With Healing Like Our Ancestors: The Nahua Tiçitl, Gender, and Settler Colonialism in Central Mexico, 1535–1660, Edward Anthony Polanco provides the first scholarly monograph on the Nahua tiçitl, focusing on the tiçitl’s work (tiçiyotl) and standing in the first and a half century of Spanish rule in central Mexico. Through a comprehensive analysis of the Nahuatl-language descriptions of the tiçitl in the Historia general de las cosas de Nueva España, Polanco defines this figure as “a man or woman who heals adults and children using knowledge of the natural world and who performs diverse, complex procedures that often involve propitiation (appeasing and making offerings) of nonhuman life forces.” (9)

Polanco frames each of the five chapters around what he terms an “apparatus” that “Spanish settler colonialism exacted on Nahua healing in what is today Mexico” (40). To flesh out how each apparatus operated, Polanco draws on fascinating cases involving titiçih (plural of tiçitl) in colonial archives; the bulk of these cases is culled from the Inquisition records of Mexico’s Archivo General de la Nación. While the Catholic Church’s Holy Inquisition fervently prosecuted titiçih on the basis that all tiçiyotl was fundamentally demonic, Polanco reads the Inquisition records in a decolonial vein, using those records to recuperate valuable information about the materials and methods of the titiçih and the ways in which these practitioners mediated the diverse ethnic milieu of post-Conquest central Mexico (officially New Spain). A representative example, discussed in Chapter 2, is that of Ana de Xochimilco, a tiçitl called before the Inquisition in 1538 for practices consisting of applying copal incense and sprinkling water on an enslaved Native woman and pinching paper off that woman’s body. She also hurled maize kernels (in a form of divination called tlapohualiztli) to ascertain whether sick children would die. Polanco emphasizes that such practices had nothing to do with the Devil as Christian authorities imagined but were, in fact, common elements of tiçiyotl that, originating in pre-Conquest Nahua society, continued after the Conquest.

Complementing his exposition of tiçiyotl in cases like that of Ana de Xochimilco, Polanco draws on the treatises and reports of Catholic clergymen in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century central Mexico to understand why Christian authorities viewed Nahua healing practices as a grave threat to their religion and what the effects of that perceived threat were for Nahuas and Native society at large. Polanco proposes that these effects include the trivialization of the knowledge wielded by Native women regarding the human body and how to cure it (Chapter 5) and the criminalization of all titiçih, deeming them “detrimental to Nahua society and settler society at large” (179). More than that, Polanco argues that the criminalization of tiçiyotl entailed the criminalization of “indigeneity as a whole” (178), making healing a critical site of Spanish domination over Native society.

With Healing Like Our Ancestors, Polanco makes a valuable contribution to a growing scholarly corpus on records of the Inquisition in Mexico and across Abya Yala (the Americas). This contribution has the distinction of bringing forth the tiçitl from the archives to provide a fuller, more historically robust picture of this figure than previously available. In doing so, Polanco elevates the Nahua tiçitl to their rightful place in an expanded, global history of medicine. By the same token, Polanco does the immensely useful work of identifying key native flora (such as cihuapahtli, literally “women’s salubrious material,” Montanoa tomentosa) and fauna (such as tlacuatzin, opossum) used by titiçih in their healing practices. Thus, Polanco’s work on the tiçitl opens the way to further research on plants and nonhuman animals not just for their curative properties (an extractivist endeavor) but as active elements of the complex social ecologies and cosmological systems of Native communities across Abya Yala. Indeed, Healing Like Our Ancestors contributes, through rigorous historical scholarship, to the project of re-indigenizing healing, that is, of Native communities reclaiming their ancestral healing practices in all their complexity.