Chriselda Hernandez, performs a limpia behind a friend, Hilda Sánchez, on South Padre Island, Texas, Dec. 1, 2023. Near the Mexican border in Texas, folk healers known as curanderas bring modern touches to an ancient practice long revered in local Hispanic culture. (Verónica Gabriela Cárdenas/The New York Times)
CHRISELDA Hernandez heard a knock at her door in the Texas border town of Edinburg. It was a college student who said she was suffering from a string of bad luck.
A drunken driver had crashed into her car. Then someone broke into the new car she was driving and stole her laptop.
“I need a limpia,” she pleaded – a spiritual cleanse.
Hernandez moved to an altar in her living room that bore an image of the Virgin of Guadalupe. Slowly, she mixed a concoction of sage and palo santo, a wood native to South America, and lit it with a match. Then she turned back to the young woman and waved the healing smoke over her body.
“You are holding on to something,” Hernandez whispered to her. “Let it go. There is no shame.”
García performing a card reading in Pharr, Texas. —©2023 The New York Times Company
For generations, Hispanic communities along the US southern border have turned to curanderas, or folk healers, like Hernandez, often seen in the popular imagination as old women with candles and religious icons operating in the shadows of society out of rusty shacks.
But the ancient healing art has entered the age of Instagram. More younger people are taking on rituals they learned from their grandmothers and deploying them against 21st-century problems.
They conduct limpias on public beaches, trade recipes online for blocking “envy energies” and sell artisan candles bearing the image of Our Lady of Guadalupe in shops. Their clients are often college-educated, like Clarissa Ochoa, the young woman who went to Hernandez for help.
“I think it’s an honour to be a curandera; it is something very beautiful, but also very limiting,” said Hernandez, 42.
“I feel like we are breaking those boundaries, that curanderas are just herbs and little old ladies. My calling is just to heal whoever I can.”
A culture of folk healing preceded the arrival of Spaniard conquistadors to Latin America and Mexico.
García monitoring the candles she is burning for a limpia at a cemetery in the Lower Rio Grande Valley of Texas. — ©2023 The New York Times Company
Over time, curanderos, a term used for healers of both genders, began mixing indigenous rituals with elements of Catholicism and influences from Asian and African folk traditions along the way.
The practice has taken hold in Texas’ Rio Grande Valley, located a stone’s throw from the Mexican border, in large part out of necessity.
Hidalgo County, home to the city of McAllen and a majority-Hispanic population, has one of the highest rates in the nation of people without health insurance, and many people rely on curanderas for lack of other affordable options, said Servando Hinojosa, a professor of anthropology who teaches a class on Mexican American folk medicine at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley.
Hinojosa said many Hispanic residents also tend to be mistrustful of the medical establishment. This is especially true when it comes to mental health.
A recent study by the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention found that while the number of Black, Asian and white people who have sought mental health care treatments has climbed in recent years, there has been very little movement among Latinos.
“There’s an element of distrust, but there is also structural alienation,” Hinojosa said.
Hernandez (left) performing a limpia for Ochoa at her home in Edinburg, Texas. — ©2023 The New York Times Company
“They are a population that will seek affordable resources, and they will go to where the products are and where the advice is to be found.”
In the past, the medical establishment has warned people not to rely on folk remedies for physical ailments, some of which can be harmful.
Many Latino children have fallen ill and even died after consuming such remedies known as albayalde, azarcon and rueda, powders often used for stomach-related illnesses that have been found to contain lead.
Curanderismo has become so accepted in the Rio Grande Valley that it is not unusual to see street signs and TV commercials advertising folk healing services.
Hernandez said her great-grandmothers had both been parteras, or midwives. When she was a little girl, she said, she discovered that she possessed her own set of gifts; as she grew older, she said, she began interacting with an entity she believes to be the angel of death, Azrael.
She works at a cellphone call centre and lives with a girlfriend in a modern house in the suburbs of Edinburg, a city close to the border.
“You make it your own. There is no right or wrong. You do what’s right for you,” Hernandez said.
Statues of figures that are part of Mexican folk and spiritual culture including St Jude, the Virgin of Guadalupe, and La Santísima Muerte, a version of the Grim Reaper, on sale at a business in Alamo, Texas. — ©2023 The New York Times Company
Another modern folk healer, Danielle López, 39, a former student of Hinojosa who said she also learned she had a don, a gift, as a young girl, has embraced the moniker of millennial curandera.
She has combined the old traditions she learned from the grandmother who raised her, Consuelo López, and an aunt, Esperanza Rodriguez, with new skills learned at institutions of higher education.
Her academic record includes a Master of Arts in interdisciplinary studies with a concentration in Mexican American literature, medical anthropology and Latin art history at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley.
She is completing a doctorate in English with a focus on borderlands literature at the University of Texas at San Antonio, where she is also a lecturer.
“For me, it’s a continuity,” she said of her spiritual work. “I feel like we need it more now.”
It is not unusual for people to ask her for trabajitos, little jobs, including blessings, limpias and home remedies, when she is not buried in books.
Not long ago, López got a request to bless a new business for a friend.
When López cleansed the establishment with a bouquet of roses, six petals fell, prompting her to warn her friend that six people “did not have good intent”.
Folk healer Eduardo Alamillo throwing pepper into a fire, part of a cleansing ritual, in the Lower Rio Grande Valley of Texas. — ©2023 The New York Times Company
“They may say they are happy about her new business, but they are not.”
She also sometimes offers more science-based advice. When people tell her that they are feeling anxious or cannot sleep, she recommends that they cut their intake of sugar or caffeine. Because the advice comes from a curandera, she said, people tend to trust that she has their best interests at heart.
The concept of a curandera is so pervasive in Latino enclaves that in September, the Texas Diabetes Institute, a state-of-the-art facility operated by University Health on San Antonio’s west side, a historical Mexican American neighbourhood, brought back to its lobby a sprawling wall-size painting, La Curandera, by Chicano painter Jesus Treviño, who died early this year.
The painting had been removed for restoration.
Still, when it comes to luck and matters of the heart, many people avoid professional help and turn to curanderas, because there is no substitute, said Sasha García, 39, a curandera who is known for her fire-red hair.
In northern Mexico, where indigenous culture is not as widespread and the Catholic church’s hold is stronger, García said, her ancestors often operated in the shadows to avoid the stigma associated with folk healers.
By contrast, on the American side of the border, she not only feels freer to practise openly, but some Catholic priests stop by for her counsel, she said. — ©2023 The New York Times Company
