Healing Traditions: How Curanderismo is Reviving Cultural Connection in the Borderlands
Mexican folk medicine is being reclaimed during a time of deep uncertainty in the U.S. political climate.
Imanol Miranda can still recall fleeting memories of curanderismo, or Mexican folk medicine, from his childhood in Mexico City. He remembers the smell of burning copal, seeing a ritual dance in El Zócalo and the overflowing displays of healing herbs in the city’s open markets. A move to the Rio Grande Valley in Texas, in his middle school years, pulled Miranda away before he could form a deeper understanding of curanderismo.
“We had an aunt who was a curandera in Mexico,” Miranda said. “But my parents didn’t practice it. In the Rio Grande Valley, I was not really exposed to it.” Years later, Miranda would again encounter curanderismo on assignment as a documentary photographer, an experience that would change his life and lead to the co-publication of the photography book “Curandero: Traditional Healers of Mexico and the Southwest.”
After he migrated to the United States, Miranda said he learned that Catholicism in the U.S. is not as open to other spiritual traditions as it is in Mexico. Even along the southern border, many people of Mexican American descent are not taught about the connections folk medicine traditions have to many other aspects of Hispanic culture, either in academic settings or in homes who have taken a less pluralistic approach to religion.
“It’s really something related to the suppression of Mexican American history,” Miranda said, adding that the border “serves as a separation” where, beginning with early education, young people with deep ancestral roots in folk traditions are pressured to move away from cultural origins.
“If your grandma is using an egg to do a spiritual cleanse, and we talk in terms of hospitals and science, people are thinking, ‘well, maybe that is, you know, backwards, right?’ And it becomes something we try to get past in order to maybe arrive at what we might think is a more modern version of ourselves.”
It was in the Southwest borderlands that Miranda began to rediscover his roots through a personal experience with traditional healing. Miranda was invited to photograph healing sessions at a curanderismo immersive retreat, run out of the Department of Chicano and Chicana Studies at the University of New Mexico. There, Miranda received his first limpia, or spiritual cleansing, from Laurencio Lopez Nuñez, a master healer of Oaxacan origin.
“You’re bringing back pieces of your soul that have been scattered, maybe through hard moments in life.” Miranda said about the experience. “Your conception of time becomes altered. You’re recovering those pieces and bringing back the essence of who you are, grounding you.”
The immersive symposium is a yearly retreat at UNM where healers, students, and medical professionals from all over the U.S., Mexico, and Latin America learn about practices like laugh therapy, the preparation of medicinal teas, and the usage of healing liniments and tinctures. It’s still organized by now-retired Dr. Eliseo Torres, who grew up in McAllen, Texas and has taught classes at UNM on curanderismo for more than two decades.
Torres has written four books on the subject and has traveled extensively in order to document the living tradition. He is also the co-author of Miranda’s photography book on the subject.
Torres began learning about curanderismo at an early age. “She was not a curandera, but she was a typical Mexicana,” Torres said, recalling his mother, who used plants from her own garden to keep Torres and his seven siblings healthy on a low income.
“In this country, if you don’t have insurance, you don’t get quality medicine. A lot of raza doesn’t have insurance, so a lot of Mexicanos hardly ever go to a doctor,” Torres said. He said that, for some, necessity leads them to traditional healing, while for others, access to modern healthcare can mean losing a cultural connection. It’s a divide often shaped by social and economic class.
Torres was first introduced to the academic study and documentation of Mexican folk medicine in the late 1970s at the University of Texas–Pan American in Edinburg, Texas, now the University of Texas–Rio Grande Valley. A pair of medical anthropologists, Dr. Robert Trotter and Dr. Juan Antonio Chavira, conducted the “Proyecto Comprender” project, which sought to “better understand Mexican American concepts of health and illness” for an audience of public health and medical professionals.
The project produced the “Curanderismo Collection” in the Border Studies Archive at UT-RGV, an extensive set of images, film and audio recordings of regional interviews and curanderismo practices on both sides of the border.
“They documented the concept of mind, body and spirit,” Torres said. Through the work of Trotter and Chavira, Torres eventually met Cresencio Alvarado, a curandero known as “Chenchito” from Espinazo, Nuevo León, Mexico, who became Torres’ mentor for the next several years and would go on to become a world-renowned healer.
Torres remembers meeting a network of curanderos across the Texas-Mexico border region as a student of Chenchito. “A lot of things were being done with curanderismo in the 70s,” Torres said. “Back then you could travel back and forth, and there wasn’t any problem. Chenchito thought he was born in the U.S., but he didn’t have his papers to prove it.”
More than 40 years later, Miranda would spend time documenting curanderismo in the region with Torres and Chenchito, then in his early 90s. “He was almost a divine presence,” Miranda said. “I strongly believe he was connected to a very strong higher power. It’s something very deep, and a lot of these indigenous communities in Mexico have really had a very strong connection with the metaphysical.”
Torres said that after many decades of fading interest from new generations in both the U.S. and Mexico, he has seen a recent resurgence in people seeking curanderismo over the past five years. “Right now more young people want to know about part of their culture that’s being lost,” said Torres.
“You grow from these experiences,” Miranda said. “You feel a deep cultural connection to that synthesis of Spanish and Indigenous and now Mexican heritage. It’s what they call the mestizaje, and this really connects you with what that means.”
The demand has led Torres to make his knowledge available through the learning platform Coursera, where nearly 30,000 people have already enrolled in his classes about traditional healing with plants.
Torres said it’s an unsettling time, especially for Latinos. “People have susto, I think,” said Torres, a term that translates as fright or emotional shock. “Trump has got everybody nervous. There’s a lot of bad vibrations going on right now. So we have to learn how to heal ourselves and our energy.”