Grief Is a Wound We Inherit: Exploring personal and ancestral grief in our culture.

Episode Description:
In this deeply personal and healing episode, we explore the many faces of grief through the lens of Latinx and Latina millennial experiences. From mourning loved ones to grieving lost versions of ourselves, we open up about how our cultural identity, family dynamics, and generational expectations shape the way we process pain and loss. Whether you're navigating fresh grief or carrying ancestral sorrow, this episode holds space for your story.

In This Episode, We Discuss:

🎙️ Grief Beyond the Personal: Collective and Cultural Grief in a World on Fire

Grief isn’t only about losing a loved one. For many Latinas and Latinx millennials, it’s about watching the world burn while being told to carry on with strength and silence. It’s grief in layers—personal, historical, and inherited. Here are some reflections:

🇺🇸 ICE Raids & Anti-Immigrant Policies:

✊🏽 Protests & Uprisings in the U.S.:

🇵🇸 Palestine, Global Liberation, and Shared Struggles:

🧬 Why This Grief Feels So Heavy for Us:

• We carry our own lived traumas and the historical wounds of our ancestors—enslaved, erased, exiled.
• Many of us are first-generation everything, trying to heal in real time while holding our families together.
• The world asks us to be strong, not soft—to survive, not feel. But grief needs space. Silence doesn’t save us. Naming grief is a form of resistance.

🖤 What Does Grief Look Like For Us?

• Grief for humanity and the current events in the world
• Personal stories of loss — from the sudden to the slow and expected.
• How grief showed up in unexpected places: body, sleep, parenting, spirituality.
• The cultural silence around grieving and how it affects our healing process.

🌺 How Our Latina Identity Shapes Our Grief

• Expectations of strength, silence, and being the caretaker.
• The influence of faith, ritual, and family dynamics.
• Intergenerational grief and how we carry stories not told.

🌧️ Different Types of Grief

• Sudden vs. long-term grief — what each teaches us.
• Losing a parent, caregiver, or grandparent and the unique heartbreak it brings.
• The grief of losing yourself — to trauma, survival mode, or caregiving.
• Moms grieving quietly while holding it all together.
• Collective grief: mourning for a world in crisis (violence, climate, injustice).

💬 How We Cope

• Therapy, journaling, ancestral practices, community circles, and rest.
• Making space for joy and grief to coexist.
• How language and Spanglish help us process emotions that don’t always translate.

❤️‍🩹 Why We Need to Talk About This More

• Honoring grief as sacred, not shameful.
• Breaking cycles of silence so the next generation has tools to heal.
• Creating culturally grounded, emotionally open spaces for healing.

Resources Mentioned in this Episode:

• ⁠Latinx therapy directories⁠

• ⁠Books and poetry on grief by Latinx authors⁠

• Community healing circles and virtual support groups

• Immigrant Rights Resources and Support

Listener Invitation:
Have a grief story you want to share? DM us or send a voice note to be featured in a future episode. Your voice matters.

This week on Listen, Mija we are talking about pop culture - films from the 80s/90s/2000s that we grew up on from the perspective of the Latina lens!

The movies of the 80s, 90s, and early 2000s—Love Actually, Never Been Kissed, 16 Candles, She’s All That, Labyrinth, Cruel Intentions, Scream, Fear, Cry-Baby, Romeo + Juliet, Kids, Rent, American Beauty—were sold to us as romantic, iconic, and formative. And they were. But they were also riddled with inappropriate relationships, misogyny, and grooming—masked as love, framed as passion, and packaged in a way that taught an entire generation of girls to crave toxicity

Watching these movies as a Latina wasn't just about toxic relationships—it was about absence, distortion, and survival.

It taught you:

• That your story didn’t matter unless it was whitewashed.

• That love meant pain—and your culture was either invisible or fetishized.

• That your body was never just yours—it was either hidden or objectified.

And yet—you still watched. You still dreamed. You still made space for your identity in a world that didn’t hand you the script.

We grew up watching stories that told us how to love, how to be loved, and how to erase ourselves to fit into someone else's frame. But we’re older now. We see it differently. We’re starting to tell our own stories—stories where Latinas are the main characters. Where love is soft and safe. Where boundaries are beautiful. Where culture is something to celebrate, not conceal. We're reclaiming our scripts. And that might be the real coming-of-age story.

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In episode 3 of Listen, Mija - we get deep exploring the topic about relationships with ourselves. We all had a lot of thoughts on this one! Growing up Latina, many of us were taught—explicitly or silently—that love looks like sacrifice. We’re praised for being selfless, strong, and always there for everyone else. We’re daughters, sisters, comadres, caretakers. But rarely are we taught to be our own first priority.

From the kitchen to the classroom to our relationships, the message is clear: "Mija, ponte en el lugar de los demás.”Translation? Put yourself last.

In American culture, where self-empowerment is often encouraged (at least on the surface), navigating our identity as Latinas can be confusing. We want to chase dreams, prioritize our mental health, and set boundaries—but guilt creeps in. We wonder if we’re being selfish, dramatic, or “too much.”

That cultural tug-of-war impacts how we love ourselves. It shows up in our inability to say no, in how we accept less than we deserve, in how we silence our needs.

But here's the truth: putting yourself first isn’t betrayal—it's healing. It's rewriting a legacy. When we learn to have a relationship with ourselves, we break cycles. We stop surviving and start thriving.

So no, self-love isn’t just a bubble bath and a mantra—it’s radical. And for Latinas, it’s revolutionary. Yo primero isn’t selfish. It’s sacred.

Listen to the episode: Spotify | Apple Podcasts | Amazon Podcasts | I Heart Radio

Don't forget to like, rate and subscribe!

You can also find us on socials here: Facebook, Instagram, and Youtube!

Don't forget to like, rate and subscribe!

You can find us online and learn more at: ⁠

⁠www.listenmijapod.com⁠

You can also find us on socials here:

Youtube:

⁠https://www.youtube.com/@ListenMijaPodcast⁠

Facebook:

⁠https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61575889247085⁠

Instagram:

⁠https://www.instagram.com/listenmija_podcast/⁠

Tik Tok:

⁠https://www.tiktok.com/@listenmija⁠