Looking for love? Hitting the poker tables in Vegas this summer and want some extra luck? A shop in downtown Gilroy has got you covered.
S.M. Mexican Imports, a botánica shop at 46 Martin Street, a few doors down from O.D. Café, carries powders, scented oils, candles, amulets, lotions, and even shampoo designed to do everything from bring good luck to protect you from bad spirits. But before you go out and buy the candle and powder that promises virility and great wealth—please note—there is a correct method to follow before you get the intended results.
“It’s not just about lighting a candle, but how you light it,” says proprietor Carlos Mascoro, who moved the store from another building on Monterey Road to its current location in February. His first botánica in San Jose’s Berryessa neighborhood has been open for 16 years. “You need to prepare the oil—there is a whole process.”
Some regular customers are given shopping lists by healers or spiritual teachers with directions to follow.
Traditionally a place to buy medicinal plants and herbs, botánicas have exploded in popularity in the last 10 years and can now be found anywhere with a significant Latino community.
“Some of my customers have been coming back for over 10 years,” Mascoro says, as we take a stroll through the shop, the front graced by a row of statues of Roman Catholic saints, the walls decorated with crucifixes.
In indigenous parts of Central America, the mix of long-held beliefs with Roman Catholic traditions and iconography are a part of everyday worship.
Mascoro points out an ominous, skeletal figure holding a scythe in one hand: Santa Muerte or “Holy Death,” a prominent female folk saint in Mexico who personifies death and, according to Wikipedia, is associated with healing, protection and safe delivery to the afterlife.
While the worship of Santa Muerte is not necessarily condoned by the Roman Catholic Church, the melding of Catholic traditions and figures with pre-Columbian beliefs have persisted and flourished since the days of Conquest.
Mascoro carries an assortment of the “Holy Death” statues in a variety of sizes and colors.
“Red is for love, rainbow is money and purple is for good health,” he explains.
Many of the products follow similar color lines or are grouped together to produce a particular effect, so if it’s riches you are seeking, you can buy the soap, lotion, perfume and candles, which come with or without special powders already included.
The shop also carries amulets, incense, bracelets and packets of dried herbs. One, “Witchcraft Breaker,” is labeled as an aromatic herb bath with instructions to “stay in tub about 7 minutes while bathing & reflect on desires.”
Burning a candle in the shape of a black hen is supposed to remove bad luck. A powder sachet illustrated with a woman holding down a bare-chested man by the back of his neck promises the bearer dominion over their man. There are also dried rolls of tobacco and sage used to cleanse homes of bad spirits.
A pair of miniature hand-woven dolls in rainbow threads—boy and girl—called “fetiches” come with directions on how to use them to inspire love in another person. Interestingly, in France during the WWI, as German warplanes dropped bombs overhead, the residents of Paris were reported in an international newspaper at the time to have taken up wearing miniature fetish dolls around their necks for protection from the evils of war. The dolls, named Nenette and Rintintin, represented two Parisienne children who, the story went, were found wandering on the side of the road alone when a villager came upon them and invited them inside her house. The children were discomfited inside and begged the woman to go outside, as the house reminded them of their home where their mother had been killed by “bad soldiers.” They had not gone 20 feet, when a German shell fell from the sky and destroyed the house.
Card reading is also available at the shop—currently in Spanish only.
Picking up a bar of soap that reads: Quita or “sales” on the label, Mascoro smiles. “This is my favorite,” he said.
