Editor’s Note: Edits were made to correct the origin of the speaker and reflect the multiple Indigenous cultures that use the term Two-Spirit.
Thursday, Oct. 12, the annual Borderlands Speaker event — a collaboration between El Centro and the Pride Resource Center — took place in the Lory Student Center.
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Borderlands is held in early October every year to mark the overlap between Latinx Heritage Month and LGBTQIA+ History Month, as celebrated by El Centro and the PRC.
“Borderlands has been a partnership between El Centro and the Pride Resource Center now for about four years,” Interim Director for El Centro Aaron Escobedo Garmon said. “That is a partnership that we’re very proud of and that is very intentional for us.”
The event highlights speakers who belong to both communities, and it focuses on the intersectional experience of those individuals through their identities.
“Borderlands — that term comes from Borderlands theory and a book that’s written by someone named Gloria Anzaldua,” Director of the Pride Resource Center Maggie Hendrickson said. “It’s about that experience of being from multiple places of multiple identities, like the fluidity of our experiences, for both Latinx (and) Latine folks but also queer and trans people. So that’s where the name comes from.”
This year’s guest speaker was Cleopatra Tatabele, an activist and educator. As a Black, Latinx and Indigenous individual who identifies as Two-Spirit, Tatabele’s work focuses on their ancestral roots and the communities around them.
“The intention is to shine a light, to honor and to respect all of these experiences and hopefully lead the way in solidarity and coalition to bring in even more stories and even more experiences because they all matter, and that’s what the purpose was for tonight with bringing in Cleopatra in particular,” Escobedo Garmon said.
In their presentation, Tatabele discussed the Two-Spirit identity. They addressed it generally within multiple Indigenous people and within their own community of the Taino people. The Taino people are indigenous to Hispaniola — what is now the island of Haiti and the Dominican Republic.
“The term Two-Spirit reaffirms for Indigenous LGBTQIA+ people that we are linked spiritually with our families and communities and nations and not just family as in, like, each other or other people but also as the Earth, as our ancestors and the people that came before and after us and the land that we’re on,” Tatabele said. “It’s all about that connection.”
The term Two-Spirit has many different interpretations within different Indigenous cultures, but Tatabele focused on its meaning in regard to gender roles within their community.
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“I’ve even heard someone share that Two-Spirit people — if the sun is male, and the moon is female, then dawn and dusk are Two-Spirit people,” Tatabele said. “We’re the inbetweeners.”
Tatabele’s presentation also spoke to the history of the Caribbean, detailing the region’s colonization and the loss of the Indigenous history. They highlighted the importance of celebrating their ancestry and not ignoring different aspects of it in favor of others.
“For me, as someone who is Black and Indigenous, it is very easy for people to write off some of my ancestry, but all of us are entitled to connect to all of our ancestry,” Tatabele said in their presentation. “We’re all entitled to that because when we erase parts of ourselves, we’re literally erasing our history. We’re literally erasing and continuing genocide, and that’s what colonization wants us to do. They want to act like we don’t exist.”
Reach Hannah Parcells at life@collegian.com or on Twitter @CSUCollegian.
