UNM students can learn curanderismo’s healing ways

Soothing the spirit: It’s not witchcraft, practitioners say, and UNM students can learn curanderismo’s healing ways
Albuquerque Tribune, July 5, 2003
http://www.abqtrib.com/
By Meredith Wade [0.5PTmwade@abqtrib.com], Tribune Reporter

An offbeat, squeaky flute and an overturned garbage can serving as a drum are all the music they need to dance.

The only other sounds from the group are joyous shrieking and maniacal laughter carried with wild abandonment on the early summer breeze.

These people are not gathered for pleasure. They are gathered to learn to heal.

Their education doesn’t take place in swirls of smoke in a dimly lit, patchouli-filled room.

These people are part of the University of New Mexico’s newest and most misunderstood summer class - a course on the traditional folk-healing practice of curanderismo.

The differences between this medicine and Western treatments are instantly evident.

Instead of educating students in a sterile room full of artificial white light, students are instructed to go outside in the sunshine to hug trees and crawl around on the grass to reconnect with their child-like selves.

A group of natural healers, physicians, nurses and alternative practitioners from all over the Southwest and parts of Mexico teach the students in English and Spanish.

The course teaches elements of curanderismo such as platicas, limpias and soul retrievals. It also integrates healing herbs, massage, acupuncture, reiki and aromatherapy.

The 11-day class is one of two in the country offered on a university campus and aims to share folk-healing practices while breaking down negative misconceptions that some people have about curanderismo.

Don’t call them witches

Monica Trujillo’s family did not want her taking this college course. Not at UNM. Not anywhere.

“My initial impression was that it was witchcraft and superstition,” said Trujillo, a 24-year-old resident of Albuquerque. “Some of my family members even started praying for me when they found out that I was taking the class. They would be surprised to see that it is just holistic healing.”

Curanderos are thought to have received a divine gift to heal the sick, but many practitioners go through a formal apprenticeship before administering treatments.

Trujillo’s family was concerned about the class because modern urban legend is rife with stories of curanderos scamming believers and the ill out of large sums of money and promising the outlandish.

Some curanderas promise they can make people fall in love. Others maintain that they can heal incurable diseases or remove curses by using spells, potions and amulets.

Elena Avila, an Albuquerque curandera and a guest speaker for the course, said not all parts of curanderismo are embraced by many healers.

Avila warned students about dishonest curanderos preying on clients’ vulnerability to take their money.

Most reputable curanderos charge a flat, nominal fee or simply ask for donations from people needing their help.

“If anyone tells you that they have special powers, they are fooling you,” Avila said. “No one has the power to do those things, so you shouldn’t give away your money to them.”

What curanderismo can do, Avila said, is heal wounds of the heart, something that Western medicine has a difficult time achieving.

In curanderismo, treating susto, or loss of spirit, is the first priority in an individual’s healing process.

“Our job as curanderas, and as humans, is to give the soul the water and fertilizer it needs to grow,” Avila said.

From folklore to campus

Curanderismo is quickly spreading in the United States, especially in the barrios of the Southwest, where Latino immigrants often lack the resources needed to visit a Western-trained orthodox - and expensive - doctor.

Its popularity in the United States is recent, but the practice is more than 500 years old.

Early Arabic and Asian medicine, Judeo-Christian religion, Indian herbal lore and medieval witchcraft came into synthesis to create the folk-medicine practice.

UNM began to offer the class last summer, in part because Eliseo Torres, an herbalist and vice president of Student Affairs, wanted to integrate curanderismo into the Chicano studies program.

This summer, more than 35 traditional folk healers from a holistic school in Cuernavaca, Mexico, traveled to Albuquerque to teach the class.

The group members, among them doctors, teachers and students, shared their knowledge of the craft with more than 90 members of the UNM community.

After completing the course, 20 UNM students went to Mexico with the group for a 10-day exchange study at the Centro de Desarrollo Humano Hacia la Comunidad in Cuernavaca. They’re still there.

“It is exciting for students to learn in the native land,” Sandrea Gonzales said.

Gonzales, director of the Women’s Resource Center on the UNM campus and a curandera, said the students who journeyed to Mexico for further study have taken advantage of an amazing educational opportunity.

“The campus in Mexico was set up to deal with traditional community healing, and so every tree and flower there can be used to make medicine,” Gonzales said.

Harmony and love

At an altar, women in traditional Indian dress say prayers in Spanish as the scent of incense wafts over a rapt audience.

They are here to teach, and their message is simple.

Heart heals heart. Corazon cura corazon.

These healers treat ailments of the body, mind and spirit.

“Mainly we concentrate on human fears and the common experiences that bring us all together,” said Avila, Albuquerque’s most widely known curandera. “Our goal is harmony, love and a peaceful existence.”

Many curanderas, including Avila, begin the healing process with a platica. During this session, the healer and the patient have a long talk about the patient’s problem. A curandera might then prescribe natural remedies to treat the problem, depending on the symptoms.

For example, a cold shower is used to relieve stress and tension.

A foot bath is recommended to cure diarrhea.

Laughter is generally prescribed as the best medicine.

“Today, we began with an exercise about laughing, because we don’t laugh enough,” said Amber Seik, 18, halfway through a course. “We all jumped up and down and held hands and laughed and laughed.”

Some problems are harder to cure than tension or somberness.

In these cases, “I put my drama queen to good use and perform a limpiar,” Avila said.

During a limpiar, a raw egg still in the shell is rubbed across a patient’s body to absorb energy that does not belong to them.

The curandera will then break the egg into a glass of water and read it by analyzing the relationship between the yolk and the energy being released.

If the problems persist, a soul retrieval could be the next procedure.

During this ritual, multiple curanderas lead a patient through prayer and ceremony to reclaim a part of the soul that is damaged or lost because of negative experiences.

“I am the soul-retrieving mama,” said Avila with an infectious smile. “Curanderismo is about doing, not intellectualizing.”

Patient Daniel Martinez, 22, carried the marks of “doing” by the end of the course. He had soft-ball sized bruises all over his back.

“Yesterday, the curanderas did cupping on me,” Martinez said. “It may look bad, but it felt great. They used a cup to suction impurities to the top of my skin so that my body could flush them out.”

Not all curanderismo treatments leave such a visible reminder of healing. Many work solely on an emotional level.

At the end of one class, students and teachers linked arms and slowly began to lean outwards from one another. The circle remained taut, forming a strong support system for the entire group.

As the course drew to a close, the instructors hoped that participants would remember the exercise as a symbol of an alternative life-approach.

Yolanda Porcayo, a 38-year-old curanderismo student from Mexico, encouraged the group to trust one another and be aware of one another.

“You must always pay attention to the passion of the soul,” she said.

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