2024 BAAITS Two Spirit Artist Grantees
Alejandra “Xoxikoyotl” Reyes
Educator. Facilitator. Yerbera. Artist. Seamstress. Musician. Danzante. Earth. Racial Justice.
Xoxikoyotl is a facilitator, artist and mother focused on collective education through ancestral knowledge. Xoxikoyotl was born in the Acjachemen lands of Anaheim, Orange County. Their mother is from Chihuahua, their father from Guanajuato and they are of Yaqui, Tarahumara, Chichimeca/Otomi, Spaniard and North African lineages.
They have been working with herbs and ancestral medicines through the Mexicayotl tradition to heal themselves since 2013, using herbs, danza, art and ceremony as a roadway to recovering from institutions, drug addiction, alcoholism and mental illness. They are the third generation of a matriarchy of seamstresses, a writer, composer of music and art in multiple mediums, highlighting themes of injustice and balancing the crudeness with practicing love through care of community and family. They are experienced in facilitation, yerberia and sewing, their collective style of teaching and interacting with others allows for both knowledge and understanding to be the core of growth for an equitable and educated community.
Chef Saguaro
Chef Saguaro (they/them) is a trans, non-binary, queer chef with indigenous ancestry from so-called Mexico. They love creating dishes from traditional mexican recetas passed down from their family. They started cooking by watching their mom and their abuelas in the kitchen. As a young adult, Saguaro started to experiment with making these traditional recetas vegan, gluten free, soy free, and dairy free. Now they eat a little bit of everything, creating Mexican inspired foods that are accessible to these diets.
Saguaro loves cooking high quality food and finds joy in seeing their community well fed. They love creating Mexican flavors and fusing their ancestral ingredients with other types of food, like creating a sweet potato frittata, mole ramen, and vegan pozole. All of these dishes have come from the many years of practice of cooking for family and friends. Saguaro is currently their family’s resident pozole chef, and holds many of their family recipes. They also pour ritual into their food and calls on their ancestral spiritual knowledge on how to create recipes and build ancestral knowledge to share through the kitchen.
Thus Cafe Dandelion was born, a collaborative food pop-up that fuses Salvadoran and Mexican food, with the hope to offer accessible plates at a sliding scale. Through Cafe Dandelion, Saguaro offers monthly meals through a pre-order model.These pop-ups can be used as a way to fundraise for community members seeking financial support.
In the past year, Saguaro has been cultivating community and learning through Oakland Bloom’s Chef Incubator program, and becoming a collaborative member of Oakland Bloom’s Open Test Kitchen. Alongside their endeavors with cooking, they have also been an active member with Wakan Wiya/Casa Tia Luna drum circles and supporting the gathering of Two Spirirt/QTIBIPOC community for spiritual healing.
Saguaro is also a collaborative organizer for a growing naturalist club called R.A.I.N.(Radical Accessibility In Nature) 4 QTIBIPOC. Saguaro has been supporting in creating the language around accessibility for these events, as well as facilitating mindful walks, Qi Gong exercises, and making nature more accessible to the community with a disability justice lens.
Jimmy Ramirez
Jimmy Ramirez was raised in Antioch California on the edge of the Delta. Raised by his mother, he spent his childhood in libraries and hair salon. Ramirez earned a degree in Government from Georgetown University and is a Masters in Fine Art candidate at the Institute of American Indian Art. His most recent film project 'Above Ground' premiered at the San Francisco Urban Film Festival and illuminated ways Fruitvale community members are caring for their neighborhood creek. This summer, Ramirez will partake in the Venice School of Indigenous Arts at the Venice Biennale. Ramirez is a two-spirit artist, educator, and filmmaker.
Lidia Ruelo-Salazar
Lidia Ruelo-Salazar is an indigenous two-spirit curandere, herbalist, sahuamadora, facilitator and community organizer who draws from over 18 years of experience supporting survivors of violence through limpias, journey drumming, peer counseling, support groups, and spiritual ceremonies. She founded Tierra Rituals, a small business focused on empowering individuals and communities with ancestral wisdom. Guided by a healing justice, harm reduction, and anti-oppression framework, Lidia integrates Ticiyotl, Curanderismo, and Western herbal training to offer handcrafted traditional herbal remedies, herbal wellness consultations, limpias, and ancestral herbal education to empower communities.
Maribel Martínez
Maribel Martínez (all pronouns) is a Queer Chicanx P'urhépecha brainiac, storyteller, and dream warrior from East San José, CA. Maribel shapeshifts between public policy, higher education, and the arts. Maribel performs and writes short stories, poems, plays, napkin memoirs, and may even sing you a Mexican bolero or ranchera. Maribel is a member of Macondo Writer's Workshop, Califas en Comunidad writer’s group, Primeras Paginas playwright’s circle, The Multicultural Arts Leadership Institute (MALI) Silicon Valley, and was a founding member of La Peña’s Hybrid Performance Experiment Ensemble and The Queeceañera Project SJ.
Maribel is a recipient of the inaugural Movimiento de Arte Y Cultura Latino Americana (MACLA) Cultura Fellowship, the California Arts Council Emerging Artist award, and a Center for Cultural Innovation grant. Maribel’s play for young audiences, Becoming (MAR), premiered at Teatro Vision in 2022 and was broadcast on CreaTV San Jose. Its sequel Mar in the Middle had a staged reading at the School of Arts and Culture in 2023. The final installation is funded by Horizons Foundation and will premiere in 2024. Maribel is also a poet whose work has been published in the Mujeres de Maiz en Movimiento, Journal X, and Beyond Queer Words: Queer Anthology.
Papi Churro
Papi Churro is an Oakland-based Two-Spirit Drag King and Cultural Bearer from Tap Pilam Coahuilitecan and Nahua-Otomi heritage. He's performed as a Drag King for 9 years and has produced showcases in 2 states for 7 years. Most recently he has co-founded the Sabes Que Collective with Drag Kings Jota Mercury, Luke Modelo, L.D. Hablo and SirVesa. The purpose of Sabes Que Collective is to increase the visibility of Queer, Trans, and Non-Binary Latinx, Chicanx, and Indigenous narratives in the drag Community. We hope to engage with local artists, vendors, and businesses to generate supportive networks and to provide a safe and inclusive space to all who identify, want to explore and celebrate Latinidad, whatever that means to them.
Paradise Maquetaurie
Paradise Maquetaurie is an artist who crafts audiovisual immersive experiences that transcend the conventional. Specializing in improvised electronic music, digital painting, projection-mapped animations, and black light installations, her work sits firmly grounded in the passed, present, and future.
Rooted in the folk traditions of dance and music, Paradise's artistic journey began with the rhythmic teachings of family and community. Evolving through self-taught mastery of digital art and music. Paradise has become a mainstay in the Bay Area's queer electronic music and art communities, resonating with the esoteric and the avant-garde, the traditional and the futuristic.
Influenced by a lineage of artists, Paradise's style is a homage to their cultural heritage—Taino petroglyphs, Zemis, line art, and the natural motifs of the Southwest blend with the aesthetics of Apache beadwork, Mesoamerican murals, West African art, and the rebellious spirit of anarchist punk zines. This eclectic fusion is brought to life through digital 3D environments, AR/VR, and live performances that illuminate the night.
Paradise's work has been exhibited in the halls of the Minnesota Street Project and vibrated across the fields of Outside Lands. They have headlined countless renegade raves and graced the stages of San Francisco's most iconic nightclubs and underground spaces, collaborating with luminaries like Grace Towers, Histrionixx, Baaits, and Macy Rodman.
Art and music, for Paradise, are as vital as the air we breathe—a manifestation of the great spirit. Their creations serve as a medicinal balm, preserving the sanctity of traditional art forms while embracing the potential of modern technology. Through their art, Paradise seeks to heal generational wounds, champion liberation, and celebrate two-spirit culture, all while fostering community strength and advocating for nature's protection.
Currently, Paradise is exploring what agency really looks and sounds like within their art, crafting narratives of revolution and reclamation. Their work is a testament to the power of independent creation, a clarion call for communal effort in the decolonization of art and music.