[Foreword by the editor and publisher of the paper entitled Healing and Sorcery in Mexico, F. Lawrence Fleming: The following paper is, I assure you, a work of historical fiction. I could tell you that the original typescript for this paper was discovered in the library of the University of California, Berkeley, in 2022, and that the paper is now at long last being published—but I am not going to. I could even tell you that the once-upon-a-time popular author Carlos Castaneda discovered the very same typescript in the same university library in 1960, and that the typescript served him as inspiration for a series of books about a Yaqui Indian sorcerer named don Juan—but I am not going to tell you that either. Use your own imagination.]
An interview conducted by J.B. Johnson with Ignacio Buitimea and Miranda de la Cerda y Jiménez on the 6th of March, 1940.
Preface:
The primary informants for this study have requested that their real names and their present-day place of residence should not appear in print in exchange for as much candor concerning the practice of healing (curanderismo) and sorcery (brujería) among the indigenous peoples of Mexico as their personal commitment to ancient traditions can allow them. They and I agreed upon the pseudonyms Ignacio Buitimea and Miranda de la Cerda y Jiménez. (Following their recommendation, I have also used pseudonyms and inaccurate places of residence for the other people living in the Valle del Yaqui in the Mexican state of Sonora who are mentioned in this study.) Don Ignacio and his wife, doña Miranda, were both forty-nine years of age at the time the magnetic wire recording of my interview was made on the 6th of March, 1940. The present study is a transcription of this interview that I made about a month after it was conducted. I endeavored to transcribe the recordings absolutely verbatim; however, I have later edited out exchanges between interviewer and interviewees when I have felt that our conversation had veered away from the subject matter at hand. In this manner, I have been able to condense almost two hours of recording into a paper that is reasonably short and, hopefully, readable. Whatever the case may be, the wire reels have been safely stored.
Don Ignacio is a man of seemingly boundless vitality and intelligence. He is about 5’ 8” tall, somewhat stocky, but muscular and not overweight. He is quite dark complexioned, with close-cropped raven-black hair which has just begun to grey above the temples. He invariably dresses in loose-fitting khaki trousers, a white cotton camisa de Yucatán shirt, leather sandals (huaraches), and a straw hat. He is married and lives with his wife in one of the many small station settlements along Mexico’s Southern Pacific Railway line. A married son lives in the nearby Vícam Pueblo and has two children. He is a non-smoker and appears to have a teetotaler’s attitude towards alcoholic beverages.
Don Ignacio speaks two Indian languages fluently: Quechan, his native tongue, which is the language spoken by the Yuma Indians of Arizona and California; and Huautla Mazatec, which he learned to speak as a teenager while apprenticed to a Mazatec sorcerer (brujo) who lived in the town of San Juan Bautista Valle Nacional in the northernmost part of the state of Oaxaca. He also speaks a smattering of Yoem Noki (Yaqui), which was his father’s native tongue. (Don Ignacio and his wife have been living in the Valle del Yaqui in Sonora since early 1938.) Moreover, and most importantly, don Ignacio speaks fluent Spanish, and, although he is reluctant to actually speak the language, he understands English almost to perfection.
Doña Miranda is a tall (approximately 5’ 10”), slender, and absolutely ethereal woman whose smile exudes a warmth of spirit that would disarm the very devil himself. She is a Chinantec Indian from San Juan Bautista Valle Nacional, dark complexioned, and with exquisitely chiseled facial features. Her grizzled black hair is always kept in a long French braid. Unlike most other Indian women in the Valle del Yaqui, doña Miranda usually wears fashionably modern clothing. She has had a university education in the United States, and thus she speaks fluent English as well as Spanish, Palantla Chinantec, and a little Yoem Noki.
Don Ignacio’s and doña Miranda’s command of both the Spanish and English languages made it possible for me to conduct my interview very flowingly; I asked my questions in English, which is my native tongue, and Don Ignacio responded in Spanish, responses which I have without too much difficulty been able to transcribe accurately from the recordings and afterwards translate into English. Doña Miranda responded to my questions mostly in English.
But before I conclude my introduction and continue this paper with the edited transcription of my interview with don Ignacio and doña Miranda, I should like to write something concerning the circumstances in which I happened to enlist them as my informants for this study. Since September of 1939, I have been residing in the town of Vícam Pueblo, one of the eight original Yaqui towns that were established in the valley of the Río Yaqui in Sonora, Mexico by Jesuit missionaries in the seventeenth century. The purpose of my residency in this town has been, and still is (1942), to fulfill the fieldwork commitment for my post-graduate studies at the University of California, Berkeley, studies which concern the phonology, morphology, and syntax of the Yaqui language.
On the 27th of February, 1940, I received a telegram from the eminent archaeologist William Curry Holden, who was at that time conducting excavations in New Mexico. (Dr. Holden is the lead author and the editor of the recently published book Studies of the Yaqui Indians of Sonora, Mexico, Texas Technological College, Lubbock [1936].) He was aware of the fact that I was doing field work in the Valle del Yaqui, and I had on several earlier occasions run errands for him when, due to conflicting commitments, he had been unable to accomplish these tasks himself. On this occasion, he wrote that he had been made aware of a healing ceremony that was soon to be held in one of those smaller settlements that dot the Valle del Yaqui. He expressed in his telegram that he would be very grateful if I could attend the ceremony as an objective observer in his place, take detailed notes concerning the event, and also take photographs, if the curandera (healer) would allow this. I was instructed to contact the Mexican shopkeeper in Vícam Estación as soon as possible to get a time and place for the event, and also to get the shopkeeper’s help in personally contacting the curandera in order to request the permission to attend.
I visited the curandera, Juana Vásques Matus, a diminutive Yaqui woman of about 25 years of age, who turned out to be a personal friend of Dr. Holden, and she told me that because I seemed to have a sympathetic attitude towards the art of the healer (curanderismo), just like “the good Doctor (el buen Doctor),” I was more than welcome to attend and observe the ceremony in his place, although she would prefer that I did not take any photographs, as that might adversely affect the potency of her ministrations.
The curandera’s patient, Isabel Sánchez García, who was eighteen years old in 1940, is the daughter of a very affluent Mexican who owns 150 acres of well-irrigated farmland south of the Río Yaqui. Naturally, don Pedro Sánchez had afforded his daughter state-of-the-art medical care at a private facility in Hermosillo when she first became seriously ill, but the doctors there had not been able to agree on what it was that afflicted her, nor could they suggest a suitable treatment. The symptoms she presented with were extreme and debilitating fatigue, cognitive dysfunction, and orthostatic intolerance. In the end, after two weeks of examinations, Isabel was referred to a psychiatric hospital in Mexico City because her afflictions were suspected to be hysterical in nature. Don Pedro was enraged at the results, and he brought his daughter home instead of sending her to Mexico City. “Isabel is as calm and sensible a person as one could ever wish to know. She doesn’t belong in any psychiatric institution, not even for just an evaluation.” Having met Isabel, I concur with the father: she is one of the sweetest people I have ever known. There is not even a tinge of anything hysterical in her personality. Thus, don Pedro and his wife, who is a Yaqui Indian, decided to send their daughter to the curandera to get a second opinion.
The ceremony took place in the afternoon of the 4th of March, 1940, in the home of the curandera; and in a room of that house, which has obviously been set apart for her practice. A very heavy Spanish-Colonial trestle table, at least two hundred years old, has been converted into an altar which is nearly covered in statuettes and candle holders of very diverse origin. The wall above the altar is adorned with the images of Jesus Christ, the Virgin Mary, and Our Lady of Guadalupe set in inexpensive frames. In the center of the room is an old-style wooden examination table that had probably once been discarded from some doctor’s office where it had been replaced by a table made of stainless steel. At the wall opposite the altar is a wooden kitchen table and two wall shelves where herbal concoctions are first mixed and then stored. Three very dissimilar chairs placed randomly in the room completed the furnishings of the curandera’s clinic at the time of the séance.
Besides me, four people were present at the healing session: Juana Vásques, the curandera; María Teresa Armenta, her young apprentice and assistant; Isabel Sánchez, the patient; and Mercedes García López, Isabel’s mother, who, in addition to providing emotional support for her daughter, acted as interpreter for the curandera, who speaks very little Spanish. (Ricardo Espinoza, the curandera’s husband, was out in the yard during the session looking after the couple’s two young daughters.) The session began with a fifteen-minute consultation between curandera and patient (paciente) in which Isabel, speaking Spanish, described her symptoms and gave the curandera a brief account of her experiences at the hospital in Hermosillo. After listening intently to doña Mercedes’ consecutive translation to the Yaqui language, and asking the occasional leading question, the curandera emphatically declared the patient innocent of having caused her own illness due to some mental disorder. The doctors in Hermosillo estaban en el camino equivocado (were barking up the wrong tree). Doña Mercedes translated the curandera’s diagnosis as robo del alma (i.e., Isabel’s soul had been stolen from her). Juana Vásques was convinced that Isabel was the victim of a diablero (evil sorcerer). She said that she lacked the “deep knowledge of her antepasados (forebearers)” and probably also the sheer strength that is needed to deal with the curse of a diablero, but that she would do all she could to ease Isabel’s physical discomfort and emotional anguish.
Following the initial consultation, the curandera continued the session with a ceremony that among the Indians of Sonora is called limpia spiritual (spiritual cleansing). She told Isabel to remain seated in her chair. She put several pieces of copal onto the glowing bed of charcoal in the earthenware censer that her apprentice had ignited during the consultation. Then she very slowly walked in circles around the patient, stopping, however, at each cardinal point to swing the smoking censer back and forth in the manner of an acolyte during the Roman Catholic processional. While circling her patient, she offered up what seemed to be fully extemporaneous prayers to the Virgin Mary, to Our Lady of Guadalupe, and to several of the saints who are worshiped by members of the Roman Catholic Church. After about ten minutes of this unconventional liturgy, the copal in the censer had burned entirely; the curandera stopped walking at a point in time when she was face-to-face with her patient, and she told the patient to stand up, remove her blouse, and then lie face down on the examination table.
From a shelf at the far end of the room, the apprentice retrieved a recycled salsa bottle containing what appeared to be an herbal infusion of some kind and brought this to the curandera, who was standing by her patient at the examination table. The curandera moistened her fingers with the infusion and proceeded to massage the patient about the neck, shoulders, and upper back. Every now and then she would concentrate on a specific spot, and then, after kneading that area of skin for a few minutes between the thumb and forefinger of her right hand, with a sudden outward jerk of that hand she would extract a very thin three-penny finishing nail, but with no bleeding or any trace of an exit wound on the patient’s skin. (I watched carefully, and from fairly close up, in order to discover the exact manner in which the curandera was performing this very convincing sleight of hand. Try as I might, I could not satisfy myself that this actually was sleight of hand. I regretted having not being more adamant about bringing a camera.) During the second stage of Isabel’s spiritual cleansing, the curandera extracted eleven nails from the neck, shoulders, and back of her patient. The nails were dropped, one by one, into a glass jar which was placed at the head end of the examination table. The nails all appeared to be of the same size and manufacture. Strangely, some were bent, as though they had been discarded by someone unskilled in the use of a hammer, while others were perfectly straight, as if they had just been purchased in a hardware store. Each nail, however, was coated in rust, which is something one might expect from a nail that had been lodged subcutaneously for a period of time.
Isabel was very noticeably more energetic and self-confident following her session with the curandera. She received a new appointment for the 2nd of April; she deposited a couple of bank notes of higher denomination into a covered basket that was kept for that purpose on the table where the herbal remedies were concocted, and then she left with her mother after thanking and blessing the curandera many times. I was also about to leave, but the curandera asked me to stay a while longer. I realized that my command of colloquial Yaqui was not good enough for me to hold my own in a conversation with the curandera, but I also knew that María Theresa, her assistant, speaks excellent Spanish and would help me to understand what the curandera had to say to me.
“You need to understand, Señor Johnson, that even you are now responsible for Isabel’s recovery to the healthy young woman she was before. It’s the price you have to pay for having obtained permission to observe what just took place. If I had not judged you to be a force for good in her case, you would not be here with me right now. Someone has done all this to her, someone who knows no fear of God, someone who has done this for a payment of some sort or maybe just for his own perverse entertainment. This evil spell must be countered by someone who is more powerful than a diablero—it must be countered by un sabio (a man of knowledge). The old people say that there have been several sabios in the past among the Yaquis and among the Mayo people, who live to the south of the Río Yaqui valley. Nowadays, at least to my knowledge, there is only one. To be honest, I am terrified at the idea of dealing with him lest my ability to heal should be diminished because of it. He is an heir to the ancient ones, those who did magic before the teachings of Jesus Christ reached the New World centuries ago with the coming of the Spaniards. I should like you to intercede with this man on Isabel’s behalf. He poses no threat to you.”
I was actually quite eager to do the curandera’s bidding, even though I had my doubts about her conclusion as to the real cause of Isabel’s malady. Dr. Holden had earlier in the year made mention to me of a Mazatec man, living in the Valle del Yaqui, who had the reputation of being a sabio. I had certainly pricked up my ears when I heard this. In the municipality of Huautla de Jiménez (Estado de Oaxaca) during the summer of 1938, I had worked with a Mazatec sorcerer (brujo/sabio) in connection with fieldwork for my post-graduate studies at the University of California, Berkeley. On that particular trip, I had hoped I would be able to record the interviews and the entire healing session using the magnetic wire recorder that Dr. Morris Swadesh had so kindly procured for my use from the Mexican government. Unfortunately, the sorcerer lived at an almost inaccessible location outside of the town of Huautla at the end of a winding donkey trail through mountainous terrain. Lugging the recorder, and the heavy AC generator with which to power it, into the high Sierra Mazatec on the back of a mule had not seemed a sensible proposition. Fortunately, the leader of our party of researchers, Sr. José Durantes, who speaks fluent Mazatec, had persuaded his personal secretary to accompany us. She has formerly worked as a legal secretary and is capable of recording conversations in shorthand in excess of 150 words per minute.
In 1940, I still had access to both the recorder and the generator. All I really had to do was approach the brujo, whose name the curandera had given me, and make an appointment for a consultation in the same manner that Sr. Durantes had done with the brujo in Huautla de Jiménez, and then hope that he would accept my proposal and even allow use of the recorder. What actually happened is that the Mexican shopkeeper in Vícam Estación pointed out the brujo’s wife, doña Miranda, to me while I was in his shop in the afternoon of the day following the session with Juana Vásques. I walked up to her at once and told her my errand. Very much to my surprise, she said that she did not think there would be any problem. “You’re coming on the behalf of Juana Vásques?” she asked in perfect English, but with an unexpected and somewhat incongruous New York Latino accent. (One might possibly deduce from her accent that she had grown up in the Bronx borough of New York City.) “She is certainly a very lovely person, and you are certainly welcome to our house tomorrow afternoon, Güerito, if you can come at that time. Ignacio will wish to help her if he can. But I’m not sure that he can be of that much help. He considers himself as having retired from the sort of work that you are proposing. I also consider myself as having retired. But we shall see.” I asked her rather bluntly if she was a bruja, and if she might be able to help. She said she was not, but that she had practiced as a curandera “of sorts” for many years in the city of Oaxaca de Juárez; however, she had not seen any clients since moving to the Valle del Yaqui. I then asked if she thought there might be any objection to me recording the consultation on magnetic wire. Once again to my surprise, she said that she was sure there would be no objection.
That which follows is the edited transcription of an interview with Ignacio Buitimea and Miranda de la Cerda y Jiménez.
This interview was conducted and recorded by JB Johnson on the 6th of March, 1940.
Miranda de la Cerda y Jiménez: Was the healing ceremony performed by Juana Vásques the first time you have witnessed something of that nature, Señor Johnson?
JB Johnson: Please doña Miranda, my fellow students and my professors call me BJ.
Miranda: Well, in that case, I’m just plain old Miranda and Ignacio is just Ignacio. I hope you do realize that your nickname does not work very well in Spanish—Be-Jota? That doesn’t sound very nice. It sounds like Italian: beota—which I happen to know means “foolish person.” Ignacio, I think you should use the English pronunciation of BJ’s nickname, although I have to say that I prefer the name Güerito. [In Mexico, Güerito is an affectionate nickname for someone with blonde hair and blue eyes.] You’ll have to excuse my familiarity, but you are the very embodiment of the word güero. Now tell me, Güerito, putting all jokes aside, have you witnessed any Indian healing ceremony before the one that took place the day before yesterday?
BJ: Yes, I have. I was in Huautla de Jiménez two years ago where I witnessed a healing ceremony performed by a Mazatec brujo. I also had the opportunity of interviewing him through an interpreter following the ceremony.
Ignacio Buitimea: Did this brujo take the honguitos sagrados [sacred mushrooms]? The Mazatec call them tsamikíndi, but you will probably know them by their name in Nahuatl: teonanacátl.
BJ: He chewed three mushrooms in succession, but these were much bigger than the teonanacátl that I am familiar with. I can’t tell you offhand what he called them in Mazatec.
Ignacio: Probably to-shka. And did he throw the maíz pinto? [The maíz pinto are dry kernels of native Mexican maize that the Indians use for divinatory purposes.]
BJ: Yes.
Ignacio: How many kernels and how many times?
BJ: He used 48 kernels which he threw seven times.
Ignacio: What is this brujo’s name?
BJ: He made me promise not to divulge his name.
Ignacio: He seems to be a brujo who is worth his salt (un brujo que se precie). He is not a rulebreaker, and neither are you, apparently. I appreciate that. Was he successful?
BJ: I don’t understand what you mean.
Ignacio: I mean, was the patient cured?
BJ: I don’t know. I didn’t follow up on that. You see, our contact man in Huautla had used the pretext of having a very sick relative in Mexico City in order to enlist the services of the brujo. I’m not absolutely sure that there ever was a sick relative.
Ignacio: If there wasn’t, then your fieldwork was done under false pretenses. That would have been pretty underhanded.
BJ: I admit, I hadn’t thought about that. You’re right, of course. That would have been underhanded.
Miranda: It may surprise you to hear that I too have a university degree in anthropology. I bet you didn’t expect to run into any Indians with a university degree in anthropology in the Valle del Yaqui. Let me tell you; the problem with every gringo anthropologist that I have met is that they seem to take it for granted that we indigenous people of Mexico are nothing but ignorant, superstitious Indians. They have confused uneducated in the ways of white people with ignorant and superstitious. The question is not so much how the ritual is performed as it is whether or not it actually works. Somebody should have followed up on the results of the brujo’s ritual. Well, as luck would have it, you are getting a second chance. It would seem this present ceremony was entirely on the up and up. And you are following up on the results. That’s good science, and certainly better science than before. Above all, it’s hopefully good news for Isabel, the actual patient in this case.
BJ: What is your field of interest as an anthropologist, doña Miranda?
Miranda: I’ve always been interested in understanding the social behavior of white people, and let me tell you, your run-of-the-mill present-day descendant of those white Europeans who lived before the conquest of the New World, no matter how generous and kind, or how self-serving and cruel he or she may be, seems to me just as ignorant and superstitious as any Indian.
Ignacio: And we Indians can be pretty ignorant and superstitious, but tell us about the session Juanita held on the day before yesterday. Apparently, she came to the conclusion that the girl’s cure will have to involve me in some manner. Did she actually say that she is afraid of me?
BJ: She said she believes that Isabel Sánchez has been bewitched by a diablero. She said that the evil spell would have to be broken by someone even more powerful than the brujo who has cast it.
Ignacio: And that would be me, I suppose. But if what she believes is true, and it is possible, we would first have to figure out who the culprit is. You see, only the diablero himself can break the spell once he has cast it. We have to know for sure who he is if we are to “persuade” him to release the girl from his spell. If he cannot be persuaded, then the only option left is to put him out of business.
BJ: What do you mean by “put him out of business?”
Ignacio: Well, we can try to turn his own evil sorcery against him, in which case, if we are successful, he will die, and the spell will die with him—and believe me, this is a very, very difficult thing to accomplish—or we can gather together like-minded people into a sort of banda delinchadores [lynch mob] and waylay the man when he least expects it, in which case he will also die. The last time someone was killed in these parts for practicing evil sorcery was ten years ago. Or so I have heard. The man was burned alive at a stake that was erected in front of the church, and the murderers were never brought to justice before the tribal council, even though everybody knew who they were.
BJ: Then this is all quite serious.
Ignacio: Of course it’s serious, because if young Isabel’s illness really is a result of malignant sorcery, then the perpetrator, if he lives in the Valle del Yaqui, can only be one particular person.
Miranda: José María Sandoval.
BJ: Who’s he?
Ignacio: He is an old man who lives in Pótam. He is surely the diablero whom Juanita suspects as the culprit in this case. In the magical world, he is what you might call “a gun for hire.” He casts his spells for material gain like money or special favors. You know, there are two kinds of diableros. One kind is only concerned with his own spiritual advancement. He sees his victims as means to an end. Every effective spell that this kind of diablero casts is just more proof of how powerful he is becoming. He destroys people’s lives in order to rise above such petty concerns as the welfare of his fellow human beings. You’ve read about how the Mayas and the Aztecs used to sacrifice living human beings on the altar in order to placate their gods? Well, they did actually do this. It was not just some innocent, make-believe game. Throats were cut, and hearts, still beating, were torn from the bodies. The other kind of diablero is someone like don José, someone who has more or less stumbled over the secret of how to cast a spell and uses this knowledge to help him earn his crust of bread and to further inflate his already monumental feelings of self-importance. In the magical world, this kind of diablero is considered a fool, but that doesn’t mean that he is not just as dangerous as the other. José María Sandoval is almost surely the kind of sorcerer we Indians call “nāhualli,” what you would call a shapeshifter (cambiante). A nāhualli is someone who can physically change into his or her tonalli, which is the animal counterpart (el animal compañero) one gets on the day one is born. I daresay, don José came intimately in touch with his animal counterpart, of whatever species it may be, one day when he was not paying attention and it bit him on the backside (lo mordió en el culo).
BJ: Did Sandoval have a teacher?
Ignacio: I’m sure he did. You can’t learn to effectively cast spells entirely on your own. It would take much more than a lifetime. Such knowledge has to have been passed on, generation to generation, from ancient times. Don José Sandoval has been taught how to weave his spells.
BJ: But don Ignacio, I imagine that you yourself have been taught the knowledge of the ancients.
Ignacio: I have, just as my teacher had a teacher, and that teacher a teacher, and so on, all the way back to ancient times, before the Spanish conquest of Mexico. My teacher, or rather, my benefactor, as I prefer to call him, was an extraordinarily powerful Mazatec brujo. Ask Miranda, she knew him.
Miranda: Ignacio and I were classmates at school when we were kids—in the town of San Juan Bautista Valle Nacional, in the state of Oaxaca. Ignacio’s benefactor was a kindly, mild-mannered, yet extremely scary old man. When I first met him, I had been told that he was Ignacio’s grandfather. I was deathly afraid of him, but I could not understood why, because once he had actually met me, he began to treat me as if I too were his dear grandchild.
BJ: What was his name, when and where was he born, who was his teacher, and when and how did he die? I am supposing that he is no longer alive. I hope I am not being far too inquisitive or, perhaps, even impertinent and ill-mannered.
Ignacio: Well, you are just doing your job, are you not? Impertinence is part of your job description.
BJ: These days I’m more linguist than anthropologist.
Ignacio: Unfortunately, I cannot tell you his name, or who his teacher was, or where he was born, or the manner of his death; not because I don’t remember, but because telling you this would be against the rules, and my benefactor was a stickler for the rules, and thus, so am I. What I can tell you is that he took me in when I was barely twelve years old, absolutely destitute, having recently escaped from forced labor in the cane fields of Veracruz. I lived with him until I was twenty; he died the year Francisco Madera became president of Mexico; I got caught up in the Mexican Revolution about the time he died, and so I left his house and struck out on my own.
BJ: Juana Vásquez says that you’re the only person in the Valle del Yaqui who has the knowledge that is needed to counter the spell that has been cast on Isabel Sánchez. Can you describe for me the manner in which you would do this?
Ignacio: No, I cannot, or rather, I should not. That would also be against the rules. Besides, we are getting ahead of ourselves. At this stage, we can’t be sure that Isabel is really the victim of an evil spell. It’s more than likely that she suffers from something more natural and less mysterious than a spell. I should like to help her if I can, but we have to wait until she has seen the curandera a couple more times. I think she should also seek medical help once more, maybe a doctor closer by than in Hermosillo. Esperanza, the cabecera municipal [municipal headquarters] in Ciudad Obregón, has a new hospital that is run by gringo doctors who are probably very good. In any case, we should wait and see if she improves. As for José María Sandoval, we are thinking of nothing less than murdering him or having him murdered in order to stop his evil conjuring. It’s true; he has a nasty reputation in these parts, but nonetheless, he may be completely innocent in this particular case. It’s even possible that he has been engaged by someone who wants to get even with Señor Sánchez through his daughter—I mean Sánchez is quite wealthy and probably has any number of enemies—but that the spell hasn’t actually worked. Isabel could, however, have become ill anyway.
Miranda: Isabel felt much better after her session yesterday, did she not?
BJ: She did.
Miranda: Then why did you accept the curandera’s supernatural diagnosis? That’s out of character for a skeptical gringo anthropologist, no matter how well-meaning he may be.
BJ: Well, I was pretty flabbergasted by the latter part of the session. Once I got back to Vícam, I guess I thought that if such things are humanly possible, then anything is possible. The sky’s the limit. The curandera told me that Isabel is the victim of an evil spell. Even now, I feel I have little reason to doubt her.
Miranda: And what is this? Some bent nails in a jar?
BJ: Not all of them are bent. There are eleven of them. I asked Juana if I could keep one of them, and she said that the number eleven is very auspicious, and that the eleven nails had to remain together in the jar with the lid tightly screwed on. She said that I could look after them, but I mustn’t remove any of them from the jar, or misplace or break the jar itself.
Miranda: I’m afraid I don’t understand the function of the nails in Isabel’s cure.
BJ: Juana Vásques pulled these nails out from under the skin on Isabel’s back, neck, and shoulders, but with no occurrence of visible wounds to the skin, or any bleeding whatsoever.
Miranda: Okay, that is weird.
BJ: If it were just weird, then I could live with that, but what the curandera did is impossible. I know that it must have been a very clever trick, yet I wouldn’t know where to begin to explain it. Juana Vásquez is a devoted curandera, not a professional stage magician. Why should she resort to doing magic tricks. How would you explain the jar of nails, don Ignacio?
Ignacio: I can’t. But then, neither can I explain how it is possible that my heart has continued to beat since the day I was born, hardly ever missing a beat, for more than 49 years. You can do the arithmetic, that’s 80 times 60, times 24, times 365, times 49.
Miranda: Wait, just give me a minute! And some paper and a pencil. Okay, that’s two thousand and sixty million, three hundred and fifty-two thousand beats, give or take a few thousand beats.
Ignacio: We met Juana Vásquez’ father when we first came to the Valle del Yaqui two years ago, so we know a good deal about his daughter. Luis Vásques has been outlawed by both the state and federal governments since 1926, when he audaciously confronted Alvaro Obregón on the train that had been delayed by Yaqui warriors at the station in Vícam Switch. That accursed, one-armed, former president of Mexico (el maldito, manco, presidente anterior de Mexico), like a rat in a trap, promised to consider the general’s demand that the federal government keep the promises it had made to the Yaqui people, but once released from custody, he had instead wired for the deployment of federal troops from Hermosillo. (Obregón, by the way, got himself shot and killed two years later—and a nun, no less, went to prison for instigating the assassination. He was a wonderful fellow. We have a town in the Valle del Yaqui that is named after him: Ciudad Obregón. It used to be called Cajeme, named after the Yaqui national hero, but because that hero had been a Yaqui, the name of the town had to be changed.) Anyway, General Vásquez, and those of his soldiers who survived the slaughter that ensued, managed to escape to the Sierra del Bacatete, and he’s been there ever since. He comes down with his lieutenants and his bodyguard out of the high sierras in secret every now and then to confer with the Yaqui governors of the eight pueblos, always in the dead of night at the ruins of the fortress El Añil [Fort Indigo] on the bank of the Río Yaqui, just south of Vícam. That is where we first met him in 1938, and it is also where Juanita meets her father when he calls for her.
BJ: Did you have to have the general’s permission to move into the Río Yaqui Valley?
Miranda: Well, yes. He is the real chief of both the Yaqui and the Mayo nations, although he is not recognized by either the state or federal governments, and thus he remains in hiding in the mountains. Besides, the general was Ignacio’s father’s boyhood best friend back in the 1870s. He has not forgotten that friendship. He wanted to meet the son of his old friend, who was killed in the slaughter of Yaquis in the municipality of Ures so many years ago. In a way, he was responsible for the death of his friend.
Chief Vásques is now an old man, well into his seventies. He has many regrets.
BJ: Juana Vásques seems to be a very devout Catholic. So too, I believe, was the brujo in Huautla. I am a bit surprised at this. The healing ritual itself must obviously have an origin in pre-Columbian times, and yet the curandera invokes the Holy Spirit, the Virgin Mary, and various saints of Christendom to help her heal her patients. I half expected that Patecatl or Ixtlilton would at least have been given an honorable mention.
Ignacio: Luis Vásques is a very devout Catholic, and thus, so is his daughter. She was never apprenticed to a curandera. She knows next to nothing about those ancient, incorporeal beings the whites call “the pagan gods of pre-Columbian Mexico.” She learned to cure by means of the dreams she had as a child. Her dreams were mostly frequented by the spirits of Christianity. I suppose they still are. She had her first successful healing session when she was eight years old. She was truly amazing from early childhood.
BJ: The clearly beneficial effect that Juana has on her patients is easily explained in terms of psychology, in terms of what medical science calls the placebo effect. And I don’t want to demean her abilities by having said that. I feel that what she and other native curanderas do is nothing short of wonderful. But the thing with the nails, if it is not sleight of hand, is simply not of this world. How would you explain it?
Ignacio: As I said before, I can’t explain it. Maybe it was just a very clever bit of conjuring. And if it was, what does that matter? As long as the cure is successful. However, if it wasn’t sleight of hand, then I think I can tell you why it is that she can do the things she does that should be utterly impossible. You see, Juanita discovered as a child, in the midst of her wholly spontaneous fervor for the Christian beliefs, a way to put herself into a mental state of self-absorption (ensimismamiento). This state of consciousness, and I mean the unsimulated state, for there are many charlatans about, is the portal to the world of magic. My benefactor called it “el silenciamiento del monólogo interno” [silencing the inner monologue]. The wise ones among the Indians have been doing this of their own volition for centuries, probably even millennia.
Miranda: One way of understanding what happened at the curing session is this: When a person becomes self-absorbed, something can change in the very fabric of the existence that practically all of us have grown so accustomed to. The impossible becomes possible. If the person who is entranced is congenitally a very powerful person, like Juana Vásquez is, then that person can actually influence the makeup of the physical world. Neither you nor anyone else who was attending the healing session were hallucinating in the manner you might expect from people who have been put into a somnambulistic state. Think back, did anyone appear to be in a hypnotic trance during the session? No? I thought not. Not even the healer or her patient. Before the séance, Isabel had not complained about the eleven iron nails that we must assume were lodged under her skin in eleven different places. That would have been very uncomfortable for her. No, Juana created those nails in the very instant she pulled them out from under her patient’s skin. They didn’t exist in our world before, neither here nor there, but they do now—in that jar that you are holding.
BJ: What if I had filmed her massaging the patient, and then projected the film in slow motion? What would we see? The nail breaking through the surface of the skin? The wound closing entirely afterwards, leaving no mark at all?
Miranda: No, I do not think the new reality that Juana was creating by means of her special ability would allow you to film that. You would not be able to get the right camera angle for the shot, for example, or the curandera’s hand would obstruct the camera view, and so on. As things turned out, she didn’t allow you to bring a camera. If you had somehow managed to use a hidden camera, you would still have found no clear evidence of a continuous sequence of events. Magic is always disjointed—at least, that is what I believe. It’s almost impossible to tell illusion from reality, or reality from illusion.
BJ: Have you ever done impossible things, doña Miranda? But maybe I shouldn’t ask you that.
Miranda: Your questions don’t bother me, Güerito. I am not a bruja. There is nothing magical about me. I would like to be a woman of knowledge in the same way Ignacio is a man of knowledge, but I have never wished to accomplish this by means of witchcraft. When I was young, I thought that witchcraft was just Indian superstition. But you should ask Ignacio if he has ever done impossible things—if he can do impossible things.
BJ: Wouldn’t that be against the rules? Juana told me that don Ignacio is both a brujo and a sabio.
Ignacio: Don’t let Miranda fool you. She is as much a woman of knowledge as ever there was.
BJ: How would you define a person of knowledge, don Ignacio?
Ignacio: That’s easy. My benefactor told me that a knowledgeable person (un conocedor) is one who is impeccably self-aware (impecablemente consiente de sí mismo).
BJ: Did your benefactor consider himself a conocedor?
Ignacio: He did not. He was enough aware of himself, however, to know that, for him, the last train had left the station. He is now dead, and gone forever, just like everyone else in his long line of predecessors. Brujería did not save a single one of them from the fate of all living organisms on this earth (be they amoebas or men), and that is—absolute annihilation. You see, true self-awareness only comes with perpetual self-absorption. A conocedor lives his (or her) daily life in a state of consciousness that is fundamentally different from what it was before—and also fundamentally different from that of most of our fellow human beings. And yet a conocedor is still a mortal being, just like every other human being on this earth. Knowledge is something that either comes to a person—usually after a long life of trial and tribulation—or, it does not. In most cases it does not. For most people, the achievement of knowledge will always be just a fairy tale from the realm of what might have been. For the wise, when the deep-seated knowledge of our inescapable mortality is brought to the mind’s surface, an ecstatic state of melancholy sets in, which, strange though it seems, takes the edge off our fear of impending death. To put it more simply, we would just love to stay, and yet, inexplicably, we know without a single doubt that we cannot stay.
Miranda: Ignacio is right, you know.
BJ: Is Juana Vásques a conocedora?
Miranda: From what I understand, she doesn’t lay claim to being a sabia. If she did, she would have told you—probably quite matter-of-factly. She is, however, undoubtedly a seataka yoeme, as the Yaquis call such a person as she. It means someone who is naturally gifted and powerful. Sabios come from seataka stock. She is yet a young woman. The day will come when she is given the choice of remaining as she is or becoming one of the wise.
BJ: Be given the choice by whom?
Miranda: Who knows? We Indians would say “by the Spirit,” which we have been saying for a very long time. Non-Indians might say “by one’s conscience” or “by one’s guardian angel.”
BJ: Do you have to be an Indian to have any chance of becoming a conocedor?
Miranda: Well, that would certainly be unfair to all of the other kinds of people on earth, now wouldn’t it? A person is simply a human being, no matter of what color the skin may be. Seeking knowledge is all about gaining the ability for self-absorption, and gaining the ability for self-absorption is all about lots of stubbornness and lots of hard work. The Indians don’t have a patent on the trance state. I’m sure that many of the people who have been considered holy or wise in other cultures were considered so because they were true conocedores.
BJ: How important are the mushrooms in the quest for knowledge? Did your benefactor train you in their use, don Ignacio? I can ask you that, can’t I?
Ignacio: You can ask me anything that comes into your head. If I feel free to give you an answer, I will. Yes, the procedures are secret, or at least they should be, but I can tell you about the kinds of things that a brujo uses, just not how he uses these things. My benefactor was an authority on the use of two power plants: the mushrooms that in Nahuatl are called teonanacatl, which can be gathered all over the southern half of Mexico, and also the plant that is known by the Indians as hierba de la pastora [herb of the shepherdess], which, as far as I know, only grows in the Sierra Mazateca.
Miranda: It may interest you to know that the sacred mushrooms are probably the reason why the indigenous culture of Mexico is so unique among all the cultures of the world. The Indians have been chewing these mushrooms since time immemorial.
BJ: Have you ever taken the mushrooms, doña Miranda?
Miranda: Once only, when I was a child. I have to admit, however, that as an adult I have smoked marijuana a couple of times.
Ignacio: La cucaracha, la cucaracha, ya no puede caminar porque no tiene, porque le falta marihuana que fumar.
Miranda: Thank you so very much for the song, Ignacio, you do have a lovely singing voice; however, I can walk around just as well as the next bug, even without the grifa. You see, Güerito, the soldaderas were called las cucarachas during the Revolution. I have told Ignacio that I tried marijuana while on the road to Celaya in 1915. Therefore, the song.
BJ: You rode with Pancho Villa?
Miranda: Hey, you’re well up on Mexican history! Yes, you could say that, although I didn’t spend much time on horseback. But I can tell you, the marijuana I smoked was from the general’s private stash.
BJ: Excuse me, doña Miranda, but what was he like, Poncho Villa?
Miranda: Era un maldito idiota, un cabrón de la chingada,
whatever that is in English. (I was offered a course in coarse language at Columbia University, but I didn’t take it.) Fortunately for me, the soldaderas in Villa’s forces, even those among us who served as nurses or medics, were summarily dismissed following his defeat by the forces of Obregón at the second battle of Celaya—I sound like a goddamned history book—and so most of us had to find our own way home. Lucky me, I found my way home; the women who elected to stay in spite of the dismissal became fair game for the soldiers’ underfed libido after that. I made my way back to the hacienda in the Valle Nacional, where I eventually met Ignacio again. I hadn’t seen him since I had gone away to college in the U.S. in 1908. Ignacio, by the way, was released from federal prison after serving a year on Isla María Madre. You see, we were both caught up in the Revolution—both of us in support of the revolution, but under different circumstances. And once back in our hometown, we put our two heads together and decided we would have nothing more to do with revolutions of any kind. And so, Ignacio opened up to me more fully concerning his participation in the world of magic, and about how his knowledge had saved him from utter demise on the Isla María Madre. Believe it or not; I had not realized that he was a full-fledged brujo, and I didn’t know for sure that his benefactor had also been his teacher (although I had long suspected as much). But I am getting off the track. We were talking about power plants. I think that what you would like to know is if ingesting power plants is the only avenue to wisdom. Well, it isn’t.
Ignacio: Power plants have one enormous drawback, especially the teonanacatl. They give the novice a taste of power without claiming any true sacrifice in time or effort. It’s easy to find yourself on the wrong path, on a path that has no heart, and then, perhaps, you end up like José María Sandoval. Insensitivity is the human condition that necessitates the use of power plants, and most of us are naturally insensitive. I am congenitally insensitive; however, Miranda is not, and, if I am any judge of character, neither are you, Chikon. [Chikon is the Mazatec version of the nickname Güerito.] So, I will tell you about another avenue to self-awareness and to the true wisdom of the ancients. Yes, my benefactor gave me a lot of power plants when I first came to live with him and he had taken me on as his apprentice, both the sacred mushrooms and the hierba de la pastora, and also another power plant from the northern part of Mexico that we Indians call peyotl. And although the power plants certainly silenced my inner monologue while I was under their influence, they also more fully brought out abhorrent aspects of my personality which earlier had been lurking just below the surface: hate and the lust for revenge. My benefactor realized what was happening to me, and so he took me for walks—for very, very long walks. The Sierra Mazateca is not the best place in the world for walking long stretches without paying attention to where you are stepping. He always chose the winding but level road which follows the river between San Bautista Valle Nacional and Tuxtepec, a distance of about thirty miles. And he always accompanied me. He knew all too well I would find some way to break off the exercise if left to my own devices. It would take us about eight hours to get to Tuxtepec, where we had a good meal and stayed overnight, and then eight hours to get back. That’s eight hours at a time without any longer rest stops apart from one ferry crossing. My benefactor was over sixty years old. I couldn’t understand how he did it. Anyway, after about 500 hours and 1,000 miles of walking in this manner, I had learned how to silence my inner monologue en un abrir y cerrar de ojos [in the blink of an eye]. I had no personal use for power plants anymore.
BJ: So, all one has to do to gain the ability to put oneself into a trace is to walk?
Ignacio: Well, you have to walk in the proper manner—briskly, keeping your eyes unfocused as much as possible, and looking straight ahead. But yes, that’s all there is to it. If you can do this exercise, you’ll never need any subterfuges like power plants. The plants cause a lot of wear and tear on the body and on the soul. Besides, both the mushrooms and the peyotl buttons taste absolutely awful.
Miranda: People in other parts of the world who seek knowledge learn to silence the inner monologue using other methods.
Ignacio: This is true, but I think that these other methods, insofar as I know anything about them, are inferior to the Indian method. You see, walking for long stretches in the manner I have described entails nothing that you cannot already do. You don’t have to recite any secret formulas for yourself or adapt difficult body postures. All you have to do is walk briskly, keeping your eyes out of focus, from Point A to Point B. If it is far enough between A and B, your inner monologue will be switched off, sooner or later, during your walk, and it will probably then stay switched off until you arrive at Point B—every time you do this exercise. The ancients called the state of consciousness that walking for long stretches brings on “self-absorption,” and self-absorption is the key to absolutely everything curanderas and sorcerers do. Of course, you need to realize that taking very long walks in this manner is very difficult to do entirely on your own. You’ll constantly feel like just quitting and taking the bus back home. You really need some knowledgeable person to spur you on, if only by the means of shaming you when you want to quit.
BJ: If I understand you correctly, don Ignacio, what you are saying is that if I were to start doing this exercise tomorrow—and the road to Esperanza would be perfect as it is very straight with no turnings—I could learn to do what brujos do in a couple of months.
Ignacio: No, that is not what I am saying. In order to do the sort of things that brujos do, you would need to gain access to the secret procedures and rituals that have been passed down from generation to generation of brujos from very ancient times. I am not at liberty to give you access, Chikon. Miranda knows next to nothing of these rituals, and she is my closest friend and confidante. Also, in order to do the sort of things that curanderos do, you would have to have had the calling, but obviously you haven’t. Miranda has had the calling, but there is no way she can teach you to heal others until you yourself have been called.
Miranda: I don’t want to know what it is that brujos do. It’s not that I’ve never been curious. Like you, Güerito, I am a creature of curiosity by my very nature. But curiosity killed the cat, or so they say. I feel that witchcraft, although I now know that it does indeed exist and is not mere superstition, is inherently evil. I see a questioning look in your eyes. Yes, Ignacio is an authentic Indian brujo. This does not mean he is an evil person, it just means that it is possible to counter evil with evil, if one chooses to do so, and if one has the ability to do so. What you would eventually discover if you were to begin the walking exercise and stick faithfully to it for, say, two months, is the state of mind in which curanderos and brujos do what they do. You wouldn’t be able to cure or bewitch—it’s very doubtful that you ever will be—but neither would you be your mother’s son any longer.
BJ: I’m quite fond of my mother.
Miranda: I’m not saying that you would want to disown your mother. You would be a fundamentally different person. Your mother would recognize you mostly by your physical appearance. This does not mean she would love you any less—probably all the more. You came here to see us today, partly because the curandera had sent you, but also because you were hoping to learn something about sorcery in Mexico that non-Indians know nothing about. Well, you’re in luck. Have you published anything concerning your field work in Huautla?
BJ: I’ve published a paper on witchcraft in a Swedish journal.
Miranda: If you have a copy here, please bring it to me so that I can read it. You can bring it around early tomorrow morning. Very early. I would like to take you for a walk tomorrow if that is convenient for you.
BJ: Where to?
Miranda: Esperanza. You suggested it yourself. Actually, it will probably get too hot to walk that far. Winter is a far better time for long walks in this part of Mexico—well, in any part of Mexico. We’ll walk as far as Estación Bacum, which is about 20 miles down the tracks from here, and then get the train back to Vícam at 11 o’clock. Are you game? I know that you came to us with an agenda. You want to be the first gabacho to be able to explain what it is that Mexican Indian brujos actually do. Well, you can’t explain the rituals because, you being an outsider, they are really none of your business, just like they have never been any of my business. As a mere observer, you can attempt to describe an event or a phenomenon, but you won’t be able to describe it accurately. Something important will always be missing from your description: a reasonably good idea of what is actually going on. And besides, you will often have to be deceitful towards your informant, just as you were in Huautla de Jiménez. I am surprised that the brujo did not see through the deceit and tell you to tomar por culo [make yourself scarce]. On the other hand, you can discover for yourself that state of mind in which curanderos, brujos, and sabios do what they do, what they have done for many, many centuries. An account of your experience could actually be of some use to others, and not just anthropologists. Maybe of much use. Güerito, I would like to be your benefactor in these matters, in the much the same way Ignacio has been my benefactor, and Ignacio’s benefactor was his benefactor, that is, if you can accept me as such.
BJ: I’m afraid you’ve caught me dead to rights. I asked you if I could record our conversation, but what I didn’t tell you that I was intending to utilize the recording for publishing another paper about sorcery in Mexico, that is, by transcribing the recording and publishing the transcription with annotations. (With your permission, of course.) This idea didn’t come to me until the morning before I saw you in the shop in Vícam Switch, doña Miranda. Nevertheless, I do sincerely want to help Isabel Sánchez in any way I can. And yes, doña Miranda, I am very honored that you would even consider taking me under your wing.
Ignacio: Okay, you have our permission, provided that you use pseudonyms for all the people involved. That’s the price you have to pay. And it’s also one of the rules in the magical world. As for our responsibility to do everything we can to help Isabel, I suggest that I pay His Reverence don José Sandoval a visit, sooner rather than later. Whether or not he is responsible for her malady—and I am far from sure that he is—from what I have heard, he has certainly caused pain and misery in the past. In my opinion, he is a damned fool, a clown, and yet he seems to know what he is doing, and, in the magical world, this makes him dangerous. Más vale prevenir que curar.
BJ: Can you put him out of business, as you called it, but without actually hurting him?
Miranda: Putting him out of business is going to hurt him. However, Ignacio is probably thinking more in terms of persuasion than outright coercion. You see, Ignacio had a reputation in Oaxaca that we tried to leave behind us when we moved here. We were not entirely successful in this. Believe me; Ignacio can put the fear of God into this obnoxious man without disturbing a hair on his head.
BJ: Which god are we talking about?
Miranda: Whichever god you prefer. How about Tezcatlipoca? Ignacio, would it be appropriate to show Güerito the black mirror?
Ignacio: I don’t see why not.
BJ: Oh my God!
Miranda: Which god are you talking about?
BJ: The one with a capital G, I suppose. I’ve never seen one of these. I’ve just read about them. But it’s so small!
Ignacio: See? Only 2 inches in diameter. It fits into the palm of your hand. The obsidian is perfectly black with the exception of a single flaw at the very edge of the mirror: a large snowflake that extends to both sides of the mirror.
BJ: Is it a relic of the Aztecs?
Ignacio: I suppose so. My benefactor’s benefactor found it back in 1820 amidst the ruins in Teotihuacan. It could be Aztec, but it could also be Toltec, in which case the mirror may be more than 2,000 years old.
BJ: What does it do?
Miranda: It doesn’t do anything on its own, apart from showing you that your lipstick is smeared. It’s a power object. What happens depends on the person who is holding it. For most people it’s just a beautiful old archaeological artifact. José Sandoval has had some training in the dark art of the diablero. Rest assured; if he gets one look at this, se cagará en los pantalones. Ignacio is much like his benefactor was. He almost always appears kind and generous, but you don’t want to cross him.
Ignacio: Surely, you’re getting into the realm of fantasy, Miranda. Still, I’m betting on the chance that José Sandoval will back down and cease his activities. From what I’ve heard, he has grandchildren who can help support him if he should retire altogether. I imagine that he is something of an embarrassment to his family.
BJ: And that will be that?
Miranda: That’s hard to tell. All we can try to do for Isabel is to ensure that the curandera, and whatever competent doctors her father can find for her, can get on with helping her, but without any interference from the dark side.
BJ: Then I can get back to the curandera and tell her that you are on it.
Miranda: Sure, tell Juanita that we’re on it.
BJ: And you’re okay with me using the recording for publishing another paper about witchcraft in Mexico?
Miranda: We haven’t yet read the paper that you have published. How was it again you were intending to use the recording?
BJ: Well, I was going to transcribe the recording verbatim, and then later add annotations and commentaries within the resulting text document, but you and don Ignacio have given me such a wealth of unambiguous information that I don’t think me putting my two cents in would be of any value. You’re the experts; I’m not. You see, I don’t now have to figure out how witchcraft in Mexico actually works because you have already told me in the best way possible. The paper will be your paper, and I will publish it with this in mind.
Ignacio: That’s fine; just as long as you don’t put our real names on the title page. Neither of us has any wish to draw attention to ourselves. Of course, if Miranda, at long last, were to be offered a doctorate because of the paper you publish, she might reconsider.
Miranda: Well, be that as it may, there is something important that is missing from this interview, and Ignacio will not like me bringing this up. Answer me this question: How does an absolutely destitute orphan boy grow up to be a menacing, awe-inspiring sorcerer?
Ignacio: Miranda!
BJ: To tell you the truth, I was a bit afraid to ask.
Ignacio: Did you think something bad might happen to you? That I might turn you into a toad? I don’t like to talk about my personal history because doing so makes me feel uncomfortable. My benefactor taught me to consider my own past as something of little consequence, and although I can see that he was possibly wrong in this, I still feel bound by his teachings. I can understand why you would consider my biography important for what you are trying to do. After all, we brujos are a dying breed in Mexico. You may never get another chance. I suggest that I take a short hike in the desert and leave you alone with Miranda. She knows as much of my personal history as is worth telling. I’ll be back in a short while. Then you can turn off your infernal generator—it should soon be running out of gas anyway—and we can all have some cabrito and tortillas. Believe me; we know how to prepare cabrito. You can smell it simmering over the fire. Jorge can then take you and your equipment back to Vícam in his automobile.
Miranda: Güerito, I thought Ignacio would never leave! Now I can give you some really juicy details about him. But seriously, I know just about everything about him because Ignacio and I attended the same secondary school in San Juan Bautista Valle Nacional and then, after that, the same escuela preparatoria—what you would call high school—in Tuxtepec. When he suddenly turned up at my school in 1903, he didn’t speak Spanish all that well. As a matter of fact, he knew English better than he knew Spanish. His benefactor, whom I am not allowed to name, had insisted from the very start of their time together that Ignacio should attend school for as long as he was able. Ignacio’s benefactor was not exactly wealthy, at least, I don’t think so, but for an Indian gentleman he was undoubtedly well-off, and he had lived for as long as anyone could remember in a beautiful old colonial-era house just north of town at the defunct hacienda that once upon a time was known as Viejo Valle Real. It appeared that he made his living selling herbal remedies at the market in Oaxaca de Juárez.
My foster parents owned, and they themselves ran, a large tobacco plantation along the river near Vega del Sol, but they also had a house in town, which is where I stayed while I went to school. My parents were wealthy, and as I was an only child (so to speak), I was used to every luxury. But even though neither of us were needy children, Ignacio and I shared an epithet that none of the other kids at school had the right to bear: We were both orphans.
My real mother died in a freak accident when I was five years old. Her name was Isidora Acevedo, and she was from the Chinantec town of Cerro Marín. I don’t really remember her very well, but I always think about her with an almost unbearable longing. I don’t remember ever having had a father other than the one who adopted me. I was legally adopted by the couple who owned the hacienda where my mother had worked as a maid. They have never had children of their own. And thus, I became their own darling girl. I still am, for they are both alive and well, and they are still running the plantation, even though they are now in their eighties. I love them both very much. They have never been in the least ashamed of the fact that I am an Indian, and I’m not ashamed that I grew up in abundance while other Indians in the Valle Nacional, not to mention most everyone else in the rest of Mexico, lived in abject poverty. I didn’t choose my fate. An Indian girl must embrace her good fortune when it runs right smack into her.
Ignacio lost both of his parents in the massacre of Yaqui peons at the Sierra Huerfana in 1902. It may interest you to know that Ignacio was born in Arizona Territory in 1891. His father, who was originally from Vícam, worked in the gold mines outside the city of Yuma. Ignacio’s mother was a younger granddaughter of Pasqual, the illustrious chief of the Yuma people. (And I imagine that her father was not too happy about his daughter marrying a miner; however, Ignacio is still in touch with his family in Arizona, so I guess the father-in-law eventually forgave his daughter’s dubious choice of husband.) Ignacio lived all of his early years at the Fort Yuma Indian Reservation, and he didn’t see that much of his father. He even did three years of primary school at the Fort Yuma school for Indians, which is where he first learned English. (He was, after all, the famous chief’s great-grandson, and so his mother thought that he should learn to open his mouth without putting his foot into it, and then maybe he himself would be chief one day.) His father, however, decided in 1901 that he wanted to move back to Vícam. The peace agreement between General Torres of the Mexican Army and Tetabiate, chief of the Yaqui nation, had been signed at Ortiz station in Sonora, and the Yaqui exiles had been promised a few acres of land in the Valle del Yaqui on which they could get back to subsistence farming. Ignacio’s father got as far as to Hermosillo with his family when his money ran out, and he was forced to get a job at one of the big haciendas outside of the town.
Late one evening, a squad of armed Yaqui warriors arrived at the hacienda where Ignacio’s family was living. The squad leader explained to the Yaqui peons who had gathered round—and the squad leader, as you may have guessed, was none other than Luis Vásques—that Tetabiate had ordered them to round up as many Yaqui peons as they could and march them south to the Sierra del Bacatete, where the newly recruited men could swell the ranks of the Yaqui army. And the chief was not asking for volunteers. The next day, a ragtag group of several hundred Yaqui warriors on horseback, and more than twice as many Yaqui peons on foot, set out towards the south and the Bacatete Mountains; however, after three days of forced march, they had only got as far as to the Sierra Huerfana near Rancho Viejo. The peons and their armed guard set up camp in the canyon at the base of the mountain, while more than 250 warriors took up a defensive position along a ridge on the mountainside. Here General Torres and his troops caught up with the Yaquis, arriving at the opposite side of the mountain in the early hours of the morning. The Mexican soldiers circumvented the base of the mountain, and then attacked the encampment with all the firepower they could muster. Ignacio’s mother was killed in the first volley of gunfire. His father was wounded, and he died of his wounds three days later. Everyone who had not been killed by the indiscriminate gunfire, or had been executed once the Mexican soldiers had gained complete control of the camp, were taken prisoner and force marched back to Hermosillo. Ignacio’s father was transported onboard a wagon with the other wounded who were incapable of walking. The Yaqui warriors on the ridge above the encampment never fired a shot, but escaped safely back to their base in the Bacatete.
BJ: I would certainly understand it, if don Ignacio hates the Mexicans. Does he hate Mexicans?
Miranda: Not any more. He has vanquished his hate, as the expression goes, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that he is overly fond of Mexicans. But getting back to our story: Once the prisoners had been marched back to Hermosillo, because Ignacio was under the age of twelve, he was released from custody when his father died. However, after about a month of scrounging for food and shelter in and around the city, he was arrested by the state police for being without the proper government-issued identification papers, and he was herded onto a steamer bound for the port of San Blas together with three-hundred other Yaquis from the area. From San Blas, the Yaquis were force marched 200 miles through unbelievably difficult mountainous terrain to the train station in San Marcos. At the train station, the prisoners were goaded onto boxcars; some boxcars were destined for the tobacco plantations in Oaxaca, others for the henequen plantations in Yucatán, still others for the sugarcane fields of Veracruz.
Ignacio wound up working for next to nothing at a sugar mill near Otatitlán in the state of Veracruz. After a year at hard labor, he managed to escape, but the mill owner sent two rurales after him to bring him back, dead or alive. After a long chase, they finally caught sight of him just outside of San Juan Bautista Valle Nacional. One of the rurales fired off a round from the opposite side of the river; the bullet ricocheted off a big rock, but then it hit Ignacio squarely in the chest. Without crossing the river in order to see if the fugitive was dead or alive, the rurales turned their horses and headed back towards Tuxtepec. Ignacio had turned twelve years old the day before he was shot and left for dead.
BJ: The wound was obviously not fatal, and yet I should think that it would have been. How ever did don Ignacio make it in to town where he could get help? He must have crawled.
Miranda: Well, he was at first knocked unconscious by the impact of the bullet. Luckily, the inertia of the bullet must have been dampened considerably when it ricocheted off the rock before it hit him. When Ignacio came to his senses again, it seemed to him that he could still hear the retort of the igniting gunpowder and the pling of the ricochet, and he could certainly feel the oddly flattened shape of the bullet that was lodged against his sternum. He says there was not that much bleeding, and what there was he managed to staunch by holding his wadded bandana against the wound. It was early morning. He continued along the path he had been following when he was shot, not knowing that he was actually coming to a town. He made it to the church and sat down to rest on a bench in the churchyard, which is where the old man who was to become his benefactor found him before anyone else did, and took him to his house. The old man later explained to his neighbors that Ignacio was a grandson from Sonora who had come to live with him because the boy’s parents had been killed by government troops during the Yaqui uprising—which was true enough.
BJ: But the boy had been shot in the chest. How did the old man explain that?
Miranda: Ignacio wasn’t as bad off as you might think. The slug had fallen out of the wound as he walked doubled over along the path leading to town. (He and I went to look for it a couple of weeks after he had started school, and, believe it or not, we found it. I have it safely stored in this matchbox. Our teacher said that the man who fired the shot had used a Winchester rifle, and not a Mauser. You can see how the slug was flattened when it hit the rock. Ignacio’s sternum was cracked, but not actually fractured. He was incredibly sore for a month after he was shot. He could hardly breathe. He couldn’t laugh at all. Of course, he didn’t really have that much to be happy about.
BJ: Well, at least he had met you. That would have made me happy, even if the slug had hit me between the eyes. But are you saying that your teacher knew what was going on?
Miranda: Maestro Morales knew just about everything. If there was something he didn’t know, he would find it out. He was my hero when I was a kid—a kind of father figure to me, you might say. Of course, people in town eventually realized that Ignacio had to be a fugitive slave worker from the sugarcane plantations in Veracruz, even though Maestro Morales had kept what he had deduced to himself. However, we lived in a town that was surrounded by tobacco plantations where much of the work was done by deportees, like Ignacio, or by contract workers from other parts of Mexico who had been hoodwinked by employment agents into coming to the Valle Real, as it used to be called, to find work. The tobacco corporations that were getting richer and richer because of what was essentially free slave labor were not exactly popular in San Juan Bautista Valle Nacional. The townspeople were content to go along with the old man’s explanation. Nobody was about to give Ignacio up to the rurales, despite the reward that was promised to anyone turning in a fugitive.
BJ: Your parents owned a tobacco plantation. What did they think about your mysterious new friend from school?
Miranda: My parents always employed the local Chinantec Indians to work their fields for them. Their parents, and even their grandparents, had done the same in their time. The Indians were never paid the wages they deserved; they never have been, but at least they were working almost next door to where they lived. And they were treated with respect by my parents. My father and my mother are both criolla, descended from Spanish aristocracy. My father regards Indians as a noble people who have fallen on hard times. And how right he is! Many of the other plantations in the Valle Nacional had been bought up by Yankee financed corporations, corporations run by people who were only interested in making as much profit as possible, no matter what the cost in human misery. My parents are not like that. They’re not looking for big profits; they only want to sustain their way of life. In those days, they paid their workers as much money as they could afford to pay. They thought the world of Ignacio, and they even contributed to the cost of his high school education in Tuxtepec. I mean, he is so smart; he became the best student in school. Had he continued on to university, they would have paid for that too. Ignacio, for his part, soon realized that being white does not necessarily mean that one is a bad person. As ever, people in power are the problem, whatever the color of their skin. The trick is to somehow remove people from positions of authority, but without replacing them with others. Ignacio learned to save his hate and retribution for those who actually deserve it.
BJ: For me, don Ignacio’s benefactor is a very mysterious person. Did the people in town understand that he was a brujo?
Miranda: If you find him mysterious, imagine how I felt. No, no one in town realized that he was a brujo. But he was a very famous herbologist, and not just locally famous, but famous far and wide in Mexico. No one could understand that someone could make so much money concocting and selling herbal potions. Still, his recipes were reputed to date back to pre-Columbian times, probably passed down, generation to generation, from who knows when. He was obviously an Indian. Well, I suppose that it wasn’t all that obvious, because he didn’t dress like an Indian peasant. He was always well-dressed, a really dapper old man. His household at Viejo Valle Real consisted of two very beautiful Mazatec women, whom the townspeople had been led to believe were his unmarried daughters, and whom the townspeople couldn’t understand that they should be so young and beautiful, and yet unmarried; and, in addition, three servants: a handyman, a maid, and a cook.
BJ: Were those two women witches? Brujas?
Miranda: Both women still live at Viejo Valle Real, at least, they still lived there two years ago, so you could ask them yourself. Both are in their eighties. So too are the maid and the cook. Carlos, the handyman, died many years ago, but upon his death, his job was taken by a boy in his teens; the boy became a man, and the man he became is still the caretaker. No, I don’t believe the women are witches, but nevertheless, it is, and it always has been, a very strange household. The women, and even the servants, treat Ignacio with great respect and affection. As for me, they barely recognize my existence. I try not to let this hurt my feelings. I have always been in awe of those two women, but I don’t think they entirely belong on this earth. I don’t think they are entirely human.
BJ: Can you tell me, doña Miranda, why it was that the old brujo chose don Ignacio as his apprentice?
Miranda: I think I have worked that out, although I could be wrong; Ignacio has never explained to me how things fit together in the world of sorcery. You understand, he’s taken a sacred vow of secrecy that he won’t break just to satisfy my curiosity. I believe that a brujo of the old school, that is, the sorcerer with a lineage stretching far back in time, and not a self-made dilettante, is obligated to pass on his (or her) knowledge to some “chosen person” before he or she dies. And I also surmise that a brujo can only have a single heir, someone whose sole purpose in the world of magic is to propagate the lineage, to keep the knowledge alive for posterity. This is why the twelve-year-old with a bullet wound to the chest stopping to rest in the churchyard just as the old man was passing by the church was such an auspicious occurrence.
In the Indian world, brujería, like curanderismo, has always been much more of a calling than something one gets into because it seems interesting, something that, eventually, might become profitable to oneself, in one way or another. In your world, in the university, you chose anthropology as your major field of study—which you now appear to have changed to linguistics. I chose anthropology too. I am not sure why. Probably because it was one of the few fields of study that were open to a woman in those days. Witchcraft, however, was never part of the curriculum that was available to either of us. Ignacio, however, did not choose witchcraft from the Indian curriculum; he was chosen for witchcraft, and he was not given the opportunity to quit and choose a different field of study.
BJ: You’ve told me that don Ignacio survived his time in prison thanks to his knowledge of witchcraft. Did he actually use witchcraft against the prison guards and officials?
Miranda: The other prisoners were just as dangerous as the idiots who ran the prison and their idiot henchmen who guarded the prisoners for them. Yes, I imagine he used a spell or two, although he hasn’t admitted as much to me. (He’s very good at casting spells, I have heard—reputedly, one of the best.) You see, the federal prison on Isla María Madre was His Excellency Porfirio Díaz’s attempt at emulating the French government’s Devil’s Island, and he did a pretty good job of it. It was not a good place to end up in. It still isn’t. But more important for Ignacio’s survival than his ability to cast a spell was his ability to assume the brujo’s special state of mind during his waking hours in that place. Everybody sensed that he was special in a way they couldn’t fathom, and so everybody, prisoners as well as prison officials and guards, gave him a wide berth. Strong, resolute men died in that place; Ignacio survived, but without ever betraying anyone in order to save his own skin. His conscience is clean, and that is so important.
BJ: How did don Ignacio wind up in federal prison, and how on earth did you wind up in the army, doña Miranda?
Miranda: Ignacio went to prison in early 1914 for demonstratively refusing to be inducted into the Mexican Federal Army. He could have evaded conscription in Huerta’s army by going into hiding until the Constitutionalist forces had gained the upper hand, which undoubtedly was going to happen, sooner or later. Going into hiding would have been easy enough in the Sierra Mazateca. Instead, he simply told the jefe politico in Oaxaca de Juárez to vete a la chingada, which was not a very polite—nor a very judicious—thing to say to the chief of police. Ignacio was subsequently tried and convicted in a federal court for refusal to defend the nation and, of course, for contempt of court, and the judge sentenced him to four years in federal prison; however, he was released after a little over a year, when Carranza came to power in 1915.
I returned to Vega del Sol from the United States with a Bachelor of Art degree from Columbia University in March, 1914. My intention was to continue my studies at the Museo Nacional de Antropologia in Mexico City. I had been accepted there under the auspices of Frank Boas and Zelia Nuttall.
BJ: Those are some pretty impressive auspices, doña Miranda. Did you study under Professor Boas? My doctoral advisor is Professor Robert Lowie, whose doctoral advisor was Professor Boas.
Miranda: I met Robert Lowie while he was working at the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan, before he became a professor. I liked him a lot, and he loved the idea of a young Indian woman studying at Columbia. On one occasion, he took me down into the museum’s basement storerooms in order to demonstratively show me what anthropology and archaeology are not all about. In a large wooden crate were 12 human skulls, each wrapped in tissue paper. A wretched smell had quickly permeated the storeroom when he opened the crate. These skulls, he said, had been collected by an anthropologist following a battle between Yaqui Indians and the Mexican Federal Army in the municipality of Ures in Mexico in 1902. Apparently, the anthropologist had decapitated the corpses of executed Yaqui warriors which the Mexicans had left unburied where the warriors had died. Then he had boiled the heads for hours in order to be able to entirely clean the bone from organic matter, both inside and out. The wretched man had even taken pictures of the process by which he had obtained such nice, shining white crania for the benefit of anthropological science. This is not, said Dr. Lowie, what anthropology and archaeology are about—a good anthropologist is morally responsible for the welfare of his informants, whether alive or dead. I began to cry, of course, and he apologized, and then he apologized again for making me so upset. Those skulls, and the procedural documentation, he said, were certainly very gruesome artifacts. I told him that the parents of one of my best friends had been killed at the Sierra Huerfana. He apologized again—he hadn’t realized, and I continued to sniffle and sob, off and on, for another two hours. It was just too strange, meeting up in New York City with some of those who did not survive the atrocity that was perpetrated in Ures, but seeing only their flayed heads.
And yes, I did study under Professor Boas. He too was happy that a Mexican Indian was studying at an Ivy League university. But enough of academic genealogy and adventures in education. When I got home, I learned about what had happened to Ignacio. If there had been something I could have done for him, I would have. I went to see those two mysterious women at Viejo Valle Real, thinking, I suppose, that they would be able to pull off some fantastic magic trick and get him out of prison, but they were just as standoffish as ever.
After about a week in Vega del Sol, I took the train to Mexico City in order to begin preparing for my post-graduate studies. I soon found myself in very cramped living accommodations together with three other female students, two of whom were graduating from the school of nursing in April. Güerito, what do you know about Christian Science?
BJ: I’ve read a few articles in the Christian Science Monitor. I quite like the newspaper. I don’t know about the religion.
Miranda: Well, I am not going to evangelize. I haven’t really thought about Christian Science for a very long time, but thirty years ago in the Ivy League universities it was all the rage, along with spiritualism, transcendentalism, and so on, and so forth. For my part, I was almost irresistibly drawn to those teachings of Christian Science which claim that disease and injury, or even just malcontent with life as it is being lived, is a malady of the spirit, not of the body, or even the brain. Although I didn’t believe in witchcraft at this time, I had as a child realized that curanderismo does really work.
My mother became frightfully ill once when I was about eight years old. My father despaired of her life. It was that bad. The doctor from Tuxtepec said she was suffering from uremic poisoning, and that there was little he could do for her because he didn’t understand why her kidneys should be shutting down. It was actually the doctor himself who recommended that my father should send for the curandera who lived and practiced in the nearby Chinantec town of San Juan Palantla.
The curandera held an all-night session for my mother. I was present for the entire twelve-hour session, and so also was my father, and the doctor from Tuxtepec, and all the household staff. My mother was back on her feet a week later, and after about a month she no longer had any symptoms of acute kidney failure whatsoever. She has not had any problems with her kidneys since then.
BJ: Was it during your mother’s healing session that you took the sacred mushrooms for the first and only time in your life?
Miranda: Yes. My father was initially against it, but the curandera had insisted, and the doctor had urged my father to acquiesce to the curandera’s demands. I mean, I was only eight years old. I remember that the curandera had smiled at me with so much warmth, and she was not at all a smiley sort of person. Everyone who was present at the session took the mushrooms, even my father, and also the doctor. When morning came at long last, I was sure that my mother was going to be all right. I also felt for the first time the urge to become a curandera myself, although I had no idea how to go about it. The curandera who cured my mother never offered to take me under her wing. I suppose she never got a proper omen about me. Anyway, I still held my fascination for the art of curanderismo when I was in college at Columbia. Once I had begun to take the teachings of Christian Science to heart, I found that I actually had a knack for working peoples’ problems out for them. By my third year, I was running a makeshift clinic, almost always making house calls. I got invited to places all over the city. Nowadays, the sort of work I was doing is called psychotherapy. In those days, I was rumored to be a medicine woman from some obscure Indian tribe who, for some unfathomable reason, had specialized in helping white people in New York City. Such a romantic notion got me plenty of clients. Not demanding anything in exchange for my services but the tram or taxi fare to and from my sessions also helped make me quite well-known in the big city. When I got back to Mexico for my graduate studies, I had even begun to contemplate the possibility of going for a degree in medicine, and then becoming a psychiatrist. Silly girl.
The nurses, however, persuaded me to put my academic plans on hold for the time being. They had both been recruited for service in General Villa’s army by Dr. Torres, Francisco Villa’s chief of medical staff, when he was clandestinely in Mexico City about a week before I got there. They had been told to be on the lookout for other suitable recruits. I became one of those recruits, although I don’t think I was very suitable. What a dope! I didn’t know the first thing about first aid, but the girls said I would learn on the job. What was important, they said, was my reputation as a curandera, something that Dr. Torres, who admired Zapata, and who loved all things Indian, would appreciate. And, of course, my passionate belief in the Revolution, which would always go down well with the Zapatistas and the Villistas. Besides, the defeat of Carranza’s Constitutional Army was probably only months away. I should take part in the fight, the girls said, while the fight was still ongoing. Now, I’m not going to tell you any war stories, but this much I can tell you: I did learn to administer first aid, and I did lose my sensitivity for the sight of blood.
BJ: I would love to hear any stories that you have to tell, doña Miranda. About war or about peace. But I am not going to ask you to tell any stories that you would rather keep to yourself. But one thing I am terribly curious about: Did you and don Ignacio get married in 1916 when both of you had returned to Oaxaca?
Miranda: Yes. I got back to Vega del Sol in June of 1915 and found that my father had successfully petitioned the Constitutionalist government for Ignacio’s release from prison. Ignacio was back in the beginning of July. We stayed at the hacienda in Vega del Sol. Everyone there expected us to be married, so we decided not to disappoint them. After all, it did seem that we were meant for each other. We were both 24 years old. How old are you, Güerito?
BJ: I’m twenty-four.
Miranda: That’s what I thought. Are you married?
BJ: Yes. Irmgard is in Berkeley, California, studying for her degree in anthropology.
Miranda: Well, Ignacio wanted me to go back to Mexico City to continue my studies. My parents did too. I was, however, a changed woman. I had realized that I didn’t need a doctor’s degree to do what I was meant to do. At least, not in Mexico in 1916. We moved to the city of Oaxaca de Juárez. With encouragement from the local authorities, I set up a clinic for what nowadays would be called personal counseling and therapy. Okay, I wasn’t a psychiatrist or a certified psychologist, but I was a Mexican Indian woman with a degree from a prestigious university in the United States and a demonstrable talent for psychotherapy, and that seemed to open all kinds of doors that would otherwise have remained shut to a woman, especially an Indian woman. Ignacio sold herbal medicines in a stall at the Benito Juárez market, just as his benefactor had done before him. And he travelled the length and breadth of Mexico to gather the ingredients for his concoctions. We lived comfortably in that city for twenty-two years, raising four children, three sons and a daughter. Once all of our fledglings had finally left the nest, Ignacio decided he wanted to move to the Valle del Yaqui in Sonora. He told me that the Spirit was calling to him with an urgency that he could not ignore. For my part, I felt I had spent enough of my life dealing with other people’s problems, so I agreed, although I had not lived in the desert before. We both like it here very much. And a few months ago, our eldest son moved here from Oaxaca with his family. They live in Vícam. Ignacio still sells his herbal remedies at his stall in the Mercardo Benito Juárez in Oaxaca, even though the train ride there and back takes more than 70 hours. Still, this has kept us in shoe leather ever since we got here. Ignacio loves the desert. He can disappear for days on end, but then he suddenly turns up just in time for breakfast. As for me, I am uncomfortable at the thought of rattlesnakes and mountain lions, so I stick to the more populated areas. You want to know about curanderos, brujos, and sabios. Well, let me tell you this: their lives are only slightly less tragic than everybody else’s. They are born; they live for a short while; and then they die—just like everybody else. That’s all there is on this earth. Because of our mortality, life on this earth can never make any sense, no matter how much you try to dissect it in order to figure out how it works. This is something sabios come to understand during their lives, although few others ever do. Tell that to your academic supervisors. They won’t believe you. It’s just too damn simple. It’s like a whole damned academic thesis rolled up into a couple of short sentences. No one gets awarded a PhD for a doctoral thesis that is only about fifty words long. And now, why don’t you go out and switch that generator off. I hope you have got what you came for. Ignacio will be back soon. I’ll take the pot off the fire, and then I’ll serve you up some real magic. You’re not a vegetarian, are you?
Postface:
On December 7th 1941, the Imperial Japanese Navy Air Service carried out a surprise military strike against the United States Naval Base at Pearl Harbor in Honolulu, Hawaii. In consequence thereof, the United States Congress has declared war on all those countries that have ratified the Tripartite Pact of 27 September 1940. Mexico, however, has asserted its continued neutral stance in the conflict by requesting United States citizens to voluntarily leave the country or face eventual forced deportation. This situation has, of course, given a great deal of urgency to my endeavors to conclude my fieldwork here in the Valle del Yaqui and return to California in order to complete my post-graduate studies. I should, however, also like to write a postface for this paper before I leave, for time has not stood absolutely still since I held my interview with don Ignacio and doña Miranda almost two years ago.
Isabel Sánchez’ state of health improved little by little during the remainder of 1940 until she was practically symptom free by the New Year in 1941. She had been given six more sessions with the curandera Juana Velásquez. I was, however, not present at any of these sessions. In addition to these healing sessions, her father followed don Ignacio’s advice and took her to see Dr. Reynolds at the hospital in Esperanza. Dr. Reynolds, almost immediately upon consultation with his new patient, suggested that Isabel might be suffering from the post-acute sequelae of a viral infection. He said that he had observed symptoms very similar to those she was experiencing in patients that were under his care while he was attending physician at the San Antonio Community Hospital in Upland, California. Isabel told him that she could not remember having been sick immediately prior to the onset of her symptoms. Dr. Reynolds explained that even a very mild infection, like the common cold, could result in severe after effects. After a thorough examination of his patient, he proposed a detailed plan for symptom management. Thus, it would appear that Isabel Sánchez’ disabilities had not been caused by the curse of a diablero. The extent to which Juana Vásquez has been instrumental in returning Isabel to a healthful state of vigor and enthusiasm for life must remain an open question. Personally, I believe that Juana Vásquez cured Isabel Sánchez of her disabilities, but I do not know how to even begin to explain how such a cure is possible. Everyone else who has had knowledge of this case is of the same opinion. Dr. William Curry Holden has told me that he has witnessed other cases similar to this one. Fumbling for an explanation of the healing phenomenon he said: “It’s one of the darnedest things imaginable!”
As he had proposed, Ignacio Buitimea did visit the diablero José María Sandoval at the old man’s house in Pótam. As to what exactly transpired during this visit, don Ignacio has been reluctant to divulge, citing a sort of doctor-patient confidentiality pledge. This much he has told me: the diablero promised to consider a “voluntary” retirement from the business of witchcraft. (Don Ignacio says he does not believe that Sandoval was involved in any way with, nor did he even have any knowledge of, Isabel Sánchez’ decline in health.) The question of whether or not José Sandoval was really considering a voluntary retirement is presently of purely academic interest. He was forcibly retired by death in late August of 1941. His body was found just off one of the less-frequented trails through the desert area south of Pótam. Because the corpse was exhibiting advanced signs of decomposition, no proper post-mortem examination was carried out. The tribal council’s ruling was death by natural causes, alternatively death by suicide. What José María Sandoval was actually doing out in the desert chaparral is anybody’s guess.
My friendship with don Ignacio and doña Miranda has been the absolute highlight of the time I have spent in Mexico. Don Ignacio is not that much at home, and therefore I have not seen that much of him. He has his market stall in Oaxaca de Juárez to manage, and he also travels far and wide, always by train or bus, to gather ingredients for his herbal medicines. When he is at home, he can better be said to be close to home, for he often spends days at a time in that marvelous wilderness that is the Sonoran Desert and the Sierra del Bacatete. Doña Miranda, on the other hand, is very much a homebody. As she promised, she took me under her wing, vowing that by the time I return home to California, I shall have understood what it is that makes brujos and curanderos tick. My wife, Irmgard Weitlaner Johnson, joined me here in Vícam in May of 1941, and she soon also found herself under the wing of doña Miranda. Presently, as we are preparing to depart for home, we both understand that don Ignacio and doña Miranda have hit the nail squarely on its head concerning sorcery and healing in Mexico. Dedicated self-control over the state of one’s mind is the key that can unlock the treasure chest of knowledge.
JB Johnson,
Vícam Pueblo in the state of Sonora, Mexico,
18 February 1942.
[Afterword by the editor and publisher, F. Lawrence Fleming: I do not expect you to actually believe that the academic paper you have just read is authentic. The point I would like to make is that it could have been authentic because the people mentioned in the people were, I believe, real people, most of whom actually resided in the Valle del Yaqui in 1940. And what became of these people after 1942, you may ask. I have been able to positively identify all of the people mentioned in the paper. And what became of these people after 1942? (Those who are identified in the paper by the use of pseudonyms will in this afterword keep their pseudonyms. This was the commitment JB Johnson made back in 1940. As the publisher of this paper, I shall honor his commitment.)
Jean Basset Johnson was never awarded his much-deserved PhD. Upon returning home to California in March of 1942, he was almost immediately called into active service by the United States Naval Reserve. The latter part of his overseas deployment during World War II was served in Tunisia. On the 4th of April, 1944, Lt. (j.g.) Jean B. Johnson was killed in action at the age of 27. He is buried in the North Africa American Cemetery in Carthage, Tunisia. His doctoral dissertation, El Idioma Yaqui. Gramatica, Textos y Diccionario, which was ready for publication in 1942, was finally published in Mexico by the Instituto Nacional de Antropologico e Historia in 1962.
Irmgard Weitlaner Johnson earned her Master’s degree in Cultural Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. She moved permanently to Mexico in 1951, where she began a systematic study of indigenous textiles and textile technique. She later became curator of textiles at the Museo Nacional de Antropologia in Mexico City. Irmgard died in Mexico City in 2011 at the age of 97.
William Holden Curry was dean and director of anthropological and historical research at the Texas Technical College in Lubbock, Texas. He died 21 April 1993 at the age of 96.
Morris Swadesh became linguistics instructor at the Escuela Nacional de Antropología e historia in Mexico City in 1954, after having been dismissed from his position at the City College of New York due to purported affiliations with the Communist Party of the United States. He died in Mexico City in 1967 at the age of 57.
Luis Vásques was chief of the Yaqui and Mayo nations. For historians, he shall probably remain a thoroughly captivating, yet very mysterious, character. A primary school in the Valle del Yaqui is named after him. He died in 1952 at an estimated age of 87.
Juana Maria Vásquez Matus practiced as a curandera her entire life. Towards the end of her life, she became quite famous, both nationally in Mexico and internationally. She died in 2012 at the age of 97.
Isabel Sánchez García became a registered nurse and eventually moved to Mexico City. The symptoms she presented with in 1940 when she had her initial session with the healer would, in more recent times, have prompted a diagnosis of myalgic encephalomyelitis, also known as chronic fatigue syndrome. The prognosis for this disorder is still uncertain, as there are no approved treatments.
Miranda de la Cerda y Jiménez died of cancer in 1948.
Ignacio Buitimea continued his business of selling herbal medicines at the market in Oaxaca de Juárez even after the death of his wife in 1948. It is rumored that on a trip in 1960 to visit relatives at the Fort Yuma Indian Reservation, which straddles the border between California and Arizona, he met an undergraduate student of anthropology, Carlos Castaneda, at the Greyhound Bus Terminal in Nogales, Arizona, as he was returning to his home in Sonora, Mexico. It would appear that Ignacio Buitimea died in 1973 at the age of 82. The railway settlement where he lived in the Valle del Yaqui has been severely affected by flash floods a number of times since 1973. Many of the houses in the settlement that were standing in 1973 have, at some time or another, been damaged to such an extent that they have been demolished and rebuilt. The single-roomed house at the edge of the desert in which Ignacio Buitimea lived during the 1960s was almost certainly one of these.] Accordingly, because we don’t know Ignacio Buitimea’s and Miranda de la Cerda y Jiménez’ real names, it may be difficult, perhaps impossible, to find admissible evidence in local folk memory and/or in public records to prove that these two people were real people, and not simply fictional characters who have been created in order to prove a point.