A Maya Bonesetter in Brooklyn

The U.S. healthcare system can be daunting to navigate — especially for newcomers. But immigrants who practice traditional forms of healing can be crucial lifelines in their diasporas. 

Producer Danny Bloch has the story of one man doing just that — drawing on knowledge from his hometown in Guatemala and adapting it to meet the needs of his community in New York City.

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A Maya Bonesetter in Brooklyn Brings Relief and Healing to His Community

“Is it a satisfying pain or an uncomfortable pain?” asks Juan, 38, a traditional Maya healer, as he looks up from the calf muscle of a man lying face down on a massage table.

“Kind of uncomfortable,” responds Romeo, a 30-year-old cook, in Spanish, his voice muffled. “Maybe it’s because I spend so much time on my feet at work.” 

“Ah,” Juan nods. He applies more body oil to his gloved hands and resumes massaging Romeo’s leg. “Then I know the kind of pain you’re feeling,” he says. 

This space for healing is also Juan’s bedroom, located on the second floor of a brick walk-up on a quiet one-way street in South Brooklyn. Juan says he’s lost count of how many people he’s helped since he came to New York five years ago. 

“Two hundred and fifty?” he estimates. “Three hundred? Maybe more?” 

Like his mother and grandfather before him in the western highlands of Guatemala, Juan is a boqol b’aaq. In his native Tz’utujil language, the term means “to fix bones.” In Spanish, this is often called a huesero, from the word for bone — hueso. In English, we might use the term “bonesetter.”

Most of Juan’s patients — he does not refer to them as “clients” — are fellow Guatemalans. And many, like Romeo, are fellow Indigenous Maya, and immigrants to New York City. 

“I never imagined I would practice these ways again here,” Juan says. 

Meeting the health needs of Indigenous immigrant New Yorkers

Official data on the number of Indigenous immigrants in New York City is scant. For Indigenous folks from Latin America, their identities are often subsumed under “Hispanic,” “Latino” or “Spanish-speaking” labels. That’s according to Marco Castillo, a founder of the Red de Pueblos Transnacionales / Transnational Villages Network, a nonprofit organizing Indigenous immigrant New Yorkers. Castillo says legacies of “institutional erasure, colonization and historic violence” further inhibit individuals from identifying as Indigenous. 

Along with treating Guatemalans from different Maya communities living in New York, such as the Kaqchikel and K’iche’, Juan also treats folks from countries like Mexico and Ecuador, which — like Guatemala — have large Indigenous populations both at home and in the diaspora. 

Many of Juan’s patients find him through word of mouth. Most are men working in jobs that take heavy tolls on their bodies at construction sites, in restaurant kitchens, or on delivery routes. Sometimes, injuries happen at soccer games enjoyed on a day off.

“I have regular patients who feel as if I were their primary care doctor,” Juan says.

But Juan is not a doctor. He has a degree from Guatemala in business administration, a subject he taught for several years in a pre-university training program. Since arriving in New York, he’s mainly worked in restaurants and delis. 

“The exhaustion, the pain, being on my feet for 12, 14 hours a day — it wasn’t what I imagined,” Juan says. “You start to think about all the work you did as a professional in Guatemala. I accepted the challenge. It wasn’t easy.” 

Former co-workers were his first patients, and they helped spread the word to others. 

The sun-dappled room is just one in a series of rooms around Brooklyn where Juan has treated people. Their reasons for seeking him out are rooted in their familiarity with bonesetting and, therefore, trust in what Juan does. Their reasons are also rooted in barriers experienced by many immigrant New Yorkers when trying to access more institutional forms of healthcare.

Those barriers include a lack of health insurance, a lack of information about free or low-cost services, a lack of fluency in English — and, in some cases, Spanish, which is not the native language for many Indigenous people from Latin America — and a lack of culturally appropriate approaches to treatment.

A 2021 report by the NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene noted higher rates of several chronic diseases among Indigenous New Yorkers, as well as lower rates of health insurance.

“This work can be slower than science, because we don’t medicate,” Juan says about bonesetting. “You have to feel the pain. You have to endure it.” 

So, Juan says, while it may seem risky — even dangerous to some — that people would seek out an unlicensed traditional healer rather than go to the emergency room, “it isn’t negligence. It’s something cultural, rooted in community ties.” 

Nevertheless, Juan says there are times when patients’ injuries are so severe that he turns them away, urging them to go to the ER. 

For Dr. Carlos Salama, the demand for traditional healers like Juan is understandable, “especially in a country where healthcare is so expensive and difficult to get.” 

A medical doctor and an infectious disease specialist, Salama serves many New Yorkers from diverse immigrant backgrounds, including Indigenous folks from Latin America. 

He says he’s familiar with the use of herbal remedies among his patients. Salama also highlights how “asking the right questions” can help doctors gain valuable insight into their patients’ medicinal practices. 

In terms of practitioners of traditional healing, including bonesetters, Salama stresses the gravity of not doing harm. 

“As long as [they’re] trained and know how to do it, and [they’re] not treating someone who’s severely injured,” he says, “I understand why people go to them. And I’m sure that in the right hands, there’s some great utility to it.” 

An evolving healing tradition

Traditional healers throughout Mexico, Central America and the Andean region — including bonesetters, as well as midwives and spiritual guides — play essential roles in everyday life, meeting the health needs of their neighbors. 

Juan remembers that, as a kid, the courtyard of his family’s house would sometimes be full of strangers, some from far-off towns. His mother would offer them coffee and bread. Eventually, Juan realized these people, who would sometimes stay for several days, all had something in common.

“They were people with problems — fractures and dislocations,” he says. They were there to receive bonesetting from Juan’s maternal grandfather, a boqol b’aaq. After Juan’s grandfather passed away, the healing practices within his family ceased for a time. 

But Juan says he remembers hearing a noise inside his grandfather’s closet. “Something was always creaking inside,” Juan says. “Until one of my uncles said, “Come on, let’s open that thing because it could be a rat or something.’ So they opened it.”

But inside there was no sign of anything that would make a sound on its own, Juan says. There was, however, an amulet — a vital reminder of his grandfather’s legacy as a healer. 

The amulet was a stone. Juan says the Tz’utujil Maya are known for using stones in their healing, especially to massage the injuries of their patients. Juan’s grandfather had multiple ones, of different sizes. 

Over time, Juan’s mother started using her own stone to treat people as a boqol b’aaq. And, as Juan entered adulthood, so did he. 

But when Juan was setting out from his hometown on the shores of Lake Atitlán to come to New York, it didn’t occur to him to bring his amulet. His plan was to work and make money in New York. At the time, he didn’t see how the amulet fit into that plan.

“It was my mother who insisted,” Juan says. “‘Never let this go,’ she said. ‘It will protect you.’ And she was right.”

Juan keeps the healing stone, which fits in his palm, inside a black cloth pouch. He says it kept him safe on his journey north. It also helped the people he was traveling with.

Whenever one of them would stumble or twist an ankle, Juan would tell them, “Come here, I’ll heal you.” He would use the stone to massage their injuries, so they could keep going. 

Juan regularly uses the amulet — which he also calls a huesito, Spanish for “little bone” — in his healing sessions. Alongside the huesito, Juan’s other tools include gloves and body oil for massages, a five-pound dumbbell to help stabilize patients’ feet, and a green and gray tweezer-like tool to help stabilize smaller muscles during treatments.

“It’s like a kind of altar,” Juan says. That altar is also a sign of how his practice has evolved. 

When he first started healing people in New York, Juan had few tools other than his own body, and the stone in its pouch.

“I could only offer people a chair. And if they had a knee injury, I would place their knee on my thigh,” as a surface to work on them, Juan says. The massage table proved to be a game changer. 

Juan also incorporated tools he saw trainers and physical therapists using at the gym he works out at, like resistance bands. Mentholated gels and ACE bandages recall the avocado leaves, slicked with menthol, that Juan’s grandfather would apply to his patients’ injuries after a session. 

Juan consults his mother in Guatemala regularly on how to handle certain injuries, especially ones that seem daunting at first. One time, over the phone, she coached Juan through the stages of resetting a patient’s kneecap.

Juan says the benefits of his practice are reciprocal. There have been times in New York when he’s been without work and then “two, three people in one week [reach out] and it’s [been] a relief for me. Honestly, it’s helped me put food on the table.” 

He says that traditionally, healers don’t charge. Instead, they accept what their patients can give — a pound of coffee beans, for example, or a few quetzales as a token donation. At first, Juan didn’t charge his patients in New York either. He wanted to do right by tradition. 

But over time, Juan’s patients insisted on paying for his efforts. “People would get angry with me,” Juan says. “There was a man from Mexico who said, ‘How are you not going to charge me? You’re using strength, you’re using your intellect. Now tell me your price.’”

Interactions like these prompted Juan to develop a set of prices based on the level of injury and intervention required. He remembers thinking, “I’m in a capitalist country. What can I do? I have to adjust.” 

Even so, there are times when Juan provides sessions for free, like when a patient’s injury is serious enough that they’re not able to work. 

“I don’t see this as a business,” Juan says. “God willing, let it be a help.”

The massage table is always open, Juan says, with his tools laid out on a black and white bandana. It must be one of the first things he sees in the morning, and perhaps the last image  before he goes to sleep. 

There on the table, among Juan’s tools, is the huesito, the healing stone his mother insisted he never let go of, at the ready. 

“Perhaps many people wouldn’t believe it,” Juan says, “but those who have believed in this work — they have been healed.”

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Credits

Hosted by Quincy Surasmith

Produced by Danny Bloch

Edited by Quincy Surasmith and Mia Warren

Fact Checking by Julie Schwietert Collazo

Engineering by Jocelyn Gonzales

Original theme music by Gautam Srikishan

Special thanks to Emily Laber-Warren and Chad Bernhard

Feet in 2 Worlds is supported by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, The Ford Foundation, the Fernandez Pave the Way Foundation, the Ralph E. Ogden Foundation, the Elizabeth Bond Davis Foundation, an anonymous donor, and contributors to our annual NewsMatch campaign.