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.
