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Ecosystems of Care
When I was expecting my second-born earth-side child, Maxwell, I thought I knew what to expect—because I had done it before just two years earlier when my oldest earth-side child Sofia was born. Any woman with two or more children will laugh when they read that part.
What a mother learns is that each life is unique, with needs as nuanced as the individuals themselves. Meeting those needs comes with its own set of circumstances, often unpredictable and deeply personal. In my mothering story, these differences began to reveal themselves right in the delivery room. Sofia was born without any medical intervention—like a jaguar, I grunted, growled, and roared her into existence, despite the nurses pleading with me to “be quiet.” Roaring was my pain management. When I gave birth to Max, the pain hit differently, and I immediately said “Fuck this, gimme the epidural!” The absence of pain allowed the natural waves of oxytocin to flood my body, making me feel euphoric, almost high on ecstasy—and I didn’t mind one bit.
As a baby, Sofia preferred constant contact She nursed, snoozed, and took in the world while strapped to my body for the first few months of her life. We were like kangaroos. But when Max arrived just 23 months after his sister, I couldn’t keep up with a newly walking, running, and climbing toddler—while wearing a new infant 24/7—it wasn’t sustainable. I decided a baby swing might be a good helper. After testing a few, we found one Max seemed to enjoy—thankfully, it was the cheapest option. Max would happily swing while Sofia and I played on the floor in front of him. He loved that swing so much that Sofia began telling me to “put baby here” when she wanted undivided mama time. When Max needed his turn for focused attention, I’d set Sofia up on our king-sized bed with books, crayons, and episodes of Yo Gabba Gabba, where she would happily lounge.
Now, at eight and ten years old, their preferences are still uniquely their own. Max loves swinging his way into relaxation, while Sofia fiercely protects her “quiet alone time,” sprawling out on her bed to draw on her iPad, read books, or watch anime.
This is a part of the ecoystem of parenting known as Nature and Nurture. Nature describes a child’s genetic inheritance, while Nurture refers to the environmental factors and lived experiences that shape their development, an area concerned especially with how their needs are met. Ideally a child is nurtured with care, and love, and their unique needs are respectfully factored into how care and love is provided. When a child’s needs are met consistently, something called “self-actualization” is made possible.
The scientific exploration of self-actualization and its connection to meeting basic needs is often attributed to the work of Abraham Maslow, an American psychologist and eugenicist who published his “Hierarchy of Needs Theory” in 1943. His theory identifies five categories of human needs that dictate an individual's behavior: physiological needs, safety needs, love and belonging needs, esteem needs, and self-actualization. Maslow also proposed that meeting these needs enables individuals to become self-actualized, reaching their fullest potential.
However, while Maslow is credited with popularizing this concept, the studies that informed his theory included a six-week stay with the Blackfoot people of Siksika Nation, where he observed aspects of his theory in practice. Blackfoot elders shared their traditional ways with him, explaining that “each person fit and belonged and was secure…Each person was valued, welcome, protected, included, taught to give back, and provided the opportunity to become actualized.” By this understanding, self-actualization is deeply communal—of, by, and for the community—rather than centered solely on the individual. For those of us raised in Capitalist cultures, it is crucial to revisit this idea of being “taught to give back” as an essential element in fostering self-actualized humans as indigenous practices are often overlooked or appropriated, and consumed passively.
The Western concept of self-actualization, as defined by Webster’s Dictionary, is “the realization or fulfillment of one's talents and potentialities, especially considered as a drive or need present in everyone.” This definition does not include the “taught to give back” part. We might argue that this does not mean “giving back” is NOT valued, but the system of American Capitalism which treats healthcare, housing, education, and food as market goods rather than basic human rights—is a reflection of a value system. Capitalism turns accessing basic needs into a competition that reduces the ability of a great number of people to have what they need, to reach their full potential.
In this context, “giving” is often perceived as anti-capitalist, and when it does occur, it is primarily channeled through systems of charity rather than mutual aid. While charity can succeed in providing something where there was previously nothing, its method of delivery often undermines the recipients’ ability to self-actualize by demanding they pay in dignity what they cannot afford monetarily. Charity systems typically operate through a top-down model, where resources are distributed by those in power and accompanied by hierarchies of deservingness that impose oppression, judgment, and dehumanization alongside access to basic needs.
Capitalist cultures frequently equate self-actualization with access to resources and an individual’s ability to “take care of oneself” without relying on external support. Within this framework, self-actualization shifts from being a holistic necessity for societal well-being to a measure of personal achievement within a materialistic hierarchy.
To return to parenting as an illustration: a capitalistic approach would demand that a child trade their dignity to access basic needs. This might look like the child betraying their sense of self or enduring abuse at the hand of their caretaker to secure access to food, water, or shelter. In a parenting context, such behavior would rightly be classified as abuse.
Think on that last illustration for a minute.
If we are to advocate for all people having what they need to become their best selves, how must we rethink our relationships with ourselves, our communities, and our resources? Let’s imagine ourselves as a garden. A garden is home to plants, and for plants to thrive, they need four essential elements: light, air, water, and proper soil. Within a garden, the quality of these elements—light, air, water, and soil—can vary significantly from one side of the space to the other.
A seasoned gardener observes how the sun moves across the land, learns the specific needs of each plant, and tends to them accordingly. Shade-loving plants are nestled under trees, while heat-loving plants are placed in the south, where the afternoon sun blazes. Sun-loving plants that can’t tolerate heat find their home at the northern end, where the cool morning light is strongest. A citrus tree is planted in well-draining, nutrient-rich soil, while tomato plants, which can coexist with caterpillars that nibble their leaves, are given a plot of their own—carefully distanced from plants that cannot withstand the caterpillar’s munching. As each plant is given what it needs the whole garden thrives, it becomes an ecosystem of self-sustaining life, and it produces an abundance of resources.
What mothering has taught me is to observe the needs of my children, appreciate the nuances of their individuality, and respond as generously as I can. Caring for people isn’t about treating everyone the same or imposing expectations from one experience onto another. I’ve learned that when I approach the act of nurturing with a mother’s mindset, or a gardener’s mindset, the rewards are abundant, and the work becomes lighter.
By cultivating care in this way—responsive, thoughtful, and attuned to the unique needs of each life—we create spaces where growth and flourishing happen naturally. Whether we are tending to children, communities, or ourselves, this approach fosters an ecosystem of mutual thriving, where every member is valued, nurtured, and encouraged to reach their fullest potential.
What might you change about the way you make art, teach, design, or work if you saw your practice as a garden? How might your perspective shift if you began to see every human as a child with unmet needs? How have you been nurtured by the garden, and how could you give back?
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/moral-landscapes/202110/indigenous-self-actualization-is-communal
https://positivepsychology.com/self-actualization/
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Engraged
Three-day old Maxwell latched on, but the milk would not come out, and he pulled away howling. His face was red and angry, and my chest was throbbing. My Mother in Law stood in the doorway watching helplessly. I handed her the baby and decided to try pumping, again nothing would come out. I went to my phone where I pulled up breast feeding support chats on La Leche League and typed “Why won’t my milk ‘let down’?” What I learned was that I was “Engorged” which meant my tetas were so swollen and so full of milk, that the ducts that allowed that milk to escape were pinched shut—and I should place bags of frozen veggies under and over my chichis to reduce the swelling and make room for the milk ducts to open back up. Within minutes, milk was pouring out of me. Maxwell latched, chugged, and knocked out. I pulled out my pump and decided to drain everything out so my body could start fresh. I pumped out 32 ounces of milk in that session.
On Tuesday November 5th, My husband, Jay, and I filled out our voting ballots with our kids, and stuck our “I voted” stickers to their t-shirts and dropped them off at school before going to drop off our ballots at the polling center. We were living in a bubble of highly likely favorable outcomes.
Because my college is a public institution we are extremely limited in what we can say or do during an election cycle. To stay on the safe side, I encourage my students to vote, I explain the importance of voting, and I give them time during class to go vote at our campus based voting center. Although it wouldn’t take very much sleuthing on their part to figure out which way I swing on the political spectrum. My identity as a Mexican American woman, a Feminist, a Queer Ally, and an advocate for marginalized populations is foregrounded in my syllabus. On my way to work I stopped and purchased a bag of candy and some cookies for my students. When I presented them with the election day treats one of them said “Oh good, I love stress eating.” we laughed a little and had a chat about how students were reflecting on this election and what it was like for some of them to be voting for the very first time.
After work I picked the kids up from school, and we headed home to watch the numbers roll in. The dread of the feeling that I felt on election night 2016 started to creep in like a shitty acid flashback, or maybe food poisoning is a better metaphor. My stomach started to ache, and I decided to try and go to bed. By morning everything had pretty much been decided. The orange pendejo won again.
I woke the kids up for school and the first thing they said was “Did she win?” and when I told them she did not their little faces dropped. “BUT WHY MOM?” they asked “He’s an abuser though!” they said. “How can an abuser become a president?!” It was a hard moment, I had no answers that could provide any sort of clarity. I said something like “Thankfully we have term-limits and he is not allowed to be president again after this term.” and then Jay and I took them to school. As soon as we were alone again, Jay looked at me and I burst into hot angry tears. My first verbal response was “America hates women more than it loves democracy. America chose patriarchy and white supremacy.”
Being a woman is exhausting.
For all the pain, violence, and love that women pour into making human life possible, we receive so little from our culture in return. Our fathers and father figures abuse us, our husbands betray us, random men on the street violate our peace and safety as if for sport. The boys in our classrooms chase us on the schoolyard like predator and prey, while the school principal dismisses it as “boys being boys.” And then there’s the things waiting for you when you in the unknown. There’s the time you had to help one of your favorite students file a Title IX report against another favorite student. There’s the day when you opened up a pile of students sketchbooks to grade them and found unsettling, manic drawings of yourself by a kid who gives you the creeps. He’s scrawled your name across the page, only to slash it out—his twisted way of reminding you he’s watching, thinking, waiting. You start delaying your walk to the car after class, taking precautions so he can’t follow you. And you live like that every fucking day.
When I got myself into therapy just before turning 40, I got in touch with my anger in a way I hadn’t before. I learned that anger needed me to honor its presence as a signal that an injustice was happening—and I needed to do something about it in order to protect myself. I grew up with men who were prone to sudden outbursts—shouting, throwing things, a violence that burst forth unpredictably. I never wanted to be like that, so I kept my anger locked inside for most of my life. That meant I didn’t seek justice for myself—for far too long.
My therapist said that what I grew up witnessing was not anger, but rage. She explained: “Rage is an extreme form of anger, often violent and uncontrollable. Anger, on the other hand, is a response to injustice. It’s a signal telling us to protect ourselves, seek safety, or fight for what’s right.”
My morning-after election feeling was not anger, it was rage. I could feel it’s hot flood of sangre boiling up in my body, an epic wave that rivaled Kubrik’s elevator of blood from the movie the Shining. But like my milk swollen tetitas, it has nowhere to go, I was ENGRAGED. Stuck full of feelings that need a safe way out.
In one attempt to relieve myself I just spouted all my thoughts into voice notes using the OtterBox app. I thought maybe I could form it into some sort of coherent essay later.
When I looked at the “Summary” of my stream of angry consciousness the next day it read:
Speaker 1 expresses a strong desire to stop considering white perspectives in their work, noting that previous efforts to include the white perspectives often resulted in additional labor, effectively “doing their work” for them.
Speaker 1 argues that homogeneity is a myth, asserting that any space with humans present inherently includes experiences of marginalization, otherness, and/or trauma. Firmly rejecting all notions of homogeneity, Speaker 1 describes any belief in homogeneity is a marker of ignorance and low intelligence. They contend that no one is fully exempt from the violence of marginalization or suffering, and that the desire for or assumption of homogeneity perpetuates harm. In this view, both the presumption and pursuit of homogeneity are acts of violence.
In reevaluating their approach to solidarity work, Speaker 1 reflects on past collaborations with white individuals, describing these experiences as effectively performing their labor. They express a decision to no longer assist white culture or go out of their way to be helpful in this regard.
The speaker also addresses critiques of the Imago DEIsign framework, particularly those focusing on its applicability to “non-marginalized” individuals. They assert that such feedback should no longer be considered constructive but instead challenged outright.
I read it and thought, “WOW. I’m really fucking angry at white culture.” For a moment, I felt a pang of guilt. But as the week went on and I checked in with my homies, that guilt began to wane. The response I was hearing from everyone was strikingly similar: we’re all tired. Tired of the güeritos and their “useful POC” helpers running their dog-and-pony show while we’re left to figure out how to survive. What we want—what we need—is space to focus on building real solidarity and survival networks from the inside, with those who will actually live through the worst consequences of this election.
Then I checked in with my friend Mark, a white man and a strong ally in our workplace. He shared his own frustration about how his white friends and family were responding to the moment. He told me about a conversation with one of his friends, a white man and a Democrat, who said: “Don’t worry, we’ll be okay ‘cause we’re white.” Mark shook his head in disappointment as he repeated the line.
I looked at him and said, “You can go tell your friend this: in communities of color, we’re all bracing ourselves for the suffering that’s about to touch every single one of our lives. We’re doing everything we can to prepare to take care of each other, because the one thing we all understand is that this shit has nothing to do with race. Race in America is a smokescreen to protect the capitalistic caste system. Until the white people at the bottom—the ones with the same boot on their neck as us—realize they’re in this with us and decide to do something about it, we’re all stuck here.”
He looked surprised. I laughed a little as the familiar warmth of oxytocin spread across my skin. My rage was letting-down, but I knew it wasn’t gone. Like mother’s milk, it would build again, become full and aching, and demand release. But this cycle—of tension, release, and renewal—is what keeps me moving forward. It reminds me that anger, like love, is a force that needs tending and has the power to nourish change when given the space to flow.
“Shipping The Work”
A reflection on a semester of sharing my grad work with a broader audience.
From the moment we learn to make a mark, we become artists. The creative act is one that starts in childhood—without any awareness of an audience—it is a blissful bubble that begins to burst the first time someone notices your work and makes a comment. We often receive praise that excites us, like “WOW!” or critique that confuses us, such as “Why is your cat purple? You do know that cats aren’t purple, right?” This marks the beginning of realizing that people will respond to what you create—for better or worse, no one is objective when interpreting your talent. Your parents might hang your drawings on the fridge, and family visitors might also notice and comment. And then, all sorts of strange reactions start to emerge. Some adults will praise you, while others raise their eyebrows suspiciously. They may ask for an autograph or predict your future fame. In America, the weirdest visitors will point toward your creative expression as a red flag for a future full of queerness, and poverty.
For the most part, though, the childhood creative act remains one of solitude. The work is made for the self—and becomes a way for us to interpret the world, and our relationship with it. At its best, it’s about making imaginary worlds you can escape into. Art often begins as a practice rooted in indulgence, personal bias, and care for the process itself, with little thought given to an audience. However, as you grow older and choose to turn art into a livelihood—whether as a painter, sculptor, designer, writer, filmmaker, or photographer—the audience becomes an essential part of your financial success.
As a designer, I’ve had plenty of practice aligning visual communication goals with an intended audience—often without too much friction. Because I’ve been able to sustain myself financially through graphic design, my personal work as an artist has never really left that childhood place of indulgence, it has remained unconcerned with an audience. While I brought personal perspectives and artistic authorship to design projects in undergrad, I never truly pursued capitalizing on that type of work. For the past 15 years, my personal creative practice has remained by me and for me.
Earning my MFA with VCFA has given me the space to indulge in creating new bodies of work and practicing “shipping” them to a range of audiences through exhibitions, critiques, and social media. Each instance of “creative shipping” has been a learning process, teaching me what it means to find and identify with an audience. I’ve also learned how to emotionally navigate the dynamics that arise when someone feels left out and demands—either consciously or subconsciously—that I make them my audience.
My creative practice has always been deeply personal—by me, for me—and I’ve never aspired to create work with universal mass appeal. Yet, this experience has introduced a vulnerability I’ve actively avoided: the hope of finding people who will engage with my work critically and, let’s be honest, respond favorably.
Because neither my livelihood nor my sense of self depends on attracting a large or broad audience, sharing my work feels more like a social experiment—a way to extend academic inquiry and explore the cultural psyche of those who interact with it. If I’m being completely honest, this work has become something of a vibe-check tool for me. I can tell a lot about the room I’m in by how people respond to it.
Recently, I was invited to participate in a faculty show at the art gallery of the college where I teach. This space brought together a group of artists and designers who share important aspects of identity and experience. I was not the only feminist, Chicana, first-generation child of immigrants, or working-class person exploring the intersections of policy and our bodies. My altar series was placed a la izquierda of another Mexican American artist whose work also grappled with themes of decolonization, code-switching, and the tension between self-perception and external perception.
At the opening, we had an in-depth conversation about our work and its connections. We asked each other questions that pushed our thinking about these new bodies of work, both still in process. Feedback poured in, not just from my own students who visited the show, but also from students in other disciplines whose questions and comments resonated with shared, relatable experiences.
This experience has given me the space to fully understand and articulate what it means to bring my full self into different environments. Shedding the acts of code-switching and people-pleasing that BIWOC are often violently conditioned to perform can paradoxically make your authentic self a barrier to access. I teach at a “Hispanic Serving Institution,” where over 50% of our students identify as part of the Latinidad. Among faculty, however, only 13% are “Hispanic,” and just 3% are Black/African American.
Reflecting on this experience and seeing my body of work as an avatar of sorts gives me some distance to articulate something I’ve felt but struggled to put into words. The contrast in how I am received when I walk into my classroom wearing a fresh set of nails, hoops, and huaraches versus how I am perceived in the all-faculty meeting that follows is noticeable. Presenting my personal work feels like creating a proxy version of myself—an avatar testing its reception across various contexts to gauge each environment’s response. Because this work is not my physical body, it gives me a layer of safety, allowing me to be even bolder and more unapologetic.
In some spaces, my work—and by extension, myself—is perceived as foreign, confusing, or even offensive. Elsewhere, it is met with curiosity, though often tinged with a subtle exoticism. Sometimes, I’m deemed “too much,” while in other spaces, I am celebrated as “just right.” But my favorite spaces are those where both me and my work are welcomed as healing. My work is medicine for the liberation of the immigrant child, the neurodivergent eldest daughter, the woman who is exhausted by patriarchy, the
Chingona who likes to say bad words, and lovingly embraces her inner puta.
The work I have made during this period has pushed my roots deeper into my soil and has made me MORE of who I am. I am a curandera, a caretaker, a medicine woman carrying antidotes against the very oppression and violence I’ve suffered—in my blood.