Teresa Urrea, la Santa de Cabora, healer and revolutionary seer, Sonora, Mexico

Max Dashu

Teresa Urrea (1873-1906) was born of a 14-year-old Mayo mother in Sinaloa, northwestern Mexico. She grew up in the Native community, taught by herbalist-midwife Maria Sonora la Huila, and later by a Yaqui medicine man. Her father, a big landholder, recognized her as his daughter and brought her to live with him at Cabora, but one of his ranch hands raped her, leaving her for dead, unconscious.

During this coma, which lasted for weeks, Teresa underwent a spiritual journey, had visions and received gifts of healing and seership. The doctor gave up on her and a coffin was brought in, but she revived and sat up. It was related that Teresa’s awakening was accompanied by the fragrance of roses. She immediately predicted that in three days, someone else would be buried in that coffin; it turned out to be her teacher La Huila. Teresa began healing people, and her cures were so dramatic that people began flocking to see her. Before long, thousands of Native people were camped out at her father’s ranch.

But though she had become a renowned healer and seeress, Teresa de Cabora was also a prophetess of Indigenous liberation, land rights, and justice. She told Native people that this was their ancestral land; it did not belong to the Mexicans. She denounced the genocide and enslavements of the “Yaqui Wars,” protesting the “many wrongs” that the military inflicted on Native people. She herself had seen commanders hang three-year-old children from trees, and march captives off to slavery in the Yucatán, on the far side of Mexico:

Do you wonder why the tribe fights the forces of such a government? My poor Indians! They are the bravest 
and most persecuted people on earth! They will fight for their rights until they win or are killed off. [Vanderwood, 198]

Teresa attracted a following of Yaquis, Mayos, Tehuecos, and Raramuríes (Tarahumaras). She became known as la Santa de Cabora. She also excoriated the greed of the priesthood, which was charging the poor for religious sacraments. She declared that no priests were needed to baptize, confirm, or marry. The church called her a heretic; the Mexican government, an Indian agitator; and others the “Queen of the Yaquis.”

The clergy destroyed a statue of Teresa in the village of Tomochic, causing the Raramurí people there to rebel. They kicked the local priest out of town, and local authorities called in the federal army to quash their resistance. The villagers of Tomóchic held off the soldiers for two weeks, repelling two detachments and then facing huge reinforcements. They ran out of food, the village was burning, but they kept fighting until only seven people were left. Those survivors were captured, shot, and their bodies hung up as examples.

Many Native people were radicalized by this massacre of October 1892. El Corrido de Tomóchic glorified the courage of the villagers: “How valiant are the Tomóchis, willing to die on the line, defying the tough machine gun, defending their soil and their home... The women in the tower, what good shots they are. The blood that runs in them is the blood of liberty.” And:

En Cabora está la gracia | Y en Tomóchi está el poder. (“In Cabora there is grace, and in Tomochi is the power.”) [Vanderwood, 319]

The dictator Porfirio Diaz called Teresa Urrea “the most dangerous girl in Mexico.” He deported her and her father to Nogales in 1892, when she was only 19 years old. Word spread, and Native people gathered along the train route to catch a glimpse of her. Her supporters were known as Teresistas. In 1896 Tomochi and Yaqui activists stormed the border customhouse in Nogales, shouting “Viva la Santa de Cabora!” A U.S. militia crossed the border to help Mexican officials drive the Teresistas out.

In exile, la Santa de Cabora continued her political activism. She was a co-author of the revolutionary Plan de Tomochic, which denounced the genocide of the Yaqui Indians. It called for restoration of the Liberal Constitution of 1857, with freedom of the press and of religion. 
It demanded abolition of “all laws or social practices that maintain inequality based on gender, race, nationality or class.” It called for new laws “declaring that men and women, whites and blacks, natives and foreigners, rich and poor, have the same rights, duties and privileges, and that they be absolutely equal before the law.”

All through her years of exile in the U.S., Teresa Urrea continued to carry out dramatic healings, whether of stroke victims, people with tumors, or skeptical journalists. When she moved to El Paso, Texas, thousands of pilgrims camped outside her new home. She treated everyone: Mexican, black, white, and Native.

After several assassination attempts, and her father disowning her for a disapproved marriage, Teresa became a traveling healer, treating people from San Jose to St Louis to New York. When she found out that the tour producers were cheating, she pulled out and moved back to southern Arizona, where her sister lived. Teresita died of tuberculosis, at the age of 33 as she had predicted.

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

Luis Alberto Urrea, The Hummingbird's Daughter: A Novel. Boston: Little, Brown & Co. 2006. (The author is the great-nephew of Teresa Urrea and thus privy to family lore not written in other historical sources. The sequel, Queen of America, tells about Teresa's life in exile and the entanglements of patriarchy, racism, and exploiters she faced there.)

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

Other prophetesses:

Dahia al-Kahina, Amazigh prophetess, Aurès mountains, Tunisia

Essie Parrish, yomta and Bole Maru Dreamer, Kashaya Pomo, Stewarts Point, California

Muhumusa, exiled Rwandan queen, oracle of Nyabingi in Uganda

Mauricia la Bruja, prophetess of the Old Ways, Venezuela

Libuše, prophetess, tribal judge, and founder of Prague, Czechia

Pau, kaula wahine / seeress, Hawai'i

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