ChristinaMaria Patiño Xochitlzihuatl Houle

The views and opinions expressed by speakers and presenters in connection with Art Restart are their own, and not an endorsement by the Thomas S. Kenan Institute for the Arts and the UNC School of the Arts. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Artist, activist and visionary ChristinaMaria Patiño Xochitlzihuatl Houle is the co-founder and lead visionary of Las Imaginistas, a socially engaged art collective working to liberate the public imaginary. 

Several of Las Imaginistas’ projects have centered on Brownsville, TX, including “Taller de Permiso,” an arts and economic-justice campaign. Through hands-on art-making workshops and events, “Taller de Permiso” harnessed the community’s collective imagination to parse and reimagine the municipal permitting process, particularly as it affects small businesses operating in communities of color.

Another Las Imaginistas project is “Borders Like Water,” an ongoing international cross-cultural collaboration between healers, visionaries and thought leaders. “Borders Like Water” centers ancestral wisdoms and environmental understanding to answer the question, “If borders have been like ice, how can they move like water?”

ChristinaMaria is also the Weaver for Voces Unidas, a network focused on immigration and community development issues serving the multi-state Rio Grande Valley. 

In this interview with Pier Carlo Talenti, ChristinaMaria, who is passionate about decolonizing longstanding historical and cultural practices, shares her deep unease with the traditional interview process and its fraught history and power dynamics. She then describes how she herself has honed her own listening practice when she visits and learns from Indigenous communities throughout the Americas.

ChristinaMaria Patiño Xochitlzihuatl Houle: I would like to call in my guides before the interview absolutely officially begins. I have a prayer from Black Elk that I have been connecting with recently, so if it’s all right, I’d like to read that. And it’s up to you whether or not you want to include this.

Pier Carlo Talenti: I’ll definitely include it.

ChristinaMaria: OK. So this is from “Black Elk Speaks.” Black Elk was the healer or — I also like to use the present tense — is a healer with the Lakota. When the ethnographer John Neihardt was looking to document the Ghost Dance, he went to different communities, looking for an elder or medicine person who had experienced or taught the Ghost Dance. It was recommended that he speak with Black Elk. 

This was after Wounded Knee, and Black Elk hadn’t shared his story really with anyone from the outside in quite the same way at that point. He was an elder, and when John Neihardt approached him, he agreed to be interviewed by him. It was really a process of more than a year. They met; they smoked tobacco together; and then he asked Neihardt to come back, I think he said, when the grass was tall. This was also after Black Elk had turned down other people for an interview. 

When Neihardt came back, part of the beginning of their talking was this prayer. I found it really resonant for when speaking to new people to help me ground and help set the space of what my intention is in communicating. So I’ll read this now.

“Great Spirit, you have been always, and before you no one has been. There is no one to pray to but you. You yourself, everything that you see, everything has been made by you. The star nations all over the universe, you have finished. The four quarters of the earth, you have finished. The day and in that day everything, you have finished.

Great Spirit, lean close to the earth that you may hear the voice I send. You, towards where the sun goes down, behold me. Thunder beings, behold me. You, where the white giant lives in power, behold me. You, where the sun shines continually once comes the daybreak, star and the day, behold me. You where the summer lives, behold me. You, in the depths of the heavens and eagle of power, behold. And you Mother Earth, the only mother, you have shown mercy to your children. 

Hear me, four quarters of the world, a relative I am. Give me the strength to walk the soft earth, a relative to all that is. Give me the eyes to see the strength to understand that I may be like you. With your power only can I face the winds. 

Great Spirit, Great Spirit, Great Spirit, all over the Earth the faces of living things are alike. With tenderness have these come up out of the ground. Look upon these faces of children without number and with children in their arms that they may face the winds and walk the good road to the day of quiet. 

This is my prayer. Hear me. The voice I’ve sent is weak, yet with earnestness I’ve sent it. Hear me. It is finished. Hetchetu Aloh. 

Now my friend, let us smoke together so that there may be only good between us.”

And I offered some tobacco for us to the Earth before we began.

Pier Carlo: Thank you.

ChristinaMaria: In light specifically of the importance of tobacco in grounding and offering to prayer.

Pier Carlo: I behold you and I hear you. Thank you.

ChristinaMaria: Thank you. So now I can answer your question or if a new question has arisen.

Pier Carlo: It’s so interesting that you started with this prayer that a white person heard through an interview that was rarely granted by the interviewee, because in our email exchange this morning, you mentioned that you wanted to talk about the legacy and the historic power dynamics of the interview.

ChristinaMaria: I didn’t anticipate when you emailed me that I was going to need or want to get there, but when I saw the questions you sent me, that was what came up in my body. 

I thought of Maria Sabina, who’s an indigenous healer in Oaxaca who was interviewed by R. Gordon Wasson. He was a banker, of all things, interestingly. He was really interested in healing plants. This was before they were made illegal in the U.S., so there were people kind of on the fringes of all different types — at that moment in time it wasn’t just hippies and liberals and people skipping war — who were connecting with plant medicine. It was bankers, and it was psychiatrists, and it was academics.

He went to Oaxaca and found this healer in Huautla de Jiménez. Her name is Maria Sabina, and essentially she was reluctant to be interviewed. She ultimately consented, based on a certain set of agreements, and he violated those agreements. He published writing about her that ended up being on the front page, I think, or the cover of Life magazine, which led to this spiral of events that ultimately just destroyed her life. 

And now if you go there, it’s painful. When she died, she was really rejected by her community. Not only did she die in poverty, but she died with the community really being angry at her for how, they felt, she had brought on all this change. Now if you go there, there’s Maria Sabina taxicabs, or if you get a bus there, there’s a bus with her image on the side of it. So that was the image that came to mind when I read your questions.

The other image that came to mind is, I’ve been reading a little bit of Michael Pollan’s books recently and listening to how he talks to Indigenous people when he asks them for wisdoms or insights about the plants. To me, how it sounds is something to the effect of, “Prove it to me. Prove it to me in a way that I, through my colonial mind, can understand.” There’s this kind of aggression to the investigation that feels less about coming with humility to a teacher and more about coming as a skeptic to someone who may or may not be a charlatan and him trying to ascertain with the supremacy of his cognitive abilities what is real and what is not.

I thought, 'I should think about who is normally in power in an interview. What are the dynamics legacy-wise of white men in power investigating or asking for something?'

So those were the two things that came up in my body. I thought, “I should think about who is normally in power in an interview. What are the dynamics legacy-wise of white men in power investigating or asking for something?” And then discerning whether or not that is applicable or is real or how it should be applied or where it should be contextualized. And then also that the knowledge itself can be cut off, that it can be extracted. 

I knew that as a start, but then it did make me wonder, “Well, what is the history of the language or the process of an interview?” And I thought when we think about land-based cultures, when we think about First Peoples, what is the context of an interview there? If I think about my ancestors on both sides, whether it’s from my white side or my Indigenous side, at some point in both those histories, there were land-based First Peoples. What were those people’s relationships to what now might be classified as an interview, even though they probably wouldn’t have used that language?

And I thought you might be someone who doesn’t know something, and you go to an elder, and you ask for some wisdom. But I think the difference in the way that the tone of interviews has evolved through the colonial, through university systems, through the imposition of Western epistemologies on First Peoples of this continent and on people descendant from enslaved peoples is that instead of coming with a humility and a sense that ... . The wisdom is fully contained. So even if I don’t understand it, that is a truth. What it has evolved to is that the truth of the speaker might be interpreted or classified or deemed correct or not correct, or dismissed or not dismissed.

Pier Carlo: And also certainly in the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries in the Western world, interviews were commodified, of course. There’s a market for them, which complicates things.

ChristinaMaria: Yeah. And then when I Googled “history of the interview” this morning, the first thing that came up was job interviews, “history of the job interview.” I hadn’t gone there in my mind, but that’s a really interesting thing to link this to. Is this resource or is this wisdom worthy of being employed further? 

Pier Carlo: And to connect it to an essay you recently wrote for the Ford Foundation, interviews are also intricately linked to employment and funding. They’re the same thing. You do have to sell yourself to someone in the hopes that they will value your work and your entire being enough to compensate you.

ChristinaMaria: Yeah. There was one question you asked or you sent in the document, I think something like, “Can you give an example of when this work has worked?”

Pier Carlo: Yes, that’s right! The impact question, which I’m always nervous to ask. Talk about that.

ChristinaMaria: Well, it just reminded me of a grant-report question. And I felt like, “Huh, that’s interesting. Am I proving my work to you?” It made that come to mind. 

And then the other thing it made come to mind was this interview I heard with Steve Inskeep for “Morning Edition.” He was interviewing this woman who was a songwriter. I can’t remember what her experience was, but I think she went through some deep meditation practice after she had a close member of her family pass. She said, kind of in passing to answer his question, “I had some very deep messages that I received directly from Spirit. That led me to X, Y, Z, and then I wrote the song.” And Steve Inskeep said something like, “Well, what did Spirit tell you?” 

I just felt like, “Are you prepared for that, Steve? Are you really going to receive it?” Because those messages, they have an energy, and then it’s the job of the receiver to protect them. I think there’s this energy of the interview as embodied through colonization that can feel really like, “I have the right to ask anything, and also I have the right to receive it or not receive it.” Instead of, “Just the act of you sharing, just the act of me receiving is now a responsibility, and I now have to do something with this knowledge.”

So sure enough, she shared what was her very deep truth, and it just became this blip in the interview that then was followed up with the next question. It felt like such a disservice to the gift she had received. 

It reminds me of when I was with the Huichol. The healer I worked with was in Oaxaca at the time. The Huichol do a lot of very intricate beading and art based on the visions they receive in ceremonies, and he had a skull of a cow that was covered in beads. It’s like a foot and a half of very intricate beadwork. We had the altar out for the ceremony, and he had the skull underneath the textile for the whole ceremony. The ceremony is like 12 hours.

He had brought all these ceremonial objects from Nayarit in a big Tupperware box on a bus — he has to travel for nearly 24 hours — and then we get to the land where the ceremony happens. He takes out all the objects, and then he puts this one particular object under a textile so nobody sees it. Then we do the ceremony, and no one sees it. Then at the end of the ceremony, he puts it back in the Tupperware. Someone asked him, “Why do you keep it covered?” And he said, “To protect its energy.” And that comes to mind also in thinking about how we receive or protect the information that's exchanged.

Pier Carlo: Clearly in your work you have to do a lot of interviewing of community members. What did you learn about your own interviewing, the way you get information?

When you asked me that question about impact, the thing I felt was the best way for me to respond was to say, 'I can tell you how I’ve changed.'

ChristinaMaria: I think this is a really important question. When you asked me that question about impact, the thing I felt was the best way for me to respond was to say, “I can tell you how I’ve changed.” I mean, I can tell you other stories, but to really tell you the full scale of what it means to change the imaginary, I have the most insights into how my own imaginary has changed. And that I can track from when we began Imaginistas.

We did a project called “Hacemos La Ciudad.” We asked community members to participate in art events where we would reimagine the city and reimagine a decolonized border. A lot emerged from that project, but I think the thing that really stuck with me afterwards was when I shared it with lots of people, they were like, “This is amazing!” And then I shared it with two people who were kind of high-power people; they were both urban planners. 

Pier Carlo: Shared the results or the plans?

ChristinaMaria: Both. What happened was we did all this artwork to help people imagine what they wanted, and then from the artwork they made, we said, “These are the findings.” Then we gave those findings back to the community and to the government, the city government, and we said, “Here’s what people had to say.”

At that moment in time, that was kind of our best interpretation of how to do a decolonial exchange of information. We didn’t make it based on language. We made it based on other ways of sharing information that were really more somatic. They included words, but they weren’t reliant or using the supremacy of words to leverage everything. Then we acted as the agents with feedback process to say, “All right, if we translate this to words, this is what we think it looks like.” And then we got review and approval and things like that. Helping folks to emerge what their intentions were through this co-creative process was our idea at the time.

So these two individuals, when I asked them what they thought, they said something to the effect of, “I didn’t need you to do all that work in order for me to tell you that. I could have told you that without you talking to all those people.” And I thought, “Well holy shit, that is a very provocative thing to say!” And it really made me think and it really stuck with me. I mean, this was maybe four years ago now.

Pier Carlo: Did you believe them?

ChristinaMaria: I both believed them and didn’t believe them. I believed that they literally thought they knew everything and that they did not think that they needed to do deeper work to listen to the community in order to learn anything, because that reflects the systems that they engage in. They were not placing value on community engagement in the way that we had just done, so it made sense to me that they would entirely dismiss it because that affirmed their logic system. 

I also knew there were things in these texts that they were not implementing or living through practice. So whether or not they thought they knew it, I knew they were not embodying a reality of it.

And then I thought about one person in particular who said [she laughs], “Well, everyone says they want more parks.” And I just thought, “Well, that’s interesting.” And that really stuck with me because I thought, “Well, that is true. I mean we want to be back more in nature. Urban planning is backwards.” But then I thought the thing about this feedback that really bothers me is that I don’t think if we were to repeat this, for example, all along the border, that the land in all these different places would have the same thing to say.

And then it got me thinking about well, the people actually might say things that are kind of similar. And when you think about community development issues, it’s not like we’re asking for radically different issues. When you look at the demands of the Black Panthers, they’re actually very similar to what our community said. It gets manifested in slightly different ways, and a decolonial border is dealing with it from a slightly different viewpoint. But I did see a component of what that person was saying as an important insight.

The other thing that happened at a similar time is somebody told me they’d been hired as an outside agency to interview people at a low-income housing project and ask them how they wanted the community to be redesigned. And they came to me in a laughing and frustrated way to say, “All they say is they want air conditioning. And we’re like, ‘No, you need to imagine more.’” And I thought, well, the reason they’re saying they want air conditioning is because they’ve lived in a life of such extreme oppression where they live in this border region and in this public-housing system where there’s been no air conditioning, and they’ve been asking for it for however long and they haven’t gotten it. They’re saying, “Can you at a minimum get us this one thing that can just help us to think clearly in the middle of the day?”

I felt like the system isn’t set up to support them in really deepening into the whole imaginary of this question. The question and the way that the interaction is set up, there’s not the space for them to really dream or imagine what else they might want. Also dreaming can feel so vulnerable because gosh, you get someone really worked up on a dream, and then you go away and you don’t build it. “Oh, that’s going to piss me off. I just told you my whole dream, and then you didn’t do anything about it.” So it can feel dangerous to really let ourselves dream.

Pier Carlo: Yeah, one’s very vulnerable when sharing a dream because it’s about longing and hope.

ChristinaMaria: Yeah. So to come back to your question of how do we work, when I started the “Borders Like Water” project, I felt that it’s going to be really important to listen to the earth directly and to learn how to listen to the earth. So I began working with Indigenous communities throughout Latin America. I wondered, “Am I going to interview them, or am I going to record this? Or am I going to take notes or photograph?”

I felt like the responsibility is really on me to understand the power that I’m bringing to this circumstance and what is right.

It’s not even like people would always tell me no. I felt like the responsibility is really on me to understand the power that I’m bringing to this circumstance and what is right. I just made the agreement with myself that I was there as a student and that if it felt appropriate to take notes, I would take notes. I pretty quickly stopped recording everything, and I pretty quickly stopped photographing everything. 

And that’s what led, I think, also to a lot of the things that I wrote about in the article I published with “Grantmakers in the Arts” recently, that talks also about the Ghost Dance. You can’t record the Ghost Dance. You can’t document it. I don’t know enough about the traditions to know whether or not it would’ve been appropriate to witness it. The real teachings from the Ghost Dance come from participating in it. 

And I wondered, what would that mean for the art world? If I now were to receive a vision to revive the Ghost Dance, perhaps the most important dance to have happened on the soil of what is now recognized as the United States, I don’t know a foundation that would fund that. It just wouldn’t be appropriate. It would be kind of like a violation of the spirit of the Dance. So I don’t really engage in that way with the wisdom teachers I work with. 

This connects to a woman, Barbara Tedlock, who is an ethnographer who worked with Guatemalan healers. When she went to study them, they gave her permission to record and watch the ceremony. Afterwards she got really sick; she thought she might die. She asked the healer what happened, and he said, “Oh, you violated the ceremony with your intention. Now the spirits are mad, and you probably are going to die.” She was really worried, and she ended up getting medical help and recovered. She came back to the healer, and the healer said, “You have to learn through doing with us as a healer yourself, and then you can write about it.” 

That story really sticks with me, and that’s how I think I approach this work now. I can learn what I’m able to learn by trying to transform myself when I meet with elders, and I can only learn when I’m really trying to engage with respect for these teachers. When it’s appropriate then from that space, I can share the information and understand how to share it out. But that’s how I think about interviewing now.

I think if there’s one thing I wanted to share about the way that we work, it returns me to the first question that also really stood out to me in the list of questions you sent me: what’s the difference between changing the public imaginary and changing the public imagination? I sat with that question a lot, partially because I felt like, “Well, I don’t know. That’s what we do. [Laughing] You tell me what it means to you.” The Spirit told me this is what it’s called. The semantics of it are not really my ... I’m not in a semantic conversation with Spirit.

I think the reason we’re changing the public imaginary as opposed to changing the public imagination is that when I think of the imagination, I think about the individual, the person who has the imagination. When I think about the imaginary, I think about the thing that is in the collective external that is manifest through the individual imagination.

But then I thought, “But it’s kind of an interesting question. What is the difference?” So I thought about it, and then I thought about the legacy of that work of changing imagination or imaginary, and I thought of Toni Morrison’s work on the white imagination and Claudia Rankine and “The Racial Imaginary.” And the framing definitely feels linked to that, but I think the reason we’re changing the public imaginary as opposed to changing the public imagination is that when I think of the imagination, I think about the individual, the person who has the imagination. When I think about the imaginary, I think about the thing that is in the collective external that is manifest through the individual imagination.

I think of the border as an imaginary that is socially constructed. I feel like the root of the work that we’re trying to do as Imaginistas is to understand how we can liberate that space of the imaginary of the collective through working with individuals in all these different ways, whether it’s writing texts or doing this space that sits between art and community-organizing.

I think of this learning as a spiral that instead of going inward and inward and inward, I think of it going more like a DNA spiral. It goes up. It spirals up, up.