This is a guest post by Nancy Groce, Senior Folklife Specialist at the American Folklife Center.
In 2023, Philadelphia-based folklorist Selina Morales received an AFC Archie Green Fellowship to collaborate with her cousin, the Los Angeles-based filmmaker Alexis Garcia, on a pioneering Occupational Folklife Project interviewing traditional Puerto Rican healers about their occupation, documenting their workplaces and gardens, and researching the critical networks of traditional care they provide that supplement or substitute for Western medicine on the Island and beyond.
Their fieldwork, featuring in-depth videotaped interviews, was recently submitted to the AFC where it is being processed for the archive and prepared for posting on our Occupation Folklife Project’s (OFP) website. It will be some time before this noteworthy collection is available to the public, but as the staff’s project liaison, I was excited to find out more about their research. So recently, I called them for an update.
Nancy Groce (NG): Okay, so tell me, how did your project go?
Selina Morales (SM): It was great! There were some surprising things about it. There were some things we expected about it, but overall, I learned a lot about how healers are moving through the island and across the diaspora. Which is what we assumed from our own life experience–but to then actually speak to folks who are based in the island supporting folks off the island and visa versa… To hear about all the back-and-forth work happening between Puerto Ricans in the diaspora and folks on the island—[it] was just incredible to see that web!
And then, after the project, to then see [dialog] continuing as folks not only met each other through the context of our project, but to see that their work is flowering and blooming in all kinds of ways. And we’re able to understand why it matters because we spent the time getting to know where it’s coming from and what it’s ground in. So those are my takeaways right now.
Alex Garcia (AG): I just want to “yes, and…” It was really cool to be able to platform these healers because nobody was documenting their labor. It seems many are working in a vacuum… in that what they do this is very localized to their community, with the exception of a couple of them who have an online presence and are making those kinds of social media connections. And so it was really, really special to be showing up with our equipment to record their stories, and just to affirm them… that what they’re doing is important and essential.
And it felt timely for us to be doing this work because some of the people we interviewed were elders and who knows how long they’ll be on this planet, right? So it was really special to have their voices and to hear about their own grandmothers or people that have long been gone, and about how they came to the work… So yes, great project! We loved it and are so happy we had the opportunity to do this work.
NG: Can you tell me a bit about how you both became interested in traditional healing? Did you have healers in your family?
SM: Yeah, definitely. Well, we were both raised by a woman, our grandmother, who identifies as a healer.
AG: We share a grandmother.
SM: And her name is Jerusalén Morales Díaz. And she lives in Florida; she’s one of the people featured in our collection. She identifies as an espiritista, healer, and I grew up with her in the Bronx, in New York, where she owned a botánica, which is a store where you can purchase religious paraphernalia for practicing a wide variety of Caribbean-based religions.
I was the kid in the back of the store, right? Helping her put things on the shelves and watching her as she engaged with the community and did healing work. So I’ve been interested in what she was doing and have been trained in what she does since as long as I can remember. When I went to college, I met a folklorist who heard part of my story and basically said ‘this is really, really special, pay attention to it’.
So, I had a fellowship when I was in college through the Mellon Foundation that paid me like work-study to do an independent research project [and] I did an oral history project on my grandmother. And I spent two summers and two winter terms interviewing her and documenting her healing practices. I did that with a VHS camera that I didn’t really know how to use. I just sort of followed my intuition…and recorded her with no lighting and no sound.
I stayed interested in her connection to spirits and spirituality, and health and wellness in her community. And then, when I became a folklorist…I started to explore museum curation and thought about the store that she owned, this botánica, and about the commerce and the exchange and the commodification of healing. But I never quite wanted to study formally, like in an academic sense, my grandmother. It was sort of always on the side of things that I was paying attention to.
That’s where Alexis found me, around this project. Alexis, maybe you want to give your back story, too, about your curiosity and interest with Lela – that’s what we call her.
NG: And Alexis, are you also her granddaughter?
AG: Yeah, so, Selina and I share this grandmother. My mom and Selina’s dad are siblings, and our grandparents came from Puerto Rico in the ‘50s or late ‘40s in pursuit of better opportunities. They met in New York City. Our grandmother always had this spiritual bent, in that she channeled messages or she had sixth sense about things, and it wasn’t until she was in her 30s that she began to pay attention to this calling.
And when she opened her botánica [in the South Bronx on 149th Street], it was the realization of a lifelong dream. Like Selina, I have very distinct memories of the botánica: I can remember the smell; I can remember the feeling of being there; and I can remember the work she did and how she would have what we call “consultas,” (“consultations”) with people that would come in for different reasons. Someone was sick, someone felt like they had a curse on them and needed a spiritual cleansing, and, you know, things like that. And as children, we knew that this was very serious work and that there were repercussions if we were to enter her special room when she said not to.
NG: If I might ask, were you scared of her at all or this power?
SM: No, it was all okay… Alexis?
AG: Honestly, there were certain things that I was scared of. We have this funny story – she did a consultation with someone that needed to get a bad spirit energy removed – she used a blanket to do that. And she’s like, “Don’t touch that blanket!” and we all knew not to touch the blanket. We took those things seriously, but at the same time we weren’t afraid of her. She was always cooking for us and very joyous and funny –until she was serious and you knew not to mess with her.
To jump forward a few years, I became interested in filmmaking. I studied filmmaking in college–screenwriting, and then, after I graduated, I worked in digital. I worked at Buzzfeed for a number of years, specializing in Latinx or the cultural content; content that was specifically about the American Latino communities that exist in the US. And I started to really realize like, oh my gosh, how important our stories were.
And that kind of led to Selina and me collaborating and discovering we have this really important, impactful cultural heritage that we should be documenting–and telling stories about and highlighting. And it has just been such a beautiful kind of full circle realization in our lives of being able to use our respective skill sets and specialties in this way.
NG: Did you interview your grandmother?
SM: Yes, we started with her! Partly, it was a follow-up to these recordings that I had done when she was much younger–and I was much younger. So, we knew we wanted to interview her. And what an honor for her to be included in a collection of Library of Congress! It’s always been very important to her to be taken legitimately as a contributor to society. And so this was such a gift to her.
So we started with her in October 2023 and it was our first run. The two of us, we met in Florida, we sat her down, we went through basic questions that we had already established, also kind of working out the kinks of our collaboration.
We spent two days with her and we actually came up with a great formula for approaching our interviews. Our questions that were really centered on her as a laborer for her community. And then, at the end, we asked her to offer the future, offer the people who go into the archive next week or 20 or 50 years from now, a remedy. A way to heal themselves based in her tradition. And so she offered a remedy.
And we continued to ask each of the people we interviewed for that offering. So, in addition to being a collection that is really focused on the labor, the international labor of Puerto Rican traditional healers, it’s also has a collection of spiritual and herbal remedies to go with it!
In February of 2024, we traveled to Puerto Rico for a week, each day [trying] to connect with a different healer. As you know, a lot of times these kinds of practices are not extremely public beyond the communities where they are relevant and useful. So, we had to have a very ambitious list [of potential interviewees] in case something fell through or somebody felt shy or a lead didn’t pan out.
A lot of the contacts came from friends of friends, people we already had trusting relationships with, who then connected us to their healer or their aunt’s or uncle’s healer or somebody that they would visit when they were younger. And maybe they [the healer] still lived at that address– go knock on the door, right? So there was a lot of discovery.
AG: We got to meet this really wonderful woman named María Benedetti, who has dedicated her life to documenting healers on the island and has a few books published with their stories. [She] now has a farm in Puerto Rico where she is dedicated to hosting workshops and teaching the community about traditional healing methodologies and preserving this culture.
That interview was so important to give context to the rest of the collection. And it was almost like meeting a celebrity, too! It was so exciting and she was so welcoming to us. It was like we made a new friend in the process.
And just the culture of inviting someone in and offering them food and coffee… Everywhere we went, we were met with that hospitality and it was so beautiful because I was like, “Oh my god, we’re here to get something from you.”
NG: So ultimately, you did 8 in-depth interviews with traditional healers in Puerto Rico, Florida, New York and Virginia, right? Did you do the interviews in English or in Spanish?
SM: Both, there’s a mix of both, with synopsizes to all of them in English.
NG: And what about privileged knowledge – information and private knowledge that shouldn’t necessarily be shared with the public?
SM: We were concentrated on the healing and on the role of the healers as workers in their community. So, everything [in the interviews] is shareable in public.
NG: And what about the future? Are you planning to use your interviews for anything larger like a documentary or a podcast?
AG: Definitely both, we are working on a film and Selina is in development on a podcast with another friend who is a practitioner in Philly.
SM: Yeah, I was really energized by our project. And we actually just got another grant to continue to support this work in another capacity.
NG: That’s great news! Again, congratulations and thanks for sharing this preview of your Healing Work in Puerto Rico project. I’ll look forward to speaking with you again when your collection has been fully accessioned and posted online where it can be accessed by researchers and members of the public.