Season 1
06 Collective racial healing
In the sixth episode, Emiko Saldívar Tanaka talks with Mónica and Fabiola about collective racial healing as a political and affective tool to confront the wounds of racism, distinguishing between mistreatment and oppression, and betting on sustained spaces of listening, memory and transformation.
About the episode
How can we heal when oppression disorganizes our lives since childhood? In this episode, Emiko—academic, activist, and founder of the COOPERA Collective—invites us to think of healing not as an individual or therapeutic process, but as a collective and political tool to confront the wounds of racism.
From her experience in training and accompaniment spaces, Emiko distinguishes between mistreatment and oppression, and delves into how racism is emotionally internalized from an early age. We talk about the anguish caused by exclusion, the fear of feeling and how to recover our ability to think, act and the importance of the collective. We also share collective practices of racial healing that have allowed organizations to sustain their work in the midst of grief.
Throughout the episode, we recognize that understanding oppression is not always enough: we need affective spaces where we can feel, share, and transform. Because racism was built—and it can also be dismantled.
Mentioned in this episode:
I love you (Te quiero) - Jairo/Alberto Favero y Mario Benedetti (Youtube, Spotify)
Colectivo para Eliminar el Racismo (COPERA) Sitio web, Facebook, Instagram
About the speakers
Emiko Saldivar Tanaka
Emiko Saldívar Tanaka is an anti-racist scholar and activist with over thirty years of experience dedicated to finding the best ways to talk about racism and contribute to its elimination. Her work combines rigorous research with collective action, and she has collaborated on initiatives in Latin America and Europe.
She is the founder of the Collective to Eliminate Racism in Mexico (COPERA), where she promotes public campaigns, media interventions, training programs, and consulting services to make racism visible and promote an anti-racist perspective in all sectors of Mexican society. COPERA works in collaboration with activists, non-governmental organizations, public institutions, media outlets, formal and informal educational spaces, academia, and society at large.
Currently, Emiko is a professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and her work focuses on the anti-racist use of statistics, the historical and cultural analysis of state policies toward Indigenous peoples, multiculturalism, and anti-racist practices in Mexico and Latin America.
WebsiteAbout the hosts
Mónica Moreno Figueroa
Mónica G. Moreno Figueroa is a Black, mixed-race Mexican woman who has lived in the United Kingdom for over 25 years. She is currently a Professor of Sociology at the University of Cambridge. In 2010, she co-founded the COPERA Collective, an initiative dedicated to making racism in Mexico visible and transforming it from a collective, emotional, and structural perspective. Through COPERA, she promotes public campaigns, media interventions, training programs, and consulting services to advance an anti-racist agenda.
Her research explores the lived and intersectional experience of race and racism in Mexico and Latin America, with a particular interest in anti-racism and its impact within and beyond academia. She also works on feminist theory, intersectionality, and the emotional effects of oppression. She is an expert in qualitative methods and visual methodologies and is known for fostering interdisciplinary collaborations that link critical thinking with social action.
She is currently leading the creation of the Global Racisms Institute for Social Transformation (GRIST), a space for research, collaboration, and action aimed at imagining and building anti-racist futures from a global perspective.
Website
Fabiola Fernández Guerra Carrillo
Fabiola Fernández Guerra Carrillo is a Mexican, mestizo and white woman, researcher and lecturer on issues of gender, racism, and discrimination, and social communicator. She is the founder and director of the communication agency 11.11 Cambio Social, founding partner of Comparte una Ola A.C., member of the COPERA collective and the REIR Network.
She works on issues of anti-racist communication, gender and discrimination, strategies and new anti-oppressive and anti-racist narratives, and family trees, ancestors and processes of collective healing. She is currently doing a postdoctoral degree at the Center for Transdisciplinary Research in Psychology at the UAEM.
WebsiteThe Structure Within podcast was conceived by Mónica Moreno Figueroa and produced by Fabiola Fernández Guerra Carrillo and Arfaxad Ortiz. The opening credits are voiced by Gabriela García.
