Brujería in Latin America

A couple of weeks ago I was talking on video call with my fiancé who is, as some of you already know, Honduran. He was telling me about how someone we know had done something wrong, but that it was okay and forgivable because that person had clearly been cursed and wasn’t in their right mind. That was his total explanation, and he was okay with it. I, on the other hand, thought that he was joking. There’s no way he could be serious, he didn’t actually believe in magic and curses and voodoo. First of all, we’re both practicing Catholics. Doesn’t that go against some kind of Church teaching? But as he went on, I realized just how serious and normal this was for him. In retrospect, I remember various instances of him and his family making references to voodoo and strange curative foods and recipes, all of which I had taken as jokes at the time. I was left dumbfounded, completely without comprehension.

It wasn’t a judgement thing, don’t get me wrong. I just didn’t understand it. My whole life I grew up with the understanding that Ouija boards were fake and magic could only be found in books, movies, and my imagination as a small child. I knew that there were different groups of people who followed Satanism or believed in Shamanism  or were just really focused on chakras and vibes. I knew maybe 1 or 2 people who personally believed in any of these things. But I had never imagined that ideas like this formed a natural and popular part of a whole culture. So I want to try to understand it. For that reason, I plan to complete my final project with a focus on brujería (magic or witchcraft in English) as a part of popular culture in Latin America. A little farther down the line I will likely find a more focused focus within that focus, but for now I have found an article to get me started on the topic.

The article “Merging Magical Traditions: Sorcery and Witchcraft in Spanish and Portuguese America” by Iris Gareis goes over a lot of the history of the understanding of magic in Latin America, discussing it’s different roots and evolutions over time. Gareis describes the effect of colonization on concepts of witchcraft, and how different forms of colonization made way for different common understandings of magic. The article also describes a general acknowledgement of the perceived difference between witchcraft and sorcery, and details how these two types of magic are seen as different. These descriptions were interesting to me as they matched much of what has been explained to me personally. This was only a small part of the many interesting things described in the article, and I look forward to sharing it all (or as much as I can) in my project.

My question to the class is this: do you believe in magic or witchcraft? All of it? Parts of it? Why or why not?