Grace Sesma: Growing up in Mexicali, one of the poorest barrios, or colonias, as they're also called, I was always observing my family. My mother used herbs. She did massages when anybody was sick in our family. My other aunts brought with them some of the healing practices from their Yaqui community in Sonora.

Heather Freeman: Grace Sesma lives in California. And one of her aunts who performed these healing practices was a curandera -- a traditional healer who not only helped her family, but served the community as well.

Grace: People referred to her as a curandera because she used some herbs, but her practice was primarily one of spiritual ceremonies to help people from harm that was coming to them in a spiritual manner. I never knew it to be curanderismo. That is a word that I learned decades later.

Heather: Curanderismo is a term for the practices performed by a feminine curandera or masculine curandero. They are community healers who treat physical and metaphysical ailments. 

Curanderismo originates from the borderlands of Mexico and the Southwestern United States, and is a remixing of indigenous, Catholic, and African practices. These practices can range from performing a limpia – a spiritual healing done by passing an egg, incense, or other objects over the body – to herbally-infused bandages on physical wounds.

Performing these community healings could be challenging for a lot of reasons. And Grace's aunties didn't get paid in cash for their services either.

Grace: It is not meant to be a business. My aunties didn't charge. If somebody gave them a donation, that was great. Oftentimes they got paid with groceries. Some healers in Mexico do charge, but it's appropriate to their community. It is not an exorbitant fee. And because you are in community, someone could come to you and say, “I don't have money, but next time I have some, I'll come back and give you something.” 

Heather: There's a lot of communities in the borderlands with curanderas or curanderos but most community members don't become practitioners. It's a difficult life, and generally one that chooses you. Grace received her first calling to be a curandera in a dream when she was 7 years old. 

Grace: So one night, as I lay there sleeping, I saw this very beautiful woman in a long gown and a rebozo, she come into our dining room area. And she leaned down towards me and she gave me a beautiful smile and reached towards me with her hand and said, “Mijita, would you come with me?” And I recall nodding my head and she sort of lifted me out of the cot and we walked out of the house and into the street and I am looking at her with just this amazement. Not only was she just beautiful, but the rebozo that she was wearing, the traditional indigenous shawl, was very dark, almost like a very dark blue or black. And there were pinpoints of light that moved. It was as if she was wearing the night sky. And you could see stars moving and shifting into different –  I guess now I could say constellations, perhaps. 

To me that is the first, the very first calling to walk this path. Even though I don't remember what she told me, I intuitively know that it was the first. It's part of what she was asking me to do.

Heather: But it took many years for Grace to follow this calling. When she was a teenager with young kids of her own, Grace was visited several times in her dreams by figures she described as grandmothers, who urged her to take up the mantle of a community healer. But Grace told them that she needed to secure her family's well-being first.

Grace: So I would always tell them, “Yes, but not right now. Right now I have to work. Right now I have to support my family.” And it finally came to a head when they said, “If you do not do this, everything is going to be taken from you.” 

Heather: Within a month, the dream’s prophecy became a reality. Grace lost her job. And without income, she lost her house. And then her car. With small children to care for, and her financial security shattered, Grace became deeply depressed and heartsick.

Grace: And then I had another dream and they came back and they said, “Don't be afraid. Once you return to the medicine, you will get a job again. And you will be protected and you will be taken care of.” And I said, “Fine. Okay. I will return.”

Heather: Today, Grace is regarded as a curandera by the communities she serves. She’s part of a long tradition of curanderas who heal and serve their communities. And one of the most famous is Teresa Urrea, sometimes called the Saint of Cabora. 

This is Magic in the United States. I'm Heather Freeman.

In today's episode Teresita, we'll learn about Teresa Urrea, a curandera who became famous in Mexico and the United States for her healing powers at the turn of the 20th-century . Teresa was an inspiration for revolutionaries in Mexico during the borderland uprisings and continues to be a role model for curanderas and curanderos today. 

We'll be right back.

 [BREAK]

Heather: Welcome back to Magic in the United States. I'm Heather Freeman.

It's roughly 1873 in Cabora, Mexico, about 400 miles from the borderlands of the United States. It's here that we meet a young Teresa Urrea. Santa Teresa. Otherwise known as Teresita. 

Her father was Don Tomas Urrea, a wealthy Mexican rancher. Her mother was an indigenous Tehueco woman – Cayetana Chavez. She grew up living with her mother Cayetana’s indigenous community. Later, Don Tomas had 15-year-old Teresa move into his home on the ranch. 

Brett Hendrickson: It was a place with a lot of workers, Indigenous and mestiza workers, and a few wealthy people at the top, including her father.

Heather: Brett Hendrickson is a Professor of Religious Studies at Lafayette College, and told me how the young Teresa started to learn the arts of a healer on her father's ranch as a teenager.

Brett: She started to work with a woman who is typically known as Huila, who was the resident healer at the ranch, and learned healing craft from her – herbal remedies, different sorts of prayers, and rituals for healing.

Heather: Like many practices we've explored in this series, what Teresa Urrea was learning was a remixing of several different practices and ideas into something unique – Curanderismo.

Brett: They came from the colonial combination of pre-modern Spanish healing techniques and religious healing techniques, and European folk medicine, combining with the medical and herbal technologies and knowledge and metaphysical assumptions of Indigenous people throughout the Americas, in this case, Mesoamerica and Northern Mexico.

Heather: These were re-mixed further with practices from enslaved Africans, as well as Catholicism, as it was brought to the Americas from Spain.

Brett: For many Catholics around the world, including in Latin America and in Spain, there's a lot of devotion to saints and to Mary, the Mother of Jesus. And each saint will often have a particular part of the body or a particular illness that that the saint has a relationship with. And so combining herbal remedies with veneration and praying intercession to saints to cure the part of the body that's, that needs healing, that would be a huge component.

And then the third component is something that comes a lot from indigenous Americans, this idea that the body can contain various souls or, the soul is able of fracturing into different pieces. And the entire soul can leave the body, which leads to lots of different health problems.

Heather: Although we're referring to this complex of practices as Curanderismo, this is not necessarily a word that practitioners or communities would use.

Brett: Curanderismo is not a term used by practitioners very much. It's more of a term used by scholars and outsiders to describe the complex of traditions that are used, coming from the name of what insiders do call a healer, which is a curandera or a curandero depending on gender.

Heather: So Teresa Urrea was learning these practices which were important to the challenging life of farming in Sonora. And these skills were both seen as practical as well as spiritual.

Jennifer Koshatka Seman: So every ranch will have a healer to heal the people that work there. They'll use herbal healing, they'll do massage, bone setting, all different kinds of healing practices for just, you know, general ailments of the body, and also for psychic or psychological illnesses as well. 

Heather: Dr. Jennifer Koshatka Seman is a Lecturer in History at Metropolitan State University in Denver, Colorado.

Jennifer: Certainly I think in Teresa Urrea's time, curanderas were seen as having this special gift from God, but also they implemented other kinds of healing into that sort of what we think of as, like, maybe faith healing today, laying on hands, the power moving through a healer.

Heather: But Teresa Urrea’s healing skills went from ordinary to extraordinary after a near-death experience as a teenager. Jennifer and Brett explain.

Jennifer: She's really young. She's like 17 or 18 when this happens. She went through this experience where she was sort of having these trances. Her body would go into these spasms and people couldn't hold her down and coming sort of in and out of consciousness.

Brett: She entered in a kind of a catatonic state. It was not clear that she was going to recover from that. But when she woke up, she claimed to have had interactions with the Virgin Mary. And, that the Virgin Mary had commissioned her to be a great healer.

Jennifer: You know, this is kind of the big story about her, that sort of legitimates her as a curandera, this moment, this liminal experience, is when the gift came to her. 

Heather: After this experience, Teresa’s skills as a healer were amplified.

Brett: She could see, in a sense, what was wrong with the other person's body, even without touching the body, even without making an official diagnosis through some sort of diagnostic conversation. And she had more of an attentiveness and control of what she considered to be energies in her body and around her and around other people's bodies. And she could manipulate those energies, sometimes without touching, sometimes with the laying on of hands, and she became an incredibly powerful healer.

Heather: Very quickly, Teresa became famous in the region for her extraordinary healing powers.

Jennifer Seman: The word starts to spread throughout northwestern Mexico that there's this girl healer, this curandera on this ranch and she's gifted. And so journalists from Mexico City are coming to the ranch to see her heal, to observe her doing these healings with these increasingly more and more people coming to the ranch. So she was –  she worked hard. People would come and she gave of herself poured out of herself and healed according to many sources, healed hundreds of people a day.

Heather: Many of the people who came to Teresa for healing were indigenous Yaqui or Mayo people, who'd been struggling for generations under colonial rule.

Brett: As they were ailing, in poverty, some of them at least, had experienced healing at Teresa's hands. You know, she would lay on her hands, she would heal them. She was, sort of a talisman for them of earlier Indigenous autonomy, of personal power, of well-being, leading to the ranch becoming, for a while at least, a center of pilgrimage, of healing pilgrimage, all over northern Mexico.

Heather: But let's pause a minute to understand why Teresa became so big as a regional healer. First, we need to understand Mexican politics at the turn of the 20th century. 

In Season 2 Episode 5: Renewal Dance, we learned how the U.S. government forcibly moved Native peoples off their ancestral lands. Around the same time in the late 1800s, Mexican president Porfirio Diaz was doing something very similar. Jennifer and Brett explain.

Jennifer: Porfirio Diaz, he's in power for about 30 years. So he becomes a dictator and he wields power through controlling local power brokers across Mexico.

Brett: Porfirio Diaz and his ruling elites worked a lot to remove communal land ownership from Indigenous and Mestizo farming communities throughout Mexico, and the land was being given as private property to elites. The Indigenous communities, they were losing their ancestral ways of tending to the land and sharing in its resources. And so that was something that was happening all around the area of Teresa Urrea’s youth.

Jennifer: This president wants to modernize Mexico. And for Porfirio Diaz, that means taking Mexico out of what he would describe as the past, ‘primitiveness’, and so part of what that means is taking homelands from Indigenous peoples, like the Yaqui and the Mayo, from where Teresa was from. These are the people that she lives among. Her mother's Tohueco, which is an Indigenous group. She knows their ongoing struggle with the Diaz government, especially coming in and trying to take their lands, their fertile river valleys. 

Heather: Mexico's Catholic church also supported the Diaz government and so hostility against the church was simmering as well.

Jennifer: She's got crowds of people coming to her, really kind of revering her, again, like a saint because of her healing power. But part of, I think, her power is that she uses her words. You know, she's quoted as saying, first of all, you don't have to go to priests to confess your sins. And you don't have to listen to the government. You don't have to give up your land because the government tells you to. And so she – apparently –  she baptized babies, right? She, as a woman, did what priests, only priests are supposed to do. So she's violating all the rules, all kinds of institutional rules, and people love her for that.

Heather: As Teresa became a regional living folk Saint – a miracle worker – the Diaz government was taking notice.

Now Teresa's father was part of the Mexican upper class, but he wasn't in line with the Diaz government on all things. He was also acquainted with liberal Spiritists, and Teresa was introduced to Spiritism – or Espiritismo – through her father’s friends.

Spiritism was developed by Allan Kardec in the mid-19th century. Kardec was inspired by Spiritualism, which focuses on communication with the dead. Spiritism, on the other hand, focuses on more mystical ideas about reincarnation, energy, and spiritual harmony. And Teresa seems to have merged her healing practices as a curandera with Spiritist ideas.

Jennifer: The big thing that I always think about is, Teresa Urrea, her practice of curanderismo is her hands, her touch, using herself, her energy to do the healing. For example, she would spit into the mud, into the earth of Cabora, the ranch. So using her own saliva, mix it with the earth, and then use that as a poultice on wounds or to massage, and say things like, “I'm going to heal you with the blood from my own heart.”

Heather: After the break, we'll learn how Teresa Urrea became an inspiration for revolutionaries, how she fled to the United States from Mexico, and how she used her gifts as a healer to continue a life of resistance. 

We'll be right back.

[BREAK]

Heather: Welcome back to Magic in the United States. I'm Heather Freeman.

Teresa Urrea was performing miraculous healings in the Sonora region of Mexico in the late 1800s, healing the bodies and hearts of the mostly Indigenous people struggling under Diaz's rule. But while she was doing that, something bigger was happening across the country. 

Mexico was headed towards a revolution, which lasted from 1910 to 1920. And in the lead-up, there were many small revolts and uprisings. Around 1890, thousands of Mayos stopped working on colonizer ranches and mines to worship together and hear from spiritual leaders. One of these spiritual leaders was Damian Quijano. Quijano described a vision – given to him through Santa Teresa – that promised a renewed landscape and freedom for the Mayo.

Jennifer Koshatka Seman and Brett Hendrickson explain.

Jennifer: The person that's leading this resistance, this Spiritual leader, says that Teresa Urrea speaks to him, gave him this vision that there's going to be a flood and they should all get in these high places, and it's going to wipe out the Mexicans, right? All this kind of very apocalyptic, prophecies in a way.

Heather: Damian Quijano's vision provided the Indigenous people of Sonora with hope for a better world -- one where they wouldn't be forced to work on ranches owned by colonists. Quijano said the vision came to him through Teresa Urrea. 

And while she definitely come to symbolize liberation, it's unlikely she actively encouraged the Mayo to stop working.

Brett: It's not at all clear that Teresa Urrea was involved in the creation of that kind of myth of her saintly power for them, but nevertheless, her image and her name itself became kind of a very powerful touchstone and rallying cry.

Heather: The Diaz government was alarmed by the work stoppage and considered the prophetic visions seditious. So several of these spiritual leaders were forcibly removed to work camps.

Later, in 1892, a group of Mayo attacked a Mexican customs house in Navojoa. This was likely a retaliation, and the rebels came in with cries of “Viva La Santa de Cabora!” on their lips.  The Saint of Cabora. Saint Teresa.

Jennifer: That is like the inciting incident, that particular uprising. It's not the only one, but that's the one where her name is really connected to it. Because she's in this mix, where the government has something at stake here. They want that Indigenous land and she is standing in the way. She's targeted because of this.

Heather: But resisting President Diaz was dangerous – even lethal.

Jennifer: If you're in with Porfirio Diaz and do what he says, you're fine. If you resist the administration, you're the enemy and quite frankly, he kills people who defy him, right? So it's quite violent and there's literally wars against the Yaqui and Mayo people that are wanting to hold on to their land. And so this is the political context that Teresa Urrea is in. So yes, she's healing people, she's a mestiza – she's mixed – she's Indigenous. So she knows the struggles of these people. She knows the violence of the state.

Heather: President Diaz sends the Urrea family a telegraph: Teresa needs to leave. She can either go to the Yucatan peninsula, where political prisoners were functionally being enslaved, or she could go across the border to the United States. Facing exile, Teresa and her father head North to the U.S. But they undoubtedly loved their homelands and weren't ready to give up just yet.

Jennifer: They're supposed to go way far away, so she's not an influence, but they settle first in Nogales, Arizona. And there's a Nogales in Sonora, and a Nogales in Arizona – they're just right at the border. So they kind of defy Diaz by staying right on the border. And, as you might imagine, people cross the border to see her and to be healed by her. It's easy. 

Heather: So Theresa continues her miraculous healings, and continues to inspire resistance. She doesn't give up. But Diaz isn't done with her yet either. And he's got help from the United States.

Jennifer: The U.S. is in line with Diaz. Diaz is seen as a great guy from the perspective of the United States. He's modernizing, Mexico's open for business and colonization. The United States sees any of these rebel groups on the border as anarchists, or, you know, they're disrupting the law and order.

Heather: From the 1890s to the early 1900s, many uprisings along the border portend the start of the Mexican revolution.

In 1896, a group of roughly 60 to 70 rebels stormed the Nogales customs house. It’s believed there were several manifestos leading up to this, and some mentioned “La Santa de Cabora” – Teresa herself. And there are legends that she blessed the rebels’ guns and that they wore Teresa's face above their hearts. This became known as the Teresita Rebellion. And it was brutally put down by a bi-national police force.

Jennifer: You see all of these things written about in papers in the United States and in Mexican papers as well, all these really, you know, derogatory words – but yet it all gets collapsed into Indigenous people that are ‘savage’, that are ‘warlike’, that are just being, brainwashed by this because they don't know any better.

Heather: After the Teresita Rebellion, the Urreas were forced to flee again, so they traveled deeper into the United States. Teresa moves to Clifton, Arizona and marries. But her new husband tries to kill her. He's driven off, and there's some suspicion that he was an assassin sent by the Mexican government. 

Meanwhile, through all this, Teresa is in many ways a spiritual seeker. She craves a deeper understanding of the mystical world and its relationship to the physical. Eventually she strikes out on her own and heads to California. And this is no small thing.

Jennifer Seman: At that time, to be a woman that was unmarried, without children, you know, she was kind of extraordinary, and not having a husband, leaving her father's household, going out on her own, like, into the world.

Heather: Public attention follows Teresa wherever she goes, but this time it's from newspapers, fascinated by the story of the remarkable Mexican healer and Spiritist.

Brett: She would go city to city and they would advertise that this young Mexican maiden would be there to heal. She had these miraculous powers that she was the hero of the Indians in Mexico, and kind of, set her up as this exotic Mexican healer, exoticized not only for being a young woman, but for being a young woman of Color. 

Heather: While Teresa's healings were certainly viewed as miraculous, it's unlikely she or her patients regarded them as magic. In any case, her healings were packing in big crowds. And she got hooked up with a manager who moves her healings to the stage. As Jennifer told me, it's a classic LA story. In true entrepreneurial fashion, her healing isn't just promoted – it's marketed.

Jennifer Seman: And so I think what her manager was doing was trying to make money off of that. Here's the Mexican girl healer watch her perform her miraculous cures. In terms of being on a stage and being a performer, she's doing that, and doing that likely to make money, right? Because she's a woman on her own now. But, she wasn't a performer, she wasn't performing for an audience. She was simply doing her healings.

Heather: Descriptions of these healings come across as quiet and intimate, with Teresa looking deeply into her patient's eyes and taking their hands in hers.

Jennifer: Sometimes she would wrap her thumbs around their thumbs and look them in their eye and exchange energy, energetic healing. She would describe how, I can feel if the person receives the energy, and then if they do, they might get healed, but if they don't, it comes back to me. 

Heather: Teresa’s contract limited her agency and freedom to move about as she wanted to. She eventually became friends with some women who were clairvoyants and Spiritualists, and they helped her get out of her contract with the manager.

And then begins a new period of Teresa's life. She travels across the United States, largely on her own, performing healings as she goes. She eventually makes it to New York City, where she has her first child. As she's traveling, and seeking, and living her life, Teresa is also Seeking her own truths.

Jennifer: She talks about wanting to discover where her powers come from, but she herself says in an interview, I want to find a source of my power. I'm going to go to all of these places. But she's this open book at this point.

Heather: Teresa’s traveling came to an end, however, after her father passes away. She returned West and remained in California for a few years, had a second child, and was also involved in labor organizing.

Eventually, she moved back to Clifton, Arizona, where she spent her last years, dying at the age of 33 of consumption – which we today know as tuberculosis. 

In her short life, Teresa was a healer, a revolutionary, a folk saint, an entertainer, a mother, a wife, and a labor organizer. It's fair to say she was a remarkable woman for any historic time period. And her legacy is a rich one.

Jennifer: We are living in a time where being a border crosser is increasingly criminalized in really, you know, scary and horrible ways, in my opinion. But really, borders and borderlands are spaces where people mix and where things grow, and a culture can grow. And I think curanderismo is one of those things, and keeping that alive, that cultural practice, is a kind of resistance to this idea that you're American or you're a Mexican. You're this or you're that. And so I think that, to me, is this another way of seeing the border. 

Heather: There are curanderas, curanderos, as well as nonbinary and genderfluid curanderXes across the U.S. today. They continue this largely community-focused practice, as they've learned it from family members and elders. 

For others, curanderismo has become a way to connect back to ancestral heritage. And Brett Hendrickson continues to look at the diversity of these practices.

Brett: I think there are a number of people in the U.S. today with Latino heritage who are re-examining curanderismo, not necessarily as a folk healing practice that would happen in their home, but as a way of even reconnecting with the Indigenous and complicated colonial history of Latin America, kind of reclaiming that part of their heritage, as kind of metaphysical and spiritual source of strength in their lives.

Heather: Today, Teresa Urrea is probably better known in the United States than she is in Mexico.

At the beginning of this episode, we met Grace Sesma. Her work as a curandera extends to large spheres of overlapping communities.

Grace: When children and families were being separated at the border, there was a huge march –  about six, eight thousand people – and they asked me to say some words and help lead the march with prayer along with several other community leaders and spiritual people. That, to me, is all part of the work that I do, and it's part of the work that if you were to say, like, Teresita came back, what would she do? Yeah, she would be marching.

She is a role model for me and for many others. All of that is part of being a curandera or a curandero as our community acknowledges us to be. So yeah, she's significant for me and many other Mexican Americans and Chicanos who are learning about her and reconnecting, wanting to reconnect with their Indigenous identity, wanting to reconnect with curanderismo and Indigenous cultural practices. And be able to celebrate each other's accomplishments, and to grieve with each other during the hard times, so that we don't feel isolated and that we know that we're part of the greater community –  part of creation.

Heather: Next week on Magic in the United States, we'll learn how a third-century pagan and sorcerer became the patron saint of magical practitioners – none other than Saint Cyprian of Antioch.

Would you like to leave us a comment or thought on one of our episodes? Give us a ring 9 8 0 2 7 7 4 4 0 2. Or leave us a message or voicemail at magicintheunitedstates@gmail.com. We'd love to hear from you.

Magic in the United States was written and hosted by me, Heather Freeman. The show is produced by Amber Walker and edited by Lucy Perkins. Our associate producer is Noor Gill, and the show is mixed by Jennie Cataldo. Fact-checking by Dania Sulemon. The executive producer for PRX Productions is Jocelyn Gonzalez. The show's music is from APM music and Epidemic sound. And our project manager is Edwin Ochoa.

Thanks to series advisors, Helen Berger, Danielle Boaz, Yvonne Chireau, Chas Clifton, Abel Gomez, Daniel Harms, Corey Hutchison, Sean McCloud, Sabina Magliocco, Thorn Mooney, and Meg Whalen. Thanks to guests Brett Hendrickson, Jennifer Koshatka Seman, and Grace Sesma. This production was funded by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.

Wherever you are in the United States, the East, the West, the North, or the South, remember that magic is everywhere.

I'm Heather Freeman and I'll see you at the crossroads.