Luis Urrea’s aunt, known to the family as La Flaca–the skinny woman–had one bad ojo, wore glittery cat-eye frames, and could curse a blue streak. She told Urrea and his brothers many family folktales. One concerned a distant relative, a Yaqui Indian woman named Teresita, who was widely believed to be a saint. Urrea, who teaches creative writing at the University of Illinois at Chicago, adopts a scratchy growl to mimic La Flaca: “You sons of bitches,” she’d bark between puffs on her ever-present Pall Mall. “You know you’ve got a Yaqui aunt? She can fly, goddammit! She can heal the goddamn sick and raise the dead!”
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The novel starts on a ranch populated by Indians, mestizos, rough-hewn caballeros, and the family of the wealthy white landowner, Don Tomas Urrea, who is also Teresita’s father. Tomas is based on the real-life cousin of Luis Urrea’s great-grandfather. (Which means, as Urrea discovered, Teresita is a cousin, not an aunt.) A kind and progressive man in spite of his infamous appetite for women besides his wife, Tomas takes Teresita in and, with help from his good friend Lauro Aguirre (a historical figure and one of Teresita’s first biographers), gives her a formal education. Meanwhile the local curandera, Huila (based on a real medicine woman named Maria Sonora), mentors her in herbal healing and harnessing the power of dreams. Of Huila, Urrea writes, “Her shadow could reach all the way across the ranch when she walked, and children rushed to cool their bare feet in the darkness of her passing. Daily, the People were amazed that this holy woman with her yellow shawl and double-barreled shotgun, and her petrified balls of a buckaroo in her mysterious apron, was merely a servant to Tom‡s and Dona Loreto.”
In his quest to understand Teresita, Urrea studied with curanderas and medicine men himself. “The experience was way outside of my usual daily grind,” he says. It affected him deeply. “UIC seems like the dream to me,” he continues. “That world seems more real to me than this cement world that I’m in here.”
As Urrea read more and more about the miracles performed by the Saint of Cabora, he had trouble reconciling her story with what he knew of how the world worked. Several years into his research and unsure how to proceed, he asked his friend Linda Hogan, a Native American writer, for advice. “My Western mind cannot get around all of the healing and spirituality and spirits and all that stuff,” he told her.
Urrea says Esperanza and several other healers he met felt he’d been guided to them for a reason. “You should join us,” they told him. He wasn’t sure how to feel about that. He’d worked with Baptist missionaries years before at Tijuana garbage dumps (the subject of his 1996 book By the Lake of Sleeping Children), and when they heard what he was up to, some sent him e-mails suggesting he was in league with Satan. Friends have shown up at readings to challenge him. “One guy told me he was in spiritual opposition to what I was doing. People are scared, you know. And I always tell them I don’t think it’s wicked, what she tried to teach.”
“I thought, wow, this is so weird,” Urrea says. “And if it’s all just made up, it’s such a cool story.”
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