The Mexican-American Curandera Who Read Souls in Three Languages

There is a tradition in the Rio Grande Valley, in the Texas Hill Country, in northern Mexico, that the modern wellness industry would like to swallow. I want to write something on this site that pushes back against that swallowing — gently, because my grandmother was a gentle woman, but plainly. The tradition is older than the wellness industry. It does not need permission from the wellness industry to exist. It does not, in fact, fit inside it at all.

My grandmother lived seventy-seven years inside this tradition. Her name was Esperanza Beatrice de la Cruz. She was born in 1908 in Saltillo, Coahuila, and crossed up to McAllen, Texas with her family in 1928. She lived in McAllen for the rest of her life. She mended vestments for the Sacred Heart of Mary parish. She raised four children, one of whom was my mother. She was widowed in 1973. She read souls until cancer took her body in 1985.

She was a curandera. The neighbors called her Doña Esperanza and went to her door before they went to the doctor. She would have laughed at the word psychic. She would have rejected, gently but firmly, the word witch. She used the words she was given.

This is what she did. And what she did not. And why I am writing about her on a website my grandmother could not have imagined.

What a curandera was

Curanderismo is the folk healing and spiritual practice of the Mexican and Mexican-American Catholic south. The word curandera (or curandero, for a man) comes from curar, to heal, but it does not mean exactly healer in the modern Western sense. A curandera was the first line of help in her neighborhood for both physical and spiritual ailment.

A child with fever in the night. A young woman whose heart was broken. A young man whose anger was about to break the family. A baby with empacho (a digestive ailment that resists modern medical naming but every Mexican grandmother could spot at twenty paces). A house that the family was certain had something heavy in it. A grief that had stopped passing through the body the way grief is supposed to pass through. The marriage that the priest could not address from the pulpit because the pulpit was not the place. Mal de ojo — the evil eye — when an envious person had looked too long at a child.

For all of this, you went to la curandera before — and sometimes instead of — the doctor or the priest. Not because the doctor and the priest were unwelcome. They had their place, and the curandera respected both. But there were ailments the doctor did not see and there were sorrows the priest, in the formal channel of confession and counsel, was not built to address.

The curandera saw differently. She listened differently. And she had a particular set of practices passed down through women in her family — herbs, prayers, limpias (cleansings), the laying of hands, sometimes the laying of cards.

What she did

My grandmother kept her practice in a single room of her house. There was a small wooden table covered with a white linen cloth. There was a chair on each side of the table. On her side: the worn King James Bible, open. The 1971 Rider-Waite deck. A bowl of dried lavender from her own garden. A small candle in a glass votive. A folded blue wool shawl that she would put across her shoulders when she sat down to read.

When a neighbor came, my grandmother would offer water. Always water first. Then she would listen. Sometimes the listening was the entire reading; the woman in front of her had not been listened to in the right way for so long that the listening alone was the medicine. Sometimes the listening would lead to a few words of pastoral counsel and a hand on the shoulder and a prayer in Spanish. Sometimes — when the trouble was older than this woman, when it had teeth, when it was the chain — my grandmother would take a deep breath, draw the shawl across her shoulders, and lay down three cards.

She read in Spanish, in English, sometimes in the Tex-Mex hybrid that lived in her kitchen. She would not call this trilingual. She would say the language followed the soul in front of her. Some sorrows live in Spanish. Some live in English. Some have to be addressed in both.

The line that she said more than any other, more than any of the prayers, more than any individual reading — and this is a line I have now repeated to thousands of souls — was:

“Niño, esto no es tuyo. Esto vino antes de ti.”

Child, this is not yours. This came before you.

What she did not do

My grandmother was not — and I want to be precise — a New Age teacher. She would not have understood the phrase. She had no use for the word energy outside of the kind of energy that came from a good cup of coffee at six in the morning. She did not speak of vibrations, frequencies, chakras, auras, the universe, or the law of attraction. She would have looked at me with the expression she used for the things she did not understand and then she would have said “está bien, mijito, eso no es nuestro” — that’s fine, my boy, that is not ours.

She was not a witch. She rejected the word firmly. Brujería — witchcraft — was a different thing in her vocabulary, a thing she avoided, a thing she warned other women about. The curandera and the bruja are not the same person; she would explain this carefully if anyone confused them. The curandera prays to the saints, takes the sacraments, and serves Christ. The bruja, in the folk Catholic understanding she carried, did not.

She was not a fortune teller. She would not give you the date of your wedding, the number of your future children, the name of the person you would meet next Tuesday. The cards, she repeated to me until I could not forget, do not predict. They reveal.

She was not a substitute for medicine. She sent women to the doctor all the time. She sent neighbors to the priest. She sent young people to the school counselor at the high school in McAllen when she could see the trouble was clinical depression and not generational pattern. She knew the difference. She held her tradition and she also held the limits of her tradition.

How she fit inside the church

She was at six o’clock mass on Wednesdays and Sundays without fail. She prayed the rosary every morning. She went to confession every fortnight. She would have been horrified at any suggestion that the work she did at her kitchen table in the afternoons was in opposition to the work the priest did at the altar in the morning. They were the same work in two rooms.

The priest at Sacred Heart of Mary knew exactly what she did. They had an understanding that I am told existed in many parishes in the Rio Grande Valley in those decades. The priest did not formally bless the curandera’s work. The priest also did not denounce it. He sent women to her quietly when the pastoral channel was not the right channel, and she sent women to him quietly when the soul work in front of her required the sacrament of confession or the rite of the church.

I am told this is rare in the Catholic Church today. I am told there are dioceses where a faithful Catholic woman who lays cards in her own kitchen would be quietly disciplined. My grandmother lived in a different time and in a different community, and the local arrangement worked because the people in it knew each other and trusted each other across the boundary.

I do not advocate the modern Catholic position on this. I do not have credentials to. I will only say that for seventy-seven years a faithful Catholic woman did this work in a Texas border town, and the parish and the community held her in love and respect, and the women of McAllen lined up at her door before they lined up at the doctor’s, and many of them are alive today because of her.

What the wellness industry is trying to do

The wellness industry of the last twenty years has taken everything it can from this tradition and stripped it of what made it real. They take limpia and call it an energy clearing. They take curandera and brand it as a class you can buy on Instagram for sixty dollars. They take the herbs and the candles and the cards and they sell them in twee little boxes with quartz crystals and crystal-grid manuals. They take the hand on the shoulder, the listening, the “this is not yours, this came before you,” and they leave it on the floor of the warehouse because it does not fit on the shelf.

I am not going to forbid anyone from buying anything they want. I am going to say, plainly, that what my grandmother did was not the wellness industry. It was Catholic. It was Mexican-American. It was specific to a place and a community and a faith. It cost nothing — neighbors brought beans and eggs and a folded dollar bill, and she accepted all of it and turned no one away. It demanded that the curandera live a particular kind of life: chaste in widowhood, faithful at mass, serious in prayer, patient with the dying, present at every Christmas Eve dinner whether she felt like it or not. None of that is in the wellness industry’s box.

When I do this work today, I try to do it the way she did it. I keep the deck on the linen cloth. I keep the Bible on my left. I light the candle. I drape the blue shawl across the chair. I serve souls who come to me from anywhere in the United States, in any state of faith, in any season of their lives — but I do it from inside the lineage. The lineage is not optional. Without the lineage, the work is something else.

Why I am writing about her on a website

Two reasons.

First, because she would want me to. Not the website — she would have been baffled by the website. But the witness. “Cuando te toque a ti, no calles. Habla.” When your turn comes, do not be silent. Speak.

Second, because there are women like her, right now, in small towns in the Rio Grande Valley and the Texas Hill Country and northern Mexico, doing this work in obscurity. Most of them will die without anyone outside their immediate circle knowing what they did. The wellness industry will not write about them. The Catholic Church will not write about them. The mainstream media will not. If I do not write, in this small way, on the page my grandmother could not have imagined, then a tradition older than any of us will keep being slowly forgotten — or worse, slowly rebranded.

Esperanza Beatrice de la Cruz is buried at the Catholic Cemetery in Mission, Texas, twenty minutes from McAllen. There is room next to her, reserved, for those of us in the family who will follow her.

I visit once a year, in October, near the day she died. I bring lavender from her garden, which my mother kept alive, and my sister kept alive after her, and which my niece now tends. I sit beside the headstone for an hour. I do not read cards there. I do not pray out loud. I just listen.

You know what she says to me, every year, without fail.

“Mijo, sigue. Sigue. La cadena no termina sola.”

My boy, keep going. Keep going. The chain does not end on its own.