Lou Florez - The Modern Art of Brujería: A Beginners Guide to Spellcraft, Medicine Making, and Other Traditions of the Global South

The Modern Art of Brujera

A Beginners Guide to Spellcraft, Medicine Making, and Other Traditions of the Global South

Lou Florez

As we elevate, we lift.

Mijo, Im wearing some of that holy water you haveyou know, the one I found in your car.

Mom, I dont have any holy water in my car, what are you talking about?

Mijo, you know, the one thats hanging on the window.

Grabbing me by the hand, she charged through congregations of hungry chickens and hip-high grasses toward the faded powder-blue Buick 88, or the boat, as I called it. Flinging the passenger door open and pointing to the window, she said, Que es eso? (What is that?)

My twenties, like my car, were filled with a mlange of crystals, tingsha bells, charred chickens feet tied to the rearview mirror for protection, and an assortment of other miscellaneous bruje crap scattered across the seats and cup holders. What I thought I needed then and what my practice looks like now are dramatically different. An Elder once said that the Craft matures us and we mature the Craft.

Que es eso? Prodding with her right index finger, she drew my attention to the glass vase suction-cupped to the window. I had already had a coming out of the broom closet conversation with her earlier in the summer, so anything and everything had the potential to be brujera in her eyes. Now, sticking her finger to the bottom of the glass and anointing her wrists with water, she rubbed vigorously and smelled.

What she had thought was holy water was in reality the remnants from the flowers I had recently discarded. I began to explain, but to her it didnt matter. Holiness was part of its essential nature regardless of whether it had been blessed. We laughed and anointed each other with sweet benedictions till it ran dry.

What makes a water holy?

My mother was a Bruja.

She wasnt the classical black-hat-wearing, skin the color of snot, soul-stealing version as seen in the Wizard of Oz, nor the modern, cool, fantastically gifted, chic version like the sisters on Charmedshe was a woman who acknowledged everyone in the room, and to acknowledge is to have a stake in a persons life (at least in that moment). She created connections between and among people, narratives, foods, and tchotchkes. She animated life; that is to say, brought life to lifebrought things to a state of becoming-ness. That was my mother, the Bruja.

A Bruja(e) is a woman, a person, a being, a consciousness that in-animates (pours soul into) the world. They are a becoming-nessstanding at the edge of arrival, a quickening change that starts internally and ripples out manifesting in a Universe that is surreala juicier, sweeter, more succulent rendition of a moment than the one that it precedes.

My mother passed on December 6, 2020, at the age of eighty-five.

There are parts of me that are just awakening to this loss like the phantom pains of limbs that are invisible. Through text messages, emails, phone calls, and letters, her families of heart and communities of soul have reached out to share memoriesplaces where their lives were changed through their interactions.

A Bruja(e) is a woman, a person, a being, a consciousness that is re-membered. That is to say, a being comprised of the memories of all those who have met them, scattered across their souls. Long after their physical passing, these aspects live in the cells of those they have encountered. They become the internalized voice that speaks of experiences not our own, the wisdoms of lives lived in totality. What is the opposite of a carcinogen? A Bruja(e) is like that.

In the spring of 2015, I was on Instagram and happened upon a post graphically displaying the charred remains of two indigenous women. The caption described how in Peru, the Office of the Inquisition was internalized as a governmental agency charged with hunting Brujasthat is to say, those who are threatening societal norms, values, or hierarchies. The legacies of the Inquisition in the discourses of magic, witchcraft, and Brujera are inexorably linked to histories of conquest and genocide.

A Bruja(e) is a woman, a person, a being, a consciousness that lives on the periphery, the outskirts, the borderlands, but makes their life the center. They are the dreamers, artists, activists, thinkers, and medicine makers who are journeying to create something new because there are no incentives for them in the present. Those who live on the outskirts are the builders of new cities.

Brujera(s) are a multitude of practices, traditions, and spiritual workings stemming from across the Caribbean and the Americas based not on religious ideologies or beliefs in gods/goddesses or other intermediaries but on a personal connection to ones own power and the engagement of the physical environment and natural world. Magic, within these contexts, is not exterior to the self or based on the recitation of power words or formulas but is the activation of the inner soul force vibrating in harmony, consenting to our workings, with the vibrations of the world to produce lasting, poignant change. Brujera, at its core, is rooted in an understanding of our environments, both urban and rural and everywhere in between, and how to build and be in relationship to land and location.

The peoples who created what we now think of as brujera did not, themselves, identify under that label. Before conquest, more than one thousand tribes populated North and South America. Following the landing of Columbus in 1492, the Spanish, Portuguese, English, and French colonized North, Central, and South America and the Caribbean, and they created large-scale plantations, which they populated by kidnapping and enslaving Africans. An estimated 22 million people were taken to the Americas and the Caribbean between 1502 and 1866. Even after their emancipations, these communities have received very little support or acknowledgment for their role in the histories of the Americas and often self-describe as having been disappeared or made invisible. The Spanish alone from 1492 to 1824 transplanted 1.86 million Spanish settlers to their colonies in the Americas. These statistics and dates, while numerous, dont account for the Jewish, North African, Middle Eastern, and Asian peoples who have immigrated to these areas throughout the centuries. All of these voices, cultures, and ways of working with Spirit have been labeled demonic, unchristian, uncivilized, and thus brujera or witchcraft.

Even if there ever were such a thing, there is no pure or perfect tradition or spellcraft. There is no one way of practicing and creating spells, ceremonies, or rituals. It is my hope to share not just the recipes but why and how people formulatethe Spirit, the anima or life-imbuing forces that animate the work, as well as the techniques for moving energy, life-force, and Spirit.

One of the major differences between Brujera and other global witchcraft traditions is not just the diversity of cultures and their wisdoms of histories, botanical essences, cycles and rhythms of nature, and engagement of their spiritual landscapes, but also the bioregional diversities of plant, animal, and mineralogical beings across the New World. As migration, displacement, and interactions occurred, peoples traditions and medicines transformed to accommodate not just the new environments but the Spirits that were and are alive within them.