Black vs. White Magic: Curanderismo, Race, and Culture in Eighteenth-Century Mexico

Frank T. Proctor III

Mexican Inquisition records for curanderismo (curing) from the eighteenth century evidence variations within Mexican popular culture based on racial—or, better, cultural—affiliations that remain largely unexplored in the ethnohistory of colonial Mexico. The class-based distinction of elite versus popular "mestizo" culture does not adequately explore such variations within Mexican culture, particularly Afro-Mexican cultural constructions. Whereas white/euro-mestizo curanderismo was immersed in popular Catholicism, Afro-Mexican forms were derived from a variant of Mexican culture fundamentally influenced by Central West African cosmological understandings of magic, illness, and healing even as European and indigenous elements were incorporated into it.

[WP# 98009]