Remembering Santa Teresita
Radical Saints, a Spirituality of Resistance, and Deep Memory Work
It took me almost 10 years to complete The Hummingbird’s Daughter by Luís Alberto Urrea. It was first assigned as a reading for a Chicanx Studies undergraduate course named “Spirituality as Resistance,” taught by Xicana/Odami artist Celia Herrera Rodríguez. That was during the fall of 2015, and my last quarter as a student at UC Berkeley. That semester I was tasked with assisting maestra Celia with the course, in facilitating Day of the Dead art workshops, like making paper flowers and creating altares, with her class. Years later, little did I know at the time, I would return to her classroom, as a graduate student, pursuing a Ph.D. in this very practice… altares, art making, re-membering. And I would finally return to this book.
During that semester, our class assisted maestra Celia in the building of her traveling art installation Red Roots, Black Roots for an art exhibit at the Mission Cultural Center in San Francisco’s Mission District. Our class spread out across the exhibition space, cutting small paper stars to hang from shaved wooden sticks that were assembled to cradle a small bundle of herbs nestled into rebozo, wrapped as if holding an infant. Around the structure were transparent drapes painted with eery silhouettes of Odami children being baptized in a mission in Durango, México.
Earlier in 2015, Pope Francis made an announcement about his plan to canonize Father Junipero Serra, fulfilling his promise in September that year. As a reponse, maestra Celia and other Bay Area artists organized that year’s Day of the Dead exhibition around the theme, The Bones of Our Ancestors: Endurance and Survival Beyond Serra’s Missions. This exhibition brought together artists who created expressions of grief, rage, satire and comedy, to expose the horrors of Serra’s missionizing campaign throughout California and the atrocities committed against California Natives. In the years to follow, fierce resistance was sparked by red paint splattered on mission plaques and the tearing down of Serra statues, throughout the state.
What was most unsettling to me was how Serra was marketed as “America's first Latino saint” (The Atlantic), harboring much support throughout the Americas for his canonization. The historical amnesia of colonization throughout the Americas is no shocking mystery, yet what this signaled to me at the time was how latinidad is utilized as a neo-colonial marketing tactic to continue to erase and otherize Indigenous and Black peoples. Where was the critical eye of our gente as we blindly accepted the canonization, in our names, of someone who actively supported the genocide of Indigenous peoples?
Although the exhibition focused on Native California, with many California Native artists in the show, the scope was expanded to a larger narrative including the voices of Xicanx, Central American, Latinx, and Black artists as well. Maestra Celia insisted, as she taught her class in preparation for this exhibition, that the Spanish frairs had perfected the mission system by the time they arrived to California. She reminded us that they had been experimenting with the Christianization process for at least 200 years throughout the Americas before they built their first California mission in 1769. A history we were all implicated in. A history she wanted us to think about as we read The Hummingbird’s Daughter, an Indigenous story that reflected the history of many peoples of northern Mexico and the border. A history that is often not told.
No Junipero Serra (2015) by John Jairo Valencia. Mixed media collage with prints by José Guadalupe Posada, colonial prints, other images, and original drawings of bones. Junipero Serra being attacked by an adelita calavera; the San Diego Mission falling into the underworld; Ohlone ancestors dancing in the sky, above the San Francisco landscape, and circling the adelita’s lasso; and Coyolxauhqui rising above the uprising.
Maestra Celia tasked me with creating 2 images that year, one central image for the exhibition and another honoring Teresita Urrea, the protagonist of Luís Albero Urrea’s novel. Offering me a basic outline of what she wanted for both images, she gave me the creative freedom to design them however I chose to. Utilizing my rasquache Photoshop skills, that my older cousin Amina taught me, I drew bones and flowers and researched images by José Guadalupe Posada for the foundations of the designs. After not being shown since 2015 at the Bones of Our Ancestors exhibition, they recently resurfaced and are currently being shown in Earth Story Ancestors | A Contemporary Indigenous Exhibit with the Cultural Conservancy in San Francisco.
Teresita Urrea, La Santa de Cabora (2015) by John Jairo Valencia. Mixed media collage with prints by José Guadalupe Posada, other images, and original drawings of arms, bones and flowers. The two original prints by Posada display a scene where Teresa was imprisoned and another of the Battle of Tomóchic that took place in the heart of Rarámuri country under the battle cry of “¡Viva la Santa de Cabora!”
Teresa Urrea was a dreamer. That was very clear throughout the novel, as she dreamt lucidly, actively navigated the dream world, and saw what was going to happen before it did. Before truly knowing her full story, her dreaming sparked my curiosity, as I come from a family full of dreamers. Cousins who fly over our barrios, communicate with the stars, and tías who receive premonitions. Many of us are dreaming people, and I am reminded of Patrisia Gonzales’s analysis in Red Medicine of how many of our ancestors were persecuted because of their dreaming medicine. From my teachers, I have also learned, how much of our “lost” knowledges have been kept safe in the dream world, awaiting for us to wake them back up again. This is was fascinated me most about Teresita’s story, her relationship to the dream world.
The seeds for this novel came from family stories Luís Alberto Urrea heard as a young boy about his “flying Yaqui aunt.” Being a distant relative of Teresa, Urrea conducted deep research to understand the full story of his tía. He began Teresa’s story with “The Initiation of the Dreamers,” her childhood initiation into the medicine ways of the Cahita speaking people of Sinaloa and Sonora, México. We are greeted with beautiful scenes of Teresita soothing herself to sleep with golden light. Scenes with her flying above the desert landscape and greeting other Yaqui dreamers flying above their villages. Moments of the spirit world. Meeting God who spoke all tongues. Although likened to the magical realism genre of many great Latin American writers, these scenes transmute a medicine that is beyond fantasy, but a visceral portrayal of dream and spirit, that is very real for those of us who take our dreams seriously.
Teresa Urrea was alive throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, and experienced the rise and fall of the Mexican Revolution. Although I will not get into the nitty gritty of the story, throughout the novel one will learn of her fierce advocacy for Indigenous rights, critiques of the Catholic Church and the corruption of the Mexican Government. While she was just a teenager, Porfirio Díaz named her “the most dangerous girl in Mexico,” forcing her and her father, Tomás Urrea, out of Mexico and into the United States.
Teresa was born to an Indigenous woman, Cayetana Chávez, working on Tomás’s hacienda in Sinaloa. Teresa was one of many of Tomás Urrea’s “illegitimate” children. Tomás had countless relations outside his marriage, with women who worked on his hacienda. Teresa was orphaned at a young age, but was raised amongst the Cahita speaking people who worked the hacienda, before Tomás learned she was his daughter and asked demanded she live in his house. Urrea’s use of the phrase “the People” in his novel to describe the workers stood out to me as a way to name the indigeneity of the detribalized and deterritorialized laborers. The story of “the People” resonated with me as one that reflects this history of many of our ancestors who were colonized and assimilated through both Christianization and labor (e.g. the encomienda, mission, and hacienda systems).
This is what brings me back to the history that maestra Celia sought to highlight through teaching this book. Who are we beyond the narratives of the nation-state and patriarchal nationalisms? Why is it important that we continue to tell the old stories of our families and not forget who we are? We must be critical the white washing of our history and the repackaging of a brown (almost white) identity that uncritically celebrates colonization, like the canonization of Junipero Serra.
Urrea’s novel highlights the way Chicano/Xicanx novelists can do deep memory work to recover their stories of origin and stories of specificity. Despite critiques of Chicano romanticism and appropriation of Indigenous cultures, through surface level adoption of Mexica symbols, the deep research found in The Hummingbirds Daughter can teach a much more complex story of quiénes somos. By focusing on family story, a much more honest recovery can emerge, where ancestors truly can guide you.
Urrea reflects on his own writing process, and states how, “it was in those [dream] ways — intuitive and suggestive — that I finally knew Teresita as a person.” I am sure she spoke to him, wanting her story to be told through his words. He also reflects how, “there are whole communities that still revere her and there are indigenous communities that still claim her power in their daily practices.” Teresa, as a curandera, healed countless people throughout Mexico, the U.S. and even Europe. She sparked revolution through her radical faith and generous love. Taught by an elder medicine woman from a young age, she was learned in midwifery and herbalism, and after miraculously resurrecting after dying at 12 years old, she received a greater power to heal with her hands.
Although Mexican priests, envious of her power, led a smear campaign calling her a “bruja” while trying to excommunicate her from the Catholic Church, many campesinos, tribes, and followers sanctified her as La Santa de Cabora. The People’s saint. A stark contrast to Saint Junipero Serra. One officially recognized by the Pope, despised by the descendants of those he missionized. The other, persecuted by the Church, but loved amongst her people.
Her story calls to me, like many who feel the calling towards certain saints. Saint Francis for animal lovers, la Virgen de Regla (or Yemayá) for ocean people. La Santa de Cabora calls to me to add her on my altar, amongst the movement, healer, and radical ancestors I look to for guidance and inspiration. It was her deep love for the People, for the Earth, her deep connection to the divine, her immense humility, fierceness to be able to speak against injustice, and magic that invoked revolution. This is what moved me deeply while reading The Hummingbird’s Daughter.. Although fiction, I know there were many truths captured within Urrea’s writing.
In the age of reason, and within our often atheist anti-colonial movements, we have been discouraged away from spirituality. Yet, it was spirit, ceremonial technologies, and ancient medicine ways that catalyzed countless revolutions. Whenever someone gawks and raises an eyebrow to whenever you bring an altar to the organizing meeting, or light some copalito before an action, a march, or class, be reminded of Teresita. Keep following the path.
Spirit stirs radical action.
Everything always starts with a dream and a prayer.
Thank you Teresita for sharing your medicine story with us through your sobrino.
I am in awe, in reverence, in gratitude.
