the door is open…
Chicana Hippie
Nicolasa Soul · your guide through the lost knowledge
scroll to enter ↓
Come sit down, bring your coffee
la biblioteca viva.
An earthship built in homage to the Library of Alexandria. What they burned, we grow back.
I’m Nicolasa. Pull up a cushion — the philosophers they left out of the record get talked through here.
keep scrolling ↓
Hispanic Heritage Month
15 September – 15 October
This month, the names.
Hispanic Heritage Month mostly gets spent on food, music and a flag emoji. I'd rather spend it on names: the Latinas and Native American women — Apache women and Chicanas among them — whose thinking, organising and making belongs in the record and mostly isn't there. Same argument as everything else here. The erasure was never about the quality of the work.
written up so far…
Gloria Anzaldúa
Queer Chicana feminist theorist. Borderlands/La Frontera, nepantla, mestiza consciousness: identity and living between worlds.
Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz
Seventeenth-century Mexican intellectual, poet and nun. Education, knowledge, and a woman’s authority to have either.
María Lugones
Argentine feminist philosopher. The coloniality of gender, “world”-travelling, and what decolonial feminism asks of you.
V. F. Cordova
Jicarilla Apache and Hispanic philosopher. Indigenous philosophy, relationality, place, and refusing to let the West define what counts as philosophy.
start here…
Where Are All the Women Philosophers?
Hypatia sent me down a research spiral into the Library of Alexandria, why women's philosophy got burned out of the record, and what it means to teach these thinkers again from a Chicana perspective.
Rebel Thought · September 10
Watch it
Who’s Behind This
Chicana is to never forget where you come from, and to have self-determination. Being a hippie is something within, not the clothes you wear. It’s a state of mind: rebelling against the norm, leading with truth and love.
Nicolasa Soul is an artist, traveler, and student of philosophy. Chicana Hippie is her long argument that the women written out of the record, the ones history called hysterics, witches, or nothing at all, still have everything to teach us about how to think, make, and rebuild from the ground up.
Read the full storyCurrent Obsessions
The research desk, this week.
notes, not essays — what I’m actually in the middle of
The Brothers Karamazov
“Above all, don't lie to yourself. The one who lies to herself and listens to her own lie comes to a point where she can no longer distinguish the truth within her, or around her, and so loses all respect for herself and for others. Having no respect, she ceases to love.”
Can we live without money after tasting it?
A question in conversation with Rousseau: once private property enters the picture, is there any getting free of it again?
A bag made from what the mezcal leaves behind
First prototypes of a sustainable purse, built from bagasse, the agave fiber a mezcal farm in Oaxaca throws away.
Featured Idea
Philosophy
Knowledge Is Free Now. Interpretation Isn't.
AI handed everybody the library. It didn't hand anybody a point of view. What's scarce now isn't the information — it's who is reading it, and from where they're standing.
Read the essayObjects in Development
Ancient material. Future object.
Carryall 001
One bag.
Many lives.
An architectural everyday carryall designed around whatever moves you: books, work, travel, a movement mat, or a board. Not a yoga bag. A fashion object built for a life that refuses to stay in one lane.
The material story is still being written.
We are preparing for our first Oaxaca research trip to learn what happens to agave waste, study the fibers, meet potential collaborators, and begin the first material experiments. We will document what works, what fails, and what the object becomes.
- Visible book pocket
- Clean phone slip
- Adaptable carry system
- Simple interior
From Oaxaca to wherever you're going next.
Follow the development ↗What We Believe
Knowledge is free now. Interpretation isn’t.
- Human rights
- Literacy is a human right
- Self-determination
- Kindness
- Community
- Sustainability
- Ecological consciousness
- Constant evolution
Hózhó
Walk in beauty with us.
Essays, rabbit holes, philosophy, art, and ideas worth arguing about, in search of a little more balance, straight to your inbox.