A Piece of Nigromante in Boyle Heights

My project conveys the role that individuals' faith in their cultural healing practices plays on their knowledge of the illness and on the actual healing process. More specifically, on how indigenous immigrant communities from Mexico are prone to utilize medical pluralism practices and experience culture-bound syndromes. When individuals migrate they take with them their understanding of disease, their ways to express it, and their ways of finding treatment according to their cultural medical practices. Based on this, I developed a project to explore the medical healing practices of twenty-three year old Claudia Velmontes during her pregnancy. Ms. Velmontes migrated to Boyle Heights ten years ago from a predominantly Zapotec indigenous community in Mexico. She is a good example for studying medical pluralism practices by immigrants in the United States, since Ms. Velmontes requested medical treatment from the biomedical sector in Boyle Heights and from the folk medical sector from her native town in Mexico. Aside from her monthly visits to her physician trained in western medicine, Ms. Velmontes’ practices to ensure a healthy pregnancy included using the services of a midwife, cleansing her mind and body by rubbing eggs throughout her body, and numerous other practices based on cultural beliefs. Ms. Velmontes claims that her upbringing in Veracruz made a profound impact on her world views and her faith in the folk medical sector. The purpose of my project is to research in depth the powerful influence that folk medicine has on the health and world views of individuals that believe in it. Part of a medical anthropologists' focus is to explore the medical pluralist practices employed by individuals in order to find health. Medical pluralism is the incorporation of more than one medical system to obtain health. This means that individuals that resource to medical pluralism adopt at the same time health care practices, diagnosis, treatments, medications, and knowledge to prevent and treat diseases from at least two different medical systems (McElroy and Townsend 2009:334). In this paper I will describe and analyze Ms. Velmontes pluralist approach to obtain health throughout her pregnancy, since she resourced to two different medical systems, which are the biomedical system and the folk medical system. According to scholars McElroy and Townsend it is common for individuals that practice medical pluralism to integrate health care practices from very different medical sectors like the biomedical sector and the folk medical sector (McElroy and Townsend 2009:334). The biomedical sector is characterized by its western scientific practices; the University of Wurzburg Graduate Schools describes biomedicine as the application of science such as biology, chemistry and physics to the diagnosis, care and treatment of patients. On the other hand, the folk medical sector is culturally oriented; the World Health Organization defines folk medicine or traditional medicine as the total domestic knowledge, experiences and practices to obtain and maintain physical and mental health and prevent disease, 1 Espinoza Barajas: Nigromante in Boyle Heights