UC Irvine

Mexican Traditional Medicine (MTM) practitioners who specialize in womb health, engage a broad range of connected practices, including birth-working, postpartum care, herbalism, and sobada (bodywork). This dissertation describes how MTM practitioners in Southern California reproduce community care through traditional mind-body-spirit healing methods, amidst the post/colonial historical legacies which construct the region as place; and which seek to discipline and foreclose their reproductive capacities for healing. The project draws on 12 months of multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork conducted with MTM practitioners across San Diego, Orange, and Los Angeles Counties, between September 2023 and August 2024. Data were gathered through participant-observation in healing sessions, community workshops, and practitioner training courses; alongside 30 semi-structured, open-ended interviews with MTM practitioners, capturing life histories and the development of healing practices. This presentation of research makes several contributions to the anthropological literature, in which womb health practices remain an under-engaged MTM subspecialty. The dissertation engages the concept of fugitive fecundity to examine how the Mexican woman’s womb becomes a site of contested production (i.e. bio-political, discursive, legal, medical). Approached through this framework, MTM healing practices represent an integral part of the broader political ecology of reproductive life for these communities – preceding and exceeding the post/colonial formations which endeavor toward a foreclosure of their expansive fecundities.