Not yet? Ya basta: Healing and the horizons of an otherwise in Salinas, California

Among a persistently criminalized population of Mexican-Americans in the farmtown-gangland of Salinas, California, healing from the wounds of history has emerged as a critical register of political action, a tacit and uncertain activism recalibrating the pace and tense of personal recoveries and social change. Engaging fieldwork conducted during a string of local police homicides of Latinos, this dissertation focuses on how spiritually-inflected healing circles, and the form of being-with they generate, came to constitute a timely formation of politics otherwise in line with burgeoning activist techniques and tactics associated with ‘the new Civil Rights’ of lives mattering. In poor communities where life is hard and its management exhausting, where the so-called Latino Sleeping Giant lies ‘not yet' awake, and where the stakes invested in silence may be illegible to latent liberal sensibilities, through what registers, relationalities, and temporalities is the social changed? Speaking with those who say ya basta, ‘enough already,’ to this not yet, I pursue the multiple alternative temporalities through which people in Salinas, particularly the members of a women's healing collective, engage in a coeval process of healing themselves and the world around them.