Healing the Susto of Deportation: The Dialectical Interplay of Resistance and Surrender in the Río Bravo Borderlands

Abstract

This dissertation is about susto, literally the overwhelming “fright,” “terror,” or “shock” experienced by Mexican migrants during arrest, detention, and deportation from the United States, as well as the recovery they seek through a traditional ritual cure. Susto is a traumatic event in which a spiritual entity, the “spirit” or “soul,” is believed to leave the body of the frightened or terrified person, creating a condition of extreme distress. Grounded in the fields of existential anthropology and the study of religion, this dissertation approaches susto through the ethnographic method of participant-observation, and through an engagement with theorists of trauma, illness, and healing including Bessel van der Kolk, Gabor Maté, and Thomas Csordas. Following the phenomenological approaches of anthropologists Michael D. Jackson and Davíd Carrasco, my ethnographic work describes the self-articulation and self-theorization of migrants and healers in everyday or ordinary language —that is, in terms indigenous to the places and people where susto is identified as an affliction and subject to traditional therapies. Fieldwork took place in the Coahuila-Texas border region over a two-year period (2023-2025) and included in-depth interviews with five migrants (Domingo, Ovidio, Santiago, Sofia, and Anita) who had been impacted by the violent event of deportation, as well as the three local ritual specialists (María Isabel, Hector, and Valentin) who treated them. Although this project draws on the life-stories and knowledge of many migrants, the focus of this dissertation is Mexican men with whom I have a direct relationship. These five ethnographic case-studies are paradigmatic of the larger political, social, religious, and medical issues associated with the existential struggles of Mexican men in the Río Bravo borderlands. This dissertation also focuses on the susto caused through deportation by state agents working for the political apparatus of the U.S. Border Patrol and cured by the ritual specialists who serve the folk saint Fidencio Sintora Constantino (1898–1938). Crucial to understanding these forms of subjugation and of Mexicanness (Mexicanidad) is the work of the folklorist Américo Paredes, the historian Monica Muñoz Martinez, the essayist Octavio Paz, and philosopher Gloria Anzaldúa. Through a critical engagement with these writers, I argue that by surrendering to the healers serving Fidencio during the ritual cure, Mexican migrants heal the susto inflicted by state agents working for the U.S. Border Patrol. By surrendering, I mean dejarse tumbar, letting themselves be thrown to the ground by the ritual specialist. This is a counterintuitive response after resisting (no dejarse de) state agents who violently threw them to the ground and/or otherwise forced them to submit during a deportation.