Teresita Urrea

This is my wee biography of an extraordinary but little-known Mexican mystic, Teresita Urrea, who has long captured my imagination (1873-1906).

She is sixteen, and writhing on her pallet on the floor in the Sonoran desert of Mexico. Her Yaqui madre, only fourteen years older than the dying child, dips a bandana into a clay vessel, squeezes, presses it to her daughter’s temples. The girl alternately laughs, sobs, and then grows silent in the face of whatever wonder she is beholding behind her closed eyes. La madre goes back to her chores: feeding some chickens, slaughtering others, transplanting beans and grinding corn. She accepts that she may return at dusk to a lifeless body.

Teresita’s father, a fair-skinned ranchero, scarcely acknowledges her existence and takes no interest in her impending demise.

“Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe came to me,” Teresita reports when she miraculously recovers from her Near Death Experience. “She taught me to heal the sick, comfort the poor, speak for the voiceless.”

Someone mentions this to someone else, and soon droves of indigenous people – Yaqui, Mayo, Tarahumara – gather at the door of Teresita’s mother’s house, pleading for a miracle. Teresita lays her hand on their burning faces, their distended bellies, their shattered limbs. She listens to their litany of sorrows as if there were nowhere else she would rather be than here: bearing witness to their lives. She rides her horse into the village plazas and speaks to the growing crowds, decrying inequality, calling for justice, reminding them that the most important thing is to love each other.

They call her “La Santa de Cabora.” And then they start a revolution in her name. Many villagers die. La Santa is heartbroken. The Mexican government exiles her to Arizona, and sends her hapless father with her. She continues to heal the sick and uplift the poor, and then finds herself protecting the rights of Mexican farmworkers in Los Angeles.

She marries two madmen, for one day each, and then bears two daughters with her translator lover. At the age of thirty-three, La Santa surrenders to the ravages of tuberculosis and releases herself into the arms of La Virgen de Guadalupe, reconciler of oppressor and oppressed, Mother of All, she who transmutes the poison of despair in every heart and distills its essence into hope.

(For a wondrous fictional version, I highly recommend The Hummingbird’s Daughter, written by la santa’s great-nephew, Luis Alberto Urrea.)

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I am thrilled to share that a new edition of my book GOD OF LOVE will be coming out on September 8, with updated language and concepts, a daring new preface by me, and a funny and moving introduction by legendary priest Greg Boyle (founder of Homeboy Industries in Los Angeles). Monkfish has helped give this interspiritual classic vibrant new life. There is an audiobook version too, which I read myself, except for Greg’s intro, read by my talented brother Roy.

pre-order here