Seeds to Inspire

"Becoming a mom really was a catalyst for learning my inheritance, because there was this little life that was looking up at me and needing answers that I didn't have”.

Jacque Salomon is an Indigenous Woman from the island of Boriken (Puerto Rico) born and raised in New York City. Jacque now lives in Phoenix Arizona, where she runs her non-profit Seeds to Inspire that “supports underrepresented, underserved, under-financed, and marginalized communities in the Phoenix metro area of AZ as well as surrounding reservations”. In her many years as an activist, Jacque has drawn upon what came out of wrestling with her identity and inheritance to engage in more holistic and impactful social justice work.

Jacque co-founded Seeds to Inspire as a response to a deep knowing that “it's our time to rise up and bring this extreme, radical love onto the planet”. Drawing from her extensive social justice work and own inheritance journey, she has decided to work through her “multidimensional” identity in its entirety

“My inheritance was prescribed by society, by the institutions in this country”.

Growing up in the “bubble of New York City”, Jacque shares, "I didn't know as much about our culture as I thought I did. I grew up thinking, I was this proud Puerto Rican girl from New York, but I didn't realize until I got older that my inheritance was prescribed by society, by the institutions in this country”. Although her family was originally from Puerto Rico, it took moving away to attend university to “really understand that there was much more to my inheritance than just the localized culture that was central to New York." She recognizes that her inheritance also includes the experience of migrating to New York and creating a new culture, and "that there were much deeper roots in our indigeneity”.

Jacque explains that “growing up in New York city, at least from my experience, it was very much like if you were not in a white body, you were one. So I grew up feeling that there were those in white bodies, and then [over there] were the rest of us, and the rest of us - we just knew it. There was an unspoken understanding that the differences between us were cultural, but that we were the same. It was just unspoken. It was never discussed. It was just known. But when I got to college, it wasn't like that. I didn't realize how much of a bubble I had grown up in in New York City, and that the world wasn't like that.”

She re-tells how it was in college when “I was kind of reminded that there were clubs and groups and organizations that were for me. And that's when I started feeling othered of being a person of color. And that's where I started really like asking, who the hell am I?”

But really it was "becoming a mom really was a catalyst for learning my inheritance, because there was this little life that was looking up at me and needing answers that I didn't have," she shares. She felt “ashamed of not knowing, there was this vacuum, that all of a sudden, I felt, of "identity". Having her eldest son, Joshie, invoked her deep desire to confront her inheritance.

“He made me look at the violence in my family, look at the violence in our speech, look at the violence in our communities…that led me to understand my indigeneity, understand the Blackness that lives inside me,” and reconcile with the fact that “50% of my inheritance comes from my colonizers”.

Jacque shares that “when my eldest son passed away, that's when everything took a turn and the world crashed. And that's when it was like, I'm not that, and I'm not going to be what the world tells me I'm going to be. I'm going to figure this out myself. And I figured this out. And that's what led me on the journey that led me to Seeds and to figure out what does being a Puerto Rican mean in this country? What does being a Brown woman mean in this country? What does being a Latin X person mean in this country?”

The experience of questioning her identity and confronting her inheritance in her twenties lead directly to co-founding Seeds to Inspire. As a mother that loves without bounds, a fierce woman, and a driven social justice activist, Jacque honors all these parts of her inheritance that make her the force of light and care that she is.

Jacque’s battle against her children’s discrimination in schools, against health concerns in her family, against family loss and suffering speaks to the potent affect of inheritance that lives in and through her. When her sons began to experience the violence of the education system she “started volunteering with the Demand to Learn campaign that was developed by a group of moms that wanted to fight back against the push out of black and Brown, trans children that were all being pushed out of the schools”. At the same time, she began seeking alternative ways to heal her family – their bodies, minds and souls. And when she was successful, and her and her loved ones were no longer sick, she decided, “everybody needs to know about this. Everybody needs to go through this and everybody has a right”. And yet this realization also came with the deeper question of “wait, why didn't [she] know this?”.

"She “started studying and learning more about the environment, about the social justice, about the animals, the health injustice” and began to understand that the same reason she didn’t have access to healthy food, to the right mediation was the same reason “why [her] mom broke, why [her] mom was so incapable of allowing herself to feel, allowing herself to express love.”

In her work, Jacque aims to “create a learning environment in which every child is embraced”, where their diversity of gifts is celebrated, and families and communities can rediscover “what it is to be human…what it is to be a family that cares”. Her community nutrition program hopes to “restore health, mind, body, spirit, and unpolluting everything that we consume…and restoring love”. Understanding the depth and weight of inheritance, she envisions the way forward through the family, through restoring multi-faceted health in the community. Her and her “advisory board of social workers go in to help where families can’t find their way, that are either very sick or food insecure” and they ask “how can we help them mind, body, spirit, what can we do as a community? How can we take all the privilege that we all have and transmit their privilege to service”?

Jacque relates that “it's important to understand that when we challenge anyone's core beliefs— and food is one—we're helping you understand that maybe your relationship with your parents is not as healthy as you thought it was. It's really hard. The defenses go up. Maybe your relationship with food is not exactly what you thought it was... so can we just have a conversation? It's delicate, but we have to be respectful and understand that we are challenging people's culture, ritual and inheritances”. She suggests that “if we give people the information, make sure that you know all the things that you need to know that's been hidden from you and then trust it. You make the best decision for yourself. We have to radically self-love, radically self-care. We got to help one another”.

Coming from a place of unconditional care and hope, Jacque recognizes that we each have this extreme, radical love within us, the same “fierceness to protect truth, the children, nature - all of that is what's rising up and coming back”. Seeds to Inspire is in many ways a manifestation of Jacque’s strength and incredible love she has for her inheritance and desire to create a beautiful world to be inherited by those to come.