Healing borders: Transcultural expressions of Mexican-American folk healing

This dissertation examines the transcultural influences of Mexican-American religious and folk healing. While this healing tradition has been and remains most relevant and appealing to parts of the Mexican-American population, I demonstrate that Mexican-American healthways have long provided efficacious healing to diverse groups of people in the United States. This study uses historical documents, newspaper archives, ethnographic accounts, autobiographies, and how-to manuals to develop a nuanced and diachronic account of the hybridizations typical of Mexican-American religious healing from the time of Spanish colonial contact to the present. Durable cultural and religious predispositions create and sustain narratives of healing and wellness that ultimately allow sick people to encounter a return to wholeness. Similar metaphysical predispositions concerning healing and wholeness have long guided the embodied experiences of Anglo-Americans. These predispositions serve to channel the narratives and bodily experiences of participants; this dissertation finds that channels of convergence exist between the predispositions of Mexican-American religious healing and the American metaphysical religious tradition, especially in the American West. To demonstrate this convergence, I explore white interactions with several prominent folk saints active at the turn of the last century as well as more recent transcultural expressions of Mexican-American folk healing within the predominantly white New Age and alternative medicine communities. This project suggests that, even in conflicted contexts of colonialism and racial prejudice, transcultural religious hybridization can and does occur.