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Teresa Urrea is an iconic figure of the U.S.-Mexican borderlands, well remembered-albeit in distinct ways - on both sides of the border. A curandera popularly known as "la Santa de Cabora," her name is often associated with the 1892 rebellion in Tomóchic, Chihuahua, an important precursor to the Mexican Revolution of 1910. Her alleged role in borderland uprisings, most particularly a Mayo Indian revolt in the town of Navojoa, Sonora, also in 1892, led to her deportation that same year to Arizona, where she began collaborating with fellow exile and revolutionary militant Lauro Aguirre. Teresa Urrea's "astonishing story" has been reconstructed with la Santa cast as a warrior (the Mexican Jeanne D'Arc), a "living saint," an "Indian girl," and a sideshow attraction, depending on the context of her deployment: the Mexican borderlands, Mexican national culture, the U.S. (Anglophone) Wild West, the Chicano Southwest, etc. This dynamic trajectory suggests that her borderland context expands the range of cultural uses of the Latin American rebel outlaw beyond those posited by Juan Pablo Dabove in Nightmares of the Lettered City, allowing her even to cross into the realm of the borderland bandit lore made popular by late nineteenth-century dime novels, as I will show in my reading of the little known Santa Teresa: A Tale of the Yaquii Rebellion, a novel by William Thomas Whitlock published in 1900.2
THE LIFE OF LA SANTA DE CABORA
Before I flesh out my arguments, let me present a biographical sketch of Teresa Urrea.3 Teresa was born in 1873 in Ocorini, Sinaloa, the illegitimate daughter of the wealthy hacendado Tomás Urrea and a young Tehueco Indian woman, Cayetana Chavez, an employee on his ranch. She was raised by her mother and an aunt on the ranch until Tomás was forced for political reasons to move to his San Antonio de Cabora ranch in Sonora in 1880. In 1888, the audacious young Teresa convinced her father to invite her to move into his house and allow her to use his last name. A year later, she suffered a cataleptic attack that left her unconscious for thirteen days and then sent her into a trance for several months. When she emerged from her trance, she began to heal the sick and handicapped. Her miraculous...