Mazorca Colectiva is composed of immigrants, Indigenous Peoples, and people of the Global South seeking to recover their ancestral memory. The core of our work is taking care of the cycle of life, the seeds/children, the stems/parents, educators, writers, and artists, and the roots/elders who share their knowledge and pass the traditions onto the next generations so we can continue nourishing our ways of life in balance with the land.
The community being woven at Mazorca Colectiva is families. The core of Mazorca Colectiva are mothers and people working in caretaking roles, whether with infants, children, or elders, the women are the backbone of our community. For us, as immigrant women from the Global South, it is really important to be rooted in our ancestral ways to teach the next generations about possible futures. A future where we don’t have to hide, dim, or assimilate to survive the colonized/capitalist way of life.
Our goal is to uphold the embodied knowledge of ancestral practices. This is because our ways of relating to knowledge production are diverse and often overlooked in the standardized models of education. We expand our agency in the recovery and reconnection of our roots and ancestral traditions. Our way of education is to contemplate the cycles of life and to relate with the land in a good way.
Our story
The main teacher in our process of cultural recovery is the corn.
The history of Mazorca Colectiva is multi-dimensional. Mazorca Colectiva was born under the forces of child and family immigrant incarceration. In a time when our community is forcibly displaced from our homelands and then upon arrival to the so-called U.S. families are incarcerated, and released into an immigration system that exploits the personal histories of violence, we seek to tend to the wounds these systems make through our ancestral practices. Mazorca Colectiva was born under the forces of racial capitalism, at the time when the COVID-19 Pandemic hit our community, families had to line up around entire blocks to receive food from pantries because of the economic violence this system imposes upon so-called essential workers. In a time when food insecurity and disease hit our community the harshest, we realized that nobody was coming to save us. We had to look to our inherent sovereignty for survival.
Realizing the potential of relying on our inherent sovereignty has been a process to come out from survival, and realize that within our community we have everything we need. The embodied knowledge of our community reflects the rich cultural heritage we carry: from Indigenous foodways to Traditional birth-work practices, to the construction/building skills, we need not look any further to find that our community is resourced to not only survive but to thrive. That is what Indigenous self-determination means to us.
Mazorca Colectiva is based in East Elmhurst and Jackson Heights, Queens. It all started in a school community garden called the Lions Den Garden and then expanded into the Peace Garden. That is where we currently plant the seeds to make herbal medicine. Itr is where we teach the children of the East Elmhurst Community School about the cycles of the earth and the seasons. The garden is where we hold ceremonies, conduct meetings, cultural exchanges and art workshops. It is a center for community organizing.
Our Restorative Ancestral Educational Practices seek to:
- Recreate the tribal model of kinship with the earth and all beings that live on it
- Honor the caretakers of the land and the memory of our ancestors
- Implement Earth-based learning in our historically disinvested community
- Uphold the embodied knowledge of our community members
- Involve parents and caretakers in their children’s education
- Create community-based learning inclusive of all families
- Heal through the practice of Indigenous food and land sovereignty
- Create an interdependent ecosystem where the elders and children lead us
- Accompany our kin in detention centers
Partners
mazorcacolectiva@gmail.com