Sharing ancestral medicine for natural healing

Alejandra “Xoxikoyotl” Reyes has sown a thread all along her endeavors as a musician, artist, seamstrxss, danzante, wood worker and owner of Coyotienda, an online store where she sells ceremonial skirts, lavender tinctures and muscle rubs. 

“I don’t like to compartmentalize my life,” Reyes explains that’s why her store carries the meaning of her ceremonial name “Xoxikoyotl” which means “coyote florido.” 

“I am the same person everywhere I go, even in music… because music is my medicine too.”

I have interviewed Reyes before, when she was part of the Latin ska punk band Gabriela Penka, many decades ago for the music website I ran during college. 

She continues to play saxophone for Gabriela Penka, but she has added another band, like beads on a dress, into her musical roster. She sings for El Colectivo Sabinas, another ska band but with more women in the group. Reyes herself is gender fluid. She uses she/they and he pronouns. 

She was born in Anaheim, Calif., but her ancestry runs deeper south. Her family is from Leon, Guanajuato, but she said her father always reminded her that they were indigenous. From her father’s side she can trace her ancestry to Yaqui, Chichimeca, Otomí and Black. From her mother’s side, she has Raramuri ancestry.  

After hearing about her ancestry throughout her youth, she began exploring with maestros and yerberos about natural medicine. It was also a part of her voyage into recovery. After years of heavy drug use, she began a healing process. “I’ve had an extensive healing journey,” Reyes said.

After six or seven years into her recovery, she opened Coyotienda during the pandemic to share what she had learned of natural medicine with other people.  

She also sells clothing from fabric that has been repurposed in her store. She sews ceremonial skirts which are designed to be worn by men, women or non-binary people. “I started sewing at 12 ... my tía taught me,” she recounted in a Facetime conversation that her aunt, who studied alta costura in León, Guanajuato, would have her do a lot of detail work, like adding pearls and details to dresses at the bridal store where her aunt worked. She didn’t like it, but she said she now knows it made her a better seamstrxss. 

She said she started sewing because she wanted to make herself punk and goth clothes. “I would look at the clothes at the Ipso Facto store in Fullerton but I couldn’t afford that,” Reyes recalled. “So I started making my clothing.”

She mentioned she would sometimes sell clothes at the swap meet but after she started using drugs in her twenties, she stopped sewing for a while. Now at 41, and after going through her healing process, she has taken up sewing again. 

“Once I went through my recovery, I wanted to make ceremonial clothing, because a lot of spaces have no space for the people in-between. I make ceremonial pants or skirts for men or women.”

She said the ceremonial clothing is for Native American and intertribal ceremonies, sweat lodges and Mexicayotl, which emerged in the 1950s as a movement to revive indigenous religion, philosophy and traditions of ancient Mexico.

Reyes said she doesn’t buy new fabric to sew clothes, she believes in reusing and recycling and in making sustainable clothing so that clothes don’t go to waste. She buys scraps of fabric from Remainders, a store close to where she lives in Pasadena, Calif., to repurpose them into new items. “I make dolls, I make pillows… just reuse them, make something new with them.”

When she’s not busy making herbal rubs for her store, Reyes works at Rahok with her wife Rio Oxas. Rahok is a Mayan Q’eqchi word which is the “action of love.” They work with nonprofits and other organizations by providing bike coaching, workshops, strategic planning, curriculum development, consultancy and real estate.  

She mostly sells online and although she doesn’t sell in many marketplaces, she participates in the marketplace and festival that the store Rhythms of the Village hosts twice a year. She said she likes to go there because “vendors are Black and Brown people.”

Coyotienda doesn’t always have the same items for sale. “Some stores always sell the same thing. I don’t. I sell what is in season, what I have ready.” 

“I grow my own plants,” Reyes , adding vodka or mezcal to muscle rubs and other tinctures and letting them soak in jars for months. “I love seeing all these mason jars in my kitchen.”