“If you do not care where your umbilical cord is buried, it is as if you had no mother.”
“If you do not care where your umbilical cord is buried, it is as if you had no mother.”
This page is designed as a resource for people in Cabo Corrientes, especially the Comunidad Indigena de Chacala. This page includes the font of knowledge and wisdom about plant life, beliefs, and traditional practices that are fast disappearing in modernity. The page contains knowledge about plant use, interviews, written and recorded, and writing about my experiences living in Yelapa.
I arrived in Yelapa in 1973 and shortly after I began learning from my neighbors and friends about the local use of plants. There was minimal access to allopathic medicine. The tradition of healing with nature -plants, water, and sea resources- was well developed by necessity and because of the availability of different species with many properties. Mexico’s total floristic richness includes 23,314 species and places it fourth in the world, behind Brazil, China, and Colombia (Villaseñor, 2003). I learned about plants as I needed them for my health. Over 40 years of living and working in Cabo Corrientes, I continued to collect local knowledge about their use.
She was a Mexican American botanist. Her love of nature began as a child living in the countryside. She used to take walks in nature, observe birds, and examine plants. She traveled on numerous expeditions to collect plant specimens in Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, Ecuador, Bolivia, Perú, Colombia and Alaska.
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When I landed in Yelapa in 1973, I felt like I had arrived where I belonged. Over the ensuing weeks and month, I got sick with almost everything there was to get sick with, and this was a stroke of good luck! Because it then enabled me to learn from local women (and some men) about the traditional approaches to medicine and healing that the bounty of the sea and jungle offered, especially where there was no doctor.
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