La Partera: Story of a Midwife

by Fran Leeper Buss

Jesusita Aragon earned the title "la partera," or midwife, at the age of fourteen. Apprenticed to her grandmother, she learned the traditional Hispanic methods of assisting childbirth. She won the coveted title by performing her first delivery when an expectant mother went into labor in her grandmother's absence. In the years that followed, she was often the only source of medical care available in an isolated, mountainous area of New Mexico. Jesusita was so prized for her medical wisdom that she came to deliver more than 12,000 babies in the course of her career.
This is Jesusita's story, told in her own words. She describes her early training as a midwife, her forced departure from home due to two unmarried pregnancies, and her solitary struggle to support her children. La Partera tells how she gradually emerged as a leader in her community, painstakingly building by hand a small maternity center for her patients while gaining the respect of the Anglo medical community.
As Jesusita's story unfolds, so too does the story of the women of the region. Supplemental sections by the author illuminate Jesusita's culture and past, along with a historical account of the network of medical care provided by Hispanic and Anglo female healers. Illustrated with photographs of both people and places, La Partera reflects the culture of an era through the prism of Jesusita's hard and useful life.
Fran Leeper Buss lives and teaches in Tucson, Arizona.

152 pages, Paperback

First published July 1, 1980

About the author

Fran Leeper Buss was an American oral historian, ordained minister, author, teacher, social worker, photographer, and feminist. She dedicated her career to documenting the lives of marginalized women in the United States through oral history.
Born Francis Barker in Manchester, Iowa, she spent much of her childhood in Dubuque. She earned a teaching degree from the University of Iowa in 1964, a Master of Divinity from the Iliff School of Theology, and a Ph.D. in 20th-century American history from the University of Arizona in 1995.
In 1971, she co-founded the Women's Crisis and Information Center in Fort Collins, Colorado. She later served as a minister alongside her husband, David Buss, in the Campus/Community Ministry in Las Vegas, New Mexico, where she was ordained in 1976. She also taught women's studies at the University of Wisconsin, Whitewater, and the University of Arizona.
Buss spent over four decades collecting the stories of women facing economic and social struggles. Her first oral history project was with Jesusita Aragon, a traditional midwife, whose life story she published as La Partera: Story of a Midwife (1980). She continued her work by traveling across the country, documenting the lives of lower-income women, leading to books such as Dignity: Lower Income Women Tell of Their Lives and Struggles (1985), Forged under the Sun: The Life of Maria Elena Lucas (1993), and Moisture of the Earth: Mary Robinson, Civil Rights and Textile Union Activist (2009).
In 1991, she published the young adult novel Journey of the Sparrows, which depicts the experiences of undocumented Latin American migrants in the U.S. The book has been translated into multiple languages, adapted into a play, and won the Jane Addams Children's Book Award in 1992.
Later in her career, she reflected on her decades of oral history work in Memory, Meaning, and Resistance: Reflecting on Oral History and Women at the Margins (2017). The original transcripts of her interviews, along with her research materials, are housed at Harvard University’s Schlesinger Library.
Buss received the first annual Catherine Prelinger Prize in 1998 for her contributions to women's history and was recognized by the American Library Association in 2018 for her academic work.

Reviews

[Yulonda · Rating 3 out of 5]

Aragon's life as a midwife is similar in some ways to what I've read about African American midwives. The sections in which the author recounts Aragon's life are interesting. But Buss provides no real analysis about race/ethnicity or class.

[Allegra · Rating 5 out of 5]

So far this book is amazing! I look forward to finishing it!

[Melanie · Rating 4 out of 5]

My LTNS professor assigned it recently and I didn't expect it move me, but it did.