Decolonizing in body, heart and mind.
What is CEPA?
CEPA is a project that designs and facilitates encounters rooted in practices to heal accumulated trauma from our being. It’s part of a movement of people working to transform their relationships and everyday life to co-create freedom, centering all marginalized peoples especially Puerto Rican women, gender nonconforming, trans, queer folx. To manifest a just future, we honor the wisdom of the earth and of our ancestors as we work to heal.
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Paths to Healing
Collective Processes: we seek to strengthen our ability to respond to any situation with integrity, embodying horizontality.
Planting and cultivation of medicinal plants: we reaffirm ourselves as guardians of the earth by entering into a reciprocal relationship with other species.
Artistic and creative explorations: we sharpen our perception in order to connect with our truth and our ability to create another world.
Healing Circles: a safe space mostly focused on queer communities to share and witness our individual healing collectively.
The Political Return: we deepen the relationship we have with the diaspora and embrace rematriation and other forms of solidarity that break with historical fragmentation and geographic separation.
Bodies and Movement: we honor the wisdom that lives in our first physical home (our bodies), and we practice ways of moving to be in harmony with their rhythms as we embody new ways of being.
Our Roots
Healing Justice is a term created by black and brown queer and trans folx –mainly black femmes –working for liberation in communities based in the US south. Healing Justice is based on the notion that everything we want to change in the world also lives in our bodies and we can see the impact of this reality on individual, and collective levels. Healing Justice looks slightly different everywhere it is practiced because it is dependent on the context. Without going into depth, Puerto Rico is one of the oldest colonies in the world and so restoring our sense of personal and collective power is key.
Our approach to healing justice is anchored in:
°Rupturing intergenerational violence through holistic and collective approaches.
°Reclaiming our ancient memory and knowledge of our own medicine or way of being and that of this beautiful archipelago known as Boriken.
°Rematriation of folxs from the diaspora is an integral reparation against the massive planned displacement of our peoples from Boriken. More Boris live in the diaspora than on the island(s) and many don’t see any way to return.
One cannot speak of healing justice in Puerto Rico without committing to decolonization.
Decolonization for us is a process that begins as a personal questioning of one’s conditioning (what we value, how we learn) and ends with the autonomy of our lands. Our body is the first territory we can decolonize.
Decolonization is:
°A practice of remembering who we are, and of listening to and strengthening our
intuition and our internal knowing.
°Decolonization is not a metaphor. It is an undoing that has physical, psychological,
social and cultural dimensions and they operate simultaneously and continuously.
Decolonization is something we must practice. It is a series of actions: questioning,
investigating, unlearning, practicing and sustaining. It requires a cultural shift in our collective conditions; and only we can manifest it together.
°It creates the conditions where we are all guardians of the earth: it is a practice of
recognizing, validating and expressing gratitude to the earth and other non-human
beings that live on the planet with us.
°We have witnessed the massive sale of Boriken that urges us to reclaim lands as a
way to allow us to return, remain and live a dignified life.
Solidarity Visits
Solidarity Visits to Casa Taller
Casa taller is the space that CEPA offers to those people committed to healing as a practice of liberation, seeking to strengthen their connection with Boriken and want to connect with people doing activism, cultural and artistic management.