What is the main conflict in The Curing Woman by Alejandro Morales?

Alejandro Morales's short story "The Curing Woman" was first published in 1986 in The Americas Review. It was reprinted in the anthology Short Fiction by Hispanic Writers of the United States (Houston, 1993). "The Curing Woman" draws on the traditional Mexican folktale, but it also possesses elements of social realism and magical realism. Set in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in Spain, Mexico, and California, it describes the life of Doña Marcelina Trujillo Benidorm. Marcelina is a young woman who leaves her home at the age of thirteen to be reunited with her mother.