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Don Martín Martínez González is the Ojinaga/San Carlos region's leading spiritual healer, or curandero.
In Mexico, the system of curanderismo, the spiritual healer's art, dates back to pre-Hispanic times, the curanderos being the inheritors of the Indian shamans who came before them.
Don Martín's mother, Doña Crispina, was also a curandera, and was even more famous than Don Martín. Thus, he carries on a family tradition which may have been passed all the way down from his Indian ancestors since pre-Columbian times.
When the Spaniards came to the New World, the Aztec Indians, who called themselves the Mexica, recognized that they were the children of barbarians who had come down from the North and conquered the more ancient civilization of the Toltecs, who dominated the valley of Mexico before them.
Their gods, particularly the so-called "household gods" (as opposed the deities of the state religion) were their versions of the ancient gods and goddesses who were worshipped from time immemorial throughout Mesoamerica, and which have traits in common with ancient beliefs from all over the world.
One of the principal household deities worshipped by the Mexica and by other tribes of Mesoamerica was Tonantzin ("Our Lady"), the mother goddess, identified with the moon. The modern Basilica de Guadalupe in Mexico City is the principal shrine to the patron saint of Mexico, the Virgin of Guadalupe, and is located on the exact spot where the pyramid of Tonantzin once stood. It is generally believed by anthropologists that the Virgin of Guadalupe and Tonantzin are one in the same, and that this is one of many examples of how ancient Indian beliefs have become fused into the unique spiritual reality of "modern" Mexicans.
Don Martín Martínez, then, is no doubt carrying on the same spiritual traditions which have shaped the minds and imaginations of the peoples who have inhabited the region around valley of the Rio Grande in the Ojinaga/San Carlos area since ancient times. The glossing over of the ancient beliefs by Catholic ritual has only served to obscure the real roots of the religious/cultural mix of the region.
But in that sense, it can be argued that the Mexica and the Toltecs, in their turn, did the same in the Valley of Mexico. So must have the Apaches and Jumanos Indians in Ojinaga done with the more ancient beliefs of the peoples they absorbed and displaced in the cultural matrix of the greater Junta de los Rios region.
Just as Tonantzin lives on in her new incarnation, as it were, as the Virgin of Guadalupe, the old beliefs here have never really died, but continue to have new life breathed into them by each new generation of believers who grow up in this culture. In turn, the spiritual entities, the saints as reincarnations of the more ancient gods, breath their life into the believers, perpetuating a living tradition which goes back to the beginning of time itself. | 
