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73 Next we turn to the West, the place of water, associated with feminine energy and endings or the completion of a cycle. A three-part poetic narrative sets the tone for the following essays, which document the authors’ spiritual journeys while offering methodological and pedagogical tools grounded in the West. Berenice Dimas’s “Queeranderismo” boldly maps the human capacity and political need for healing across generations in ways that recuperate our multilayered selves, including our sexual, erotic-spiritual selves. Evoking the healing maternal waters of the orisha Yemaya—“Durante una ceremonia con Yemaya / My mother’s womb walls spoke to me” (77)—in “I Was a Curandera Before Birth,” Dimas offers us a decolonizing spiritual imaginary where we are invited to envision the possibility of healing the violences experienced by our ancestors, and thus ourselves and future generations. She leads us to the present, showing us how past wounds can linger and make themselves known in unexpected ways. Through the private and communal spaces and tongues of what she calls “Queeranderismo,” “[c]uranderismo in motion for queer cuerpos y espíritus” (79), Dimas powerfully holds up hope for learning how to be our own conscious curanderas capable of healing historical, intergenerational , and present-day traumas. She closes this ongoing healing cycle with “Under the Blankets of our Bed,” an ecstasy-filled “re-remembering of our twospirited ancestral way of loving” (79). Unsurprisingly, several anthology contributors elaborate on the preeminent Virgin of Guadalupe-Tonantzin, a powerful sacred figure representing the feminine energy of la mera mera Madre, Our Mother, the Mother Earth. While C. Alejandra Elenes focuses on the deployment of “borderland/transformative Part two The West Feminine Energies 74 · Part 2 pedagogies” in part 1 and Brenda Sendejo’s emphasis is the development of research methodologies, both frame their spiritual inquiries and conocimientos through the prism of their relationship with Guadalupe-Tonantzin. In this section, Sendejo discusses the various ways that coming into a new consciousness about Tonantzin-Guadalupe are what she defines as “methodologies of the spirit,” the building of knowledge about spirituality through reflecting on one’s “spiritual development, experiences, and trajectory” (84– 85). In “Methodologies of the Spirit: Reclaiming Our Lady of Guadalupe and Discovering Tonantzin Within and Beyond the Nepantla of Academia,” Sendejo analyzes the ways that critically reflecting on “the new knowledge about spiritual connections, intimacy, and healing among and between women that emerged from [her] research experience” (85) helped her develop a deeper understanding of spiritual formations, including her own. Building on Chicana/Latina/Indigenous praxis and taking the “insider/outsider” researcher discussion into new terrains, Sendejo, “a Texas Chicana conducting anthropological research on and with other Texas Chicanas” (85), shows us how our research can be a spiritual process and how our research can benefit from our spirituality. Oliva M. Espín, in “Saints in the Cuban Heat,” is also primarily guided by the feminine energies of the West. She begins her essay by stating that in the course of a life full of dramatic change and uncertainty, two strands have remained constant, shaping the backdrop against which she has made decisions and weaving other strands of her life. One is the guiding force of spirituality and the other the sustaining force of feminism. The author notes that writing about the presence of women saints during her Cuban childhood led her to weaving the strands of women, feminism, and spirituality. The following question is addressed throughout this essay: Why have the lives of women saints created this peculiar point of convergence of the main strands of her life? In the writer’s life she has been witness to how faith and heroism work together in the stories of these women. Espín notes how she has been captivated by the intricacies of these women’s lives, their courage as well as their weakness, their childishness as well as their maturity, and above all, doing what they believed was right regardless of their fears or the opinions of others, including male authorities in the Church and family. She proclaims that her spirituality has grown against the grain of traditional beliefs . Thus, the writer makes available her own memories as a tool to better understand the transaction between the stories of women saints and her life narrative. Irene Lara’s essay also focuses on the relationship with feminine sacred energies and the engagement of such spiritual figures in relation to the cultural and biological maternal bodymindspirit as a generative place. In “Sens- [18.188...

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