Precarious Prescriptions: Contested Histories of Race and Health in North America

1. Curing the Nation with Cacti: Native Healing and State Building before the Texas Revolution

1 Curing the Nation with Cacti Native Healing and State Building before the Texas Revolution MARK ALLAN GOLDBERG 1 just twelve years after Mexico declared independence from Spain, a cholera epidemic that had struck Europe, Asia, and North America made its way to Mexico. Cholera ravaged much of the nation, stretching from Chiapas in the south to Tamaulipas and Texas in the north.When it first appeared in New Orleans in late 1832, municipalities in Texas began to prepare for an imminent attack. The disease struck southern Mexico in the spring of 1833, and the federal and state governments sent preventive measures to city councils in the north to combat the disease. When the epidemic reappeared in Tamaulipas, state and municipal governments across the Texas–Mexico borderlands sent more measures, plus physician Pascual de Aranda’s prescription. They later supplemented de Aranda’s scrip with a different remedy, in which physician Ignacio Sendejas incorporated peyote, a plant associated with Native spirituality. Sendejas’s cure became the state’s preferred prescription. Native health practices such as peyote healing made the Indians savage in the eyes of Mexicans.1 Rooted in the Spanish colonial era, Mexicans based their notions of race partly on cultural practices. For Mexicans, Catholic customs were civilized and proper, and they considered anything beyond the Christian cultural realm uncivilized. For example, Indians in East Texas reportedly believed that“all internal maladies are caused by some witchcraft,” a belief counter to Catholicism.2 Mexicans recognized the power and skill of Native healers and continued treating Native healing arts as “superstitions” based on the spiritual character of Native healing.The Indians’ use of chants, drums, and sucking to enact cures also appeared “heathen” to Mexican eyes. 2 MARK ALLAN GOLDBERG These characterizations of Indian “savagery” shaped Indian relations and nation building in early national northern Mexico. Centered on the U.S.–Mexico border, this is a story of state formation at the outer limits and meeting point of two nations and numerous Native communities.Through an analysis of different forms of healing during the 1833 cholera epidemic in the Texas–Mexico borderlands, this chapter examines the connections between medical practice and nineteenth-century state formation in Mexico and beyond.3 Disease outbreaks brought everyday Native cultural practices to the forefront of elite Mexican visions of state formation, and the exchange of healing customs placed marginalized populations at the center of nation building . But the literature on state building often obscures the cultural elements of these instrumental political and economic processes.4 In their national projects for the Mexican north, for example, Mexican state officials advocated individual land use and (limited) popular political representation, practices that were as cultural as they were political and economic. This study centers on the place of Native healing practices in nineteenth-century nation-building efforts. Centuries of tenuous yet interdependent relations set the stage for the exchange of peyote healing between Native peoples and Mexican officials. A focus on disease and healing helps depict Mexican nation building as a cultural negotiation as well as a political and economic one. This study also uses the Mexican state’s response to the 1833 cholera epidemic as a window into how health and healing shaped race making in the Texas–Mexico borderlands. As people constantly grappled with disease, the young Mexican nation grappled with colonizing a frontier region, securing its citizens against Indian raids, protecting claims to land, incorporating diverse peoples into the body politic, and now healing sick citizens in this moment of crisis. In the borderlands, Mexican officials were working to create “civilized” societies among “uncivilized,”frontier peoples.Trying to build a nation on the margins, Mexico’s elites promoted certain practices that they considered to be central to national progress, and they used culture to marginalize populations who, in their eyes, practiced“uncivilized,”“savage”customs. For example, Native spiritual healing constituted improper medicine because it was not scientific. Mexican medical science, on the other hand, was not only proper but also modern and therefore constituted service to the young nation. However, the cholera epidemic forced Mexican CURING THE NATION WITH CACTI 3 doctors to draw from Native healers during the cholera epidemic.They stripped the peyote remedy from the taints of Indian spirituality and made it medical through scientific methods.Thus, Mexican authorities blurred the boundary between proper and improper national health practices when they adopted peyote healing as an integral component of...