The University of Arizona Press

September 17, 2026

Curandereando: Sacred Decolonial Healing reclaims curanderismo as a living and revolutionary practice of ancestral wisdom, resilience, and renewal. Blending poetry, Spanglish storytelling, oral histories, and testimonios, this hybrid work illuminates healing as both a sacred tradition and a decolonial act of resistance.

Lani Cupchoy traces curanderismo’s survival under colonial oppression, its adaptations across diasporas, and its vital role in addressing contemporary struggles for ecological balance, cultural survival, and social justice. By centering diverse healers and community voices, it resists folkloric portrayals and instead presents curanderismo as an evolving practice deeply relevant to today’s crises.

Today, we share a special interview with the author, who discusses the meaning of “curandereando,” the history of curanderas, and how the past intersects with the living future of curandera healing.

Tell us about your title, Curandereando.

Curandereando is about healing in motion. I wanted a title that made curanderismo active because, to me, it is not simply a tradition we study or a set of practices someone performs. It is a way of being, relating, caring, remembering, and moving through the world.

I also wanted to demystify curanderismo. When people hear words like curandera or curandero, they sometimes imagine a shaman, a mystic, or even a witch. Curanderismo can certainly include deeply spiritual and ceremonial practices, but it takes many forms. Healing can happen through plant medicine, prayer, limpias, healing circles, altars, meditation, mindfulness, intention, preventative care, or simply knowing how to care for someone. It can be physical, emotional, spiritual, communal—or all of these at once. At its heart, curanderismo recognizes that our well-being is connected to our relationships with ourselves, one another, the earth, and spirit.

Many people may recognize aspects of that philosophy in their own lives. Perhaps they grow herbs, meditate, pray for someone, gather in community, pay attention to their wellness, or still use a remedy taught to them by a parent or grandparent. That does not mean every wellness practice is curanderismo; curanderismo has particular cultural histories and ancestral lineages. But it does remind us that healing does not only happen in extraordinary or mysterious spaces. It can happen in ceremony, and it can happen around the kitchen table.

That is curandereando: healing as something living, something we do. As I write in the book, it is “a way of being. A way of life.”

Your book traces curanderismo through time, describing precolonial curanderas and their persecution during the Spanish Inquisition. How did colonization affect the work of curanderas?

One thing I hope readers take away from the book is that the association between curanderas and witchcraft did not emerge in a vacuum. Colonization helped create it.

Long before European colonization, healers held tremendous knowledge about plants, birth, the body, spirit, land, and community. Colonial authorities often recast Indigenous and African-descended healing practices as superstition, heresy, or witchcraft. Healers were persecuted, ceremonies were suppressed, and ways of knowing that did not conform to Catholic orthodoxy were demonized. Yet there was an incredible contradiction: the same colonial society that condemned curanderas could still depend upon their knowledge and remedies when people became ill.

What fascinates me just as much as that persecution, however, is how curanderas responded. They adapted. A prayer might take on Catholic language while preserving older meanings. An Indigenous deity might appear through the image of a saint. A ceremony might move from a public space into the privacy of a home. Knowledge could be carried quietly through families from one generation to the next. I do not think we should automatically interpret those changes as assimilation. In many instances, adaptation was a strategy of survival and resistance.

Colonization also changed how people understood the spiritual dimensions of healing. Curanderismo is grounded in connection—to the earth, to community, to ancestors, to spirit, and, for some, to a Creator. These relationships can take many forms and do not belong to any single religious tradition. Prayer, intention, ceremony, plant medicine, and relationships with the natural world may exist alongside one another as parts of a much more holistic understanding of healing. Over generations, practitioners have carried these relationships forward in ways shaped by their families, communities, histories, and lived experiences.

So when someone encounters the stereotype of the curandera as a “witch,” I want them to ask: Who taught us to see her that way? Behind that stereotype may have been a healer, a midwife, a caretaker, a keeper of plant knowledge, or a community member carrying practices people had relied upon for generations.

Colonization changed curanderismo, but it did not erase it. The fact that these traditions continue today is itself an extraordinary story of survival.

In the preface to your book, you write that your practice of curanderismo is “rooted in the wisdom of my abuela curanderas, yet continually shaped by the teachings of countless healers from across the world.” Can you tell us about one or two of the people who have influenced you the most?

The healers who have influenced me most are the women closest to me: my mother and my abuelas.

Each carried her own gifts and her own ways of healing. Some of that healing happened quietly within the family—through plants, food, prayer, touch, intention, and knowing how to care for someone. Other practices extended outward into the community. What I understand now is that they did not have to announce themselves as healers before they healed. This knowledge was simply woven into everyday life.

One of my earliest memories is from when I was about two years old. I fell from my bicycle and injured my knee badly enough that it became swollen and difficult to walk on. My mother went into our backyard, gathered aloe vera, arnica, and other herbs she knew, heated them, and gently placed the mixture on my knee. By the next morning, the swelling had subsided and I was walking again.

What I love about that memory is that as a child, I did not think anything unusual had happened. I did not think, My mother is practicing curanderismo. I thought, this is what mothers do.

Only much later did I understand what I had witnessed: knowledge of plants, the body, healing, and care that had traveled across generations. My mother may not have called herself a curandera, but, as I write in the book, “her hands carried the same wisdom passed down through generations.”

In many ways, studying curanderismo did not introduce me to healing. It gave me language for something the women in my family had already taught me. That realization has profoundly shaped both my practice and my scholarship.

Importantly, you identify many “New-Gen” healers and describe their current work. What excites you the most about these approaches?

What excites me most about New-Gen healers is that they remind us that a living tradition is allowed to evolve.

Sometimes we romanticize ancestral practices by imagining that they are only authentic if they remain exactly as they were generations ago. But curanderismo itself tells us otherwise. It survived precisely because people adapted, carried knowledge into new environments, and responded to the needs of their communities.

We see that happening again today. Contemporary healers are cultivating medicinal plants in urban environments, transforming everyday spaces into places of healing, connecting diasporic communities through digital platforms, and bringing healing practices into conversations about migration, environmental justice, activism, and decolonization. Queer and gender-expansive curanderes are also creating and reclaiming practices that make space for identities, chosen families, and communities whose spiritual lives have not always been recognized.

What I find exciting is the question underneath all of these approaches: What does healing require from us now?

That question allows us to honor ancestral knowledge without freezing it in the past. New-Gen healers are not simply preserving traditions; they are in relationship with them. They are asking how inherited knowledge can respond to contemporary bodies, communities, environments, and realities.

Curanderismo has roots, but it also has movement. That is how living traditions survive.

What are you working on now?

I have two forthcoming books, so it has been an exciting and very busy period. Although the projects may initially seem quite different, I see a thread connecting all three books: How does knowledge survive across generations, and what do families and communities do to carry it forward?

My forthcoming academic book, Urban Aloha: Hawaiian Diaspora, Identity, and Belonging in Los Angeles, from the University of Nevada Press, turns toward my Hawaiian ancestry and examines how Hawaiian communities in Los Angeles have created belonging and sustained cultural identity through foodways, festivals, family, oral histories, and other forms of cultural memory. The project is deeply personal to me. My father migrated from Hawaiʻi to Los Angeles and created a sense of Hawaiianness in our home through everything from ʻukulele and hula to the plumeria and ti plants in our yard and the foods we ate together. The book examines what I call a “transgenerational imaginary”—the ways cultural knowledge moves across generations, being preserved but also reimagined as communities adapt to new places.

My other forthcoming book, Abuela Medicine, from FlowerSong Press, brings questions of ancestral knowledge even closer to home. It follows five generations of women in my family and the different forms of healing knowledge they carried. Through family stories, memoir, poetry, photographs, and more than forty-five remedios, I explore how knowledge can move from one generation to another through gardens, food, herbs, prayer, spiritual practice, storytelling, and everyday acts of care.

I also want to be clear that I do not see Curandereando—or any of these books—as the final word on these subjects. Curandereando highlights particular people, practices, histories, and moments. There are countless others. There are healers whose stories have never been documented, family knowledge that has never entered an archive, regional traditions that deserve far greater attention, and communities whose experiences still need to be recorded.

We need more of these stories now more than ever. So I think of Curandereando as a contribution and an opening rather than a final word. My forthcoming books take some of the questions that have long shaped my work—about memory, inheritance, cultural knowledge, and what communities carry forward—in very different directions. There will always be more histories to recover, more elders to listen to, more stories to document, and more knowledge to carry forward. No single book can tell the whole story—and that is precisely why we need many more of them.

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Lani Cupchoy is a public historian, storyteller, artivista, and filmmaker of Chicana, Afro-indígena, Kanaka Maoli, and Chinese heritage. She is an assistant professor of Chicana/o and Latina/o studies at California State University, Los Angeles, specializing in public history, ethnic studies, and Indigenous knowledge. Founder of Pinkjade Creations, she uses film, music, and digital media to amplify testimonios and cultural resilience. Her work bridges scholarship, ancestral healing traditions, and community-engaged storytelling.

September 1, 2026

In September 2024, when we first published Tim Z. Hernandez’s memoir They Call You Back, the author took some time out of his busy schedule to answer a few questions for us. In celebration of the paperback version of this book, we asked him additional questions about his research and writing related to the Los Gatos Canyon plane wreck and his documentary film project.

What inspired you to begin your research into the plane wreck at Los Gatos Canyon?

I was born and raised in the San Joaquin Valley where the incident took place, and I’m the son of migrant farmworkers. As a storyteller I’m always paying attention to the stories that come my way, and I believe i was standing in the right place at the right moment in history, enough to be aware that there was something powerful and moving about this story. 

Why did you start filming your interviews with the families of the victims, as well as recording your own thoughts during the research journey?

I was aware very early on that there was no archive that existed about this piece of history, which meant that I was essentially
creating the archive myself. Therefore, everything I did would become a record of the story. This is the main reason I began
carrying around a camera, audio recorder, and later, a video camera.

Did you always have in the back of your mind that you would make a film, or did that decision come after writing the books?

After a couple of years of doing the research it occurred to me that if I accumulated enough footage and materials, there was potentially a documentary in this down the road. If i could sustain it. And it turns out I could. But I wanted to finish the books first, so I focused on that. But I was always keeping in mind as I went along that I was also collecting footage and audio for a documentary.

How does the film complement the stories in your books, All They Will Call You and They Call You Back?

It’s absolutely complimentary. Whereas the books allow me more room to delve into the details of the people, the history, and the stories, there’s still nothing like seeing the raw human essence with your own eyes that only film can offer. The documentary will bring the people and their stories to life, but the books will contain the deeper narrative behind what you’ll see in the documentary. 

What was the most challenging part about making a film?

The funding is always the most challenging part. And then i’d say finding the right team to help me realize the film. I had spoken with several producers and filmmakers over the years but none felt as invested in the story as I had wanted/ needed them to be, so i remained patient and knew the right people would come into my life eventually.  They since have and we’ve been nonstop ever since. And I have to say, the editing too was a scary process. Cutting 200 hours of footage into a digestible 90 minutes isn’t an easy feat, but our Editor has a ton of experience and he’s handling it masterfully. 

What is the projected release date for the film and where can people watch it—on tour? On PBS? On Netflix?

We’ll be submitting to film festivals first, and if we can’t secure a distributor that way then we have back ups plans. But right now that’s the first goal, submitting and seeing if it gets picked up. We’ll also host screenings in various cities and communities across the country, so the best way to keep updated on all that is through our website: www.alltheywillcallyou.com

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Tim Z. Hernandez is an award-winning author, research scholar, and performer. His books include fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, and he is the recipient of numerous awards, including the American Book Award. His work has been featured in international media, and in 2018 he was recognized by the California Senate for his work locating the victims of the 1948 plane wreck at Los Gatos, which is chronicled in his book, All They Will Call You. Hernandez is an associate professor in the University of Texas at El Paso’s Bilingual Creative Writing program. He is the writer and director of the documentary film All They Will Call You.

August 26, 2026

Moving tenderly across memory, continents, and literary forms, Jacob Shores-Argüello’s tightly woven cross-genre collection, Grief for the Green That Was, evolves a private family bereavement into an exploration of collective ecological grief. Following the death of his mother, the speaker navigates between his Costa Rican heritage and his Oklahoma upbringing, eventually arriving at something like healing on the banks of New Zealand’s Whanganui River—the first river in the world granted legal personhood. 

A book about what we inherit and what we leave behind, both in families and in landscapes, Shores-Argüello examines how climate change affects not just the physical world but also our emotional and spiritual relationships to place.

Today, we share a special interview with the author, getting his insights on the grief we share in the face of climate change, the nature of personhood (or the personhood of nature), and resisting emotional numbness through formal play.

The title of your book speaks to the many aspects of grief you explore: grief as a form of memory, longing, place, love. Did your relationship to grief change in the writing of this book?

The idea of this book is that it takes personal griefs, something I’ve written about extensively before, and uses them as a platform to speak to the grief we all share. In this case, our communal grief of climate change. More and more, it feels like we are getting wiser in our ways of understanding our individual losses, but we rarely know what to do when the loss is at a different scale, sometimes so wide that we have trouble comprehending it.

This book is a first step for me in understanding the need to recast the way I think of community, the way I think of nature. For instance, this book looks at the town in Costa Rica where my mother is from alongside its idea of giving citizenship to pollinators—birds, bees, and trees. It also looks at the idea of extended family while exploring the recognition of legal personhood for the Whanganui River in Aotearoa New Zealand.

Are there other poets (or artists in any genre) whose work on grief, elegy, loss, or environment you see this book in conversation with?

Perhaps Craig Santos Perez’s From Unincorporated Territory [åmot]. My book isn’t as visually experimental as that one is. But I think they both lean on weaving together different forms and materials in order to hold complexity.

Robert Macfarlane’s Is a River Alive? would be good for those interested in the ideas of the rights of nature. That one doesn’t focus on Aotearoa New Zealand specifically, and so it might be a good complement for this book.

I think readers will be interested in the book’s structure, organized into sections that move from the first, to second, to third person. Can you talk about this incremental shift in perspective?

The book moves from first person, to second person, to third person, and back again to first person—now plural. As the book itself is concerned with ideas of personhood, this seemed like a natural fit for its structure.

Each shift let me think through what the “I” means in the face of loss, what it means to step outside of self with that “you,” and how stories usually told in third person might be the best way to remember our connection with both family and the land. And finally, it ends with the hope that comes when disparate selves can come together as a “we.”

The section “Cuando Tienen Frío (Second Person)” unfolds in Aotearoa New Zealand in the unexpected form of a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure narrative. What appealed to you about this form?

I like to put games in my books when I can. I’ve been numbed by my own grief and I know readers can feel this too. And so I wanted them to flip around the pages. I wanted to offer play as variation. One of the lessons I’ve learned is that it is often hard to understand something big without counterpointing it with something smaller.

Of course, the choose-your-own-adventure has a natural multiplicity built into it. More than one thing can be true. That can be a powerful idea in the face of realities that seem so stark.

What are you working on now?

I’ve been working on this project for years. Eventually, I realized that I was making two books. Grief for the Green that Was is the cross-genre part, it looks through the lens of overlap—between poetry, short stories, and the choose-your-own adventure style memoir.

My next project is a continuation of some of the ideas I’ve mentioned. Hopefully, the sustained length of the novel will offer a different canvas for these ideas to continue to breathe. It is a complementary book, one that explores the roots of citizenship itself while adding a throughline that follows the idea of Blue Zones, those places in the world where people live exceptionally long, healthy lives.

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Jacob Shores-Argüello is a Costa Rican American poet and prose writer. His second book, Paraíso, was selected for the inaugural CantoMundo Poetry Prize. He is a 2018–19 Hodder Fellow at Princeton University, a Lannan Literary Fellows for Poetry, and a 2024–25 Rome Prize in Literature winner. His poetry and fiction appear in the New Yorker, Poetry Magazine, the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, and the Oxford American, among others. His work examines borders—between geologies, cultures, and languages—between humanity and the natural world.

May 21, 2026

“Down to Earth, Planet to Plate” podcast host Mary-Charlotte Domandi recently interviewed Andrew Flachs author of Feeding the World as if People Mattered: How Small Farms Produce Value Beyond Yields. Flachs is an associate professor of anthropology at Purdue University, a father of two children, and a semi-retired musician.

Asked about how food became a global industrial commodity, Flachs replied that as an anthropologist, he takes a long view of 10,000 to 20,000 years. He said, “There was a lot of diversity in the past, and even in some places today, where agricultural practices actually increase biodiversity and the capacity of land to sustain life. But there was a big break around the 1300s, 1400s, and 1500s. And that reorganization we can accurately name colonialism and capitalism. This was social, political, and ecological control that is responsible for the long hangover of destructive behaviors and failure of diversity that we see today.”

Listen to the full podcast here, on Spotify, Apple or wherever you find podcasts.

About the book:

Backyard gardens flush with cucumbers, tomatoes, and peppers where bees buzz and chickens scratch. Beyond, a forest filled with blackberries and jewelweed. Inspired by childhood memories of his grandmother’s overflowing backyard garden, author Andrew Flachs has embarked on a multi-continent, decades-long look at agriculture and its value.
 
The dominant view of agriculture has focused only on what we produce. It sees value in terms of capital gains or yield efficiency, masking how our global food system produces tremendous amounts of food commodities while failing to feed people, support rural communities, or enhance ecological well-being. Feeding the World as if People Mattered asks us to look more deeply and more humanely at what we perceive to be most valuable in our agricultural systems.

This book draws on fifteen years of anthropological research, taking readers to fields in South India, Eastern Europe, and North America, where people are already feeding the future amid global change. From these fields, Flachs shows us how a radical rethinking of the value of small farms and farmers is already happening. Bringing together conversations in agriculture, economics, anthropology, and the environmental humanities, Flachs deftly shows how small farms reproduce social and ecological relationships that are the only sustainable path forward.