María Benedetti is an ethnobotanical researcher and educator raised in New York City.A student of anthropology, linguistics, literature and the art of writing, she has worked as an educational journalist (culture, ecology, environment, botanical medicine) since the 1980s.Her maternal family left their native city of Mayagüez during the 1920s in order to start anew in Manhattan.

 

     Deeply identified with Puerto Rican music, food and family celebrations, María studied Spanish in New York and Sevilla.  She also studied Puerto Rican literature, history, culture and folklore at Hunter College with professor José Manuel Torres Santiago and other dynamic educators. She combined these interests with her love for nature, cultivated by her father's Irish/Hungarian family.  After ten years of ethnobotanical studies in New York with Susun S. Weed, "Wildman" Steve Brill and with Hudsonia – an environmental education NGO associated with Bard College – she traveled to Puerto Rico for the first time in 1987, eager to learn about and write about the Puerto Rican tradition of botanical medicine.  This experience is documented in her first book, Earth and Spirit: Medicinal plants, remedies and spiritual healing from Puerto Rico (In Spanish, ¡Hasta los baños te curan!)

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     Upon moving to Borikén in 1989, she began work at the Sea Grant Program at UPR, Mayagüez campus, where she acted as the writer/editor of Sea Grant in the Caribbean and principal journalist for El Boletín Marino.  She also produced the book Palabras de Pescadores: Entrevistas con pescadores comerciales de Puerto Rico 1991-1995.

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     ​Thanks to support from the Center for Research and Development of UPR Mayagüez, she also produced Sembrando y Sanando en Puerto Rico: Tradiciones y Visionando para un futuro verde (1996). That same year, Benedetti moved to Matrullas, Orocovis, where she practiced beekeeping, woodland coffee production, and ecological agriculture (greens, root vegetables, medicinal plants) with sustainable farmer Pablo Díaz Cuadrado.  She also began offering workshops and courses as part of the agro-tourism project known as Verde Luz. She soon produced Bendiciones Botánicas para Boriquén en el 2000: un almanaque de ciencia y folclor, sponsored by the School of Pharmacy of UPRS’ Medical Sciences Campus.  In 2001, she moved to Cayey and began to study Plant Spirit Medicine with Eliot Cowan, master of classical Chinese medicine and shaman of the Huichol tradition. She translated his book Plant Spirit Medicine into Spanish (Alma Verde: Chamanismo botánico para la sanación espiritual.)

 

     In 2004, Benedetti began to work as part of the research and planning group for the Botanical Garden at Caguas.  There, she did five, in-depth ethnobotanical studies about the trees planted at the Garden.  Abbreviated versions of her work were published in Spanish as guidebooks for the Taíno, African and Hacienda arboreta.  There, she also planned and co-directed (with the farmer and master craftsman José Rivera Rojas) the “Jíbaro House” or Casa Jíbara, its ecological family farm and the guariquitén of SembrArte, PT on an acre within the Garden. She was president of SembrArte, PT, a worker-owned corporation (2008-2010) and edited José Rivera Rojas’s book Desde Borinquen Atravesada: Apuntes para una sustentabilidad jíbara.

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     In 2009, Benedetti began to collaborate with artist and Montessori educator Jacqueline Negrón Flores.  Together they created an interactive book about the value of 12 common tree species in Puerto Rico. This book, 12 Árboles Amigos: Juegos y retos etnobotánicos para Borikén, is dedicated to Puerto Ricans aged 7 to 107, and integrates botanical and anthropological knowledge with island history, art, geography, math, community studies, home remedies, crafts, reading, writing, games and much more. Her novel: Dolores and Milagros (Dolores y Milagros en español), weaves personal anecdotes as a rematriating newyorican with deeply moving historical and cultural secrets narrated by the elders she interviewed from 1987 to 2017.

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     Finding herself unable to offer classes after hurricane María, she realized that it was the perfect time to organize her ethnobotanical research about some of the native trees she had studied at the Caguas Botanical Garden.  In 2019, she gave birth to Arboles Nuestros para la Supervivencia (Native Trees for Survival) in collaboration with graphic designer Carmen Lebrón Anaya and sponsorship from Para La Naturaleza and an inheritance (Hajosy-Benedetti family fund).

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     Today, María Benedetti directs BotaniCultura, in Villa Montuna, her new home and learning center in Mayagüez.  Her educational offerings include lively conferences, "bálsamos de bosque" (forest immersion), ethnobotanical safaris, hands-on workshops, empirical folklore exchanges, and Bendiciones Botánicas, a 36-hour “fundamentals and certification course” focused on the recognition, understanding and uses of Puerto Rico’s medicinal herbs, bushes and trees.  She also offers an on-line/residential course for Puerto Ricans living off island.  (See workshops).

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     Benedetti has enjoyed collaborating with diverse groups committed to ecological, cultural and spiritual evolution (Casa Pueblo, la Cooperativa Orgánica Madre Tierra, la Feria de Agricultura Sana y Alimentos Alegres, Soplo, La Chiwinha, Llamado del Caracol, Arboladas, Marisel Herbal, El Departamento de la Comida, La Cosecha, Para la Naturaleza, el Mercado Natural del Viejo San Juan, TRAMIL, La Brigada Solidaria del Oeste y el Bosque Comunitario de Rincón, among others.  She is a founding member of Cayey para el Mundo and works for the education committee of Mayagüezanos por la Salud y el Ambiente.

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