About Curanderismo: Curanderismo (Spanish for "the way of curing/healing") is a system of traditional medicine and ancestral healing arts that came from the mixing of African, Asian, European, Islamic, Jewish, and especially Indigenous American medicines and healing arts during and since the Iberian colonial period (1492 to 1821). Curanderismo is found throughout all of the sacred and unceded Indigenous lands we now call "Latin America" and represents an incredibly diverse spectrum of practices.

This class focuses on the traditions of Chicano and northern/central Mexican curanderismo carried by the instructor, Dr. Jesús Cuauhtémoc Villa (PhD). These include his own family's curanderismo traditions from New Mexico and Guanajuato, México, and the South Phoenix and open-tradition Huasteca curanderismo traditions passed to him by his maestra of 18 years, Doña Patricia Federico-Ruiz of Mi Tierra Healing Arts in South Mountain, Phoenix. Maestra Patricia received her Arizona curanderismo training from her Tía Dora in the Cuatro Milpas Barrio of South Phoenix and her Huasteca curanderismo traditions from Doña Cuauhtli "CC" Cihuatl (z''l), a Huasteca, Rarámuri, and Lipan Apache curandera who faithfully served the Albuquerque, NM area for many decades. 

About the Instructor : Originally from Las Cruces and La Villita, New Mexico, Dr. Villa is a third generation Chicano who has called the Phoenix Valley home since 2007, when he began his undergraduate studies at Arizona State University (ASU). There he received his Bachelor’s degree in Anthropology in 2011, a Master’s in Religious Studies in 2016, and a PhD in Transborder Studies in 2026. Dr. Villa’s research specialties are applied activist anthropology; the anthropology of religion, magic, witchcraft, and healing (with a focus on the African roots of Mexican curanderismo); and thanatology: the study of death & dying in a cross-cultural perspective. Dr. Villa works as a Postdoctoral Research Scholar with the ASU School for the Future of Innovation in Society, where he studies how community members, nonprofits, municipalities, and industry can successfully collaborate for ensuring sustainable, nature-based water reuse systems and wetland restoration. He teaches Anthropology and Archaeology as an adjunct professor for ASU and the Maricopa County Community College District (MCCCD).

Dr. Villa is the co-founder and Director of Programming for the Sonoran Desert Cultural Preservation Society (SDCPS), a 501c7 nonprofit organization dedicated to preserving, promoting, and celebrating the cultural plurality of the Sonoran Desert and empowering Arizona community members to reconnect with their ancestral arts, crafts, foodways, and traditional medicines and healing practices. He is the founder and Head Instructor of the SDCPS' flagship program, CAHAM: the Center for Ancestral Healing Arts and Medicines, through which these Second Sunday classes are offered. Along with Maestra Patricia and a group of multicultural healing arts practitioners representing traditional medicine practices from all over the world, Dr. Villa co-founded the Patiloni Collective in 2018 to offer free holistic health and wellness services to the diverse communities of the Phoenix Valley. The Patiloni Collective is proud to have offered limpias (traditional energetic cleansings) and other ancestral healing and educational services at the Cultural Coalition’s annual Mikiztli Festival ever since, and more recently at their Indígena and Mask Alive! events. The Patiloni Collective offers open community holistic health and wellness clinics at The Sagrado every Second Sunday of each month from 12pm-3pm (directly after Dr. Villa's class) and every Third Thursday from 6pm-8pm.

Above all, Dr. Villa is a curandero: a practitioner of Chicano and Mexican traditional medicine and ancestral healing arts, which he learned from family and from his maestra of 18 years, Doña Patricia Federico-Ruiz of South Phoenix. Since completing his formal apprenticeship and being recognized by his community and a council of local healing Elders in 2021, Dr. Villa has offered healing services and taught interactive healing workshops for hundreds of clients and community members in Arizona and New Mexico. His classes for the University of New Mexico’s online Curanderismo Course have been attended by thousands of online learners worldwide since 2023. As part of his ongoing development as a curandero, Dr. Villa became a certified death doula (a caregiver specializing in the non-medical aspects of the end-of-life process) in 2025 after being certified as a Death Compadre by the Indigenous womb-to-tomb care specialists of the Cihuapactli Collective. He is currently undergoing apprenticeship in Western death midwifery under International End-of-Life Doula Association instructor Kim Stravers, with whom he is a member of a local Phoenix end-of-life doula collective.

Outside of work and his nonprofit duties, Dr. Villa enjoys serving his community as a curandero and death doula; mentoring his curanderismo apprentices; making art and music; looking for bones and talking with plants in the desert; walking his two sweet dogs; and trying (with mixed success) to keep his garden and houseplants alive.

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