Healing Justice: Francisca Porchas Coronado (part 2 of 2)
Written by Sandra Olarte-Hayes, Director of Equity
Last month, I interviewed my friend Francisca Porchas Coronado, a healing justice practitioner and the founder of the Latinx Therapists Action Network (LTAN), a network of politicized therapists interrupting intergenerational trauma being caused by the state’s violent immigration, detention, and deportation policies. This month’s post will discuss the concept of healing justice which drives her work, the role of healing in the fight for social justice, and the unique challenges inherent in organizing therapists.
Healing has to be political because our wounds are political
The Latinx Therapists Action Network is ultimately a healing justice offering. I hear this term being used frequently by folks outside of movement and yet I don't see it being very well understood by most folks in the therapy community. Francisca shares that “Healing Justice (HJ) as originally articulated by Cara Page of the Kindred Southern Healing Collective ‘...identifies how we can holistically respond to and intervene on generational trauma and violence, and bring collective practices that can impact and transform the consequences of oppression on our bodies, hearts and minds.’ It is a political and spiritual framework rooted in disability justice, environmental justice, reproductive justice, and abolitionist movements, as well as the ancestral traditions and practices of people of color, poor people, people with disabilities, women, femmes, and queer and trans people.”
From this perspective, trauma is political in that it is used as a tool by the state to further control and exert domination over the bodies of oppressed peoples. State violence and harmful political policies create trauma and we know from the research that trauma, especially the type of chronic and complex trauma that systematic oppression creates, causes a person to live in a continuous state of fight-or-flight. The nervous system stays activated and the person's body cannot find a sense of safety in which to regulate. The chronic activation can then lead to chronic inflammation and subsequent health conditions. It becomes much harder to fight for liberation when one is facing ongoing traumatization, continuous activation and health maladies, and fighting for one’s life and basic needs. This is what we mean when healing justice practitioners say that trauma is political. Is used as a form of social control.
“Throughout my work on environmental and climate justice, I realized that we must fundamentally transform the social relations of our society in order to build the kind of world where we can truly be free and well. The network is part of that greater effort—building a new system of care that is a direct challenge to the trauma wielded against our communities, the way in which “health” has been defined and practiced, and can also be an example of the type of care infrastructure we must build for the future.”
Francisca shares that “Healing has to be political because our wounds are political, especially as Latinx and Chicanx people. We have been deeply impacted by five hundred years of colonization and the systems of oppression that have been established in order to ensure the continuation of the colonization process. Our U.S. economic system is based on the super exploitation of land, people, and entire countries. We are the descendants of a long line of people impacted by these systems.”
An offering of love
“Every movement for our liberation has included traditions, practices, and caregiving infrastructure for our well-being and protection. We (LTAN) see ourselves as part of a long tradition of healing justice practice. We are an offering of love for the migrant communities who have suffered over three decades of mandatory detention, militarization of the Southern border, and the systematic, and homophobic, sexists, ableist, and racist collusion of local law enforcement across the country with Federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement. This love and commitment extends to all those who are healing justice practitioners, radical health providers, community health workers, organizers, and movement leaders on the frontlines of the struggle for a new world with a radically different set of social relationships based on life, community, well-being, reciprocity, and relationality.”
The complexities in organizing therapists
Through LTAN and Resilient Strategies, healing justice organizations Francisca has founded and co-founded respectively, Francisca continues her work as a community organizer by organizing therapists and healers. She shares how her work with LTAN feels different. “I have always organized working class and poor people of color—mostly U.S.-based Black people and Black and also non-Black Latinx peoples. Organizing any community comes with its challenges. Organizing a diverse group of Latinx people with different identities, backgrounds, and migration statuses feels very familiar, but what is definitely new territory is organizing folks who have a higher education, who are seen as professionals, and have a middle class status. I think one of the challenges I am currently navigating is the lack of awareness in this sector about what they do not know. By that I mean that a degree and extensive practice in the mental health profession does not automatically mean one has the skills to teach, create curriculum, or create trainings around that knowledge or facilitate a learning space for migrant people who are most impacted by the system. That is a gap that we as network staff with organizing experience can address and support in closing so that our members who are Latinx mental health professionals, can grow into that role and develop those skills and practice. We support them in this journey.”
Another challenge I have experienced in this work is that oftentimes in the therapist community, new therapists feel a commitment to working towards social justice and working with poor folks for the first few years out of school, but once they obtain full licensure, there is a sense of having “made it.” I see many of us shift away from this work towards a sense of having already paid their dues in those first few years, and so prices get hiked up and their services stop being accessible to working class folks. Many become less committed to working towards social justice, towards volunteering their time etc. I personally get frustrated when I hear therapists say that providing therapy is enough and is social justice work in and of itself. I see these trends a lot in mostly White therapists but also among therapists of color. I know therapists deserve to get paid, but it is complex because people who we need in the movement end up leaving and the people who need services don’t get them.
Along these lines, as a message to apolitical therapists, Francisca says “As a trauma healing practitioner myself, I know that the systems causing the conditions that lead to people’s pain will continue causing harm. It is not enough to provide therapy work for someone to cope with this legacy. We must build toward transforming the conditions that create this harm in the first place, otherwise we are simply putting a band-aid on a gushing societal wound. Therapists can be agents of change, not in protesting in the streets but in joining movement and seeing their healing work as a critical part of building a movement to transform society.”
I personally would like to see more of them in the streets though.
