About
Meztli Projects is an Indigenous based arts & culture collaborative centering Indigeneity into the creative practice of Los Angeles by using arts-based strategies to support, advocate for, and organize to highlight Native and Indigenous Artists and systems-impacted youth.
Meztli Projects operates out of Apachianga (East Los Angeles) in Tovaangar (Los Angeles County), lands stewarded since time immemorial by families and villages now known as the Acjachemen, Chumash, Tataviam and Tongva Tribal Nations.
Our work requires a constant reinvestigation of our presence as Indigenous Peoples on lands that are not our ancestral homelands so that we may be guests living in kinship, reciprocity and doing our best to center these Tribal Nations.
If you reside on, work on, or profit from the lands stewarded by the First Peoples of this land, we encourage you to support the efforts of these Nations to self-determine by donating to their respective land conservancies.
Yaangna Vive! (altar) was installed for the City of Glendale’s 2019 Día de los Muertos celebration at the Glendale Library. It was created by Joel Garcia, Tongva artists Kelly Caballero, and River Tikwi Garza in honor of their families and all Tongva relatives. The altar was composed of California native plants as-well-as our four-legged relatives the black bear, coyote, deer, big-horn sheep, abalone and red tail hawk.
Land Acknowledgement & Stewardship.
As a core value, Meztli Projects believes that our work needs to center and make space for the original caretakers of this land the Acjachemen, Chumash, Tataviam, and Tongva Tribal Nations, and build authentic relations with both the land & water, and all living beings.
Intercultural Frameworks.
The push for Cultural Equity, Diversity and Inclusion mostly feels like it entraps culturally specific and organizations of color to compare themselves and try to emulate historically white-led organizations. We have seen that this ultimately changes nothing. Diversity under White Supremacy and Patriarchy are still just that. We encourage Intercultural approaches that can coalesce resources around Peoples so that communities can develop, relearn, restore, thrust into the future their cultural practices within an ecosystem that best serves their self-determination and journey forward.
Arts-Based Healing Practices.
Ancestral teachings and cultural practices allow us to activate the healing qualities of interconnectivity, kinship, Elders, ritual & ceremony in partnership with creativity and art-making to not only address trauma, violence, and the impacts of colonization to begin healing ourselves and our communities but most important to recode our bodies with resilience, ancestral brilliance.
Harm Reduction & Violence Prevention.
Violence manifests in our community far beyond physical and emotional trauma. We see a spectrum of violences that prohibits our communities from fully thriving. Our work is rooted in creating spaces and approaches that embrace people, center the most marginalized, eliminate as many barriers for participation, and provide as many tools to shed the impacts of colonization and settler colonialism moving towards a harmonious and balanced life. Please check out our resource pages.
