UC Berkeley

This dissertation claims a decolonial turn in healing sciences is possible by nurturing theepistemic and ontological practice that I call “panza awareness” (gut-knowing in English and el saber de la panza in Spanish), which is the embodied exercise of listening to our gut feelings and learning to interpret the information that comes from our body as valid knowledge. It proposes a mapping (or constellation) of possibilities for healing the body that centers Black and Indigenous people of color (BIPOC)—with a focus on a Black, Indigenous, and Chicanx/Latinx perspective. It outlines the limits of biomedical ways of understanding the body through race-based, individualized medicine; and it introduces an alternative, race-conscious approach to producing knowledge about health and the body alongside students and community members of color. Using interpretive methodologies in a transformative action research framework, this dissertation generates ethnographic data through a community-engaged, BIPOC-oriented workshop called the Panza Knowing Workshop. I designed and tested the Panza Knowing Workshop through the pilot program discussed in this dissertation. For this dissertation’s first intervention, I 1) study and critique the cultural concept of distress known as ataque de nervios (loosely “nerve attack”) and 2) develop panza awareness. Using a decolonial, feminist-informed critique of nervios, I propose a shift from the individualist mandate, “Te tienes que cuidar tus nervios” [You must take care of your mental health], to a collective, empowered invitation to foster panza awareness. Through panza awareness, we can begin to fill in the gaps in our knowledge of healing and the body. As a second intervention, I demonstrate that the Panza Knowing Workshop generates knowledge of connections between body, mind, health, and knowledge of embodied and ancestral healing modalities. The workshop enacts action research by reciprocally providing psychoeducation and community resources for health and healing to workshop interlocutors. It imagines how biomedical and embodied and ancestral knowledge of the Global South may continue to emerge in respectful, humanizing coexistence in line with the Zapatista imperative to imagine a world where many worlds are possible.