Celebrating La Bruja - Part I

 La Bruja: Latina Folk Heroine

Folk heroines are found in every culture. These women of courage, vision, and virtue journey into unchartered challenges that become tests of character. Examples include France’s visionary Joan of Arc and Japan’s warrior samurai Hangaku Gozen. These folkloric figures, based upon real people, are examples of how women have learned how to identify and grow their gifts, becoming powerful enough to help themselves and to benefit others. 

The ability to combine inner and outer elements in order to accomplish tasks, while not new, has often been judged to be dark, even evil magic– this has led historical abuse and denial. Because folklore’s strength is in its ability to adapt to the society is exists in, such folk heroines are now re-emerging as women of insight, wisdom, and power.   

The brujas (Spanish word for witches) who inhabit poet/writer Jennifer Givhan’s world are such figures. Jennifer, a Latina/indigenous woman whose credits include  2015 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a PEN/Rosenthal Emerging Voices Fellowship and a 2020 Southwest Book Award, has just written about such a woman in her newly released RIVER WOMAN, RIVER DEMON (Blackstone Publishing). This spellbinding ‘otherworld’ mystery novel, praised in Kirkus Review, for the way “the mystical and the earthly are seamlessly intertwined” highlights the place of magic(k) in the protagonist Eva’s life. 

She explores the topic with me. Here is Part I of our conversation: 

Q:  What is the difference between a  bruja and a curandera (one who cures) and why write about one in RIVER WOMAN, RIVER DEMON?

A: A bruja is a powerful, badass woman, and, yes, a witch. But not in the sense that Latinx culture has long castigated her.

Brujería and curanderismo are two sides of the same coin; they are not light and dark, good and evil, as too many folks still mistakenly believe. Even a much-beloved bedrock of Chicanx/Latinx literature, highly regarded in New Mexico, where my novel takes place draws an erroneous and misleading line between the two: characters use healing for good or curse for evil intent.  

Eva in RIVER WOMAN, RIVER DEMON modernizes, reclaims, and subverts antiquated notions of good versus evil in women’s spiritual and traditional home remedy practices, as well as folks of color and indigenous people in this country who have long had to obscure their ancient magickal practices by weaving them through Western religion. For instance, Eva’s brujería melding with Catholicism is a mirror of my own personal practice.  

Q: You refer to yourself as La Bruja. What does that mean?

A: For some Latinx folks, the term carries a negative connotation that stems from the Spanish colonizers’ misaligned interpretation of ancient spiritual practices and practitioners. Patriarchal leaders feared women’s power, matriarchal knowledge, wisdom, and empowerment, as well as our Ancestors’ innate spiritual wisdom, rooted in self, family, nature, and Spirit. Over time, that fear, adopted in Latin American culture, created a tacit divide that widened,  although crossovers in practice may exist, much in the same way Latinx patriarchal misogyny perpetuates the mother/whore dichotomy.  

As La Bruja, I reclaim the ritual of writing, the magic(k)al possibility I invoke for healing, manifesting, empowering, and overcoming in the works I create as my own form of brujería. My magic(k), then, most clearly presents itself through my writing, and people are often drawn to me to help guide them through their personal and intergenerational trauma through writing, where they start healing themselves and allowing Spirit to flow onto the page and into their hearts.  

In Part II Jennifer talks about being (and becoming) a bruja.

Click here to view the book trailer.