Curanderismo: Mexican American Folk Healing, 2nd Ed.

by Robert T. Trotter II and Juan Antonio Chavira

Book Overview

The practice of curanderismo, or Mexican American folk medicine, is part of a historically and culturally important health care system deeply rooted in native Mexican healing techniques. This is the... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0820319627
• ISBN13: 9780820319629
• Release Date: November 1997
• Publisher: University of Georgia Press
• Length: 232 Pages
• Weight: 0.65 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.5" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

Well written.

This is one of the best books on the subject of Curanderismo that I have found. Curanderismo by Robert Trotter came reccomended to me as the most acurate book available today. The reader will learn about the history and practice of curanderismo, and find several common prayers and methods of spiritual cleansing and healing too. This book is deffinently one to hold on to.

Excellent Resource

Sound academic research on the under-examined beliefs and practices of curanderismo or Mexican American folk medicine. Very informative and a good introduction for further research. Objective and well-written. Printed by the University of Georgia Press in Athens, GA.

The best book on the topic BUT..........

This book is what one would expect from a team of American academics starting from scratch trying to assemble a definitive body of knowledge while based on US soil and focusing on a population located inside of the US. The focus is on Mexican Americans in South Texas, and the researchers are basically English speaking white folks, helped by Mexican Americans who led them to the operations of folks with shingles hanging out in front of their homes announcing that they were curanderos and curanderas. A method was used in interviewing the subjects and cataloguing the findings which seems to be very extensive and complete, and the conclusions that are drawn are pretty much right on the money. For instance, the authors make it clear that curanderismo is definitely rooted in Catholic culture imported from Spain much more so than it is rooted in anything else, which will come as a disappointment to New Agers and Indianists, who would like to think differently, and who have generally perpetrated a myth that things are otherwise. The authors also investigated the contributions of the two most influential curanderos who have helped set the stage for the current modes of curanderismo in the region there, namely, El Niño Fidencio and Pedrito Jaramillo. And they show how the concepts of sickness and health are rooted in a set of beliefs that include the elements of classical Greek medicine, and of the malevolent power of witches - which are not viewed in any sympathetic light ala New Age and Wicca interpretations - and they highlight many other basic facts about curanderismo that anyone who has studied this first hand will be in complete agreement with.For all of this, they should be commended.Where the failure is apparent, however - and this is why I did not rate this as five stars - is that they seem to have blinders on when it comes to the existence of a place called Mexico, which is the place from whence all of this folk culture comes. And this seems to be the failure in general of writers and researchers on this topic. They are generally not Spanish speakers, and they rely on Mexican Americans to help them out as they traipse around the Texas Valley and San Antonio and places like that, but they would likely find that they would have a much more difficult time with this if they were to actually cross the Rio Grande into Mexico with those same Mexican American translators and guides. Considering the sheer size of Mexico's population, and the fact that the vast majority of Mexicans do believe in at least some of the concepts that the authors would describe as being those of curandismo, then this belief system dwarfs those better known and more celebrated Latin American and Afro-based systems of Santeria, Voodoo, and Hoodoo. Although curanderismo has much in common with these cults, in many ways it is radically different. If one were to concede that they authors of this text really did not set out to do anything but a study of folk beliefs there in their re