Two women were hybrid tiçitl-curanderas in 1560s. Isabel de Vera was a mixed-race woman living in Michoacán in 1562. There were rumors that she had been publicly shamed as a sorceress and alcahueta in Mexico City. She performed various spells, including making a potion from dead sheep heads for a girl who had a broken toe or foot. She was exiled from Michoacán and disappeared, maybe. More than a decade later, a woman with the same name was accused of bigamy in the mining town of Guanajuato. These were probably the same woman – daughter of a conquistador and a low-status Nahua woman in Mexico City. She was fleeing an abusive husband (a mulato shoemaker) and remarried a Nahua man from Texcoco, believing her first husband had died. The two case files show the fluidity of ethnic identity in early colonial Mexico. The other case concerned a Spanish or mestiza woman, Agustina Núñez, who was a spellcasting curandera in Oaxaca. She used mulberry, which was probably the Native Mexican plant, xanatl, though the mulberry introduced by Spaniards for silkworm food may also have been the plant used in her healing of a broken bone – accompanied by spells. Both women had adapted to their Native environments as curanderas.

This chapter explores the writing of Aleksandar Hemon, Dmitry Samarov, and Erika L. Sánchez as a process of carving out a personal space in the city. Their diverse literary output exemplifies the complexities of immigrant identity and its myriad dialogues with home, boundaries, and space. Hemon’s literature reveals a nuanced spatial-temporal sensitivity that establishes a multilayered and overlapping experience of Chicago and his native Sarajevo. Russian-born Samarov encounters Chicago through the window and rearview mirror of his taxi, observing the city and its inhabitants close-up yet from the sidelines. His unique perspective encompasses the immigrant outsider stance alongside an intimate insider knowledge, facilitating his tersely articulated and poignant vignettes of Chicago’s city- and human-scapes. Sánchez, second generation Mexican, boldly crosses restricting boundaries in her work, challenging constraints of family, community, neighborhood, and nation. By straddling a mixture of cultures, languages, genres, and themes, she cultivates her own distinctive space. Taken together, the writers offer a literary panoply of what it means to be an immigrant in Chicago today.