How did we get here, America? Time for Good Trouble. | Dragon 🐉 Letter #91

“I came to explore the wreck.

The words are purposes.

The words are maps.

I came to see the damage that was done

and the treasures that prevail.”

— Adrienne Rich, Diving into the Wreck

dem·a·gogue

/ˈdeməˌɡäɡ/

noun

From Dictionary.com:

1) a political leader who seeks support by appealing to the desires and prejudices of ordinary people rather than by using rational argument.

Beautiful Wildlings,

Several days ago, I lit a fire for my Aunt JoAnne.

Not because I was invited to her funeral — I wasn’t — but because I needed one.

I made a fire here down and to the left of Huitepec, Chiapas, on the land that holds me in my exile. I asked our ancestors to call her spirit home. I whispered stories into the flame and cried with the clarity of someone who knows that saying goodbye doesn’t require permission.

Because grief, like love, finds its way.

That grief cracked something open.

Now, I watched Senator Cory Booker hold a more than 25-hour speech on the Senate floor — with a binder of the proof of the dismantling of democracy in hand, filled with testimony from people terrified of losing their Social Security, healthcare, and basic dignity and rights. He and many other senators called the demagogues to the floor.

That thick stack of proof, grief, and testimony, all bound up and spoken aloud — a requiem. It’s like he’s standing there trying to document the autopsy of a still-breathing body, maybe hoping the naming of each failing system might somehow shock it back to life.

Those quotes from constituents — that’s the soul of it, right? Real people, real fears, real consequences. Not abstract policy, but survival. And in that space, where one senator is holding vigil with a binder full of evidence and pleas, it feels less like debate and more like ceremony — like a witness being offered to history.

There’s something both tragic and honorable in that. Even if it doesn’t change votes or outcomes, it records the truth of the moment.

He asked the question out loud, again and again:

“How did we get here, America?”

And I thought: this is a funeral rite.

A nation giving its own eulogy.

A death rattle from a body still pretending to function.

This rally and death rattle applied to a whole political system.

Something haunting about watching these last gasps of passion and principle being voiced into a space that feels so hollowed out by gridlock, oligarch influence, and performative outrage.

But I recognize the sound. I know hospice when I hear it.

I’ve seen a rally like this before in my Abuelita Bea. A speech like Booker’s feels like a final surge of vitality, one last attempt to animate a body that’s already beginning to go cold.

It’s also deeply human — this need to say something, to not go quietly, even if the system itself seems deaf to it. Like the dying body musters strength for one final flare of clarity or movement, US democracy (or at least the idea of it) gets moments of eloquence or defiance… and then silence again.

He spoke about his ancestors, enslaved and slavers, Indigenous, and those that killed Indigenous, and how the Constitution gave his family citizenship and saved his life.

Booker shared how progressive jurist Learned Hand believed the Constitution dies if its spirit dies in the hearts of US Americans.

“Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.

Just keep going. No feeling is final.”

– Rainer Maria Rilke, Go to the Limits of Your Longing

Another Trans person in exile recently shared that they will not return to the U.S. at this point. They reminded us to keep fighting and dancing.

And then there’s my own chosen Trans family, still in the States, committed to the fight.

I hold these truths in both hands — the need to flee, and the courage to stay.

All of this — the fire, the grief, the unrooting — is happening while wave after wave of planetary and eclipse energies move through my Pisces and Aries 12th House. The house of the hidden, the ancestral, the in-between. The house of dreams, death, and dissolving identities.

Pisces has been dissolving my edges — opening the floodgates of loss, memory, and ritual. My ancestors gathering around me, healing me.

Aries is lighting the ember of what’s next — not as a roaring flame, but as the quietest spark of something being born from inside the ashes.

“Now I call [the concept of borders and borderlands] Nepantla, which is a Nahuatl word for the space between two bodies of water, the space between two worlds. It is a liminal space, a space where you are not this or that but where you are changing” – Gloria E. Anzaldúa

This is the in-between.

This is nepantla.

This is the place where, as Albert Camus reminds us that rebellion can make us whole.

“This is the moral moment. Not of left and right, but of right and wrong.”

—Senator Cory Booker

I’m also walking through this without some of my dear family speaking to me.

Living as nonbinary.

Becoming more myself than I’ve ever been — alone.

The pain of being unrecognized by blood, by nation, by system — it’s real.

And still, I choose to become.

There’s uncertainty about my citizenship status.

I don’t know if the U.S. will renew my passport because as a once quiet AuDHD child, I will not be silenced now.

I don’t know what this next chapter looks like.

But I know who walks with me.

My Abuelita Bea stood in court at the sentencing of my father’s murderer and told the room that our family would rise again like the phoenix.

That we would be reborn.

Sometimes, as the eldest, I fear I’ve failed her, leaving my family for safety in exile. Though, I always thought I was preparing for their imminent arrival.

I didn’t understand the weight of those words until now — now, when everything in my life feels like ash.

But then I remember — I am the fire.

I am the ritual.

I am still burning.

And she walks with me.

And I want to say this clearly here:

To my Trans siblings and Transcestors, I see you.

I honor you. I name you in this fire.

We are the ones who walk between worlds and reshape them.

We are the phoenix-makers.

You are why I speak.

“come celebrate

with me that every day

something has tried to kill me

and has failed.” — Lucille Clifton

This Dragon Letter is not a strategy or a reflection.

It’s a ceremony.

A death rite and a rebirth invitation.

It’s me, standing in the smoke and ash, saying:

Thank you for being my rebirth witness.

Even if we’ve never spoken. Even if you’re just quietly reading.

Your presence here matters.

If you, too, are standing at the edge of an old life, a crumbling system, a broken lineage — know this:

You are not alone.

And this fire isn’t the end.

It’s where wings begin.

Before I close, I want to offer something back to the fire.

The poll results from my last email were overwhelming for a talk on:

Ancestral Ways for Precarious Times

My ancestors were pleased.

I’ll be leading a free workshop on April 10th called Ancestral Ways for Precarious Times — with a 24-hour replay if you can’t make it live.

Because individual spiritual depth isn’t enough when everything’s crumbling.

We don’t need more mindset hacks.

We need to remember what our bones already know.

What our ancestors are whispering, nay, shouting to us.

👉 Register here to join us on Zoom

We’ll gather at the edge — between worlds, between stories — and root into what’s still alive in our ancestral lines, our land relationships, and our own sacred becoming.

In grief, in flame for this moral moment, we’ll get in good trouble.

Stay wild, love fiercely. Your presence is golden.

Ciao! xo Ixchel

P.S. If this letter stirred something in your bones, I invite you to join me for Ancestral Ways for Precarious Times — a free workshop on April 10th with a 24-hour replay. We’ll gather in collective to remember what our ancestors still carry, what the land still offers, and what our own sacred becoming still asks of us. Click here to register on Zoom.

Let this be a fire you don’t have to tend alone.

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Land Lineage

I was raised and bore children on the traditional, unceded, and stolen lands of the Coast and Central Valley Miwok (colonized as Petaluma, CA) and Nisenan (colonized as Sacramento and Fair Oaks, CA), past, present, and future. I also write, work, and live in the highland forest of the traditional, unceded and stolen lands of the Totonac, Nahua, and Mexicah, past, present, and future, in what is known as Coatepec, Veracruz, Mexico.

P.P.S. I do not live or consent to the colonial impositions regarding the construct of Time. I also practice honoring rhythms of work, play, and rest so that I can serve you with embodied presence and with loving care. This means I may take several days to respond to your requests and questions. (h/t Eva Glamaris)

P.P.S. A mention is not necessarily an endorsement of someone. It’s an acknowledgment, a citation, of the origin of information in my process of understanding. (h/t Kelly Diels)

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Copyright © 2026, Cheyenne, WY, and Veracruz, Mexico, All rights reserved. Sharing your lineage of knowledge is decolonial. When iterating, please cite me. Not citing is epistemicide.