How Maraliz Salgado's Decolonial Approach Is Freeing Women of Color to Reclaim Their Power
There is no denying that the world can sometimes be an imperfect, dark, and dismal place. But don’t lose hope, dear reader! There’s a way to turn your emotional pain and trauma into the very medicine that can begin to heal it.
During the toughest times, we forget that we are very capable and remarkable creators and that our true power lies within ourselves. Our personal liberation and mental wellness journeys are worth exploring and investing in so that we can show up every day as the most badass, kind, creative, and confident versions of ourselves who can face fear and say, “Nope, not today! I’m here to serve my life’s purpose because I know who I am and what I’m about.”
If you’re looking for a thought partner who can hype you up and remind you of your stunning authenticity, beauty, and power, Modern Brown Girl has you covered!
We sat down with Maraliz “Mara” Salgado, a liberatory life coach and former educator with a corazón full of sazón who isn’t afraid to break down systemic barriers when helping women of color reach their highest potential. Mara was born in Puerto Rico and raised in Chicago by her educator parents; she received her B.A. in Elementary Education from the University of Illinois Chicago in 1997 and an MA in Educational Leadership and Administration from Northeastern Illinois University in 2004. After sixteen years of teaching and nearly five years of administrative work, she left the public school system and took a year off. She obtained a life coach certification from Life Purpose Institute (accredited by the International Coaching Federation), launched her life coaching business, Libérate LC, in 2020, and then joined the Decolonial Healing Collective with Dr. Rocío Rosales-Meza in 2021.
Mara is also Reiki 2 certified, and she’s been studying the Taíno language and culture for the past three years (the Taíno are an indigenous group native to Puerto Rico, Cuba, Jamaica, Haiti, the Virgin Islands, the Bahamas, and Dominican Republic). She also co-wrote the book “F.L.Y. L.I.B.R.E.: A Guide for Healing and Liberation” with Dorian A. Ortega, which serves as a liberatory wellness guide on eight specific life areas: Learn, Labor, Lament, Laugh, Lust, Limpia (spiritual cleansing) and Liberate.
Each chapter covers one of these eight life areas and is full of vividly beautiful descriptions, anecdotes, resources, and prompts that invite the reader to challenge themselves to dive deeper into each area of their lives. The book is intentionally woven together to ask readers to love themselves enough so they can fly freely past the fears and insecurities holding them back from being their authentic selves.
Both co-authors shared the following description of their book: “Inspired by therapist Dorian Ortega's practice F.L.Y. (First Love Yourself) Radical Therapy and life coach Maraliz Salgado’s Libérate Life Coaching work, we have created ‘F.L.Y. L.I.B.R.E.: A Guide for Healing and Liberation’ for fellow people of color who are working toward a more loving and just world and might be forgetting to count themselves in it. The guide consists of a preface for each ‘L’ followed by a set of prompts using our signature L.I.B.R.E. framework based on Liberatory Mindset, Integration, Belonging, Radical Responsibility, and Embodiment–critical components of our wellness, wholeness, healing, and liberation as BIPOC, LGBTQ2S+, and all sacred but undervalued identities.”
Mara shared with MBG her experiences as a sober, first-generation Puerto Rican immigrant seeking new ways of reframing what it means to heal and be free, why she started a life coaching business explicitly designed for women of color, and how her business and book help her fulfill her life’s purpose.
F.L.Y. L.I.B.R.E.: A Guide for Healing and Liberation, $20
By: Maraliz Salgado and Dorian A Ortega
How did your Puerto Rican culture impact who you are now?
My childhood was full of education, music, and faith to keep us strong, resilient in love, and courageous. I come from a really beautiful Puerto Rican family that came to Chicago in 1977. My parents and my grandmother on my dad’s side were educators, so I became a public school and charter school teacher, and then an instructional coach.
When my parents moved us here from Puerto Rico, we came into a neighborhood where we were rejected right away. Our white neighbors committed hate crimes—they burned down our garage, busted our windows, poisoned our dog. Some of these kids were students at the high school where my dad taught. Those immigrant experiences have never left me. I watched my dad yearn for his island, and now I do the same.
What made you leave the public education system and launch your life coaching business?
I was always more curious of my students as people than as learners, and of building something together. I think I was a coach already, [since I] cultivated brave and safe spaces with young people who could feel able to be authentically themselves. That’s a gift in and of itself. That’s a privilege and honor.
In my 16 years of teaching, there were 360-degrees of exhaustion all the time, but there were also infusions of joy all the time. My students and I laughed and had so much fun, but as an instructional coach I didn’t find the role to be as refueling and regenerating for the amount of work being put in. When I left the classroom to become an instructional coach, I was fully in the throes of my overachieving, over-functioning, workaholism, alcoholism mode.
What pushed me the most out of the system was that I couldn’t believe that I was not experiencing joy anymore. I couldn’t do it anymore, I couldn’t live that way. There were no lifted spirits, just problems. [When you are burnt out] your mind is on overload, your body is overworked, your spirit is exhausted. After almost five years of doing administrative work, I realized I needed to be more integrated [because] the students need people who are committed, and if you don’t slow down you’re going to break down.
It’s been liberating becoming an independent business owner. I know some people get turned off when I say I’m a life coach, but to me, the role is about the transition, not focusing on a particular life area. [Coaching someone] is about how we follow our passion and see things through, it’s about having somebody be a thought partner or a mirror to you, be a supporter, to challenge you.
Your business is called Libérate, which means “free yourself.” How do you explain to your clients what it means to be free?
People are still asleep to the ways we are programmed and conditioned in this society by structures like schools, families, churches, etc. When we say “Let’s get free!” people tend to ask “Free from what?” So we have to start with decolonization to answer that.
Many civilizations and societies lived together harmoniously for thousands of years, but other groups subjected, oppressed, and dominated others. There’s no freedom in that--you become a subject of a superpower. Colonization is erasure. It’s disembodiment, disconnection between us and our land. It’s power over, not power with. The dominant culture makes us see things from a Eurocentric worldview like it’s a standard.
Indigenous peoples’ worldviews tends to be more relational and dynamic than transactional and outcome-oriented. So, decolonization makes us say “Wait a minute, I don’t have to believe what my parents, grandparents, or generations prior to me have believed in the past.” There’s a reason why you learned certain things in history class, because it keeps you docile and focused on the perspective of the cis-hetero, patriarchal, white, able-bodied, Christian, colonial culture.
But we haven’t lost our culture, we just have to tap back in and connect. In order to conserve my energy to dedicate more time to that, I had to ask myself “Do I really believe that? Or did somebody implant that? Does this feel right to me? Let me feel into that with my body, soul, spirit, intuition.”
We have every right—and the responsibility, for the sake of ourselves and this planet and every living thing on it---to go back to indigenous ways, or at least to weave them together with the ways we live now, to conserve and preserve humanity, because this cis-hertero patriarchal way we’ve been living for centuries now is killing us all. Decolonization is ecological, physical, emotional, spiritual, mental, intrapersonal, and interrelational work. It’s global on every level. To be free, we must divest from certain beliefs and practices and invest in life-sustaining ones.
Who are your life coaching services tailored to, and what can they expect from the services you provide?
I offer individual and group coaching, healing circles, and Reiki. [To honor Mother Earth], I want to honor and center my time and energy on women and girls. Like Frida Kahlo said “I paint the subject I know best.” I give my first demo sessions to all women of color for free, that’s my gift to them. It's a way for me to give reparation. As a coach I ask my clients “Where are you aligned?” I’m not there to judge, but I will post the question, so you know where you come from and what motivates you.
I also want to start framing my services as decolonial leadership coaching, because since the colonizer lives within us, [we don’t realize that as leaders] we also lead with dominance and a competitive spirit, exploiting each other and ourselves. [That colonial type of leadership] doesn’t affirm life, which is what we need to be doing.
How do you define decolonial leadership for someone who’s never heard of decolonization?
No matter what we do, we are all living in these same systems: the way we do business, politics, housing, healthcare, how we provide mutual aid toward each other. No matter what sector we’re working in, we’re part of a culture--folks of color, women, the disabled, LGBTQI+, folks that are not citizens, that don’t speak English, aren’t Christian--that has been discriminated against and not allowed to just live free, to be ourselves. We’re constantly under the thumb of the rich, white, straight, able-bodied system. ¡Ya basta [enough]!
The depression we all feel comes from colonization, it’s insidious. It’s A to B and don’t dilly-dally, do the job. In different tribes throughout the world, they believe in flexible and cyclical time structures where people are more valuable than products, the process is more valuable. In indigenous ways of thinking, everything is very much communal and you can find more solidarity and support to move forward instead of this rushed productivity and urgency of colonial culture.
So to decolonize is to realize “Maybe this particular way is not the only way? And it’s not something I need to aspire to or assimilate to in order to be successful.” Before you can accept what you’re learning about your people as a leader, you also have to shed layers. The decolonization process is shedding those layers.
Why should our self-care and mental wellness journey include collective solidarity?
Self-care is not external, it can’t just be about yoga and eating organic food. It’s also about the relationships that we have with others, how we speak to each other with subjugation or harm. We do it all the time in community: folks will be living their best lives, taking care of themselves, but then they actually duplicate the same type of [colonizer] behaviors of harm because they start to think they’re in a better place in life, and that sometimes turns into superiority and replicates the hierarchy.
We’re all connected. These organic foods that you purchase for your smoothies or green juices in your self care plan--who do you think picks those fruits and vegetables? Those people get infected by pesticides to keep it organic and they get sick, and they crossed borders to get better healthcare. It’s a butterfly effect, there is no separation in humanity.
There’s a social movement ecosystem that shows there’s more than one way to fit within the movement: you can be a healer, a storyteller, a weaver, an agitator, a caregiver. It’s a journey just awakening, because you’re going to have to deal with some cognitive dissonance within you that says “I don’t know what’s right or wrong anymore.” You’re going to have a productive struggle with yourself.
If I don’t know how to show myself curiosity and compassion, how can I give it to you? If I'm not aware of the ways that colonialism shows up in the ways I treat other people that I deemed to be less than me, how am I different from the colonizer? If we re-indigenize, come back to ourselves, reflect on who we are in mind, heart, body, and spirit, if we look at our masculine and feminine selves, our colonized and decolonized versions, our shadow and our light, maybe we won’t have so much conflict within community. If you’re apathetic and only focused on your individualistic, self-care journey and think “I don’t have time for all of that,” that apathy is problematic because to not be connected to your people is to also be somewhat disconnected from yourself. We don’t live in a vacuum, we all impact each other.
Let’s talk about your book, “F.L.Y. L.I.B.R.E.”, written by you and Dorian A. Ortega. How is it a starting point for women of color seeking more guidance on freeing themselves from the harm done by colonization?
Adding the medicina Taína, as me and my writing partner Dori like to call it, into the “L.I.B.R.E.” framework’s eight different life areas makes it our interpretation of a way to approach healing and liberation for folks of color and other sacred but undervalued identities. You don’t have to read it in order, they intermix and overlap. In awakening to colonization or decolonization, the most important is to start with the “L.I.B.R.E.” framework: Learn, Labor, Lament, Laugh, Lust, Limpia and Liberate. You can start with any area you feel most called to right now!
It was, however, very intentional of us to have started with an “L” (Liberatory Mindset): how do we get free in our learning, loving, lusting, liberation, laboring, limpias, lamenting, and laughter? It goes back to how you perceive things, to asking yourself “How am I thinking about this situation, or this person? How am I thinking about this problem, and who am I bringing along to repair conflict?” The book asks us [to examine] how we forgive each other, how to love outside of ourselves. It makes us answer things like “What is my role in my suffering? How am I contributing to my joy?”
You’ll develop more compassion for others once you have grace for yourself. We can’t change a thing without that. Remember, you’re the world, start with you. Make a change in you first. You are part of the collective simply by existing. If you’re taking care of yourself how you need to without harming others, you will have surplus to offer [the collective] when the time comes.
What rituals do you need to keep you grounded when your external world starts to feel unstable?
I kneel on my meditation cushion toward my clay sculpture of Atabey (Mother Earth’s name in Taíno religion) and touch my forehead to her crowned forehead attempting to connect with her sacred, loving, abundant earth energy to ground myself. I also pray in the little bit of Taino Arawak language that I feel so blessed to have reclaimed.
I have lots of river rocks, ocean rocks, shells and earth elements from Puerto Rico and Mexico and places I’ve traveled to, so I grab whatever rock is calling to me, hold it, and connect with it. I give gratitude to our Mother Earth, sit, breathe, say a prayer over and over, and remember that I’m part of the Earth, not in competition with it. I remember that everything is open, abundant.
Sometimes if I’m feeling burdened I’ll take a walk around the park, grab rocks and give them the names of my burdens--my finances, an argument I had with my spouse, a dream that I want to come true that’s taking too long. I take a second walk around the park and I release the rocks and with it, the burdens. It doesn’t mean the burdens have disappeared, but I know I don’t have to carry it because I can feel it off my chest and conscience.
If you could give 15-year old Mara advice, what would you tell her?
I would tell her to have fun, to do whatever you want and let other people do the same as long as harm is not being caused. Be your authentic self, because if you’re you, you’ll naturally attract those who vibe with you. This was the last year before my parents finally divorced when I was 16, and so I’d tell her they’re just changing, that’s all. The love you share as a family will change, but energy and love cannot be destroyed, it just transforms. Have mercy for your future self, because she’s going to rebel from the uncertainty you’re feeling now. Have grace for yourself, it’s all part of your journey. Stay loving you, baby girl. There’s a lot of work ahead, it’s okay to pick and choose what fuels you and that can change over time. You don’t need permission to change your mind. Do what you love, pause often, and mind how you treat yourself.
You can follow Maraliz on Instagram at @liberatelcwithmara; her book, “F.L.Y. L.I.B.R.E.: A Guide for Healing and Liberation,” is available but not recommended for purchase via Amazon at this time due to the boycott in solidarity with immigrants and workers. You can also purchase the book by reaching out to healingandliberation@flylibre.com.
