The limpia sits at the crossing point of the histories that made greater Mexico. Its Catholic frame is Spanish and medieval: the prayers, the saints, the sign of the cross, and the figure of the gifted healer working with God's permission all crossed with the colonists, along with humoral ideas of hot and cold illness that still organise curandero practice. Its material culture is substantially Indigenous: cleansing sweeps with plants and the ritual use of copal smoke are documented in Mesoamerican sources from the earliest colonial descriptions, and the eagle-eye reading of the egg has analogues in older divinatory technique.
The fusion was made by centuries of practice in villages served thinly by both priest and physician, and it travelled north with migration, so that the borderlands ethnographies of the 1970s and 1980s, above all Trotter and Chavira's Curanderismo, found the limpia flourishing in Texan and Mexican cities alike, practised by healers ranging from grandmothers treating a child's ojo at home to renowned curanderos with waiting rooms. The tradition's relations with its neighbours are pragmatic. The church has oscillated between disapproval of superstition and tolerance of folk piety; medicine, once dismissive, now studies curanderismo under the heading of culturally competent care, since patients commonly use clinic and curandero together; and the healers themselves typically refer serious organic illness to doctors, reserving the limpia for the harms the clinic does not name. It remains a living, open, household practice, and one of the most widely performed purification rites in the Americas.