“Andean Baby is for our children, our children’s children, and our inner-children.”

I am a Qariwarmi (Two-Spirit), queer, auntie, educator, community-healer-herbalist, and child of the Peruvian diaspora. I was born and raised in New Jersey where little Lima exists and the Andean community is abundant. As the first in my family born in the U.S. I always had a yearning to return home as a child. I would smell the inside of my relatives’ suitcases when they were visiting from Perú and imagined that’s what it would smell like if I visited. The reality of being a generationally displaced child and growing up in predominately white schools, left me searching for belonging and (re)connection. As someone who hated school growing up, I decided to become a teacher so that I could be the teacher I never had. In my college years I started community organizing in my birth city —Newark, NJ— supporting grassroots efforts that centered mass incarceration, and abolitionist teaching.

My first year in the classroom I was fired for teaching my 3rd graders the truth and it was a high-profile case that garnered mainstream media attention. That teaching experience connected me with organizers and educators in the Bay Area relocating me to Oakland, CA where I found, what bell hooks calls, my “homeplace.” I taught in Oakland for 5 years until the 2020 pandemic; that is when I came to the harsh reality that being a teacher was no longer feeding my spirit and felt unsustainable. I needed time to heal from the institutional trauma I had experienced in schools both as a student and teacher. As I continued to do consulting work with schools and districts, I embarked on a long journey of healing my inner-family (child, teen, twenties, elder).

In 2021, during an ancestral visualization practice I had an encounter with my maternal abuelo. As someone who was murdered by police on the streets of Lima, Perú he affirmed that my calling as an abolitionist educator and healer was ancestrally and intergenerationally aligned and that it was time to take it beyond the classroom. This is what propelled me to return to the motherland and spend two months on the border of Bolivia and Perú. I spent three of those weeks on Isla del Sol, the birthplace of the sun. Floating atop Lago Titicaca, earth’s sacral chakra, our ancestral lands have such strong energetic healing powers that most visitors only stay for a few days. Throughout those weeks I traveled through multiple portals with the support of my ancestors, Pachamama, plant medicine and the cosmos. Being so close to the sun, stars, and moon, literally 2,507 feet above sea level, allowed me to connect to my inner-qariwarmi. Qariwarmi is two-spirit in Quechua; we are healers that embody gender fluidity and serve as a connection between divine feminine and masculine healing energies, a portal between the present and the past, the living and the dead.

I moved through a lot of generational trauma and pain on that trip which allowed me to alchemize the vision that my abuelo spoke over my life. It was on that trip back to the motherland that Andean Baby was born: a resource hub for folks of the Andean Diaspora and beyond to reconnect to their roots through mind, body, and spirit. It was through deep study, practice, and prayer that ancestors revealed to me that Andean Baby is “beyond representation, this is reconnection.” It is a space where we co-create a world of joy, love, and liberation “for our children, our children’s children, and our inner-children.”