Jennifer Koshatka Seman

Teresa Urrea (La Santa de Cabora)

TERESA URREA TIMELINE

1873:  Niña Garcia María Rebecca Chávez (later known as Teresa Urrea) was born to Cayetana Chávez in Sinaloa, Mexico.

1877-1880; 1884-1911:  The Porfiriato, the period of the presidency of Porfirio Díaz in Mexico during which the government suppressed Indigenous and popular rebellions in the name of “orden y progresso” took place.

1889:  Teresa Urrea received the “don,” the gift of healing, and became widely known throughout Northwest Mexico as “La Santa de Cabora” (or “Santa Teresa”) because of her miraculous healings.

1889-1890:  Many visited the Cabora Ranch, where Teresa lived, to be healed, including Yaqui and Mayo Indians from the region. Mexican Spiritists and U.S. Spirtualists also visited to assess her power as a Spiritual medium.

1890:  Spiritualist and Spiritist presses joined to from the Federación Universal de la Prensa Espirita y Espiritualista.

1890-1892:  The Mexican Spiritist periodical, La Illustración Espirita, published stories on Santa Teresa. Some of these stories were published in U.S. Spiritualist periodicals, including The Carrier Dove.

1890 (September):  Mayo Indians worshiped and witnessed their holy santos (living saints). They prophesied along the Río Mayo (in the name of God and Santa Teresa) that a flood would come and destroy Mexicans and then Mayo lands would be their own again. The Mexican government stopped this and deported the santos.

1892 (May):  Mayo Indians attacked the Mexican customs house at Navojoa, Sonora, and proclaimed “¡Viva la Santa de Cabora!” “¡Viva la Libertad!”

1892 (June):  Teresa Urrea and her father were exiled from Sonora because of Teresa’s association with Mayo uprising. The Urreas temporarily settled in Arizona, close to the border with Sonora where Teresa continued to heal.

1892 (September-October):  The Tomochic Uprising in Chihuahua, Mexico was suppressed by the Mexican government. Although she was not present, Santa Teresa’s name was invoked during this uprising.

1896 (February):  “Plan Restaurador de la Constitución Reformista” (Plan to Restore the Reformed Constitution) was drafted in the Urrea home in Arizona.

1896 (June):  Teresa, her father, and extended family moved to El Paso, Texas where they continued to publish the anti-Díaz paper, El Independiente and other materials including ¡Tomóchic!.  In El Paso, Teresa continued to heal many people from both sides of the border.

1896 (August 12):  Rebels attacked the Nogales, Sonora Customs house in the name of “La Santa de Cabora.”

1896 (August 17):  Rebels attacked the Mexican Customs house in Ojinaga, Chihuahua (across the border from Presidio, Texas).

1896 (September):  Rebels attacked the Mexican Customs house in Palomas, Chihuahua (across the border from Columbus, New Mexico).

1897:  Teresa Urrea and family moved to Clifton, Arizona. They continued to publish the anti-Díaz paper, El Independiente and Teresa continued her healings.

1900 (July):  Teresa Urrea left Clifton, Arizona and moved to San Jose, California where she continued healing and gained media attention in papers such as the San Francisco Examiner.

1901 (January):  Teresa embarked on tour of the United States. She stopped first in St. Louis and gave interviews for the local press.

1903 (April):  In Los Angeles, Teresa supported La Unión Federal Mexicana (UFM) and took part in the Pacific Electric Strike.

1906:  Teresa Urrea died in Clifton, Arizona at thirty-three, probably from tuberculosis.

FOUNDER/GROUP HISTORY

Niña Garcia María Rebecca Chávez (later known as Teresa Urrea) was born in 1873 in Ocoroni, Sinaloa, Mexico to Cayetana Chávez, a fourteen year-old Tehueco Indian girl. Her father, Don Tomás Urrea, was the owner of the hacienda that employed Cayetana’s father as a ranch hand. Cayetana herself may have been working as a criada (house servant) for Don Tomás’ uncle, Miguel Urrea, on a nearby ranch. Until she was sixteen Teresa Urrea lived in servant quarters near the Urrea Ranch in Ocoroni, Sinaloa with her mother and aunt, half brothers, sisters, and cousins. There, she lived the life of the Tehueco, a tribe in the Cahita linguistic group, who, along with the Yaquis and Mayos of this region in northwestern Mexcio, had been farming the Fuerte River Valley since before the arrival of the Spaniards in the sixteenth century. After centuries of colonization by the Spanish and then the Mexican state, in the late nineteenth century, these Indigenous peoples mostly worked as house servants and field workers for wealthy hacendados, like Don Tomás Urrea, who came from a family tracing their lineage back to Spain, as Christian Moors, or moriscos. However, after growing up with her Tehueco family, Teresa was welcomed at sixteen into her father’s “legitimate” family at the Rancho de Cabora.

At Cabora, Teresa Urrea received the don, the gift of healing. One evening in 1889, witnesses described how Teresa experienced a sudden attack of violent convulsions. For approximately thirteen days thereafter, she alternated between short bursts of convulsions and longer spells of unconsciousness, interspersed with moments of lucidity during which she talked about seeing visions and expressed her desire to eat dirt. Those who attended Teresa during these thirteen days remembered that she would eat only dirt mixed with her saliva and nothing else. Teresa came out of this violent thirteen-day episode by healing herself with dirt mixed with saliva.  On the last day of her convulsive attacks, she complained of intense pain in her back and chest, and she ordered her attendants to apply to her temples the mixture of dirt with her saliva that was kept by her bed. Her attendants did as she asked, and when they removed the mud and saliva mixture from her temples, she claimed to finally be free of pain.

Over the next three months, Teresa drifted between coherence and a kind of otherworldly daze; she seemed to be in a trance, or a liminal state. She had visions. She began to heal. In one of her visions, Teresa claimed the Virgin Mary told her she had been given the gift of healing (the don) and that she would be a curandera.

Years later, Urrea would describe her don experience to a San Francisco journalist:

For three months and eighteen days I was in a trance. I knew nothing of what I did in that time. They tell me, those who saw, that I could move about but that they had to feed me; that I talked strange things about God and religion, and that the people came to me from all the country and around, and if they were sick and crippled and I put my hands on them they got well…Then when I could remember again, after those three months and eighteen days, I felt a change in me. I could still if I touched people or rubbed them make them well…When I cured people they began to call me Santa Teresa. I didn’t like it at first, but now I am used to it (Dare 1900:7).

It seems that from the moment she received her don Teresa Urrea became known throughout Sonora, Mexico, and even parts of the U.S. Southwest, for her miraculous cures, divinely-sanctioned healing powers, and the multitudes of poor and oppressed that she healed freely at Cabora Ranch. [Image at right] Her adherents (and detractors) called her “La Santa de Cabora,” “La Niña de Cabora,” or simply “Santa Teresa.”

Because she was one of the santas from whom the insurgent Mayos took inspiration in the 1892 attack on the Mexican customs, President Díaz became convinced that nineteen-year-old Urrea incited Indians to rebel against him, and that the Ranch at Cabora was the place that dissidents met to plan these uprisings against his government. Thus, he had her expelled from the region. The government claimed there was no reason for the Mayo uprising, other than “religious fanaticism” that Teresa Urrea inspired at her father’s Rancho de Cabora. On the president’s orders, Teresa and her father were then exiled from Mexico and into the United States. Teresa and her father stayed in Nogales, AT (Arizona Territory) across the border from the twin city Nogales, Sonora.

To the disappointment of the Mexican government, Santa Teresa continued to heal people and inspire resistance from the U.S. side of the border, first in Nogales, Arizona, and then when she moved to El Paso, Texas in 1896. Some reports suggest that hundreds, even thousands, crossed the lightly monitored border into the U.S. to receive healing from Santa Teresa. One journalist, writing for the Los Angeles Times, visited Teresa’s healing practice in El Paso and described the way she healed Mexicanos as well as Americans: she used her hands to massage and apply salves, she administered and prepared herbal remedies with the assistance of several older Mexican women in order to heal 175-200 patients each day.

In addition to healing, Teresa Urrea was also engaged in a political project in El Paso, along with her father Don Tomás, and Spiritist friend Lauro Aguirre. Teresa and Aguirre published an opposition newspaper, El Independiente, which exposed the injustices of the Díaz regime and called for an overthrow of the current Mexican government.  They wanted to replace it with a reformed, more enlightened one with Teresa Urrea at the head, as the “Mexican Joan of Arc.” They also published a revolutionary manifesto that proposed that Teresa Urrea would overthrow the Mexican government: Señorita Teresa Urrea, Juana de Arco Mexicana.

Three attacks on Mexican customs houses launched from the U.S. side of the border into Mexico within three months in 1896, all in the name of “La Santa de Cabora” with the goal of overthrowing the corrupt Mexican government provide evidence of the power and influence of Santa Teresa and the ideology she and her cohort articulated in their publications, First, on August 12, 1896 rebels attacked the Nogales, Sonora Customs House (across the border from Nogales, Arizona), then on August 17 they attacked the Mexican Customs House in Ojinaga, Chihuahua (across the border from Presidio, Texas), and thirdly in early September fifty armed men attacked the Mexican Customs House in Palomas, Chihuahua (across the border from Columbus, New Mexico). Although Teresa Urrea denied involvement, her name was invoked by many of the assailants (sometimes called “Teresistas”), and authorities on both sides of the border suspected that these were coordinated attacks meant to start a revolution. The editorials published in El Independiente, including Señorita Teresa Urrea, Juana de Arco Mexicana, strongly suggest that Teresa was involved, even if she denied allegations.

Because of the unwanted attention these attacks and publications brought to Teresa, she moved with her family almost 200 miles away from the border, eventually landing in Clifton, Arizona. There, for three years, Teresa lived with her family, continued to heal, and became an important figure in the town of Clifton, making friends with the local physician and other influential families who sought her healing. In July 1900 Teresa left Clifton for California, with the support of Clifton friends, and began a healing career far from her family, on her own, in the urban cites and medical marketplaces of San Francisco, Los Angeles, St. Louis and New York City. Santa Teresa Urrea represented a source of cultural and spiritual refuge and possible revitalization for the people she healed in these U.S. cities. In the burgeoning urban centers, she continued to heal those on the margins of power: especially people of Mexican descent. Many of those she healed in these growing cities not only suffered from diseases for which medical science had no cure, but were discriminated against by U.S. public health officials who deemed non-white “others” as vectors of disease.

During the years Teresa Urrea lived in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York City (1900-1904) she performed cures in front of audiences, and the analysis of her healing from observers described her as an “exotic” that had special powers emanating from the electric impulses in her hands. [Image at right] However, in U.S. cities, Teresa continued practicing her curanderismo that mixed Indigenous healing ways with espiritismo. She used her hands to heal by applying mud, plasters, sínapismos, and electric vibrations, yet, she continued to identify as an espiritista healer as well, as she advertised herself as a Spiritualist medium in the San Francisco Call classifieds, demonstrating this connection between Mexican espiritistas and U.S. Spiritualists revealed when she was investigated by both at Cabora.

At twenty-eight years old and on her own, Teresa Urrea made plans to travel the world in order to discover the source of her healing power. However, she never made it to any of those places. It seems that, as is the case for so many women, domestic concerns intervened and cut short her dreams. In New York City, she gave birth to her first child, Laura, in February of 1902. Teresa lived in New York City for a year with her translator, a family friend from Clifton named Jon Van Order with whom she had two children. Then, in September of 1902, she received news that her father, Don Tomás, had passed away. The sources are silent on her reasons for abandoning the world tour and returning to California, yet it seems possible that Teresa wanted to raise her family somewhat closer to family and friends. Whatever her reasons, she returned to California, and by December of 1902, she had settled in an East Los Angeles neighborhood near Sonoratown, populated with Mexican people from Sonora. In Los Angeles, Teresa Urrea continued to heal and attract attention of the popular press. She supported La Unión Federal Mexicana (UFM) and took part in the Pacific Electric Strike 1903. However, after her home burned down that same year, she (and her family) moved back to Clifton, Arizona where she lived until she passed away in 1906, at the age of thirty-three, probably from tuberculosis.

DOCTRINES/BELIEFS

The doctrines and beliefs that animated Teresa Urrea, according to her own writings, were Spiritist and liberal ideologies popular among her cohort and others in Mexico over the turn of the century. The Spiritist ideology embraced the concept of social equality as well as a practical and Christian morality centered on charity and love for one’s fellow man. These values are reflected in Teresa Urrea’s own words, published in the radical anti-Díaz newspaper El Independiente in 1896: “Todos somos hermanos é iguales por ser todos hijos del mismo Padre” (We are all brothers and equal because we are sons of the same father) (El Independiente 1896). Like their French counterparts, Mexican espiritistas sought to apply scientific rationale to religious faith.

In her own words, Teresa Urrea expressed what Spiritist meant to her:

If for something I have affinity, and if something I try to practice, it is espiritismo,     because espiritismo is based on the truth, and the truth is much greater than all the religions, and also because espiritismo was studied and practiced by Jesus and is the key to all the MIRACLES of Jesus and the most pure expression of the religion of the spirit…

I suppose, as well, that science and religion should march in perfect harmony and union, being that science should be the expression of truth and religion… I think God more adores the ATHEIST that loves his brothers and works to acquire science and virtue than the Catholic monks that kill and hate men while proclaiming God.

God is goodness, is love, and only for goodness and love can we elevate our soul towards him (El Independiente 1896).

Like many anticlerical liberals in Mexico at this time, Santa Teresa voiced a clear disdain for the hypocrisy of institutional religion and in particular the Catholic Church in Mexico that often aligned with oppressive leaders, yet she combined this cynicism with sincere Christian beliefs (particularly the belief in the centrality and goodness of Jesus) as well as the Spiritist ideals of the pursuit of God and “Truth” through science and the perfection of society.

RITUALS/PRACTICES

Teresa Urrea’s healing practices combined espiritismo and curanderismo. One of the most important aspects of Teresa Urrea’s healing was that her adherents believed she had received the don, the supernatural gift of healing. To receive the don, curanderas undergo a kind of symbolic death and rebirth, accompanied with visions and messages from God, Jesus, the Virgin Mary, or saints and other deities. Some curanderas claim the gift also gives them the power to see into the future and discern people’s illnesses before they present themselves, a belief about healers shared by the local Indigenous groups Yaquis and Mayos. The gift to cure is considered by curanderas a spiritual gift, something Teresa consistently claimed. Yet, Teresa also healed as an espiritista medium, and her own descriptions of her healing reveal the blending of traditional curanderismo and espiritismo healing.

Teresa gave an interview in St. Louis on January 13, 1901, when she was setting out on a tour and possibly a world tour, to demonstrate her healing power and to discover the sources of her power. [Image at right] In this interview, she provided a description of what happened when she healed. First, she explained how she diagnosed her patients: “Sometimes I can tell at a glance what ailment afflicts the patient who comes to me – just as though it were written on his face; sometimes I cannot.” She discussed giving botanical medicines: “Sometimes I give medicines made from herbs to my patients.” The use of herbal medicine is not what Urrea is most known for (surely not what most people wrote about when they described her healing), but it is something consistently mentioned in less sensationalized accounts of her healing and reflects her training as a curandera in Mexico with Maria Sonora.

Teresa went into most detail discussing the intimate moment of healing, the laying on of hands, and what transpires between the curandera and her patient:

In treating a patient, I take his hands in mine – not grasping them tightly, but only clasping the fingers and pressing each of my thumbs against each of his thumbs.  Then, after awhile, I place one of my thumbs on his forehead – just over the eyes (The Republic 1901).

Then, she describes the patient’s point of view, why they come to her, what they should feel:

It is this way: You have headaches. Sometimes your head feels heavy. Your heart does not at all times beat regularly – sometimes it palpitates too rapidly. Your stomach is not as good as it should be.  Do you feel a little electric thrill entering your thumbs? No? Sometimes I cannot communicate the thrill to patients –and then I cannot cure them (The Republic 1901).

Here, Teresa Urrea describes communication between herself and her patient: the clasping of hands and touching of thumbs and the “little electric thrill” that the patient must feel to know that healing power is passing from her to her patient. This electricity is something many described feeling when Urrea clasped their hands in this way.

In this interview, Urrea consistently speaks about her healing as powerful, as a power within her that she conveys to sick bodies through her hands. For example, Teresa describes how she almost always uses her hands to “rub” her patients “gently.” However, she makes a distinction between what she does and what “masseurs” do. She only rubs her patients in order to “communicate the power that I have to them,” not necessarily to give pleasure, as journalists would describe her touch as doing. In this interview, Urrea acknowledges the limitations of her power. In fact, she begins her discussion of healing by admitting that she cannot heal everyone.  She explains the importance of belief in her healing power, that healing is a two-way street, and if some do not believe, “that power I try to send into them returns to me, and they are no better.” However, she says that if her patient does accept that power from her hands, “most of them get well.” Finally, Teresa describes how she often goes into a trance state when she heals, similar to the trance state she was in for over three months when she received in don, and this is when she is when her healing power is strongest:

I frequently go into trances, but none have lasted as long as did the first one. Then people think I am crazy. Not that I am violent: But I do not pay attention to their questions, and I say strange things. These spells do not give warning to their approach. I do not know when I am to have them except by my queer answers to their questions. In these spells my power for healing is greater than at other times (The Republic 1901).

News of Urrea’s cures spread, inspiring ever more visitors to come to Cabora to be cured or witness the amazing powers of the curandera Santa Teresa. Santa Teresa’s style of healing involved touch, herbs, faith, and the use of earth, water, and her saliva. For example, one man was carried by his friends to Teresa because he could not walk. He suffered a wound in a mining accident (the mines in this area were significant employers of Indigenous peoples and peasant mesitzos) that he believed was incurable. This man came to Santa Teresa as a last hope. Her cure? She drank water, spat it out on the dirt, mixed the water and dirt into a poultice, and applied it to the man’s wound. Witnesses claim he was “instantly cured.” A woman was brought to Teresa who had hemorrhage in one lung. Witnesses describe how Teresa said to her: “I am going to cure you with blood from my own heart” (La Ilustración Espirita:159). Then she took saliva, in which appeared a drop of blood, and mixed it with earth, and applied it to the middle of the sufferer’s back, with the result that the hemorrhage was at once controlled, and the woman cured.

ORGANIZATION/LEADERSHIP

During her lifetime, Teresa Urrea influenced, healed, and inspired many people, but no organization ever developed around her. However, she did have numerous supporters.  In addition to the Indigenous and mestizo peasants who came to Cabora to be healed by Santa Teresa, there was another group in Mexico drawn to her: espiritistas. Mexican espiritistas (Spiritists) followed the French metaphysical religion of Spiritism, which taught that gifted mediums could heal while in a trance state, and Mexican espiritistas believed Teresa Urrea was one of these gifted healing mediums. Espirista mediums, like Teresa Urrea, they believed, prophesied, cured, and offered advice that guided their “brothers and sisters” to higher, more evolved and “scientific” ways while in trance states. Like their French counterparts, Mexican Spiritists sought to apply scientific rationale to religious faith. While most prominent in cosmopolitan Mexico City, there were groups of espiritistas in other areas, such as the Sinaloan and Sonoran groups that came to be associated with Teresa Urrea. In 1890, Mexican espiritistas from Mazatlán, Sinaloa, declared Teresa Urrea a medium. Subsequently, espiritistas from Baroyeca, Sonora, traveled to Rancho de Cabora to observe her healing. Among several miraculous healings they observed, the Sonoran espiritistas witnessed Urrea heal a deaf man in front of 100, simply by applying her saliva to his ears. These espiritistas came to believe that she not a curandera or a miracle-working santa, but a powerful healing medium.

Not unlike the skeptical journalists who described Teresa’s healing, the Espiritistas explained that Teresa Urrea’s Indigenous, impoverished, and (they believed) ignorant followers had been misled by Catholic priests into believing in miracles, saints, and superstitions. Espiritistas believed that her powers could be scientifically explained through magnetism and spirit channeling. She was not a religious mystic, they insisted, but a champion of the “Nueva Ciencia” (New Science). When Teresa healed by “laying on hands,” espiritistas did not interpret this as a miraculous, supernatural sign of God or the Virgin Mary working through her, but rather as proof of the vital magnetic fluid moving through her. Mexican Spiritists were not alone in interpreting Teresa Urrea’s healing powers in this way. American Spiritualists, who maintained contact with Latin American Spiritists through shared editorials in publications (such as La Ilustracíon Espirita and The Carrier Dove (San Francisco)) also became interested in the healing powers of Teresa Urrea.

There was a political dimension to the connection between Mexican Spiritists and Teresa Urrea. The Spiritist movement in Mexico typically reinforced elite, Porfirian ideas about modernization and progress, yet there was a minority of Spiritists, including Lauro Aguirre and eventually Teresa Urrea, who held more radical views about social equality and transcendence (Schrader 2009). One of the observers at Cabora described the promise of Teresa Urrea as an espiritista regenerating agent for Mexico, as one who could return the nation to the ideals articulated in the 1857 Constitution that had been betrayed by the government of Porfirio Díaz:

Espiritismo, we repeat, is called to bring about universal regeneration and with the help of God we will see an age not very far in the distance, the true brotherhood of man without distinction between races, nationalities; the true government of the people in order to benefit the people, without the intervention of despots or tyrants…(La Ilustracíon Espirita 1892: 29).

In her own words, Teresa Urrea expressed what Spiritist meant to her:

If for something I have affinity, and if something I try to practice, it is espiritismo, because espiritismo is based on the truth, and the truth is much greater than all the religions, and also because espiritismo was studied and practiced by Jesus and is the key to all the MIRACLES of Jesus and the most pure expression of the religion of the spirit…

I suppose, as well, that science and religion should march in perfect harmony and union, being that science should be the expression of truth and religion… I think God more adores the ATHEIST that loves his brothers and works to acquire science and virtue than the Catholic monks that kill and hate men while proclaiming God.

God is goodness, is love, and only for goodness and love can we elevate our soul towards him (El Independiente 1896).

 Two influential espiritistas supporting Urrea’s spiritual status were General Refugio González and Lauro Aguirre. González fought for Mexican Independence when he was young, for liberalism during the civil wars and Reforma, against the United States invasion (1846), and then in the French Occupation, became one of the founding leaders of Mexican Spiritism. General González was often referred to as the “Mexican Kardec.” He founded the first official espiritista circle in Mexico in 1868, translated Kardec’s books into Spanish in 1872, and helped to establish the main journal of the espiritismo movement in Mexico, La Ilustracíon Espirita. As Teresa Urrea would do, González spoke out forcefully against the Catholic Church in La Ilustracíon Espirita, his own books (written as spiritist transmissions, like Kardec’s), and in well-known Mexican liberal newspapers such as El Monitor Republicano and El Universal. González believed in Teresa Urrea as a powerful healing medium and he defended her often in the pages of La Illustracion Espirita as well as other publications.

Lauro Aguirre, a practicing Spiritist and close friend of the Urrea family, claimed that Teresa was a medium of the highest order, never seen before in Mexico, perhaps even one that Allan Kardec had prophesied in his Book of the Mediums. Aguirre and his fellow Espiritistas believed that Teresa healed in a trance and that she could channel spirits of the dead and help them elevate Mexico to a higher plane of scientific and spiritual evolution. While the Spiritist movement in Mexico typically reinforced elite, Porfirian ideas about modernization and progress, there was a minority of Spiritists, including Lauro Aguirre and eventually Teresa Urrea, who held more radical views about social equality and transcendence (Schrader 2009).

One of the observers at Cabora described the promise of Teresa Urrea as an espiritista regenerating agent for Mexico, as one who could return the nation to the ideals articulated in the 1857 Constitution that had been betrayed by the government of Porfirio Díaz:

Espiritismo, we repeat, is called to bring about universal regeneration and with the help of God we will see an age not very far in the distance, the true brotherhood of man without distinction between races, nationalities; the true government of the people in order to benefit the people, without the intervention of despots or tyrants…(La Ilustracíon Espirita 1892: 29).

ISSUES/CHALLENGES

Teresa Urrea was a complex figure who confounded even her supporters while drawing strong opposition from Mexican authorities. Her healing practice crossed both religious/spiritual boundaries and political/religious boundaries.

In her healing practice Urrea combined seemingly contradictory ideas as she embraced Spiritism, with its scientific orientation, but also her religious status as a folk saint. She practiced Indigenous healing ways as well as some elements of folk Catholicism, but strongly rejected the institutionalized Church. She also defied proscribed gender roles. While her healing practice in some ways conformed to the traditional gender roles for women as nurturers and caregivers, she defied the rigid gender expectations that demanded women be kept sequestered in domestic spaces. Instead, openly, in the public space of Cabora, she healed those who came to her.

Urrea drew the most intense opposition from government officials who were concerned that she was not only healing the Indigenous Yaqui and Mayo from the region, but also inciting them to resist government attempts to dispossess them of their lands for foreign investment. The government of Porfirio Díaz was committed to a national project encompassed in his idea of orden y progresso, a mantra as well as an official program whose ultimate aim was to unify and modernize Mexico by courting foreign investment in enterprises such as railroad production and mining. This development especially affected the north of the country and created an increasingly larger and discontented agrarian class, including the Yaquis, Mayos, and other Mexicans. Teresa Urrea, as the Mexican Joan of Arc, threatened Díaz’s orden y progresso. She specifically addressed (and healed) those excluded from the economic benefits of modernization or targeted by his government, like the Mayos who were disposed from their homeland and the Yaquis, who the government deported from Sonora to work on henequen plantations in the Yucatan, or killed for not submitting to the government’s wishes.

Teresa Urrea and her family were exiled as a result of her political activities and her symbolic representation of opposition to the Mexican government. She never returned to Mexico but rather moved to various locations in the United States and continued both her healing practice and political opposition. She died in Clifton, Arizona at age thirty-three, but her influence as a healer and supporter of revolution lived on.

IMAGES

Image #1: Teresa Urrea healing and blessing babies in El Paso, Texas, 1896.
Image #2: Teresa Urrea healing by grasping hands and transmitting healing energy through her thumbs. San Francisco Examiner, September 9, 1900.
Image #3: Teresa Urrea, ó La Porfetisa De Cabora, sitting with a world globe.

REFERENCES

Unless otherwise noted, the material in this profile is drawn from Jennifer Koshatka Seman, Borderlands Curanderos: The Worlds of Santa Teresa Urrea and Don Pedrito Jaramillo. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2021.

SUPPLEMENTARY RESOURCES

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Domecq de Rodriguez, Brianda. 1982. “Teresa Urrea: La Santa de Cabora.” Pp. 214-51 in Memoria del VII Simposio de Historia y Anthropología, Universidad de Sonora, Departamento de Historia y Antropología: Hermosillo, Sonora, México.

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Nava, Alex. 2005. “Teresa Urrea: Mexican Mystic, Healer, and Apocalyptic Revolutionary.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 73:497-519.

Newell, Gillian E. 2005. “ Teresa Urrea, Santa de Cabora and Early Chicana? The Politics of Representation, Identity, and Social Memory.” Pp. 90-106 in The Making of Saints: Contesting Sacred Ground, edited by James Hopgood. Tuscaloosa:  University of Alabama Press.

O’Connor, Mary I. 1989. Descendants of Totoliquoqui: Ethnicity and Economics in the Mayo   Valley.  Berkeley: University of California Press.

Perales, Marian. 1998. “Teresa Urrea: Curandera and Folk Saint.” Pp; 97-119 in Latina Legacies: Identity, Biography, and Community, edited by Vikki Ruiz and Virginia Sánchez Korrol.  New York: Oxford University Press.

Putnam, Frank Bishop. 1963. “Teresa Urrea, ‘the Saint of Cabora’.” Southern California Quarterly 45:245-64.

Rodriguez, Gloria L., and Richard Rodriguez. 1972. “Teresa Urrea: Her Life as It Affected the Mexican-U.S. Frontier.” El Grito 5:48-68.

Romo, David Dorado. 2005. Ringside Seat to a Revolution: An Underground Cultural History   of El Paso and Juárez: 1893-1923. El Paso: Cinco Puntos Press.

Ruiz, Vicki L. 1998. From Out of the Shadows: Mexican Women in Twentieth Century America. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Schraeder, Lia Theresa. 2009. “The Spirit of the Times: The Mexican Spiritist Movement from Reform to Revolution.” PhD Dissertation, University of California-Davis.

Spicer, Edward H. 1962. Cycles of Conquest: The Impact of Spain, Mexico, and the United States on the Indians of the Southwest, 1533-1960. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.

Torres, Eliseo. 2005. Curandero: A Life in Mexico Folk Healing. 62-74. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.

Treviño-Hernández, Alberto. 2005. Curanderos: They Heal the Sick with Prayers and Herbs. Tucson: Hats Off Books.

Trotter II, Robert T. and Juan Antonio Chavira. 1981. Curanderismo: Mexican American Folk Healing. Athens: University of Georgia Press.

Urrea, Luis Alberto. 2011. The Queen of America. New York: Little, Brown and Company.

Urrea, Luis Alberto. 2005. The Hummingbird’s Daughter. New York: Little, Brown.

Vanderwood, Paul J. 1998. The Power of God Against the Guns of Government: Religious Upheaval in Mexico at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Newspapers

La Ilustracíon Espirita. 1892.

El Independiente. El Paso, Texas, 1896.

San Francisco Examiner. September 9, 1900.

The Republic. Sunday, Jan. 13, 1901.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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