Jessica Hernandez - Fresh Banana Leaves

Jessica Hernandez, PhD

In Fresh Banana Leaves, Jessica Hernandez weaves personal, historical, and environmental narratives to offer us a passionate and powerful call to increase our awareness and to take responsibility for caring for Mother Earth.

Emil Keme (Kiche Maya Nation) , member of the Ixbalamke Junajpu Winaq Collective

Fresh Banana Leaves is a groundbreaking book that busts existing frameworks about how we think about Indigeneity, science, and environmental policy. Beyond her trenchant critiques, she also offers the generative constructs of eco-colonialism and ecological grief as new ways of thinking through the current climate crisis. This book will soon be a vanguard text in the burgeoning field of Indigenous science, a must read for practitioners and theorists alike.

Sandy Grande , professor of political science and Native American and Indigenous Studies, University of Connecticut, and Senior Ford Fellow

Dr. Hernandez offers many gifts for us to learn, grow, and heal. She shares many details of how settler colonialism has impacted Indigenous people, specifically people of Mexico and Central America. Fresh Banana Leaves is a true validation of the Indigenous knowledge of community.

Dr. Michael Spencer , Presidential Term Professor of Social Work and director of Native Hawaiian, Pacific Islander, and Oceania Affairs at the Indigenous Wellness Research Institute (IWRI), University of Washington

While ecological destruction has intensified, many of the approaches intended to minimize cataclysmic harm continue to emerge from the Global North. What has long been ignored are the practices and worldviews that Indigenous peoples have with our nonhuman relatives. Fresh Banana Leaves offers seedsthrough the form of lived experiences and historic practices that come from the authors own ancestors and relatives. We are invited to take heed, to be part of rebuilding a world that is more dignified and responsive to our environment and nonhuman living relations. Our collective futures hinge upon us abiding.

Dr. Alejandro Villalpando , assistant professor of Latin American Studies, Cal State LA

Copyright 2022 by Jessica Hernandez. All rights reserved. No portion of this book, except for brief review, may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any meanselectronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwisewithout the written permission of the publisher. For information contact North Atlantic Books.

Published by
North Atlantic Books
Huichin, unceded Ohlone land
aka Berkeley, California

Cover art gettyimages.com/briddy
Cover design by Jasmine Hromjak
Book design by Happenstance Type-O-Rama

Fresh Banana Leaves: Healing Indigenous Landscapes through Indigenous Science is sponsored and published by North Atlantic Books, an educational nonprofit based in the unceded Ohlone land Huichin (aka Berkeley, CA), that collaborates with partners to develop cross-cultural perspectives, nurture holistic views of art, science, the humanities, and healing, and seed personal and global transformation by publishing work on the relationship of body, spirit, and nature.

North Atlantic Books publications are distributed to the US trade and internationally by Penguin Random House Publishers Services. For further information, visit our website at www.northatlanticbooks.com.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Hernandez, Jessica, 1990 author.
Title: Fresh banana leaves : healing indigenous landscapes through
indigenous science / Jessica Hernandez.
Description: Berkeley, California : North Atlantic Books, [2022] | Includes
bibliographical references.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021027787 (print) | LCCN 2021027788 (ebook) | ISBN
9781623176051 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9781623176068 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Women and the environmentLatin America. | Indian
womenAgricultureLatin America. | EnvironmentalismSocial
aspectsLatin America. | Environmental protectionLatin America. |
Human ecologyLatin America. | EcofeminismLatin America.
Classification: LCC GE195.9 .H47 2022 (print) | LCC GE195.9 (ebook) | DDC
304.2082dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021027787
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021027788

This book includes recycled material and material from well-managed forests. North Atlantic Books is committed to the protection of our environment. We print on recycled paper whenever possible and partner with printers who strive to use environmentally responsible practices.

For our Indigenous pueblos, by our Indigenous pueblos. May we continue to write and tell our stories, instead of our stories being written and told for us.

I want to acknowledge the Indigenous people who have come before me and have advocated for the protection of our Mother Earth. I want to thank my guiding ancestors for motivating me to pursue the environmental field as an Indigenous woman. I also want to thank everyone who was a part of this book and legacy: my mother, my father, my relatives, and all the Indigenous women from my communities who provided their testimonies. This book would not have been written without their support and guidance. May this book inspire you to plant seeds that will one day blossom into flowers of change. Decolonize. Revolutionize. Indigenize.

I am Victor Manuel. I now carry the last name Hernandez because like the war fractured my country, it fractured my identity. I had to adopt a new last name because everything was burned during the civil war, including the alcalda, where they held all of our birth certificates and other paperwork. I was eleven years old when I fought in the war that devastated my country of El Salvador.

W hen I started writing this book, I asked my father to tell me more about his experiences as a child soldier during the civil war that devastated his country of El Salvador. This was the hardest and most difficult conversation I have ever had with my father, as this was something he tried to keep beneath the surface. While he shared pieces of his story with me throughout my life, he had never shared his entire story from start to finish. This was his way of protecting me from the life he endured as an Indigenous child. He never wanted his experiences to become my experiences, as his main goal as a father was to protect me from any harm. However, no matter how much he tried to hide his trauma, it always resurfaced.

War leaves a devastating impact on ones mental health, especially when the trauma is experienced during ones childhood. At a young age, I started to piece together every short story my father had shared with me to fully understand the magnitude of his lived experience. I witnessed his healing journey, which was not always easy, pleasant, or a fairy tale, as he overcame his post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and other traumatic impacts the war left on him. I became his caregiver and confidant and continue to be both to him to this day. Ultimately, because I witnessed his journey, I can say that I ended up inheriting my fathers trauma. This gave me a different perspective on what intergenerational trauma really means. For me, it is not just something I get to read about in health journals or hear about in research. It has manifested in my lived experience as the daughter of an Indigenous former child soldier of the Central American civil war.