Curanderismo: Mexican American Folk Healing

Robert T. Trotter II and Juan Antonio Chavira are scholars of medical anthropology, and this University of Georgia Press book is their standard scholarly study of curanderismo, Mexican American folk healing practice, examining its practitioners, methods and place within the communities that use it. Its strength is that it combines academic anthropological method with Chavira's own grounding within the tradition being studied, giving the work both scholarly rigor and genuine access. Its limit is that it documents the practice as observed at the time and place of the authors' fieldwork, so a claim about curanderismo practice in a different region or its more recent evolution needs a more current or geographically matched source.