UNM Curanderismo Program

The University of New Mexico's Curanderismo program is a university-backed institution for the study of Mexican and Latino traditional healing, led by UNM faculty and scholar Eliseo Cheo Torres with guest healers and practitioners from Mexico, the United States and Latin America. Its framing is that it is not just a class but an experience: traditional medicine without borders.

The program runs on several tracks: the June summer face-to-face class and conference in Albuquerque with community ceremonies, healing fairs and afternoon workshops on specific practices (cleansing with roses, healing fright/susto, the seven directions, grief and Day of the Dead, care for the elderly); the formal Curanderismo Certificate pathway; continuing education courses; and the free global Coursera course whose enrollments number in the hundreds of thousands.

Its curriculum covers limpia (energetic cleansing), herbology, and the history and practice of curanderismo as a living healing tradition. UNM's program is the rare case of a university treating Mexican folk healing as a field of formal study, and it publishes class media and research alongside its teaching. The institution's stated mission: Traditional medicine without borders.