Some primary themes of the study of American religious cultures in the past half-century or more have been the interconnectedness, overlapping, or borrowing among many religious and philosophical movements, and all this in the context of a vast American “marketplace” of religion. In Border Medicine, Brett Hendrickson, himself a former Presbyterian pastor in Arizona, leverages these thematic angles to explore what he rightly identifies as a transcultural phenomenon of healing cultures: borderlands healing modalities represented and continued under the rubric of Mexican and Mexican American curanderismo as this has developed and adapted to changes in regional political, social, ethnic, and economic realities. The result is a satisfying study of the transcultural influences on curanderismo and the influences of curanderas and curanderos, female and male healers in that tradition, on cultures outside of Mexican and Mexican American communities.
Hendrickson situates his study within a theoretical framework informed by Thomas Csordas, whose anthropological reformulation of the sociologist Pierre Bordieu's theory of practice asserts that sickness and healing are subject to a community-specific rhetoric that enables healing of the patient. That rhetoric functions on a community's predispositions to specific cultural attributes, beliefs, and healing modalities, and where these predispositions align, healing is as much a product of the “rhetoric of transformation” (7) as the other inputs to the healer's method. Hendrickson notes that while Csordas explains how such healing occurs within a specific culture, curanderismo defies the limitation of rhetoric and its power to operate solely within the community in which it originated. One of the main arguments of this book is that curanderismo has proven an effective healing modality for persons within Mexican and Mexican American communities and also for outsiders, be they Anglo Americans or African Americans, Native peoples of the Southwest, or travelers from outside the United States and Mexico. As such, Border Medicine finds a place within the emerging area of transnational studies in history, the sociology of religion, and borderlands ethnic studies as it illuminates the existence of overlapping cultural predispositions (to use Csordas's term) between Mexican, Mexican American, indigenous, Anglo, and other cultural groups inhabiting the long U.S.-Mexico border region.
Hendrickson divides the book into three parts. In the first, he examines the history of hybrid healing practices in the greater Southwest, arguing that curanderismo emerged from the specific social, religious, and political climates present between the colonial era and the early national period of Mexico and the United States. Franciscan and Jesuit missionaries’ efforts in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in northern New Spain ended with much of northern Mexico in a vacuum of official Catholic presence at the time of Mexican independence. The nineteenth century's conflicts left the region largely on its own in terms of Catholic oversight of communities as few priests persisted in the North, and following the American invasion in 1846 and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848, a large swath of northern Mexico became part of the United States, as Texas had done after its experiment as an independent nation ended in 1845. Anglo American influence increased over the next decades; Hendrickson explains the scenario that resulted in which transcultural sharing of healing practices emerged in the border regions from Texas to California. Many of the new arrivals on the border from the eastern United States brought knowledge of emerging American metaphysical movements such as mesmerism, spiritualism, and New Thought. As Americans moved east to west, new veins of metaphysical healing emerged in the greater West, among them the ideations of Mary Baker Eddy and Christian Science. In this milieu, Hendrickson argues that these movements provided Anglo American residents of the borderlands with a set of shared predispositions towards healing that resonated when such individuals came into contact with border region healers working as curanderas in local communities.
In the second part, Hendrickson examines the cases of regionally significant curanderos and folk saints and the channels of healing that they adapted to their work. He examines the healing approaches and cult followings of don Pedrito Jaramillo and the Santa de Cabora, Teresa Urrea, two of the more prominent borderland healers whose work was based in localized curanderismo, but which expanded beyond to Anglo Americans and others, as both emigrated from Mexico to the United States during the last decades of the nineteenth century. Hendrickson dedicates a chapter to the life and influence of Niño Fidencio, the founder of the fidencista movement, whose work the author claims was influenced by Kardecists in Mexico who embraced espiritismo very much like the Spiritualist movement in the United States. While Fidencio worked primarily as a male midwife (partero) and curandero in his early years, his followers after his death began to channel the Niño's spirit to heal as materias, or mediums, of Fidencio. The fidencista movement demonstrates the success of curanderismo in Mexico in adapting new influences and enabling cross-cultural sharing across borders and communities.
In the last, well-written section, Hendrickson addresses the more immediate past of curanderismo by showing how its entry into the American spiritual marketplace during the twentieth century brought new challenges to border healers. Using the religious marketplace concept developed by R. Laurence Moore, Hendrickson explains the movement of curanderismo out of Mexican American enclaves into suburbs, shopping centers, and virtual Internet marketplaces. He also examines the emphasis more recent curanderas have placed on indigenous sources for their healing practices; Native American and Aztec spiritual beliefs hold a prominent place in the movement in recent decades, replacing the European roots of curanderismo in Mexican American healers’ portrayal of origins. These changes and curanderismo's significant reorientation to a spiritual marketplace of options within a greater context of New Age healing modalities, led Hendrickson to question the future of borderlands healing arts in the Mexican context. Yet, in spite of new influences and the myriad ways in which curanderismo grapples with twenty-first-century North American mores, Hendrickson concludes that curanderas and their healing practices provide an example of the permeability of borders and fruitful interactions between cultures. Cultural scholars of the greater Southwest will find this a compelling, contextual analysis of curanderismo's past and present.
