Borderlands Curanderos: The Worlds of Santa Teresa Urrea and Don Pedrito Jaramillo

Abstract

Medical anthropologists have tended to treat curanderos (folk healers) and curanderismo (folk healing) as exotic, non-American phenomena found only in isolated, credulous Latino communities clinging to their cultural traditions despite the advances of modern medicine. Jennifer K. Seman presents a very different view of curanderos and the borderlands society within which they operated. As faith healers, they not only participated in society on either side of the U.S.-Mexico border but they also shaped the social life of both sides. Teresa Urrea and Don Pedrito Jaramillo were curanderos born into that regional variant of Mexican society, identity, and culture, called (in Mexico) norteño. Around the turn of the twentieth century, both moved to the United States. The Latino communities in the cities the curanderos chose to live in around 1900—El Paso, Los Olmos, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and San José—had been, just fifty years earlier, part of the same regional norteño variant of Mexican society into which they had been born (see David E. Hayes-Bautista, El Cinco de Mayo: An American Tradition, 2012).