“YOU HAVE A GHOST ATTACHED TO YOU,” Marisa Santos tells me matter-of-factly. We’re standing in what she calls her “healing casita,” nestled into a quiet neighborhood in Albuquerque’s South Valley, examining an egg she’s cracked into a glass of water. She traces the unusual contours of what looks like a jellyfish taking a nosedive, whitish tendrils streaming upward from a golden yolk.
The egg cleanse, or limpia, is a curandera ritual to remove negative energy and reveal blockages. For the past 20 minutes, Santos has rolled the intact egg all over my body, working it from the top of my head into my armpits and down to the soles of my feet before gently brushing me with carnation blooms and parsley sprigs for purification.
Although this is my first limpia, I’m somehow not surprised to see the egg-white spirit she’s describing. I’ve been emotionally wrestling with the death of someone close to me. The person—a man I knew—died suddenly and violently, Santos tells me. “He’s hanging around because he wants to be sure you’re okay,” she says. It’s not a regular occurrence to have a ghost attached to a person, she adds gently, and if I want to be free of it, she can guide me.
“IT SEEMED THE MORE I KNEW ABOUT PEOPLE THE more I knew about the strange magic hidden in their hearts,” Rudolfo Anaya writes in his 1972 novel Bless Me, Ultima, fiction’s most famous depiction of a New Mexico curandera. Driving away from Santos’s house, I reflect that the deeper I dive into the idea of what contemporary curanderismo looks like, the more significant this line becomes.
“It resonates from the plains of Texas to the deserts, “from the Yucatán Peninsula to the Sangre de Cristo Mountains in southern Colorado—and beyond.” In 2000, Torres began teaching the traditions of the Mexican folk healers he grew up with in South Texas to students at the University of New Mexico, where he served as vice president of student affairs for 25 years. A two-week summer course, Curanderismo: Traditional Medicine Without Borders, has been offered at UNM ever since—the first of its kind at a U.S. university.
