Chancla

Healing Our Families, Ourselves, and Our Culture through Nonviolent Parenting

De: Leslie Priscilla

Narrado por: Leslie Priscilla

A parenting guide that speaks directly to Latinx families with language, history, and lived experience that honors and celebrates our cultura—while helping readers unlearn violence and shame as tools of discipline.

For many in the Latinx community, “la Chancla”—what we learn to see as the warning sign for disciplinary violence—has become a cultural symbol that has spawned relatable memes that many of us laugh about and bond over. But what if it’s also a symbol of something more harmful?

In Chancla, educator and Latinx Parenting founder, Leslie Priscilla, invites readers, parents, and the Latinx community on a transformative journey away from cycles of fear, shame, and corporal punishment. With warmth and deep cultural insight, Priscilla explores the historical legacies attached to Chancla while offering a path forward rooted in connection, self-reflection, and ancestral healing. Chancla is the nonviolent parenting practice that celebrates Latinx cultura, while teaching its readers—and their Mamis, Papis, Tias, and Tios—how to heal from generational violence.

Blending personal storytelling, historical context, and actionable tools, Chancla helps readers not only nurture their children, but their wounded inner child. Readers will see themselves in these pages, because ultimately Chancla encourages them to unlearn what they’ve inherited and make space for what they deserve: homes full of love, safety, and respect.

loving curiosity

This book is everything I needed to give language to helping families I work with and foster conversations with my own spouse. Leslie provides humor, stories and research to communicate how to celebrate a culture without continuing various harms that might happen inside the culture. One thing I hear consistently, which Leslie notes early on, is "if they -my parents- didn't do what they did, I wouldn't be who I am, or I would have been worse off". Leslie challenges this by asking, but what about the creativity part, could that have flourished. If you are part of the Latine culture, this is a beautiful book. If you are white (like me) this is a MUST read to learn how to decolonize/decenter whiteness and learn into another culture. Thank you Leslie for giving me language and curiosity to have conversations with my clients and my spouse.

A gentle welcome or reintroduction to the world of what can be

This is a hard review to write. I don't have eloquent word to share how this book settled into my soul. It brought me a full complement of emotions from gratitude, shame, anger and resolve.

I am most appreciative of feeling SEEN. This parenting journey is so hard, especially when choosing to go against the grain so to speak. it can feel isolating and always full of doubt. I am full of gratitude for the author sharing her journey and feel validated and confident that the PATH forward is the correct one even though I am crawling and stumbling along that path.

I hope this book finds its way to more hands, heard and ears because the children are the saviors of this world.

When Culture, Parenting, and Healing Meet

Chancla: Healing Our Families, Ourselves, and Our Culture through Nonviolent Parenting by Leslie Priscilla is a warm and courageous invitation to become curious about the parenting practices, traditions, and generational “do’s” we may have inherited without ever asking why.

Leslie does something important throughout this book. She invites us to examine what has been passed down without asking us to judge or reject the people who came before us. Our parents and grandparents parented with what they knew, what they had experienced, and what their families and cultures taught them. We now have access to growing knowledge about mental health, child development, trauma, attachment, wellness, and neurobiology. That knowledge also creates an opportunity to ask a different question: What do I want to carry forward, and what do I want to change for my family?

Leslie courageously names the layers that make this question so complex, including cultural expectations, invisible family loyalties, family projections, cultural narratives, corporal punishment, migration, parenting strategies, and generational trauma.

As a marriage and family therapist, migrant, and someone deeply committed to cultural humility, I appreciate that Chancla does not ask us to choose between honoring our culture and changing harmful patterns. It reminds us that we can do both.

This is more than a parenting book. It invites us to understand where our parenting came from, recognize what our families were trying to survive and protect, and intentionally decide what the next generation will inherit from us.

Chancla is a must-read for parents, therapists, educators, and anyone who wants to interrupt generational patterns without disconnecting from culture, family, or belonging.

The book I'm handing to my mom, my partner, and my therapist

CHANCLA is a guide to liberating ourselves and our children from colonial mindsets. Reading it, I nodded furiously, I cried, I took notes, and I found myself discussing my revelations with strangers.

The book gives us space to reflect on the deep, systemic challenges we face, and it also hands us a practical lens through Leslie's stories and life experience - stories so attuned to my own. I feel empowered to be that small but mighty match that stops the flames of past family cycles of trauma. So much so that I'm getting this metaphor tattooed on my body.

I finished the book and immediately began reflecting on the "home culture" I want for our family. My husband is reading it next. I'm also excited to use CHANCLA as a medium for healing my own mother wound, by sharing it with my mama and with my brother. It's truly for everyone, parent or not. I'll be bringing it to my therapist too, so we can work through the reflection questions together and keep us accountable.

Thank you, Leslie, for existing, for sharing, and for helping us see that our future is full of color, strength, joy, and love.

Wow, what a book

What an enlightening book. Something I can definitely listen to over and over again to remind myself to be kind to myself and work on healing my inner niña and being a better mom and human