call divine receptivity. rather than traditional spell-crafting (the kind of stuff you see in witchy pop culture representations), divine receptivity asks you to reconnect with yourself and the universe, listening to the life signs and synchronicities that will guide you throughout your day. So I’m not trying to force a specific outcome, but rather living more in tune with nature and my own natural rhythms. I set intentions and I work hard to manifest them—but I also listen when the universe tells me something is not meant to be mine. I let go of what I think I should have or what my life should look like and trust the signs that always lead me to something even more abundant and daring than I ever could have dreamed up on my own.

And yeah, there’s some spell work in there too, in the form of tea blending, body butter making, and stew stirring. Every mundane act is a form of intentional conjuring to me as I relearn my profound capacity for joy and fulfillment. I practice what I can of curanderismo. I talk long walks in nature. I read by lamplight. I write and deal the tarot. I plant healing herbs in my garden and cook delicious meals. I enjoy good company and nourishing conversations. All that is magic to me.

Natural spirituality is also about respecting my internal life, my autonomy, and my right to privacy. Healing from colonization is, in part, recognizing that I do not have to share culturally-specific parts of my practice with anyone outside of it. I do not have to perform for a white gaze or always make my magic available to those who want in. There are some things you can share with the world, and some things are just for you. Like any good bruja knows, it is essential to protect your magic and not feeling like you have to give it away. Again, this goes back to the social justice aspect of my craft: I am not required to deplete or exploit my natural resources in order to aid those unwilling to do the hard work of healing for themselves.

Pleasure Magic & the Divine Feminine

Here’s where things get really juicy. Once you’ve come to terms with generation trauma and disrupted the cycle, once you’ve opened yourself to divine receptivity, the world of pleasure magic opens up to you. This is all about sex positivity, body positivity, joy positivity. I know joy positivity might sound redundant, but I’ll tell you a little dark secret about experiencing joy as a marginalized identity: it often leads to guilt. Did you earn that doctorate degree you’ve been working night and day for the past few years? Guilt! Did you get offered that highly competitive job at an inclusive and progressive college based on the years you spent developing your CV for just that? The shame! Oh, you wrote a multi-awarding winning book on ordinary magic? Tragedy! Have a hot date with someone who’s awesome and makes you feel good? Slut!

Except all those things are actually quite wonderful. But what happens is that every time you change the narrative about women of color in this case from oppressed and struggling, to successful and empowered, you feel pangs of guilt and shame. It’s called internalized oppression. And it’s a bitch. There’s also quite a bit of social shaming involved here (aka lateral oppression). People might say you’re getting a little too cocky or that god has blessed you or worse, you got where you are because of affirmative action. In all cases, those statements either intentionally or intentionally disempower you and make you feel as if you don’t deserve the accomplishments you’ve worked hard for. Let’s face it, an empowered woman of color is a threat to the social norm. Throw in some lingering Catholic guilt and pretty soon you start finding ways to make yourself suffer.

That’s where pleasure magic and the divine feminine come in. They push back against internalized oppression. Pleasure magic is the daily invocation of all things sensual and joyful, from the sacred simple pleasure of an afternoon cup of tea to the titillating delights of a good romance novel or the profound ecstasies of an intimate relationship. Of course, we look to the goddess within, the divine feminine in all of us, regardless of our gender orientation, for guidance here. She allows us to value our emotions and instincts, to feel what we need to feel for healing and insight.

Invoking the divine feminine about reclaiming our right to joy and rejecting anything that tries to control how we should feel about our bodies, our sexuality, our accomplishments (our external life), or our magical practice (our internal life). Pleasure magic is all about autonomy—joyfully and rigorously asserting your right to explore and express yourself as you choose free from the pressures to perform your culture, perpetuate oppression, or diminish yourself in order to be more socially acceptable.

In claiming the title of bruja, I reclaim my autonomy. I conjure new narratives for myself and my community. I celebrate and advocate for inclusivity in all that I do. I revel in my pleasure magic practice. And I do not apologize for loudly, joyfully taking up space.

Enchantment Learning & Living is an inspirational blog celebrating life’s simple pleasures, everyday mysticism, and delectable recipes that are guaranteed to stir the kitchen witch in you. If you enjoyed what you just read and believe that true magic is in the everyday, subscribe to my newsletter below for regular doses of enchantment. Want even more inspiration? Follow me on Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter. Here’s to a magical life!

Being Mestiza

I’ve been getting a lot of questions from readers about what I mean when I say I’m mestiza. That fact is always one of the first pieces of information in all my author bio and that’s intentional. Although the term has been around for a long time, I specifically use the definition from Gloria Anzaldua’s Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987), which focuses on developing a new mestiza consciousness. For those that aren’t familiar with the term, mestiza or mestizaje means a person of mix-raced decent.

Being mestiza is different for everyone—everyone’s mix is a little different and, in many cases, few of us know everything about the mix that is our cultural background. This is because we are, in one way or another, products of colonization. And as a result of colonization, histories of the colonized sometimes get lost, erased, or suppressed. So it is important to remember that, like the wider Hispanic and Latinx communities, the mestizaje community is not a monolith. Our mixed heritage and our relationship to it are as complex and diverse as our backgrounds.

Identifying as mestiza then is a way of acknowledging the history of violence in our veins and undoing rigid cultural purity norms. We eschew conversations about who is the whitest or brownest. The purest Spanish or the most Indigenous. Celebrating our mixed-race heritage is one of the many ways we work to dismantle lateral oppression and white supremacy. It’s also a way of reclaiming the rich cultural practices that the colonizers tried to stamp out or villainize. Much of the legacy of witchcraft in New Mexico is one of the Spanish church villainizing—dare I say crucifying?—anything and anyone they didn’t understand or couldn’t control, which included many cultural practices outside the purview of the church.

I want to make it clear, before I go on, that I don’t speak for all mestizas as I write this. Again, each experience is unique, no mix is the same, just as our relationship to our mixed heritage is complex and individual. I’m likewise making some broad brushstrokes here, as this is a complex conversation that many communities have been having since colonization. So keep in mind that I’m only addressing some aspects of the very rich conversation as it relates to my personal experience, my writing, and my brujeria practice.

And I’m doing all this in the relatively small space of a blog when many have written books and dedicated entire careers to discussing this very topic. All by way of saying, what I’m writing here today is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to being mestiza. I’m also acknowledging here that explorations of my relationship to my cultural background will be ongoing and that, even as I write this, there will inevitably be things I won’t get right, nuances I gloss over, and complex conversations that aren’t fully unpacked. But to my mind, what is important is having the conversation. Articulating what this identity means to me right now, however incomplete. Part of pushing back against white supremacy is letting go of the need to be perfect, have all the answers, and produce a flawless text. My mestiza identity is about exploring my messy heritage and my messy relationship to it. Nothing is clean-cut about this history, so there will be no clean-cut conversations or answers.

New Mexican Mestizaje Consciousness

I often speak with my students about being mixed-race and how that is an integral part of my identity as a bruja. I identify specifically as mestiza, not Chicana, Spanish, Hispanic, or Latina. I never get offended when people do put me under those labels, as I know the conversation of being mestiza is pretty culturally specific, as is the difference between Spanish, Hispanic, and Latino labels and the history of colonization behind those terms.

In all honesty, all those terms are problematic and all those terms have different meanings depending on where you are in the world. For example, for native New Mexicans, Hispanic was the common term used when I was growing up. Nationally, we get lumped into the term Latinx since we are brown and Spanish speakers. Honestly? All those terms make me uncomfortable because I don't feel like they adequately express my mixed heritage. I likewise don’t judge those who wouldn’t know the nuances of those various terms because they are outside the cultural conversation. I mean, there are plenty of social and cultural conversations in which I’m an outsider, so I always appreciate it when someone kindly educates me when I get something wrong or if I’m simply unaware of it!

Embracing my mestiza roots, however, is a way for me to acknowledge that I am a product of histories of violence—and that I’m ready to move beyond them. New Mexico has a bloody history of Spanish conquistadors exploiting and violating Indigenous communities and, later, erasing them completely in an effort to sanitize and white-wash our history. Yet the legacy of the Spanish conquistadors is heavily romanticized while Native American cultures are silenced, appropriated, and exploited. What often gets left out in this highly sanitized version of our state history is that we have the blood of the colonizers and the colonized in our veins, the curanderas (folk healers and mystics), natural witches, and shamans—as well as the Catholic church. We are European. We are Ingenious. Some of us are also Latinx. Or a mix of other cultures. We all look different. We are always othered bodies because we cannot be easily categorized.

Therein lies our power. We are inherently transgressive because we don’t comfortably fit into the racial and ethnic stereotypes white patriarchy wants us to occupy. The evidence of this is something I always carry with me. I have a European last name. My skin is bronze but, in certain contexts, I can pass as white. So much of my existence inevitably challenges people’s preconceived notions of what it means to be a woman of color. I’m from a Spanish speak heritage but my speaking skills have deteriorated from adequate to mediocre. I would like to one day be fluent and try to practice more regularly. But my ability to speak the language (or not) does not make me more or less Latinx. I love Latin dance but I don’t practice the Catholic faith—something often heavily romanticized by people outside of our culture…but more on that in the next section. In each case, my very existence challenges traditional assumptions about what it means to be a woman of color and separates my relationship to my heritage from mainstream culture’s stereotypes about who I am.

I likewise honor my ancestral roots while also coming to terms with the fact that I can’t reach back for them. Some of us can reclaim other parts of our heritage, reclaim what’s been lost in a way that heals individuals and communities. For others, histories have been lost, so there is no way to fully recover what has been erased. Then there are those, like myself, who can’t look back. You’d be surprised by the ghosts and ancestral hauntings that get stirred up when you dig up family history. And, contrary to popular belief, not all ancestors are benevolent, a hard fact you have to learn when you’re a product of colonization. So I’ve closed the door to the past, though it sometimes calls to me. Instead, I’ve decided to look forward.

Mestizaje Bruja Activism

Here’s what I can reclaim: joy, pleasure, autonomy, and wholeness. That’s where bruja activism comes in.

For a start, bruja activism is about anti-racism. Claiming our mestiza roots pushes back against blood quantum, a colonial concept that pits Indigenous communities against one another in the battle for resources. Likewise, I acknowledge my ancestry and honor the histories I’ve learned, but I don’t pretend to know anything about rez life and don’t appropriate Indigenous experiences that aren’t mine. Again, there are a lot of different ways to explore and connect to our heritage.

We also resist the white-washing of our communities that celebrate only the European aspects of our heritage while ignoring or diminishing the value of the Latinx and Ingenious cultures that also make up who we are. But more importantly, it reminds us that, while we are all products of colonization in one way or another, we have the power to become more than those histories of violence and oppression. All of this is a rejection of white supremacy and the lateral oppression it feeds as communities of color try to regulate who is the most Latinx, the most Ingenious, the most Spanish, the most whatever, thus perpetuating systemic racism.

Instead, we take our power back. We reclaim what we can of our known Indigenous and Latinx traditions (so long as it doesn’t bring up old ghosts and traumas). We acknowledge that there are powerful magics in our bloodlines even if we can’t fully reclaim them or know their origin. It is enough to know they are there. We forge new paths. We push back against cultural norms of what mestizaje should look like. Again: we are not a monolith. Not easily categorized or labeled, and so, harder to control.

Mestizaje brujeria is also about rejecting traditional religion, at least for me. There’s no denying that the Catholic church historically suppressed women and other minorities—and continues to. From the Spanish witchhunts to the exploitation and violation of female bodies, the church is no friend of the mestiza. That history of religious trauma is something we still carry with us. I cannot romanticize Catholicism like so many outside our culture (and, yes, within it) can because I cannot separate its cultural and historical value from the traumas it has inflicted on women of color in particular. I’m also not here to police other mestizas’ relationship to the Catholic church. Again, our relationship to all aspects of our cultural roots is deeply personal and complex. What is medicine for some is poison to another. I only resist being told how I should feel about my own relationship to my heritage, especially by those who want to appropriate it or romanticize it without experiencing the burden of that history in their veins. That easily becomes another form of colonization, after all.

My path is one of reclaiming curanderisma, natural spirituality, and natural sexuality freed from the chains of colonization, religion, and white patriarchy. The power of mestizaje is the power of shaping our own narrative. When we are so often confined to stories about the past, histories of trauma, and oppression, we forget that we are also stories of resilience, strength, and transformation. Abundance and hope. Love and healing. Through brujeria, I allow myself to explore my unfolding story outside of preconceived narratives rooted in historical oppression. I am allowed to know my body, myself, my soul beyond the mainstream (white) culture’s gaze. I am allowed to be whole, autonomous. And I am allowed to be the one who decides what that means and looks like for me.

I’m not entirely sure I’ve got it all figured out, either. In fact, I think it would be dangerous to assume so. But what I can say is that there is no separating my writer identity from being mestizaje, just as there is no separating my bruja identity from it. They are all one. Every word, story, insight that I commit to paper is all part of working through generational and ancestral trauma, conjuring a way of being beyond those legacies, and daring to see narratives of hope and healing in our futures. Having this conversation, working through the ambiguities and nuances, are all part of the magic. Putting these thoughts in writing on my blog…that’s part of the magic too.

Enchantment Learning & Living is an inspirational blog celebrating life’s simple pleasures, everyday mysticism, and delectable recipes that are guaranteed to stir the kitchen witch in you. If you enjoyed what you just read and believe that true magic is in the everyday, subscribe to my newsletter below for regular doses of enchantment. Want even more inspiration? Follow me on Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter. Here’s to a magical life!