This paper will explore the relationship and tensions between curanderismo–a traditional Mexican faith-healing practice–and professional medicine in the Mexico-Texas borderlands over the turn of the century by examining both the Mexican and U.S. government's attempts at regulating healing practices during this period.
This paper will focus on one curandero, Don Pedrito Jaramillo (1829-1907), who crossed the border from Mexico into Texas in the 1880’s and healed ethnic Mexicans on both sides of the border, while also drawing attention from professional medical associations, such as the American Medical Association and professional physicians in Northern Mexico, yet all the while maintaining a reputation as a gifted and benevolent healer among the people living in this borderlands. During his lifetime many of his adherents considered him a “folk saint”–unsanctioned by the Catholic Church yet revered by the people he healed.
This paper asks two questions: why was Don Pedrito Jaramillo such a popular healer among the people, and why did he draw the attention and ire of professional medicine? As scholars William Taylor, Frank Graziano, and Desirée A. Martín have shown, folk saint movements are strongest in places where institutions (government, church, professional medicine) are weak, such as the U.S.-Mexico borderlands at the turn of the twentieth century. Yet, as this paper will show, there was perhaps more in common between curanderismo and biomedicine than professionalizing medicine would acknowledge in this period where official institutions attempted to project their power and dominance into the borderlands.
