#  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.

**\[WP# 98009\]**