About Us

Xochipilli Collective is an Indigenous-led organization rooted in Houston’s historic Settegast community. We are dedicated to revitalizing ancestral traditions through land stewardship, cultural education, and community-based practice. Our work is guided by Indigenous knowledge systems that honor the interconnected relationship between land, water, food, culture, and spirit.

We create spaces where Indigenous peoples and allies can reconnect with traditional foods, herbal medicines, creative practices, and sustainable lifeways grounded in reciprocity and respect for the earth. Through collective learning, shared labor, and intergenerational exchange, we cultivate resilience, cultural continuity, and environmental responsibility in an urban landscape shaped by displacement and environmental harm.

Ceremony is at the heart of our work. Our seasonal gatherings, including the Spring Planting Corn and Water Blessing, Harvest Ceremony, and Indigenous Peoples Day observances, are sacred practices rooted in ancestral teachings and cultural responsibility. Our ceremonies are living traditions that guide how we relate to the land, the water, our ancestors, and one another. They ground our work and inform everything we do.

Our programming focuses on hands-on, land-based learning that supports cultural survival and everyday nourishment. We plan and host workshops and learning sessions centered on traditional foods, medicines, and creative practices, including planting and harvesting ancestral crops, preparing and preserving food, seed saving and seed return, herbal medicine-making, and maintaining a community food bank.

Additional programming includes learning to build underground ovens and cook for the community, creating natural dyes and woodcut prints, weekly free Danza Azteca practice, and hosting elders and culture bearers to teach the making of traditional regalia. These offerings emphasize practice, reciprocity, and shared responsibility, ensuring knowledge is lived, not just remembered.

Xochipilli Collective is committed to Indigenous land stewardship and Land Back practices that protect land at risk of further industrial pollution and fossil fuel expansion. We work to restore and care for land through traditional ecological knowledge, transforming blighted spaces into living environments for food, medicine, ceremony, and learning. Healing the land is inseparable from healing our communities.

Milpa Móvil is a solar-powered RV transformed into a living, teaching, and creative space that supports Indigenous elders, artists, chefs, and environmental educators hosted at Xochipilli Collective. It provides space for learning, art-making, and rest, and serves as storage and preparation space for harvested foods and herbal medicines. Milpa Móvil reflects adaptability, mobility, and continuity, carrying ancestral knowledge forward in contemporary forms.

We are guided by ancestral teachings, collective care, accountability, and respect for all living beings. Xochipilli Collective exists not only to preserve culture, but to practice it, to plant it, cook it, sing it, build it, and pass it forward for generations to come.