D e s e r t E x p o s u r e
January 2010
 |
|
In the late 1970s, Silver City physician Gilbert Arizaga remembers, "I was basically the Lone Ranger." Western medicine "was very rigid," he recalls, and few other medical doctors incorporated concepts that followed the indigenous Latino healing system known as curanderismo.
 |
Dr. Gilbert Arizaga bridges two worlds,
as symbolized by the traditional imagery and modern medical equipment
in his Silver City office on Highway 180. |
Conventional health-care providers "did not accept chiropractors or even osteopathic doctors," recalls Arizaga, clad in brown shirt and slacks, running fingers through his mane of salt-and-pepper hair. "Now, of course, it's quite different. You go to UNM Hospital in Albuquerque and they may bring in a medicine man. Lovelace even has a chiropractor on staff."
Grant County's only dermatologist seems pleased that the world has moved in his direction. Mainstream doctors and nurses as well as urban hospitals and clinics are increasingly open to holistic approaches long familiar to Arizaga, a man with an abiding faith in the restorative potential of mind-body-spirit interventions that are sensitive to the unique culture of Spanish-speaking New Mexico.
"These days everyone is interested in herbs, in alternative medicine, in integrative medicine," he notes, without a hint of vindictiveness in his steady, unemotional delivery. Seated comfortably in a windowless chamber that Arizaga calls his "ceremony room," the doctor gestures toward a colorful wall-hanging that depicts a baby being supported by an adult. The decoration is a visual metaphor, he explains, for the importance of intergenerational support in a community.
Beside the 62-year-old doctor is one of four altars that correspond to the cardinal directions. "This is the South," he explains, extending an open hand toward a tableau of iconic objects arranged on a small table. "This is where you find the wounded child within." Arizaga, a mustachioed fellow with a penetrating gaze and air of confidence, elaborates: "The North is the doorway to the ancestors. In the West, that's where we let go of things. In the East, we find new beginnings and strengths."
Such interpretations, he says, are part of a cultural tradition of healing arts that in New Mexico and other Spanish-speaking regions of the Americas are collectively referred to often as curanderismo. The word's root is the Greek cura, meaning "care," and its Spanish ending translates as "the practice of." Currently, curanderismo is composed of elements from Aztec, Greek, Spanish, homeopathic, naturopathic and modern medicine.
This practice of caring, Arizaga maintains, "is a quintessential model for holistic medicine," expressing the inability to separate "spirit, mind, body, peoples [such as a sick person's relatives] and the earth" from the process of treating or preventing disease. This time-tested and culturally honored approach makes use not only of wild herbs and other medicinal plants, but of touch, massage, prayer, meditation, family support, imagery, chanting and singing as well as intuitive sensitivities, ancient sacraments and ritualistic ceremonies. It treats both physical and non-physical manifestations of illness with an emphasis on finding such root causes as past trauma, emotional turmoil or psychosocial imbalance.
Arizaga is a bona fide curandero — male healer — who has taught, written and lectured widely on the subject of traditional New Mexican folk medicine. A member of a Mexico-originated family whose ancestors have lived in Grant County since before it became part of the US in 1848, he wears a Mexican flag bolo tie on the day of our interview. Arizaga grew up in the mining district and graduated from Bayard's Cobre High School in 1965. He went on to earn degrees from Western New Mexico University and the University of New Mexico School of Medicine. His three-year residencies in pediatrics and dermatology were in Tucson at the University of Arizona Medical School. In 1977 he began practicing as a pediatrician in Silver City, switching to dermatology nine years later after noting the links between spirit, emotion and skin disorders. Arizaga is also board-certified in palliative care and serves as medical director for the hospice program of Gila Regional Medical Center.
"My tia [aunt] — Juana Sierra in Hanover — still does curanderismo and she is in her eighties," says Arizaga, outlining the genesis of his interests. "I learned much from her as well as from my aunt in Arizona, who died eight years ago. She also was a well-known curandera. In the past, everybody had someone in the family who would do this. My grandmother taught the generation after her to do [such healing], and my aunts taught those who came after them. It just goes on and on like that."
During his childhood, recalls Arizaga, "everybody used to grow [medicinal plants] in their backyards. Things like peppermint, spearmint and chamomile were commonly used as remedios [remedies]." In nearby mountains and meadows, a host of wild plants were — and still are — used selectively to treat rashes, coughs, colds, flus, aches and many other ailments.
Yet as a young man, Arizaga reflects, curanderismo "was not a direction I chose, it was just there. It was part of me.... And once I emerged from the incarceration of my medical school residency in 1977, I started to integrate that [knowledge] into my pediatric practice. Later I would do presentations in the community about various kinds of common herbs. My work in that arena simply grew over time."
Arizaga's family boasts a bright constellation of health practitioners. His wife, Maria, has a doctorate in psychology from New Mexico State University, where she works in the university's Counseling Center. His eldest daughter, Teresa, is a psychiatrist and medical director of behavioral health services at Silver City's Gila Regional Medical Center. (She also is married to Howie Morales, New Mexico state senator from District 28 and a GRMC administrator.) Arizaga's second-eldest daughter, Maria Elena, is a psychiatrist at GRMC who practiced previously in Albuquerque. Both Maria Elena and Teresa continue to be taught informally by their father, who considers curanderismo "something like folk psychiatry."
All told there are 10 Arizaga children, ranging in age from their teens to thirties. Family members place an emphasis on service and spirituality that connects to their Catholic faith as well as to the precepts of traditional and modern medicine. Gilbert Arizaga, in fact, is often called upon to recite rosaries and preside over memorials for those who have passed on.
"Curanderas and curanderos have an affinity with the spirits," Arizaga once told an interviewer. "There is not the line between the spirit world and our world for those who open themselves spiritually, as there is with most people. Mystics, even the prophets in both the Old and New Testaments, had that awareness."
Curanderismo can be integrated ceremoniously in treatment of the dying through hospice, according to Arizaga, by using candles, prayers, feathers and eggs as well as caregiving rituals. "Or you can just do it in one's mind without going into ceremony. For example, one [hospice] nurse was telling me how difficult it was going to visit one particular family because they were angry at what was happening and had to direct their anger somewhere. It was directed toward the nurse, who as a result felt unsafe in that environment. I told her that in our culture, as you move in this physical environment, you pray for [those distressed] in thought. You hold no negative thoughts, no thoughts of anything sinister.
"Instead you image gold around you and [the family]. Gold is the color of a mother's love. Beyond the gold you image purple, surrounding you and surrounding them. Purple is the color of healing. Then you visualize a blue-white color around you and around them. Blue-white is the color of Jesus, or of the divine. Then you simply rest, with a filter around you and around them. Finally, you ask divine love to come in through you to the family, so they will now feel a higher frequency of energy, which is love. After doing this, the nurse said, 'Wow, this worked for me.' I emphasized that this is not specific to any religion; it is generic energy with which anybody can feel comfortable."
Arizaga sees treatment of bodily discomfort as a doorway for addressing other types of unease. "If hospice assists the family in dealing with physical pain," he says, "that gives the patient and family space to process the healing of social, psychological and spiritual pain."
In his dermatology practice, the doctor continues, "sometimes I'm finding things energetically that happened [to a client] far in the past. The sources of the disturbance or imbalance may have occurred 40 or 50 years ago. They are simply buried in there. A person may feel something and not know why." Arizaga's challenge is to determine how an unresolved issue is manifesting itself through the skin or other part of the body.