In this image a woman with brown hair holds the magenta flowers of an amaranth plant.
Photograph courtesy of Maxwell Gay.
Yerba Nomadica believes in the right to non-judgemental, inclusive, affordable health care for all.
In this image, two femme hands hold a flowering stalk of Yarrow.
Photograph courtesy of Maxwell Gay.
The moniker 'Yerba Nomadica' is the traveling seed - honoring the propagation of plants and memory.
It celebrates the perseverance of healing traditions through generations, migration, and naturalization.
In this image, a woman with brown hair and tattoos, kneels by a garden bed while harvesting a boquet of flowering yarrow.
Photograph courtesy of Maxwell gay.
Carla Vargas-Frank, Herbalist
in this image, a woman with long brown hair and glasses, wearing a white shirt and black pants with suspenders, stands in front of a class, smiling.
Welcome! My name is, Carla Vargas-Frank (she/her) and I am an energetic herbalist in community and clinical practice, under the name Yerba Nomadica, in so-called Tucson, Arizona, unceded lands of the Tohono O'odham and Yaqui/Yoeme peoples.
My focus is in whole person healing and food justice, primarily in my local community through private herbal consultations, classes & workshops, and as a team member of New Roots; a refugee farming and gardening program within the Nutrition and Food Security Department of IRC Tucson.
I feel extremely fortunate that all of my most influential mentors instilled in their teaching, and by example, that herbal medicine is an art form inextricable from social justice and anti-oppression work. In 2010, I graduated from the Wildflower School of Botanical Medicine in Austin,Texas, under the instruction of Nicole Telkes. I stayed on as an educator and apothecary manager at the school for the following 5 years. Through 2015-16 I completed the full-time and advanced practitioner program with Karyn Sanders and Sarah Holmes at the Blue Otter School of Herbal Medicine in Fort Jones, CA. All of the above remain influential mentors and dear friends.
A mixed Jewish Chicana, my ancestry and healing traditions deeply influence my work with the herbs and their role in social justice movements, as does my own experience living with chronic illness.
Yerba Nomadica, as a community project, is dedicated to access, inclusion, anti-oppression, and restorative, relational healing. My practice is trauma informed and I am ever working to improve quality and accountability in my offerings.
“How do you sum up a personal herbal path in a few paragraphs? You can't really, I think! Mine is made up of many strings; ancestral, familial, resulting of trauma, beauty, illness and restoration, and the call of something wild, powerful, and compelling.” Carla
Press
Interview with Carla Vargas-Frank, Tucson Herb Store
Arizona Illustrated, ‘Digging From the Root’
The Herbal Highway, ‘Interview with Lena Walker and Carla Vargas-Frank’
Borderlands Restoration Network, ‘Spring Workshop with Carla Vargas-Frank’
Austin Culture Map, ‘La Botánica, folk healers on wheels: A Triumvirate of botanical power grows roots in East Austin’
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