CHICHIHUALTIA
Perinatal & Family Wellness
Addressing Perinatal Health Inequities with Traditional Knowledge Systems, Lineage Legacies, Early Family Foundations, and Community-driven Action
Traditional Knowledge Systems
Through the study of Classical Nahuatl and pre and post colonial Mesoamerican manuscripts, we repair religious and cultural worldviews to build on ancestral paradigms for advancing perinatal, pediatric and planetary health.
Lineage Legacies
We safeguard ancestral practices that facilitate optimal birth and postpartum outcomes, postpartum rites of passages for baby and parent, mammalian behaviors, responsive parenting, and sustainable food systems to promote symbiotic relationships, biodiversity, and perinatal and family wellness.
Early Family Foundations
We're co-creating a world in which all parents and families in the City of Los Angeles and beyond have access to culturally and linguistically appropriate birth, lactation, perinatal health and family wellness services. We uphold these services as human rights to healthy starts in life, protective factors against adverse perinatal and pediatric health outcomes, and facilitators of lineage health and healing.
Community-Driven Action
To meet the needs of the families we serve, Chichihualtia strengthens dual processes for providing direct perinatal family wellness services alongside ongoing capacity-building and workforce development for the clinical care providers who serve them. As such, Chichihualtia also takes a systems-level approach to strengthening familial and communal systems that support optimal perinatal health outcomes and family wellness.
Join the Guardians of Ancestral Perinatal Paradigms (GAPP) Study & Work Group
Guardians of Ancestral Perinatal Paradigms (GAPP) is an Indigenous centered Collaborative and Cultural Workforce and Study Group committed to closing the gaps across the continuum of perinatal care services among our diverse Indigenous and Hispanohablante communities on Gabrieleno-Tongva Lands/California, City of Los Angeles and beyond.
Every 1st Monday of the month 7:30pm-9:00pm PT.
Ancestral Lactation Trainings
A Virtual 10hr Live Interactive Human Lactation Lesson Series Rooted in Anahuacan Mesoamerican Culture for BIPOC Perinatal Care Providers
This is a live cohort-based series that includes ongoing skills and capacity building for BIPOC Perinatal Care Providers, Birthworkers, and Support Persons Serving Indigenous, Chicanx, and Latine/Hispanohablante Communities. For more information email info@chichihualtia.org
Why Us
As an organization whose core values are perinatal, pediatric and planetary health and family wellness, Chichihualtia is charged with upholding ancestral traditions from Mexico, Central and South America, for the health of the planet and future generations. We nurture and maintain cultural attachments to our native languages, ancestral calendars, traditions and heritage, always centering lactation within community, culture and ceremony. We're revitalizing Anahuacan cultural legacies for birth, lactation, parenting and family wellness one parent-baby dyad and family at a time.
Mission
Chichihualtia is a nonprofit organization committed to improving the health and wellbeing of childbearing and lactating people through providing access to culturally and linguistically appropriate birth, perinatal and family wellness services, and outreach, education and advocacy in support of exclusive chest/breastfeeding, birth related services, and midwifery-led models of care.
Chichihualtia centers birth, lactation and parenting within culture, ceremony and community.
The Lineage-Health Initiative
Founded in 2020, Chichihualtia sprouted from an Indigenous People’s Lineage-Health Initiative focused on cultivating values of self-determination and the restoration of lineage-based traditions that have always culturally and historically supported and sustained ancestral birth, lactation and family wellness practices for improved generational health outcomes.
The Lineage-Health Initiative is an Indigenous people’s health initiative and cultural revival that builds on family lineage legacies, such as culture and customs, to nurture ancestral values of wellbeing and self-determination for improving personal and intergenerational health outcomes.
The Lineage Health Initiative acknowledges the legacies of health enhancing customs within family lineages and takes a lineage and individual strength based approach to promote homebirth, chest/breastfeeding and revitalization of familial, communal, ecological and agricultural systems.