For Curanderas, Or Healers, The Calling Comes Unbidden

YAKIMA - Priests hear it, politicians hear it, doctors, nurses, artists and musicians hear it.

The call crosses cultures and centuries. For those who listen, they must heed its incessant directions, messages tapped out on their innermost recesses.

So it is for curanderos, the Hispanic folk healers of Mexico, Texas and the dozen or so now in the Yakima Valley. El don, the gift, calls them to practice the art of healing. Not as physician, not as priest, but somewhere between - combining naturalistic, magical and religious elements embracing body, mind, soul and culture.

"I was born with it, and born into it," says Maria, a 56-year-old curandera from the valley. "It's not a very easy life. I know I have to help someone."

The youngest daughter of a family of five girls and two boys, she was the only one of her siblings to have the "sixth sense," or spiritual sensitivity. Her grandmother had the gift as well.

Maria, who practices curanderismo on her own time upon demand, is not her real name. She requested anonymity out of fear of personal and professional censure. Even after 20 years employed in social work, she is concerned that people's misunderstanding about curanderismo will hurt her.

"You do all this for people and they turn around and say you're a witch," she says, sighing. "It's a very heavy cross to bear, but whether I want to or not, I have to."

One day when Maria was a little girl and still living in Texas, a pregnant woman came to see her grandmother. The young mother-to-be was having contractions before her time.

"She was spooked," Maria recalls. "My grandmother filled a pan with water and lots of roses, beautiful fresh roses. She had the pregnant lady make the sign of the cross, one, two and three times over the water and flowers. Then the water was taken off to a crossroads and thrown away, far from the lady. The contractions stopped."

Curanderismo, from the Spanish verb curar, to cure, involves distinctive rituals, seeking health by balancing of body and spirit. Though difficult to define in its scope, some of its theory lies in the Hippocratic doctrine of the four bodily humors: blood, phlegm, choler and melancholia.

The vibrations of the body, as well as inherent qualities of hot and cold, need to be in tune. Not only can food or illness set a body's humors out of synch, but fright or strong emotional experiences can bring on what anthropologists call "folk culture-specific syndromes."

Malpuesto, or hex, mal ojo, or evil eye, or susto, fright sickness, are the most common Hispanic folk illnesses. Patients might feel mentally and physically ill and have range of symptoms ranging from insomnia to fevers, gallstones and sometimes even death. Though most Hispanic country folk will seek out a medical doctor for physical symptoms, at the same time some simultaneously rely upon curanderismo.

When Gilbert Galvan was 17, he sought out a curandero "because I couldn't have sex, you know?"

Galvan, now 23 and program director for KYXE, Radio Centro's AM station, says he asked around and found a curandero in Harrah.

"He used some leaves and some grass and put water on my head and he gave me an `iman,' a magnet," Galvan says. "And it was all right."

Unlike the prescribed curriculums of social workers and physicians, each curandero's training and practice is a little different, says Greg Uberuaga, who wrote his master's thesis in multicultural anthropology on curanderismo. Uberuaga, 34, is a social worker with Child Protective Services in Sunnyside. He is also a curandero.

Uberuaga's intensive study and eventual metamorphosis into a curandero involved an apprenticeship with Don Jesus, a curandero living in the Seattle area. Don Jesus took Uberuaga on his annual pilgrimages to Espinazo, a poor village in northern Mexico totally dedicated to El Nino Fidencio, a folk saint known for his healing. Uberuaga, who grew up in a middle-class family in Poulsbo, is of Basque descent. In the course of researching the Fidencistas - a sect of curanderismo - he wound up living alone in Espinazo for a year.

Despite being a self-proclaimed agnostic and, at first, a doubting Thomas about curanderismo, Uberuaga now is both its educator and practitioner, deeply enchanted by its simplicity and power. He speaks on the subject at health-care seminars around the state, but loves curanderismo most when he goes to someone's home, crucifix in hand, to answer a request for help.

"I don't know exactly why or how it works," he says, "I may never have the answers, but I would be hypocritical to practice it if I didn't believe it."