This past weekend, I drove to Chimayó — not for a meeting or a panel, but for a quiet act of making. At a small prayer bead and poetry workshop, we rolled paper, wire, and beads into prayer strands, guided by Tara Evonne Trudell, daughter of the late AIM leader and poet John Trudell. Some beads read love. Others carried humor, grief, or resistance. We worked slowly. We listened.
Chimayó sits on ancestral homelands shaped by Tewa peoples and long Indigenous trade routes, later woven into Hispano, genízaro, and mestizo settlement. Like many places in southern Colorado and northern New Mexico, it holds memory not as a monument, but as practice — what is carried forward in hands and relationships.
On mine, I wrote: El Derecho de Vivir en Paz. The right to live in peace. It’s a phrase many of us know from a song written by Chilean musician Víctor Jara — born of resistance, carried through decades, and still echoing across borderlands communities where peace remains unfinished business.
Just days earlier, Bad Bunny opened his 2026 show in Santiago with a mandolin version of that same song, inside Estadio Nacional — where the Chilean state once tried to silence dissent. Music carried memories forward. La canción volvió porque las condiciones que nombra no son del pasado.
Here, too.
In rural places like ours, where culture often carries what institutions cannot, these moments matter.
La cultura cura.
Across the United States, immigrant and mixed-status families are living under renewed threat — raids, detentions, and the quiet erosion of constitutional protections. Fear shapes nervous systems, relationships, and access to care. In moments like this, culture is not decoration. It becomes a public-health function: how communities stabilize, remember their rights, and protect one another.
As we step into 2026 — marking the 250th anniversary of the United States, Colorado’s 150th, and Archuleta County’s 141st—celebration alone is not enough. These anniversaries invite reflection on whose peace has been secured, whose voices have carried authority, and whose care systems have been built — or denied.
Pagosa Springs sits on the homelands of the Ute peoples — Southern Ute and Ute Mountain Ute — with long ties to Jicarilla Apache communities as well. Tribal sovereignty means these are distinct political nations with inherent rights to self-govern and steward land, culture, and future generations. Any honest conversation about health here must begin with that truth.
My December column, Community Health Beyond Silos, named a shared reality: our health has never depended solely on institutions. It has always been carried through relaciones, mutual aid, and cultura viva. This piece builds forward, because the question now is scale and power.
No queremos mutual aid para unos cuantos.
Queremos infraestructura de cuidado para miles — sin borrar quiénes somos.
My work from 2001 to 2026 — across food systems, regional health, cultural programming, and writing — has centered observing, listening, convening, and translating lived knowledge into practical care structures: food as medicine, culture as prevention, and public health rooted in place. If we are serious about public health, we must be serious about who designs it, who governs it, and whose histories it is built to serve.
This conversation is not theoretical for working families like mine. Archuleta County has long been sustained by people laboring in agriculture, ranching, timber, construction, caregiving, service work, and small family businesses. These families built homes, fed neighbors, and held communities together through boom-and-bust economies and tourism.
Working-class culture is not a deficit to be managed. It is a source of knowledge, resilience, and care.
We are often flattened into tidy boxes: white, Spanish, Native. That framing may be administratively convenient — but it is historically inaccurate and politically dangerous. Our reality is more complex: Indigenous, Hispano, Chicanx, mestizo, genízaro, immigrant, mixed-race, queer, disabled, multigenerational.
All of this lives here at once.
Journalists like Jeremy Jojola have built trust by naming these complexities while situating themselves within them. Public health built on half-stories will always fail to serve half the people.
Celebration matters — but how we celebrate matters just as much. Moving beyond a single “Spanish fiesta” narrative does not erase Spanish heritage. It honors its relationship with Indigenous, African, mestizo, and migrant histories. Living culture, not museum culture.
Culture also does not mean a return to patriarchal traditions that have excluded women, queer people, and Indigenous and Black voices from authority. The cultures that sustain communities today are feminist, intersectional, and accountable. La cultura cura not by repeating the past, but by transforming it.
Scholars help name what many communities already live: colonialism is maintained through everyday systems — planning, funding, governance — not just historical memory. When those systems fail or exclude, communities build their own. As political theorists remind us, culture is never just expressive. It is structural.
Bad Bunny honoring Víctor Jara was interruption. It was witness — and it was architecture.
If we are serious about scaling care, we must treat culture as infrastructure:
- arts and music as prevention
- food systems as medicine
- education that tells the truth
- community governance with real authority
Later this year, Borderlands Health will turn directly to water, wildfire, land use, and housing pressure — the material conditions now shaping who gets to live in peace here.
El Derecho de Vivir en Paz is not only a song. It is a public-health mandate.
Peace is not silence.
Peace is care — with power.