Healing Movements

How a grassroots abolitionist project of cultural healing counters the carceral state in a Chicanx community in California

For many, gang involvement can be a guaranteed life sentence, a force which traps them in an inescapable cycle of violence even if it does not lead to actual prison time. Healing Movements explores the work of formerly gang-involved Chicanx men and women in California who draw on the social connections made during their gang-involved years to forge new pathways for cultural healing and countering the carceral system.

Known colloquially as the “movement of healing,” this Chicanx-Indigenous abolitionist project based in Salinas, California, was spurred on by a series of four police homicides of Latino men in 2014. Organizing around such issues as police brutality and mass incarceration, these collectives—two of which are discussed in this book, one mixed-gender, and the other women-only—turned to their often obscured Mesoamerican ancestry to find new resources for building a different future for themselves and subsequent generations.

Drawing on extensive fieldwork conducted in Salinas, Healing Movements reveals how these communities have taken shape in large part through a conscious effort to uplift Chicanx-Indigenous culture and ceremonial practices. By tapping into their Indigeneity, the members of these collectives access a wealth of new resources to shape their future, opening up novel ways to organize and build strong relational ties that are noteworthy to anyone invested in abolitionist work.