Homenaje a Nuestras Curanderas / Honoring Our Healers
Oakland, CA: Latina Press (National Latina Health Organization), 1996.
First Edition. Wire Comb Bound. 10" x 7". iii, 53pp. [i]. Wire comb bound pictorial wrappers. Front cover with sepia-toned photograph of a curandera's home altar within a papel picado border printed in coral and cream on a green ground; rear cover with a sepia photographic portrait of a curandera at her altar and a dedicatory quotation from Helen Rodríguez-Trías, M.D. Bilingual text (English/Spanish) throughout, printed on tinted stock, with papel picado-style graphic borders marking section divisions. Cover photo and book design by Edgar R. Ayala, grassroots publishing; translations by Carmelita LaRoche, Teresa Navarro, and Liliana Roman.
The inaugural, and possibly only, publication of Latina Press, the imprint of the National Latina Health Organization (NLHO). Produced as a companion to an altar the NLHO built for the Oakland Museum's Third Annual Día de los Muertos exhibit, "Days of the Dead: Time of Remembrance" (October 19–December 1, 1996), the volume presents oral-history profiles, family remembrances, and remedios of Latina folk healers — curanderas, yerberas, and sobadoras — including Martina Amancio, Angela López Aranda, Anastasia Duarte, Francisca Muro, Sarah Bustos, Victoria Rey Ceniceros, and Natalia Delgado (the last represented by her own words, a letter and a poem from her daughter, and a set of her remedies).
Edited by Luz Alvarez Martinez, a foundational figure in the reproductive justice movement. She co-founded the NLHO in Oakland in 1986 — the first national feminist health organization for Latinas in the United States — and served as its executive director until her retirement in 2005, shortly after which the organization ceased operations. In 1997 she went on to co-found the SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Health Collective, and her activism is documented in Smith College's Voices of Feminism Oral History Project and discussed in Loretta Ross et al.'s Undivided Rights: Women of Color Organizing for Reproductive Justice (Haymarket Books, 2016) and Lisa Levenstein's They Didn't See Us Coming (Basic Books, 2020). No further Latina Press titles have been located, and the sequel volume proposed in this book's closing note (for 1997, to broaden coverage across Latina cultures) does not appear to have been realized.
Reviewed on publication by Jane Zones in The Network News (National Women's Health Network) 22, no. 3 (May 1997). No copy located in OCLC/WorldCat. Smith College's Sophia Smith Collection holds Alvarez Martinez's personal papers and the NLHO's organizational records. An apparently unrecorded example of grassroots Latina feminist health-movement publishing, preserving oral traditions of folk healing largely absent from mainstream medical and print culture, issued by an imprint that did not survive its parent organization.
Overall very good condition, with mild shelf wear; contents clean and free of marks. Very good. Item #17746
Price: $350.00