The Women Who Know Things

I love fall.

I grew up watching Sabrina the Teenage Witch. I throw Hocus Pocus viewing parties in my backyard. I have watched every cheesy episode of Hallmark’s Good Witch. The crisper air makes me giddy, and I love pretending I live in some whimsical little town vibrating with magic.

There, I admitted it to the world: I am a full-fledged, pumpkin-spice-loving fall cheeseball.

Maybe I came for the cozy magic, but I stayed fascinated by what the witch represents: a woman who notices things, trusts what she knows, and holds knowledge other people do not always understand.

So, in my first year of having the Mi Hita shop, I have been anxiously waiting to curate for fall.

Not because I suddenly stumbled into a witchy theme, but because I knew exactly what I wanted to bring in and what it represented.

Since opening the shop, I have grappled with what belongs in a womanhood store.

Does everything need to be explicitly about periods, hormones, pregnancy, postpartum, or menopause? Does every object need an obvious educational purpose? What makes something part of the larger conversation about womanhood?

In some ways, the answer was already sitting on my shelves.

Nopalera has been part of Mi Hita from the beginning. Beautiful body care created by a Latina founder, deeply rooted in Mexican heritage, ingredients, scent, and ritual. I chose Nopalera not only for its clean, phthalate-free standard, but because women deserve luxurious care without compromising their hormonal health.

Nopalera belongs because culture belongs. Pleasure belongs. Caring for the body belongs.

Fall simply gave me the opening to stretch that idea further, bringing in the Bruja and Señora Era hats, cookbooks, family remedies, tarot cards, and mystical lotería. They aren't random seasonal items; they share the exact same thread of food, culture, intuition, gathering, and the knowledge women carry.

Fall did not give me the idea. It gave me the opening.

There are brujas in the Mi Hita shop this fall. Let me explain.

Women who know things have always made people nervous.

So fine. Call us brujas.

Across cultures, women have always found ways to gather and share knowledge.

In kitchens and gardens. Around tables and bedsides. Through recipes, remedies, stories, books, rituals, and careful observation of the body and the natural world.

Sometimes that knowledge came from a grandmother, mother, aunt, or sister. Sometimes from a midwife, healer, neighbor, or friend. Sometimes it was written down. Often it was learned simply by spending time near women who knew things.

We learn how to keep things alive: plants, children, friendships, families, ourselves.

We learn what to cook when someone is sick. Which tea settles the stomach. What our bodies feel like before we bleed. How to make a home feel welcoming. How to recognize when someone we love is not quite themselves.

We gather recipes, remedies, observations, stories, warnings, and little pieces of wisdom. Some are taught to us directly. Others we learn through experience, necessity, or years of simply paying attention.

But what happens when that knowledge is not recognized as knowledge?

Years ago, I read Witches, Midwives, and Nurses: A History of Women Healers. The book explores the relationship between women, healing, and power, and the ways women’s knowledge has been feared, discredited, or excluded from formal systems of authority.

The history is more complicated than the idea that every woman accused of witchcraft was a healer or midwife. Still, the book affirmed something I already felt to be true: knowledge creates power, and women’s knowledge has not always been treated as legitimate knowledge.

Women have repeatedly been conditioned to dismiss their intuition and ignore the wisdom within their bodies when it does not fit neatly into an established category.

Knowledge shared in a kitchen becomes an “old wives’ tale.” Knowledge developed through generations of observation becomes superstition. A woman who knew too much, lived too independently, resisted convention, or practiced outside the accepted systems of her time could become suspicious.

Eventually, women who know things are given names.

Crone. Wise woman. Healer. Midwife. Auntie. Grandmother. Señora. Bruja. Bruha.

These words come from different cultures and carry different histories. They are not interchangeable. But each points, in its own way, toward something that has existed across cultures and generations: women as keepers of knowledge.

European history gave us the figure of the witch, a woman associated with healing, nature, mystery, and forms of knowledge that could inspire both reverence and fear.

Mexican and Latino cultures hold their own rich traditions through curanderas, food, plant medicine, home remedies, family rituals, Día de los Muertos, and the wisdom carried by madres, tías, abuelas, and señoras.

In the Philippines, the Spanish word bruja became bruha and entered cultures with their own distinct traditions of healers, herbalists, spiritual leaders, and knowledge keepers.

These histories are distinct, but they speak to one another. They remind us that women’s knowledge has always existed, even when it was informal, dismissed, feared, interrupted, or never recorded in a book.

That is the thread running through the Mi Hita shop this fall.

You will find Señora Era and Bruja hats alongside organic coffee grown by small family farms surrounding La Concordia, Chiapas, Mexico, then roasted right here in Escondido by a woman named Marlette!

There are cookbooks exploring Mexican food and menstrual-cycle nourishment, herbal family remedies, abuelita wisdom, brujería, tarot, and mystical lotería.

Some pieces are distinctly rooted in Latino culture. Others reach into the broader history of women, food, remedies, intuition, healing, and the mystical. Together, they reflect the many ways women come to know what they know.

As Día de los Muertos approaches, I have also been thinking about lineage and what it means to honor the people who came before us.

We build altars. We make food. We display photographs. We tell stories. We welcome our ancestors back into the room.

But honoring our lineage can also mean becoming curious about what our people knew.

What did they cook? What did they make when someone was sick? How did they care for someone who was bleeding, pregnant, postpartum, grieving, or dying? What did they believe about the body, the land, the moon, or the sacred?

What did they notice after years of watching and living? What survived? What was lost?

And what are we learning now that might become part of the wisdom we leave behind?

My own relationship to this lineage is particular.

I consider myself Latina, but I most naturally describe myself as Northern New Mexican. Northern New Mexico holds a cultural identity all its own, shaped by the Indigenous peoples who have always lived there, Spanish colonization, its history as part of Mexico, and eventually its incorporation into the United States.

Those histories do not sit neatly beside one another. They have mingled, collided, survived, and changed across generations. You can feel them in the land, language, food, faith, art, and traditions of Northern New Mexican families.

I was steeped in that lineage, but it has often felt like an in-between place, not entirely represented by the way Latino identity is understood elsewhere in the United States.

That experience lives inside the name Mi Hita.

In Latino cultures, daughters are lovingly called mijita or hija. In Northern New Mexico, we say mi hita, a term of endearment, a way of saying: you are cherished. In Spanish, hito also means milestone.

My vision of Mi Hita honors both meanings.

It reflects a life lived in-between languages, cultures, systems, and identities, and the milestones that shape who a woman is becoming. At its heart, Mi Hita is a reminder that you belong and that you deserve to be cherished through every part of your womanhood journey.

Then I married a man deeply rooted in Mexican tradition.

Now we live in San Diego, a remarkable border city where Mexican culture is alive and present in everyday life. Being surrounded by it has expanded my understanding of my own identity. It has given me permission to become more curious, recognize connections, and more fully embrace parts of myself and my history that I did not always know how to name.

Northern New Mexican and Mexican traditions are not the same, and I am not trying to collapse them into one story. But my life now holds both: the lineage and land that formed me, the traditions I married into, and the Mexican influence surrounding the place where we are raising our family.

This collection comes from that intersection and from the questions I am still learning to ask.

You may recognize one piece of that lineage that has been on the Mi Hita shelves for some time: the Virgin de Guadalupe Breastfeeding prints and stickers created by my dear friend and New Mexican artist Alicia Sosa Provencio. Her work brings faith, culture, the body, and motherhood together in a way that embodies so much of what Mi Hita is exploring.

And while this is my way into the conversation, the invitation is wider.

Maybe your family passed down recipes but not the stories behind them. Maybe you inherited a last name, a place, a faith, a ritual, or a vague memory without its larger context. Maybe you grew up deeply connected to your culture. Maybe you feel distanced from it. Or maybe you are beginning to ask questions about your lineage for the first time.

Sometimes lineage is something we receive. Sometimes it is something we seek.

Not everything handed down to us must be preserved simply because it is old. Our inheritance can include wisdom, but it can also include silence, fear, misinformation, and practices that no longer serve us.

Being a keeper of knowledge also requires discernment.

We can honor ancestral remedies while asking whether they are safe. We can value intuition without treating it as unquestionable truth. We can respect lived experience while continuing to seek evidence. We can listen to the body without rejecting science.

We do not have to choose between modern knowledge and the wisdom that came before it. We can become curious about both.

Intuition, in this sense, is not magic in place of information. It is an invitation to notice, pay attention to the body, recognize patterns, and become curious about what we sense before we can fully explain it.

It means trusting ourselves enough to investigate further.

Because we are not only recipients of knowledge. We are also becoming its keepers.

Every time we learn to understand our own bodies, we add something. Every time we recognize a pattern, develop a ritual, prepare a family recipe, ask a deeper question, or share what we have learned with another woman, we participate in that lineage.

That is part of what Mi Hita has always been about: bringing together biology, culture, lived experience, and the knowledge women build by paying attention to their own lives.

So the Señora Era hat and the Bruja hat belong beside each other.

One celebrates the woman who has lived long enough to know some things. The other plays with what happens when a woman trusts what she knows, especially when the rest of the world does not quite understand it.

The books, cards, recipes, remedies, coffee, games, ointments, teas, period support, motherhood support, and mystical objects surrounding them are invitations to explore, remember, learn, question, and gather.

They are also a reminder to talk to the women in our families while we still can.

Ask what they cooked, made, noticed, practiced, or believed. Ask what was handed down to them and what they had to discover for themselves.

Then ask yourself the same questions.

What are you discovering?

What will you keep alive?

And what will you pass on?

This is also my invitation to connect.

Mi Hita has never been just a shop with physical products on a shelf. It is a space built for conversation, body literacy, and personal reclamation.

If reading this sparks something you want to explore, whether that means understanding your own cycle, navigating a transition in your womanhood, or bringing workshops and conversations into your own community, let’s connect.