Women Defenders Made of Fire and Clay
10 years of Casa La Sirena
A Manifesto
We are women human rights defenders,
potters crafting care and healing.
Because we fiercely defend life and justice, we experience the impacts of necropolitics that the powerful seek to spread through all of Mesoamerica and the wider world.
However, we women defenders are present in every corner of the world, united and resisting.
We are clay, past memories reinventing ourselves.
Casa La Serena:
A collective dream, a political proposal,
a feminist reality,
home to all women defenders,
Coordinated by Consorcio Oaxaca and the Mesoamerican initiative of Women Human Rights Defenders (IM- Defensoras). Casa La Serena is a space for active, purposeful pauses within our political reflections and that of our allies in the Global South.
In these ten years, we have accompanied an immense diversity of cuerpos-territorios (body-territories) that come from distinct mountains, seas, valleys, plains and cities.
Women who, like pottery, hold cracks, pain, sadness, wounds, and grief.
Women made of living clay, resisting distinct forms of oppression, whose hearts’ beat in embodied fights for justice and who position themselves in favor of sustaining life, joy and dignity.
At Casa La Serena we center care as a political act in order to reclaim and exercise our rights to well-being and enjoyment, through which we unite and weave our immense collective power.
We draw from different practices to transform what hurts us, what needs to be seen and recreated in our distinct forms of activism.
To become who we freely and justly want to be.
Like in ceramics, we work slowly, kneading with patience and care.
Through care practices that reconnect us
with the profound, with the inherited, with life,
with what takes us back to the root and motivates us,
We shape and reshape.
We are clay, living earth.
Rooted in a feminist perspective, we harness holistic knowledge, ancestral traditions, alternative therapies, natural medicine, bodily expression, hearty foods, and radically tender shared experiences in order to foment our life force and to politicize our right to witness and prioritize ourselves: the pause is part of the journey.
At Casa La Serena, we invite our sentipensares,
our thoughts-feelings,
to be still and we tend to what needs to be delicately cared for in the moment.
With the power of water and the warm whisper of the wind,
we repair the cracks,
we trust the process, and
we create a new existence in which we know what it’s like to be sustained and held by each other.
Networks save us.
In this space, we as human rights defenders, have learned to shape, polish, burnish and shine our minds, bodies, spirits and life force energy from coherent and grounded wisdom that inspires in us new ways of being, experiencing, feeling and interacting with the world.
We are and we will be in COMMUNITY.
We embrace the fire’s warmth and let it blanket us.
With the sacred smoke rising from our burning hearts, we transform the demands of the patriarchy and reinvent ourselves. From the vessels that shatter, we will rebirth anew: more free, rebellious and united.
We came to Casa La Serena to find ourselves, to cultivate knowledge and practices that support both our political and everyday lives, to come back to our body-territories and to situate ourselves in right relationship, in reciprocity with life.
To mark the 10 year anniversary of Casa La Serena, we honor, we give thanks, and we celebrate that we are living clay and collective fire.
WE ARE POTTERS, CRAFTERS OF CARE.
