Fanny Rivera Plascencia: For Modern Healing

Dengue. I’d never felt so weak before. Worse than having pneumonia. I took the medications my doctor gave me. I tried drinking as much coconut water as I could, like my neighbor told me. I slept 20 hours a day. I still felt horrible, existential, done. I went to Quetzal to get out of my head, to get something good to eat. I described what I was experiencing to Zali. She suggested I talk to her mother, Fanny, who has a pharmacy full of natural remedies right above the café. Really? Fanny listened to me and came back holing three little bottles, tinturas she called them, tinctures. One labeled “Dragon’s Blood”, another labeled “Pain” and a third labeled “Immunity”. She assured me they didn’t have any alcohol or drugs, that I should take a few drops of each three times a day. So, I did. What did I have to lose? I felt like I was about to die. Fanny also told me to make a tea from the leaves of muicle, MWEE-klee, Mexican honeysuckle. That I’d feel better soon.

LOT: How do you describe what you do?

Fanny: I study la herbolaria, the practice of healing using plants. The grandmothers of the past called it las curanderas, the healing practices, the healing arts. Traditional healing, that’s what I do. I work with plants. I extract and combine their essence to make remedies that help people with their various ailments.

LOT: How did you discover your practice, your healing art?

Fanny: I discovered it twelve years ago, in recovering from my accident, in using the temazcal [teh-mahz-cahl, a traditional sweat lodge, a Mesoamerican healing practice designed for physical, mental and spiritual purification]. It’s a good therapy for many people, especially those who have problems in their body, who have joint and bone problems. I felt good from the temazcal, but I felt even better when I used tinctures from plants in combination with the temazcal.

LOT: Do you make your own tinctures?

Fanny: Yes. We, my husband and I, travel to different states in Mexico to collect native plants, and from those we make what is called la tintura madre, the mother tincture. We wash and soak the plants to make the mother tincture, and bury it in the ground for three months so it can absorb the energy of the Moon, the energy of the Sun and the energy of the Earth. We belong to a group called Salud Popular Integral [literally, Integrated Popular Health], a nationwide group whose members get together to share medicines, to share recipes that have worked for different people.

LOT: How do you to make your tinctures?

Fanny: The start of the process is to collect the plants. They have to be plants that are not stressed, plants that retain their healing properties. You don’t find those along the roadside. Roadside plants are stressed. They hear noise all day; they get covered in dust and exhaust. The cars and trucks rushing by disturb them. We go to places far away from busy roads—we go to the mountains, to the forests. There, we collect the plants, then take them to our place for una maceración, a softening of a plant into a liquid form, to make la tintura madre. We bathe the plants with spring water, put them in sterilized jars and fill the jar with undenatured alcohol. Not just any alcohol; it’s an alcohol you can drink, without any impurities, not like the ones used for liquor or rubbing alcohol. We add a little spring water and put the jars in the earth. That’s how the healing begins.

LOT: What local plants do you use?‍

Fanny: Each state has different types of plants and there are many powerful local plants here. For example, there is a lot of kalanchoe here. It’s a plant with red flowers. It’s good for inflammation, healing wounds, gastric ulcers and relaxing muscles. We also have el palillo, turmeric, for bruises; el caucagua nanche, that little yellow-orange fruit you see people eating, which is good for diarrhea, for the skin and for anxiety. And there’s jalapa, scammony root, which I have a lot of faith in, which is good for the prostate.

There are many plants here for us to use. Some of them, people think of them as weeds. We know them for their vitamins but people pull them out and throw them away. One of those is la insulina, a vine with an orange flower that has little red seeds inside. It grows everywhere. That’s good to treat diabetes.

LOT: Which plants do you source from other places in Mexico?

Fanny: We get our sangre de drago, our Dragon’s Blood, from San Luis Potosí [a state located in Mexico’s central plateau]. We’ve brought home Dragon’s Blood from a place near San Miguel de Allende in the state of Guanajuato, but it doesn’t have the same potency as the one from San Luis Potosí. It’s probably the tincture I recommend the most.

LOT: What do you use Dragon’s Blood for?

Fanny: We use it for stomach pain, skin regeneration, hair loss, ear pain and sore throats. It’s good for treating a virus, like dengue. We also use chaparro amargo from Matehuala a lot. That’s known as Bitter bark or Castela texana; it helps with intestinal infections, upset stomach and skin health. It’s antiviral; it’s an astringent; it’s anti-eczema.

LOT: How did you end up in Troncones?

Fanny: We arrived in Troncones about 25 years ago. We were invited to visit and we liked it. It was beautiful and we got to know the people in the village. We began to think of it as a place we could live, a quiet place where we could raise our daughters. My husband knew about Troncones before our visit, and he and I have always felt comfortable in the towns of Mexico, even though we are from the city. We’ve been very happy here.

LOT: Where were you living before coming to Troncones?

Fanny: Our families belong to Mexico City, to a demarcación territorial, a borough, a city-within-the city, called Iztapalapa [a village originally founded around the year 900, long before the Aztecs came into the Valley of Mexico in the 1400s]. Iztapalapa is where the Festival del Fuego Nuevo, the Festival of the New Fire, is held every 52 years. That festival celebrates an ancestral tradition that goes back to the Aztecs, who had a 52-year cycle as part of their calendar. We belong to that demarcación. Our families have been there for a long time. Our grandparents, our great grandparents, our great-great grandparents have all been part of that festival. The next one is in February 2027.

LOT: Was your mother or your father involved in the healing arts?

Fanny: Not my parents, but my paternal grandmother was. She was dedicated to la herbolaria. She had a stall in La Merced, a very old and very famous market in Mexico City, where she sold all kinds of dried plants, fresh plants, too, everything needed to make remedies. When I was little, I would go to her stand. I really liked the smell of the plants. I don’t know now why or how it came to be that I’m carrying on her lineage. She’s been dead for many years, but she came from a lineage of abuelas curativa, healing grandmothers, that go back many years, many generations.

LOT: Is your family here involved in your work?

Fanny: Yes, all of my family. The one who is most involved is my daughter Jazmín. She helps me with my pharmacy, with making the tinctures and with the temazcal. My son-in-law Esteban and my husband Oscar also help me with the temazcal. Of course, Oscar helps me with collecting plants and he joins me when I’m taking courses. So does Jazmín.

LOT: When is your temazcal open?

Fanny: On Saturdays, at 4 pm.

LOT: How many people come?

Fanny:  There is no maximum number. We ask for at least five people to be able to do the temazcal. Sometimes there may be seven people, or ten, or fifteen. The most we’ve had is 25. To come, people need to make a reservation in our pharmacy and sign a waiver, una responsiva. They also have to give us a phone number so we can be in touch, before and after.

LOT: Can you describe the ceremony?

Fanny: Of course. We start with asking permission, that we remember the temazcal has no religion but that we all believe in something. We ask permission from the four directions and invite them in. We ask permission from the four elements—water, fire, earth and air–and acknowledge their presence. Then, we put our attention on the people who have gathered. We bless them with copal before they enter the temazcal; it’s a ritual of smoke, a cleansing. Inside, we hold two ceremonies—we call them puertas, which translates as doors—each puerta is open for 45 minutes to an hour. In the first puerta, we play the drum and sing to raise our vibration. The second puerta is one of silence.

LOT: What happens between the puertas?

Fanny: People drink water and prepare themselves to be in silence.

LOT: What is the temperature inside the temazcal?

Fanny: It varies week to week, but usually we reach between 37 and 38 degrees Celsius [that’s 98.6 to 100 degrees Farenheit]. We are helped a lot by the weather.

LOT: The people who come need to be ready to sweat.

Fanny: Claro. Clearly, they need to come in something comfortable, something they can soak with sweat.

LOT: When people see you again, after the ceremony, what do you hear?

Fanny: We hear a lot of good things, especially from people who come for the first time, how they could not imagine what their bodies told them inside the temazcal. When you enter a temazcal, you are entering and connecting to a womb, the womb of Mother Earth. Your body does the talking, not your mind. Why? Because the temazcal detoxifies your body. It connects all aspects of you in body, mind and spirit.

LOT: What are you studying now?

Fanny: I am constantly learning from plants and exploring different therapies. For example, right now, we are going to a course on healing with magnets. I’m also involved in another course that is more ancestral, on using un rebozo, a specially woven cloth, that’s soaked in castor oil to cure empacho, common digestive blocks and indigestion. It’s an energetic cleansing the abuelas curativas used to do. While I like learning about new and different therapies, I am much more interested in continuing the traditions and practices of the abuelas.

LOT: What is making modern people so sick?

Fanny: We are all emotionally ill. That’s where the pain comes from. People nowadays are sick because they are stressed all the time. That is our emotional illness. When you are emotionally sick, it comes into your body. Your body speaks to you and says, “Oh, my stomach hurts.” That’s because you are worried. Or, you have gastritis because you don’t eat so well—it could be you’re eating foods irregularly and impulsively, or you’re eating foods that shouldn’t be eaten together, or you’re eating foods that simply aren’t nourishing or good for you. One of the main reasons we are sicker now is that we are no longer eating naturally. Our foods contain a lot of chemicals. In the past, los abuelos, our grandparents, lived into their 80s and 90s. Now, they are dying at 60 or 70. Why? Because everything we eat is contaminated. What we consume, what we eat, is no longer natural. That poisons our emotions. So, simply, we are sick because of there being so many unchecked chemicals and so much misdirected emotion in our lives. In la herbolaria, we create remedies for the emotions. We make remedies to ease suffering.

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