Judith Leon / Connect Arizona
Part of the history of the late 19th and early 20th centuries shared by Sonora, Arizona and Texas is the life of Teresa Urrea, also known as the Saint of Cabora, a woman who received the gift of healing and was considered a witch and an opponent of the regime of Mexican President Porfirio Díaz.
Teresa Urrea was born in Ocoroni, Sinaloa, Mexico (564 miles from the Nogales, Arizona border). She was the daughter of rancher Tomás Urrea and a Yaqui ranch worker named Cayetana Chávez.
In her adolescence, Teresa was taken to live on her father’s property in Cabora, a ranch belonging to the municipality of Quiriego (386 miles from Nogales, Arizona), in southern Sonora.
There, a ranch servant, who was called La Huila, passed on to him her knowledge of healing with herbs for different illnesses.
He came back from the dead to heal and rebel
At the age of 16, Teresa, who suffered from epileptic seizures, had an episode of catalepsy. People around her thought she had died and organised a funeral for her. While they were holding a wake for her, the young girl woke up, coming out of the trance with visions and healing powers that went beyond the teachings of La Huila.
Her healing powers were not only through roots and plants, she also healed by laying on of hands (perhaps what we know today as reiki) and by preparing pastes composed of earth and her saliva.
When the ranch workers asked the boss what they were going to do with Teresa’s coffin, she asked them not to get rid of it because they would use it very soon. And so it was. That was the coffin in which they buried La Huila, their teacher.
The life of Teresa Urrea has been addressed by authors of various genres, from novels, biographies to historical texts and theses; the most popular are The unusual story of La Santa de Cabora, written in 1990 by Brianda Domecq, and The daughter of the chuparosawritten by Luis Alberto Urrea in 2006.
This woman lived during the Porfirian regime and is associated with the development of the Mexican Revolution and with a struggle of indigenous people in Tomóchic, Chihuahua, tired of abuses of power, extermination of peoples and dispossession of lands.
Teresa caused displacements in search of her healing powers, for which she was not paid. In addition, she was named as an emblem of the fight against the dictatorship. “Long live the Saint of Cabora!” was the cry that marked the beginning of what was her exile from Cabora, until she reached the United States.
The texts about her indicate that she spoke of the love of God above the powers of the church, which was linked to the Díaz regime, which made her considered a heretic for wanting to destabilize said institution, and she was accused of betraying the country.
Nogales was his gateway to the United States
Accompanied by her father, Tomás, Teresa began her exile from Cabora to the north of Sonora, and thus arrived in Nogales, Arizona in 1892.
The National Institute for Historical Studies of the Mexican Revolutions, INEHRM, notes that Teresa and Tomás Urrea requested U.S. citizenship, but this request was never resolved; however, they continued to live near the border, attracting thousands of people seeking the healing powers of “La Santa” and anti-Porfirian liberals.
They then moved to Clifton and then to El Paso, Texas, where she was kept under surveillance by Mexican and American authorities. At the age of 19, Teresa began a relationship with John Van Order, with whom she shared her life between San Francisco and New York, before settling in a neighborhood of Los Angeles, where she lived with anarchist and socialist workers.
In her exile, after the persecution of the Díaz government, which went so far as to ask for her deportation, Teresa Urrea had two daughters: Laura was born in 1902 and Magdalena in 1904.
The Van Order Urreas were victims of an arson attack in California, which their entourage blamed on the Mexican government. Teresa and John then separated and she moved with her daughters to Clifton, Arizona, where she built a dispensary to treat Mexican miners and homeless people who were sick with tuberculosis. Later, she fell ill and died of pneumonia. She was 33 years old. Her grave is still visited by migrants and homeless people, who have made her a character in Chicano culture.
