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This chapter explores the devotion to Niño Fidencio, the most prominent Mexican folk saint. It examines Fidencio’s biography in historical context; spiritism and channeling; curanderismo (folk healing); relation to other curandero folk saints; and the nature of devotion at Fidencio’s shrine in Espinazo, Mexico, and in the Río Grande Valley of the United States.

This book has explored how transcultural exchanges have occurred between Mexican American folk healers and Anglo American patients. It has also discussed the impact of Mexican American religious and folk healing traditions not only on Mexican Americans but also on a small but significant number of non-Mexican American patients. It has shown that the narrative predispositions of Mexican American folk healing have encountered channels of convergence with the predispositions of the American metaphysical tradition, making transcultural healing a possibility. One positive outcome of this transcultural exchange is that curanderismo has established a place for itself in the expanding world of complementary and alternative medicine. It has also allowed some curanderos in the United States to reconnect with the perceived indigenous roots of Mexican American religious healing.

This book presents a transcultural and multiethnic history of curanderismo, the folk and religious healing arts and practices of Mexican Americans. It looks at the religious and cosmological foundations of curanderos as well as their impact on multiethnic communities in the United States. It also explores curanderismo's relationship to American religious, metaphysical, and alternative medicine and healing, suggesting that curanderismo has been a constant part of Mexican and Mexican American interactions with Anglo Americans since the Mexican–American War. It shows that the practices and beliefs surrounding curanderismo, and Mexican American religions more generally, occupy an integral and influential place in religious life in the United States.

This chapter traces the history of the peoples and settlement patterns of the U.S.–Mexico border region, with particular emphasis on both the religious history of the area and the colonial nature of successive waves of population. In presenting a regional history of colonial encounter and change, the chapter focuses on healing during the first 400 years after European arrival. In particular, it looks at the Spanish arrival in the region that is now northern Mexico and the southwestern United States in the mid-sixteenth century. It also considers the borderlands as a remarkable site of continuous cultural contact and colonization, providing a fertile site for transcultural exchange. Finally, it examines the emergence of a religious healing tradition in the borderlands that has been essentially hybrid in nature, along with the factors that influenced Mexican Americans to maintain curanderismo in the new American Southwest.

This chapter focuses on the various practices of curanderismo in the United States. Drawing on historical and ethnographic accounts, it examines the customs and habits of Mexican American religious and folk healing. In particular, it chronicles the lives of two prominent folk saints, Teresa Urrea and Pedrito Jaramillo, as early examples of Mexican American folk healers who interacted often and successfully with mainstream white America. It also considers Anglo cultural assumptions that allowed Mexican American folk traditions and medicines to be transculturally efficacious. Finally, it discusses the herbal remedies, prayers, and typical techniques of several mid- and late-twentieth-century curanderos, who practice mostly in Mexican American barrios.

This chapter examines the importance of metaphysical worldviews at play in the lives of multiethnic populations in both northern Mexico and the American Southwest. More specifically, it considers the emergence of spirit channeling, spirit communication, and religious innovation by focusing on the life and times of the Mexican curandero Niño Fidencio. It also looks at the cult of devotion that has arisen after Fidencio's death, with hundreds of healers in Mexico and the United States channeling his spirit to bring healing and comfort to their patients. The chapter concludes by discussing the influence of fidencismo on Mexican American curanderismo and placing it in the context of Mexican espiritualismo. It suggests that fidencismo is an instance of the boundary-defying hybridization of Mexican and Mexican American religious healing.

This chapter examines New Age interest in curanderismo and Mexican American folk healing. It considers how the more “traditional” curanderos extend their practice to Anglo clients who almost always participate in alternative healing and have been impacted by the American metaphysical religious tradition and New Age spirituality. In order to elucidate contemporary curanderismo's convergence with New Age and alternative healing communities, the chapter focuses on the continued development of American metaphysical religion into the twentieth century. It also looks at one of the most prominent contemporary curanderos, Elena Avila, and her way of practicing Mexican American religious healing to show that curanderismo continues to undergo hybridization. Finally, it discusses the use of the concept of chakras by curanderos to explain how Mexican American as well as Mayan and other Mesoamerican healing traditions work.

This chapter examines the ways that contemporary curanderos as well as neo-shamans have endeavored to continue to “import” knowledge from Mesoamerica and South America. It shows that contemporary curanderos, in an act of cultural memory and reclamation, reconfigure their healing tradition as one that is largely indigenous rather than the result of colonial contact and oppression. It also considers new directions in curanderismo by focusing on the University of New Mexico's course on curanderismo and the growing role of neo-shamanism in contemporary Mexican American metaphysical healing. The chapter suggests that contemporary curanderismo combines an overt return to an imagined indigenous Mesoamerican and South American past with attempts to incorporate with other common alternative healing traditions such as ayurveda, Reiki, and massage therapies.

This chapter examines the ongoing hybridization of healthways in the U.S.–Mexico border region, with particular emphasis on Anglo American uses of Mexican American folk healing and similar transcultural exchanges both in the United States and in other colonial border regions. It first considers how the folk saints and metaphysical therapies of borderlands' Mexican Americans sometimes operate effectively for Anglo Americans, and what these transcultural experiences tell us about the religious history of the border. It then discusses problems and possibilities arising from white and other non-Mexican American exchanges with curanderismo and other kinds of Mexican American religious healing. It also shows how the cultural exchange of healing from Mexican Americans to Anglo Americans has been facilitated in part by deep cultural predispositions of openness to such healing in the majority white culture.