Charles Mingus and Pachita: the Mexican healer who could not save him

Charles Mingus and his third wife, Sue Graham Mingus, in the late 1970s. Mingus Archive

Beneath an orange jacaranda, Gobi Stromberg has just left a psychotherapy session halfway through to open the door of his home in Cuernavaca.

Already in the garden, next to a volcanic stone fountain and now in the shade of some palm trees, this American anthropologist begins to remember old times before returning to therapy.

Stromberg arrived in Mexico almost as a baby with her parents, two theater writers who escaped the anti-communist witch hunt of the 1950s.

In this militant environment, personal friends of Martin Luther King passed through the family home, to the leader of the organization of Malcolm X, who left the office of a famous dentist in Cuernavaca with gold teeth.

That was well into the 1970s, when another African-American rights activist was also in this Mexican city where it is always spring, a kind of spa town near the capital.

Charles Mingus, one of the giants of modern jazz, moved in 1978 from New York to the same street of colonial houses and exotic trees where his countrywoman still lives.

The anthropologist Gobi Stromberg at her home on Humboldt Street in Cuernavaca, Morelos.Claudia Aréchiga

Stromberg does not remember exactly where the

whose centenary of his birth is celebrated this year

but he does remember why he came to Cuernavaca.

Mingus did not travel to Mexico because of his activism in favor of civil rights, his second great dedication after music, nor because of that dentist's golden implants.

“He came to heal with Pachita, a shaman who was very well known around here.

It was said that her clients were politicians and businessmen and that she operated on tumors and terminal illnesses with her hands or with a kitchen knife.

She removed the organs, cured them, and put them back into her body.

No blood and no pain.

Anthropologist friends of mine and other leading academics became very interested in it.

She was a phenomenon in Mexico.”

Mingus put himself in Pachita's hands because a year earlier he had been diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), an aggressive disease of the nervous system for which there is no cure.

At 54, her fingers could no longer play the double bass.

An instrument that he pioneered by placing him as the protagonist and leader of a jazz group.

Plump, six feet tall and known for his hot temper, the angry man of jazz had become "a pumpkin in a wheelchair."

This is how his third wife, Sue Graham, describes it in her memoir,

(La Cifra, 2020)

which deals with the last years of the artist.

Pachita in a photograph with an unknown date. Courtesy

The scenes that appear in the book about the Mingus operation coincide with the legends that are still told in Mexico about Pachita.

In a dim room smelling of alcohol, Mingus lies face down on a bed and the lady appears with a kitchen knife.

When she finishes, she says she feels "like Christ when they stuck a spear in her side."

And also that “she knows how to cut, right between the pores.

A laser beam!

From God to Pachita!”

The musician left there bandaged and full of faith.

His wife, more skeptical, took advantage of her husband's nap to look under the bandage.

There was no blood or wound.

They never told him and they changed the dressings with a mixture of "iodine, water, ketchup, soy sauce and alcohol."

The following days Mingus was in a good mood and never stopped believing that Pachita had removed a kidney.

Graham reflects in the book on the miracles of the shaman.

“He cured sickness and pain with his own subconscious?

Was that the magic of him?

Could the disease be curable by one's own will?

Her husband would die a few months later, on January 5, 1979, of a heart attack derived from the disease.

Composer, arranger and performer, his works from the fifties and sixties had catapulted him as one of the most famous jazz musicians of the time, a key figure in the renewal of the tradition.

During a meal in his honor on the White House lawn, Mingus heard Pachita's name for the first time, already confined to his wheelchair.

Another musician, the saxophonist Gerry Mulligan, who participated in his last recording before his illness,

(1977), recommended that "Mexican indigenous" who had miraculously cured a friend of his.

a racist stigma

Mingus was born in 1922 on a military base in Nogales (Arizona) and his veins ran through Swedish and African-American blood from his paternal grandparents, Chinese and also black from his maternal grandparents.

His ancestors also include Germans and Native Americans.

"I'm not white enough to stop passing for black, nor clear enough to be called white", she used to repeat as a mantra after growing up in the Los Angeles suburb of Watts, epicenter of the race riots of the sixties.

Charles Mingus, March 5, 1960. Bettmann (Bettmann Archive)

For him, the word jazz was a racist stigma.

“I don't want to be called

.

That word means

, discrimination, second class citizen, the seat-in-the-back-of-the-bus”.

Also at war against the music industry, which he accused of being racist and bloodsucking, his widow's book is full of bizarre episodes.

Mingus in the accounting department of Columbia Records dressed in a safari suit and a shotgun to ask about the delay of the royalties of his records.

Mingus sharpening his nails with a knife in front of a company executive while negotiating a contract.

He called it "creative anger."

In the fifties he even founded his own short-lived label, Debut Records, with drummer Max Roach, another militant of the black cause.

The roots of his music are as mixed a cocktail as his genes.

A gospel blender,

blues, seminal New Orleans jazz, swing, bop,

and even Latin rhythms and contemporary European music.

Critic Leonard Feather defined his legacy as "a cross between old, half-forgotten styles and avant-garde improvisation."

A versatile and curious musician who found in the sounds of various continents a palette of colors for his own compositions.

Inspired by one of his trips to Mexico, in 1957 he recorded the album

.

His latest piece is titled

, where he at times captures Mexican folklore with jazzy manners: the nuance of the serape and the sadness – the blues? – of the charro trumpeter.

Another central feature of his work is spirituality and a deep inquiry into both personal identity and black culture.

In

(1963), another of his major works and the summit of modern jazz orchestration, many of the texts that accompany the album edition were written by his psychologist.

Unlike many of his colleagues, Mingus was a fairly sober musician who detested the use of drugs as an inspiration.

That's how it was at least until the pain of the disease pushed him to abuse painkillers, amphetamines and cocaine, according to another of his biographies,

(Gene Santoro, Oxford University Press, 2001).

Drugs at that time made his explosive and paranoid character extreme.

Convinced that the State was spying on him because of his activism in civil rights, he urinated in bottles of juice that he kept by rows on the shelves.

He even wrote brief instructions on how to train a cat to relieve himself in the toilet and then flush it.

The text is titled:

After he died, his wife scattered his ashes in the Ganges River in India.

Mingus had written that he wanted to spend eternity away from the music industry executives, the agents, the club owners, "the mobsters" that he always considered his enemies.

Humboldt Street in Cuernavaca, Morelos.Claudia Aréchiga

The months he spent in Cuernavaca, a city 85 kilometers from the capital, he moved with his wife and son in an adapted van with a wooden ramp for the wheelchair.

She gave him time to visit a brothel, go to the bullfights, listen to the mariachis in Plaza Garibaldi and receive a visit from her friend Joni Mitchell, who would dedicate a tribute album to her after her death.

In any case, Mingus already knew Mexico City.

He had traveled to the capital in 1977, shortly before being diagnosed with ALS, to play in the Nezahualcóyotl hall of the UNAM (National Autonomous University of Mexico).

Mexican double bass player Agustín Bernal was there and remembers him as “a fierce, fearsome, intimidating jazz guru.”

subscribe here

to the

of EL PAÍS México and receive all the informative keys of the current affairs of this country

Exclusive content for subscribers

read without limits

subscribe

I'm already a subscriber