#3: Loving The Land, Loving Ourselves with Alex Purple Liera, brönte velez, and Carla Macal
[This event was broadcast on Tuesday, May 10, 2022]
Loving ourselves means loving the land. Somos tierra que camina. We are soil that walks.
Loving Economies means loving the land, tending to the land, tending to ourselves and our relations. It means dismantling land as property. Like water, earth/soil is a relative, it is not to be sold and enclosed (in property rights, in cement, in commodification).
Hear from brönte velez, Alex Purple Liera, and Carla Macal share about their land relationships and the work they are doing to heal and deepen their relationships with the land, themselves, and their communities.
Alex Purple Liera, Healer
Alex Purple Liera is an educator, activist, community organizer, and healer. She helped start the El Sereno Community Land Trust and has worked with along side the LA CLT Coalition. She is the founder of the WOC Sister Collective. The collective offers a wide variety of BIWOC focused events, circles, and workshops that educate, motivate, and empower womxn in our community.
brönte velez, Artist
brontë’s work and rest is guided by the call that “black wellness is the antithesis to state violence” (Mark Anthony Johnson). as a black-latinx transdisciplinary artist, curator, trickster, educator, jibarx and wakeworker, their eco-social art praxis lives at the intersections of black feminist placemaking, abolitionist theologies, environmental regeneration and death doulaship.
they embody this commitment of attending to black health/imagination, commemorative justice (Free Egunfemi) and hospicing the shit that hurts black folks and the land through serving as creative director for Lead to Life design collective and ecological educator for ancestral arts skills and nature-connection school Weaving Earth. they are currently co-conjuring a mockumentary with esperanza spalding in collaboration with the San Francisco Symphony and practicing pastoral care as a co-steward of a land refuge in unceded Kashia Pomo territory in northern California.
mostly, brontë is up to the sweet tender rhythm of quotidian black queer-lifemaking, ever-committed to humor & liberation, ever-marked by grief at the distance made between us and all of life —
Carla Macal, MSW
Carla Macal is a popular educator, yerbera, and community organizer. She was born in Guatemala and raised in East Los Angeles. Carla is part of community space Memories of El Monte, a cultural arts space centering QTBIPOC artists. Carla is also the creator of Ixoq Arte, an herbalist project preserving ancestral Indigenous knowledge. She identifies as an interdisciplinary community scholar engaged with on the ground research and social justice work.