Curandero: A Life in Mexican Folk Healing

INTRODUCTION

The Healing Tradition

of a Family and a Culture

My name is Eliseo Torres, and this book is a piece of my heart.

It’s a piece of my heart because it comes straight from the heart of a culture I grew up with down in South Texas, not far from the border with Mexico, and not very far from the Gulf.

It’s a piece of my heart because it belongs to a world that no longer exists in quite the way it was when I was growing up. And so, in writing this book, I am trying to save, to preserve, a piece of what to me is a still-living past.

All over the Southwest, and in much of Latin America as well but particularly in Mexico, the tradition of the Mexican folk healer, or curandero, has been an important part of the fabric of life. It pulls together elements of a multiplicity of worlds, of the past, of the present—and perhaps of the future as well, as conventional medicine begins to re-imagine itself as a discipline that encompasses ancient traditions of healing. It brings together the cultures of the indigenous peoples of the Americas—the Aztecs, the Mayans, and others—with the healing traditions of the Old World, reaching deep into a Moorish and a European past.

It resonates from the plains of Texas to the deserts and mountains of New Mexico all the way to the spectacular canyons of the Colorado River; it resonates from the Yucatan Peninsula to the Sangre de Cristo Mountains in southern Colorado—and beyond.

Some of the people who are in this book are gone now. Their wisdom, however, still lives on—inside of me, in the traditions of folk healing that other people like myself still carry with them, in the work of healers who are still providing an ancient and honorable form of health care that everybody can afford—surely an admirable undertaking in a day and age when the cost of health care seems out of reach for so many, including many Americans. Americans supposedly live at the apex of the developed world, but we are still stymied by the perplexing problems of providing an effective and affordable health care system to all of our citizens.

When I was growing up, we did not always have access to medical care in my rural Mexican-American¹ community. Nor did we always have the money to afford doctors or medical facilities when we did have access. Instead, we relied on ancient traditions that are older than the conventional medical science that is practiced in hospitals and clinics these days.

When I think about some of the things I learned directly from my mother and from my father, I can sometimes still hear their voices, and I can smell the aromas of the herbs and plants they taught me about; and I can still bring to mind the elaborate dance of the healing rituals. Some of these healing rites were steeped in practicality and in common sense—certain foods and plants cured us or relieved our symptoms through properties they carried within themselves. Some of the healing rites also had a strong basis in faith—a basis in our willingness to believe in the efficacy of the healer, to believe that a higher power is watching over us and is acting through the agency of a plant or of a ritual, and even in our simple belief that a ritual works because it has been practiced for time out of mind.

Some of the things in this book, in these stories, come straight from mouths of people I knew, who practiced the rituals and cures that they describe in these pages. A couple of the personages I have employed in these pages are actually composites of a number of people I knew, or have read about, but they are no less real or true to life, despite this poetic license. For example, I have simplified the task of telling the story of the Mexican-American midwives, the noble parteras, by this device. But just because there was no actual Doña Juana does not mean that she did not exist in the form of hundreds of other such women who did the things I conveniently attribute here to Doña Juana. But for a couple of exceptions like this one I have just mentioned, those people I name here as historical personages are, of course, quite real—not only the oppressive president of Mexico Porfirio Diaz but also Teresita Urrea, Don Pedrito Jaramillo, El Niño Fidencio, as well as people I have known personally, such as my university colleagues that I have mentioned in the course of this story, and my friends Art Esquibel and I.Q. Vidaurri, and of course my mentor, Chenchito Alvarado, the great materia or medium who channels the spirit of the early twentieth century healer El Niño.

A few important things need to be said at the outset about the nature of the Mexican Folk Healing tradition, or curanderismo. It is many things rolled into one—and it’s not really even one, since there are many different varieties of folk healing, employing different techniques and emphasizing different theatres of action, as it were (some place more emphasis on the body than the mind, and vice versa; some might employ more ritual than herbal remedies, and vice versa). It is an art, a calling, a gift from some supernatural agent to some of those who practice it, and in the best of worlds it seems to be a profession that is pursued not for the profit or gain but as a form of charitable care-giving. This has meant, in the history of curanderismo, that many of its practitioners have lived humble lives at the subsistence level, refusing payment for their services although they sometimes would accept small gifts. (In one exceptional case, Don Pedrito adopted the child of a grateful couple who gave this great curandero their child in gratitude for his service; he purportedly took Severiano Barrera in as his own son.)

It must also be said that curanderismo resides in that uncomfortable liminal space between respectability and something vaguely smacking of what we might think of as charlatanism, partly because modern science and medicine tend to stifle competing paradigms; anything that sounds alternative or New Age tends to be dismissed out of hand by many people inside the conventional medical/scientific mindset. It should be pointed out, however, that modern Western medicine itself has only recently emerged from eons of ignorance and poor practices—only a few lifetimes ago, basic hygienic practices in hospitals and surgeries to prevent the spread of infections, and the use of anesthesia as a way to ensure that surgery patients would lie still for delicate procedures, had yet to be introduced in Western medicine.² Thus, watchdog groups such as the American Medical Association jealously guard their hard-won standards, both to protect patients and to protect the integrity of their profession.

The great curanderos, of course, were not charlatans—they were deeply serious, religious people with, perhaps, a sense of showmanship at times, because they recognized the importance of the mind in healing the body. This is not to say that there have not been self-styled curanderos who have been quacks—but I suspect these people are the ones who are most easily spotted as charlatans, since they are usually the ones who insist on being paid for their services.

The old-time curanderos, some of whom I describe in this book, were oftentimes the only source of medical care that the rural folk they served ever received. The image I have carried away from my interviews, reading, and research is not one of charlatanism, but of something much more akin to saintliness. These folk healers worked hard, sometimes seeing hundreds of people per day, and sometimes getting little sleep for long periods of time. Both El Niño and Teresita are conjectured to have died young partly as a result of exhaustion from years of labor. They also worked for little or no compensation. These old-time curanderos were regarded as folk saints while they were still alive—that is, they were recognized by la gente (the people) as holy beings, even while they were not officially canonized as such by the Church.

I have written this book as a collaboration with a friend and colleague of mine, Timothy L. Sawyer, Jr. Tim has taken my many years of research, interviews, presentations, past publications and other materials, attended lectures, and listened to the many stories I have to tell about curanderismo, and has fashioned all of this information into the book you are reading. In turn, he has brought his years of experience as a writer and editor to bear in compiling and editing this book over several months of work for publication. In the process, he has become knowledgeable about the rather arcane subject of curanderismo in a relatively short time, a necessity for taking on a topic as varied and little understood in an academic sense as Mexican folk healing is. We have spent many, many hours going over these materials, and I have told him many stories about these wonderful curanderos and their herbs and remedies. Both of us enjoyed every moment of this process, and we look forward to future collaborations on other aspects of this immensely rich subject. Even though Tim and I both have doctoral degrees, we have, in a sense, both set aside this academic training, with its linear, logic-based processes, in order to slip more easily into the non-linear and sometimes mystical mindset of the culture of curanderismo.

The plan of this book is mainly narrative in form, since so much of what is involved in curanderismo is in the nature of great stories—i.e., the reverence with which some of the folk saints who were healers were regarded cannot be understood without also knowing the stories that contributed to this reverence. In the first chapter, I begin by talking about my first experiences in the Mexican town of Espinazo, the home of El Niño Fidencio, where I underwent some important spiritual changes of my own and learned that my interest in the folk healing traditions of my forebears was based in something more than academic curiosity. In the second through the fifth chapters, I talk about my experiences with folk healing within the fold of my own family and my neighborhood, and about my introduction to some of the more exotic plants and rituals of folk healing. In the sixth, seventh, eighth, and ninth chapters I talk about some additional important figures in the folk healing tradition, including Don Pedrito Jaramillo and Teresita Urrea, the Saint of Cabora. In the tenth chapter I revert to my childhood again, and tell about the lessons I received from my mother in the wisdom and properties of healing herbs. Chapter eleven is about some of the pitfalls of teaching people about curanderismo—people are very willing to believe almost anything you tell them, and with the recent interest in alternative healing practices, I have become quite familiar with some of the dangers inherent in talking about a folk healing tradition. Chapter twelve tells about the extraordinary experience of team-teaching a class on curanderismo in the summer of 2002, which involved some wonderful curanderos who visited New Mexico from Cuernavaca, in the state of Morelos, Mexico. These wonderful people worked both with our own university students and with community members here in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and I think very few people involved were not transformed in some way by this experience. Chapter thirteen discusses some recent, modern curanderos I have encountered and/or researched.

Like its subject, then, this book is something of a mosaic, reflecting the different influences of culture and geography that have contributed to the art and practice of curanderismo. I offer it out of love for my people’s traditions, and out of hope that readers will come away with a new sense of awakening of their own about the possibilities that are contained in ancient traditions, including, and particularly, those traditions that have been nurtured and kept alive by people who do not necessarily have advanced degrees or training in history or ethnography or medicine or the like, but who have been anything but ordinary people nevertheless. The stories in this book may bring back memories for some readers of certain rituals, herbs, or healers from the past and the present. Living in extraordinary times, and doing extraordinary things, these people have kept alive possibilities that we have all but forgotten ever existed—the possibility for hope coming through simple faith, for change coming about through rituals, and for miracles.

1. For simplicity’s sake, I have decided to use the term Mexican American in favor of the many other terms for people in the U.S. of Mexican background and ancestry. Other terms could have been used, such as Latina/o, Hispanic, and Chicana/o, and we hope our decision not to use these terms will not offend readers. We are aware that many people of Mexican background in New Mexico prefer the term Hispanic to others, while in other parts of the country the term Latino/a is preferred by people of similar background. Where I grew up, in South Texas, Mexican American was actually the preferred term. We have tried not to use the terms indiscriminately, and certainly they must not in some cases be used interchangeably, as is the case with Hispanic versus Mexican American, since the former term is meant to be inclusive of a larger group than people of Mexican heritage alone. We are cognizant of the fact that