Under dim light at the Municipal Theater in Xela, Quetzaltenango, Guatemala, the setting is intimate. Rows of flowers and herbs separate the stage from the audience, forming a square that creates the illusion of a protected space. Inside it, four masked women stand in character.
Colorful paper decorations hang overhead, contrasting with their huipiles and cortes, lending the stage the feel of a village celebration.
Suddenly, the theater falls silent. An actress wearing a mask of an elderly woman steps forward. Deep wrinkles mark her face; a cloth wrapped around her hair signals a healer—a curandera. She begins a cleansing ritual—una limpia.
A younger woman pleads for help. Years of gender-based violence have settled into her body as shame and self-hatred. In a fractured voice, she repeats, “me siento sucia” (“I feel dirty”), touching her body as if it were no longer her own. With each repetition, her estrangement deepens.
Me siento sucia.
Me siento sucia.
Me siento sucia.
As the audience watches, the curandera circles the young woman, then slowly moves outward, drawing closer to us. She performs the limpia, declaring in a forceful voice:
“They know where to hit us.
They hit us where it hurts most, in hidden places.
They lock us away until the bruises fade.
They hit our legs so we cannot walk.
They hit our heads so we cannot think.
They hit our stomachs so we cannot breathe.”
—Performance at Municipal Theater, Quetzaltenango, Guatemala. July 2018
The above vignette recounts the first time I witnessed Las Curanderas Teatro perform their play Fiesta Convite on stage in 2018, during preliminary research in Guatemala—an encounter that later marked the beginning of my dissertation research journey. The ethnographic note describes a scene in which a curandera, a traditional healer, performs a cleansing rite known as a limpia. In the scene, a woman seeks healing for the trauma left by gender-based violence, describing herself as “dirty” after a lifetime of psychological, physical, and sexual abuse. Within Mesoamerican curanderismo and Maya medicinal traditions, limpias are broadly understood as forms of ethnomedicine that provide therapeutic and rebalancing care, practiced since ancient times (Aparicio Mena Reference Aparicio Mena2009). On stage, the curandera performs the limpia not only for the individual woman but also as a public denunciation of the collective wounds produced by gender-based violence.
Inspired by this scene, this article examines how Maya Kaqchikel women conceptualize violence against women and how they engage in healing through theater-making practices grounded in embodied ancestral medicinal knowledge. Drawing on the case study of Las Curanderas Teatro, I analyze how this all-women Maya Kaqchikel theater group has developed a theater-making methodology rooted in Indigenous medicinal and spiritual healing systems. I suggest that Las Curanderas Teatro engage in what I call performing healing, an embodied praxis through which healing is enacted rather than represented. This praxis unfolds through two interconnected practices: first, by mobilizing the sociocultural authority of curanderas through staged limpias that confront gender-based violence; and second, by structuring theatrical performance to mirror Indigenous healing processes. Within this framework, I define performing healing as a feminist decolonial theater-making methodology that draws from Indigenous healing systems to use performance as an embodied process of identifying wounds, facilitating transformation, and restoring life at both individual and collective levels.
To theorize this praxis, I draw on Gina Starblanket’s (Reference Starblanket and Green2017, 23–24) concept of resurgence and cultural memory, particularly her emphasis on the “everyday” character of resurgence as enacted through daily practices, relationships, and embodied actions rather than exclusively through large-scale political mobilization. Within this framework, performing healing emerges as a form of spiritual resurgence—understood as the renewal or awakening of knowledge and practice after periods of suppression (Starblanket Reference Starblanket and Green2017, 25). Las Curanderas Teatro’s theater-making praxis constitutes an everyday act of resurgence that unfolds through rehearsals, performances, and communal interactions, as the group advocates for Indigenous healing traditions as responses to contemporary patriarchal violence. By performing healing, Las Curanderas Teatro enact what Starblanket (Reference Starblanket and Green2017, 25) describes as an “interplay of pre-colonial pasts and decolonial futures,” positioning collective healing as integral to liberation processes that take shape in liminal and quotidian spaces. Theater making, I suggest, is one such space—where ancestral healing practices reemerge as cultural and political resurgence, foregrounding Maya women’s strategies of resilience and resistance within the ongoing structures of colonial patriarchy.
A note on methods and positionality
This article draws on ethnographic research conducted for my doctoral dissertation (Hernández Ochoa Reference Hernández Ochoa2022a) and uses Las Curanderas Teatro as a case study to illustrate and analytically deepen performing healing—a theater-making methodology I theorize as emerging across Maya and Mestiza women’s theater collectives in Guatemala. While the framework was developed through research with multiple groups, this article centers Las Curanderas Teatro to deepen the analysis. The research is based on feminist ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Guatemala between June 2019 and June 2020. Data collection included participant observation, attendance at rehearsals and performances, and in-depth semistructured interviews in Santa María de Jesús (Sacatepéquez) and San Juan Comalapa (Chimaltenango). In total, fifteen interviews were conducted; this article draws primarily on seven interviews with members of Las Curanderas Teatro, alongside sustained ethnographic engagement and conversations with Francisca Salazar Guaran (Nana Panchita), a Maya Ajq’ij and medicine woman whose teachings significantly informed the analysis. Interviews ranged from one to three hours, were conducted in Spanish, and employed life-history methods grounded in feminist and Indigenous methodologies (Atkinson Reference Atkinson1998; Ghorashi Reference Ghorashi2008; Hernández Castillo Reference Hernández Castillo2016; González-López Reference González-López2006). All interview excerpts cited here derive from this fieldwork and were originally analyzed as part of my doctoral dissertation.
Methodologically, this study is grounded in Indigenous research practices and decolonial feminist ethnography (Smith Reference Smith2021; Wilson Reference Wilson2020; Davis and Craven Reference Davis and Craven2022; Espinosa-Miñoso et al. Reference Espinosa-Miñoso, Lugones and Maldonado-Torres2022). These approaches shaped both the research design and my ethical commitments to relational accountability, reciprocity, and care. Guided by Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s Indigenous research agenda, I centered testimony, storytelling, and practices of remembering and survival as forms of knowledge production. Following the framework of research as ceremony (Wilson Reference Wilson2020), I approach my analysis as a relational, transformative, and iterative process. I maintained field notes, reflexive journals, and ethnographic memos, transcribed all interviews, and conducted thematic analysis across interviews and observations. Journaling, photography, and poetry also functioned as reflexive practices through which embodied and affective forms of knowing informed my analysis.
My positionality as a Salvadoran American Mestiza researcher shaped this work. Raised within the Central American mestizo project that sought to erase Indigenous ancestry while privileging whiteness, I continue to grapple with how colonial and patriarchal power is inscribed on and through the body. Drawing on Yolanda Aguilar’s theorization of femestizaje (Aguilar Reference Aguilar2019), I approach positionality as an ongoing process of decolonization rather than a resolved stance (Hernández Ochoa Reference Hernández Ochoa2022b). While my language skills and cultural familiarity facilitated relational engagement, my positionality shifted across the fieldwork, revealing how researchers may occupy fluid positions of both vulnerability and privilege. Finally, in accordance with Indigenous protocols of relational accountability, all participants are named after one of the twenty sacred medicinal plants within Maya cosmovision, as taught by Nana Panchita through the women’s medicinal plant collective Rujotal K’aslemal. Each name is preceded by the prefix Ix, the feminine marker in the Maya Kaqchikel language and associated with the nawal Ix. Footnote 1 This naming practice reflects my commitment to ethical collaboration, participant protection, and respect for the spiritual and epistemic traditions guiding this research. May this work serve us all.
Contextualizing Indigenous women’s healing as a decolonial project across the Americas
Gender-based violence against Indigenous and racialized women in colonized territories is inseparable from enduring colonial legacies of racial, ethnic, gendered, and class stratification. In Guatemala, violence against women—particularly Indigenous women—has been extensively documented across historical and sociopolitical contexts, with particular attention to the internal armed conflict (1960–1996) and its aftermath (Arenas Bianchi et al. Reference Arenas Bianchi and Saravia2017; Carey and Torres Reference Carey and Gabriela Torres2010; Velásquez Nimatuj Reference Velásquez Nimatuj2016; Sanford et al. Reference Sanford, Álvarez-Arenas and Dill2016). These legacies persist in the present, as reflected in Guatemala’s high rates of teenage pregnancy, domestic violence, and femicide (Rodriguez and Sisodia Reference Rodriguez and Sisodia2025; Telesur 2017).
Across Guatemala and the Americas, Indigenous women face heightened vulnerability to extreme forms of gender-based violence produced at the intersection of race, class, and gender within colonial social hierarchies. Feminist scholars argue that gendered violence is not incidental but constitutive of settler colonial projects, forming part of their genocidal and assimilationist logics (Stephen and Speed Reference Stephen and Speed2021, 4). In Guatemala, the Maya scholar Emma Chirix demonstrates how colonial stratification continues to organize regimes of violence embedded in state institutions and social life, disciplining Maya women’s bodies through racial, sexual, and moral regulations (Chirix García Reference Chirix García2013; Icaza Garza and Leyva Solano Reference Icaza Garza and Solano2019). Similarly, Aura Cumes (Reference Cumes2012) analyzes how inequality is naturalized through the folklorization, commodification, and labor exploitation of Indigenous women, particularly through their racialized positioning as sirvientas within Guatemalan society. Together, these analyses reveal how colonial patriarchal violence operates through both material practices and dominant discourses that render Indigenous women disposable, exploitable, or perpetually victimized.
This article builds on the theoretical contributions of María Lugones, Rita Segato, and Gloria Anzaldúa to conceptualize Indigenous women’s healing as a decolonial project. Lugones’s (Reference Lugones, Mignolo and Escobar2013) concept of the coloniality of gender elucidates how colonial rule produced racialized hierarchies that rendered Indigenous and Afro-descendant women exploitable through sexual violence, coerced labor, and domestic servitude in service of Eurocentric capitalism. The Sepur Zarco case exemplifies the endurance of this colonial patriarchal system: In 2016, fifteen Q’eqchi women testified against former military officials for crimes of sexual and domestic slavery committed during the armed conflict, exposing the persistence of gendered colonial violence embedded in state institutions (Velásquez Nimatuj Reference Velásquez Nimatuj2016).
Rita Segato further situates violence against women within a global political economy of power, conceptualizing it as a form of political warfare produced through colonial modernity and capitalism. Her notion of the pedagogy of cruelty describes how public, ritualized violence teaches domination and reproduces patriarchal authority (Segato Reference Segato2024). From this perspective, violence against women’s bodies exceeds the intimate or national scale and emerges as a central mechanism of global patriarchal power. In this context, I suggest that creating and sustaining spaces for healing—particularly by and for Indigenous women—constitutes a decolonial modality that disrupts the normalization of cruelty and domination.
Gloria Anzaldúa’s concept of the open wound further illuminates how historical and ongoing violence shape both Indigenous women’s lives and the social body (Anzaldua Reference Anzaldúa2012). The open wound names not only the structural and embodied effects of oppression but also signals a site of potential healing and transformation. Indigenous women’s theater making across the Americas can thus be understood as an exercise of the decolonial imaginary (Pérez Reference Pérez1999): a practice of reclaiming histories, narratives, bodies, and spaces to imagine liberatory futures. In this sense, collective healing emerges as a political project that intervenes in shared social wounds produced by colonial patriarchal violence.
Within this broader hemispheric context, Maya and Mestiza women’s theater-making praxis constitutes a decolonial intervention that simultaneously denounces violence and cultivates collective healing. Their work resonates with the cuerpo-territorio framework that positions the body as the first territory of resistance and defense against colonial and patriarchal violence (Cabnal Reference Cabnal2012, Reference Cabnal2017). In dialogue with Segato’s concept of the territorialization of women’s bodies—understood as sites of colonization, control, and violation that reflect broader structures of domination (Segato Reference Segato2024)—the defense of the cuerpo-territorio emerges as a central site of political resistance against the reproduction of the pedagogy of cruelty. Grounded in these theoretical traditions, I examine how Las Curanderas Teatro’s theater-making praxis becomes a political and spiritual act of resurgence that reclaims Indigenous epistemologies, disrupts colonial imaginaries, and recenters healing as a decolonial horizon.
Why theater? Consciousness raising and social transformation
Theater and performance have long been mobilized as tools for consciousness raising and social transformation across the Americas, closely linked to social, political, and cultural movements in the region (Rizk Reference Rizk2007; Milleret Reference Milleret1998; Schwall Reference Schwall2021; Nigro Reference Nigro1984; Boal and McBride Reference Boal, Leal McBride, Prentki and Abraham2020; Taylor Reference Taylor2003, Reference Taylor, Bial and Martin2005; Smith Reference Smith2016). Historically, theater has functioned both as an instrument of hegemonic power and as a practice of liberation, enabling individuals and collectives to resist oppressive systems and imagine alternative social relations (Boal and McBride Reference Boal, Leal McBride, Prentki and Abraham2020). Popular theater movements of the 1960s–1980s across Latin America blended collective creation, testimony, storytelling, and theater of the oppressed to catalyze social change (Milleret Reference Milleret1998; Luzuriaga Reference Luzuriaga1978). These practices influenced movements beyond the region, including El Teatro Campesino in the United States (Bagby and Valdez Reference Bagby and Valdez1967), yet feminist analyses of women’s labor within popular theater remain limited, as evidenced by the marginalization of Latina immigrant women (Broyles-González Reference Broyles-González1990).
More recent scholarship foregrounds feminist theater making as a site of gender consciousness raising, political intervention, and collective empowerment. Scholars examine women as playwrights, performers, and theorists who mobilize theater to confront intersecting forms of oppression rooted in race, class, gender, sexuality, and legal status (Sandoval-Sánchez and Sternbach Reference Sandoval-Sánchez and Saporta Sternbach2001; Larson and Vargas Reference Larson and Vargas1998; Taylor and Morales Reference Taylor and Villegas Morales1994; Taylor and Costantino Reference Taylor and Costantino2003; Moraga and Anzaldúa Reference Moraga and Anzaldúa2015; Sánchez Ares Reference Sánchez Ares2015; Daniels Reference Daniels2015). For example, Sánchez Ares (Reference Sánchez Ares2015) shows how Caribbean and Central American immigrant women use community-based theater to mobilize audiences toward social transformation, while Daniels (Reference Daniels2015) demonstrates how the praxis of theater group Fortaleza de la Mujer Maya in Chiapas simultaneously denounces gender inequality and advances personal and collective healing grounded in Indigenous women’s narratives.
Despite these contributions, scholarship on Indigenous women’s theater—particularly in Central America—remains limited. Existing academic literature is concentrated primarily in Canada and the United States (Armstrong et al. Reference Armstrong, Johnson and Wortman2009; MacKenzie Reference MacKenzie2020; Mojica and Farnell Reference Mojica and Farnell2023). In Canada, MacKenzie (Reference MacKenzie2020) argues that Indigenous women’s theater functions as a decolonial strategy that challenges colonial representations of Indigenous women as passive victims by reclaiming narrative agency and centering lived experience as sociocultural healing. In the United States, Spiderwoman Theater’s story-weaving methodology integrates personal and collective narratives to confront colonial patriarchy while resonating with broader social structures (Armstrong et al. Reference Armstrong, Johnson and Wortman2009, vii). Across these contexts, Indigenous women’s theater consistently grapples with the enduring impacts of colonial patriarchal violence while articulating a desire for transformation grounded in ancestral forms of healing. As Monique Mojica asserts, “only through looking back at the atrocity and the resulting wounds can Native artists look forward to creation, transformation, and healing” (Armstrong et al. Reference Armstrong, Johnson and Wortman2009, vi). Building on this lineage, this article examines how Maya Kaqchikel women mobilize theater as an embodied and collective healing praxis—what I theorize as performing healing—through the case of Las Curanderas Teatro in Guatemala.
Women’s theater as a site of resistance to gender-based violence and the politics of healing in Guatemala
The territory known today as Guatemala is deeply shaped by enduring colonial and patriarchal violence and by contemporary expressions of the pedagogy of cruelty (Segato Reference Segato2024). In this context, feminist scholarship, activism, and artistic production led by Indigenous and Mestiza women have proliferated across civil society. Many of these initiatives center practices of healing that address personal and collective wounds produced by intersecting forms of gender-based violence embedded in historical, political, and social structures. Organizations such as Centro de Formación-Sanación e Investigación Transpersonal Q’anil, Mujeres Mayas Kaqla, and Tzk’at Red de Sanadoras Ancestrales del Feminismo Comunitario exemplify this work (KAQLA—Mujeres Mayas, n.d.; ecopolitica 2018; Qanil, n.d.). Across these efforts emerges a shared imperative grounded in Indigenous and Mestiza women’s social and political agency: a collective demand for healing—of women’s bodies and memories, of territory, and of the social and political body. It is within this interpretive context that this section traces selected community theater initiatives that denounce gender-based violence while advancing practices of individual and collective healing essential to Guatemala’s social fabric.
Key figures in contemporary Indigenous and Mestiza women’s theater and perfromance art in Guatemala include Regina José Galindo, Patricia Orantes, Paula Acevedo, Magdalena Morales, and Víctor Barillas. While each has made significant contributions across performance, theater, and feminist cultural production, their collaborative trajectories converge around the use of theater and/or perfromance as a tool for political denunciation and healing. Given the scope of this article, what follows is a brief overview of selected all-women theater collectives that enact theater as a healing praxis.
Founded in 2008 by five survivors of gender-based violence, Las Poderosas Teatro emerged from a collective process of psychological therapy aimed at promoting healing and empowerment for participants. Under the direction of Marco Canale and Patricia Orantes, their play Las Poderosas weaves autobiographical narratives of survival and transformation (Gallegos Reference Gallegos2015; Hernández Ochoa Reference Hernández Ochoa2022a). Similarly, Actoras de Cambio developed a theater-based methodology of formación-sanación to accompany Maya women survivors of sexual violence during the Guatemalan armed conflict (Fulchirone et al. Reference Fulchirone2009; Méndez Reference Méndez2020). Their play Mujer Montaña, directed by Paula Acevedo, draws on Indigenous women’s testimonies to dramatize the release of shame, pain, and guilt while advocating for integral healing of mind, body, and spirit. Both Las Poderosas Teatro and Actoras de Cambio originated as therapeutic processes that evolved into collective political interventions rooted in public storytelling and performance.
Founded in 2012 in El Tablón, Sololá, Mujeres Ajchowen (Women Who Make Art) is a Maya Kaqchikel women’s theater collective whose performances draw on Maya cosmovision and origin stories to critique gender inequality and violence. Led by Clara Alicia Sen Sipac and frequently directed by Víctor Barillas, the group integrates ancestral narratives with lived experience to challenge restrictive gender norms and empower Indigenous women (Hernández Ochoa Reference Hernández Ochoa2022a). Also founded in 2012, Ix Saq’il Ik’ (Moonlight Women), based in San Juan Comalapa, emerged from a collaboration between Paula Acevedo and Berta Chirix inspired by the book Los deseos de nuestros cuerpos (Chirix García Reference Chirix García2010). Their theater laboratory explored women’s bodies, sexuality, pleasure, and autonomy through narrative and performance, drawing inspiration from Maya cosmovision and contemporary life experiences. Plays such as Los tejidos de mi cuerpo and Ix Ajmak re-center women’s agency within origin stories, emphasizing theater as a tool for self-exploration, liberation, and collective healing (Hernández Ochoa Reference Hernández Ochoa2022a).
While many of these collectives have continued to develop additional performances and collaborations, a comprehensive analysis exceeds the scope of this article. Nevertheless, the examples discussed here underscore the central analytical concerns of this study and highlight Indigenous and Mestiza women’s theater as a critical site of resistance to gender-based violence and as a praxis through which the politics of healing are enacted in Guatemala.Footnote 2
A case study: Las Curanderas Teatro
Las Curanderas: Teatro para Curar el Susto y Los Males Sociales is a theater group of Maya Kaqchikel women from Santa María de Jesús, Sacatepéquez, Guatemala, formed in March 2017. The group is led by María Telón—Doña María—a renowned film and theater actress whose work spans internationally recognized productions, including Ixcanul (2015) and Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (2022). The ensemble also includes Doña María’s daughter, Rosa Angélica Pío Telón, as well as another mother-daughter pair, Rosa Linda Chávez and Medelyn Chávez. The group works in close collaboration with directors Víctor Barillas and Magdalena Morales, both of whom have extensive experience in community-based and socially engaged theater. Las Curanderas Teatro emerged from earlier collaborative dialogues between María Telón and Patricia Orantes, who at the time was leading a youth theater group in Santa María de Jesús. Orantes invited Doña María to participate in a production in a minor role and to advise on the community protocols surrounding traditional marriage request ceremonies. Through this exchange, Orantes recognized Doña María’s interest in and aptitude for performance, which led her to facilitate a connection with Magdalena Morales and Víctor Barillas. Following a year-long theater workshop and laboratory, Las Curanderas Teatro premiered their play Fiesta Convite in 2018, touring across Guatemala and internationally. I first encountered the group during one of these performances as described in the opening vignette of this article.
My engagement with Las Curanderas Teatro emerged through sustained ethnographic collaboration, including interviews, participant observation during rehearsals and performances, and everyday relational exchanges that shaped both the research process and its analytical direction. In accordance with protocols identified as important by the members and led by Doña María, my research began only after the completion of a Maya ceremony, during which “the road was opened,” and I was granted permission to embark on this collaborative journey. This ceremony was not symbolic but constitutive of the research process, establishing relational accountability, ethical responsibility, and spiritual alignment as foundational to my ethnographic practice.
The name Las Curanderas Teatro emerged from collective conversations among the group members and the directors as they theorized the figure of la curandera as both an ancestral healer and a social authority. Curanderas are women traditional healers who have the skill to heal spiritual and bodily wounds through rituals, spoken word, medicinal plants, water, sacred fire, and other elements drawn from Indigenous healing traditions. The archetype of traditional healers embodies the group’s philosophy, which understands gender-based violence as a social wound that can be addressed through embodied, collective theatrical practice. Las Curanderas Teatro uses theater-making praxis and performances as both pedagogical and healing spaces, where performance operates as a form of communal reflection, release, and transformation. These commitments are powerfully expressed in the group’s play, Fiesta Convite, which examines the normalization of gender-based violence within everyday cultural practices, such as music, dance, and community celebrations. Through the strategic use of popular music and episodic scenes, the play weaves together multiple narratives of violence experienced by women across different stages of the life course. These range from interpersonal violence within courtship and marriage to institutional violence enacted by the state and judicial system. Importantly, the group emphasizes that while Indigenous women are disproportionately affected, such forms of violence also shape the lives of Mestiza and Ladina women, revealing the intersectional and structural nature of gender-based violence in Guatemala.
In a social context where gender-based violence, sexual violence, and structural violence remain pervasive yet silenced, Las Curanderas Teatro situates these experiences within familiar cultural settings, challenging audiences to recognize how violence is reproduced through normalized social behaviors. At the same time, their performances invite audiences to imagine alternative futures grounded in collective healing, accountability, and liberation. In the following sections, I analyze how the group’s reclaiming of the curandera archetype and their embodied enactment of limpias constitute a radical decolonial praxis embedded in their theater-making process and performances rooted in Indigenous women’s embodied memory of ancestral healing practices.
The Curandera archetype: Performing healing in a wounded and fragmented world
She [a curandera] does not only heal the body, but also the soul. —Ix’ChilcaFootnote 3
Across cultures, women traditional healers appear as figures of embodied knowledge capable of addressing physical, emotional, and spiritual afflictions. Despite cultural specificity, their social role is strikingly consistent: healers who mediate between the material and the spiritual. The historical persecution of women healers—often labeled “witches”—from early modern period in Europe to the colonial Americas reveals a shared pattern of patriarchal and capitalist violence aimed at disciplining women’s bodies, knowledges, and social authority (Federici Reference Federici2004). In Guatemala, the historian Martha Few (Reference Few2002, 3) demonstrates that women healers in colonial Santiago de Guatemala held significant cultural authority, which paradoxically rendered them vulnerable to inquisitorial accusations of sorcery under Spanish colonial rule. These histories continue to shape collective memory, sustaining the symbolic power curanderas hold in their communities despite long-standing efforts to discredit traditional healing practices.
In Santa María de Jesús, a predominantly Maya Kaqchikel town, community members continue to seek curanderas for fractures, the evil eye, and energetic cleansings, even as biomedical systems increasingly dominate healthcare. According to Ix’Chilca, one of the curandera’s primary sources of social and cultural power lies in her ability to heal both natural and the supernatural ailments—to attend to the body and the soul. People often seek curanderas when illness manifests across physical, emotional, mental, or spiritual dimensions. In her own words:
Yes, in order to remove evil spirits, for children who get the evil eye, for those who fall down and get sick. So, they bring out the evil spirits from within, they not only heal the body, but they heal the soul from bad things. They are curing and curing. That is why they are called curanderas. (Ix’Chilca, interview, 2020)Footnote 4
This account illustrates the multilayered labor of curanderas, whose healing unfolds through gradual, relational processes aimed at restoring balance rather than treating isolated symptoms. Central to curanderismo is the understanding that mind, body, and spirit are inseparable. Chicana scholar Amanda Ellis conceptualizes this unity as mindbodyandspirit, defined as “the unity of mind, body, and spirit” oriented toward preserving individual and collective well-being (Ellis Reference Ellis2021, 4). Accordingly, diagnosis and treatment attend to the totality of a person’s lived condition.
Prior to Spanish colonization, Indigenous healers across Mesoamerica practiced diverse medicinal and spiritual traditions. The term curandero emerged through colonial governance as a homogenizing label imposed on Indigenous healing practices (Treviño Reference Treviño2010, 47). Today, curanderismo remains widespread throughout Mexico and Central America, shaped by the historical convergence of Indigenous, African, and Spanish medical and spiritual systems (Avila et al. Reference Avila, Parker and Pinkola Estes2000; Treviño Reference Treviño2010; Few Reference Few2002; Buenaflor Reference Buenaflor2018). While practices vary by region and lineage, they share a commitment to holistic, ancestral care. Within Maya cosmovision, the Ajq’ij serve as spiritual guides and ceremonial timekeepers. Although distinct figures, the roles of curanderas and Ajq’ij often overlap, depending on the practitioner. As Nana Panchita—a Maya Ajq’ij who also identifies as a curandera—explains, the mission remains the same: to heal, regardless of the name assigned.
Curanderas performing Limpias to heal
Limpias are “Latin American curanderismo cleansing rites that clear, heal, and revitalize the mind, body, spirit, spaces, and situations, and may facilitate soul retrieval—the recovery of sacred essence energy displaced by trauma” (Buenaflor Reference Buenaflor2018, 2). As Ix’Ruda explained to me, limpias address experiences of shock or trauma—commonly referred to as el susto—that cannot remain lodged in the body and require guided release through medicinal plants endowed with spiritual properties. She recalled how grandmothers routinely performed such cleansings:
Look, when it comes to healing, well, before, here, you were never cured with doctors, you were cured with natural things. At least with the fright, or a baby that fell down, and do you know what grandmothers used to do? They grab a bunch of chilca, they chilquean [rub the chilca plant on a person’s body], so that the fright doesn’t stay… they chilquean or rub the egg, so that it [the fright] doesn’t stay in the body. (Interview 2019)Footnote 5
This account illustrates how limpias were historically embedded in everyday community care. The use of chilca (Baccharis latifolia)—a plant widely found in the territory—highlights the intimate relationship between healing practices, land, and language. In Guatemala, the verb chilquear refers specifically to a limpia conducted with chilca, underscoring how Indigenous medicinal knowledge is sustained through daily practice and speech. Many of the women I interviewed reported learning about limpias from their mothers and grandmothers and continuing to practice them, at least occasionally.
Within Fiesta Convite, Las Curanderas Teatro’s decision to stage a limpia is both deliberate and politically charged. As director Ix’Romero explained, “The curanderas are not only healing the diseases of the body but also social diseases. In this case, the illness is violence” (Ix’Romero, interview, 2020).Footnote 6 In the performance, the curandera recognizes trauma as simultaneously individual and collective, framing gender-based violence as a condition that wounds bodies, social relations, and the communal spirit. The limpia scene enacts a holistic intervention: through embodied diagnosis and cleansing rites—using siete montes, a mixture of medicinal plants—the curandera releases accumulated harm, including emotional residue, physical scars, and internalized oppression. Healing is directed not at an isolated subject but toward a social body shaped by colonial, patriarchal, and institutional violence. In this sense, limpias function not only as curative practices but also as decolonial gestures that expose violence as structurally produced while insisting on the possibility of collective restoration through Indigenous epistemologies of care. Although limpias are commonly associated with curanderismo, they intersect with Maya spiritual practices carried out by Ajq’ij (spiritual guides), comadronas (midwives), and yerberas (herbalists), whose roles may differ but often overlap. Curanderismo operates here as an analytic framework that foregrounds these intersections and illustrates how Indigenous healing practices sustain embodied forms of resistance in the aftermath of colonial violence.
By performing limpias on stage, Las Curanderas Teatro reclaims the curandera not as a folkloric figure but as an embodied site of Indigenous women’s resurgence of cultural memory. In doing so, they activate what Diana Taylor (Reference Taylor2007, 20) conceptualizes as the repertoire—an embodied archive through which cultural knowledge is transmitted and renewed through performance. Performing healing thus becomes both method and message: a spiritually grounded intervention that restores fractured bodies and social relations while affirming Maya Kaqchikel women’s epistemic authority. Centering limpias as collective acts of care invites audiences to imagine healing not as an individualized remedy, but as an ongoing communal process of decolonial resurgence.
La limpia, image taken by the author at the Municipal Theater, Quetzaltenango, Guatemala in July 2018, as a first-time audience member witnessing Las Curanderas Teatro’s play Fiesta Convite.
Visual representation of performing healing, a cyclical and nonlinear theater-making methodology grounded in Indigenous and curanderismo-based healing systems.
Performing Healing: A Maya and Mestiza women theater-making methodology
Guided by ethnographic engagement with Maya and Mestiza women theater artists and directors, I came to understand theater not simply as representation, but as a relational and transformative healing practice. Feminist ethnography and in-depth life history interviews allowed me to trace connections between performance sequences, creative processes, and the lived experiences of the artists—connections that are central to this theorization. As I listened to their narratives and observed their collaborative practices, it became clear that these women had developed a distinct theater-making methodology grounded in ancestral healing logics, collective memory, and embodied knowledge. This methodology unfolds through three interconnected stages: identification of the wound(s), release and personal transformation, and restoration of life. I conceptualize this process as performing healing.
Performing healing mirrors the epistemological and practical frameworks of curanderismo and Indigenous healing systems across Mesoamerica, where illness is understood as a disruption affecting the body, spirit, emotions, and social relations. In traditional healing contexts, a curandera begins by listening to a person’s life story through a practice called pláticas (Buenaflor Reference Buenaflor2018, 64) to diagnose the root of imbalance; healing then proceeds through rituals, medicinal plants, and other practices that facilitate release and transformation, followed by long-term restructuring to sustain well-being.Footnote 7 Drawing from curanderismo scholarship (Avila et al. Reference Avila, Parker and Pinkola Estes2000; Buenaflor Reference Buenaflor2018) and in conversation with my learning journeys with Maestra Marika Alvarado in Austin, Texas, and Nana Panchita in Guatemala, I recognized these same healing logics embedded in the theater-making processes of the participants in this study.Footnote 8 In what follows, I trace how these three stages of performing healing emerge through the creative labor, relational practices, and performances developed by the theater groups participating in this study through the case study of Las Curanderas Teatro.
La obra me curó—The play healed me
The play healed me; that’s what we say; it healed me; it took away my fears and sadness. When we perform, it is as if I have faith that more women will see the play, and they will know that the way they are being treated is not good. Yes, because mostly everywhere we go, people cry, and I feel it is as if they are getting rid of their sadness. (Ix’Chilca, interview, 2020)Footnote 9
When Ix’Chilca stated, “The play healed me,” she was not referring only to the moment of performance, but also to the long, collective process that led to it. Throughout my ethnographic engagement with Maya and Mestiza women theater-makers, I observed how healing unfolded across conversations, workshops, rehearsals, performances, and the afterlives of those performances in participants’ everyday lives. This understanding aligns with Richard Schechner’s (Reference Schechner2010, 16) notion of the performance sequence, in which transformation emerges through the full range of theatrical creation rather than the staged event (performance or play) alone. In a way, the performance sequence is constantly taking place in the participants’ lives and their quotidian interactions with the world. Within this extended process, theater becomes a site where wounds are named, emotions and memories are released and reworked, and new forms of personal and collective life are imagined. I conceptualize this praxis as performing healing, a theater-making methodology structured around identifying the wound(s), facilitating release and transformation, and restoring life.
Identification of the Wound(s)
The first stage of performing healing begins with a collective process of naming and acknowledging the wound(s). Rather than imposing predetermined themes, the directors of Las Curanderas Teatro intentionally opened the creative process by inviting the group to articulate what mattered most to them. As recalled to me by Ix’Romero, during their first official meeting, she and her codirector asked the group, “So, what would you all like to talk about?” One of the group leaders responded without hesitation: “I want to talk about the violence we experience in this town because if you could only see everything we live here.” The directors exchanged glances, immediately recognizing the weight of this statement. On the one hand, they were wary of reproducing narratives of victimhood and spectacle that often dominate representations of Indigenous women’s lives in Guatemala. On the other, they were committed to honoring the collective voice of the participants, since dialogical listening and shared authorship are foundational to community-based theater practices (Ix’Romero, interview, 2020). The group ultimately agreed to engage in sustained conversations—rather than immediate dramatization—to collectively shape the themes that would emerge from the women’s lived experiences.
Identification of the wound(s), as this process revealed, is neither immediate nor singular. Wounds are often layered, embodied, and deeply embedded in personal histories, family dynamics, and social norms. As the participants reflected together, they were asked—implicitly and explicitly—to confront difficult questions: Where does this pain come from? How has it shaped our lives? What has been normalized as “just the way things are”? This stage required what can be understood as a labor of care and ethical witnessing, in which the group collectively revisited experiences of harm that had long gone unnamed. Through these dialogues, participants began to recognize how violence is often normalized in everyday life. The conversations surfaced recurring themes, including parental preference for boys, spousal sexual and domestic violence, restrictive expectations of motherhood, and institutional violence enacted by police, church authorities, employers, and health-care providers. For many, the process of listening to one another was itself transformative. Ix’Chilca reflected on this realization:
For me, it was a beautiful experience because of everything that we have gone through, although no, no … I haven’t experienced much violence, but from there, things became known. What was common for us was actually violence. (Interview, 2020)Footnote 10
In the theater-making process, Ix’Chilca came to recognize that even without having experienced extreme or overt forms of violence herself, she had internalized multiple forms of gendered harm as normal and inevitable. Through collective reflection, she—and others—began to understand that these normalized practices were, in fact, manifestations of violence. Maya Kaqchikel women identified these realizations as wounds: painful memories, embodied experiences, and social inscriptions that had shaped their sense of self and their relationships to others. Importantly, the identification of wounds did not frame violence as an individual pathology. Rather, participants consistently linked their experiences to broader socio-structural inequalities that produce intersecting forms of gender, racial, socioeconomic, and sexual violence. Sharing these stories within the group created a space of “human interconnectedness” (González-López Reference González-López2006, 21), forged through mutual recognition and ethical listening. This collective witnessing proved both politically radical and emotionally restorative, producing a cathartic effect that participants hoped would extend to audiences—particularly women who might recognize their own experiences reflected on stage. Once the wounds had been named and collectively held, participants described feeling ready to move toward the next stage of their theater praxis: el desahogo, or the release—a necessary step toward personal and collective transformation.
Release and personal transformation—El desahogo
Following the collective identification of wounds, the second stage of performing healing centers on release and personal transformation, commonly articulated by participants through the concept of el desahogo. Many women described their theater-making practice as a profoundly liberatory experience, emphasizing the importance of having a space to unburden what had been carried silently for years. Culturally, desahogo is closely tied to the sensation of being overwhelmed—symbolically drowned or pulled under (ahogarse). To desahogarse is thus not merely to vent, but to release what suffocates, offering a pause from the accumulation of pain, worry, and emotional overload. Ix’Ruda described how the theater-making process created such a space of release, allowing her to articulate experiences that had long gone unvocalized:
The play allows me to feel relieved. To unburden ourselves because we have lived that—not only me, not only my mother. We have lived it, they have offended us, but we never analyzed that they were mistreating us. (Ix’Ruda, interview, 2019)Footnote 11
While Ix’Ruda frames desahogo as emotional relief, her testimony extends beyond catharsis. Her reflection reveals a growing consciousness of how personal and familial experiences of harm are rooted in broader social and structural inequalities. When she says, “We have lived it,” the we gestures toward a collective condition shared by Indigenous women whose lives are shaped by intersecting forms of racialized and gendered violence. In this sense, desahogo becomes both an emotional release and a process of critical recognition—an awakening to how normalized forms of violence are historically and socially reproduced.
Ix’Chilca similarly described how performing and being on stage enabled her to liberate herself from long-held fears, internalized prejudices, and negative self-perceptions. She characterized this burden as a physical weight on her body—la carga—explaining: “It helped me get out there because I was timid. I could not hang out with many people. It helped me get rid of a weight that I was carrying—that’s why I like it” (Ix’Chilca, interview, 2019). Among Maya and Mestiza women in Guatemala, la carga is a widely shared metaphor used to describe emotional, psychological, and even spiritual burdens carried over time. Another example of releasing las cargas is offered by Ix’Pericón, who reflected on her experience after each performance in which she embodies the woman receiving the limpia—the spiritual cleansing rite. She explained: “I arrived carrying a burden of problems and sadness, but once I was there, I already felt somewhat liberated because I was able to express myself, and it was as if I released everything that was inside me [laughs]” (interview, 2020).Footnote 12 Directors and theater practitioners I interviewed—many of whom have worked extensively with Indigenous women’s theater groups—frequently spoke about the importance of releasing las cargas within creative processes.Footnote 13 These loads may stem from unresolved trauma, enforced silences, shame, or intergenerational histories of violence that remain stored in the body and subconscious. As a result, the theater-making process provides a space to release accumulated overloads through different techniques.
Within the theater-making process, bringing las cargas into collective spaces—through workshops, group conversations, rehearsals, ritual gestures, and performance—creates the conditions for their release. Participants described this stage of the performance sequence as deeply liberating, noting that pain, stress, shame, and worry could be externalized and transformed through embodied practices such as movement, voice, intention, and ritualized performance. As a result, el desahogo functions not only as emotional relief but also as a critical turning point in performing healing: a moment when internalized wounds begin to loosen, making space for personal transformation and preparing the ground for restoration.
Restoration of life
What follows el desahogo is not an endpoint, but a reorientation toward life itself. For personal release to become transformative, participants emphasized the need for collective change—an outward movement in which healing circulates beyond the self. Many women described a desire to share their experiences publicly to interrupt cycles of violence, offer hope to others, and imagine futures in which women—particularly Indigenous women in Guatemala—can live lives with joy, pleasure, eroticism, dignity, and freedom. In this sense, restoration of life names a political horizon: the possibility of healing from multiple forms of violence as a lived and sustained condition.
A central theme that emerged was the understanding of theater as a medium capable of carrying healing outward by transmitting messages of social transformation to the collective—the audience. Participants repeatedly emphasized this communication as both motivation and responsibility. Through performance, they sought to share personal experiences of empowerment and healing, not as individual success stories, but as invitations for others to recognize their own worth and agency. Ix’Ruda articulated this process powerfully:
So, I was shy to speak [in public], but when I went to the play, I felt as if my eyes were opened. I learned how to value myself. I learned how to have self-esteem. So many women remain quiet even now. For me, a play is like carrying a message to other women. (Ix’Ruda, interview, 2019)Footnote 14
Before joining the theater group, Ix’Ruda avoided public speaking and social interaction, in part because Spanish is not her first language, and she continues to navigate linguistic barriers. She shared stories of women in her community who endured abuse in silence, constrained by economic precarity, language limitations, and internalized feelings of inferiority. When Ix’Ruda states, “Now we are valued,” she signals a profound shift—not only in self-perception but also in collective recognition. Her reference to women who remain “quiet” points to both individual silencing and broader social complicity in sustaining gender-based violence. Restoration of life also extends beyond the performers themselves and materializes in the relational space created between Las Curanderas Teatro and their audiences. I witnessed this most clearly while accompanying the group to the Sixth Ruk’u’x Festival in San Juan Comalapa in November 2019, where they presented Fiesta Convite alongside other Maya and Indigenous artists from Guatemala. At the conclusion of the performance, the four actresses did not simply exit the stage; instead, they remained present, embracing audience members one by one and repeatedly thanking them for coming. What followed was a chorus of “gracias por venir”—sometimes spoken through smiles, sometimes through tears—marking an affective exchange grounded in gratitude and recognition. This gesture reflects how restoration, within the performing healing methodology, is not an abstract outcome but a lived relational practice that affirms dignity, connection, and mutual witnessing.
In interviews, the actresses emphasized how audiences often responded by publicly reflecting on their own life histories as mirrored in the play. Ix’Ruda recalled an instance in which a man stood up after a performance to share how, throughout his childhood, he had witnessed his father mistreat his mother, and how seeing the play compelled him to commit to not reproducing that violence in his own life. Moments such as these illustrate how restoration of life unfolds collectively: through dialogue, accountability, and the reimagining of social relations. By closing each performance with embodied gratitude and openness, Las Curanderas Teatro transforms theater into a space where personal healing circulates outward, nurturing ethical responsibility and the possibility of social repair beyond the stage.
Within performing healing, restoration of life thus involves reclaiming value, voice, and visibility. It is not limited to personal empowerment but extends toward the ethical reconstruction of social relations. Within Schechner’s performance sequence, this closing exchange functions as reaggregation, marking the return from the liminal space of performance into everyday life with renewed relational ethics, responsibility, and the possibility of social transformation. Theater becomes a means of restoring respect for women’s lives and challenging the normalized structures that render violence invisible or acceptable. As articulated through Fiesta Convite, the restoration of life calls for a reimagining of Guatemalan society—one in which Indigenous women’s lives are not only protected from violence but affirmed as central to collective futures grounded in justice, care, and liberation.
Final reflections and contributions
As I finalize this article in 2026, I reflect on my time with Las Curanderas Teatro with deep gratitude and a sense of grief. Witnessing their performances between 2019 and 2020 was, now for audiences, a profoundly moving and healing experience. After the COVID-19 pandemic, it remains uncertain whether I will see the group perform together again. The pandemic produced severe economic, health, and emotional disruptions that fractured the collective momentum sustaining their artistic and healing praxis during my fieldwork. This rupture constitutes a central limitation of this study: I am unable to trace the long-term continuity or institutionalization of their theater-making practice beyond this research. Yet absence does not signal erasure. I remain ethically committed to documenting the healing force, epistemic labor, and futures imagined through their theater-making praxis, which constitutes a form of Indigenous feminist knowledge production and resurgence. As Gina Starblanket (Reference Starblanket and Green2017, 39) reminds us, resurgence is “far from being an end goal,” but an ongoing, grounded process that draws on the past to imagine more just futures.
This article has examined Maya Kaqchikel women’s theater-making as a form of spiritual activism and spiritual resurgence (Keating Reference Keating2008; Starblanket Reference Starblanket and Green2017), arguing that Las Curanderas Teatro mobilizes performance as an embodied healing praxis rooted in ancestral medicinal knowledge systems. I have theorized this work as performing healing, enacted through performance and throughout a theater-making methodology grounded in Indigenous healing systems. This praxis does not merely represent violence; it intervenes in it—affirming life, care, and relationality in the face of colonial-patriarchal structures that normalize diverse expressions of violence (Quijano Reference Quijano2000; Lugones Reference Lugones, Mignolo and Escobar2013; Segato Reference Segato2024). By implementing the three-step cyclical theater praxis of performing healing, theater-making artists reassert Indigenous women’s artistic interventions as sites of memory, resistance, and political agency, engaging in a form of cultural and spiritual resurgence centered in ancestral strategies for collective healing—decolonial at heart (Starblanket Reference Starblanket and Green2017; Espinosa-Miñoso et al. Reference Espinosa-Miñoso, Lugones and Maldonado-Torres2022).
This study contributes to a broader conversation about what collective healing might/can look and feel like, and what it demands of us. It also intervenes in debates on translation and epistemic friction. Rendering Maya Kaqchikel ways of knowing into academic language is neither seamless nor neutral; it is political, and it involves loss, excess, and transformation that exceed Western frameworks of understanding and existing in the world. These translations emerged through sustained, ongoing conversations with my collaborators—especially Nana Panchita and my language tutor—whose insights continue to be essential to engaging Maya Kaqchikel epistemologies and worldviews. While centered on Las Curanderas Teatro, the concept of performing healing arises from a wider landscape of Indigenous and Mestiza feminist artistic and healing practices in Guatemala. Groups such as Mujeres Ajchowen, Las Poderosas Teatro, and Ix Saq’il Ik’ engage in teatro que sana, foregrounding embodied healing, collective memory, and activating decolonial political imagination(s). Together, these practices signal a possibility towards decolonial feminist(s) movement(s) rooted in the cultural and spiritaul resurgence of collective healing, as a political project. In a world shaped by violence and dispossession, performing healing offers a vital gift from Iximulew: a vision of healing as an ongoing, collective commitment to restoring the possibility of life amid enduring structures of violence.
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