Rootless with Polo

You were never lostyou just didn't have the words yet

Not Mexican enough, not American enough. Ni de aquí ni de allá. There are old Nahua words for what you've been carrying, and they were never about leaving. They're about getting rooted.

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3 Nahua concepts + week one of the 30 day challenge.
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The feeling first

You're from nowhere, and you know it

Your Spanish gets corrected on one side. Your name gets flattened on the other. You're too much of one thing at work and not enough of it at your abuela's table. So you float. You learn to be a slightly different person in every room and you call that being adaptable, and somewhere in there you stop knowing which version is actually YOU.

I lived in that my whole life and never had a word for it. Turns out the word is old. Turns out the in-between was never the actual problem, the expectation that you had to pick a side was.

I'm not gonna sell you a heritage kit or tell you to go find yourself. The Nahua had working tools for standing in the middle without getting torn apart by it, and they still work, and most of us were never handed them.

Inside the guide

Three words that do the work

01 Nepantla The in-between. The space between two waters. The thing you've been treating as your failure was a place the Nahua had already mapped.
02 Tlalticpac The slippery earth. The ground was always slick, for everybody. You were never supposed to walk it without falling, only to get better at finding your balance.
03 Teotl The sacred energy running through everything, including you. For anybody who walked away from church and still feels the pull toward something bigger.
What lands in your inbox

A guide you keep, not a newsletter

The knowing comes after the doing, not before.

Straight up

Who this is for

This is for you if

  • You're first or second gen and stuck between two cultures
  • You feel disconnected from where you come from and don't know how to get back
  • You want something to practice, not more theory to scroll past
  • You'd rather be talked to like a person than a student

Skip it if

  • You want a quick fix or a morning routine hack
  • You're looking for made up ancient secrets
  • You want somebody to tell you you're already healed
Who's writing this

I'm a few steps ahead, that's all

I'm Polo. I work at a restaurant and I've been studying Nahua philosophy for a while now, and I make videos about it for people who feel the same thing I felt. I'm not a scholar and I'm not a healer, and I'm not gonna pretend to be either one.

The words in here are real, they're attested vocabulary from actual Nahua thought. The way I build on them is mine, and I say which is which. Where I don't know something, I say I don't know it. That seems like the least you should expect from somebody handing you your own culture back.

Last thing

Start tonight

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