Persecuted as evil during colonial times, considered charlatans during the nation-building era, Puerto Rican brujos (witch-healers) today have become spiritual entrepreneurs who advise their clients not only in consultation with the spirits but also in compliance with state laws and new economic opportunities. Combining trance, dance, magic, and healing practices with expertise in the workings of the modern welfare state, they help lawyers win custody suits, sick employees resolve labor disability claims, single mothers apply for government housing, or corporation managers maximize their commercial skills. Drawing on extensive fieldwork among practicing brujos, this book presents a masterful history and ethnography of Puerto Rican brujería (witch-healing). Raquel Romberg explores how brujería emerged from a blending of popular Catholicism, Afro-Latin religions, French Spiritism, and folk Protestantism and also looks at how it has adapted to changes in state policies and responded to global flows of ideas and commodities. She demonstrates that, far from being an exotic or marginal practice in the modern world, brujería has become an invisible yet active partner of consumerism and welfare capitalism.

Curandero: Ethno-Psychotherapy & Curanderismo Hispanic Mental Health in the 21st Century, is the product of more than 50 years of the study of curanderismo and Hispanic mental health. In this book, Dr. Zavaleta examines curanderismo and the folk beliefs carried by immigrants across the U.S.-Mexico border. In the United States, the Hispanic population is notoriously underserved in both physical and mental health care. In Curandero, Dr. Zavaleta reviews the history of curanderismo, beginning with pre-Columbian populations, and traces the development of curanderismo over the past 500 years. He also examines the history and practice of psychiatry and the emergence of ethno-psychotherapy as well as psychiatry’s historic failure to incorporate culture in the treatment of the mental health of Hispanic populations. Dr. Zavaleta seeks to introduce curanderismo to psychiatry with the intention of incorporating its important aspects in the treatment of Hispanic mental health.

DIVA study of the development of the medical profession and the health system in Costa Rica, integrating an analysis of class, gender, professional hierarchy, and a comparative perspective on the health care systems of other nations./div

2022 Americo Paredes Award, Center for Mexican American Studies at South Texas College A historical exploration of the worlds and healing practices of two curanderos (faith healers) who attracted thousands, rallied their communities, and challenged institutional powers. Santa Teresa Urrea and Don Pedrito Jaramillo were curanderos—faith healers—who, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, worked outside the realm of "professional medicine," seemingly beyond the reach of the church, state, or certified health practitioners whose profession was still in its infancy. Urrea healed Mexicans, Indigenous people, and Anglos in northwestern Mexico and cities throughout the US Southwest, while Jaramillo conducted his healing practice in the South Texas Rio Grande Valley, healing Tejanos, Mexicans, and Indigenous people there. Jennifer Koshatka Seman takes us inside the intimate worlds of both "living saints," demonstrating how their effective healing—curanderismo—made them part of the larger turn-of-the century worlds they lived in as they attracted thousands of followers, validated folk practices, and contributed to a modernizing world along the US-Mexico border. While she healed, Urrea spoke of a Mexico in which one did not have to obey unjust laws or confess one's sins to Catholic priests. Jaramillo restored and fed drought-stricken Tejanos when the state and modern medicine could not meet their needs. Then, in 1890, Urrea was expelled from Mexico. Within a decade, Jaramillo was investigated as a fraud by the American Medical Association and the US Post Office. Borderlands Curanderos argues that it is not only state and professional institutions that build and maintain communities, nations, and national identities but also those less obviously powerful.

Health and medicine in colonial environments is one of the newest areas in the history of medicine, but one in which the Caribbean is conspicuously absent. Yet the complex and fascinating history of the Caribbean, borne of the ways European colonialism combined with slavery, indentureship, migrant labour and plantation agriculture, led to the emergence of new social and cultural forms which are especially evident the area of health and medicine. The history of medical care in the Caribbean is also a history of the transfer of cultural practices from Africa and Asia, the process of creolization in the African and Asian diasporas, the perseverance of indigenous and popular medicine, and the emergence of distinct forms of western medical professionalism, science, and practice. This collection, which covers the French, Hispanic, Dutch, and British Caribbean, explores the cultural and social domains of medical experience and considers the dynamics and tensions of power. The chapters emphasize contestations over forms of medicalization and the controls of public health and address the politics of professionalization, not simply as an expression of colonial power but also of the power of a local elite against colonial or neo-colonial control. They pay particular attention to the significance of race and gender, focusing on such topics as conflicts over medical professionalization, control of women’s bodies and childbirth, and competition between ‘European’ and ‘Indigenous’ healers and healing practices. Employing a broad range of subjects and methodological approaches, this collection constitutes the first edited volume on the history of health and medicine in the circum-Caribbean region and is therefore required reading for anyone interested in the history of colonial and post-colonial medicine.

Along the coast of northwestern Mexico, "pink gold" may mean wealth for some, but the new global economy has imposed terrible burdens on many sectors of the population. State and regional economic development policies have supported the use of natural resources for commercial export, resulting in the rapid growth of agriculture and shrimp aquaculture. Environmental pressures have contributed to the degradation of marine ecosystems, and once self-reliant rural populations have been driven to wage and subsistence labor in order to survive. This book eloquently explains how contemporary rural communities in southern Sinaloa have responded to economic and ecological changes affecting the entire nation. A political ecology of human survival in one of the most important ecological regions of Mexico, it describes how these communities contest environmental degradation and economic impoverishment arising from political and economic forces beyond their control. María Luz Cruz-Torres evokes the rich and varied experiences of the people who live in the villages of Celaya and El Cerro, showing how they invent and utilize their own social capital to emerge as whole persons in the face of globalization. She traces the histories of the two villages to illustrate the complex variation involved in community formation and to show how people respond to and utilize Mexican law and reform. Surrounded by limited resources, poverty, illness, sudden death, and daily oppression, these men and women create innovative social and cultural forms that mitigate these impacts. Cruz-Torres reveals not only how they manage to survive in the midst of horrendous circumstances but also how they transcend those impediments with dignity. She details the participation of household members in the subsistence, formal, and informal sectors of the economy, and how women use a variety of resources to guarantee their families’ survival. A sometimes tragic but ultimately vibrant story of human resistance, Lives of Dust and Water offers an important look at a little-studied but dynamically developing region of Mexico. It contributes to a more precise understanding of how rural coastal communities in Mexico emerged and continue to develop and adjust to the uncertainties of the globalizing world.

This innovative textbook fulfills the needs of upper-division Spanish students who are pursuing degrees in the health professions, plan to become medical interpreters or just want to improve their proficiency in the language. It provides multiple opportunities to learn vocabulary related to the medical field, reviews hard-to-understand grammatical concepts, describes health-related cultural competence and presents opportunities to discuss issues of concern about the health of Hispanic communities in the US and abroad.