Last month, I had the wonderful honor of participating in The Carterhaugh School of Folklore and the Fantastic’s wonderful panel on Folkore and Resistance, along with an incredible lineup of scholars, folklorists, and creators, including Dr. Jean Jorgensen, Dr. Margaret Yocom, Daisy Ahlstone, and Terri Windling. It was a celebration of community, storytelling, and more than a little magic!
To keep the magic of this event going, I’m posting the full transcript of my talk below and the full recording, which is so worth the watch—my fellow panelists had so much joy and wisdom to share. Enjoy!
Joy as a form of Resistance: Conjuring Change by Rewriting Trauma Narratives to be Narratives of Hope
Storytelling has always been one of the most profound acts of magic-making, the most beautiful and healing of spells, the thing I turn to when I need to conjure a new way of being in this complicated, fraught world. As a New Mexican mestiza, a woman of mixed raced heritage, so many stories about people like me are ones of trauma, be it ancestral, generational, or rooted in systemic oppression. And, let’s be real, sometimes we go through things in life that can make us feel closed off, perpetually trying to protect the self from further injury—but that’s no way to live. So when I put pen to paper, I conjure change, a shift away from these trauma narratives towards narratives of joy and hope. And this can be especially important when perpetuating trauma narratives can be a way to reinforce systemic oppression.
As I explain the spell work of writing in the short prose poem “My Joy is My Resistance,” in my first book Everyday Enchantments, “I let my hands relish the feel of my dreams being coaxed to life between my fingers like the red clay of my beloved desert. I mold the clay and I love the earth and shape it into stories they do not want me to tell: the ones of hope. The ones of healing. The ones that remind us of the moon's power and our own capacity for abundance and possibility.”
In fact, all of Everyday Enchantments was written because I was trying to figure out what happiness looks like and what FEELS like day-to-day and to do that, I had to reimagine my life as a sort of fairytale, a place where the mystic could be found in the mundane, where synchronicities and archetypal messages were as common as fairy-godmothers and enchanted objects. In essence, I started focusing on life as a form of lived folklore. Like the fairytales and stories I grew up reading, I was on my own journey of discovery, only instead of saving Middle Earth, traveling to Narnia, or making friends will all the animals of the forest, I was relearned the magic of everyday life.
So folklore and the imagination became a lifeline for me, a way to imagine happiness and fulfillment in a world that doesn’t want people like me to have it. One of the ways I conjured this sense of joy in a fraught world was by examining my relationship to pleasure. It can teach us so much about ourselves. Think about.
In a world that always feeds the negative, which our own fears can magnify, we have to remember that pleasure is a valuable healing tool. It’s something we have to actively nourish and celebrate, like 12 dancing princesses sneaking off each night to dance in a magical kingdom (although I’m simplifying that tale quite a bit). It’s also something we can feel disconnected from when we go on autopilot in a effort to cope with the world around us or our own inner turmoils. Healing our relationship to pleasure can help us process difficult emotions and get real about what we want in life: abundance, meaningful relationships…you name it.
You see this play out in my gothic fairytales, too, like Weep, Woman, Weep, based on the Legend of La Llorona. For those of you who don’t know, La Llorona, or the Weeping Woman is an urban legend that terrifies most Hispanic communities…she is the spirit of a woman who drowned her children in a fit of rage and now sends all eternity roaming the Rio Grande trying to get them back…she just might take you. I have my own spin on this tale in Weep, Woman, Weep, where La Llorona only drowns girls so that they come back and live lives as sorrowful as her own. La Llorona wants to perpetuate the trauma she had to live through in her own life.
The protagonist, Mercy begins her story by telling us, “I am built for tears. It’s in my blood. The women in my life don’t know how to have a life without sorrows.” In the story, she survives an encounter with the Weeping Woman. Mercy survives but doesn’t come back quite right—her tears now have the power to hurt or, she later finds, to heal. She starts in a dark place. She’s dealing with generational trauma, ancestral hauntings, and history of colonization and enforced cultural assimilation written in her blood.
But she chooses to define herself outside of those things. Through her focus on pleasure, the things that make her happy, the things that define and shape her outside of these traumas, she comes into her own—and, eventually, finds a love so strong that not even La Llorona can break it.
Mercy’s pleasures are small, like trashy novels and pretty rocks, really really good turnips and old records. And they’re big pleasures, too, like building a thriving farm from the ground up and nurturing her magical ability with plants. They’re unexpected, like the sweet lemon balm soap made for her by a man who is half-Angel, half-wildcrafter. And sometimes, her pleasures allow her to process her pain as she reconciles herself to the fact that La Llorona has irrevocably changed her life but that she still has a life to live. Through these experiences of pleasure, she learns that she is not just some weed but a seed. By the end of the tale, she is no longer a victim of La Llorona or the often whispered about reviled figure in her small town of Sueno, NM, but Miracle Mercy, the woman who can change fates, the woman who has turned her grief into joy.
This transformation sneaks up on her. She’s been working toward it every day, but she’s never quite able to see the big picture until after she’s developed some magical relationships. There’s a moment, near the end of her story, where she sees this wonderful abundant life she’s created for herself—Mercy’s been so focused on the small little pleasures and the small acts of moving forward from her family’s history of trauma, that she hasn’t quite seen all she’s accomplished, the big picture, until now.
As Mercy says near the end of the story, reflecting on what it’s taken for her to find her joy:
“[La Llorona] was the Weeping Woman, sure. But I was the woman who made rainwater out of tears. I would use them to water my crops through this drought. When people bought my fat turnips and sharp radishes and long, thick carrots, they would taste of freshly turned earth and freshly turned futures, hope, and the bittersweet taste of things past, and the salty tang of possibility. This I would do to remind others that we are the seeds we plant, not the histories forced upon us. This I would do to wash away the sorrow from my soul.
Was I scared? You bet.
But nothing makes a woman brave except living.”
So here we have at the end of this gothic fairytale, another transformation. A girl turned weeping woman turned miracle worker through the simple act of turning away from feeding and perpetuating trauma and learning, one small step at a time, what it means to embody joy and abundance.
In fact, the joy of folklore is that it can be a form of resistance, of changing the kind of stories we tell about ourselves and our communities. It helps us choose magic and possibility over stifling conventions that would regulate our bodies and our minds.
So in closing, I want to leave you with a meditation or ritual to help you when things get difficult, to remind you that you are the author of your own story and nobody can talk that from you. Or, as Mercy puts it, “that we are the seeds we plant, not the histories forced upon us.”
This exercise is fairly simple, but it helps me a lot when I get too in my head and need to ground myself. Think about something that brings you joy, specifically a simple pleasure. It can be anything. For Mercy—okay, and me!—it’s listening to old records and reading trashy novels.
Now visualize that simple pleasure as sacred. It’s not just something you do for fun. It’s not a bonus. It’s a necessity. Resist the temptation to trivialize it! There is no room for guilty pleasures here. You can either visualize this or write down details about it, depending on what works best for you. As you do, imagine the story it tells about you. How does it soothe? Heal? Transform? What emotions emerge as you meditate on this pleasure? They don’t always have to be pleasurable, either. Sometimes enjoyment can give us a safe space or relax enough to process difficult emotions.
Lastly, imagine yourself as your favorite fairytale character—I’m personally very fond of thinking of myself as a hobbit—or who you would be as a folklore protagonist. Imagine it down to the last detail, including how your sacred simple pleasure fits into your quest. What magic does it offer you? What wisdom or insights to help you conquer your foes or inner dragons? How does it help you transform your tears into rainwater?
In closing, always remember to reword Mercy a bit, “nothing makes a person brave, except living.”
And, to add to that, miracles don’t happen unless you show up, every day, ready to work magic.
The Bruja Professor, a witchy take on literature, the occult & pop culture, is the scholarly sister to Enchantment Learning & Living, an inspirational blog celebrating life’s simple pleasures, everyday mysticism, and delectable recipes that are guaranteed to stir the kitchen witch in you.
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