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At Voces Ancestrales por la Madre Tierra, a celebration of Indigenous Peoples’ Day, event coordinator Adriana Paola Palacios Luna aimed to give the Boulder community a chance to “see themselves in others.”

“We want to amplify the voices that are here,” Palacios Luna said. “We want to have a space where we can gather together and have fun and build something.”

Called “Ancestral Voices for Mother Earth” in English, the event pulled a crowd consisting mostly of Hispanic and Latino individuals to the University of Colorado Boulder on Saturday afternoon to honor their cultural heritages.

Palacios Luna is the founder of Luna Cultura, a Boulder company that offers art, science and technology classes to help communities achieve socioenvironmental justice. Luna Cultura presented Voces Ancestrales with funding from the City of Boulder Human Relations Commission.

The event is free, which Palacios Luna said is a key part of making it inclusive and accessible to everyone.

“It’s a space to connect with our history,” she said. “If you know that you come from a powerful ancestry, you become powerful.”

Voces Ancestrales was advertised as a bilingual event and featured Palacios Luna translating from Spanish for the two guest speakers, Rosalinda Santiz Diaz and Lenz Jn Francois.

Santiz Diaz is from Chiapas, the southernmost state in Mexico. She has been weaving since she was 9 and speaks Tzotzil, a Mayan language.

Santiz Diaz spoke on the cultural importance of embroidering and weaving, including how the Mayan calendar can be woven into blankets and tapestries. She said it’s important that elder members of her community preserve their knowledge by passing it on to the next generations.

“Embroideries share our emotions in different ways,” she said.

Guests were given the opportunity to directly support Santiz Diaz by purchasing her embroideries, which were on display at Voces Ancestrales.

Jn Francois is a doctor of psychosociology whose work focuses on social development in rural and urban communities. Born in Haiti, he currently lives in Philadelphia.

Jn Francois talked to the audience about resilience — specifically, how resilience is an attitude that people can adopt to work through hard situations.

“In Haiti, people laugh all the time about everything,” he said. “Laughing about your tragedy is a way to talk about it. It is an ancestral source of resilience.”

Jn Francois spoke at length about the power of solidarity. People should be comfortable asking others for help, he said. “It doesn’t expose your weakness. It is a way to help and be helped by others.”

Even in the face of challenges like poverty and prejudice, Haitians don’t give up, Jn Francois said. They fight to have dignity in their lives.

“We are not just products of history, but producers of history,” he said.

After a question-and-answer segment with the speakers, guests were invited to participate in a hands-on cultural activity: making amaranth candy. Participants mixed popped amaranth grains with melted chocolate to create traditional treats.

Victoria Rivera, a Boulder resident, said she appreciated how interesting and informative the event was, particularly the guest speakers.

“You can see that these people are finding enjoyment and fulfillment in their lives,” she said.

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