Culture : Traditional Healers Preach Gospel of Health in Rural Mexico : Part doctor, part priest, as many as 2,500 <i> curanderos</i> tend to the physical and spiritual needs of the Tzotzil Indian community deep in the heart of Chiapas state.
CHENALHO, Mexico — Antonio Vasquez had only to listen to his dreams to learn that he would become a healer. At the age of 10, they told him where to unearth medicinal plants and how to administer them.
Dreams taught him to search a man’s pulse for fear, envy and other sources of illness. They said that his spirit lived in a tiger, an animal with a strong heart.
Most importantly, Vasquez’s youthful dreams instructed him that he had the power to communicate with God.
“If one has the power to heal, one uses it,†Vasquez said, touching his heart with one hand and pointing heavenward with the other. “I learned purely from my dreams. First my father sent me to heal my mother. By the time I was 15, I was treating everyone.â€
More than half a century has passed since Vasquez became a curandero to this Tzotzil Indian community deep in the highlands of Chiapas state. Part doctor, part priest, the 70-year-old Vasquez tends to the natural and spiritual illnesses of his people much as his Mayan ancestors did for hundreds of years before him--with herbs and prayers.
While some highland villages like Chenalho have access to schooled physicians and modern medicine, the Indian communities still largely trust their health care to traditional practitioners called parteras , yerberos , hueseros and curanderos --midwives, herbalists, bone-setters and healers--who are also known as “preachers of the mountains.â€
Anthropologists estimate there are 1,500 to 2,500 curanderos attending to the more than 300,000 Indians who live in the highlands. Revered for the religious powers they are said to possess, the healers are mainstays of Mayan culture in traditional communities that remain on the margins of Mexico’s dominant Ladino or Spanish society--the nation that President Carlos Salinas de Gortari hopes to modernize into a First World country.
“The healer (believes he) has contact with God,†explained Maria Teresa Olvera, an anthropologist with the Organization of Indigenous Doctors based in San Cristobal de las Casas.
“His religion is a mixture of Western Catholicism and ancient Mayan religion, with apostles, angels, water holes, guardian trees and sacred places. He believes everyone has a spirit in the heart and a spirit--a nahual --in an animal. A healer has to have a strong heart,†Olvera said.
Vasquez’s nahual appeared in a dream: “A tiger came and kissed me and said we would live together. He said we have to have strength to cure people.â€
Vasquez seems to be strong in body and spirit. A dark man with broad cheekbones and brilliant black hair, only a slightly drooping eyelid hints of his age. He stands erect in the white toga that is the costume of men in his village, and he walks a brisk gait in leather sandals.
Twice a year, Vasquez leads a drum-beating excursion into the jutting, green hills around Chenalho to pray for rain, a hearty corn crop and the health of the community. He makes a third trip after the annual harvest to offer prayers of thanks.
The rest of the time he sells Coca-Cola and chips from the storefront in his house and tends to patients in need of treatment for everything from colds and diarrhea to rheumatism and epilepsy. Often, he said, the men and women who seek his help have already tried herbal remedies at home. Sometimes they have been to see a Western doctor, to no avail.
That leads Vasquez to suspect a spiritual illness as well as a physical one. Fear and anger can provoke sickness, he says, as can another person’s envy. So can the glare or sorcery of a brujo --a witch--who is the healer’s evil counterpart.
To discover the source of illness, Vasquez takes the pulse of his patient. “Anger, rage, envy are all felt here in the heart. Your left hand speaks from the heart. Even when you put one of those apparatuses in your ears and listen to the heart, you hear the same thing as the pulse tells you. Envy, for example, sounds like falling water, like irrigation,†Vasquez said.
Herbs treat the symptoms but prayer addresses the cause. Vasquez keeps an altar in his house, with fresh flowers, incense, candles and decorated icons of San Martin--patron saint of the poor--and the Virgin of Guadalupe. Colored and white candles of varying lengths hang from the wall for use in his rites.
“This is God’s food. The candle is like the soft drink I offer you. The incense is like bread and coffee. You have to know how to respect God. If you give enough food and gifts to God, you will get better,†he said.
The herbs that Vasquez uses are wild, although recently, in cooperation with the Organization of Indigenous Doctors, he has planted an “orchard†of the flowers and bushes most frequently used in herbal medicine. He and other Indian doctors in the organization conduct classes for townsfolk on the preparation and uses of herbal medicine.
During a tour of the hillside orchard with midwife Margarita Perez, Vasquez pointed out greens used to speed up childbirth, stop hemorrhaging and cure diarrhea. With a machete, he took cuttings from several bushes for his wife, who was suffering from a cold and laryngitis.
UC Berkeley researchers Brent Berlin and Elois Ann Berlin say the Tzotzil and Tzeltal Indians of the highlands have one of the most elaborate systems of plant remedies in the Americas. Over the last three years, they have collected more than 1,500 plants to identify the species, understand their common uses and, eventually, to analyze their chemical properties.
“We would like to know how this system works and we would like to capture it in a permanent form,†Brent Berlin said. “Many of these people can’t afford modern medicine, and here they have got something (natural) that stops diarrhea as well as pharmaceutical medicine.â€
Asked about the effectiveness of the healers, he responded that even in Western medicine, faith plays an important role.
“There is some evidence to suggest that if you don’t have faith in your doctor’s ability to treat you, that interacts with medicine and it is not as effective as it would be,†he said.
A majority of the highland Indians speak no Spanish; about 90% of the women can converse only in dialect, according to officials from the government’s National Indigenous Institute in San Cristobal de las Casas. They cannot communicate with the outside world.
The Indians are viewed with suspicion, even hostility, by much of urban, Spanish-speaking society. They are impoverished, tilling small plots of land with rudimentary tools and working for day wages in coffee plantations; often they earn less than minimum wage. If there is money for shoes, it goes to the men, and women walk barefoot, carrying children against their breasts and bundles of firewood on their backs.
The rates of malnutrition and illiteracy are among the highest in the country. Diseases such as tuberculosis, which have been eliminated elsewhere in Mexico, still plague their communities.
Health workers note that many Indians cannot afford modern medicine even when it is available. Many people cannot read instructions or expiration dates on the boxes. Sometimes they save bottles a doctor has recommended in one case to erroneously prescribe for themselves the next time they fall ill.
Indian doctors--from bone-setters and midwives to healers--do not charge fees for their services, but patients know to offer them gifts such as corn, beans, eggs and tamales.
Health workers say Indians choose their traditional doctors in part because of the way they practice medicine. For example, Indian women prefer to have their babies at home, surrounded by their family, rather than at a hospital. Dressed in woven skirts, with her husband holding on to her, a women squats down to deliver their child into the hands of a midwife. Afterwards, the placenta is buried under the fireplace in the center of the house.
Western doctors and Indian healers generally cooperate with each other in communities where both are practicing, according to Sister Esperanza Nieves, a nurse who has tended to highland Indians for the last 35 years.
“The doctors learn they must be friendly to the curanderos . Sometimes they don’t learn. They can’t stand it and they leave,†she said.
The government, however, has been less accommodating. Last year, the state legislature passed a health law requiring healers to take a course in modern medicine and secure a state license; it prohibits them from being “ministers of a cult.â€
Healers shrug off the law, saying they have no plans to comply. Health workers cringe at what they consider the insensitivity of the law.
“People die because they don’t have good water, food and work, not because the healer treats them,†said Sebastian Luna, a founder of the Organization of Indigenous Doctors.
Added Dr. Barbara Cadenas, a general practitioner with the organization: “This is an attempt against Indian culture, which mixes the natural and supernatural in health care. All healers are religious ministers with a relationship with God and natural forces.â€
Government officials are not the only ones who view Indian medical traditions skeptically, however. Many of the highland communities have been split by the conversions of Protestant evangelicals, who disavow the healers’ use of idols and what they consider to be mysticism. They tell their followers to steer clear of curanderos .
But Vasquez says his help is sought by all kinds of people, including Protestant Indians and Western doctors. He believes his brand of medicine will endure despite them and the government, too.
“Indians know there is a God and there are healers,†Vasquez said. “This will continue forever.â€
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