"Huitzlin, The Healer" transforms a pair of worn Nike Cortez sneakers into something closer to a relic than a sculpture. rafa esparza reconstructs the shoe into an avian form, evoking the hummingbird implied by its Nahuatl title, a word that serves as the root of Huitzilopochtli, the Aztec warrior deity associated with the spring sun and supernatural regeneration. The Nike Cortez carries a specific cultural weight in this work: a shoe deeply embedded in the visual landscape of 1990s Los Angeles, particularly among Brown youth and gang culture, it arrives here already saturated with history, belonging, and the specter of violence. Esparza collects these journeyed objects precisely because they hold that memory in their worn surfaces and frayed edges, and in remaking them as birds, he redirects their biographical freight toward something generative rather than terminal. The materials extend that logic carefully. Sick, bandana, thread, and chicken wire join the deconstructed shoe to build a figure at once fragile and charged, improvised and ceremonially weighted. The bandana in particular resonates with the same cultural codes as the Cortez, signaling community, territory, and survival within communities routinely misread or criminalized by dominant culture. By assembling these into the form of Huitzlin, a creature mythologically connected to strength, endurance, and the return of light, esparza proposes a counter-narrative rooted in Indigenous cosmology and Brown urban experience simultaneously. The work does not soften or aestheticize the histories it carries. It holds them intact while insisting they can point elsewhere. This piece is offered as part of a Critical Resistance benefit auction, aligning its subject matter with a movement dedicated to challenging carceral systems, an alignment that feels less coincidental than structurally coherent given esparza's sustained practice at the intersection of performance, materiality, and community building. Originally fabricated in Los Angeles, where esparza continues to live and work, the sculpture measures 30.5 by 43.2 by 17.8 centimeters and ships from Los Angeles, with shipping and handling costs the responsibility of the winning bidder. A work of this scale in esparza's practice carries the same conceptual density as his large-scale adobe installations and performances at institutions including the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, making it an unusually accessible point of entry into a body of work that commands serious critical attention.