In Memoriam: Della M. Flusche, 1936-1999

New Mexico Historical Review, 2015

How did you become interested in the history of the Southwest and Latin America? When I was a very young reader, my grandmother gave me a book about Latin America. I recall being fascinated by the idea of Mexico City originally being built on a lake, and as I tried to imagine and investigate how that could be possible, I found the region to be a wonderland that was new and different to a boy from the mountains of western North Carolina. As an undergraduate at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, I read Samuel Shellabarger's 1945 historical novel, Captain from Castile. It is not a great book as historical novels go, but it fired my curiosity and really made me want to know more about the history of Spain and colonial Mexico in the sixteenth century. The book also fueled a lifelong exploration of historical fiction as a way to study and teach history. The main character in the novel is the fictional Pedro de Vargas, a nineteen-year-old soldier in Hernán Cortés's army during the conquest of Tenochtitlan. I find it a curious coincidence that I spent my early career working with a real life Vargas, New Mexico governor Diego de Vargas. I turned my attention to the Southwest in a serious way when I came to UNM [the University of New Mexico] in 1979, largely because Peter Bakewell covered the northern expansion into the Southwest in his class on the history

New Mexico Historical Review, 1984

1997

Chamisa: A Journal of Literary, Performance, and Visual Arts of the Greater Southwest, 2021

Chamisa: A Journal of Literary, Performance, and Visual Arts of the Greater Southwest, 2022

The subject of curanderismo, or healing traditions that emerged as a mixture of Indigenous, African, and European influences in Latin America, is gaining interest in institutions of higher education. In existing colonial and modern texts, Latin American and Mexican descent women have emerged as significant healers. Three well-known women have provided traditional health services to many families and trained a number of people throughout New Mexico, the Southwest, and Mexico. They are Teresa Urrea, known as Teresita, who died at the age of thirty-three in 1907; Rita Navarrete, who has been a Mexican healer for more than twenty years; and Antoinette Gonzáles, known as Tonita, who is New Mexican, from the Gonzáles Ranch located fifty-five miles southeast of Santa Fe, and who established a clinic in the North Valley of Albuquerque. This article explores the influences and the contributions of these three women healers. Because of its multicultural influences, a basic historical description of curanderismo is provided. The purpose of the essay is to inform general audiences of the evolving role of women in curanderismo, particularly for audiences interested in these healing traditions in the U.S. Southwest.