Taught, Tested, and Sent: What It Means to Be a Curandero

If you searched for the word "shaman" and found your way here, you are welcome. But the word our traditions use is curandero, and behind that word is a history worth knowing.

What does curandero mean?

Curandero comes from the Spanish curar, to heal. A curandero or curandera is a traditional healer in the Indigenous and mestizo lineages of Mexico, Central America, and the communities that carried these traditions north. The practice as a whole is called curanderismo.

Curanderismo is not one technique. It is a whole way of understanding health: that body, mind, spirit, family, community, and land are woven together, and that illness can come from a break in any of those threads.

Who were the healers before curanderos?

Long before the Spanish word existed, the Nahua peoples had the ticitl, the healer. Ticitl knew plants, bones, births, and prayers. Their knowledge was so deep that in 1552 a Nahua physician named Martín de la Cruz wrote a book of Aztec herbal medicine, translated into Latin by another Nahua scholar, Juan Badiano. Known today as the Badianus Manuscript, it is considered the first book on medicinal plants written in the Americas.

In the same century, the friar Bernardino de Sahagún worked with Nahua elders to record their knowledge in what we now call the Florentine Codex. Among its pages are descriptions of healers, plants, and remedies that were in use when the Spanish arrived.

These records matter because they show something colonial histories often denied: Indigenous medicine was a system of knowledge, not superstition.

How did curanderismo survive?

After the conquest, Indigenous healers were often treated with suspicion. Some were brought before church courts. Many practices were forbidden or forced into hiding. The healers adapted. They prayed to the saints alongside the old forces of earth and sky. They used new plants that arrived on ships. They worked in homes, in villages, and at the edges of towns where no one was watching.

By the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, some curanderos became known across entire regions. Don Pedrito Jaramillo, who lived in South Texas, was sought by thousands of people and received letters from those who could not travel to him. Teresa Urrea, known as the Saint of Cabora, drew crowds in northern Mexico and Arizona. Their stories show how deeply the people trusted this medicine when little else was available to them.

What kinds of curanderos are there?

Curanderismo has always had specialists, and many healers carry more than one gift:

• Yerbera or yerbero

  One who knows the plants.

• Partera 

  The midwife who accompanies birth.

• Sobadora or sobador

  One who heals with the hands.

• Huesera or huesero

  One who works with bones.

• Consejera or consejero

  One who heals through counsel and conversation.

Why not call a curandero a "shaman"?

The word shaman comes from the Evenki language of Siberia, thousands of miles from Mesoamerica. In English it became a catch-all for healers from hundreds of different peoples. The word is familiar, which is why many people search for it. But curanderos generally do not use it for themselves, because it erases the specific languages, lineages, and responsibilities that each tradition carries. A curandero is not a generic spiritual figure. A curandero belongs to a people.

How does someone become a curandero?

Not from books alone, and not from a weekend certificate. In these traditions, knowledge travels from elder to student, in ceremony, through relationships. It comes with correction, with waiting, and with tasks whose meaning becomes clear only later. Above all, it comes with permission. No one appoints themselves. You are taught, you are tested, and if you are trusted, you are sent to serve.

That is why a healer with integrity names their teachers openly. Lineage is not decoration. It is accountability.

How can you recognize integrity in a healer?

A few signs have held true across generations. A healer with integrity names who taught them. They keep closed what is closed. They never ask you to stop your medical care. They promise nothing and pressure no one. And they will tell you honestly when the work is not what you need.

The curandero's first loyalty is not to their own reputation. It is to the medicine, to the elders who carried it, and to the person sitting in front of them.