Night Flying and Fly-overs: Notes from a Spiritual Activist Researcher

Irene Lara, Associate Professor, Department of Women's Studies, San Diego State University, ilara@mail.sdsu.edu. Abstract: "Night flying and Fly-overs: Notes from a Spiritual Activist Researcher.” With the aim of... [ view full abstract ]

Irene Lara, Associate Professor, Department of Women's Studies, San Diego State University, ilara@mail.sdsu.edu. Abstract: "Night flying and Fly-overs: Notes from a Spiritual Activist Researcher.” With the aim of cultivating new decolonial feminist languages while simultaneously restoring ancestral ones for contemporary contexts, my presentation will engage the work and words of several Latina/Indigenous/Women of Color "healers," considered so for their engagement in what Laura Pérez terms "curandera work" through their cultural production as writers, activists, and/or spiritual healers: from Aurora Levins Morales' witchy "night flights" that put our Anzalduan "facultud" to healing work, to Layli Maparyan's bold assertion of a "fly over" as a leap of consciousness that will help humanity powerfully shift into what Inés Hernandez-Avila and others immersed in Mesoamerican praxis also theorize as a more gender balanced, socially just era of high spirituality, the "Sexto Sol," to Madre Sarita's democratization of spiritual knowledge and technologies of soul traveling. As a “promiscuous" scholar and spiritual activist committed to moving between and among multiple sites of knowledge construction and meaning making, I foreground the lessons learned from the testimonios of these women that emerge through ongoing decolonial feminist plática-oral history methodologies.