Documentation: Maria E. Pelayo (Yoli’s Mami)

Video Editing: Yoli (formerly Known as Estela)

Text Support: Tricia Avant

Coachilicue is a ritual, embodiment, and video project by Yoli. Coachilicue is an intergalactic cactus consciousness who on Earth is honored as a deity. The embodiment of Coachilicue is inspired by Yoli’s origins in the so-called Coachella Valley and the Nahuatl teotl/diosx/god Coatlicue. Coachilicue is the patron of shapeshifters and genderfluid beings. This is part of a postcolonial cosmology formation informed by Yoli’s Nahuatl ancestry and commitment to re-indigenizing as a cosmic frijole remembering how to belong.

Coachilicue engages in movement, ritual and play inserting themselves back into the Earth where Yoli was born and raised. It is the Coachella Valley, associated with agricultural production, that brought Yoli’s abuelos from so-called Mexico to the so-called US as farm workers. Coachilicue literally and ceremonially digs, explores, and excavates Yoli’s personal relationship to home, their roots, and their familial/ancestral relationship to communing with the land. Yoli transforms their family connection to the land from one based on labor-out-of-necessity to that of play-out-of-necessity.