We sat down with Mary Anne Quiroz, co-founder and executive director of Indigenous Roots Cultural Arts Center in Saint Paul, to talk about arts, culture, and her deeply matriarchal, anti-racist approach to community development.

To start, can you share a little about yourself and your community development work?

Mary Ann: I’m the co-founder and executive director of Indigenous Roots Culture Arts Center, and my community development work is really what I’m trying to recapture, I guess, or reconnect or reactivate the matriarchal practices and ancestral matriarchal teachings that have been passed down to me from my mom and from my grandma, my Lola Esther.

They embedded in me practices of how to organize community. It was very much the lived experiences of observing and experiencing and seeing them in their moments of how they interacted with community members and with family members.

My work is based on intuition, lived experiences, and lessons. I don’t ever see anything as a failed launch or errors. I take from mistakes what lesson that experience might give to us, and then I try to take out the fear, the guilt, the shame, and the punishment of those learned lessons and mistakes.

I am embracing a place of abundance of patience, grace, and humility. I’ve learned over time that I don’t know at all, but I do know that our community collectively knows it all. That’s been especially evident in the community response work over the past few months.

Can you share an example of how those matriarchal teachings show up in your work?

Mary Anne: We immigrated from the Philippines when I was nine years old. My mom was working two jobs, going to nursing school, and even as a single mom, trying to sustain on the East Side of St. Paul, our house was ready for everyone to come over, basically a youth after-school program. In the summer, all of my siblings and our friends would come over. She would always make sure there was food there. She would make sure we had the supplies and materials to entertain ourselves, and we didn’t get into trouble. It came from a place of trust. She never said, “Don’t do this, don’t do that.” She just said, “Here you go, eat and take care of each other.”

How does that show up at Indigenous Roots as a cultural and community space?

Mary Anne: At Indigenous Roots, I’ve applied that same concept of trust and abundance. The center is open and accessible to our network of artists and culture bearers, youth and elders, 24/7. Folks in our network know that they can access the space at midnight to paint, or at 6 A.M. to do movement work, yoga, tai chi. There are so many different spaces inside Indigenous Roots, and you can show up as exactly who you are. We trust that you’re going to take care of the space.

And the community cares for one another. People come in and we’re like, ‘Okay, hey, did you eat? There’s food in the wellness space, go grab some food.’ If you walk into Indigenous Roots, I’m either offering you something to drink, something to eat, a space for you to do your meeting at, or a space for you to hang out with your friends.

We make sure that we pay practitioners and honor practitioners that do body work, cupping, acupuncture, massage and give them an accessible space to work towards financial freedom, but we make sure that those services are available to our communities at no cost or very low cost.

We see massage as a privilege and a luxury, but that’s actually preventive medicine. Taking care of our bodies and minds is something also that I’ve been able to honor through this work in developing community. It’s really creating a culture of care.

We operate a coffee shop, and it’s become a youth development opportunity. We don’t do it for the business, but they did start making a profit to buy their own materials. The youth leaders create their own menus, experiment with drinks. They’re learning how to do bookkeeping, inventory, scheduling, and payroll, and then another is in charge of research and development, training and hiring. They have taken on a lot of responsibilities.

Many people see art centers as separate from community development. How do you understand the intersection of arts, culture, and anti-racist community development at Indigenous Roots?

Mary Ann: The main reason we have Indigenous Roots is because of Kalpulli Yaocenoxtli, which is the Mexica Aztec dance and drum circle that Sergio and I co-founded together with our family. Our circle was really the one that launched Indigenous Roots. Indigenous Roots started with zero grants — it was a lot of sweat equity and a lot of people power and just time and love and care.

Over time, the work has stretched far beyond performance into incubation, youth development, and civic engagement.

For example, I was just at a conference focused on policy work around transportation, but they wanted community organizations to give feedback on how transportation is a barrier and how it can create accessibility. They’re tearing up the street in front of our Center as we speak. We went supporting businesses during the ICE Metro Surge over the past year, and now we;re supporting businesses dealing with construction. We are centering rapid response, raising funds for mutual aid and business support.

Sometimes I do get asked to show up in spaces that I normally wouldn’t even consider being in.

But one of my superpowers is I see how everything is connected and intersects. I’m always thinking how we can weave each other in so that we’re lifting each other up at the same time. When we weave a quilt, the image starts to appear when we’re weaving colors together. We need all of those different sectors not just to survive, we need them to thrive.

You talk a lot about generations — your elders, the youth. How does that generational lens shape your approach?

Mary Ann: We have a lot of younger people in our dance group and who work in the coffee shop. I think we’re setting up a future for them with incredible youth development opportunities. They have accessible space 24/7, stipends for organizing, grant writing support for creative projects. But it can still be hard to be a young person. I’m constantly trying to remind them how life is beautiful, and we can live each day and hold grief and hold joy at the same time. You can totally be sad, and you can also totally be happy and have peace.

I’ve learned an ancestral practice of matriarchy, and that applies in my arts administration, community work, and to my family. Becoming a mother doesn’t automatically make you a matriarch. Especially living in a patriarchal and machista world, I had to learn over time what it really means to be a matriarch, the practices of a matriarch as a head of a household. It’s having and exercising my own agency.