Presents portraits of unconventional figures in the Borderlands region who gained iconic status in folklore.

In Borderlands Saints, Desirée A. Martín examines the rise and fall of popular saints and saint-like figures in the borderlands of the United States and Mexico. Focusing specifically on Teresa Urrea (La Santa de Cabora), Pancho Villa, César Chávez, Subcomandante Marcos, and Santa Muerte, she traces the intersections of these figures, their devotees, artistic representations, and dominant institutions with an eye for the ways in which such unofficial saints mirror traditional spiritual practices and serve specific cultural needs. Popular spirituality of this kind engages the use and exchange of relics, faith healing, pilgrimages, and spirit possession, exemplifying the contradictions between high and popular culture, human and divine, and secular and sacred. Martín focuses upon a wide range of Mexican and Chicano/a cultural works drawn from the nineteenth century to the present, covering such diverse genres as the novel, the communiqué, drama, the essay or crónica, film, and contemporary digital media. She argues that spiritual practice is often represented as narrative, while narrative—whether literary, historical, visual, or oral—may modify or even function as devotional practice.

The more than 2,000-mile U.S.-Mexico border is a focus of intense interest today, as immigration, security, and environmental issues dominate the headlines. This is the first A-to-Z encyclopedia to overview the unique and vibrant elements that make up the borderlands. More than 150 essay entries provide students and general readers with a solid sense of the U.S.-Mexico border history, culture, and politics. Coverage runs the gamut from key historical and contemporary figures, art, cuisine, sports, and religion to education, environment, legislation, radio, rhetoric, slavery, tourism, and women in Ciudad Juarez. The more than 2,000-mile U.S.-Mexico border is a focus of intense interest today, as immigration, security, and environmental issues dominate the headlines. This is the first A-to-Z encyclopedia to overview the unique and vibrant elements that make up the borderlands. More than 150 essay entries provide students and general readers with a solid sense of the U.S.-Mexico border history, culture, and politics. Coverage runs the gamut from key historical and contemporary figures, art, cuisine, sports, and religion to education, environment, legislation, radio, rhetoric, slavery, tourism, and women in Ciudad Juarez. Alphabetical and topical lists of entries in the frontmatter allow readers to find topics of interest quickly, as does the index. Those looking for more in-depth coverage will find many helpful suggestions in the Further Reading section per entry as well as in the Selected Bibliography. A chronology and historical photos also complement the text.

Mexican American folk and religious healing, often referred to as curanderismo, has been a vital part of life in the Mexico-U.S. border region for centuries. A hybrid tradition made up primarily of indigenous and Iberian Catholic pharmacopeias, rituals, and notions of the self, curanderismo treats the sick person with a variety of healing modalities including herbal remedies, intercessory prayer, body massage, and energy manipulation. Curanderos, “healers,” embrace a holistic understanding of the patient, including body, soul, and community. Border Medicine examines the ongoing evolution of Mexican American religious healing from the end of the nineteenth century to the present. Illuminating the ways in which curanderismo has had an impact not only on the health and culture of the borderlands but also far beyond, the book tracks its expansion from Mexican American communities to Anglo and multiethnic contexts. While many healers treat Mexican and Mexican American clientele, a significant number of curanderos have worked with patients from other ethnic groups as well, especially those involved in North American metaphysical religions like spiritualism, mesmerism, New Thought, New Age, and energy-based alternative medicines. Hendrickson explores this point of contact as an experience of transcultural exchange. Drawing on historical archives, colonial-era medical texts and accounts, early ethnographies of the region, newspaper articles, memoirs, and contemporary healing guidebooks as well as interviews with contemporary healers, Border Medicine demonstrates the notable and ongoing influence of Mexican Americans on cultural and religious practices in the United States, especially in the American West.

Mexican American folk and religious healing, often referred to as curanderismo, has been a vital part of life in the Mexico-U.S. border region for centuries. A hybrid tradition made up primarily of indigenous and Iberian Catholic pharmacopeias, rituals, and notions of the self, curanderismo treats the sick person with a variety of healing modalities including herbal remedies, intercessory prayer, body massage, and energy manipulation. Curanderos, “healers,” embrace a holistic understanding of the patient, including body, soul, and community. Border Medicine examines the ongoing evolution of Mexican American religious healing from the end of the nineteenth century to the present. Illuminating the ways in which curanderismo has had an impact not only on the health and culture of the borderlands but also far beyond, the book tracks its expansion from Mexican American communities to Anglo and multiethnic contexts. While many healers treat Mexican and Mexican American clientele, a significant number of curanderos have worked with patients from other ethnic groups as well, especially those involved in North American metaphysical religions like spiritualism, mesmerism, New Thought, New Age, and energy-based alternative medicines. Hendrickson explores this point of contact as an experience of transcultural exchange. Drawing on historical archives, colonial-era medical texts and accounts, early ethnographies of the region, newspaper articles, memoirs, and contemporary healing guidebooks as well as interviews with contemporary healers, Border Medicine demonstrates the notable and ongoing influence of Mexican Americans on cultural and religious practices in the United States, especially in the American West.

Theatre of the Borderlands: Conflict, Violence, and Healing is an enlightening and encompassing study that focuses on how dramatists from the Northern Mexico border territories write about theater. The plays analyzed in this study are representative of the most important Northern Border playwrights whose plays’ themes present the US-Mexico Borderlands in a socio-historical and political context. The most important themes observed include topics that engage in discussions of: the indigenous, Border crossings, heroes and folk saints, the city of Tijuana, and violence in the Borderlands, to name a few. These themes have led to the birth of the Teatro del Norte movement, a group of determined playwrights insistent on presenting dramaturgical themes that show the bond between their particular geographies, histories, socio-political and economic situations, thereby giving birth to an original voice and new aesthetic of representation. Dealing with the topics already mentioned, and pairing them with more timely ones like immigration reform, namely, this study can serve as an invaluable resource to many interdisciplinary academic settings, and can grant an eye-opening insight to Border relations through several critical readings.

. . . we move to the town of Aconchi on the Río Sonora, where the mission church once contained a life-sized crucifix with a black corpus, known both as Nuestro Señor de Esquipulas . . . and El Cristo Negro de Aconchi . . . So describes well-known and beloved folklorist James S. Griffith as he takes us back through the decades to a town in northern Sonora where a statue is saved—and in so doing, a community is saved as well. In Saints, Statues, and Stories Griffith shares stories of nearly sixty years of traveling through Sonora. As we have come to expect through these journeys, “Big Jim”—as he is affectionately known by many—offers nothing less than the living traditions of Catholic communities. Themes of saints as agents of protection or community action are common throughout Sonora: a saint coming out of the church to protect the village, a statue having a say in where it resides and paying social calls to other communities, or a beloved image rescued from destruction and then revered on a private altar. A patron saint saves a village from outside attackers in one story—a story that has at least ten parallels in Sonora’s former mission communities. Details may vary, but the general narrative remains the same: when hostile nonbelievers attack the village, the patron saint of the church foils them. Griffith uncovers the meanings behind the devotional uses of religious art from a variety of perspectives—from artist to audience, preservationist to community member. The religious artworks transcend art objects, Griffith believes, and function as ways of communicating between this world and the next. Setting the stage with a brief geography, Griffith introduces us to roadside shrines, artists, fiestas, saints, and miracles. Full-color images add to the pleasure of this delightful journey through the churches and towns of Sonora.

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.

This edited volume focuses on the role of traditional or indigenous healers, as well as the application of traditional healing practices in contemporary counseling and therapeutic modalities with Latina/o people. The book offers a broad coverage of important topics, such as traditional healer’s views of mental/psychological health and well-being, the use of traditional healing techniques in contemporary psychotherapy, and herbal remedies in psychiatric practice. It also discusses common factors across traditional healing methods and contemporary psychotherapies, the importance of spirituality in counseling and everyday life, the application of indigenous healing practices with Latina/o undergraduates, indigenous techniques in working with perpetrators of domestic violence, and religious healing systems and biomedical models. The book is an important reference for anyone working within the general field of mental health practice and those seeking to understand culturally relevant practice with Latina/o populations.

An overview of Latino/a spiritualities today--Protestant, Catholic, Pentecostal, and non-Christian and the challenges they bring to Christian theology and ministry. Given the context of increasing religious pluralism and a burgeoning interest in religions, religiosity, and spirituality within the United States and the knowledge that by the mid-twenty-first century an estimated 100 million Americans will claim Latin origin, an understanding of the varieties of Latino/a spirituality becomes essential. This book focuses on the ways in which Latinos and Latinas participate in the pursuit and practice of the spiritual or "holy" santo as part of their lived religion. In seven chapters, Aponte explores various understandings of santo and its participation in daily life, rites of passage, and worship.