Amber Rose González, Felicia Montes, and Nadia Zepeda on Mujeres de Maiz

[00:00:00] Cathy Hannabach: Welcome to Imagine Otherwise, the podcast about bridging art, activism, and academia to build more just futures.

[00:00:12] I’m your host, Cathy Hannabach, and today I have on the show Amber Rose González, Felicia Montes, and Nadia Zepeda—three legendary feminist artists, activists, and scholars from the genre -defying transnational feminist of color collective Mujeres de Maiz.

[00:00:30] Amber, Felicia, and Nadia are also the editors of a new book called Mujeres de Maiz en Movimiento: Spiritual Artivism, Healing Justice, and Feminist Praxis, which was just published by the University of Arizona Press and indexed by Ideas on Fire.

[00:00:46] I am incredibly excited to bring these fantastic folks on the show as both the book and the collective from which it springs are in many ways the quintessential example of the art, activism, and academia braid that’s at the heart of Imagine Otherwise and Ideas on Fire.

[00:01:03] In our conversation, Amber, Felicia, and Nadia share their journey with Mujeres de Maiz and the collective liberation that the group is building. Traversing poetry, performance, zines, healing ceremonies, visual art, autoethnography, and a plethora of other mediums, these scholars and artists demonstrate the power of collaboration and intersectional solidarity.

[00:01:27] We chat in the episode about how the book publishing process builds on their longstanding practices of making publishing more accessible and collaborative, embodying the political and ethical commitments found across their art and activism as well.

[00:01:42] We also discuss how intergenerational knowledge transmission and other forms of community education dovetail in some interesting ways with classroom teaching, often to create radical spaces of learning.

[00:01:55] Finally, we close out the conversation with Amber, Felicia, and Nadia’s vision for a world in which many worlds are possible, and how Mujeres de Maiz collectively brings those worlds into being.

[00:02:08] I’m really excited to have you all on the show today to talk about this fantastic book that I think is such a stunning tribute to the work that you all have been doing with Mujeres de Maiz over the past two and a half decades. What’s the story behind you all deciding to put that together into a book like this?

[00:02:26] Felicia Montes: Well first of all, thank you for having us. Second, Mujeres de Maiz has been an art and wellness organization over the last 27 years. And from the very beginning, in our first year, we knew something was very different and something was really important about documenting and making sure that we had to keep sharing this, the energy, the transformation of not only the participants but people in the audience or people watching, seeing the exhibits or hearing performances.

[00:02:59] It was transformational in such an important way that many of us felt like it needed to be documented. So, we started to write about it—at that time we were in college—in college papers or in short mini documentaries. We just knew that it needed to be documented.

[00:03:18] Nadia Zepeda: Thank you, Felicia, for always setting the foundation for us. I was invited a little bit after by Amber and Felicia to help co-edit the piece. Mujeres de Maiz, like Felicia said, has been documenting, has been creating these like DIY zines, self-published.

[00:03:33] So part of the work that we wanted to do in the book was also highlight the 25 years of work that has been written in the community. And part of that was editing so we kind of can show the breadth of the topics the communities that have been part of us.

[00:03:48] People assume that Mujeres de Maiz is just Chicana, Chicanx, Latinx, Latina women, but this organization started as a women of color, femme of color space. So also honoring that multi- ethnic solidarity movement in the book as well.

[00:04:04] A lot of us are academics too, so we’ve bridged community and academic spaces by organizing with Mujeres de Maiz, but also writing about the work that we’ve been doing , for the last couple of years.

[00:04:15] Amber Rose González: Yeah, and I think maybe the one thing that I’ll add is because Mujeres de Maiz is so many things, we wanted to make sure the book was as close of a representation to that as possible.

[00:04:29] So it’s very interdisciplinary. It’s intergenerational in terms of the contributors, artists, writers, scholars, activists. There’s visual art, there’s poetry, testimonio, and a feminist of color writing style. Even the scholarship is very interdisciplinary mixed media. It’s prose and poetry and scholarly research interwoven together.

[00:05:01] And so we were, I think, very intentional since the inception of the project to try our best to represent the organization and the worldviews and the values and the cultural production. It was really hard to represent all of that on paper because it is so vibrant and so alive and almost ephemeral in a way because it’s, you know, performance and music and interacting with one another.

[00:05:28] So we were really intentional to try to capture the spirit of that in the writing and the artwork.

[00:05:35] Felicia Montes: I think what was really key is that all of us wrote either about our own work or were studying Mujeres de Maiz in some way. So, Nadia and Amber did their dissertations on Mujeres de Maiz. So, there was so much information, both from the heart work, the art work, the poetry, and the prose, but also these studies and research and case studies and interviews, oral histories, and so it was really important to kind of place that all together.

[00:06:00] I think it’s looking towards the next 25 years. One of our legacy projects is this book.

[00:06:06] Cathy Hannabach: That trans-genre element is certainly ever present in this text and certainly in the various projects that the collective has worked on over the decades. What are some of the most memorable projects for you individually, or maybe as a group, that you’ve worked on with the collective? I know it’s hard to choose, .

[00:06:25] Amber Rose González: So, I’ll, I’ll maybe start with one that I was inspired by and didn’t participate in, and maybe ask Felicia to comment on.

[00:06:32] So I think one that I’ve been very inspired by is really at the foundation of Mujeres de Maiz in terms of being an inspiration and influence, is the encuentro between Chicanx artists and activists on the East Side of Los Angeles and Zapatistas in Mexico.

[00:06:52] I came on a little bit later almost a decade after the organization had been started, but that is still ever present.

[00:06:59] Felicia Montes: Yeah, I think it was really key. I mean, we go back to like that seed of Mujeres de Maiz, to the kernel. We were in college, we organized an encuentro or a gathering in Mexico, in Chiapas, Mexico with the Zapatistas, but it was all based on art. Women were at the forefront of organizing that.

[00:07:15] A lot of Mujeres de Maiz went there. It has been throughout a really, really important foundational moment movement for us that continues through art, activism, the way we organize collectively, etc. So, it was really, really big.

[00:07:30] There have been others, I think individually, we can share some of them. But I know one was our own 20th anniversary retrospective. We created our own exhibition and then were hosted and supported with and curated along with La Plaza de Cultura y Artes, which is a museum in downtown Los Angeles.

[00:07:50] I think that was really key because it honored our 20 years. It was the first time we received grants, to support that work. It showed again the legacy, the different generations and people. That was one of the big ones for me.

[00:08:02] Nadia Zepeda: Yeah, I would like to echo what Amber did. So, I want to talk a little bit first about one of the events that I participated in that really transformed the way I saw myself and kind of my view of the organization.

[00:08:13] So in 2014, Felicia gathered us together and she invited Atava [Garcia Swiecicki], who is an herbalist and curandera who works really closely with other herbalists and curanderas in Mexico. We did a cycle of four. So, we did it for four weekends and we were able to learn different kind of healing modalities and kind of have conversations with each other and reconnect to an ancestral, wellness practice.

[00:08:35] And I think it really allowed for a lot of us to get close but also to allow us to have agency toward our healing. And I think that also spoke a lot to why I also pursued the research project that I did with Mujeres de Maiz, specifically looking at their work at their monthly full moon circles.

[00:08:52] It really shifted how I saw myself, but also that, you know, this collective that had been historically known for their art and activism moved to this modality of our own wellness and healing.

[00:09:04] So that was a really beautiful space that really shows how multifaceted Mujeres de Maiz is as well.

[00:09:10] Amber Rose González: There are so many memorable projects, but I think one that really brings me joy to reflect on is the time where I brought Felicia and Lisa Rocha, a jewelry designer to do a Cultura Conscious FEshion Show—like fe as in faith.

[00:09:30] Alicia Montes was our featured designer when I was in graduate school at UC Santa Barbara, and it was part of a service-learning project that I had my students organize with Mujeres de Maiz. The students participated as role models, in the show, and I am still in contact with some of those students today because of their participation in that class. It’s probably almost 15 years ago, and it just made such a strong impact on them.

[00:10:00] We organized the event at Casa de la Raza, in Santa Barbara on the east side, and so that was a really beautiful, memorable event to be able to bring Mujeres de Maiz to my community at the time in Santa Barbara and create that experience for the students and the local community there.

[00:10:19] Cathy Hannabach: Teaching is something that I’ve noticed runs through all of the examples that you just described, but also most of the examples in the book, which is really interesting. I’d love to talk more about the role you see teaching playing in art and activist movements, both the ones you trace in the book but also the broader work of the Mujeres de Maiz collective.

[00:10:40] Amber Rose González: Yeah, I can, I can start with that. So, as you said, many of us are educators, are teachers, and many of us have become that in a more formal higher ed or K–12 sense. We’ve all always been teachers and learners in our communities, but many of us have become teachers in the process while also being members of Mujeres de Maiz.

[00:11:05] Our understanding of teaching and learning and pedagogy is pretty expansive. There’s a really robust scholarship on Chicana pedagogy, pedagogy of the home and the community, and the ways intergenerational knowledge is transmitted through cultural practices, through arts practice.

[00:11:27] A lot of the spaces that we curate, whether that’s a live art show, an exhibit or, for example, the fashion show, there’s always a component of teaching and learning and really co-creating knowledge. So, I think I can speak for us all when I say we don’t necessarily see ourselves as like the teachers who have all this knowledge. We’re creating knowledge together in community.

[00:11:54] We learn so much from our students, from the participants, from our peers, from folks who have written for our zine. Even if there isn’t like live interaction with people, like, for example, in the zine, we’re still learning from each other, reading the pieces and organizing it and putting it together.

[00:12:14] So teaching and learning, I think, is a really important piece of what we do.

[00:12:21] Nadia Zepeda: I would also like to add that within our communities, we also have these radical spaces for popular education that move beyond university or institutional walls. That’s something I really appreciate about Mujeres de Maiz, too, that part of our programming has been to create workshops, skill sharing knowledges, book clubs that we offer to community that really move beyond institutional walls and allows for folks to learn new skills or to be part of important conversations that aren’t necessarily, tied to the ivory tower.

[00:12:53] Felicia Montes: Yeah, one of the things that we wanted to do, and why we started doing the zines in 1997 and doing the events, is to make it accessible for those who would never get to college, who weren’t ever able to take an ethnic studies course. Many of us, our community, family members, friends, were not able to get to college, were pushed out, aka dropped out, or those kind of things.

[00:13:13] And so sharing something that we learned in a poem from a 300-page book or from articles that we were reading in our classrooms. And how could we share that in like a one-page scene or an image, a painting, or a poem? We wanted to make it accessible as much as we can and use art as a tool for education, empowerment, and transformation.

[00:13:34] I believe that’s really what we started to do with the magazine and the events is began to talk about some of those key topics and ideas in a more accessible way and a short way, a way that was often free and came to the community, the streets, or the neighborhoods.

[00:13:50] Nadia Zepeda: And I know, I also want to add, we’re all educators, right?

[00:13:53] We still teach in the university, most of us teach in the university. So part of it too was ensuring that our book was accessible to students as well. So, our target audience is high school age, early university.

[00:14:04] And we’ve also been intentional about creating different pedagogy or assignments or things to kind of support, especially as we’re having conversations with different folks, especially in California, the implementation of ethnic studies in the high schools and some universities.

[00:14:17] So ensuring that there is stuff available for folks if they want to teach local history, especially L. A. history.

[00:14:24] Cathy Hannabach: The model of curation and editing that this book and your work more broadly embodies is, I think, a really fascinating and inspiring example of what radical publishing can look like or a different model of publishing that gets beyond some of the gatekeeping structures.

[00:14:41] And it’s one of the things that I found particularly enjoyable about indexing this book. I’d love to talk about where you see publishing going in the future or maybe where you want to see it go.

[00:14:52] Felicia Montes: The way we started in 1997 was really key for us to open it up and make it accessible as well. So, we knew that my cousin or the person down the street or the tía had a poem or knowledge base or something to share that was important that they wouldn’t necessarily have access to be published.

[00:15:12] And so we put out an open call. You know, who has information to share, who would like to share the art or who would like to perform, and just kind of did a call out to community.

[00:15:22] We did edit, but pretty much most of the people got in that we shared, you know, because we thought everybody had something to say, and they said it in different ways and different experiences, different art forms. It was very important to show from beginning to established or quote unquote professional artists and writers of the time.

[00:15:40] The zine has always shown people who are beginning, like their very first poem was published or the very first time they’ve ever performed was at our show. And maybe now they tour, or they have three books of poetry and it’s not to say it’s because of Mujeres de Maiz, but it was important for us to give a stage for people or a page that they could publish or the wall where they can exhibit perhaps for the first time.

[00:16:04] And so that was important in creating and sharing that and making it accessible.

[00:16:10] Amber Rose González: Yeah, and maybe I’ll add, in just thinking about where we published the book. We went back and forth and had a lot of discussion about what type of press do we want to go with: academic, do we want to self-publish this book like we had been doing with the zines.

[00:16:29] And finally we did settle on University of Arizona. It seemed like a really good fit because they have a great track record of producing feminist of color and Indigenous texts of this nature that are really intergenerational, interdisciplinary, multimedia.

[00:16:51] The experience was really great because they allowed us to curate the collection. We hosted numerous writing workshops to get people, get their ideas on paper, to help support them to develop their essays and their drafts.

[00:17:04] And so I think for me one of the biggest lessons or takeaways is the possibility of the types of publishing practices, and this just felt very in line with Mujeres de Maiz’s ideology and ways of connecting and being with each other.

[00:17:24] It’s very supportive, very open, non-hierarchical. And so that really translated to the publishing process and practice. I would like to see publishing be like that for more people.

[00:17:40] One of the things I’ll also say is all of us do have book-length academic writing on this topic, on Mujeres de Maiz, and we decided not to write individual books because there’s only so much one individual can say, even if you have interviews and things like that.

[00:18:00] So for us, an anthology was really important because we did want to feature multiple voices and perspectives. Even though we are talking about the same organization and the same time period, everybody has their perspective and their memories. And so, it’s really interesting to be able to see that come together and tell this larger collective story.

[00:18:22] Cathy Hannabach: So, this brings me to my absolute favorite question that I love closing out every episode with, which really gets at the heart of why you do the kind of amazing work that you do. I think Mujeres de Maiz is a fantastic example of the power of this question and what happens when you let people answer in their own time, in their own medium, in their own way, and draw strength from each other. So, what is the world that you all are working toward? What kind of world do you want?

[00:18:51] Felicia Montes: So, most of our work is around justice, whether it’s in classroom spaces, art spaces, about accessibility to all of the things that everybody should have access to aside from food and wellness and health and education. It’s also being able to create through art or write.

[00:19:09] One of the things I think is very key is the idea that the Zapatistas mentioned of a world where many worlds fit. So even though, again, we’re Chicana/Latinx-centric and we’re unapologetic about it, we have always been a community where many other spaces not only fit but are welcomed and encouraged and supported.

[00:19:29] Nadia Zepeda: I would say that we also have a vision of transformative justice, of a world beyond what we have right now, really imagining and envisioning what that can look like.

[00:19:39] One that is very queer, one that’s feminist, one that really honors all our lives, that takes into consideration our body, mind, and spirit. So, I think the work that we do in Mujeres de Maiz, it really speaks to how we’re all entangled through art, activism, our wellness, social justice.

[00:20:00] It really allows us to also imagine what kind of world we want to leave or live for future generations.

[00:20:07] Amber Rose González: This goes back to my first Mujeres en Maiz live art show, in 2009. There was a neon sign art installation that said in really bold, large print: Another city is possible. And I really felt that in this space. What I experienced as an audience member was this other world, even if it was only for a few hours, it was about the ways people relate to each other and care for each other, sharing knowledge, sharing love between one another, and it was in the middle of downtown LA , and this was the LA that I knew and loved. I knew that we were capable of making this world, even if it was for a moment.

[00:20:58] And so I think that’s the beauty of Mujeres de Maiz. It allows us to practice the relationships that we want to see. It allows us to live in our full beingness. It allows us to undo some of the harmful ideologies and harmful ways of being that we’ve inherited. I think we’re working toward it by living it and providing opportunities for other people and inviting them into that.

[00:21:29] I think to be able to work toward it, you have to know that it’s a possibility and know that it’s real.

[00:21:36] That really happened for me at my first MDM live art show, and I think we all in our own way can come together and work toward that world.

[00:21:47] Cathy Hannabach: Well, thank you all so much for being here and sharing all of these amazing ways that you imagine otherwise.

[00:21:55] Nadia Zepeda: Thank you so much, Cathy.

[00:21:57] Amber Rose González: Thank you, Cathy.

[00:21:57] Felicia Montes: Thank you.

[00:22:02] Cathy Hannabach: Thanks for joining me for this episode of Imagine Otherwise. A big thanks to Amber, Felicia, and Nadia as well for sharing their incredible stories

[00:22:11] Their book, Mujeres de Maiz en Movimiento, is out now from the University of Arizona Press. You can discover more about the book and grab your copy in the episode show notes at ideasonfire.net/podcast. There’s also a detailed transcript, related books and interviews, and a teaching guide.

[00:22:29] If this episode inspired you, make sure to subscribe to the show at ideasonfire.net/podcast. In addition to new episodes, subscribers get access to exclusive writing and publishing resources, book news from the Ideas on Fire author community, and invitations to interdisciplinary events to help you imagine otherwise.

[00:22:50] This episode of the show was produced and edited by me, Cathy Hannabach.

[00:22:54] Finally, you can find Ideas on Fire on social media at @ideasonfirephd, where we share all kinds of resources to help interdisciplinary scholars like you write and publish awesome texts, enliven public conversations, and ultimately build more just worlds.