Brujas and the Long Struggle for Reproductive Justice
Since the leaked document that surfaced last week of the Supreme Court Justice’s vote to strike down Roe v. Wade, many have rightfully declared that a ban on abortion will not stop people from having abortions. Indeed, history has shown that even under the most violent and oppressive conditions, before modern technology existed, women had knowledge of the reproductive body, of herbs, plants, and other methods to induce abortion and prevent pregnancy. Across cultures and communities, mainly women were the keepers of this knowledge, specialists in the field, whose gifts provided reproductive health services to women in their community. They were midwives, nurses and counselors. They were botanists, pharmacists, chemists, specialists in herb and plant knowledge, medicine women, and spiritual leaders. To the people they were “wise women,” to the authorities they were brujas — witches and charlatans.
From Europe to the Americas, they were ostracized and sometimes even burned at the stake for being reproductive care providers. In the Americas in particular, a white supremacist, colonial regime built an apparatus to repress Indigenous and African healing practices; using violent means that were sanctioned by the church. They were especially suspicious of women’s activities in the realm of healing and midwifery. They accused them of “devil worship” and heresy, over-policed them, and they were oftentimes the first in line to be prosecuted by the inquisitorial court.
Feminist solidarity
Amid this terrifying political juncture—where we are faced with a potential future where abortion becomes criminalized—I want to honor the Black and Brown brujas of the Americas who practiced their profession despite immense risks to their own well-being in order to serve women in their community. These women served other women that were oftentimes poor, Black and Indigenous, and who lived on the margins of society and whose bodies were policed and controlled.
Bruja Feminism refers to the act of putting into practice ancestral healing knowledge to engage in revolutionary acts to challenge the ruling order, in both material and ideological ways, for the liberation of the people.
Under colonialism, the onus fell on poor women of color to reproduce the workforce for a profit-making economy that relied on the exploitation of labor. It was these brujas who saved women’s lives; it was their knowledge that helped women take control of their own bodies, it was they who cared for women during pregnancy and childbirth; and neither men nor their laws could stop them. Their work directly impacted women’s material conditions. Furthermore, by providing contraception and abortion, they would deal a blow to an economic system that relied on exploiting a workforce. This collective type of feminist solidarity is what I call Bruja Feminism: the act of putting into practice ancestral healing knowledge to engage in revolutionary acts to challenge the ruling order, in both material and ideological ways, for the liberation of the people.
Mesoamerican Brujas
Indigenous women had knowledge of abortifacients in the pre-Columbian era and these practices continued into the colonial period and throughout the nineteenth century in Mexico.[i] Sixteenth century missionary Bernardino de Sahagún notes in Historica general de las cosas de la Nueva España, that pre-Columbian midwives administered “medicinal substances” to bring on menstruation, induce labor and provoke miscarriage, which included vanilla bean mixed with mecaxochitl (a pepper plant) in a drink with chocolate, ginger root and the root of the phehuame plant, nochtli (nopal cactus) and tlaquatzin (dried opossum tail ground into a powder. There was also yahuatli, or marigold and leaves of tlapechmecatl which “provoked abortion and expelled dead fetuses.”[ii]
Sixteenth century Franciscan Toribio de Benavent Motolinía in the early sixteenth century described with alarm the “witches” “… who know of the substances that could make women miscarry.”[1] Indeed, physicians and clergy at the time both put out warnings admonishing midwives for performing or counseling women on abortion and priests were advised “to routinely question women about whether they had ‘[taken] some potion in order to expel the baby.”[2] It is clear that these processes did not stop women from having abortions nor did it stop healers from helping women have abortions. In Reproduction and its Discontents in Mexico, Nora E. Jaffary notes that in the colonial period, Mexican midwives “employed a variety of medicinal substances to assist women in regulating their pregnancies.”[3] She also notes that despite being under more scrutiny in a period where there was increased condemnation for procuring abortion, women continued to “circulate knowledge and employ the techniques of inducing early labor to regulate their pregnancies…”[4]
African Brujas
African peoples in the Americas also maintained centuries-old folk knowledge about contraceptives and abortifacients. According to historian Barbara Bush-Slimani in her article, Hard Labor: Women, Childbirth and Resistance in British Caribbean Slave Societies, African societies used various techniques to induce abortions. These included special shrubs, herbal infusions, plant roots and bark of certain trees. Some common plants include cassava, manioc, Barbados pride, yam, passion flower, papaya, wild tansey, mango, lime and frangipani.[5] Among the Djukas of Surinam, abortion and contraception techniques included herbs and “‘crude instruments’ akin to the pointed sticks used some African societies.”[6]
The retention of African ancestral knowledge in the Americas allowed enslaved women to save their children from a life of servitude since —no matter who the father, the child inherited its mother’s legal standing. It is well documented that enslaved women were successful in ending pregnancy. The naturalist priest, Jean-Baptiste Labat, acknowledged in the late 17th century that “‘Negresses’ in the French Antilles were adroit in the use of ‘simples’ that ended pregnancy with ‘surprising effectiveness.’”[7] Records of the Worthy Park Estate in Jamaica in 1795 found that “the rate of miscarriage (spontaneous and induced) for that year was 1 in every 4.6 births.”[8] Edward Bancroft, author of the 1769 Essay on the Natural History of Guiana, in South America, reveals that abortion, referred as “unnatural practice” on the Wild Coast, “is very frequent, and of the highest detriment to the planters, whose opulence must otherwise be immense.”[9] Enslaved women aborted their children for the same reason that many committed suicide by poisoning or by hanging themselves, to find relief from the cruelty of slavery.[10] The knowledge from the motherland helped them take back ownership of themselves and their bodies.
Enslaved midwives were held in high social esteem on the plantation and was sought after for their knowledge to end or prevent pregnancies. It is my claim that these women played a revolutionary role in the fight for liberation against the slavocracy. In many instances, they helped give enslaved women some degree of autonomy over their bodies in a world defined by strict patriarchal control and violence. In Karol Weaver’s book, Medical Revolutionaries: The Enslaved Healers of Eighteenth-Century Saint Domingue, Weaver explains that midwives and other enslaved healers engaged in “occupational sabotage” to obstruct the productivity of the plantation.[11] In doing so midwives would deal a blow to the plantation economy while directly impacting enslaved women’s material conditions.
Thwarting the Social Reproduction of Labor
The midwives’ work is noteworthy here because there was a reliance on enslaved women conceiving and having children to replenish the labor force and maintain productivity of the plantation. After the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade in 1807, plantation managers could no longer depend on the supply of labor provided by the slave trade. Thus, enslaved women were viewed as breeding units necessary to reproduce the workforce. Their bodies became something to be strictly controlled and policed, and their reproduction viewed as a matter of utmost economic importance to the state.[12] In Sainte Domingue, for instance, both midwives and mothers were often whipped and punished when infants died.[13] Some women were placed in iron collars day and night until she became pregnant again.[14]
While the enslaved midwife had limited powers herself, she enabled enslaved women to maintain some freedom of reproductive labor. In some West Indian colonies, for example, the law required enslaved women to report their pregnancy to a midwife who was then required to report it to a surgeon to be registered.[15] Some did comply, but many did not. Midwives, often referred to as “wicked midwives,” were looked at with mistrust by planters and plantation doctors, as many perceived Black medicine to be correlated with “witchcraft.”[16]
Most planters and white medical practitioners on the plantations suspected that midwives destroyed fetuses by means of abortifacients or of murdering newborn infants to free them from a life of slavery.[17] In Jamaica, some planters even contemplated replacing black midwives with white midwives because they thought they would have more success in increasing birth rates, since Black midwives were accused of helping mothers carry out abortions and infanticide.[18] A well-documented example is that of a midwife named Arada in Saint Domingue on the Fleuriau plantation. It was said she wore a rope collar with seventy knots that symbolized number of children she was believed to have killed.[19]
As Roe v. Wade hangs by a string, let us remember the reproductive justice warriors, the bruja-midwives, who stood by the most marginalized women.
As Roe v. Wade hangs by a string, let us remember the reproductive justice warriors, the bruja-midwives, who stood by the most marginalized women. Let us not forget they were ostracized because of their knowledge and they retained their ancestral knowledge despite authorities professing it was witchcraft and devil worship. And let us not forget that it is the people that will liberate the people.
Reclaiming the bruja as resistance to patriarchal capitalism
Today a new generation of Black and Latina women look to recover the ancestral traditions of healers, what was deemed lost, but not destroyed, by the process of colonization. They are reclaiming the Bruja as a feminist figure who stood up to the patriarchy. Of course, these healers were not brujas, but because we now know the word “bruja” equates the dark history of persecution of witches as women who resist patriarchy — the word constitutes a breach in the patriarchal order. Let us continue fighting relentlessly to resist the patriarchy and push back against the forces that wish to force motherhood upon us.
NOTES
[1] Jaffary, Reproduction, 79.
[2] Jaffary, Reproduction, 80.
[3] Jaffary, Reproduction, 77.
[4] Jaffary, Reproduction, 78.
[5] Bush-Slimani, “Hard Labor,” 92.
[6] Bush-Slimani, “Hard Labor,” 93.
[7] Londa Schiebinger, Plants and Empire: Colonial Bioprospecting in the Atlantic World (Harvard University Press, 2007), 130.
[8] Schibinger, Plants and Empire, 130.
[9] Schibinger, Plants and Empire, 128.
[10] Schiebinger, Plants and Empire, 107.
[11] Karol Weaver, Medical Revolutionaries (University of Illinois Press, 2006), 59.
[12] Schiebinger, Plants and Empire, 128.
[13] Weaver, Medical Revolutionaries, 57.
[14] Shiebinger, Plants and Empire, 148.
[15] Schiebinger, Plants and Empire, 148.
[16] Sasha Turner, Contested Bodies: Pregnancy Childbearing, and Slavery in Jamaica (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019), 115.
[17] Weaver, Medical Revolutionaries, 57.
[18] Turner, Contested, 141.
[19] Weaver, Medical Revolutionaries, 57.
[i] Nora E. Jaffary, Reproduction and its Discontents in Mexico (University of Carolina Press, 2016), 79.
[ii] Jaffary, Reproduction, 80.
Dr. Norell Martínez is a professor of English and Chicana/o Studies at San Diego City College. Her work centers on gender issues with a special focus on the witch-hunts in the Americas, revolutionary healers, and the current resurgence of the bruja (witch) in Bruja Feminist movements today, both on the streets and in cultural production.
