Ancestral Herbal Narratives

[0:10] Francisco G. Gómez: Good afternoon.

[0:11] María Benedetti: Good afternoon.

[0:13] Francisco: Alright. So can you state your name for us?

[0:16] María: María Benedetti. I, I’m from New York. I was brought up in Queens. And, I came to Puerto Rico for the first time in 1987, and I’ve been here ever since. I haven’t gone back for more than two weeks.

[0:32] Francisco: Well, you liked it here, huh? Obviously, obviously. And who are you now and where are you now?

[0:40] María: Okay, well…

[0:40] Francisco: And where do you plan to go?

[0:43] María: Right now we’re at my beautiful learning center, Villa Montuna de Monte. Villa Montuna en Mayagüez And I’ve been here… I bought this place in January of 2020, and I moved here in May of 2021. So I’ve been here three and a half years creating a place that helps me to teach the herbal medicine tradition that I learned here in 1987. And I kept learning throughout the nineties from traditional healers, mothers, grandmothers, espiritistas, bone setters, people that offer different types of, of healing. And just grandmothers and mothers who raise their kids without ever going to the, to the medical doctor. So those are my great teachers, and this is a place to honor them and their knowledge and their wisdom. That’s what Villa Montuna is about.

[1:44] Francisco: Right. You answered half of my questions. That’s cool. So that’s, that’s where you are now.

[1:52] María: That’s where I am.

[1:53] Francisco: And that’s where you intend to be?

[1:54] María: Yes.

[1:55]: Francisco: Can you see into the future?

[1:57] María: Well, the only thing I can see in the future is having more people involved in the day-to-day, design work. It’s five acres. It’s a lot of work… maintenance.

[2:12] Francisco: Yeah.

[2:13] María: Yes.

[2:13] Francisco: Okay.

[2:14] María: Yes. And a permaculture partner, that’s what I’m visualizing for this space. Someone who, who looks at the natural world through a lens compatible with mine. Understands regenerative agriculture, permaculture. So that’s the up and coming. That’s the next step, because this is really the way I want it. This is the way I want it. I have, you know, this beautiful school here, and I also have other areas to do, you know, forest therapy and, and, and meditations and different kinds of activities, improvisation, musical improv. Different things like that. We use the, the roof for dancing and for what we call auténtico, authentic movement. And, so this is a place where people can really connect with themselves and with what we call nature, but it’s part of us. Yeah

[3:15] Francisco: That’s beautiful. Very nice. Okay, so I’m gonna talk a little bit too, because everybody having has interpretations

[3:23] María: Mm-Hmm.

[3:24] Francisco: And me as the interviewer, I have my own interpretation about certain things that might actually come together with your yours or they might bifurcate.

[3:32] María: Mm-Hmm.

[3:32] Francisco: Mine goes a different way to yours. Who knows? But I have to ask these questions, so, and I’ll tell you why I have to ask the questions, because when we look at healing from different perspectives out of the United States, healing to a lot of people in my audience…

[3:47] María: Mm-Hmm.

[3:48] Francisco: That see healing. They only see healing as something that’s herbal. Something that they can drink or they might eat, or they might put on their skin, so on and so forth. And that’s, that’s part of it.

[4:00] María: Yeah.

[4:01] Francisco: I think it’s, it’s a great part of it, but there’s so many other aspects to this idea of healing.

[4:07] María: Yes.

[4:08] Francisco: To see if yours vary from those that I’m going to, you know, put on your table right now.

[4:15] María: Well, to me, I mean, I’ve, I’ve had great teachers, and to me, healing is integration of all of the most divine parts of ourselves and maybe, mundane parts of ourselves so that we can become the greatest manifestation of all of our talents, of all our, our ancestors’ blessings. So, to me, healing is all of the activities that bring those blessings into our body, mind, spirit. So that, that to me is healing. And it’s, I love botanical medicine, but I also love dance and I also love forest therapy. And I also, there are so many things that I feel that are healing that are not necessarily physical. Yeah.

[5:09] Francisco: Right.

[5:09] María: So we do all those things here when I, we can.

[5:13] Francisco: I read your, when I read your book, “Earth and Spirit”

[5:15] María: Uh-huh Yeah.

[5:16] Francisco: A while back.

[5:16] María: Mm-Hmm.

[5:17] Francisco: I was taken aback when I read it and I said, wow, this is a tremendous book. Simply because for me, when I immediately upon opening up the pages and I’m seeing all these different healers that you went and you interviewed and you interacted with, I said, this is old school right here.

[5:36] María: Yeah. Old school.

[5:36] Francisco: She’s documenting things that are being lost.

[5:39] María: Yeah.

[5:39] Francisco: And that’s, that’s an, a very important element to the, the ideas and the traditions of traditional healing, especially Puerto Rico or the Caribbean, per se.

[5:48] María: Right.

[5:49] Francisco: And like others throughout the planet, but we’re unique too. We have that uniqueness to ourselves. So that, that’s what I looked at and I said, I can’t remember all the people you put in there, but some of these healers, they reminded me just to share in context.

[6:06] María: Absolutely.

[6:06] Francisco: Some of las tías mías.

[6:08] María: Mm, absolutely.

[6:09] Francisco:My my family’s from Río Grande

[6:11] María: Mm-Hmm.

[6:11] Francisco: And we had quite a few curanderas in my family, healers not, and I wanna get into the other aspect that you talked about, because there is spirituality that coincides with everything that we do that’s elemental.

[6:26] María: That’s right.

[6:27] Francisco: Right?

[6:27] María: That’s right.

[6:28] Francisco: With what we do. And out there, a lot of times, the people that we deal with there…

[6:33] María: Mm-Hmm.

[6:34] Francisco: In our communities. I’m not saying all over. I’m just saying in my community, a lot of people don’t understand that.

[6:40] María: Mm-Hmm.

[6:40] Francisco: We have a lot of Anglos. Even, I would call ’em African Americans that don’t know their histories. And what they do, what they do is they, they deal in the… I call it topical. They just touch the surface of things without understanding that there’s a lot of spirit. There has to be a spirituality. There has to be, I think, I’m not saying that I’m correct, but I feel like that, and my organization feels like that. There has to be spirituality in order to create the essence of what herbalism is. There has to be…

[7:14] María: That’s one of the things I love so much about Puerto Ricans, they all understand spirituality.

[7:19] Francisco: Yes.

[7:19] María: There’s no one in Puerto Rico. They may have a very restrictive religion, but they, they can come into the, the meditation circle and they, you know, they start talking to their grandmother. I mean, it’s unbelievable. People understand. And what I found when I came in 87′, and I interviewed these people in their eighties and nineties, that was before Hurricane Hugo, before the whole rash of hurricanes that we’ve had here. I recognize that those elders were my people. They were talking to plants. They were living in a state of connection with nature all the time. They blessed water before they took it. They, before they drank it. I mean, when I saw that, and I, I saw that these people felt ashamed of these practices because they had been told that that was witchcraft or superstition or ignorance or, you know, backwardness, whatever. That’s when I decided to, I, I hadn’t decided at that point to stay here. But that’s when I decided to create a book that would be beautiful. And that would be something that would last for, for the future, because I realized that they weren’t being recognized and that the society they we’re living in made them feel small. So my work is to help honor them and make them big. And that’s what I’m trying to do with my literature.

[8:54] Francisco: Right. And you have several books. I mean, several.

[8:55] María: Yeah. They’re my babies. Some of them aren’t around anymore, but those are the ones that are still here.

[9:02] Francisco: So is there anybody specific in the course of your life when you first became you were taken with herbs that was really, really, an impression that moved you towards better understanding the plants?

[9:18] María: Oh yeah of course.

[9:18] Francisco: Was it a family member? Was it a…

[09:20] María: No, no.

[9:21] Francisco: A friend?

[9:21] María: No. My, my father was a country boy from Connecticut. I mean, he was into nature, and that was very important. But when I was in, when I was in my last year of college at, in the Catskills, I went to New Paltz State College, and I met Susan Weed, and she was, at that time, the most inclusive, kind, compassionate, and so knowledgeable, and so wise and so connected. She and two of her great companions were, Billie Potts and River Light Woman. Those three kind of just changed my view of what was possible for me as an adult. I’ll never forget, it was a women, a women’s conference in 1976. And I went to it, I was in my last year of college, and I went to it. And in walk these three wild women with their hair flowing, with these giant jars of green, you know, brebaje, green, green drinks with the herbs in them. And they were passing them around, and we were sitting in a circle, and it was like, oh, this is the real thing. This is real. This is real. This is roots. And and I studied with her, and I, I was very fortunate. I was her editor, so I was reading everything and, and, you know, checking everything. She was writing everything she said, practically. I was listening to, I was taping and I was writing it for her, you know, to have a record of all her teachings. And then I studied with, when I was forced to move to New York City, I studied with, Wildman, Steve Brill, who, you know, who every single weekend took people to a different public park in New York City, but also, and he would, he would have us foraging wild food, and he would also have wild parties. And he also gave a botany class, an economic botany class, or ethnobotany class. And he taught botany and uses of the plants. It was wonderful. And in that class, during that class, which was a night class, the botany class, someone came to me and said, you know, you know, you gotta go to, you gotta go to Puerto Rico now, because right now they have this medicinal plant garden at the, at the University of Puerto Rico in the jardín botanico, in the, you gotta go. And that kind of made up my mind to come. I had other things happened. I got the money. A friend of mine died. She left me $5,000. I told my boss, I’m taking five weeks off. I came here. And that was the end of that. And, and, and that was, I took five weeks and I was doing the interviews in five weeks. And that’s, that’s how the first book came to be. And then I just realized as I was doing the transcriptions, I was like, I don’t think there’s anything more important than I could be doing with my life. I had good jobs and I had interesting things, but it was like, no one else sees this. I mean, I’m the only one who’s seeing it. I better get to it. You know? So I was, I was moved to come here and stay for my life because it felt like what I was doing in New York, someone else could do it. And what I, what I was seeing to be done here at that time, there wasn’t anyone really, I mean, I couldn’t find kindred souls. I did find some kindred souls, in Orocovis. And, we shared, that’s one of the interviews, I think it’s called “Living on the Land” or “Living Off the Land” in the, in the English version of «Hasta los baños te curan!». it’s called “Earth and Spirit”. And in that book I, I found my people. I was like, I found my people, and that’s where I wanna be, and that’s where I wanna be. And then, so I was able to move here and stay here. And that’s basically what I did.

[13:27] Francisco: So, so that’s very interesting. And it seems like your community, the first time you sort of start packing that in your head right. About learning about herbs and these different people that you meet that make an impression on you. You mentioned a First Nations person, didn’t you? Just now, back in that time.

[13:48] María: No. Who, who?

[13:50] Francisco: I, I can’t remember. I should’ve written…

[13:53] María: My father Wildman Steve Brill, Susan Weed, and then Eliot Cowan, who I, I studied with in the 1999, 2000, 2001. I was with him for a couple of years. Eliot Cowan.

[14:05] Francisco: I thought I heard a First Nations person. That’s my bad

[14:08] María: Mm-Hmm.

[14:09] Francisco: That won’t be in there.

[14:09] No problem. No problem.

[14:13] Francisco: But that, and so in essence, that was a community of people for you.

[14:17] María: Oh, yeah.

[14:19] Francisco: That, that kind of…

[14:19] María: Those are my people. I mean, I came back. I mean, I wanted to see everybody, everyone, you know, gave me their approval of the interviews as you did.

[14:27] María: Something like that.

[14:28] Francisco: Uhhuh

[14:29] María: And, and I just, I dedicated myself to that while I was moving out of New York City.

[14:35] Francisco: Okay. So, just to retro a little bit so I can further unpack your experiences. As a child, there, there really wasn’t that much, activity in terms of the herbs…

[14:49] María: No

[14:50] Francisco: And spiritual traditions?

[14:51] María: Spiritual tradition? Absolutely.

[14:52] Francisco: Yes.

[14:53] María: And dance, and I mean, we were a very musical family. Both my parents were musicians. And the Puerto Rican side of my family were my neighbors. We were very close by. So we did a lot of things together. And we, we didn’t speak Spanish, but we had parties and we listened to music, and we cooked together, and we, you know, it was, a different way of living that, you know, I didn’t find anywhere else. So it was my family. That was what was, and then, and the spiritual tradition was Catholicism from both sides. And it was a, a rather strict Catholicism in school. But my parents were kind of iconoclast. My mother especially. She had been a Rosicrucian. I mean, she had ideas. I mean, she, she knew what spirituality was about it. She was my idol. My mother was my idol. You know, Nuyorican woman went to college in the fifties. I mean, she was, she broke everything. She broke all the molds.

[15:57] Francisco: So that’s fascinating.

[15:57] María: Yeah.

[15:58] Francisco: Because when you look at, at, at comparative societal communities, you see that the story that you’re telling me is like unpacking this idea of being with your family. Dancing and interacting with other, and, and your, your journey, your quest starts basically from there, maybe?

[16:18] María: Yes. Yeah. Absolutely. Be, because we weren’t really, I, we didn’t speak Spanish at home.

[16:23] Francisco: Right.

[16:24] María: My mother spoke Spanish with my grandmother. That was basically it. I didn’t really identify as Puerto Rican. We didn’t know those words. We didn’t say Puerto Rico when we talked about Puerto Rico was a bad place that had, you know, tsunamis, had hurricanes and earthquakes, that, that was my family’s reality in the 1920s when they left. So, you know, it wasn’t someplace that I wanted to go to until I discovered Puerto Rican music. I discovered, yeah, salsa and, and Johnny Pacheco was my first album that I ever bought. Like, my first LP was Johnny Pacheco. And, and my grandmother was a big fan of Tito Puente. And that was, we had this soundtrack in the background, at least when my grandmother was there, La Lupe, Tito Puente, Rafael Hernandez. That was in my background. So when I started dancing as a teenager, I was like, well, this is, this is much better than what they play at the dances. People would come over and we would dance to this stuff. I didn’t know what it was. I just knew I loved it. And then when I moved to New York City, it was in 1982, I think, that I moved, then I really got into, what, I went to the Hunter College Puerto Rican Studies department. And I went to El museo del barrio. And I learned Latin percussion. I took Bomba classes, and I took, you know, I had, I, I gave myself the opportunity to immerse myself in my Puerto Rican identity, because it felt like that was what was missing from my life. And indeed, I felt like I had found my people. And I, and I lived, and it wasn’t even just Puerto Rico. ‘Cause I lived in a Dominican barrio. I lived in Dyckman Street for seven years, and, and they became my people too. And even the Koreans on the corner, I mean, we had a community that was unbelievably close knit, like lending people money. I, it was just an amazing community in the eighties. And I left it because I felt like this was, you know, more important. I tried teaching English at Boricua College. That was fun. And I learned a great deal from the Dominican people. I, I learned what solidarity means from them, for them. And they, they, they taught me unbelievable things. I could tell stories if you want, but that was something that I experienced.

[18:53] Francisco: Please, please do.

[18:54] María: Oh my God.

[18:54] Francisco: If you wanna share it.

[18:56] María: The Dominican, the Dominican young people that I was teaching English in Boricua College, and I was trying to inculcate some sense of punctuality, because the class was from nine to ten thirty, and they were getting there at nine thirty. So I, I made this rule that if they were late three times, they couldn’t take the class anymore. And they were trying to be fairly good about it. And one day this young woman came late, and it was like the fourth or fifth time that she was late. And I just went like that. And I locked the door, and I turned around to give the class. And another of her classmates kneeled on the floor in front of me and said, “Hay pero Missy por favor, por favor,” You know, “she has seven kids, and she went to the clinic today, and she came here. She needs that English, she needs the English. Please give her, give her another chance. She has so many kids. She has so many problems. Oh my God. She just got divorced. And she need, she needed to take the kid to the clinic. He has measles. And she had to leave the kids with her, with her mother. And she came, she, she takes two trains to get here. Oh, please Missy. Please let her in.” And I could not believe it. I started, I just turned around, I started crying, and I opened the door and the lady came in and I said, well, now I’m jodida because now they’ll never respect me and nothing I say they’ll ever obey. But I don’t care. I have to let this lady in. And she was there, and we hugged each other, and she was crying, and I was crying. Everyone was crying, practically in the classroom. And we went on and we sang, and we did what we did in my classes. After that, I got invited to every baptism, every confirmation, every every marriage, ceremony, everything they did, I was there. I was like, they, they loved me after that. That was an experience to me, that marked me as a human being. That was one of the most deeply humanizing experiences I’ve ever had. And there were other experiences like that, that I don’t wanna tell right now, but there were that intense of, you know, what is it? What does it mean to be human and to live in community? And to me, the Dominican people taught me that. And I love them for that. And I, and I, when I meet them in kids on the streets, sometimes if we’re gonna be sitting for a long time, I tell them that story, and we end up crying and hugging each other.

[21:17] Francisco: That’s an interesting story.

[21:20] María: I knew…

[21:20] Francisco: Interesting story.

[21:21] María: My mother talked about solidarity. I had heard that word so many times. I got it that day. I knew what that was. You know, that to me is, you know, part of being, you know, Latin American. It’s not, it’s not about me and my family and my things and me. It’s not that I can’t, I can’t relate. I can’t relate to people hoarding and making the, it’s like we’re all gonna be in this together. Okay. So let’s gain skills and let’s share, and I produce this, and you produce that, and we exchange. That makes much more sense to me.

[21:55] Francisco: So it seems like that interaction with that particular family as you came to know them, that may have elucidated some other further things that brought you towards your, that part of your Hispanidad maybe?

[22:07] María: Yeah.

[22:08] Francisco: Yeah?

[22:08] María: Yeah, definitely. I mean, I was already, I was there because I wanted to be in Boricua College. I wanted to be around Puerto Ricans and, and Latin American people. And I wanted to speak Spanish. And I was practicing. My Spanish wasn’t, you know, I had majored in Spanish. I had lived in Spain, but my Spanish wasn’t very fluent. So that was something that I was working on.And, but I got much more than the language I got. I got so much depth of experience. It, it really prepared me to come here and live here.

[22:38] Francisco: So I think we’ve, we’ve kind of cleared up the idea of the herb part.

[22:44] María: Uh-huh.

[22:45] Francisco: We, we’ve kind of cleared that.

[22:46] María: A little bit.

[22:46] Francisco: A little bit. We kind of cleared it up, but now let’s retro a little bit from the first moments that you meet that community, like where you were learning and stuff. Is there…

[22:56] María: Here?

[22:56] Francisco: No, out there.

[22:58] Oh, yeah, okay.

[22:58] Francisco: Because you started out there too.

[22:59] María: In Dyckman. Yeah. Well, I lived in a lot of different communities. I lived on Avenue B, you know, I, I lived in a lot of places in New York City, but that particular community to me was the home. I loved it there.

[23:11] Francisco: So when you think of herbs and stuff like that in healing, we haven’t even gotten to the healing part yet, but the herbs and stuff, is there anything that, that comes to memory that first stood out at you, like, that touched you in terms of, you know, get, wanting to get involved in, in herbs and healing?

[23:29] María: Well, I, I mentioned that I, when I saw Susan and Billy and, and River, I mean, that was like, this is what I want for me. You know.

[23:39] Francisco: But anything specific, very specific.

[23:43] María: Well…

[23:42] Francisco: About the actual process of looking at a plant, or tasting a plant, or using a plant.

[23:50] María: It was a very long continuum because we, you know, we did herb walks and we did for exchange. And then we took a course, and then, then I took the course, and I learned about the physical properties of, of the plants and the, the vocabulary that I could read in, in scientific books and extrapolate information. But it really, for me, the greatest connection, it wasn’t even just plants. It was being outdoors, being receptive and feeling the greatness of life. And, you know, for us plants today that are being, you know, poisoned everywhere around the world, you know, why poison plants? I can understand maybe, mosquitoes, maybe rats, but plants, what, what could they possibly be, you know, so bad for? I mean, and we certainly could substitute plants, but poisoning the earth and poisoning our water, supposedly because of the plants. It’s something that makes me so outraged that it has helped me to commit myself more to the plants themselves because, I, I just can’t wrap my mind around all of the, the poisoning that we as humanity have done. You know, I have a, I have an interesting statistic that I would like to share with you guys. It’s in my book. But, before the industrial, well, before the Green Revolution of using petroleum products and creating, fertilizer, chemical fertilizers and, and chemical herbicides and all of that, before any of that, around the world, agriculture lost approximately 30% of all of its fruits around the world to pests being what they were. You know, how much we, and now that we’ve poisoned everything around us, guess how much we lose to pests now? 33%. The number has gone up, and all we’ve done is poison. And when I was in New York City, I had a beautiful, I had a beautiful job at a Buddhist foundation, Samaya Foundation. And, one of the jobs that really helped me to prepare for my book writing career was, I did kind of a ghost writing thing. And we did a lot of interviews with, some Tibetan people. And some of them were doctors, and some of them weren’t, but they all were very clear about one thing, if you have a pest, you gotta talk to them. You gotta communicate. You gotta give them something. If you just can’t say no, they’re, they have every right to be there. They were there first. You came, you wanna colonize them, you wanna kill them off. That’s what we do in the, in, in this world of colonization and genocide. So, to me, that was like another eye-opening thing when I met these Tibetan people. And they were so, they were so like, really, you don’t even talk to them? I mean, they were here first. So that was a possibility. And then, later in, in, when I lived in Orocovis, ya, you know, like 25 years ago, I started studying with Eliot Cowan, something that is called “Plant Spirit Medicine.” And that book is really worth reading. “Plant Spirit Medicine.” It was so, it changed my life so much that I dedicated six years to translating it into Spanish, ’cause I, I couldn’t bear the thought that my best friends here could not read or really enjoy reading the book. But “Plant, Spirit, Medicine,” was my way of immersing myself in the possibility of truly opening our minds and communicating with the spirit of plants, animals, rocks, whatever. And even our own inner teachers with only a rhythm to guide us, with a drum. And that to me was because I’m very sensitive. I do not use, you know, mind altering substances. I can’t drink alcohol. I can’t smoke pot. I can’t do any of that stuff. So, to me, finding this drum as a means of totally changing my, my mentality, having grown up in a family of musicians was just absolutely the greatest thing. And, um, and that’s why I, I, I spent six, six years and three versions. Oh, translating his book.

[28:30] Francisco: You, you mentioned salsa, you mentioned Johnny Pacheco, you mentioned Bomba, you mentioned a bunch of music.

[28:36] María: There. There’s music everywhere here.

[28:38] Francisco: So this, there seems for you to be a, a big connection. Big connection, big. In terms of vibrations.

[28:42] María: Yes. Big connection.

[28:45] Francisco: With, with the healing practices. Yeah.

[28:47] María: Yeah. Well, yeah. I mean, it’s a specific rhythm. It’s not a Latin rhythm that we use to enter, but, into the other world, the lower world or the upper world, depending on what we wanna do. But, music to me, has always been so fundamental in creating friendships for instance. Here, and even in New York City, I mean, as a high school student, I would go to dances and I would find my people, my, my dancing people, we would find each other. We would dance and dance and dance and dance and dance. And we would sing and sing and sing. And my father gave me a lot of, both my parents really, they were very creative and they liked us to be creative, their kids. So, you know, when I was making up songs and stuff like that, they were like, yeah, you’re good at that. You should, you know, you should do that. Which was a wonderful thing. And, and so music to me, when in the fifties, no one gave a little girl drums to play. That was like so masculine an instrument, a type of instrument. And I was given a piano, and I, I didn’t like the piano. It was very mental. I had to memorize all kinds of stuff. And, and I was basically a percussionist by, you know, by nature. So now I have a lot of ways that we can enter the, the healing circle with, with instruments to support the people who are going through the labyrinth and things like that. Yeah. I get it.

[30:10] Francisco: But it’s interesting because I like to look at things comparatively. You know, when we say salsa, it’s not really salsa, it’s Cuban music.

[30:17] María: Yeah.

[30:18] Francisco: Right.

[30:18] María: Yeah, That’s right.

[30:19] Francisco: I mean, there’s a big controversy and debate over that, but it really is Cuban music.

[30:23] María: El song. El song.
[30:25] Francisco: Right. So, so, so you have, you have a secular music.

[30:28] María: Mm-Hmm.

[30:28] Francisco: That’s derived from spiritual music.

[30:30] María: Absolutely. All of salsa. All Cuban music, all Cuban music, all Bomba is all spiritually based.

[30:37] Francisco: All comes from spiritual…

[30:37] María: Absolutely.

[30:38] Francisco: bases.

[30:38] María: Absolutely.

[30:39] Francisco: Yes.

[30:39] María: I’m totally… okay.

[30:40] Francisco: I say that to people and say, what? I didn’t know that.

[30:42] María: Oh, yeah, Absolutely. Well, everything is, we’ve just secularized the world.

[30:46] Francisco: Yes.

[30:46] María: I mean, we, trees aren’t alive. They’re things, I mean, nothing is, nothing in our world really has any value except what the market deems valuable. So we have to understand that we’ve been colonized, our minds have been colonized, and we have to break that. And I think that when we, when we understand that all music comes from this connection that we feel with life, that is, in some, in some places in the world, the word for God is great vibration. I mean, it’s all, it’s all about that. So, yes, I, I know, I know this. When I was, I had a wonderful job at, at the Botanical Garden in Caguas, and we were creating, different arboleras, different areas, and we had an arbolera Africana. And during, during the period of creation of that particular area, I was fortunate to go to a couple of, congresses on African spirituality and culture, cultures. And it was amazing all that I picked up. And the biggest thing that I learned there was that Bomba, every single rhythm is different. And it has a spiritual root, and it has a spiritual meaning. The actual rhythm has a meaning. So for me, that was like, ah, and there are bomberos today in Puerto Rico that are teaching that, and it’s beautiful.

[32:12] Francisco: Yeah. It’s about time. It’s about time.

[32:14] María: Yeah.

[32:15] Francisco: Because I historically we’re going back to the, you know, the bomba coming to the stage, you know, with Cortijo.

[32:23] María: Right.

[32:24] Francisco: And Ismael Rivera. I mean, that was like, I call that Hollywood, you know, Bomba.

[32:29] María: Mm-Hmm.

[32:29] Francisco: And mixed with a little, jazz,

[32:31] María: Not bad though.

[32:32] Francisco: Oh, no, no. It was great. It was, it was great. But, but I think a lot was left out. And you make a tremendous point when you say all those rhythm, have they have a meaning. If you play a sicá. If you play güembé, an holandé. Right. A yubá. Right. All of those have different vibrations and meanings.

[32:51] María: Yes.

[32:52] Francisco: So that’s beautiful. You said that. I like that. Okay, good. We might add something to that later, but I, I want to go back now to something you said before, because you mentioned the ancestors. And it’s funny because I, I was like the first one that entered your house,

[33:06] María: Uh-huh.

[33:07] Francisco: And as soon as I passed, that was a bed there. I see the altar. Now I, I’m not certain, but I think that’s, that’s some kind of ancestral altar that you have there.

[33:15] María: Yes, yes.

[33:16] Francisco: So can you elaborate a little bit on that altar, because that’s fascinating to me.

[33:21] María: Well, we can take a picture of it maybe later. Yeah.

[33:23] Francisco: Oh, that’d be beautiful.

[33:25] María: It’s a space where I honor the botanical tradition of Puerto Rico, and I honor my spiritual values. I had an experience once when I was, I got very sick in the nineties, maybe it was 2002 or something like that, 2002, 2003. I got very sick. And I went to see a beautiful medical intuitive. And she said, “who are you praying to?” And that was exactly the question I needed to hear. And I thought to myself, I better get clear about this. And so I met with my mother, who was a great spiritual teacher of mine. And we sat down and we, and we thought of all the values that we had, what are our spiritual values? Compassion, connection to the world, to humanity. We, we made a list of all the wonderful things, and we put a, an image to her, and the image is on the cover of the novel, La milagrosa. Milagrosa, miracles.

[34:34] Francisco: Right.

[34:35] María: And that was something that was really important. So that altar actually, it, it, it, it embraces the altar is pretty big. It’s my whole room, actually. But it, it embraces, it embraces that moment of who, who are my divinities and what do they represent to me? And when I light a candle, I am, I am offering the day to my divinities and saying, bless me, bless me. Protect me, protect all of ours. And bless us here in Puerto Rico, as we create our reality, as we, as we dance our reality, as we laugh, our reality, as we, as we sing our reality, as we cook our reality, as we do nothing, our reality, as we lie down our reality, all of that, that’s what my, my, that room that you came into represents for me.

[35:31] Francisco: It’s one of the first things I noticed.

[35:33] María: Yeah.

[35:34] Francisco: That’s cool. That’s a, it’s a wonderful way to, to enter a room.

[35:37] María: Mm. Well, I’ll show, I’ll show you. I wasn’t really expecting you yet, ’cause, but I’ll show you, I’ll show you the different, a Adolfina Villanueva is there who defended her home, and was killed defending her home, her ancestral home in Loíza. And the, my teachers, the most important herbal teachers from here in Puerto Rico are there. Ixchel is there, who is a goddess of the Maya Mayan people who represents, many of the values that I, hope to manifest through my work and my life. And of course, La milagrosa is there, among the plants are there, and the five elements are there. Eliot Cowan, was a, a Chinese, oriental medical doctor. And he taught us to see the world through air, fire, water, earth, and green growing things. But it’s called wood. But it’s, it’s not really that. It’s green growing things. They call it wood, but wood is dead. I don’t think it’s wood. It’s green growing things.

[36:45] Francisco: Cool, cool.

[36:47] María: Yeah.

[36:47] Francisco: So, which leads me to my next question. Let’s unpack this a little more, because you already, you’ve spoken about preservation.

[36:54] María: Mm-Hmm.

[36:55] Francisco: Just by simply bringing out the books, which you say got all stuck together. So you’re selling them. But…

[37:01] María: No, I sell them all. But those particular ones, I’m giving them away practically for a low price.

[37:06] Francisco: I’m messing with you, messing with you. It’s a joke. But, in terms of preservation, you, you’ve already started that preservation years ago, right?

[37:17] María: 87′ I tried to start.

[37:19] Francisco: So, so the preservation and kind of coupling that, putting it together with the spirituality and the ancestor worship, let, let, let me present, let me take that, that question and expand a little more, because this, this seems to be a problem for a lot of people in the West, especially over there on Turtle Island.

[37:39] María: A big turtle island.

[37:40] Yeah. Big Turtle Island. I mean, you know, it seems to be a problem because a lot of the people that we deal with…

[37:37] María: I’ve gotta get outta this.

[37:48] Francisco: They, they make, I’m so sorry that I, you know,

[37:50] María: That’s okay.

[37:51] Francisco: Do it like that.

[37:51] María: Uncomfortable.

[37:52] Francisco: Okay. So this idea of preservation, and when you couple that with spirituality and the ancestors, is it, is it hard for, how do you perceive that in terms of your worship, having an altar, speaking to your, your ancestors? Do you hear, is there vibrations that come to you, that speak to you, that talk to you? Because that’s hard for those people to understand.

[38:18] María: They’re right. They’re in my bed. They’re always talking to me. They’re always talking. They’re always there. I, I, I do, I blow out the candle at night. But, first of all, when my mother died, I had this incredible revelation. She was my best friend. We talked every day. She dies. And like two, she had a good death, a very good death. And it, she was very close. She came to Puerto Rico to die. And, which was incredible because she, she grew up, she, she was born and grew up in New York City. She was like the last of my, of the family that left. And she was like, the extra who came, you know, after all the other brothers were all grown practically. And she came along, and mommy died. And two weeks later I was like, oh my God. I was burning to call her. And then I heard her say, you don’t have to call me anymore. You just talk to me. You don’t need a phone to talk to me now. And it was the greatest. And I just, I talk to her all the time. He’s always with me. And my father’s always with me. I say,”Oh, oh, daddy, listen to that music. Oh, mommy.” “Look at this. What do you think of this?” “Oh, you, I’m, you must be loving this with me.” And I, and they’re always with me and the, and the ancestors as well. You know, my, my grandmother would be so shocked, you know, I’m sure she’s not now because she knows everything that’s going on. It’s funny that I actually, when you read the novel, I actually moved to the same neighborhood, like a block away from where my grandmother was, was raised, or at least where she raised her kids, where she raised her, her sons, her first kids before my mother was born. She moved away before my mother was born. But all my uncles were, were actually born a street or two away from where I found a place to live in my Mayagüez when I came, I had no idea. I found it by myself. I mean, I just walk in the streets and, you know, I gave myself three days to find a place to live because I, I couldn’t just move here. I mean, I, I had to find a place and rent a place and get my moving stuff in order. And so I came and it was like the last hour of the last day. And I see this stairway, and I go up the stairway and I found my, I loved it. I see this little house, it was $150 rent. It was perfect. I, it was high. I loved being high. I like getting the breathe. And, and there I was. And that was like, they guided me. Okay, well, here I am. I use my mother’s last name because of that. I, I use my mother’s last, first of all, it’s a rare name, Benedetti in Puerto Rico. It’s a very small sepa. And also because I, I’m the only one of all of my Puerto Rican cousins who really are fully genetically Puerto Rican, which I’m not, because my father was Irish Hungarian. But there, they, none of them even learned to speak Spanish or came to Puerto Rico. And here I am, la gringa, they call me la gringa. How could, how could she be Puerto Rican? She’s Puerto Rican. She came out Puerto Rican. How did she come out Puerto Rican? They would say, because it was, was no, there was no effort on anyone’s part that I would be that way. But that’s what I turned out to be. So yeah, they’re, they’re there. That was part of my initiation, you know, moving into a community that was, it was like, uh, a working class community. Very humble. I mean, you could hear everything that was going on in the next, in the next house. And, um, I heard some unbelievable things. And I saw some unbelievable things. And we shared unbelievable experiences, with my neighbors. That’s, it was great. Yeah.

[42:08] Francisco: That’s beautiful.

[42:08] María: And that was all, you know, it’s all ancestor inspired, you know, these are my people. So this is the place I wanna be. This is the place I wanna die. This is the place I wanna live. And I have tried three times to get outta here. I mean, I thought three times in my life, I said, I can’t go on like this. I can’t be in a place where people just throw their garbage on the beach. I can’t be in a place where they think, you know, the new economy should be biotechnology. I can’t be. And each time I go, I’m like, it, it never takes more than 10 days before. I’m just dying to get back home to these people, to, to this group of problems. And, and these compañeros, which, with which we can, we can resolve or help to solve some of these problems. Or at least, you know, work with them. So yeah, I’m a…

[43:02] Francisco: So that’s beautiful story.

[43:05] María: …love about Puerto Ricans.

[43:06] Francisco: So we touched on healing a little bit, but healing means a lot of things to a lot of people. And it seems like healing might just be a biological need for a malady that you need to pay attention to and maybe cure it, or, you know, deal with it. So it gets you through in life. For example, if you have diabetes…

[43:27] María: Mm-Hmm.

[43:28] Francisco: Maybe at one point we will be able to reverse it. You can reverse it if you get it early enough. Some people have had it and reverse that.

[43:36] María: Mm-Hmm. Right.

[43:36] Francisco: How they did it, who knows how they did it. But there, there is a sense of preservation in the work, the kind of work that you do. And I think you’re doing it by writing these books. That’s a sense of preservation.

[43:46] María: Well, I haven’t written any books since I’ve been here, I’ll tell you that.

[43:48] Francisco: But that’s okay.

[43:50] María: It’s not…

[43:50] Francisco: That’s okay. You know what? I read that book and I read some of your other books, and that is a way of preserving it. Especially the first book that I read. I’m saying, this woman is preserving our culture. Our boricua culture in terms of these old people, probably most of them are dead now.

[44:09] María: Oh yeah.

[44:09] Francisco: Yeah.

[44:10] María: In the first book, from the first book, I think there’s only one person.

[44:12] Francisco: There’s only one. So, you know, you’ve done an incredible service, you know, to this island and to its people. And to, and more to yourself.

[44:23] María: Thank you to myself. I’ve done a great service. I use those books all the time.

[44:26] Francisco: I’m sure you…

[44:27] María: I, I made those books ’cause I needed them. I needed to find out everything that’s in there. And I use them when I’m teaching. I use them all the time. Those are my reference books. And the last book that I did, the, the tree book, I mean, I just discovered that jíbaros really, and, and all of the Caribbean people in the Caribbean basin, you know, the trees were really the source of most of their medicine. It’s not about, you know, lemongrass or, hierbabuena- mint, peppermint. These plants came to us from the Europeans. They, they’re wonderful. I love them. But that’s not what our ancestors were using. Before, let’s say the 19th century, they weren’t using those plants. They were using the trees. They were using all the wild plants that now everyone wants to eliminate and, and poison. So for me, it’s like, I, I feel so strongly about it, but I didn’t even understand when I took that book, when I took the, the challenge that was given to me by the botanical garden to do the research on all the plants that were being planted there. And I have three more in the oven, but I can’t get to do, do them. ’cause I have five acres of land. Anyway, but when I started doing that, I realized, my God, oh my God, flamboyan is medicine. Oh my God. Oh my God, reina de las flores is medicine. Oh my God. Oh my God. I couldn’t believe it. And then I realized, of course, this influx of, what we call exotic plants to do all our landscaping and stuff, it just separates us from the wisdom of thousands of years. And people of three cultures, of three continents. The African continent, the American double, triple continent, the European continent. I mean, we have here in Puerto Rico, the memory, thousands of years in three continents. And it’s not like it was a lab where they paid people to get a certain result. This is like, if this remedy doesn’t work, I may lose my baby. I may lose my husband, I may lose my mother. This has to work. And if it doesn’t work, I am gonna not pass it on. So what happened is that we were little by little, separated, separated, separated from the knowledge and belittling the knowledge is part of what every colonizer does. You know, they did it in India. They do, they have done it in Africa. Africa is the richest continent in the world. And look how we look at Africa. Everyone’s poor there. Well, it’s not poor because the, the people don’t have traditions. It’s poor because their traditions have been, and their traditional leaders, their traditional spiritual systems have been belittled and destroyed just as what has happened in the Americas. So for me, you know, this whole richness, if I can just spark the imagination of people to understand how rich we are in our botany, in our natural, the plants that wanna grow here and that have always grown here, and some that have been introduced and that are part of our, our landscape and part of our imagination. When we think of Puerto Rico, we think flamboyan, we think of pana. They’re not from here, but they have been adopted by the Puerto Rican people through centuries of use and love. But when we wanna find out the medicinal uses of those plants, we have to go back to the literature of the places where they’re from. We have to look at ethnobotany from Africa and Madagascar to find out all the uses that flamboyan has had over the centuries. We have to look at the, at the Pacific tropics to find out about the medicinal uses of panapé or pana pepita. And we can compliment that with modern uses from indigenous people who really do, live from the plants that surround them. But that’s what, you know, that’s what I understood. I I, I came to this understanding that everything is medicine. Everything, everything green is medicine. And that is why it’s so very painful to me that we ignorantly poison plants that could keep us alive, plants that could heal, plants that could bring us back to our, our highest level of health and wellbeing in on the island. And we have to stop the poisoning first from the sky and from the earth. And I’m gonna say something about this, because if, if the poison came from, from, you know, from a colonizing, structure that we could recognize, oh, that’s a colonizing structure. Everyone would say, no, we would be in the streets. No poison, don’t poison us. We’re not cucarachas, but, you know, the Puerto Rican people have been brainwashed to think that it’s good, it’s clean, it’s easy to poison our streets and our front yards and our, you know, our trees. I mean, they do it with the guayaba tree. I see them poisoning around the guayaba trees. And then they’re gonna wonder in two years why the guayaba tree died. There’s no life in the soil when you start poisoning. There’s no life in the soil, there’s no life in your food, and there’s certainly no life without water.

[49:48] Francisco: So, to wrap this up…Wrapping it up. I just want to get into the a a little bit more in the preservation, because you’ve told me a lot about what you’ve done, what and what you’re doing now or what you have done. But to take it into the future, the idea of preservation comes through the dissemination of information and study. Right? All the researches that we do.

[50:10] María: Not really all of it. I’m trying to get away from that. Now. I’m trying to take people, we, well, we do study here. I mean, this is a classroom, but I’m trying to bring people into the forest and offer them an experience of direct connection and direct knowing, you know, of, of what they are apart. And when people come from the, I say, oh, if you’re coming on, if you’re coming from, you know, whatever the states or Europe or wherever they’re coming the next day, you have to come here and we’ll do the forest therapy. So they all the boricua, so they can feel the forest, they can feel their land, their land, our land. Like you can feel it, you can talk to it, you can experience it, it can come through your pores. That’s, you know, that’s, that’s something else that I, I wanna offer people. It’s more, and now that I’m, you know, I’m, I’m getting older, ha ha as we all are. And you know, sometimes I even start thinking, you know, this is a lot for me. And, I don’t wanna be always in my head and I’m not writing books. What can I offer? What’s the best thing? What do I need? What does my spirit need? So I do the things that my spirit needs and I offer to other people and they need it too. That’s like the book. I need the book. I make the book. We all enjoy the book.

[51:25] Francisco: So, so piggyback backing on what you just said.

[51:28] María: Mm-Hmm.

[51:30] Francisco: You, you’re teaching here, obviously. I see boards and stuff.

[51:33] María: Yeah, yeah. I mean, it’s not, it doesn’t look like this where we have…

[51:35] Francisco: Can I, can I ask you a question about that though? What, what, what type of people do you get here? Do you get a lot of people from outside that come to study with you because they know you or you come to teach ’em a class? What’s, what’s the demographics here for the people that come?

[51:52] María: Well, no, my classes are, they take a, my course takes a long time. It takes two months. So people have to be here for that. So it’s Puerto Ricans.

[51:59] Francisco: Puerto Ricans.

[51:59] María: Interesting, used to be, mostly people older than I, used to be. They would come to kind of go down memory lane and think about mommy and think about grandpa. And, it’s not that anymore. Now I have young people, mostly my students are mostly between 20 and 38 years old.

[52:24] Francisco: And Puerto Rican?

[52:25] María: Yeah. I mean, they wanna bring their kids up. They wanna bring their kids up without having to go to the emergency room. Every time they have a cold or a cough or they get scared, they’re not gonna be scared. They’re gonna have their plants around them. And they are the people that give me so much hope because the tradition is not dying. The tradition, you know, I, I kind of insist on people learning about their own tradition. So I’m like, if you’re interested in plants, come, come to my course first. And then you go to Peru and then you go to Mexico, and then you do whatever you wanna do to, to learn from other traditions. But you really, we really wanna be rooted in our own tradition. And that’s something that I can offer because I had the opportunity to come here and the 87′ and feel that tradition and, and document it. And so, so that’s the demographics. Mostly young people and some older, I have midwives. I have, grandmothers, I have, you know, but I would say 70% of the students that I have now are from 20 to 38, 40 years old, which is wonderful for me because I adopt them and they’re all my kids.

[53:37] Francisco: And, and that’s interesting. First article that I ever read on the, the no, the nuevo jíbaro movement here in Puerto Rico, which isn’t new at all now.

[53:47] María: No.

[53:48] Francisco: For, for a while. But you see that those highly educated Puerto Ricans who studied a lot of this stuff at a university in a, at a university level, they’ve said, you know what? I leave here. No, we’re, we’re not gonna become doctors and lawyers and whatever…

[54:05] María: Engineers.

[54:06] Francisco: And, and, and even if we do that, like Naniki, you know Naniki, right?

[54:09] María: Yes.

[54:09] Francisco: From Orocovis?

[54:10] María: Yes.

[54:11] Francisco: She is a lawyer.
[54:11] María: Yeah, I know.

[54:13] Francisco: And she decided to come back. Yeah, of course. She’s older now, and she’s a, what they call elder, maybe.

[54:18] María: Yes, yes.

[54:19] Francisco: I know Naniki too. But, those young people, they are the, the people that are going to preserve this for the future by teaching their children.

[54:29] María: That’s right.

[54:30] Francisco: Because maybe they came here and they also learned with you.

[54:34] María: And then, and they learned in many places.

[54:36] Francisco: But I’m saying…

[54:36] María: But I want them to come here too.

[54:39] Francisco: To come here too, right.

[54:39] María: I want those kids.

[54:40] Francisco: Right. So, so you’re in agreement with, with that, with this jíbaro movement?

[54:45] María: Oh, yes, definitely.

[54:45] Francisco: Right?

[54:46] María: Absolutely. That’s the most important thing. And, and you know, I know that Juan Dalmau is gonna, is gonna win the elections by votes. I don’t know if, if we will be permitted to have that sort of government, because there’s all kinds of, of corruption here. And even, you know, people have told me, you know, my mother’s PNP and she got four ballots in the mail. You know, that’s scary to, to us, to everyone in Puerto Rico. We realize, and, and the commission, the electoral commission is from one party, the PNP. And they’re, you know, they’re controlling everything. But I don’t care. I mean, I do care. But the important thing is that we have created a culture of understanding. There’s not, we don’t want corruption. We don’t want people who are insisting, you know, on this model, this, this economic model, this trickle down model that puts all Puerto Ricans in second place, third place, fourth place, and says, come here and save us, boana, we don’t have to pay taxes. Oh, we don’t even have any more schools. That’s not a priority. We don’t have health. That’s not a priority. We just want you to come, wanna, and make us rich, or make us better, or give us jobs, cleaning rooms for you. We will give you massage and clean your room. That’s what’s happening. And that is not acceptable. And Puerto Rican people are very clear about that. So, I mean, we want a change and we’re gonna create that. And the neo-jíbaros you know, we’re all neo-jíbaros. I mean, we, we are all saying we love this place and we are gonna defend it. And we are defending it in every way we can. And this is a little, like a little chapter of defense over here.

[56:28] Francisco: That’s beautiful. That’s beautiful. You have anything else you wanna add to what you’ve told me?

[56:33] María: No.

[56:33] Francisco: Not anything in particular that might stand out to you that you wanna share?

[56:37] María: Well, I’m, you know, I’m honored that you’re, that you’re interviewing me and I’m, but I’m mostly honored that I have been, let’s say blessed. I’m very honored to have been blessed to be in this position and, and at my age, you know, to have this project. And, you know, I feel very, very blessed. And, I’m, I feel very fortunate and I don’t know what the future will bring. But I, I, I’m not going anywhere, let’s put it that way. I’m not going anywhere. So I’ll be here.