CURANDERISMO: Traditional Healing of Mexico w/ Eduardo Holman, Apprentice

Precorded 7/10/2004

The Late Bryant "Eduardo" Holman, (author: La Santisima Muerte: A Mexican Folk Saint) a "gringo" of Presidio, Mexico, was a student of Curanderismo, the belief in the practice of magical healing.

A curandero or curandeiro is a traditional Native American healer or shaman in the United States and in Latin America. Historically, in the United States, curanderos were only found in concentrated Amerindian populations. In the mid to late 1970's the rise in ethnic minority and immigrant populations grew in tandem with the public presence of curanderos in areas outside of the historical geographic regions of the United States which had large Indigenous populations. The curandero dedicates their life to the administration of remedies for mental, emotional, physical and spiritual illnesses based on their evaluation.

CURANDERISMO by Bryant "Eduardo" Holman
When I first came to live in Ojinaga, I immediately became intrigued as to how much the people here are influenced by what is almost an obsession with what we might term the supernatural. I came to find out that this fact is almost the cornerstone of the culture here, and that this is really the norm throughout Mexico. It amazed me that anthropologists and writers seem to have missed the point on this issue, by and large. In the course of studying this phenomenon it finally became clear that the only way I was going to really understand it would be to befriend an actual curandero, and thus I came to seek out and to know Don Martín. I have since discovered that he is quite famous both here in Ojinaga and in the San Carlos region, besides having a large following all around the area of the "diaspora" of the Ojinaga and San Carlos people in the United States.