Action 1 | Teko Pora

Home is where my soul is located…home is here, home is there, home is them, home is me, home is us...

Guarani cosmovision talks about “Yvymara’ei”, the land without evil:
“a land where the corn grows by itself and men and women can become immortal.”
The Guaranies are in permanent search for this land. This search is based on their profound care for the earth. Looking for it allows them to have balance in the way that they relate to the soil. How they take only what they need and when the earth demands to rest, they move. While they are in that piece of land, they call it “Tekoha”, their place, their home… While living there, they practice the “Teko Pora”, the good living. It is a true ecological balance.

My “diaspora”, the exodus from my homeland brings me to a place of reflection, where the Guarani people’s voice talks about better ways of knowing, doing and being in their intrinsic relation to the earth. But what are my borders, where do they start and end?. Can Canada be the land without evil?. A place where I can be myself?  Definitely it cannot be a land without evil, because otherwise we would have been all immortals, but on the other side, many times, not always, I can be myself.

Diasporic Immigration brought me here, and it made me belong also to this piece of soil. I can hear the colonial voices of oppression, misogyny, sexual discrimination, conservatism, puritanism, ignorance as the border maker from my embryonic home ground. I can not stay within those boundaries. I do not want to.

My latinx american epistemology is filled with questions: When did I arrive? Did I just do?, Can I reconcile acknowledging that my native home ground didn’t want me and that my new one doesn’t really know what to do with me? Because colonial voices also exist in Canada and they talk about me as the “exotic”, the other, the darker. Our current state of unsustainability, (with planetary boundaries that are bleeding), scream for the inextricable need of an ontological diversion from modernist, individualist, capitalist ways. These are ALL mannerisms from Colonialism.

Departing from the homogenizing frame of western understanding can lead us to sustainable futures. To shift away from looking for the universal (the global, in a modernist way) and redirect onto the pluriverse, where many worlds relate to the earth already caring, respecting and restoring it.

Home is here, there, us, them.

MBA’EICHAPA Vancouver!

TERERE, MATE, CHIPA, THE GRIND, MOUNT PLEASANT, SALMON, CANUCKS, GRANVILLE ISLAND, IMMIGRANT, BROWN, QUEER, STANLEY PARK, IDENTITY, DISTANCE, MONTREAL, ASUNCION, VANCOUVER, MBA’E HA’E PIKO?

Tereré | yerba mate, water, lemon and friendship

When we drink tereré in Paraguay, it is all about sharing. It is a way to connect, to pause, to be grateful…It is a moment of reflection, to start over, to move on, to be back.