Con el Nopal en la Frente: The Body as Nopal in Decolonial Sexuality Education
Live Webinar: March 28, 10:00–11:30 AM PT
This 90-minute live webinar explores the body as nopal, a living site of memory, protection, and transformation. Con el Nopal en la Frente invites participants to reflect on embodiment through a land-rooted framework drawn from the sacred nopal.
Across this session, participants will examine the four interwoven phases of the nopa: seed, root, thorn, and flesh. The nopal becomes more than symbol. It becomes pedagogy. It becomes anatomy. It becomes survival and thrivance.
We will also explore the cultural and political meaning of the phrase Con el Nopal en la Frente. Historically used as an insult to mark Indigenous features and proximity to Indigeneity, the phrase has functioned as a tool of shame and internalized colonial hierarchy. In reclaiming it, we shift from stigma to sovereignty. To wear the nopal on the forehead becomes an embodied refusal of erasure and a declaration that ancestral memory lives in the body and cannot be scrubbed away. This reclamation reframes the body itself as site of dignity, knowledge, and power. It also unsettles the desire to distance oneself from Indigeneity. Even when one attempts to forget or assimilate, the nopal remains visible. Reclaiming the phrase becomes both personal affirmation and communal mirror, asking what it means to remember who we are when forgetting has been rewarded.
Drawing from Xicana feminist frameworks and contemporary understandings of fascia and somatic memory, this course reframes the body beyond colonial separations of mind and flesh, sexuality and spirit, protection and pleasure.
Participants will explore how the nopal framework reshapes approaches to consent, resistance, trauma-informed teaching, and culturally responsible sexuality education. Rather than pathologizing protective responses or disembodied learning, this course centers embodied sovereignty as both survival strategy and erotic reclamation.
Who This Course Is For
This webinar is designed for sexuality educators, counselors, therapists, supervisors, and community knowledge-keepers seeking frameworks that move beyond colonial separations of body, land, and sexuality. It is especially relevant for professionals working with Afro-Indigenous, Indigenous, Chicana, Xicana, Latina, Latinx, and diasporic communities rooted in the Nopal, Mesoamerican land, lineage, and for those committed to culturally responsible and accountable practice.
If you are not of these communities but serve, love, teach, supervise, parent, partner, or move in relationship within these cultural spaces, this course invites you into deeper responsibility rather than observation. It offers an opportunity to examine how colonial narratives of embodiment shape your own training and to consider what culturally grounded respect looks like in practice. This space is not about claiming what is not yours. It is about learning how to stand in right relation.
Learning Objectives
By the end of this session, participants will be able to:
- Describe how the four phases of the nopal (seed, root, thorn, and flesh) function as an embodied framework that challenges colonial narratives of embodiment in sexuality education.
- Identify one specific strategy for integrating embodied sovereignty or boundary intelligence into sexuality education or community practice.
Core Knowledge Areas
CKA C – Socio-cultural, familial factors
CKA O – Professional communication and personal reflection skills
AASECT CE Language (you can mirror your previous format)
This program meets the requirements of the American Association of Sexuality Educators, Counselors and Therapists (AASECT) and is approved for 1 CE credit. These CE credits may be applied toward AASECT certification and renewal of certification. Completion of this program does not ensure or guarantee AASECT certification. For further information, contact [email protected].
TUITION
The full registration rate is $45.
If you are earning AASECT CE credit and have the capacity, I invite you to contribute the full amount in support of the labor and administrative work required for CE programming.
Sliding scale options are available at 50%, 75%, or 90% off. Please choose the rate that reflects your current access to resources. No justification is required.
If you need a full scholarship, contact [email protected].
Sliding scale is a practice of shared responsibility. Those with greater access help create room for those with less. We move according to capacity.
Use one of these coupon codes at checkout for sliding scale pricing:
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Presented by Dra. Serina Payan Hazelwood
Dra. Serina Payan Hazelwood (Dra/She/Ella) is a queer, Indigenous Chicana scholar, educator, and community gatherer. Steward of The Elsewheres, she creates spaces for learning rooted in ceremony, storywork, and embodied practice. She holds a PhD in Sustainability Education and an MA in Interdisciplinary Studies from Prescott College and is currently pursuing a second master’s in Regenerative Design. As an AASECT Certified Sexuality Educator, Organizational Provider, and Supervisor in Training, her work bridges professional education with Indigenous and decolonial pedagogies. Living on Kumeyaay lands in Playas de Rosarito, she teaches from a core truth: violence to the land is violence to our bodies. Guided by the Nahui Ollin, her work re-animates Chingonisma as a body of knowledge that restores voice, memory, and communal power. Through The Elsewheres, Serina stewards spaces where people remember themselves, practice accountability, and build futures with land, body, and ancestors in right relation.
