Voices From The Ancestors: Xicanx and Latinx Spiritual Expressions and Healing Practices

I have three contributions in this important anthology on healing. The first is a how-to guide for a moon ceremony; the second, a Chalchihuitlique ritual to honor the anniversary of a child who has passed; and the final is how to honor a child during Dia de los Santos (the day of the dead reserved for children who have passed). To purchase click HERE. 

The Labor of a Dream, my poem published in Poets & Dreamers

My poem, The Labor of a Dream, was published in Poets & Dreamers, an online literary magazine. This was written on Labor Day 2017 as the government deliberated over the fate of DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals). If ended, 800,000 registered undocumented immigrants stand to be deported.

Latinas: Struggles and Protests in the 21st Century USA 

It is an honor that my essay, The Poison Beneath Our Feet, was published alongside some of the great Latina thinkers in the US.
Latinas: Struggles & Protests in 21st Century USA is a timely collection of poetry and prose reflecting on women’s lived experiences and the ways that Latinas address the relationship between gender and social change. The contributors are poets, activists, educators, artists, and journalists engaged in a variety of work from community organizing to university teaching. Edited by longtime activist Iris Morales, the selections illustrate how Latinas understand the gendered conditions of their lives and discuss inequities faced as women and also by class, race, ethnicity, national origin, and immigration status. The volume is most closely aligned with the view of feminism as a movement to end sexist oppression, both its institutional and individual manifestations.

The Making of an Angel
- Huizache Magazine

Here, a review of my piece in Huizache in the Los Angeles Review of Books by Alci Rengifo. 

"Salazar, by telling a story about a Mexican tradition, produces a narrative with universal force, because pain and memory belong to everyone."

Our newest issue is great reading, and with the beautiful cover art by legendary Chicano artist John Valdez, you’ll look great reading it! Huizache #6 offers prose from El Paso’s Christine Granados, Denver’s Sheryl Luna, Oakland’s Aida Salazar; from award-winning playwright Octavio Solis, filmmaker/author Jesús Salvador Treviño, and New Orleans’s Bryan Washington. Poets in h6 include California’s Lisa Alvarez, Texas’s Abigail Carl-Klassen, Mexico’s Christina Rivera Garza, New York’s Paco Marquez, Michigan’s Rachel Nelson and New Mexico’s Joaquin Zihuatanejo. And if that’s not enough, we’ve put linocuts by LA printmaker Daniel González throughout the issue.

My Aunt was a Revolutionary Genral, Mexico's Joan of Arc
- Huffington Post

In the Womb of Love

A conversation about my story and memoir in progress on Good Grief Radio Show hosted by Cheryl Jones.  

A Bereaved Mother on the Right to Die Bill
- Huffington Post

Excerpt from the essay:
Bleeding Dichotomies: A Strategy For Liberation
by Aida Salazar
*All Copyrights Reserved 2015


Manantial- donde nace el agua where water is born.

The Japanese character for listen is written with the characters for soul, body and mind. A message I heard birthed from the mountains of southeast Mexico, spoken in the same tongue my mother speaks and different from those in which I write. In my process of exploring a creative consciousness I have begun to learn to listen. I search for a fluid and modular space that does not distinguish the mind-body-spirit as individual categories commonly understood in Western notions of human existence and functioning. To listen is a simultaneous performing of all of my sensual and mental faculties (hear, see, smell, speak, taste, think) which includes the use of my (often forgotten and dismissed) metaphysical sense (know). To listen then is to enter into the psychic terrain, a new consciousness, where the voices of my ancestors speak,  where the wisdom of the lives I’ve lived inhabit, where my many and often contradictory realities collide and converge, where the “whos” of who I am name, feed, destroy and recreate me at once, so that I may be free to write.

Listen,               

 van cayendo palabras

                 a waterfall of words

el viento arrastra nuesta historia entre las hojas,

the town elders pray poems of liberation

de tu manantial sale sangre

 from your spring

​blood is running

When I listen I depend on movement, a necessary fluidity, that questions the words and forces that define me, examines the dualistic barriers that incarcerate and suffocate me. This is when I can write for me and those like me who carry our uncertain identities on our shoulders-- the uninvited guest, an outsider even inside ourselves and our apparent communities. I must never stay still, for to stay still means to become rigid, cold, dead. My writing must do as leeching does, become a healing tool, one that bleeds the dichotomous definitions into a pool of multiple realities. Listening, I am nourished by the continual flow of blood.

 
the swirl of a child stirs in my brain

algo ha de nacer

it’s sixth sense es sangre

and runs through me like words

“blood tells as blood will”

flooding

flesh falls into my fingers

alive as nipples that touch

a river of red ch’ulel soul- my perpetual revolutions

beyond the womb-world

a stream,

strong with struggle,

joined as moss,

pained as death

deepens and rises

ebbs and knows

rains on

thighs

legs,

achilles,

me.