"The Damned: Mexican Curanderas Building Bridges," A Brown Bag Lecture with James Mestaz
Stevenson 3900
12:00 pm
– 1:00 pm
The Brown Bag Lecture Series provides a congenial interdisciplinary forum for the discussion of recent research by HSSA Faculty.
Title: The Damned: Mexican Curanderas Building Bridges
Speaker: James Mestaz, HIST
Utilizing archival documents and oral history interviews from Chiapas, Mexico, this project traces indigenous curanderas’ (herbal remedy healers) ability to bridge their ancient knowledge systems with a modern world that changed as a consequence of development. Irrigation projects in particular have led to deforestation and drought, and indigenous curanderas in the past three decades have scrambled to adapt to the disappearance of flora and fauna they used for cures. Such modification tactics relied on a deep knowledge of Chiapas’s diverse ecological systems and ability to navigate changes in power dynamics which included the appearance of the EZLN (Zapatistas).
» Free to attend
»Open to faculty, staff, students, and public