Con el Nopal en la Frente: The Body as Nopal in Decolonial Sexuality Education

Title of Event: Con el Nopal en la Frente: The Body as Nopal in Decolonial Sexuality Education

Description of Event:

This 90-minute live webinar explores the body as nopal, a living site of memory, protection, and transformation. Con el Nopal en la Frente invites participants to reflect on embodiment through a land-rooted framework drawn from the sacred nopal.

Across this session, participants will examine the four interwoven phases of the nopa: seed, root, thorn, and flesh. The nopal becomes more than symbol. It becomes pedagogy. It becomes anatomy. It becomes survival and thrivance.
We will also explore the cultural and political meaning of the phrase Con el Nopal en la Frente. Historically used as an insult to mark Indigenous features and proximity to Indigeneity, the phrase has functioned as a tool of shame and internalized colonial hierarchy. In reclaiming it, we shift from stigma to sovereignty. To wear the nopal on the forehead becomes an embodied refusal of erasure and a declaration that ancestral memory lives in the body and cannot be scrubbed away. This reclamation reframes the body itself as site of dignity, knowledge, and power. It also unsettles the desire to distance oneself from Indigeneity. Even when one attempts to forget or assimilate, the nopal remains visible. Reclaiming the phrase becomes both personal affirmation and communal mirror, asking what it means to remember who we are when forgetting has been rewarded.

Drawing from Xicana feminist frameworks and contemporary understandings of fascia and somatic memory, this course reframes the body beyond colonial separations of mind and flesh, sexuality and spirit, protection and pleasure.
Participants will explore how the nopal framework reshapes approaches to consent, resistance, trauma-informed teaching, and culturally responsible sexuality education. Rather than pathologizing protective responses or disembodied learning, this course centers embodied sovereignty as both survival strategy and erotic reclamation.

Who This Course Is For
This webinar is designed for sexuality educators, counselors, therapists, supervisors, and community knowledge-keepers seeking frameworks that move beyond colonial separations of body, land, and sexuality. It is especially relevant for professionals working with Afro-Indigenous, Indigenous, Chicana, Xicana, Latina, Latinx, and diasporic communities rooted in Mesoamerican land and lineage, and for those committed to culturally responsible and accountable practice.

If you are not of these communities but serve, love, teach, supervise, parent, partner, or move in relationship within these cultural spaces, this course invites you into deeper responsibility rather than observation. It offers an opportunity to examine how colonial narratives of embodiment shape your own training and to consider what culturally grounded respect looks like in practice. This space is not about claiming what is not yours. It is about learning how to stand in right relation.

By the end of this session, participants will be able to:
1. Describe how the four phases of the nopal (seed, root, thorn, and flesh) function as an embodied framework that challenges colonial narratives of embodiment in sexuality education.
2. Identify one specific strategy for integrating embodied sovereignty or boundary intelligence into sexuality education or community practice.

Sliding Scale Pricing Available

Date of Event: 3/28/26

Time of Event: 10:00 AM - 11:30 AM PT

Location: Online Synchronous

Presenter/Speaker: Dra. Serina Payan Hazelwood

Company/Organization Sponsor: The Elsewheres

Contact Name: Dra. Serina Payan Hazelwood

Contact Telephone Number: (602) 373-1840

Contact Email:  serina@payanmedicine.com

Event Website: https://www.theelsewheres.com/store

AASECT Approved CEs: 1