Brujería

Brujería is not one tradition but the folk category under which Latin American communities file harmful, coercive or unsanctioned magic - the work of the brujo or bruja. It overlaps with curanderismo and with hechicería (spell-work), and what counts as brujería depends on who is judging: the same act is healing in one village and witchcraft in the next. Colonial Inquisition records are the main early source, and they shaped the category as much as they described it, because the inquisitors' questions produced the answers they expected; later ethnography inherited some of those categories.

What is described under the label ranges from love magic and binding to curses, the burial of objects, doll work, and traffic with spirits or the devil. Much of the repertoire is the same as curanderismo's, used toward different ends: the herbs, the baths, the sweepings and the candles are familiar, and the difference is the intent and the community's judgement of it, not the technique. Where a bruja is also a healer, the two roles are kept apart in the same person's practice.

The category is an ethical judgement before it is a practice. To call someone a bruja is to accuse, and in small communities the accusation has cost people their standing, their family and sometimes their safety; the corpus records the category without supplying it with a method. The harmful work that the word names is condemned by curanderismo, by the Church and by the communities that use the word, and it is not reproduced here.