Annette Sandoval calls it a “flashbulb memory.”
After nearly 30 years it remains a clear snapshot in her mind: She is about 4 years old, waking up in the middle of the night to hear her older sister Yola gasping for breath. While her frightened father and siblings watch, Sandoval’s mother works frantically in the kitchen, concocting a mysterious medicine Sandoval now thinks probably contained onions and eucalyptus leaves mixed with a little Vicks VapoRub .
Sandoval, her sister and her mother do not clearly remember what went into the poultice. What they do remember is once the “stuff” was wrapped in a clean diaper and placed on Yola’s chest, her breathing eased.
For years, Sandoval didn’t give much thought to the incident. Her father, who had crossed the border from his home state of Jalisco to work in Southern California’s orange groves, got a green card and a good union job. His five children got a health plan. Growing up in Santa Ana, Calif., they saw doctors when they got sick, and their mother readily gave up her home remedies in favor of modern medicine, American-style.
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It’s not an unusual story, says Sandoval, who has spent the last two years collecting the memories of other Mexican-Americans once treated with poultices, salves and tinctures administered by their abuelitas, tias and madres–grandmothers, aunts and mothers entrusted with day-to-day health care. Sandoval found gathering the remedies in her new book, “Homegrown Healing: Traditional Home Remedies from Mexico” (Berkley, $6.99) to be like “catching raindrops in your hand”–she had to pursue them hurriedly, here and there, before they evaporated.
“I would ask people for their memories of remedies, and they would say, `Oh, we don’t practice this in my household,’ ” says Sandoval, 33, who supplements her income as a writer by tending bar in her San Francisco neighborhood. But then, Sandoval would ask her subjects, what about aloe vera for burns? A potato poultice to pull out a fever? Mint tea for an upset stomach?
“And they’d say, `Oh, yeah! We used to do that,’ ” Sandoval says with a laugh.
Just how widespread the use of traditional home remedies remains among Mexican-Americans is difficult to gauge, not the least because “Mexican-Americans” are far from a homogeneous group.
Broadly speaking, says Dr. Frank Meza, physician in charge of the Kaiser Permanente clinic in East Los Angeles and co-author of a handbook on the Latino community for Kaiser health-care providers, people from rural areas, with less money, less education and less access to other forms of health care are more likely to use traditional remedies.
That doesn’t mean others never take lemon tea to ease a cold, or soothe their tired eyes with a wash made with rose petals. And most traditional kitchen remedies, Meza says, are probably not harmful.
“The problem with all home remedies, no matter what culture we’re talking about,” he says, “is if you use it and you get better, that’s OK. But let’s say you’re getting worse and you persist in the treatment. You’re going to run into danger.”
Kaiser Permanente last year issued a news release after physicians saw two Latino children with high levels of lead in their blood, believed to be the result of home remedies used to settle upset stomachs.
Both children did well after seeing their doctors, and Kaiser doctors stressed that on the whole the incidence of lead poisoning is low and many home remedies are safe. But they advised parents to check with their pediatricians before administering remedies to children.
The usual advice for alternative treatments remains: Be especially mindful with children, the elderly and people with suppressed immune systems. If symptoms persist, see a doctor. Two of the most serious potential problems associated with treating yourself are missing a diagnosis of a serious condition or refusing conventional treatment that may be effective.
“Some of these I do, some of these I don’t do,” says Sandoval, referring to the treatments she’s gathered for everything from dandruff to a condition called susto, which Sandoval describes as “the loss of the spirit or soul due to a sudden shock.” She cautions readers who are taking medication to check with their doctors to make sure a remedy doesn’t conflict with their prescription drugs, and points out that while the book may contain remedies for serious diseases such as diabetes, she does not suggest that patients quit conventional treatment.
“If I get a sharp pain, I’ll go to the doctor,” she says by way of example. “But if I’ve got a headache or tired eyes, I’d rather reach into my cupboard for something.”
Accordingly, Sandoval sees her book not only as a guide to treatment but as a kind of social history.
“As a teenager, I suffered from a chronic fever that lasted some four or five days,” reads a typical submission to her Web site. “My parents took me to several (allelopathic) doctors in that period with no success. Upon return from the last doctor visit, my Nana had been preparing some stewed tomatoes and proceeded to wrap my feet in cheese cloth filled with this hot (potion). That same afternoon I was playing football. I have no idea what she added to the tomatoes, if anything, but it worked.”
“My mother used to cure me from fever with a mixture of the following,” reads another. “She would buy one of those caps from Vicks VapoRub and she would crush 2 aspirins to powder along with a shredded cigarette all mixed up in the little container of VapoRub. Then she would rub all our bodies with this ointment and cover us completely until we would sweat.”
“A good way to clear a stuffy nose is to cut small slices of oranges and stick them in your nose,” says a third. “It feels gross but it works!!!”
Sandoval regained her interest in home remedies when she came across a reference to Mexican healers while researching her first book, “The Directory of Saints: A Concise Guide to Patron Saints,” (Signet, $5.99).