Xochicoatl Bello (they/she/amor) is a deindigenized queer healing practitioner, cultural worker, educator, earth steward, and good ancestor-in-training. Xochicoatl focuses on cultivating cultures of healing by restoring our connections to the sacredness of self, each other, Earth, and ancestors through ceremony, circle practice, Indigenous technologies, and agricultural traditions. They have co-created healing spaces for over a decade in Boston Public Schools, community gardens, the Hudson Valley with Kite’s Nest & Sweet Freedom Farm, and across Turtle Island through their virtual learning herbal programming explicitly for queer, trans, Black, Indigenous, and people of color (QTBIPOC).
Their work invites community into herbal medicine making, growing foods with all of our relations in mind, ceremony, and circle practice. Xochicoatl believes that these Indigenous technologies have kept our people healing for generations, and are how we find our way back from the violences of colonization, and transform the wounds of oppression into more healthy, harmonious, and justice-filled connections with ourselves, community, and the Earth.
Xochicoatl comes from Afro-Indigenous, Portuguese, and Spanish bloods via love and colonization rooted in Central & Southern Mexico, from a people recovering their memory, from a people in treaties with peoples and lands alike reclaiming their sovereignty. They hold healing spaces in relationship with the Earth with the prayer that when we heal the soils that sustain us, tend to the seeds, tend to our hearts, and tend to our relations, we remember our bodies as sites of wisdom, we heal our souls, and we awaken ancestral memory that we have always been free.
They deepen their prayer for intergenerational healing & the return of the sacred contracts that have sustained conditions for all life to thrive by tending to their own healing, staying close to their elders & the earth. They are (un)learning how to be in sacred relation, honoring the stories of all beings & understanding diversity as essential to our existence. Xochicoatl is building relations with themselves, the people of the lands they are on, their ancestral communities, and nature to assure our relations, like our medicines, are here for the next seven generations. They are planting seeds for relationships of reciprocity, responsibility, and redistribution with Indigenous, Afro-Indigenous, people of color, LGBTQAI, and immigrant communities across Turtle Island through art-based community engagement, storytelling & healing encounters.
Post-Institute: Transformative Action Plans
Xóchicoatl is dedicated to addressing ‘susto’, a condition of intergenerational chronic soul loss manifesting as physical ailments, mental and emotional distress, and social harm such as anti-blackness and xenophobia. Through racial healing, they envision programs like A Bridge Home—a 9-month virtual Decolonial and re-indigenizing journey for the diaspora’s children, aiming to recover and reclaim their essence, life, and interconnectedness.
In addition, an upcoming project, Woven, is an encrypted, digital, and printed database connecting sanctuary communities across borders, set to launch in 2024. Their ongoing initiative, ‘omeyolotzintlalli’, establishes two earth and ancestrally-based sanctuaries bridging the US-Mexico border for BIPOC immigrants, LGBTQIA community members, and individuals with disabilities in California, USA, and Yucatan, Mexico.
