Healing Through Cultural Knowledge

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In July and August 2020, the Alliance for California Traditional Arts hosted a five-part series of workshops called La Cultura Cura (Culture Heals). Our Building Healthy Communities artist fellows led online sessions focusing on how the traditional arts can guide us toward healing and peace during times of great stress. In this Q+A, ACTA Program Manager Betty Marín speaks with Artist Fellows Luz Marlene Cordero and Dalila Mendez about the relevance of traditional arts in mental wellness.

“La Cultura Cura: Using the traditional arts to cope with stress and anxiety” was an online workshop series that grew out of almost a decade of work in Boyle Heights with the Building Healthy Communities initiative funded by The California Endowment.  In this program, the Alliance for California Traditional Arts has elevated traditional arts practices that center community knowledge and culture in advocacy efforts around health equity, investment in youth, anti-displacement efforts, restorative justice, and the expansion of physical and mental health services in Boyle Heights. Through the processes of co-creation, engagement, wellbeing, and collective change that are embedded in the traditional arts, ACTA’s Artist Fellows create paths for everyday activists to live into and practice the changes they want to see in their communities and beyond. 

ACTA’s model has been to place one traditional artist fellow and one mentee in each of the individual health equity campaigns in Boyle Heights.  The mentor-mentee relationship mirrors teacher-student relationships in traditional arts contexts that assure the transmission of collective knowledge. The La Cultura Cura series was an opportunity for the artists to work together across four campaigns: Health Happens with Prevention, Health Happens in Schools, Eastside Leads, and Invest in Youth. Artist Fellows lifted up mental health and wellness as essential to the activism work we do, especially at a time when anxiety and stress are heightened for all of us as we continue to face the COVID-19 pandemic.

We partnered with the LA County Department of Mental Health through their Promotora program, which supports culturally sensitive community health educators who work to reach the Latinx community and other underserved communities with resources around mental health and other health issues. We worked with promotora Maria Moreno to pair her mental health curriculum with a traditional arts component led by our Artist Fellows. The program focused on how cultural practices support our healing through engagement with plants, altars, songwriting, and other day to day traditional practices. The series included five weekly sessions that took place between July and August 2020. 

In this story, we invited two of the artists to share their experiences in these workshops: Luz Marlene Cordero and Dalila Mendez. Luz  has been mentored by Ofelia Esparza and Rosanna Esparza Ahrens for the last almost three years in the Health Happens with Prevention campaign. Dalila has been the Artist Fellow within the Eastside Leads campaign working against displacement and for equitable development for almost two years. 

What workshop did you lead and how did you develop the theme?

Luz

The workshop that I carried out was on loss and grief: El Rebozo de Bienestar, with the support and guidance of my teachers Mrs. Ofelia Esparza and her daughter Rosanna Esparza Ahrens. The theme was developed with the cultural context in mind first. Second, the pain of loss without being able to say goodbye, especially in these pandemic times that are affecting the entire world.

One of the main activities during the workshop was making a paper flower. The flor de cempazuchitl (cempasúchil) is the traditional flower used by many Mexican communities, and in particular in Oaxaca, to create the traditional altars that are made to honor and remember our loved ones who are already in the process of transcending into divinity.

It is incredible how the process of transforming a few simple sheets of paper can help participants visualize and connect with pain from the past that has not yet been released.

Through traditional arts they managed to create a beautiful flower that by tradition has been made to guide the spirit of our loved ones to find their way back to the home to which they belonged.

Dalila

I led the workshop Planting seeds of healing: how to use plants to heal. As we discussed how la cultura cura [how culture heals], it inspired the theme of remembering our ancestral stories and knowledge around plants and how they can heal. In our and all communities we have so much cultural knowledge that we can all learn from, reconnect with, and honor. This workshop was inspired by the healing properties of plants that my grandmother imparted to me.  During our workshop we discussed our memories and knowledge that we carry about plants and our connection to the earth. I presented four plants that can be easily found either in your neighborhood or at your local store.  The plants we talked about were chamomile, lavender, mint and lemon balm and their help with alleviating stress and anxiety.   

How does it reflect the work you’ve done within the BHC (Building Healthy Communities) and how is it different?

Luz

Since I became part of the BHC, I have tried to reflect in my work not only that the traditional arts can be a bridge of transition to build even healthier communities, but also to do it with commitment and dedication. Today, I feel that we have been able to awaken that existing need in our community to achieve a better emotional balance.

Dalila

It reflects the work by continuing the dialogue around land and cultural knowledge. We continued our discussion on our connection with land and plants as a way to help build healthy communities.

ACTA Story Multi-genre Visual/Craft/Material Arts Greater Los Angeles Los Angeles County Latino/a/x