Help Xochitl Cortez fight cancer

Xochitl Cortez, our dear friend, comrade, and warrior for justice, faces a battle that she and her family are determined to win, and for which they need your support: defeating cancer.

Xochitl’s doctors discovered a mass in her breast that was later determined to be cancerous. She will undergo an immediate double mastectomy on November 4th, and then face intensive cancer fighting treatments, including chemotherapy.

Your support will help provide crucial assistance to Xochitl and her loving partner (and our fellow comrade) Jason Ferreira as they deal with expenses for insurance, cancer treatments, parallel treatments not covered by insurance as well as the day-to-day living expenses of raising two young girls and supporting two young adults (such as a newfound need for extracurricular activities, babysitting, and providing professional and emotional support for the entire family). Her medical team tells Xochitl she will not be able to work for a long period of time and this fundraiser has been set up to help her not have to worry about income for a year.

We believe in Xochitl’s power to defeat this cancer. That power comes from her family: her four children (Ayari, Quetzalli, Malinalli and Che), her loving partner Jason, her mother Regina Cortez and her 11 siblings. It also comes from you, her community of organizers, activists, and cultural workers dedicated to the fight for a better world. But don’t just take our word for it, listen to the words of Xochitl herself, who—even faced with her own personal health challenges—wants us to think urgently about the need to eradicate the cancers of injustice and inequity that plague our society.

Please support Xochitl as much as you can today!

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My name is Xochitl Cortez, a 46-year-old woman, mother of four, a sister, a daughter, a friend recently diagnosed with breast cancer, an invasive ductal carcinoma has metastasized to my lymph nodes. But my story runs deeper, illustrative of so much more.

I had regular mammograms, ultrasounds, ate healthy, didn’t smoke tobacco, didn’t drink alcohol, exercised regularly, and had no high-risk factors or genetic associations. And yet, on November 4, 2021, I will undergo bilateral mastectomy and removal of my left axillary lymph nodes during surgery.

I find myself in an unfathomable situation. I am a strong brown woman who advocated for myself time and time again; yet, in this medical healthcare complex, as a woman of color, I was routinely ignored, minimized, and, as a result, left misdiagnosed for many months. Everyone tells me I have a right to be angry that I have cancer but my anger is not against the cancer in my body, my anger is against the cancer that lives outside: the cancer of colonialism and capitalism.

I am angry at the healthcare complex that puts profit before people. I am angry at capitalism which rapes and exploits Mother Earth in the name of so-called innovation and profits. I am angry that corporations put toxins in our food, consumer goods, the clothes we wear, the air we breathe, and yet face no consequences or assume responsibility. I am angry that our lives are considered disposable.

I am angry that I am told that it is okay because, after all, this cancer is treatable without appreciating that it all comes at a high cost. I am angry that we look at the individual and not at the systems that create cancer in the first place.

The cancer in my body will heal but who and how will we heal the Cancer outside my body, in our society?

For now, I am on a journey to heal both physically and spiritually. I must go back to my ancestral wisdom, back to undoing western value systems that may have colonized my body but not my spirits.

With the your help—my family, friends, and community—I will protect this body just as we need to safeguard Pachamama for the next seven generations. I will heal and come out stronger and with more conviction than ever.

I am a social justice warrior, both Chicana and Chingona; this will not change, but I now need to count on my community to hold the space while I heal. And heal I will. We will.

The resistance of my ancestors lives in me forever! Their fierce spirit is stronger in my blood than the cancer I will defeat.

Professional Photos by Alexa Treviño (see full photo set of “The Cancer of Colonialism, Parts 1-3 at Instagram: @lexmexart)