Blood, Hex and Money

 El Armadillo for Borderland Beat

This piece does not come from formal reporting. It comes from personal curiosity and from years of natural conversation with believers, people from my own life, communities I have moved through. The witch is a familiar figure in Mexican and Mexican-American communities across the American Southwest. If you grow up around this, or spend enough time around people who did, you accumulate a working knowledge without ever setting out to.

The bruja is a working professional. She operates out of her home, a back room, occasionally a storefront, but the location is incidental. What matters is the reputation, which typically travels by word of mouth.

The range of services is wide. Limpias are spiritual cleansings, usually involving eggs, herbs, smoke, and prayer, and are the entry-level offering, the thing a casual client might come in for. Card readings. Rituals to undo evil that has been done to you. Love work. Financial work. Curse removal. Curse placement. You learn your options through conversation, through referral. Even a simple ritual, something that takes under an hour, will tend to run over a hundred dollars. More involved work involving multi-day rituals, materials, and sustained attention climbs into the hundreds or thousands. The belief that the work is real is also a belief that the work has value, and value has a price. A witch who charged nothing would not be trusted.

The work does not always happen in the witch's space. She will often prescribe rituals for the client to complete at home. An ingredient list for a bath, a stew of herbs and materials the household should soak in, specific colored candles with instructions for when and how to light them. The client becomes an active participant in the ritual rather than a passive recipient. In more serious cases the prescription escalates. I am aware of clients being instructed to get specific protective sigils tattooed. The tattoo itself becomes the ritual object, carried permanently on the body.

Every bruja operates differently. Some refuse offensive work. Some specialize in it. The space itself is often syncretic: an image of Christ beside Santa Muerte beside Elegua, the Yoruba orisha of crossroads and beginnings. Catholic candles next to cigar ash and rum. The witch does not experience this as contradiction. She is working with whatever works.

The practitioners who discuss their work describe networks. Some report to a more powerful witch somewhere in Mexico. Others describe a supposed organizing temple in Guatemala. Whether these structures exist as described, or whether they are part of the mystique practitioners cultivate to establish their authority, is difficult to determine from the outside. Both the true believers and the con artists are present in this economy. The proportion is not fixed. In some cases the true believer and the con artist are the same person.

For a serious client, the witch is not just a sorceress. She is a professional with a specific skill set that no licensed professional offers. She is priest, lawyer, business partner, and relationship counselor. She operates outside the state and outside the Church, which for a significant portion of her clientele is ideal. A man who cannot walk into a bank, a courthouse, or a confessional can walk into her home. He can describe his problem completely. He will not be judged and he will not be reported.

It should not be assumed that her clientele is strictly working-class Latino. The witch will work with most anyone who can pay, and the referral network carries further than outsiders expect. A white American attorney I spoke with had gone to see a witch on referral from one of her paralegals. She wanted something done about her husband's erectile dysfunction. 

There is a stigma attached to consulting a witch that has nothing to do with class or background. Even within communities where the practice is familiar, many clients keep it private from close family and friends. The assumption is often that anyone seeing a witch must be seeking to do harm to someone.

When a witch cannot handle a particular problem, she refers. A client whose love situation is beyond her specialty gets a name. A client whose enemy requires more serious attention gets a different name. The referral network is informal and relational, built on reputation and connection. Every referral is a new client relationship. Every new client relationship eventually generates its own referrals.

The arrangement is not without risk for the client. A serious ritual often carries a serious price tag, and not everyone pays in full upfront. Payment plans are not uncommon. But a client who defaults, who stops answering calls and goes quiet after the work has already been done, has left a great deal of compromising information in the hands of someone with both the motive and the means to use it. The witch knows who hired her and why. 

She knows who the targets were. A scorned lover, an in-law who paid to break up their child's relationship, a former business partner who wanted a rival damaged — all of them are findable, and all of them would be interested to know what was done to them and who paid for it. The non-paying client may also find themselves on the receiving end of the very category of work they originally commissioned. The witch who was your advocate becomes your enemy, and she already knows everything about you.

I attended a Día de los Muertos gathering at one witch's home, somewhere on a semi-rural property, outside a major city. The whole thing was outdoors, at night. What struck me first was the diversity of the crowd spread across the property. Blue-collar workers still in their uniforms had come straight from job sites, their company trucks parked in the dirt outside. Others dressed flashier and carried themselves with a particular bravado. Elderly couples. A black American man, which registered differently once I understood that the witch spoke no English. Whatever had brought him there and whatever they had communicated, the language barrier had not been an obstacle.

A live mariachi band played through the night, standards and classics that everyone in the crowd knew. The food was buffet style, guests moving through with plates in the dark. At the center of the gathering stood a large Santa Muerte statue surrounded by smaller ones, lit up against the night. Guests had been bringing photographs of deceased loved ones and placing them at her feet throughout the evening. By the end of the night the base of the statue was covered in faces.

The limpias came toward the end. A line formed. The cleansings ran two hundred dollars each and the line was long. By the number of people I watched go through it, she cleared something in the range of four thousand dollars before the night was over, conservatively. 

What I was not prepared for was what happened to some of the recipients. Multiple people seemingly lost consciousness. They dropped and lay on the ground while their families crouched over them, trying to rouse them. Most came back around within a few minutes. One older person did not. The family's attempts were not working. The concern in the crowd was visible and real. The witch finished with whoever she was working on, walked over, did something I could not fully see, and the person was up. The line continued.

The use of witches as weapons is a distinct and underreported dimension of this world. Anyone with a grievance and dollars can contract a witch in Mexico to perform a maldición against a specific target. The cost is low relative to what it accomplishes.

Contracting someone in Mexico is often deliberate. It creates distance, limits the target's options, and carries its own implication of seriousness. Within this world there is a broadly held perception that Mexican witches are stronger, more deeply trained, operating closer to the source of the tradition. Whether or not the hierarchy is real, the perception is, and a video arriving from a Mexican number lands differently. The delivery is a dark room, statues of demons, a photograph of the target burning on an altar, a woman's voice announcing death or suffering. This is done to ensure that when things begin to go wrong for the target, and things will go wrong because things always go wrong eventually, they will know exactly what to attribute it to. The psychological work is already done. The rest the world does on its own.

The predictable response is to find a witch who can undo the work. In Mexican and Mexican-American networks, a referral does not require much asking. The bruja who lifts the curse will also mention that she can help with other things. The person who came in frightened leaves with a list of services. It requires belief, or at minimum the inability to dismiss the possibility. For a family that grew up with this tradition, that has aunts who have seen results, mothers who paid for limpias, grandmothers who knew what certain herbs were for, the threshold for dismissal is higher than it is for an outside observer.

Among the witch's more consistent clients are independent traffickers living on the American side of the border, a mix of Mexican-born and American-born individuals who move low to moderate quantities of drugs through extended family networks or their own connections south of the border. People running their own thing, managing their own risk.

For these clients the witch fills a specific gap. Before a load moves, she may be consulted. She reads the cards, interprets signs, performs protective rituals. She tells the client whether the conditions are right. Whether to cross now or wait. The spiritual world is being asked to render an operational judgment.

This puts the witch in a position that most people in the supply chain do not occupy. She is not moving product. She is not holding money. But she may be the person whose assessment greenlights the crossing. If the load moves on her word and arrives safely, she gets paid and her reputation grows. If the load moves on her word and gets intercepted, the outcomes vary. I have heard of a witch killed for exactly this. A load she blessed was seized and she suffered for it.

There is also a more structural overlap between the witch's client network and the trafficking world. A witch who serves multiple traffickers independently may become a connection point between them. She knows things about both. She may facilitate introductions, formally or informally. The information and relational architecture that makes her useful to one client makes her potentially useful to another. Whether this constitutes participation in a criminal network is a question that probably varies by witch. It is also a question no one is formally asking. I have wondered whether priest-penitent privilege would apply, whether what a client tells a witch in the context of a spiritual consultation would be protected from compelled disclosure. I am not aware of anyone having tested this.

The risks the witch carries are not only occupational in the abstract sense. Part of what the job requires is that people know where to find her. She works out of her home. She opens the door. The client who walks in seeking help and the client who walks in with other intentions are indistinguishable until they are not. A witch who has wronged someone, through a failed ritual, a disputed payment, a secret passed in the wrong direction, may have invited that person, or someone sent by that person, directly into her home. 

The standard domestic work carries its own version of this. A witch who helps end a marriage can find herself the target of the aggrieved party. An ex-partner who believes the bruja is the reason his relationship collapsed is an ex-partner with a grievance and an address. In a community where witches can be understood to have real power, the witch herself is a plausible target for the same tools she deploys. It is not unusual for a witch to maintain her own rigorous spiritual protection. Whether that protection extends to the physical is a separate question.

Part of what clients are paying for, beyond the ritual itself, is the performance of investment. A witch who takes your side takes it visibly. She expresses anger at your enemies. She names them with contempt. She describes what she will do to them with a specificity that functions as reassurance. You are not being processed, you are being championed. How much of this anger is genuine and how much is performance is a question that probably does not have a clean answer. The performance is expected and delivered. But there are situations where the witch's investment in the client's enemy stops being theatrical.

A client told me that their witch had offered to arrange a kidnapping of someone in Mexico who had wronged them. What strikes me about this, beyond the obvious, is what it required of the witch herself. Facilitating a kidnapping across an international border is not a service you offer from a position of detachment. It requires existing relationships with people in Mexico who are capable of and willing to carry out that kind of operation. It implies a willingness to be known, by those people, as someone who brokers that kind of work. It demonstrates an appetite for a category of risk that is different from anything else in the service menu. She is not adjacent to serious violence. She is a participant in it. She said it with a passion that both inspired and terrified the client.

Some witches advertise. They post videos on social media, sessions with clients, testimonials, demonstrations of their work. They run botanica shops with regular hours. The entry point is not hidden. It is, for anyone in the right community, almost mundane. What is hidden is the depth. The same woman whose TikTok shows her performing a limpia for a grateful client is operating inside a network that, at its outer edges, includes the capability to have someone kidnapped in another country. Most of her clients will never get anywhere near that edge. Most do not know it exists. They came for a cleansing or a card reading and that is what they received and that is the whole of their experience of this world. The depth is not advertised. It is arrived at, gradually, by people whose needs or whose circumstances push them further in.