The Buzzard's Butt

Curandera and Nyssa, Oregon, resident Eva Castellanoz in her healing workspace, July 2020. 
(Photo/Rachel Parsons)

Author’s note: A version of this story was originally published in a Malheur Enterprise special print publication in September 2020. 

By Rachel Parsons

Eva Castellanoz opened a small, dusty, decorative box and pulled out a wad of protective paper. She hadn’t looked at the prize under it in years. 

 

She gingerly took hold of the delicate trinket and lifted out a beautiful arrangement of exquisitely fine paper flowers and flower buds the color of alabaster. They’d been hand-made and dipped in wax and fixed to a light frame in the semicircular shape of a crown, or in Spanish, a corona. The elegantly fragile buds were so polished with age they looked like pearls in the golden afternoon light filtering through the windows.  

 

 “She is older than the buzzard’s butt,” said Castellanoz, matter-of-factly. “And the buzzard’s butt is old.”

 

At 81, Castellanoz talks about age with authority. Though, as nimble as she is, no one would guess how many years she’s been around. The corona she placed back in its protective shell is one of who knows how many she’s made over the decades (she doesn’t) as a Mexican folk artist and traditional holistic healer, or curandera, in Nyssa, Oregon, a small town of about 3,200 souls abutting the Idaho border. 

 

Las coronas are worn for baptisms, weddings, quinceañeras, first communions, and other special occasions. Castellanoz is a living brain trust for traditional Mexican practices that tend to die out with migration. And her family did migrate. 

 

Her parents, both from Mexico, brought Eva and her siblings first to Texas, where her father worked as a migrant farm hand as part of the largest contract labor and guest-worker program ever undertaken in the country. From 1942 to 1964, the Bracero Program allowed millions of Mexican men to come work in primarily agricultural settings in the United States. As with thousands of other workers throughout the years, Castellanoz’s father came to the Nyssa area to work the sugar beet fields for Amalgamated Sugar Co. After several years cycling between Texas, Oregon, Idaho and Washington state in the 1950s, her parents settled in Nyssa. She followed not long after. 

 

As we sat in her healing workspace, she became reflective. “I don’t know why I been thinking about this the last few weeks,” Castellanoz said. “Maybe because I’m old.” But she seemed to need to tell someone. And I, a journalist from the county newspaper, the Malheur Enterprise, had arranged to write a profile on her and shown up on her doorstep. The piece was supposed to focus on her heritage and work in the Hispanic community and its history in Malheur County. But she seemed to need to tell me about something else. 

 

So Castellanoz told me about the time in Texas when, as a young teen, her father beat her with a belt because he thought she was stepping out with a young man. She wasn’t, but he hit her so hard bits of her clothes were embedded in her skin. She told me of her subsequent marriage to that young man when she was 15, of the philandering and neglect, the abandonment. She had nine of his children. She doesn’t know where he is now, but she is still married to him. She cried as she described these times.

“The first time I fell in love I was in my 50s,” she said. She never told the object of her affections. “Now I help girls. I tell them.” She tells them that they don’t have to be with men who hurt them. 

 

Her memories of the family’s early days as migrant workers in Nyssa seem no less painful, all these decades later. “It was very, very, very hard,” she said, tears coming back to her eyes. 

 

The first migrant housing she remembered living in was a “little house over by the city dump” that was bitterly cold in winter. When they were able to go to school, she and her siblings faced derision because “we didn’t have pretty clothes.” She loved school, though, she said, and as a gifted student was often placed in classes with older children. 

 

Today, the rural Oregon county’s school districts have robust migrant student education programs to serve the unique needs of migrant workers’ children. 

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The Braceros were, of course, not the first Spanish-speaking group to appear in the Pacific Northwest. Spanish conquerors based in Mexico made their way along the Pacific Coast numerous times stretching back to the 1500s. There were also smaller numbers of Hispanic agricultural workers in the Pacific Northwest as early as the 1920s. But the program crystalized the flow of migrant farm workers who were desperately needed in the region during World War II. By the 1970s, according to research by historian Richard Slatta, Spanish speakers were Oregon’s largest ethnic minority. 

 

As with so many others, Castellanoz’s family put down roots and became part of the mosaic of Malheur County. If her family story is emblematic of much of the Hispanic community’s development here, her reputation as an artist and healer is emblematic of the cultural contributions that individuals from that community make. 

 

“I know people in their 30s and 40s who still think she is some kind of saint,” said Matt Stringer, executive director of Four Rivers Cultural Center in Ontario, the county’s largest town. “Because at some point when they were children, their mothers would take them to Eva to be healed.”

 

Customarily, many from rural Mexico have put great faith in holistic folk healing, or Curanderismo. The practice puts emphasis on treating emotional, psychological and spiritual problems as well as physical ones. Though today most people see medical doctors when physical illness strikes, curanderas such as Castellanoz still hold revered positions within the culture. 

 

People are usually “called” to be healers, and the ability is often said to be inherited. Castellanoz said both of her parents had the gift, and she learned her practice from them. Her mother often worked with healing herbs. She still remembers going out into the Owyhee hills with her mother as a child to pick herbs and flowers that had medicinal properties. 

 

Back in the “casita,” the second house on her property next to her small orchard where she kept the prized corona, Castellanoz, a slight but strong woman in blue jeans and sneakers, led me into another room full to bursting with a lifetime of memorabilia. 

 

She pointed to a wall covered in portraits and framed photos. There was one of her father. “I loved him,” she said. Most of the others were of young men in uniform. Four sons and one granddaughter served in the U.S. Army. Most of her children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren live nearby, she said ­– first, second and third generation Americans who are woven into the multicultural fabric of rural Oregon. 

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