Gloria Merino came to the Salinas Valley from the Mixteca region of Oaxaca, where she’d learned how to help women deliver babies. “My cousin was a curandero [a practitioner of traditional medicine] and he taught me how to heal,” Merino recalls. “The Virgin, God and San Marcos all told me that I would heal people and make a living that way, so I learned to help deliver babies.”
In Greenfield, in the Salinas Valley, she became a partera, or midwife, to women who wanted to deliver at home, using methods their communities had depended on for generations. She had to start growing her own herbs, since she couldn’t find them in stores. “Triquis [the Oaxacan indigenous group to which she belongs] began to seek my help in healing or for trouble in their marriage,” she recalls.
