Bodies Politic Talk: A-Maizing Nahua Healers: Colonial Attacks on Indigenous Healers in Early Modern Central Mexico

Dr. Edward Anthony Polanco will discuss how Nahua healers used maize to heal the human body in central Mexican communities in the 16th century. Titiçih (Nahua healing specialists) provided maize to patients topically and orally and relied on it for answers about illnesses. Dr. Polanco will also explore how Spanish Catholic authorities viewed these healers and their practices as a threat to settler colonial society and attempted to extirpate them. Audience Q&A and a reception will follow.

Dr. Edward Anthony Polanco is a Kuskatanchanej scholar of Mesoamerica. His parents fled their homeland due to political violence and instability. Although he was born in Los Angeles, CA, his ancestors are from Kuskatan of the Nahua territories, in what is now western and central El Salvador. He is an associate professor, associate chair, and the director of undergraduate studies in the Department of History, and the director of Indigenous Studies at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, VA. Dr. Polanco’s research presents Native ideas with Indigenous concepts and focuses on 15th-, 16th-, and 17th-century Nahua communities in Mexico and El Salvador.

Cosponsored by the IHC’s Bodies Politic series and Sara Miller McCune and George D. McCune Endowment