Curanderismo: Mexican American Folk Healing

FOREWORD

FOREWORD Luis D. Leon THE REISSUE of Robert Trotter and Juan Antonio Chavira's Curanderismo: Mexican American Folk Healing represents a critical turning point in the study of Chicano culture, just as it did when it was first published.1 Originally, Trotter and Chavira's Curanderismo broke radically with the derogatory assumptions about Mexican American religious healingpractices circulating mainly in medical anthropology literature. In its second printing, the text signifies a fresh academic momentum to understanding the complex religious traditions of Mexican Americans. Academic interest in Chicano religious healing practices in particular has waxed and waned since the late 1960s. The Immigration Act of 1965 was a watershed for legal Mexican immigration into the United States. From the time of the act's passage,until the per-nation Western Hemisphere limit was passed in 1976, legal migration from Mexico increased steadily and substantially.2 This onslaught ofMexicans aroused concern about the kinds of diseases Mexicans might carry with them, and their culturally specific health care techniques. United States public policy-making and health-care providing institutions subsequently channeled money into research on disease, health, and healing among Mexican Americans. Take, for example, the establishment ix x Foreword of the Research Institute on Immigration and Ethnic Studies , which emerged in 1973 as part of the Smithsonian Institution . According to one spokesman for the research center, "the Institute has a special interest in new immigrants who have entered the country since the Immigration Reform Act of 1965because this legislation has contributed to the emergence of a dramatic new chapter in the history of immigration in the United States/'3 The same institution funded studies on Latino health. Academics, particularly medical and psychological anthropologists , responded to the call for new knowledge about health in Mexican America, embarkingon ethnographicventures into the depths of Chicano barrios—most for the first time. The majority of these studies were supported by generous government grants funneled through prestigious academic research centers. Thus researchers' concerns, such as a promotion hinging on one's ability to demonstrate authority in a particular academic discipline, often drove the collection and representation of the "data." Curanderismo, Mexican religious or "folk" healing, imported to the United States by the earliest Mexican migrants as a result of the American annexation of Mexico, and added as another fiber to the American religious tapestry, captivated the "medical gaze" of these investigators. A consideration of the motivations for these studies provides a clearer perspective on the literature: the image of curanderismo that is constructed in this earliest literature is tainted by a number of related interests that are rooted in the Enlightenment paradigm of the social and medical sciences . One need was for knowledge of the foreigner—the Mexican "Other" among us—written in terms that the scientific world could understand. Hence, researchers writing and theorizing about curanderismo attempted to translate its culturally specific idioms into positivistic academic discourse . In other words, post-1965 anthropological studies classified curanderismo in terms dictated by reason and sci- Foreword xi ence. When it was interpreted using positivistic grammar rules, curanderismo became a Mexican social pathology: an "obsession" among the "uneducated," "paranoid," backward masses who struggled to make sense of a modern industrial world. Sadly, its most favorable representation in this literature was as a form of half-baked folk psychiatry, a placebo functioning as a free and accessible panacea to assuage apoor and superstitious population. Then, in 1976at the Twenty-ninth WorldHealth Assembly, the World Health Organization "was for the first time presented with a request from a group of countries to take under consideration the subject of traditional medicine." As a result, the Pan American Health Organization "started collecting available data on traditional healers, including traditional birth attendants, that have resulted from surveys and research findings of studies of traditional practices to determine the relevance of traditional healing to primary health care needs in the region of the Americas."4 The studies that issued from the efforts of the Pan American Health Organization created a second wave of post-1965 Immigration Act scholarship that approachedcuranderismo with more of what historians ofreligions call epoche, or "structured empathy," that is, seeking to understand religious phenomena from the perspective of the believer.5 Trotter and Chavira belong to this second wave of curanderismo . They went much further, however, than many of their contemporaries in understanding and representing curanderismo from a position of structured empathy. Their expressed goal "was neither to justify...