Representations of curanderismo in Chicana/o texts
My dissertation focuses on representations of curanderismo in Chicana/o texts. A healing tradition, a worldview, a system of beliefs and practices of diverse origins, curanderismo addresses medical, religious, cultural, social and political needs of the Mexican American people on both individual and communal level. In my discussion of literary texts (Rudolfo Anaya’s Bless Me, Ultima, Pat Mora’s selected poems, Cherrie Moraga’s play The Hungry Woman: A Mexican Medea) and of the 2014 academic course on curanderismo at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, which I approach as a cultural text, curanderismo reflects complex, often ambiguous ways of representing Chicana/o search for self-identity, self-affirmation and self-empowerment, growing out of a long history of subjugation and discrimination. In the texts under analysis curanderismo assumes the role of a powerful metaphor of the possibility of bringing together a variety of values, attitudes, concepts and notions with the ultimate aim of celebrating the potential of the Chicana/o self.
Curanderismo Genre Chicana/o literature Mexican American communities U.S.-Mexico borderland Representation Curanderismo Identity Gender Politics Academia