Continuing on the Journey with Elena, Part Three
I am returning to repair and patch back up what has been left out of my last pieces of work on the ethnography I undertook about Elena Avila, a curandera from El Paso and New Mexico, who made a signficant impact on many lives in the US southwest and beyond, with her contribution to the revival of traditional Meso-American medicines. I say that there is an element of repair, because so much gets lost in the scholarly writing process, including much of the material that we begin with, knowledge that is not deemed acceptable by the academy, or which is authentically edited out by the researcher. I share this in the spirit of honoring every aspect of the work I have done, not just the final This writing project was initially intended as type of descriptive article that would touch on the ways in which she had been an integrator of discourses (medical, scientific, and cultural ones, to name a few), combining my personal experience with her, ethnographic interviews, and a study of her texts, mostly written ones. What you find here is the product of that original effort. Since that time, I have taken the article in a direction that is more directly relevant to therapists and psychoanalysts. That will be published in its new form, separately, in an academic journal. This final section, part three, is a discussion with two traditional healers who trained with Elena and I conclude with an auto-ethnography, inspired by the recommendations in the work of Shawn Wilson, an expert on Indigenous research methodologies. So the sharing of this text is a way of honoring a part of this whole process, which has changed many of the words and perspectives you will find here, in the end. In all of this, I am following what I feel I would have received as advice for how to go through this process, from Elena, the "woman who glows in the dark," had she lived and work with me on this journey.
Virginia Marie Rincon, Apprentice
Can you tell me, first, a bit about who you are? Where are you from? What sort of work do you do? Is there anything else about yourself that you would like to express?
I am an Episcopal Priest who is currently retired in Austin Texas. Although I live in Texas, I continue to be canonically resident in the Episcopal Diocese of Maine. I have a Master in Divinity from the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
I am the first Mexican- American to be ordained in the Episcopal Diocese of Maine. I also planted and founded the first Hispanic Mission church in Maine. In 1999 I founded an organization called TengoVoz/I Have Voice. The mission statement was to empower Latina women through the arts, spirituality and educational formats.
I am also a recipient of the Maine Women’s Fund on leadership development and was awarded the Cesar Chavez award for my work on social justice issues.
It is important to note that activism was and is a big part of my life but at this point in my life, my intention is spiritual activism. I built a small little studio in my back yard in memory of my teacher Elena Avila. Here I offer spiritual respite for those on the journey to a higher consciousness and who are seeking a better understanding of themselves. I use the tools of the spirit and those taught to me by my abuela[1] and my maestra[2] Elena Avila.
How did you take an interest in Curanderismo?
Curanderismo has always been in my life because my grandmother was a curandera. She was originally from Mexico and in the 1940 she and my grandfather settled in Houston, Texas. I lived with my grandmother until I was seven years old and curanderismo was a way of life for my abuela.
It wasn’t unusual for her to take an egg and do a cleansing of my energy from time to time. She used to say, “ you have the gift and you must protect and secure your energy.” It wasn’t until many years later that I was able to understand this offering of my abuela’s.
Who was Elena Avila?
I considered Elena to be my teacher, friend, and comadre. She was someone I could trust with my deepest wounds. I believed that Elena was a true healer because of her ability to see things in my soul that no longer served me. Some would say she knew how to trust her intuition. I agree, but I also came to the conclusion that she had a sixth sense that enabled her to be the curandera that she was. She was so many things and I experienced so many facets of her character in the short time that I knew her. In her poem " A Woman Who Glows in the Dark," she writes ‘I like living in the middle of either/or.....I am the ember seed in light/dark.’ I often felt that my connection with her was both spiritual and magical. Magical because in the cracking of the egg she removed so much from my body and in terms of spirituality, I always felt a true connection with the whole of the universe whenever she was talking to me or blessing my body.
How did she impact your life? What was it like having her as a teacher in the healing arts?
In 1989, I was diagnosed with an autoimmune disease called Lupus. Therefore, my daily and professional life has always been affected by this fierce and deadly disease. There have been many hospitalizations and near death experiences. In 2006, I was hospitalized because of blockage and stones in my Gallbladder. Three days later after being discharged from the hospital, I was rushed to the hospital dying from a severe complication to the gallbladder surgery. I was exhausted, and weak. I felt an enormous need to reevaluate my life, and my ministry. I went to a book store and as I walked to the section marked ‘alternative/holistic medicine’, a book literally fell off the shelf. It was ‘Woman Who Glows In The Dark’ by Elena Avila. I read that book in a day in a half and my life changed forever. I searched for her on the internet and eventually I found her. We spoke briefly on the phone and arranged for a visit to her home. I still remember her saying, “I am not looking for any apprentice or students but I will talk to you. I am intrigued by the fact that you are a priest looking for a curandera.” My visit was scheduled and she gave me instruction on what to bring: a white candle, a picture of myself and some flowers. We were to meet for an hour; we met for four hours, a life changing experience that also began an incredibly beautiful and wonderful friendship. That afternoon in our first meeting she officially made me an apprentice acknowledging that this was not in the plan. I studied with her until her death in 2011.
I see Elena as a great figure of in-betweeness. She was trained in modern medicine and psychology, especially the psychology of sexual abuse and yet her main passion seemed to have been curanderismo and incorporating traditional forms of healing with modern western medicine.
Would you agree with this description? Why or why not?
I would agree with your statement on her in-betweeness. This beautiful and powerful curandera was able to heal places in my soul because of her ability to be real, genuine, direct and in-between. She was seriously committed to what curanderas call la medicina sagrada. I do believe she had a deep spiritual understanding of how to incorporate the old and the new. She could cure the soul with spirit knowledge and at the same time have a complete understanding of the psychological interlays of western medicine.
Is there anything else you could or would like to add about who you saw Elena to be?
I want to learn all that I can about curanderismo. I believe it is an old medicine that can especially bring enormous healing for those suffering trauma, depression and autoimmune diseases.
Selma Sroka, Apprentice
Can you tell me a bit about who you are? Where are you from? What sort of work do you do? Is there anything else about yourself that you would like to express?
I’m a Family Physician in MN. I work in our county hospital in the inner city of Minneapolis, which serves as the safety net for immigrants and the underserved. I practice Integrative Family Medicine and teach Family Medicine residents to think and approach their patient care more holistically.
How did you take an interest in curanderismo? How did you end up learning about it with Elena Avila?
I knew before I started medical school that there was more to healing than conventional, allopathic medicine. One month after completing my residency training, I became involved with a community cultural healing project, where I met a Lakota woman who started to teach me about her cultural ways and philosophy. I went to conferences/workshops with anthropologists like Angeles Arrien and Michael Harner who were teaching indigenous philosophy. I began to see traditional healing as my model for holistic medicine. Then I heard about the Indigenous Healing Conference that was being held in Washington D.C. in 1995, and I went. Elena shined for me as the person/healer at that wonderful conference that I wanted to find a way to study with some day. The seed was planted, and it took about 10 years for me to find a way to make that happen, because we lived so far apart.
Who was Elena Avila?
Elena was very complex and embodied many aspects. My first impression of her was that she was a performance artist, with her poetry and her dramatics. She could take a huge auditorium full of people through the full range of emotions, with tears and laughter, and always bring us back together with healing and hope. She could lead workshops and classes with skill and intuition, leading us together for group and personal healing. We each got something we needed through the experiences at Ghost Ranch in NM and The Ways of Knowing organized by U of MN’s Center for Spirituality and Healing in Minneapolis. She worked with everyone from all cultures and professions. She took a group of us to Mexico, to sacred sites and the four directions. Traveling with her was quite a trip at many levels.
She was a friend and a mother, and she loved her family fiercely. The love and pride glowed in her eyes when she would share photos of them or share stories.
She worked with Dr. Cheo Torres and others to initiate the annual course at UNM called Curanderismo: Traditional Healing Without Borders, which has grown from 12 students the first year to 200+ students every year. She was a catalyst and a master of creativity. Elena was honest about her own struggles and never claimed to be perfect or put up a façade. She could make jokes and laugh the hardest at herself and her human imperfections.
How did she impact your life? What was it like having her as a teacher in the healing arts?
Elena impacted my life in many ways. Because we lived so far apart the opportunities were patchy, although it did work out that there were many more opportunities in the last couple years of her life, in NM, MN and Mexico. I was able to be there the last two winters that she led the Mending Wings; Building Bridges workshops at Ghost Ranch, NM. In between these workshops, she was diagnosed with kidney cancer and had a nephrectomy. She lost a lot of vital force through that illness, and it was apparent in her teaching and stamina that last year. I learned from all my experiences with her, and the lessons were not all fun and easy. We went through some hard times too.
What I treasure the most are the personal limpias she did for me at her home, in her beautiful healing room. She helped me gain insight about some deep personal issues and supported me to release and become free of these burdens and false beliefs, so that I could move more fully into my life and work. Her teaching was dynamic and the experiential learning in groups was very powerful. Sometimes there was confusion and there were many unspoken rules that were challenging. Sometimes I would struggle to make sense of it all. I know now it was all part of my learning a different paradigm and my own transformational process. Having Elena for a teacher all balanced out to be a very positive, powerful influence in my life and path, and I will always be grateful.
I see Elena as a great figure of in-betweeness. She was trained in modern medicine and psychology, especially the psychology of sexual abuse and yet her main passion seemed to have been curanderismo and incorporating traditional forms of healing with modern western medicine.
Would you agree with this description? Why or why not?
I agree that Elena’s main passion was curanderismo and the sweetness and power of this medicine. Having had the background of being a nurse she knew the language and knew how to communicate with medical professionals, showing her insight and compassion for how hard their work is. She certainly did weave in her psychological background with the platicas, limpias, soul retrievals and the frequent psychodramas that would help move energy through to emotional/spiritual healing. She was a pioneer, an explorer and an ambassador who entered unchartered territory to bridge the gap between health care professionals and traditional healers. She traveled nationally and internationally, sharing this message wherever she went.
Do you have comments on your experiences with Elena from the point of view of a physician, specifically?
She helped me to understand how to work more holistically. She taught me some tools that I have used many times as a physician, and I expect I will be using them the rest of my life. She changed my personal life and my work. I did not have the confidence to claim to be a curandera or a practitioner of traditional healing at that time. She brought our group to the home of Rita Navarette Perez in Mexico a few months before she died, and I realize now that she was offering a teacher, a path to continue on with the study and practice. I have continued to go to the curanderismo course at UNM and study with Rita and become more at home with the medicine. My friend Kim Hart and I will be teaching a Fundamentals of Traditional Healing 9 month course in MN this year, to help some more interested people get started on this path, on Rita’s mandate. As Rita has said “I can’t be everywhere”. We know there needs to be a lot more healers in our community in Minneapolis, as we have a very large immigrant population from Mexico, Central and South America. We will hopefully bring our students to the Curanderismo course at UNM and Rita Navarette Perez and Tonita Gonzales will return here to Minneapolis in the fall to do more intensive work with our community.
Is there anything else you could or would like to add about who you saw Elena to be?
As I move closer to retirement from conventional medicine I plan to move more into this community healing work. Elena taught me some tools and led by example some ways to support healing and connected me to teachers who could lead me further, and a community of friends. Basically, Elena changed my life. In the words of the song from the musical Wicked, because I knew Elena, “I have been changed for good”.
Auto-Ethnography
These interview questions were not initially written with an auto-ethnographic intention. Rather, the idea was to engage with Elena’s personal impact on others, a kind of mirrored biography that would present her to the reader through a number of views. After gathering the material for this piece and writing all of it, I have made the choice to include an interview with myself.
Can you tell me, first, a bit about who you are? Where are you from? What sort of work do you do? Anything else about yourself that you would like to express?
I dedicate my life to the analysis and understanding of culture. That’s a relevant topic for me because of the fact that, in my own life, although I didn’t exactly grow ‘on the border’, I experienced cultural readjustments constantly and still very much do. I was born in the deep south in the US and am a white Anglo-Saxon man. I moved to a large city in Texas, as a boy, was promptly marginalized as a hick and then moved in early adolescence, to Los Angeles. There, everyone was something different and I didn’t seem to particularly stick out amongst Iranian Bahais, the children of Central American migrant workers and Russian Jews. I also had to learn to deal with a tougher culture in which even LA gang warfare could show up on occasion. After that, I did most of my education, through to my PhD in the UK, Spain and the Netherlands. I did an MA in Religion and a BA in Spanish Latin American Studies in England and Spain, then my PhD in the Netherlands In a special program devoted to the study of ritual. While in those countries I also spent much of my time in subcultures of Sufis and Islamic mystics living in western cities (so, often immigrant spaces with West Africans, Mauritians, Turks, locals…). I also spent some time in Israel/Palestine, South Africa and Mexico, although I did not live for a long period in those places. Finally, I came to Turkey to begin my career in ethnography after my PhD, teaching at a new private university and working at the Netherlands Institute in Istanbul. It may sound colorful and fascinating, but anyone who has had a similar experience knows that for a southern boy to make such a journey and end up in the city between two continents, means a lot of cultural observation and adjustment. I have turned these observations, to some degree, into my life’s work. As my work progresses, I am more and more focused on the epistemologies/hermeneutics/fundamental assumptions that we bring to reality and that way that these lie at the root of our cultural differences about things like medicine and traditional healing, or the role of violence and perceptions of violence and conflict in the historical split between the Islamic world and what we now call, the ‘West’.
How did you take an interest in Curanderismo?
Many years ago, while living in London, I somehow managed to pick up a copy of Elena’s book and read it while I was travelling around on the underground, going to class, and looking for student jobs. I took in most of her major points, more or less, and set her work aside until I entered into the field of ritual studies during my doctoral research. At the same time as I was working on my PhD, I was suddenly finding myself waking up in a sweat with strange anxiety attacks in the middle of the night. I remembered Elena and her understanding of the capacity of the wisdom of curanderismo for dealing with all sorts of semi-conscious trauma. I also remembered her adept use of ritual, embodiment and nutrition and, above all, ethno-psychology, to deal with her clients. Having done a fair amount of psychotherapy, I was concerned about going exclusively for talk-therapy.
Who was Elena Avila? How did she impact your life? What was it like having her as a teacher in the healing arts?
Elena was many things: She served the healing processes of others beautifully, but she was also a student of indigenous knowledge, very identified with her role as a mother and grandmother and certainly a performer. She impacted my life not only by helping to ‘grind my pain like corn’ but also by opening up intellectual issues that stayed with me after her death in 2011. These are the issues I present here. After encountering Elena I began to make observations about healers I encountered in places like South Africa and the Middle East, or others involved in curanderismo in the US Southwest and Mexico. Elena would discuss more than just my traumas and give me remedies that would make me confront my psyche to the point of waking up crying for my mother in the middle of the night. She would also share with me her thoughts about anthropology and the postcolonial issues implicit in the work of researchers from outside the community. She may not have always used that sort of lingo, but the stories she shared opened me to an interest in what they scholarly community has said since the time she described, in which Anglo researchers had not yet begun to become conscious of the issues at stake. Sadly, many still are not.
I see Elena as a great figure of in-betweeness. She was trained in modern medicine and psychology, especially the psychology of sexual abuse and yet her main passion seemed to have been curanderismo and incorporating traditional forms of healing with modern western medicine.
Would you agree with this description? Why or why not?
Since this is my own observation, I certainly agree with it. Elena once read to me a poem that she had written about daring to live the contradiction of being Pagan and Christian at the same time, with images of tripping over herself while making the sign of the cross, because of what I think she understood to be something dogmatic, unresolved and unintegrated in my relationship to spirituality or religion. Although she would sometimes express quite agnostic positions, she seemed to really strongly believe that if one lived on the frontera it was necessary find integration, including peace with religion. In that way she, of course, followed in the path of others like Anzaldúa, but also others who made the issue less explicit or who transformed it into fictional and surreal narrative, like Rudolfo Anaya. She went about sharing her concerns about personal integration in many ways.
At the same time, it is true that there is a path to medical anthropology here that is interesting and points toward some of the stickier questions on this topic. Yes, its popular to see traditional and biomedical forms of medicine as compatible and many of the obstacles around this have been overcome since Elena wrote about her struggles in the 1990s, for example. At the same time, her in-betweeness stands as an example of a process that is, indeed, not resolved, as such. While many have entered into a sort of post-modern dialogue about medicine, some are not part of the conversation. While in the field I have learned that there are sangoma (traditional healers) in South Africa who claim to heal HIV and AIDS despite the potential dangers in that. There are Islamic healers in Turkey who abuse schizophrenics and others with mental illness based on the belief that they are possessed. Elena herself gave similar examples. It seems it would certainly be easy to inhabit a more monolithic space than she chose, relying on positivism or going back to a purely traditional view. One could say that her views changed at times or were not always consistent, but that is perhaps what makes her so interesting: the transparency of her process. There was something deeply human about her that made it easy to connect with. After all, corazon cura corazon as she said.
Conclusion
While one could certainly be drawn to a romanticization of Elena Avila, and while the-less-than-perfect elements of Avila’s story have not been excluded, the intention here has been to present some fraction of what a life lived between cultures and discourses can be: at times fractured and painful, at times harmonizing and creatively hybrid. Elena Avila’s life cannot be exhaustively explored here, nor can all of the significant facets in her relationship or the perceptions of her by those who knew her well. The process is only initiated in this piece of research and interviews. What perhaps is sufficient here is that there be an opening of a perspective that looks at curanderismo, not just in a Mexican American context with an eye for immigration issues or for anthropological value, but with a focus on biography as a renewed focus for those interested in the existential and ontological experiences of peoples with a Spanish speaking background in the US. This line of discussion was started with Cisneros, Anzaldúa and others; Here we have the voice of a self-identified Chicana curandera, to add to the mix of articulations in a different form. In this particular case, there are the unique constructions of both wellness (in contemporary and traditional formulations) and identity that have been explored as two inseparable discourses, both by Avila and within this text. This extraction of information and commentary certainly does not in some way intend to present radically new empirical information, so much as to extend the hypothesis of what the experience of the margins has and continues to be for Latino and Chicana Americans in the 21st centuries, but moving into new potential areas for further exploration. Undoubtedly and innovatively, looking at the lives and identities of Mexican-American/Chicana curanderas can be a bridge to many new pieces of work including, but not restricted to, discourse analysis and studies of the effect of postmodernity on the folk medicine of the United States Southwest.
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