The Chicken and the Egg

It took me almost two years of living in Oaxaca to find him.

In a city that sells limpias and temazcales in every tourist trap and expat Facebook group, I have spent enough time in Latin America to know the real ones don’t advertise. You have to know the right people from the villages, and they have to feel like they know you. My Mixe ayudante who has helped me in more ways than I can express had to witness me live my one-year master-plant dieta process day in and day out — isolated, at home, without TV, movies, or books, taking the same ascetic meals since last April — before she broke out the goods.

When the curandero’s wife first ushered us in to see him after we arrived at their humble home outside the city, the room where he was waiting appeared chaotic, yet respectably shamanic, its cement walls painted burnt adobe-red. He was pensively seated at a table covered in various bottles, and behind him loomed a large altar made of stone, large irregular slabs of tree trunks, and wooden carvings, with a confusion of melted wax splattered on the floor.

This was Oaxaca, real Oaxaca, where no tourists go, unglamorous and definitely not Hollywood. It is where life is unstylized — only survived — and the colonization of the past five centuries isn’t distilled to quaint architecture, but the post-apocalyptic remnants of genocide.

Again and again, the history and healing of Latin America have proven to be quite another thing than my curated American mind had imagined it. Sixteen years ago when I first fell ill, Eastern modalities proved more legible with their sophisticated medical and spiritual texts, translated and annotated, olive branching themselves to me like a tour guide, their offerings ubiquitous throughout Western culture. In Boston I could spit and hit an acupuncturist. And though I held out my tongue, presented my pulsing wrist, and prostrated my body as a dart board, it never quite scratched the itch.

Ever since my diagnosis of scleroderma in 2011, I have not been much for theory. It’s a luxury I could no longer afford after my doctors and their medical literature told me that I was not long for this world. Overnight, I became a steel-eyed pragmatist: it either works or it doesn’t. I live or I die — an excruciating death. Discussions over God and the Devil quickly fell into the narcissism of small differences.

“You have to know the right people from the villages, and they have to feel like they know you.”

When top medical professionals collectively shrugged while handing me fentanyl, morphine, and oxycodone as their sole exit strategy, it was time to become my own doctor, or at least my own guinea pig. And so I have been, to my own detriment and miracle, because ultimately, I felt it was unnecessary to die. Call me stubborn.

Moving from the medical systems of Asia to the less documented ones in Mesoamerica to the purely oral ones of South America has given me a way to translate the unbroken lineage that adopted me into the jungle and revealed an unexpected portal into the strata of a secret history: what was lost — and what wasn’t. A sparse offering of scholarly texts about Mexican curanderismo is available throughout the country, though mostly untranslated, yet it is still practiced in small villages throughout the state of Oaxaca, where three tribes have managed to retain some semblance of their originary culture: Zapotecas, Mixtecas, and Mixes.

Their traditions unsurprisingly overlap with Shipibo plant medicine in the Amazonian jungle despite the fact that the traditions in Mexico sit more closely to modernity, mixed with a kind of pagan Catholicism. They share the same diagnoses, from salación (bad luck) to mal aire to mal de ojo (evil eye), which I was already knew intimately. Like most spiritual phenomena, I learned about it after seeing it in a ceremony and having to google my visions afterward. On a moonless night, a Shipibo healer had chanted an enormous and cumbrous eye out of my body, while I watched it levitate to the ceiling and vanish.

My Oaxacan Señor is a young Mestizo man with a small apartment halfway up an impoverished street and a family with a rancho hours away, where his mother and grandparents practice, the ones who taught him. When I first walked into the room, I thought he was blind because his eyes didn’t seem to register my indigenous friend and me standing directly in front of him, but when he held out a well-loved Tarot deck and instructed me to take 11 cards, which I did twice, I realized he saw far more than we did.

Staring at the cards in formation like they were x-rays suspended in a crystal ball, he diagnosed me, quite accurately, describing my medical history. He then wrote down an extensive list that included an assortment of candles, plants, and other items from the market to bring back for my limpia. When I saw the word for live chicken at the end, I knew this wasn’t going to be another fun IG post for the uninitiated.

The root of my autoimmune disease is quite complex in the sacred plant medicine world. Some diseases, like cancer, have purely physical origins according to the Shipibo, and are relatively easy to cure…