Border Medicine

A Transcultural History of Mexican American Curanderismo

Brett Hendrickson

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781479861293
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

MexicanAmerican folk and religious healing, often referred to as curanderismo, has been a vital part of life in the Mexico-U.S.border region for centuries. A hybrid tradition made up primarily of indigenousand Iberian Catholic pharmacopeias, rituals, and notions of the self, curanderismo treats the sick person witha variety of healing modalities including herbal remedies, intercessory prayer,body massage, and energy manipulation. Curanderos,“healers,” embrace a holistic understanding of the patient, including body,soul, and community. Border Medicine examines the ongoingevolution of Mexican American religious healing from the end of the nineteenthcentury to the present. Illuminating the ways in which curanderismo has had an impact not only on the health and cultureof the borderlands but also far beyond, the book tracks its expansion from MexicanAmerican communities to Anglo and multiethnic contexts. While many healers treat Mexican and MexicanAmerican clientele, a significant number of curanderos have worked with patients from other ethnic groups as well, especially thoseinvolved in North American metaphysical religions like spiritualism, mesmerism,New Thought, New Age, and energy-based alternative medicines. Hendricksonexplores this point of contact as an experience of transcultural exchange. Drawingon historical archives, colonial-era medical texts and accounts, earlyethnographies of the region, newspaper articles, memoirs, and contemporaryhealing guidebooks as well as interviews with contemporary healers, Border Medicine demonstrates the notableand ongoing influence of Mexican Americans on cultural and religious practicesin the United States, especially in the American West.

PART I

Contact and Combination

1

Hybrid Healing in the U.S.-Mexico Border Region

In the far northern reaches of the Spanish empire in the Americas, Franciscan and Jesuit missionaries labored to spread the authority of the Catholic Church and to harness the productive potential of the indigenous inhabitants of the land. As part of their mission, the Catholic religious committed themselves to caring for the sick, administering medicines and other kinds of treatments, and explaining the very nature of health and illness. In an early history of his order’s work, the Jesuit Ignaz Pfefferkorn wrote in 1795, “The vigilant care of the sick was one of the most important concerns of the missionary. . . . he did not content himself with looking after their souls; he also looked after their comfort, their needs, and the restoration of their health.”¹ However, their premodern European healing methods were arguably no more sophisticated or effective than the healing traditions and disease etiologies of the native people. Pfefferkorn and his fellow Jesuits found direction for their ministrations in an early New World medical text, the Florilegio Medicinal. Compiled by another Jesuit, this text drew on native plants and indigenous remedies even as it reformulated them in the Catholic context of saints and divine retribution. This early combination of European and native Mesoamerican knowledge systems and religious worldviews set the stage for many later developments in traditional healing in the region.

Eventually the Spanish missions declined and other national and religious powers came to dominate the lands that we now know as northern Mexico and the western United States. As the regimes changed, colonial expansion and massive demographic shifts in the region created displacement, anomie, epidemics, racial and ethnic tension, and a host of other kinds of suffering. Like the Jesuits, Franciscans, and indigenous healers before them, later residents of the area would also find new ways to treat their pains, large and small, most often within the broad purview of religion. The eventual advent of modern medicine and the proliferation of biomedical care throughout the region did not obviate the need for religiously and culturally based healing modalities, which remained astonishingly vital, creative, and flexible. For hundreds of years now, Mexican and Mexican American curanderos, folk saints, and other popular healers have been part of the options for restoring health and providing spiritual guidance to people in the borderlands.

This chapter presents a regional history of colonial encounter and change through the lens of healing during the first four centuries after European arrival. A remarkable site of continuous cultural contact and colonization, the borderlands area provides a fertile matrix for transcultural exchange. These cultural and colonial contacts were often violent and deeply contested. First, Spaniards and the native people of the American continent and, later, mestizos, indigenous people, and white settlers from the United States and Europe have negotiated, exploited, and resisted constantly shifting patterns of power. Religious notions of wellness and specific healing modalities have long been some of the clearest examples of these complex exchanges. In fact, the sicknesses that often result from cultural contact—and conquest—motivate new combinations and predispositions for the restoration of wholeness both in body and in culture. The religious studies scholar Kristy Nabhan-Warren maintains that “Borderlands women and men live in intensely charged geographic, ethnic, and cultural milieus and their religious beliefs and practices reflect the contested and coterminous terrain in which they live.”² Indeed, resilient combination comes to be a defining feature of the religious and medicinal landscape.

Colonial Contact and an Incipient Combinatory Healing Tradition

The Spanish first entered the region that is now northern Mexico and the southwestern United States in the mid-sixteenth century. These conquistadors, religious brothers, soldiers, and servants did not initiate religious and healing combinations but rather brought their ongoing hybridization from the Iberian peninsula, another longtime zone of contact and cultural redefinition. Muslims had introduced to Spain a Hippocratic-Galenic understanding of the body, based in the four humors.³ This doctrine of the human body calculated the amounts and natures of blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile. Inherent to each of these four humors was an admixture of temperature and moisture. For instance, blood was deemed hot and wet while yellow bile was hot and dry. Restoration of health in this system often meant rebalancing physical and other forces that had moved from their proper position; illnesses related to heat might best be remedied with application of cold, while too much bile might require some emetic treatment to likewise restore the proper order of bodily fluids. The anthropologist George M. Foster argues that a humoral understanding of the body and its wellness, especially the hot-cold balance, was “the basis of ‘scientific’ medicine of the Contact period.” Foster further explains that it was “the members of religious orders, who for three centuries played the major role in transmitting humoral concepts to Indian and mestizo populations in the New World.”⁴

Since these “scientific” concepts were propagated by various religious orders in the Americas, it is not surprising that the Greek and Arabic emphasis on humoral equilibrium operated within and alongside Christian understandings of wholeness that stressed participation in the sacramental life of the Catholic Church as the prime mediator of God’s healing and merciful grace. Sickness and health in the light of this grace were multivalent, at best. On the one hand, suffering in body and mind might be exalted, even canonized, as participation with Christ in his passion. On the other, sickness might as easily be the just punishment divinely meted out upon the sinner. In both these conceptions of suffering, union with the Church via the ministrations of baptism and the Holy Eucharist, penance, and extreme unction was central to a return to the innocence and blessedness of health. Yet this Christian understanding of health and salvation was not rigid. In the Iberian context—a veritable crossroads—Islamic, Christian, African, Arabic, and European medicines and metaphysical paradigms continuously related to produce a malleable and impressionable relationship with health and healing.

The indigenous peoples had their own understandings of health and the body as well as healing specialists and medicines, though these conceptions and traditions varied somewhat from people to people. It is probable that many in the region shared the notion of soul as detachable from the physical body, and that the soul—in whole or in part—could leave the body due to fright or other trauma, thus occasioning sickness. Similar to the Europeans, the native inhabitants manipulated witchcraft to both bless and curse, and they used herbal and nonorganic medicines to treat these and other complaints. Some have argued that a contemporary emphasis among Mexican folk healing on emotional states as cause of disease is an aspect of healing that predates the Conquest.⁵

One of the earliest examples of hybrid healing that occurred in the New World is depicted in Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca’s relación of his odyssey through what is now the southern United States and northern Mexico. From 1528 to 1536, Cabeza de Vaca and his companions Estebanico, Alonso de Castillo Maldonado, and Andrés Dorantes wandered on a general westward course from the Gulf of Mexico toward Arizona and then down through the Sonoran desert to the already established New Spanish city of Culiacán. Near the beginning of their long journey, Cabeza de Vaca and his men are impressed into service as healers by their native captors, and the healing practices they adopt explicitly draw on local customs. The Spaniards then modify these customs with their own religious and cultural assumptions about the cessation of sickness. The following passage from Cabeza de Vaca’s account foregrounds the combinatory nature of their methods:

What the [indigenous] doctor does is make some cuts in the place where the patient has pain and sucks all around them. They perform cautery by fire, a thing that is held among them to be very beneficial, and I have tried this and had good results with it; and then they blow on the place where the pain is, and with this they believe that the illness is cured. The way in which we cured was by making the sign of the cross over them and blowing on them and reciting a Pater Noster and an Ave Maria; and then we prayed as best we could to God Our Lord to give them health and inspire them to give us good treatment. God Our Lord, and His mercy, willed that as soon as we made the sign of the cross over them, all those for whom we prayed told the others that they were well and healthy; and because of this they gave us good treatment and went without food themselves in order to give it to us and gave us hides and other small things.⁶

In this example, Cabeza de Vaca and his men do not forsake their Christian faith in religious healing through prayer and the sign of the cross, yet they accept that blowing and cautery seem also to be effective, at least with the people they are attempting to cure. The account also makes clear that the willingness of the sick indigenous to be healed by these both familiar and foreign techniques plays a role in successful curing.

For Cabeza de Vaca, the act of healing engenders important results, which the Spaniards regard as miraculous. As the noted French historian Jacques Lafaye points out, “Alvar Núñez [Cabeza de Vaca] does not establish a qualitative distinction between healing the Indians and the survival of his companions and himself. Drawing on miraculous cures becomes for the four men the normal procedure for procuring what they needed.”⁷ Lafaye suggests that these combinatory cures present an example of the hybridization that would later characterize so much of the Mexican experience, a complex process often called by the Spanish term mestizaje. Mestizaje in the Mexican context almost always signifies the racial and ethnic mixing of Spanish and indigenous people, history, and culture. “Forced by the Indians to perform miracles, [Cabeza de Vaca] limited himself to transmitting the petition to the superior power: God—herein a beautiful example of religious mestizaje in which Pagan belief appears as the motor, or rather, as the proximate cause of the Christian miracle.”⁸ In Cabeza de Vaca’s case, the indigenous need for healing coupled with the Spaniards’ need to maintain personal safety—despite being completely outnumbered—pushed both parties to discover resonances between their colliding notions of how to restore health. It is no exaggeration to suggest that Cabeza de Vaca and his men survived their shipwreck and desert wandering precisely because they were quickly able to create and exchange prayers and rituals for healing with the peoples they encountered.

In stark contrast to the tentative and experimental relationship between Cabeza de Vaca and indigenous people, the first intentional wave of Spanish presence moved decisively to evangelize and pacify the tribes in northern New Spain. The Franciscan and Jesuit orders at the forefront of this expansion spread not only Iberian healing practices but also European diseases, all in the name of propagating the Catholic religion. In the Jesuit priest Andrés Pérez de Ribas’s monumental tome History of the Triumphs of Our Holy Faith amongst the Most Barbarous and Fierce Peoples of the New World, the tropes of sickness, epidemic, and death are more often employed as evangelistic tools than as points of cooperation among the priests and the Indians. First published in 1645, Pérez de Ribas’s history relates several decades of early Jesuit mission activity in what would become northwestern Mexico and the U.S. Southwest.

In contrast to Cabeza de Vaca’s miraculous and comparatively seamless hybrid cures, the Jesuits’ imposition of Catholic practice and understandings of wellness drew less on native conceptions of health and sickness. The general Jesuit evangelistic strategy in this region was to gather ethnographic data on the native groups they encountered so that they could better frame their own Christian message in response to local knowledge and customs. Pérez de Ribas calls examples of this kind of work “casos de edificación—instances where missionaries (invariably with divine assistance) ‘successfully’ substituted Christian for native rituals and beliefs.”⁹ With this strategy, Christian rituals often replaced native practices of healing even as they accomplished political and economic subjugation of the indigenous people.

By this point in the Spanish conquest of the American continents, European diseases were running rampant through the indigenous populations. Various parts of Pérez de Ribas’s epic account of Jesuit missions touch specifically on how the priests and religious dealt with the epidemics of death and sickness that they were forced to confront. He recounts several situations in which native people, terrified by their impending demise from disease, would consent to Christian baptism as a last measure. Pérez de Ribas reframes sickness not as a negative to be overcome but rather as a joyous gift from God and entrée to a state of grace:

Among the fruits that God reaped from this illness was the Baptism of sixty-three elderly men and women who, being more hardened to the introduction of Christian ways, had refused Baptism when they were healthy. They had been persuaded by the devil that Baptism would make them sick and cause them to die. The illness struck them even though they were not baptized, and seeing that they were going to die without Baptism, they asked the priest to baptize them. Once he had prepared them he baptized and cleansed them in those heavenly waters. Then within days God took them all in a state of salvation.¹⁰

In this way, the sacramental rites of baptism and extreme unction came to be medicines that always preceded death. The Jesuits conceived of death not as a failing of the healing arts but as the final blessing and gift of a God who was, by his mysterious ways, overseeing and supporting the conversion of the New World. In this tortured calculus, it was better to die a Christian than to live as a savage.

Later in his account, Pérez de Ribas acknowledges that the priests were in some way responsible for healing: “In one hand they carried the holy oil, which they administered to these people along with the other sacraments for healing souls. In the other hand they carried all the medicines and aids that they could find to heal and mend bodies.”¹¹ The sacramental function came first for the Jesuits, but there is a recognition here of the kind of hybrid medicinal efforts that Cabeza de Vaca carried out. However, only a few paragraphs later it becomes clear that the Jesuits’ corporal healing skills were quite secondary, especially when dealing with children. “The first fruits that Our Lord took were more than eight hundred children. They received the water of Holy Baptism, and before they could sin, died from illness and, thus, could go dwell in heaven.”¹² Indeed, the death of native children is framed over and over as a particularly clear sign of God’s favor and presence.

This theological understanding of death served as a potent justification for the terrible hardships the Spanish were bringing upon the native people. However, they did not claim that God extended death as a blessing only for the indigenous. The Spanish and other European Jesuits explained their own deaths in these terms as well, suggesting that European and American healthways were not necessarily placed in a qualitative hierarchy. From the Spanish point of view, both European and American medicines operated as best they could within the inscrutable mercy of God. For example, the bishop of the area made one fateful journey to the northern hinterlands of his diocese. While in the wilds of Sonora and Sinaloa, he participated in the confirmation of eleven thousand new Christians and marveled at the work of the Jesuit evangelists. However, “divine goodness wished to reward the acts of such an apostolic Prelate without further delaying his glorious reward.” He died on his return trip.¹³ Perhaps what is most surprising about this view of death—as a reward from God—is that the Jesuits applied it consistently not only to themselves but also to the “barbarous” subjects of their evangelism. To be sure, the Spanish priests most certainly claimed civilized ascendancy over the natives in terms of their God, their political institutions, and their social structures. But in terms of health care, premodern European medical technologies were decidedly no more advanced than native American healthways; indeed, the low estate of European healing arts and the o...