Transcestral Gathering is a socially engaged project that creates a space for communities to reconnect with their heritage through rituals of remembrance. First convened on May 26, 2023, at the Green House Project in Santa Cruz, and later exhibited at the Sesnon Art Galleries at UCSC on June 6, 2023, the project brings together offerings, communal food, and sound-making in an immersive, multi-sensory experience. The integration of ancestral traditions with contemporary artistic methods transforms the gathering into a living archive of resistance, where bodies actively shape and reimagine cultural narratives.

Rooted in the desire to challenge colonial frameworks, the project foregrounds the importance of honoring ancestral epistemes and interconnection while addressing the historical erasure of trans and queer identities. The gathering serves as a site of wholeness and solidarity, collapsing the past and present through embodied rituals of kinship and reclamation. The participation in numinous ceremonies of collaborative making reaffirms the role of community in continuing cultural practices that have been marginalized or forgotten in the violence of colonization and migration.

The theoretical scaffolding of the project has been featured in TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly (Duke University Press, Vol. 10, Issue 3-4) and other platforms, situating it within broader discourses on gender, diaspora, and radical belonging. Centering the experiences of trans* Filipinxs, Transcestral Gathering challenges hegemonic narratives and opens a space for reflection, connection, and resistance. This project explores how ancestral knowledge can be vessel for both collective survival and transformation, in which liberatory futures are being born and imagined.