July 3

Don Pedro Jaramillo: Curandero, Shaman, and Folk Saint

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On this day in1907, Don Pedro Jaramillo died at his ranch along Los Olmos Creek in what is now Brooks County, Texas, having spent nearly four decades as the most sought-after healer in the South Texas borderlands. By the time of his death, families were traveling to see him from as far away as New York City and now, more than a century later, pilgrims still leave offerings at his roadside shrine outside Falfurrias, Texas: votive candles, photographs of the sick, handwritten letters of thanks, all to a man Mexican-American communities have never stopped calling el mero jefe—“the real chief,” or, the genuine article, among curanderos.

Jaramillo belongs to a tradition this column has not yet had occasion to explore: curanderismo, the syncretic folk-healing practice of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, and the broader phenomenon of the folk saint—a figure venerated by ordinary believers with the full devotional apparatus of sainthood, entirely outside any official church canonization process. “Don Pedrito,” as he is affectionately known throughout South Texas, is perhaps the most enduring example of both traditions that the borderlands have ever produced…

The Number Nine

Jaramillo was born around 1829 in Guadalajara, Jalisco, Mexico, to parents of Purépecha descent, the indigenous Tarasco people of west-central Mexico, whose own pre-Columbian healing traditions would have surrounded him from childhood, decades before his more famous calling arrived. The story of how that calling came to him has been told and retold across generations of South Texas families, and it remains genuinely strange in its details regardless of how many times it’s repeated: Jaramillo, suffering from a painful nasal ailment, applied mud from the edge of a pool to his own face as a desperate, self-prescribed remedy. He kept at it for three days and, on the third night, he reported hearing a voice tell him that God had given him the power to heal others. The ailment cleared—but the mud treatment left a permanent scar across his nose, a physical mark that would identify him for the rest of his life as a man who had, by his own account, been touched directly by something beyond ordinary medicine. Young Jaramillo tested the gift immediately, prescribing a simple tepid bath to his own employer, who recovered from his own ailment soon after. Word spread the way word spreads in tightly bound rural communities: not through advertisement, but through the accumulating testimony of people who had been sick and were no longer sick. By the time Jaramillo arrived at the Los Olmos ranch near Falfurrias and announced himself plainly as a curandero, the region’s Mexican and Tejano families were more than ready to receive him.

Where many curanderos incorporated elaborate ritual objects, extensive herbal pharmacopeias, and direct invocations of specific saints, Jaramillo’s prescriptions were almost austere by comparison: water, taken internally for a precise number of days; baths, repeated in carefully specified sequences; mud, applied directly to the afflicted area, in direct homage to his own founding miracle. Accounts collected by folklorists in the decades after his death (first published in Spanish in 1934, then translated into English in 1951) consistently describe the centrality of water as both medicine and ritual instrument, treated with the same gravity a more ceremonially elaborate healer might reserve for incense or a saint’s relic.

The number nine recurs throughout his recorded treatments with a consistency that borders on the liturgical: cures to be performed for nine consecutive nights, remedies measured out in quantities of nine. Several surviving accounts insist that patients who altered his instructions even slightly—who stopped a treatment early, or substituted their own judgment for his precise count—failed to recover, while those who followed his prescriptions exactly were restored to full health, occasionally even from paralysis. Whether one reads this as evidence of genuine spiritual potency invested specifically in the number itself, or as the kind of strict-adherence folklore that tends to accumulate around any healer whose reputation depends on consistent, repeatable results, the emphasis on precision is itself worth noting: this was not loose, improvisational folk magic, but a structured practice with exact specifications, taken exactly as seriously as any pharmacist’s prescription.

Clairvoyance and Modern Shamanism

Beyond the cures themselves, the Jaramillo legend carries a consistent thread of clairvoyance. Multiple accounts describe him knowing instinctively when a supplicant was lying about their symptoms, or possessing knowledge of conversations that had taken place entirely outside his presence, the kind of unverifiable but persistently repeated detail that distinguishes a folk saint’s legend from a simple historical biography. Equally persistent, and rather better documented, is his extraordinary generosity: residents of Alice, Texas recalled him purchasing as much as five hundred dollars (an enormous sum in the period) in goods at a single sitting, purely to distribute to the poor. He traveled constantly, accompanied for much of it by a companion named Teofilo Barraza, and his popularity grew large enough that crowds would camp for days along Los Olmos Creek simply awaiting his return from a healing circuit elsewhere in the region.

But his popularity didn’t go unchallenged. As the American Medical Association and the broader apparatus of professionalized medicine consolidated their authority in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Jaramillo drew exactly the kind of institutional scrutiny one would expect of an unlicensed healer commanding the devotion of thousands: both the AMA and the U.S. Post Office investigated him for fraud in the years before his death. The investigations did nothing to diminish his standing among the people he treated, a pattern that would repeat itself across the entire history of curanderismo in the borderlands, where official medical and religious institutions and the lived devotional practice of ordinary believers have rarely moved in step with one another. The curandero tradition itself had emerged from the direct collision of Spanish colonial medicine (a mixture of ancient Greek humoral theory, medieval European herbalism, and Moorish influence carried over from North Africa) with the sophisticated indigenous medical and spiritual systems already in place across Mesoamerica when the Spanish arrived. Catholicism supplied the third layer, providing the theological framework through which a healer’s gift—his don, in the language curanderos themselves use—could be understood as a direct, personal endowment from God, channeled through but never owned by the individual healer.

This is the precise sense in which Jaramillo and his contemporaries practiced what scholars term folk Catholicism: not heterodox belief operating in opposition to the Church, but a devotional layer operating alongside and through it, in which sainthood is conferred by the sustained, accumulated testimony of a believing community rather than by any Vatican process of formal canonization. Jaramillo never claimed sainthood for himself, and the Catholic Church has never recognized him as one. None of that has mattered to the families who have continued visiting his shrine for well over a century.

The Legacy of a Folk Saint

Unlike faith healers of many other traditions, Jaramillo didn’t practice in isolation. Historian Jennifer Koshatka Seman’s study Borderlands Curanderos places him in direct dialogue with his near-exact contemporary, Santa Teresa Urrea—a healer working simultaneously, several hundred miles to the west, across Sonora, El Paso, and eventually the cities of San Francisco and Los Angeles. Urrea, sometimes called the “Mexican Joan of Arc,” combined her healing practice with outright political defiance, preaching a vision of Mexico in which the rural poor were not obligated to obey unjust laws—a combination of gifts that led to her expulsion from Mexico in 1890. Seman’s research frames both healers as something larger than individual eccentrics: living evidence that institutional power—state, church, and the newly professionalizing medical establishment alike—was never the only force capable of building community and identity along the border. A third figure belongs in this same company: El Niño Fidencio, the Mexican folk saint whose own healing missions spread from Roma to Brownsville in the years after Jaramillo’s death, and whose followers, much like Jaramillo’s, understand themselves as devout Roman Catholics practicing devotion to a folk saint simultaneously, without any sense of internal contradiction.

The Texas State Historical Marker dedicated at Jaramillo’s shrine in 1971 was the first in the entire state written bilingually, in English and Spanish—itself a quiet acknowledgment of exactly whose history was being commemorated and for whom. The shrine remains active property today, currently maintained by a curandero named Gonzo Flores, who has described curanderismo in refreshingly contemporary clinical language: “the medicine of the twenty-first century where no one questions the mind-body separation, no one questions the effects of PTSD on the body.”

Over the last century, songs have been written about Jaramillo, as well as historical novel dramatizing his life and legacy. His image still adorns the walls of homes throughout South Texas and across the broader Mexican-American diaspora, painted and cast in plaster alongside the saints the Church does officially recognize—because for the families who have continued visiting Los Olmos Creek for well over a hundred years, there is no real distinction among the saints.

OCCULT READS PRESENTS: DAILY OCCULT REVIEW

Modern Occultist is proud to present today's "Daily Occult Review" from our new ongoing series—as part of the newly-launched Occult Reads... In honor of Don Pedro Jaramillo's legacy and curanderos everywhere...

Bruja Curandera: Spells, Rituals & Ancestor Work from a Mexican Healer & Witch

By Wendy Mata | Llewellyn Worldwide (Coming September 2026)

Wendy Mata identifies herself plainly on the cover and throughout: a fifth-generation bruja curandera, initiated shaman, fire priestess, and founder of “Bruja Power Botanica.” That lineage claim matters, because Bruja Curandera positions itself deliberately apart from the folk-Catholic devotional framework that shaped Jaramillo’s own practice. Several of the book’s advance endorsements continue on that thread: Reverend Laura González’s blurb notes that Mata “establishes an important distinction” early on—that this is “not a manual on Catholicism, faith healing, or devotional practices to specific saints or deities,” but rather a reclamation of ancestral Mexican magic “on its own terms,” apart from religious syncretism altogether.

Whether or not a reader shares Mata’s particular framing of that boundary—almost akin to Chaos Magick—the book’s actual stated content is rich and personally grounded: exercises, spells, and recipes built around what she calls “deprogramming”—unwinding inherited fear, silence, and disconnection from ancestral power—before moving into the spellwork itself. The bilingual structure, accurately threading Spanish vocabulary (la magia, el espíritu, las comunidades) directly into English prose, encourages the reader to assimilate their own notions of occult and spiritual beliefs into a universal wisdom, inviting readers fluent in either language, or both, to feel equally at home. Multiple advance readers single out the chapter on ancestors and abundance as the collection’s emotional center, particularly its call to interrupt inherited generational patterns rather than simply inherit them passively.

At 240 pages and not due until September, this is a title we’ll want to revisit for our readers in the future. For now, the early praise—and Mata’s clear, lived authority as a fifth-generation practitioner—make it one of the more anticipated entries in Llewellyn’s autumn catalog.

Mexican Magic: Brujeria, Spells, and Rituals for All Occasions

By Laura Davila | Red Wheel-Weiser

Where Mata draws a firm line away from folk Catholicism, Laura Davila—a fifth-generation Mexican witch in her own right, and a self-identified bruja de rancho, “ranch witch”—plants her practice directly within it. Davila’s author bio describes her as a longtime practitioner of “ensalmería, hechicería, brujería, and folk Catholicism” in the same breath, without contradiction, which is precisely the devotional architecture this column traced through Jaramillo’s own life: sainthood and sorcery, holy water and herb, operating side by side rather than in competition. Davila’s opening dicho—“some are born with a star, while others are born starry”—sets the book’s tone immediately: luck, in her telling, is real and unevenly distributed by fate, but virtue, purpose, and hard-won skill can still close most of the distance.

Mexican Magic is organized around the specific, urgent intentions any bruja’s clientele actually walks through the door asking for: love, lust, money, protection, gambling luck, safe travel, legal justice, even pregnancy. Cory Hutcheson’s blurb praises the book’s remarkable range, from candle spells and prayers to a properly magical use for a tortilla press, and a spiritually charged recipe for rompope worked into the Navidad calendar—the kind of granular, kitchen-table specificity that separates a genuinely lived tradition from an imported aesthetic. Multiple reviewers also single out Davila’s treatment of the Anima Sola, “the Holy Soul of Purgatory,” as one of the clearest introductions to that widely misunderstood spirit class currently available to English-language readers, a figure who would have been entirely legible to Jaramillo’s own nineteenth-century patients and remains very much alive in Mexican-American devotional practice today. At 224 pages, Mexican Magic has had time to accumulate an unusually deep bench of respected endorsers across the broader Latine occult publishing world, including Atava Garcia Swiecicki, J. Allen Cross, Lorraine Monteagut, suggesting a book that has already found its footing as a reliable working reference rather than a passing trend title. Davila’s own prior volume, Mexican Sorcery, suggests readers drawn to this one will have a second destination waiting once they’ve worked through the first.

Taken together with Jaramillo’s own story, these two books make a useful, almost diagnostic pairing: one practitioner choosing to step outside the Catholic framework her ancestors inherited, the other choosing to stay inside it and work the seam between saint and spirit that curanderos like Don Pedrito occupied for their entire careers. Neither approach is more “authentic” than the other—both, as this week’s look at Los Olmos Creek made plain, are simply different inheritances of the same beautiful, syncretic, endlessly adaptive borderlands tradition.

(Every day, Modern Occultist News will present "This Day in Occult History" and your "Daily Occult Review" and will dive into the birthdays, rituals, breakthroughs, and crucial moments that shaped today's many esoteric traditions. From the Hermetic revival to Witchcraft, from Crowley to cyberspace, we'll bring the best stories and latest trends to today's own modern occultists everywhere.)

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