El Curandero

By: Ramirez, Paul

South Texas, 1881. A widower drives a half-loaded wagon into brush country nobody has bothered to claim, kneels in the caliche, and says, "Here, then."

Pedro was born poor in the green hills of Tamaulipas, where his father hauled corn to a scale that never tipped their way. There, an old curandera named Do a Refugio taught him that most healing "isn't magic, and isn't medicine either. It's showing up." After a devastating loss, he vows never again to stand in a room with nothing to offer the person dying in front of him. He settles at Los Olmos, sets out water and a little patience, and opens his gate to anyone who walks through it, asking for nothing in return.

As the line of visitors grows, so does the resistance. Dr. Wallace Hayes, the only physician in Falfurrias, has his own reasons for distrusting the man down the road. Sharp-tongued Amparo Villarreal arrives with a basket of mending and stays. A courtroom hearing puts Pedro's life's work on trial, and a cholera epidemic forces the county to decide who it will stand with. Over twenty-six years, Pedro grows from an anonymous stranger into a legend. He never stops insisting he is just a man.

Told in five parts across the border country, El Curandero is an intimate work of historical fiction about faith, folk medicine, grief, and the quiet courage of showing up again the next morning. It is for readers of Texas and borderlands fiction and of character-driven stories about ordinary people who do extraordinary good.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0HLZ4GVKH
• ISBN13: 9798178157732
• Release Date: October 2026
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 276 Pages
• Weight: 0.74 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 6.0" x 9.0"