The Making of a Curandera Historian: Aurora Levins Morales Centro Journal, Vol

Centro Journal ISSN: 1538-6279 [email protected] The City University of New York Estados Unidos

Garcia, Elizabeth The making of a curandera historian: Aurora Levins Morales Centro Journal, vol. XVII, núm. 1, spring, 2005, pp. 184-201 The City University of New York New York, Estados Unidos

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CENTRO Journal

Volume7 xv1i Number 1 spring 2005

The making of a curandera historian: Aurora Levins Morales

ELIZABETH GARCIA

ABSTRACT

In her essay, “The Historian as Curandera,” Aurora Levins Morales delineates her own historical methodology in order to compensate for the historical erasures of more traditional historical methodologies. She argues that the traumas of oppression suffered by women, people of color, and the poor in the United States are further perpetuated by the invisibility of their experience in historical narratives. A historical narrative that is inclusive of their experiences can heal the traumas of oppression for the oppressed. In this article, I trace Levins Morales’ medicinal historical methodology throughout her literary works, beginning with her contribution to the seminal work, This Bridge Called My Back. I explain her medicinal methodology and analyze the ways in which she documents and narrates the history of Puerto Rican women in prose, poetry, and essays. [Keywords: Aurora Levins Morales, Puerto Rican history, women’s history, Puerto Rican literature, historiography, diaspora]

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Evoking the tradition of Puerto Rican and Latina women’s roles as spiritual and medicinal healers, Levins Morales creates a culturally grounded historical methodology to heal the wounds of historical oppression and silence.1 She documents Puerto Rican women’s experiences, accounting for their cultural hybridity and multiplicity of experiences along race, class, and gender lines.2 Her methodology heals not just the traumas of silence, exclusion, and marginalization but also the burdens of disconnection and division by illustrating the fluidity of Puerto Rican identity, documenting the multifaceted experience of being Puerto Rican from various racial, class, and gender perspectives. Levins Morales’ concerns with histories of the oppressed and in particular that of Puerto Rican women from both the island and the mainland can be traced to her earliest writings, beginning with her contributions to the groundbreaking anthology This Bridge Called My Back (1983). In this paper I will explain her “medicinal history” methods and trace the making of this curandera historian throughout her literary works. In my analysis I employ Tey Diana Rebolledo’s (1990) approach to literary criticism, where the theories used to critique the work are taken from the texts themselves.3 In this manner I also apply the curandera historian’s methods, validating the knowledge that is experienced and felt. As Levins Morales states, “In the market place of ideas, we are pushed toward the supermarket chains that are replacing the tiny rural Levins Morales colmado…” (Levins Morales 1998b: 67). I therefore, shop in Levins Morales’ own beganAurora graduate school and therapy within two weeks of each other. In her collection of intellectual colmado for my theoretical grounding in this analysis of her work. essays, Medicine Stories: History, Culture, and the Politics of Integrity (1998b), she explains that while she was digging through the histories of Puerto Rican women for her dissertation The curandera handbook work, she simultaneously dug through her own personal experiences of abuse and Levins Morales provides what she calls a “curandera handbook,” which lists fifteen subsequent trauma. This led her to find commonalities between personal abuse at the steps the curandera historian must follow in order to produce a medicinal history. hands of individual victimizers and the collective abuse of oppression at the hands of These can be condensed into five key areas, which appear repeatedly throughout a racist, sexist, and classist society. As a result she creates a unique brand of historical her work: (a) giving agency and voice; (b) questioning and challenging definitions of methodology that serves to document and heal the traumas of historical oppression and historical evidence; (c) showing multiple historical perspectives; (d) local and global silence. Through this methodology she (re)defines the role of Puerto Rican historians, contextualizing; and (e) crossing borders. First, she is mostly concerned with giving in particular, not only to document the consistently silenced history of Puerto Ricans in agency and voice to those who have been historically silenced. This requires “telling the United States, but also to create narratives that are healing. untold or undertold stories” (Levins Morales 1998b: 26), particularly those of women. The experiences of Puerto Ricans in the United States, although researched Her goal here is to empower these women, who at times have been portrayed as and documented by Puerto Rican scholars, continue to be absent from most larger merely victims. Throughout her work she illustrates and asserts the everyday ways historical narratives of the nation. Levins Morales argues that this continued in which Puerto Rican women empower themselves. silencing of Puerto Rican history further perpetuates the oppression of Puerto Creating a healing history requires that the curandera historian question and Ricans in this country. As a response to the particular invisibility of Puerto Rican challenge definitions of historical evidence. She does this by using alternative sources women’s experiences, she creates an alternative way of doing history that gives voice to written documentation, relying on oral histories, myths, and stories. Yet there to the historical experience of these women and heals what she claims are the are still those moments where very little evidence, whether traditional or alternative, consequent traumas of such silencing. Using Judith Herman’s (1997) work on trauma is available on the history of Puerto Rican women. In these cases, the curandera and recovery, she argues that the perpetrators of both personal and collective abuse historian must make these absences and gaps visible in her narrative, instead of have similar characteristics. In the same manner that perpetrators of sexual abuse simply excluding the experiences of these women. One technique Levins Morales disempower their victims, threatening them with further violence should they report suggests is using “what if” questions. For example, she discusses the story of the their abuse, U.S. institutions, as perpetrators of collective abuse, similarly Taína cacica Guanina, whose life story resembles that of Pocahontas. She falls in love disempower their subjects by silencing the historical experiences of those they with a colonizer and dies beside him after her people kill him in battle. “The two marginalize. One clear example appears throughout the various history textbooks, are buried side by side and the lilies of Spain entwine with the wildflowers of Puerto which ignore or minimize the significance of the history of people of color and Rico upon their graves” (Levins Morales 1998b: 29). Levins Morales wonders what women. In his study, James Loewen (1995) has analyzed history textbooks and has was most likely to have happened given the historical context of Guanina’s time demonstrated how the narratives told through these texts about national history period. Levins Morales asks what would the story be if we assume that Guanina was repeatedly exclude and marginalize the experiences of women and people of color. not a naive woman and her liaison with the colonizer was intelligent and strategic. Levins Morales, therefore, (re)defines the role of the historian as a healer or curandera. Levins Morales’ reinterpretation “proposes another possible set of motives and

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understandings that could explain the known facts of her life and death and leave (i.e. mainstream culture and their own various cultures) and find ways to us with a sense of her dignity and purpose” (1998b: 29). function in all of these. Another way of building this capability of crossing The third key element to the curandera historical methodology is to show the borders into the medicinal historians’ narrative is to make sure that the multiple perspectives and angles to particular historical experiences. In addition narrative is accessible to large audiences. to addressing the multiple racial, class, and gender experiences of Puerto Ricans, illustrating a multifaceted Puerto Rican history also means showing the various sides If the purpose of medicinal history is to transform the way or perspectives of a particular historical event. For instance, although represen- we see ourselves historically, to change our sense of what’s tations of Puerto Rican militant resistance, particularly through historical figures possible, then making history available to those who need such as Pedro Albizu Campos, are significant to the history of Puerto Ricans both on the island and the mainland, one should be wary of romanticizing these movements. it most is not a separate process from the researching and For although there is the leftist and perhaps politically correct perspective of the interpreting. The task of the curandera historian includes independence movement, there are also other sides to the history of Puerto Rico’s delivery. To do exciting, empowering research and leave it in status. “Stories of accommodation, collaboration and outright defeat are just as academic journals and university libraries is like manufacturing important because they give us ways to understand our position unaffordable medicines for deadly diseases. (Levins Morales 1998b: 37) as caused rather than just existing” (Levins Morales 1998b: 31). Another way of illustrating various historical perspectives is to reveal hidden power relations. For instance, “Puerto Rican liberal feminists of the late 19th century, all those ‘firsts’ The role of the curandera historian is not just to heal others but also to heal in the arts and education, came primarily from an hacendado class made affluent herself. So an additional aspect of crossing borders and making the work accessible is by the slave-produced profits of the sugar industry” (Levins Morales 1998b: 31). to personalize the historical narrative. This means not just naming individuals but Levins Morales has also made it a point to show connections between Puerto also including her own individual voice and experience as part of the collective. Ricans and their experiences and other peoples both locally and globally, by The curandera historian, therefore, is a socially committed one, who uses “history, contextualizing Puerto Rican history more broadly. As a Jewish-Puerto Rican not so much to document the past as to restore to the dehistoricized a sense of woman, she consistently makes connections between Jewish and Puerto Rican identity and possibility” (Levins Morales 1998b: 24). In essence, Levins Morales is historical experiences. She also illustrates the ways that race, class, and gender posing a challenging (re)definition of Puerto Rican historiography where our roles relate Puerto Ricans to other ethnic/racial groups in the United States and in other as historians are not just to document the history of Puerto Ricans, but also to locations globally. “The fact that General Nelson Miles, who led the U.S. invasion create narratives that heal the traumatic effects of historical oppression and silence. of Puerto Rico in 1898, was also the most prominent military commander of the wars against the Plains Indians is not just biographical information about Miles’ The firth of the curandera historian career. It connects the stories of peoples affected by U.S. expansion from Puerto The origins of Aurora Levins Morales’ “medicinal history” can be traced to her Rico to the Dakotas, from Idaho and Arizona to Hawaii and the Philippines” contributing piece “And Even Fidel Can’t Change That…,” published in the anthology 4 (Levins Morales 1998:b 36). This also requires contextualizing historical figures This Bridge Called My Back. This collection arose from a need felt by women of color such as Pedro Albizu Campos and Luis Muñoz Marín within a larger historical to give voice to their experiences as historical and multiply identified subjects. framework. “Just as medicinal history must restore individuality to anonymous “This Bridge documents particular rites of passage. Coming of age and coming to masses of people, it must also restore social context to individuals singled out as terms with community—race, group, class, gender, self—its expectations, supports the actors of history” (Levins Morales 1998b: 35). Through such contextualization and lessons. And coming to grips with its perversions—racism, prejudice, elitism, we heal the divisions and silences that focusing on national heroes produces. misogyny, homophobia, and murder”(Cade Bambara 1983: vii). The contributors used In this manner, the many Puerto Ricans who were instrumental in the everyday creative methods of voicing the many concerns and issues that had been brewing for practices and/or support of the ideas and movements embodied by such historical so many years. In this collection are poems, essays, letters, and dialogues in which figures can also come to the fore. women of color address their anger and frustration at the historical invisibility of Finally, the curandera historian is concerned with crossing multiple their experiences. They speak about the agonies as well as pleasures involved in borders. Related to the fourth point of contextualizing and making negotiating and navigating one’s identity through the axis of race, class, gender, connections, this fifth and final component of the curandera handbook and sexuality. Their concerns shape many of the methodologies listed in the requires that we cross racial, classed, and gendered borders so that Puerto curandera historian’s handbook. They center women and focus on untold stories. Ricans can also gain a better understanding of their multifaceted experiences They challenge traditional notions of what is historical evidence through subjective and heal some of the divisions caused by these differences. Crossing borders accounts of their experiences. And they make their work readable and accessible to also means crossing those geographical borders as well, where we can see those a wide audience. connections between Puerto Ricans and Africans, Latin Americans, Asians, and The writings in This Bridge Called My Back were also intended to heal the damage Europeans. María Lugones has defined this kind of border crossing as “‘world’- done by sexist, racist, homophobic, and classist oppressions. The contributors, travelling,” where women of color are able to constantly shift between “worlds” in particular, address white women and the Anglo-American dominated women’s

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movement for its exclusion of their experiences. The rejection many of them experi- her Puerto Rican peers have endured. “The junkies could be my younger brothers. enced by women in a movement based only on “sisterhood” or gender further con- The prisoners could be them. I could be the prostitute, the welfare mother, the sister tributed to the societal traumas they had suffered as women of color. They are therefore and lover of junkies, the child of alcoholics. There is nothing but circumstance and rejecting their usual role as the bridge between white women and women of color and good English…between me and that life” (Levins Morales 1983: 55). Any slight change are instead reclaiming a bridge back to themselves, as expressed in “The Bridge Poem” of path or circumstance such as her mother marrying someone other than her by Donna Kate Rushin, “I must be the bridge to nowhere/But my true self/and then/ middle-class Jewish father, could have greatly affected her own race, class, and I will be useful” and, therefore, healed of racist and classist trauma (1983: xxii). gendered experience. Because she sees how much of her fate as a Puerto Rican In her earlier works such as “And Even Fidel Can’t Change That…,” her woman is related to circumstance and chance, she is able to recognize herself in the contribution to This Bridge Called My Back, Levins Morales first addresses the healing experiences of Puerto Ricans such as her Nuyorican female relatives or Piri Thomas of her divided self along racial, class, and gendered lines. However, throughout these and connect her past to theirs. “Behind me stands my grandmother. Behind me lie works we can see evidence of her application of some of the curandera historian’s the mean streets. Behind me my little brother is nothing but skin and skeleton” methods. In “And Even Fidel Can’t Change That…,” she begins by addressing the (Levins Morales 1983: 55). Through this written piece she practices facing those distance that she feels from Nuyoricans. She describes the aspects that separate her points of terror and denial and sees the ultimate connections of all of her various from her Nuyorican family history as her “points of terror, points of denial” (Levins parts, linking her past to a broader Puerto Rican community. She further applies the Morales 1983: 54). However, as she goes along she identifies how race, class, and curandera historian’s tools as she makes connections and contextualizes the multiple gender are more specifically those “points” that separate her, as a middle-class, experiences of Puerto Ricans in the United States. light-skinned Puerto Rican-Jew who was born and raised until the age of thirteen on At the end she returns to the issue of gender focusing primarily on the relationship the island, from the rest of her Puerto Rican past. “Where I grew up, I fought battles between mothers and daughters. She argues that one way in which to begin to heal is to prove I was Puerto Rican with the kids who called me ‘Americanita,’ but I stayed to repair the relationships between mothers and daughters, where not only mothers on the safe side of that line: Caribbean island, not Portah Ricah; exotic tropical can change the experiences of the next generation of women by teaching their past, blossom, not spic—living halfway in the skin and separating myself from the dark, but can also alter the messages the younger generation receives about their infinite bad city kids in Nueva York” (Levins Morales 1983: 53). possibilities as “‘world’-travelers.” She proclaims at the end, “a revolution capable However, as she goes on to describe those “points of terror, points of denial” of healing our wounds. If we’re the ones who can imagine it, if we’re the ones who she begins to find connections between their differences. The Nuyorican women in dream about it, if we’re the ones who need it most, then no one else can do it.... her family and their apparent excess, evident in their loud clothes, heavy make-up, We’re the ones” (Levins Morales 1983: 56). Part of the process of healing and break- and contradictory sex talk, are at first some of those elements that she fears within ing the silence means writing those stories that once distanced her from her own herself. Their contradictory messages about women’s bodies, sexuality, and relations identity. In this preliminary piece she does this not just by addressing the cultural with men—on the one hand, her female relatives point out prospective suitors for her, hybridity and multiplicity of her self, and by extension Puerto Ricans in general, while on the other, they warn her of men’s evil ways—led her to question how, as a but also by invoking her own individual and communal healing; thus she previews feminist, she could claim alliances and connections to these women. Yet, as she what she later names as medicinal history. She uses curandera tools such as giving proclaims, “I love these women for facing up to the ugliness there” (Levins Morales agency and voice to the voiceless, contextualizing and making connections, and as 1983: 54). Although they appeared to be passing on patriarchal ideologies to the a result she crosses borders. By using her skills as a creative writer to document her younger women in the room, through these “bitch sessions” they were able to experiences, she challenges the idea of historical evidence, expanding the definition “pool common knowledge,” creating community for themselves, as well as support to include her own subjective experiences. And finally, she provides a history that is and strategies on how to negotiate what they seemed to accept as the limitations of communal through her own personal voice and experience, producing a personalized their gender (Levins Morales 1983). Here she practices some of the elements of the historical narrative. In her next project, she begins where she left off, picking up on medicinal historian as she gives voice and agency to these otherwise silenced women. her own suggestion about the healing and revolutionary potential of the Even though she cannot claim the experiences of these other Puerto Rican women mother/daughter relationship. in her family as her own, she still recognizes her connection to these women, who belonged to older generations, her ancestors. As she states, “behind me lies my In search of a healing “home” grandmother,” and so these stories are also her grandmother’s stories, part of a Aurora Levins Morales continues her own search for a sense of a healed completed collective Puerto Rican experience and history (Levins Morales 1983: 55). self, in Getting Home Alive (1986), which she co-authored with her mother, Rosario This first realization of connection with multiple Puerto Rican experiences Morales. The text is a testimonial written in prose and poetry, in which the co- spills over into other points of terror and denial across race and class difference. authors bear witness to their collective history across time and place. The collection After reading Piri Thomas’ Down These Mean Streets (1967), which chronicles his includes pieces written by both mother and daughter although the specific writer of sordid street life as a black Puerto Rican man in Harlem in the 1940s and 1950s, each individual piece is not identified within the text. The only marker differentiating she acknowledges that her middle-class background and light skin privileges have the pieces are the nearly identical type of font used for the texts, allowing for a flow afforded her many advantages, and claims that circumstance has basically saved her between mother and daughter’s writing, thinking, and experience—a fluidity and from experiencing first hand the racial discrimination and poverty that so many of experiential continuity which is directly addressed by the authors through their

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representations of raced, classed, and gendered Puerto Rican identities. access to books and an education. She also dedicates the poem to her “great- The text opens with the piece “Wolf” written by Levins Morales.5 She imagines grandfather Abe Sackman/who worked in Bridgeport making nurses’ uniforms/and an encounter with a shape-shifting wolf, symbolic of her true self. “It is changing came home only on weekends, for years” (1986: 215). She engages medicinal tools here shape to protect itself from extinction...”(Levins Morales and Morales 1986: 16). as she shows the connections between her Puerto Rican and Jewish pasts. She also His presence is a warning to the potential dangers that multiple, hybrid beings dedicates the poem to others like Norma, a young child who suffered the such as herself may encounter. In the wolf’s case the danger lurking overhead is consequences of poverty, dying from inadequate health care. Levins Morales extinction; in her case it is erasure from history. The urgent need to avoid this deromanticizes popular notions of “the people” or “the community” as only being erasure or extinction drives her to tell her story. “For their survival and mine and those who live in poverty. the world’s, I must make them see the wolf’s nature. I must tell them this story” (1986: 16). The stories she tells are those that follow in the rest of the text. This is a poem to say Throughout the text the two authors document the dangers of extinction and loss My choosing to suffer gives nothing as they discuss their cultural transformations and migrations from New York City to to Tita and Norma and Angelica the island and back to the mainland for the mother, and from the island to Chicago to California for the daughter. As Benmayor (1989) states, “the authors tangle the and that not to use the tongue, the self-confidence, the training linear view of the immigrant trajectory.” Although their migrations do not follow my privilege bought me the expected linear migration between the island and New York City, they do show is to die again for people who are already dead historical continuity between the island and the mainland and across generations, and who wanted to live (1986: 47). in particular gendered ways. In “Kitchens,” Levins Morales (1986: 37) links her cultural history through her own cooking, to women from the island whom she Instead of holding on to some working-class identity, she acknowledges and represents remembers from her childhood in the town of Indiera: those Puerto Ricans who no longer live in the barrio and who have achieved access through education to a middle-class lifestyle. Yet, she uses her middle-class privilege Mine is a California kitchen, full of fresh vegetables and to give voice and agency to those less fortunate who have not, for example, achieved whole grains, bottled spring water and yogurt in plastic pints, access to publishing houses. She documents their stories along with her own. but when I lift the lid from that big black pot, my kitchen fills In “I am what I am,” Rosario Morales clearly illustrates the multiplicity and with the hands of women who came before me, washing rice, cultural hybridity of Puerto Ricans while contextualizing and connecting her own washing beans, picking through them so deftly, so swiftly, historical experiences locally and globally. She reclaims her position as a subject of that I could never see what the defects were in the beans they United States’ history and challenges hegemonic constructions of history and culture in this country. She states, “I am what I am and I am US American” (Levins Morales threw quickly over one shoulder out the window. and Morales 1986: 138). She had not claimed this part of her identity before because, in the context of United States hegemonic culture, this affirmation would have She uses a specifically gendered space such as the kitchen through which to connect meant a denial of her Puerto Rican heritage. She reclaims her identity as a United her own history to those of other women in her family. As López Springfield (1993) States American along with her Puerto Rican, Caribbean, and Latin American notes, the kitchen and food are both metaphors that represent a space and a tool identities as she “croon[s] sentimental tangos in my sleep and Afro-Cuban beats in used by many women to transfer their culture. But the kitchen is also significant my blood” (Levins Morales and Morales 1986: 138). She continues to challenge “not only because it has been conceived as a traditionally feminine space—the ‘womb’ hegemonic constructions of identity by also claiming her many languages: English, of a feminine culture based on story-telling, female control, and domesticity—but also Spanish, and Spanglish. She also claims all those cultures and histories that shaped because the kitchen is where one brews new concoctions, mixing various ingredients her identity construction including Irish and Jewish, representing those groups with to produce a desirable blend” (Bost 2000: 201) or healing potion. As a curandera whom early migrant Puerto Ricans shared neighborhoods in the 1930s and 1940s. historian in the making, she also brews in her pot healing recipes mixing together She makes no apologies for a hybridity that avoids easy compartmentalization into the ingredients of Puerto Rican women’s lives with her medicinal tools. neat and essentialist labels such as Latino, Hispanic, or even Nuyorican. As she ends In the “Class Poem” Levins Morales once again addresses her class difference, her piece, “I am what I am. Take it or Leave me alone” (1986: 139). but here she takes ownership of her class-based identity as a middle-class Puerto In “The Ending Poem,” the two authors bring together the many elements of the Rican woman. She therefore critiques those who define Puerto Rican identity in medicinal historian continuing to make those necessary historical contextualizations essentialist terms, where one must be from “the barrio” and of the working class in through their poetically personalized historical narrative. The authors clearly depict order to be considered authentically Puerto Rican. She embraces her middle-class the multiplicity they are claiming as their historical and cultural identity. They identity as a homage to her ancestors who struggled so that her generation could reiterate their different migrant trajectories as they claim geographical identifications have a better chance at a more comfortable life. She dedicates the poem to the with Puerto Rico, New York, and California. They position Puerto Rican history in a hunger endured by her mother not only physically but intellectually, not having easy broader global context as they define themselves as Caribe a and also Latino American,

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“rooted in the history of my continent” (1986: 212). They reclaim their racial hybridity treats historical erasure and hegemony as diseases that a curandera historian can heal composed of African, European, and Taino descent, further contextualizing in the through her “home-grown” herbal history. For instance, the preface to the text is larger global history of conquest and diasporic displacement. They also centralize entitled “Yerba Buena.” “Its common name ‘witch’, refers to its resistance to even women in their narrative. “I am a child of many mothers./They have kept it all the most cruel treatment that can be inflicted on it” (Levins Morales 1998a: xxiii). going/All the civilizations erected on their backs. All the dinner parties given with The histories that she portrays in the rest of the text demonstrate the strength and their labor” (1986: 213). As they close the poem and their hybrid text they claim their resistance of Puerto Rican women and their ancestors, just like yerba buena. “newness,” a direct result of the global history they portray. “We are new…born at Keeping to the tenets of a curandera historian, Levins Morales incorporates her a crossroads” (1986: 213). However, their hybridity is not fragmentary or divisive. own personal history into the text. While writing the narrative she engages in two They refuse to choose a particular side or to melt into the hegemonic cultural pot. tasks: “digging up the histories of Puerto Rican and related women and their Empowered in their multiplicity, they assert, “And we are whole” (1986: 213). responses to the often brutal conditions of their lives; and recovering the buried “Getting home alive” means surviving the many barriers and struggles en route memories of my own experience of, and responses to, brutality” (Levins Morales to this home they have found at the crossroads of their multiplicity.6 1998a: xxv). Following the traditions of Jesús Colón and Bernardo Vega, she writes a communal, collective historical autobiography. Efraín Barradas has discussed the The curandera historian’s healing narratives autobiographical nature of Colón and Vega’s texts, arguing that these sought to Yet it is not until her most recently published works, Remedios (1998a) and Medicine represent a collective “I.” In other words these texts are actually communal Stories (1998b), that Levins Morales names the methodology she has been using in autobiographies as the authors represent not only their individual lives but also that her works all along and directly defines her work as medicinal history. As mentioned of their communities. Yet Levins Morales’ goal is not just to represent the untold earlier, the catalyst for this work was her own personal search for healing from her histories of Puerto Rican women and their communities. Her community also traumatic experiences of sexual abuse. The first part of the collection of essays, includes the larger human race, indicating a universal usefulness of her medicinal Medicine Stories, includes those where she defines and describes the curandera history and methodology. historians’ handbook. The essays that follow continue to address her earlier concerns with the cultural hybridity and multiplicity of the Puerto Rican experience, but more I am moved by an urgent sense that in order to find those paths directly implement the curandera historians’ methods. that lead to the continuation of life on earth, we must come to Her vision of an alternative method of doing history and healing trauma comes understand the nature of these blows: how and why they fell, full circle in her last section, where she offers a sense of wholeness found in the life of the activist. In “Circle Unbroken: The Politics of Inclusion,” she addresses the what was lost, what was hidden away and sacred, and, most of need to commit to justice for everyone, not just the victimized. She believes that part all, what we, the majority of humans, have learned from the of understanding how issues such as race, class, and gender affect those victimized by long process of resisting, surrendering, accommodating, and the oppressions perpetrated along these axes of power is to offer healing to those transforming ourselves so that we could live (Levins Morales 1998a: xxvii). who participate as perpetrators. As she explains, “it is a call for a politics of inclusion that abandons no-one, and begins with those it is hardest for us to think about with Her interests position Puerto Rican women’s history and experiences in a broader compassion—the professional perpetrators of atrocities” (Levins Morales 1998b: 8). global context. She brings this collection to a close, affirming her vision for healing on both a In the introduction, entitled “Revision,” she establishes her own revision of Puerto personal and collective level. This vision led to her creation of what she calls a Rican history by refuting the hegemonic constructions of Puerto Rican historiography “radical history” (Levins Morales 1998b: 20). A medicinal history which has widened from both the island and the mainland. She centralizes women, arguing that “Puerto the possibilities for historiographical narratives, producing empowering imaginations Rico was a women’s country” (Levins Morales 1998a: xxi). In a similar assertive manner of the nation not only for the excluded, but also for those who have blindly accepted she also claims Puerto Rico was always a multiracial society, as well as one where the the exclusions and their subsequent positions of privilege. majority of the people were poor. She immediately repositions the historical lens away Remedios: Stories of Earth and Iron From the History of Puertorrique as, contains an from narratives that have privileged the experiences of those who had access to power in-depth example of a curandera historians’ narrative. Although she continues to (i.e. the Creole elite, the Europeans, and men). Instead, she centralizes the experiences address issues of race, class, and gender, in this text her priorities shift. Whereas of multi-racial, poor, and/or working class women. She establishes a continuity with her before these issues were her primary concern as she strove to heal her multiple earlier works as she defines the particular untold story she here sets out to tell along identities along these axes while indirectly applying her medicinal tools, here her race, class, and gender lines. However, as we move throughout the text it becomes conscious use and goal of presenting a curandera’s history of Puerto Rican women clear how conscious she is about demonstrating the curandera historians’ method. takes center stage. As she explains in the preface, her goal in this text is “to unearth Beginning with the section she calls “Bisabuelas,” or great-grandmothers, the names of women deemed unimportant by the writers of official histories” she employs the first key element of the curandera historian, centralizing women (Levins Morales 1998a: xvii). Interspersed throughout the narratives are short pieces and giving them agency and voice. She begins Puerto Rican women’s history in the where she describes different medicinal herbs and foods that are symbolic of the year —200,000, with the African mother of all humanity. She relies on the healing properties of the narratives that follow those sections. In this manner she mitochondrial DNA research resulting in the “Eve theory,” which argued that all human

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beings have one common female ancestor, living in sub-Saharan Africa 200,000 years She makes “reading” an obvious part of the historian’s task, as she suggests the many ago (Levins Morales 1998a: 3). She continues reclaiming Puerto Rican women’s great- possible readings of the evidence she finds. In this section, she gives examples of the grandmothers throughout the world. “Women of the Yams” refers to the African great- medicinal historian’s methodologies such as self-reflexivity, showing agency, grandmothers. She re-imagines these women’s lives creating place and home around fire, questioning evidence, and making absences visible. and centralizes their key roles as those in charge of finding “medicines in the trees and She also illustrates another one of the methodological rules of the curandera herbs” (Levins Morales 1998a: 5). She establishes her own medicinal role as a historian as historian, evoking power dynamics and not romanticizing historical heroes or heroines. a trait passed on from her female ancestors. “Women of Bread” covers Puerto Rican For instance, she depicts the history of María Bibiana, who was a poet in Puerto women’s Mediterranean female ancestors. She reclaims these European foremothers Rico, in 1833. She first praises her as “the first published poet to speak in a Puerto along with her African and Native foremothers in order to heal the wounds of self-hatred. Rican voice, a criolla voice” (Levins Morales 1998a: 149). However, she also illustrates “How do we love what is pale-skinned in us? Listen, daughters of Spain, inheritors of her privilege as a slaveholding woman. “Sitting at her desk, she reaches absently for ancient Europe: once there was a time before war. Once upon a time, it was Europe that the cup of coffee handed to her by her slave and never sees the woman’s shadow fall, was free and flowering, Europe that was indigenous, Europe where women were honored, leaving no trace, across the page” (Levins Morales 1998a: 150). Although she is one nature respected, the hoop unbroken” (Levins Morales 1998a: 10) Finally, the protagonists of the first poets to write as a Puerto Rican woman, the experiences of her slave of “Women of the Yuca” are the native female ancestors of the Americas. Here we see women are not part of her imaginary, and hence remain in the shadows. how the author establishes continuity across time, in the piece “City Girls-Teotihuacan, A clear depiction of personalizing historical narratives appears in the section Mexico.” She compares the “city girls” of Teotihuacan, their experiences and interests, entitled “Discovery,” which serves as the transition between the historical period with contemporary ones from Los Angeles and New York City. prior to 1492 and the history that ensues as a result of conquest. In this piece she juxtaposes her own personal history of violence and physical conquest with the All you big city girls with hearts that sing to the bustle of history of her Native American female ancestors who also were victims of violence crowds, let me tell you, it didn’t begin in Manhattan, didn’t and oppression as a result of “discovery.” start in L.A. Teotihuacan may not have had subways or Central In the violated places of my body I find the voices of the Park, but you could walk for hours around the rim of that conquered of my island. When I seek their voices among the lake….There were no department stores, but who needed them yellowed manuscripts, I find my own bad dreams. In a time of with all the crafts people’s quarters where you could shop for personal nightmares and hours spent in archives I wrote these obsidian mirrors, jade jewelry, feather garments, and polished words to break both silences and embarked on the work of a beads? (Levins Morales 1998a: 25). people’s historian, a wounded healer. I thank the spirits of the Contemporary metropoli such as New York City and Los Angeles are not the only invaded who accompanied me (Levins Morales 1998a: 55). ones in the world nor have they been the only ones in history. She debunks western In this section she documents the terrors experienced, such as the rape of Native hegemonic notions of “third world” societies and their histories as backward and American women, as well as their agency as she re-imagines the cacique Guanina who, uncivilized. She demonstrates that our present conditions are part of a larger and although remembered as the passive, loving wife of a conqueror, just like Pocahontas, broader context, across space and time, employing the additional elements of “was no ‘maiden.’ She was a woman of rank and influence” (Levins Morales 1998a: 67). contextualization and crossing borders of the curandera historian’s methods. She ties this history of native Puerto Rican women to those of other native women We see an example of how she deals with the issue of questioning accepted forms of of the Americas such as Mexico’s La Malinche. She joins Chicana scholars such as evidence when she addresses the unavailability of documentation of Native American Norma Alarcón in their redefinition of La Malinche, re-imagining her as a shape women’s lives. Instead of perpetuating their silencing by not writing about them, she shifter, part of the snake people who adapt to situations, shedding old skins and documents the absence and self-reflexively discusses the limitations of the historian’s task. growing new ones in order to survive in shifting situations (Levins Morales 1998a: 88–9). Once again, Levins Morales illustrates the historical ties that ground Puerto Here I sit, a storyteller looking back across places that have Rican women’s history in a larger global context. been altered beyond recognition, looking for the lives of In “1513: Flames-Puerto Rico,” she continues to contextualize while personalizing women in a splinter of bone, a single hair, a shard of pottery. her historical narrative as she documents the presence of Jews in Puerto Rico. The bone suggests the graceful movements of an arm, the hair Specifically, she documents the repression of Jews in Christian Puerto Rico, where a the sound of someone breathing in their sleep, the shard the woman and her brother by the name of Morales were hung from a cross on the wall curve of a vanished bowl. But perhaps the arm was clenched in and whipped when they were suspected of being secret Jews. “No one remembers her name or the exact date of her death. Only that under torture she confessed what they anger, the hair shaved from an enemy’s head, the shard from a asked her to confess” (Levins Morales 1998a: 101). In a chilling connection between chamber pot (Levins Morales 1998a: 34). past and present she illustrates why we must remember those who came before us.

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“I am a Jew…. If I had been there, if someone had told on me, I would have burned. which demand that she include herself within the (his)stories. Levins Morales uses You would never have known my name” (Levins Morales 1998a: 102). She points to the educational tools her middle-class privilege has made available to her, to create a our own vulnerability to the dangers of historical erasure. If we do not actively historical methodology that gives agency and voice to those who have been oppressed, participate in documenting our own experiences and bear witness to the terrors and suffering the traumatic erasure and silencing of historical narratives. With Remedios atrocities of our own lifetime, these too can be erased by those who hold the power she puts the tools of her curandera medicinal bag to use and demonstrates the rich to dictate what constitutes national history. historical narrative created by using her medicinal historian’s methods. In the last piece, “1954: Transitions,” Levins Morales celebrates her own births, The journey of the curandera historian however is endless, as silences, exclusions, both physical and intellectual, resisting those who have tried to stop these, telling her and outright inaccuracies continue to appear in the nation’s historical narratives. “no nascas.” She imagines herself on the other side, on the threshold of birth In the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, Aurora Levins Morales surrounded by her ancestors giving her last minute advice before she embarks on her once again wielded her most essential medicinal tool, her pen, and gave birth to journey, in 1954. “Ancestors crowd around me, giving me advice, shouting last minute “Shema: September 12th, 2001.” In this poem she responds to the many who instructions about life on earth” (Levins Morales 1998a: 205). Yet the piece also wondered “why would anyone want to attack us?,” creating a poetic historical documents other moments of birth. For instance, she experiences re-birth in 1964 narrative to counter the once again inaccurate history the nation’s leaders were creating during a childhood moment of freedom, stealing tangerines with her friend Tita from and disseminating to their constituents. She answers this naive question by showing a neighbor’s yard in Puerto Rico. She is born again in 1988 when she gives birth to the gaps, connections, and continuities between our history and “theirs.” What begins her daughter. Finally, her latest moment of re-birth in 1996 as she comes to the end as a personal journey for self healing as she negotiates her Puerto Rican cultural hybridity of her book and to her self-healing, “pushing myself forward through the narrow opening and multiplicity culminates in a life dedicated to “collect[ing] and retell[ing] people’s carrying all these voices I have called to me, wrapped in my skirts. Carrying my own stories through [her] writing…in order to inspire, empower and organize us toward voice, leaving behind skins that only hamper me now. I am in transition, pushing a world of respect, justice, peace and abundance” (Levins Morales 2003). myself out of myself” (Levins Morales 1998a: 207). This final rebirth is also a collective Just as Aurora Levins Morales has experienced and learned from her multiple one, symbolic of her broader Puerto Rican community’s continuous rebirth into personal and professional rebirths, so now it is time for the field of Puerto Rican history. “We are pushing into history, we are coming out of the corners, we are history to undergo a new awakening. As historians and scholars interested in the gathering our spirits, we are taking up the challenge, we are living in this heartbeat, production of historical narratives that document the often invisible experience we are deciding…venga lo que venga, to be born” (Levins Morales 1998a: 208). of Puerto Ricans, we must engage in crossing borders and ask questions that help The author is not only speaking about those who have already been born but also (re)define and expand our field. Levins Morales’ work suggests that the Puerto those future generations that, as they carry this same ancestral history she has gathered Rican historian has a broader goal and responsibility. Our work is not just to in this text, continue the history of resistance and healing of historical trauma. document the histories of our multi-faceted experiences, a task that in and of itself can be overwhelming and daunting. But perhaps more importantly, and as an Conclusion additional impetus for the continuation of our scholarly work, we are also Aurora Levins Morales’ trajectory as a medicinal historian began with her first piece responsible for creating narratives that are healing for the many Puerto Rican in This Bridge Called My Back, where she began her search for a sense of wholeness. communities of the island and the diaspora. I believe that we must consider not Her use of literary forms as a way of telling and documenting Puerto Rican women’s just what areas of Puerto Rican history need to be “told,” but we must also address history continues in Getting Home Alive as she joins her mother Rosario Morales in issues of historiographical method. A closer look at Levins Morales’ work can gives documenting the hybrid nature of Puerto Rican culture as well as the myriad experi- us rich ways of thinking, theorizing, and “telling” Puerto Rican history. ences of migration and struggle along race, class, and gender lines. Although the primary concerns in these earlier works appear to be the search for “home” and an identity that would encompass her multiple ways of being Puerto Rican, there is evidence that, whether consciously or not, she was already employing curandera methods in her search for healing. In Medicine Stories, after receiving her Ph.D. as a historian, she creates her own empowering methodology steeped in Puerto Rican women’s traditions of oral storytelling and curanderismo. Levins Morales offers historians a new method that both documents the experiences of many who have thus far been excluded from historical narratives of the United States and heals the consequent traumas of these exclusions. She particularly focuses on centering the lives of women, giving agency and voice to them by telling their untold stories. She expands the definition of historical evidence using alternative sources and when even those are non-existent, asking the “what if” questions that make those absences visible. The curandera historian’s work contextualizes and shows local and global continuities, crossing not only geographical and cultural borders, but personal ones as well,

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NOTES Cade Bambara, Toni. 1983. Foreword. In This Bridge Called My Back, eds. Cherrie Moraga 1 Espin (1997) has investigated the “prominence of women healers” in Latino and Gloria Anzaldua, vi–viii. New York: Kitchen Table/Women of Color Press. communities. She argues that the role of the healer allows these women to cross Colón, Jesús. 1961. A Puerto Rican in New York and Other Sketches. New York: Mainstream gendered barriers and not be limited to traditional gender roles. Because their powers are Publishers. perceived as supernatural, healers are able to move beyond some of the gender Espin, Oliva. 1997. Spiritual Power and the Mundane World: Hispanic Female Healers in constraints Latinas endure within their cultures. The role of healer “constitutes, for Urban U.S. Communities. In Latina Realities: Essays on Healing, Migration, and some, the expression of a sense of self that is strong and competent but cannot be fully Sexuality. Boulder: Westview Press. communicated in all spheres of life without breaking cultural norms” (Espin 1997: 162). Thus, Levins Morales’ defining her historical methodology as medicinal and calling the Herman, Judith. 1997. Trauma and Recovery. New York: Basic Books. practitioner of this methodology a curandera is significant both for its cultural grounding Levins Morales, Aurora. 1983. And Even Fidel Can’t Change That…. In This Bridge Called and for its specific gendered qualities. My Back, eds. Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldua, 53–6. New York: Kitchen 2 Lisa Lowe explains that hybridity “refers to the formation of cultural objects and Table/Women of Color Press. practices that are produced by the histories of uneven and unsystematic power ––––––. 1998a. Remedios: Stories of Earth and Iron from the History of Puertorrique as. Boston: relations”(1996: 67). This includes here the uneven power relations that have defined Beacon Press. Puerto Rican history through its various colonial experiences, first with Spain and now with the United States. Multiplicity, Lowe suggests, designates “the ways in which ––––––. 1998b. Medicine Stories: History, Culture and the Politics of Integrity. Cambridge: subjects located within social relations are determined by several different axes of South End Press. power”(67) such as race, class, and gender. Here I invoke her definitions when speaking ––––––. 2003. Shema: September 12, 2001. Latino Promotions. of Puerto Rican experiences as being both culturally hybrid (a result of encounters of http://www.latinopromo.com/speakers/shema.html. 23 August 2003. uneven power relations between Africans, Taínos, Europeans, and Americans on the island and mainland) and multiple as these experiences are defined along race, class, ––––––, and Rosario Morales. 1986. Getting Home Alive. New York: Firebrand Books. and gendered axes of power relations. See Lowe (1996). Loewen, James. 1995. Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook 3 I follow the role of the literary critic suggested by Rebolledo (1990: 349) “to make Got Wrong. New York: The New Press. the writers known” and “remember our literary history”. As she states, “our literature López Springfield, Consuelo. 1993. Mestizaje in the Mother-Daughter Autobiography of and our cultural production does not need legitimization from the academy,…it already Rosario Morales and Aurora Levins Morales. a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 8(2) is legitimate in itself” (354). Applying Levins Morales’ own theories to her work clearly 303–15. demonstrates this point. Immigrant Acts 4 For critical work on This Bridge Called My Back, see Alarcón (1990). Lowe, Lisa. 1996. . Durham: Duke University Press. 5 Although within the individual pieces the name of the author is not identified, Lugones, María. 1990. Playfulness, ‘World’-Travelling, and Loving Perception. In Making they are identified within the table of contents. Face, Making Soul: Haciendo Caras, ed. Gloria Anzaldua, 390–402. San Francisco: 6 For other analyses of Getting Home Alive see: Rojas (1989), Benmayor (1989), Aunt Lute Books. and Wadman (2000). Moraga, Cherrie and Gloria Anzaldua, eds. 1983. This Bridge Called My Back. New York: Kitchen Table/Women of Color Press. REFERENCES Rebolledo, Tey Diana. 1990. The Politics of Poetics: Or, What Am I, a Critic, Doing in Alarcón, Norma. 1983. Chicana’s Feminist Literature: A Re-vision through Malintzín/or This Text Anyhow? In Making Face, Making Soul: Haciendo Caras, ed. Gloria Malintzín: Putting Flesh Back on the Object. In This Bridge Called My Back, eds. Anzaldua, 346–55. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books. Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldua, 182–90. New York: Kitchen Table/Women of Color Press. Rojas, Lourdes. 1989. Latinas at the Crossroads: An Affirmation of Life in Rosario Morales and Aurora Levins Morales’ Getting Home Alive. In Breaking Boundaries: ––––––. 1990. The Theoretical Subject(s) of This Bridge Called My Back and Anglo- Latina Writing and Critical Readings, eds. Asunción Horno-Delgado, Eliana American Feminism. In Making Face, Making Soul: Haciendo Caras, ed. Gloria Ortega, Nina M. Scott, Nancy Saporta Sternback, 166–77. Amherst: University of Anzaldua, 356–69. California: Aunt Lute Books. Massachusetts Press. Andreu Iglesias, César, ed. 1984. Memoirs of Bernardo Vega. New York: Monthly Review Rushin, Donna Kate. 1983. The Bridge Poem. In This Bridge Called My Back, eds. Cherrie Press. Moraga and Gloria Anzaldua, xxi–xxii. New York: Kitchen Table/Women of Barradas, Efraín. 1998. Partes de un todo: ensayos y notas sobre literatura puertorrique a en los Color Press. Estados Unidos. Puerto Rico: Editorial de la Universidad de Puerto Rico. Thomas, Piri. 1967. Down These Mean Streets. New York: Knopf. Benmayor, Rina. 1989. Getting Home Alive: The Politics of Multiple Identity. Wadman, Monika. 2000. Multiculturalism and Nonbelonging: Construction and The Americas Review 17(3/4): 10–7. Collapse of the Multicultural Self in Rosario and Aurora Levins Morales’ Getting Bost, Suzanne. 2000. Transgressing Borders: Puerto Rican and Latina Mestizaje. Home Alive. Lit 11(2): 219–37. MELUS 25(2): 187–211.

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