Borderlands Curanderos: The Worlds of Santa Teresa Urrea and Don Pedrito Jaramillo by Jennifer Koshatka Seman

Abstract

Reviewed by: Borderlands Curanderos: The Worlds of Santa Teresa Urrea and Don Pedrito Jaramillo by Jennifer Koshatka Seman Jethro Hernández Berrones Jennifer Koshatka Seman. Borderlands Curanderos: The Worlds of Santa Teresa Urrea and Don Pedrito Jaramillo. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2021. 224 pp. Ill. $29.95 (978-1-4773-2192-8). Jennifer Seman’s Borderlands Curanderos is a cultural and microhistory of borderlands medicine that examines the healing activities of Teresa Urrea and Pedro Jaramillo as well as their cultural and social contributions to support the wellbeing of Mexican American communities in California and Texas, marginalized by cultural norms and state policies in the United States at the turn of the twentieth century. Building on the work of Alan Goldberg, John McKiernan, and Natalia Molina, who have examined the racialized construction of disease and sanitary interventions in the region, Seman argues that these curanderos provided medicine for the oppressed at a time when medical innovations promised to shape healthier communities—at the cost of marginalization and abuse. With their medicine, these curanderos helped shape the Mexican American identity, one marked by mestizaje—mixture of cultures that helped these curanderos and their communities navigate and negotiate their lives in the United States. Seman examines each curandero in two chapters, describing their healing skills, their shifting practices across the border, the racial and gendered framing and reception of their activities, the effect of different national cultures on healer-patient-community relationships, and the expansion of their healing to the social body through activism. Chapter 1, “The Mexican Joan the Arc,” places Urrea’s healing practices in the context of rebellion and resistance against Porfirio Díaz’s regime (1884–1911) in Mexico. Teresa’s altruistic healings constituted a political inspiration for the dispossession- and labor-based Yaqui—indigenous communities that live in the limits of the states of Sonora and Sinaloa in Mexico—rebellions. In addition, influential friends framed her healings as an alternative model of modernity that disrupted gender, religious, and medical norms, challenging the limitation of women’s action to domestic spaces, Catholic devotion based on miracles and faith, and the científicos’—Díaz’s technocrats—authority over the physical and the social body. Díaz’s government exiled her in the United States from where she continued her healings and political activism. Chapter 2, “Laying on Hands,” examines U.S. audiences’ reception of Teresa’s healings. If the diverse U.S. medical marketplace accepted her therapies associating them with botanical medicine, mesmerism, and homeopathy, the public description of her hands—key in her therapies—as “lovely, slender, gentle, magnetic, electric, and white” (p. 65) suggests that gender and race mediated such acceptability, for only her sexualized hands, charm, and whiteness rendered her closer to the U.S. society. The chapter concludes examining the racialized public health policies in Los Angeles that excluded Mexican immigrants from social services based on their status as vectors of incurable disease and that contributed to shaping Urrea’s practices as a cultural refugee space. Chapter 3, “All Roads Lead to Don Pedrito Jaramillo,” focuses on Los Olmos Ranch as a place of pilgrimage. Seman uses Ann Harrington’s cultural scripts to explain the power of pilgrimage as a healing narrative that boosted the effect [End Page 162] of Pedro’s healing interventions. This cultural script was essential for the Rio Grande Valley’s communities of Mexicans who endured internal colonialism, land dispossession, a severe drought, famine, and an economic depression in the late nineteenth century. Jaramillo supplemented his water cures with other activities that benefitted the community such as finding water, digging wells, and providing food. Chapter 4, “In the Clutches of Black Magic,” examines the tensions between academic medicine and Jaramillo’s healing activities. Using newspaper articles that denounced the treatments as sorcery and that defended Jaramillo for his community work, Seman describes how race shaped definitions of disease, medical interventions, the lack of state services, and the defense for the curandero’s livelihood. The case filed against him for postal fraud by members of the American Medical Association shows how his unpaid services, lack of academic medical training, and use of traditional healing approaches did not fit the growing...