My name is Antonia Estela Pérez Rojas. I’m first-generation, born in New York City. My parents came to New York in 1980 from Chile. They came during the dictatorship; their plan was to stay only for a short period of time, but the dictatorship lasted until 1991.

In the meantime, they pursued their PhDs, my brother and I were born, and eventually they decided to stay. They’re both math professors. For my mom in particular, her passions are pedagogy, learning, community, and the ways in which people develop their ability to think—not only on their own, but within a context of group and social learning. This isn’t limited to the classroom; how does being able to learn and work together support us in our daily lives?

I grew up in a household that was full of math, but my parents’ love for knowledge and culture transcends disciplinary boundaries. They both work within the CUNY (The City University of New York) system, and I was always hearing them reflect on what they’d experienced in the classroom and process it with us at the dinner table, combined with conversations about politics and social justice. Growing up with such an emphasis on education and on learning to think critically provided an important foundation for my worldview. My mom would not accept “I don’t know” as an answer. She always encouraged us to go deep.

Even though I grew up in the city, my parents had a very strong relationship to land, to nature, and to the ways that they grew up in rural, mid-20th-century Chile. They would bring my brother and me out of the city every weekend so we could spend time in the woods playing, observing colors and sounds, and generally having more space to feel and explore. Although they were not familiar with this particular land, they related to it in the same ways they would have back home. At the time, my mom didn’t necessarily know the medicinal properties of the plants that she was harvesting to dry, but I remember her along the roadside collecting the same plants I now harvest to make medicine. I was thinking how beautiful that is—that my mom, even being from a different country and not having traditional training as an herbalist, was still drawn to these medicinal plants and was accessing aspects of their medicine, such as smell and sight. Now I am growing and tending to many of these plant relatives and making tinctures, herbal balms, and teas with them. My relationship to plants has been there from the very beginning, both on my mom’s and my dad’s sides. My lineage is farmers, herbalists, seamstresses, barbers, organizers/activists, and educators. I think it’s within my body and memory to be in relationship to the land in this way. I think there are many ways to find a deeper relationship to land, but the ways in which I was taught by my mom and my grandmothers are what gave me my sensitivity to the more-than-human world.

By the time I was in high school, I wanted to share everything I’d been learning. Even at such a young age, I already felt how much nourishment I’d received and how it was benefiting me and the world around me. I started sharing workshops during and after school about composting and how to make your own deodorant and lip balm. When I went to college, I participated in and ran a club called Preservation Nation. We hosted workshops on how to make sourdough bread, build cob ovens, make sauerkraut and kimchi, make friction fires, identify plants, and concoct herbal medicines. I was being critical of capitalism and consumerist culture. I was trying to think of ways we could be more autonomous within that system, like how to make our own things and learn the processes and ingredients going into the products we buy. There is so much value in exploring what it takes to physically create something we might otherwise take for granted. One of the ways I’ve furthered that is by asking, “what are all of these ingredients?” and “what’s the history behind them?” I see that as an entrypoint into world history, because through tracing and understanding plants’ migrations, for example, you can see people’s migrations and the roles that colonization, slavery, and genocide have played in the creation of a world we still live in today. I wanted to learn about skills that had helped people survive through everyday history as well as times of crisis and dire need. With the climate of pending doom and an apocalypse that at times has seemed imminent, I thought to myself, “wow, I know nothing, and all my classmates know nothing... we’re in a liberal arts school, drowning ourselves in books and theory, but does anyone know how to make a shelter? Does anyone know how to make fire by friction, or how to filter water?” I did my best to learn as much as possible during that time, especially because I was out of the city in a very privileged and beautiful location. Looking back on all that experience, it is easy to perceive a very clear trajectory to the present and my work with Herban Cura.

The premise of Herban Cura is to learn the necessary skills to become more autonomous from capitalism, and to remember and honor ancestral life and food ways. Capitalism alienates us from the source of where things come from and where we come from. When we forget who we were, how we lived, and how we survived, we easily become dependent on an intricate web of production where abuse and oppression can hide in plain sight. That’s not to say that we need to revert to a former way of life, but it’s so important to have the skills in case you need them, as well as to bring more awareness to the idea of time and gratitude for the moment that we are living in. There’s something so powerful that shifts inside us when we try to go back to the source.

I felt a responsibility to go back home and connect to where I came from and who I was before college. When I got back to New York, I became involved with the beginnings of the free-form art, political, and autonomous organizing collective BRUJAS, which I’m still a part of. I was holding workshops, teaching people how to identify plants in the city and how to make herbal medicine. Some of the first workshops and three/four-part classes that I hosted in the city were through BRUJAS, over five years ago. That was also when I first got on social media. At that time, there were very few people on social media in New York doing herbal stuff. Getting people interested was super exciting.

Photography by Mekdela Maskal and Tashi Tamate Weiss.

When I facilitate a class on herbalism, I’ll usually start by asking “what are plants that you feel connected to?” or “what’s your ancestral relationship to plants?” People will often say, “oh, I don't have any.” But then, as we start talking, all of these memories start to come through. That’s when I feel my learning goal is complete, because what I want to spark in people is that we all have a relationship to plants. BIPOC communities in New York especially have been even more disassociated from their ancestral relationship to the land. We’ve come to think that these practices are not for us, since they’re so often presented in a whitewashed version. It goes so far as even being presented with whitewashed versions of our own ancestral knowledge and practices, as I’ve experienced with “permaculture,” for example. So much knowledge has been taken from Indigenous communities and rebranded. It’s important for everyone, but for us especially, to acknowledge that these plants and remedies have actually been central to the continued resilience and survival of our people. In the midst of colonization and genocide, the plants were and always continue to be one of our strongest allies. For me, that’s really exciting—to remember, uncover, and recover the wealth of that ancestral knowledge, even though it has been manipulated, co-opted, and stolen for so long without recognition or recompense. Being interested in or knowledgeable about plants is still considered niche, but the reality is that everyone is dependent on plants, whether they see and think about it or not. Plants, through receiving the power of the sun and alchemizing it into earth-soluble forms, power most of life on this planet. Strict meat eaters, for example, would do well to remember where their food receives its nourishment.

Photography by Adam Anorga.

My hope is that we will all think deeper about the contradictions and compromises that we live in, within this system. This is the context for one of Herban Cura’s areas of focus: knowledge shares. So much of what I’ve learned, throughout every facet of my work, is that this is all a work in progress, and each knowledge share is an opportunity to receive feedback and to rework and refine our approach to a piece of the puzzle. It doesn’t feel static—it’s a constant question. Yesterday was Herban Cura’s first knowledge share where we had English to Spanish interpretation and live closed captioning. I didn’t cry, but the tears were close! I felt so much joy in my body! The incentive came from someone asking if there was going to be interpretation. It was a great place to start incorporating more language justice values and accessibility into the work. That’s something I had been reflecting on because I realized that many online knowledge shares are really not accessible to many communities. Closed captioning can help people who are elderly, speak English as a second language, or are hard of hearing.

To help make our knowledge shares more affordable, we offer scholarships based on need, a pay-it-forward option to help fund our scholarships and work redistributing resources to Black and Indigenous Land Projects, as well as either a sliding scale or a flat $35 for the three hour workshop. In my experience, having facilitated for some years now, many similar projects doing this kind of work charge $50 or more for a three hour workshop.

“An ‘open source’ pedagogy means the facilitator isn’t the only person holding the knowledge.”

Now that we’re hosting in the digital realm, and there’s the possibility of having more people and financial abundance, it’s an opportunity to reassess. How can Herban Cura be a model for regeneration, both in terms of business and as a learning space? How do we navigate costs and current economic realities in a reciprocal flow that nourishes all sides of a “transaction.” Everyone involved is contributing an essential part, which gives a project its life energy. To view the producer as more valuable than the consumer, or vice versa, has no place in the reality we perceive to be true. Non-hierarchical, lateral, fully consensual, mutually beneficial, perfectly distributed, equal relationships are an ideal we can always aspire to and tirelessly pursue, but I am not aware of the manual that lays out the whole model, step-by-step. “El camino se hace al andar” is a popular saying in Spanish that has at least two interpretations: the path is made as you go (on the/your way), and the path is made/determined by walking the path. We are in the process of constant learning: feeling and acknowledging what is in or out of alignment, and readjusting, if necessary, to continue on the proposed path, or even reexamining the direction of the path itself. And we are in it together. This kind of “open source” approach to pedagogy means the facilitator isn’t the only person holding the knowledge. Everyone is invited to give and receive from their unique life experience; we’re here to learn from one another. While we do prepare a structural outline of important content that we want to transmit, we also ask how we can best support the diverse array of participants who may attend. Some people are more auditory listeners. Others are more visual, or more hands-on. Three hours can be a long time to sit through something, especially online, but when it’s dynamic and interactive, that time can move really fast. I’m also always trying to encourage exchange between participants.

That’s the big vision I’ve been holding since day one: that the participants in our knowledge shares will take the skills they learn back into their communities, and based on what they see is actually needed, create it themselves, whether through starting their own businesses or through forming cooperatives. That is my dream.

Antonia Estela Pérez Rojas is a clinical herbalist, gardener, artist and co-founder of collectives Brujas and Herban Cura. They are first-gen, born and raised in New York City (Lenape territory).

Portraits by Juan Veloz. Photography by Adam Anorga, Mekdela Maskal, Julieta Varela, Tashi Tamate Weiss.