For Curanderos, Cures Come From the Ground Up
Felicia Cocotzin Ruiz makes blue corn dumplings with chile sauce. Photo by Nicky Hedayatzadeh..
Whenever Tonita Gonzales was sick, her grandma would bring her warm, soothing atole. This rich blue corn meal drink, often fortified with juniper ash, is a staple for many in the American Southwest and Mexico. Atole (some variations are also called atole de elote, chakewe and champurrado) is full of vitamins and minerals. But for Gonzales it’s not just the nutrient packed blue corn that brings comfort to those who cradle a cup of steaming atole—it’s also the spiritual infusion of love and healing.
“We look at the prayer that went into it; that is part of stirring the atole. The intention is to bring healing.”
Felicia Cocotzin Ruiz also grew up with atole and treasured sharing it with her daughter when she was young. Today, she makes it, “whenever I’m feeling like I just need a hug.”
Both Ruiz and Gonzales are Mexican folk healers, or curanderos. Traditional folk healing in Mexico and the Southwest is called curanderismo, from the root word curar, to heal. Ruiz is known as the Kitchen Curandera and is based in Phoenix, but her familial roots are in New Mexico. Gonzales’s family is also from New Mexico. Her practice, Tonantzin Traditional Healing, is in Albuquerque.
Practitioners address issues of physical, mental and spiritual wellbeing. Curanderos/as (and more recently, curanderx) incorporate a variety of healing modalities into their work including massage, herbal medicine and spiritual counseling. Some healers channel their work into a focused specialty and become a huesero/bonesetter, a yerbero/herbalist or a partera/midwife, for example. Many curanderos also guide people through the sweat lodge (temazcal), practice acupuncture and apply ventosas (fire cupping).
A newer branch of curanderismo is culinary medicine, the focus of Ruiz’s work in Phoenix. One of her teachers consulted fellow practitioners in the Southwest before giving Ruiz her popoxcomitl, the sacred clay incense burner used in curanderismo rituals. Ruiz received this cup, also known as a sahumerio, when her teachers felt she was ready to carry the title of curandera.
“That was not a branch, even though many of us might have already worked with food and believed that there was healing food. She recognized that that was kind of my dominant way of helping people heal. And so, when I earned that title and that responsibility, it elevated my practice in a different way.”
While culinary medicine is Ruiz’s specialty, she certainly isn’t the only healer using food when working with patients. But how do Ruiz, Gonzales, and others actually use food in their practice? Ruiz points out that it isn’t about “prescribing” recipes to people, though curanderos certainly do suggest certain types of foods and herbs to help with ailments. Rather, it’s about working intimately with a client to understand how the food they eat is an integral part of their life, their memories and, often, their ancestral lineage.
Photo courtesy Eliseo “Cheo” Torres.
Backyard Apothecaries
Curanderos see food as spiritual nourishment, rather than just as fuel for the body. It is about recognizing the food one eats as medicine for mind, body and spirit. Many times, these foods come from plants and herbs that grow around us.
Gonzales recalls a time when a pregnant client was feeling low in mood and energy. She gave the woman several basil plants that were gifted to her from another person for use in the temazcal. She told the mother-to-be, “‘Go grow your medicine.’ The moment that it comes into her body it resonates as medicine.”
Professor Eliseo “Cheo” Torres, vice president for student affairs and a faculty member in the College of Education at the University of New Mexico, teaches a variety of classes on curanderismo. He recalls the fresh fruits, vegetables, and herbs his mother used to help his family with common ailments when he was a child living on the border of Texas and Mexico. More often than not her remedies included ingredients from her own garden.
Torres remembers one of her treatments for nervousness. “Orange leaves and blossoms will calm your nerves and insomnia. So, I started doing some of that [again] and, wow, what a difference. Sometimes we have our medicine in our backyard.”
Torres’s mother also urged him to eat papaya for digestive health, drink lettuce tea for anxiety and to use potatoes externally for puffy eyes, headaches and insect bites. He went on to share a list of fruits, vegetables and spices commonly used by many practicing curanderos including garlic, cinnamon, figs and nopales, to name only a few.
Ruiz also fondly remembers her great grandmother teaching her about plant medicine in old town Albuquerque. As a curandera, she was known for making herbal remedios (remedies) for those in her community. “She would grow and collect plants. She was my introduction into wildcrafting.”
Gonzales encourages people to go back to the literal roots of the plants we consume, “because not only when we’re planting plants do we recognize them as food, but as medicine. The spiritual part starts when you plant the seeds; the intention is to make it medicine.”
Felicia Cocotzin Ruiz makes blue corn dumplings with chile sauce. Photo by Nicky Hedayatzadeh.
Ancestral Connections
Curanderas like Ruiz and Gonzales believe that another important aspect of healing is understanding one’s ancestral foods and connecting to the past through traditional recipes.
“A lot of the foods that I make for myself when I’m feeling that urge to reconnect to my lineage are simple foods that maybe we grew up eating,” says Ruiz
But Ruiz also enjoys “peeling back the layers” to learn what her indigenous ancestors were eating generations before. Recently she experimented with growing an Isleta melon, an old variety of melon from the Isleta Pueblo in New Mexico.
“Everything’s magical to me. And it's like, ‘Wow, I'm opening this melon and who knows how long this seed has gone from one person to another person and another person.’ I don't want to over-romanticize it, but who knows, someone in my family may have had these exact seeds and they have survived. Then I have a melon that could have been in my family for thousands of years. That’s super cool.”
This excitement about ancestral foods resonates with Gonzales and her clients, and she often asks those who come to her for help to reach back into their own familial past, whether or not they are of Mexican descent.
“One of the first things I ask people to do is to ask their grandparents, how did they heal.”
Native people in Mexico and the United States were often cut off from their ancestral knowledge by an allopathic medical system that told them that, “your grandmother knows not what she’s doing,” says Gonzales.
In cases where people are recovering from this historical trauma and may not have a direct connection to a grandparent or other living ancestor, she suggests reaching out into the community for education about their ancestral foods.
“We have to trust that our ancestral wisdom can come from other people, too. So, go to a neighbor, find somebody,” says Gonzales.
Ruiz also deeply believes that ancestors can offer wisdom to those on a path to wellness.
“I talk a lot about ancestor work, because I think that with food as medicine, it’s also spiritual medicine. And I wholeheartedly believe that because I’ve seen it in my own healing."
Ruiz recently worked with a woman from Colombia who didn’t fancy herself as much of a cook, but Ruiz felt that her physical and emotional concerns could be eased by making some traditional foods from Colombia. She encouraged her to call her mom and ask about family recipes.
“It really helped her spirit and her soul and she feels like she’s connecting to home. She’s connecting to her family. It’s helped her perhaps feel more grounded, which I think is something that a lot of us are missing right now because we're going through such change. Cooking with your foods like that just brings you that sense of calm.”
Gonzales adds that rediscovering the foods that one’s forbearers ate can help bring balance to your life. Often those foods, “will resonate in your body, because that’s your ancestral history.”
Spiritual Reclamation
Gonzales says that learning about ancestral foods and healing modalities is crucial at this moment in time, since so many have not been taught about the history of their ancestors.
“It's harming, it’s actually harming to the soul. So, for me, the best weapon, and not the only one of course, is teaching the history of our ancestors, and our traditions—it’s restorative justice. It brings us back to the roots of who we are. We don’t have to be ashamed right now. It’s really about creating a dialogue and recognizing that what our grandparents knew was authentic wisdom and authentic indigenous science.”
“Yes, it’s a spiritual reclamation,” agrees Ruiz. “It’s like we're reclaiming our spirituality through the food.”
Torres sees it among his students all the time.
“Nowadays, it seems to me that a lot of these traditions seem to be coming back,” he says. “A lot of young people want to know what grandma used when they were young, or their aunt or their mom. And they're reading, and they're taking my class, and they're finding out about the traditions. I say they are reclaiming some of those traditions, which is wonderful. They want to live a healthier life.”
To make Ruiz’s recipe for atole, visit her website at kitchencurandera.com. Learn more about Gonzales at temazcalito.com.
