In the book Stones from the Creek, Teresa Urrea tells Henry Ossian Flipper about the night raid conducted by white Clifton, Arizona Territory  housewives and their armed husbands to seize children from their Mexican neighbors.  These children had been placed by nuns from New York City to give them a chance to be raised by Catholic families far from the presumably dangerous streets of New York.  The question of why a mine camp -- subject to the dangers of underground work and the violence of the Phelps, Dodge corporation and Arizona Rangers -- was considered "safe" is beyond the scope of this posting.  Maybe another day.

Today I am wondering how various authors imagine a historical character like Teresa Urrea and her response to the orphan abduction.  In the book, The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction, Linda Gordon chooses to discuss la santa de Cabora as another test of what constituted racial boundaries in Arizona Territory at that time.  She argues that Teresa, despite speaking no English, was included as a member of white "society" because of her light skin and her well-to-do father.  And she discusses her carnival-like healing tours of the United States as tied to what I will call exoticism, following Said.

Urrea's nephew, Luis Alberto Urrea, discusses la santa's time in Clifton at some length in Queen of America, his sequel to The Hummingbird's Daughter.  But while he gives us the romance of Teresa's marriage there, we don't get much about the mines or the mine strike.  And we hear nothing about the orphan train or the theft of "white" children from Mexican families.

Much has been made in all sources about the question of whether Teresa was political.  She was certainly close with the revolutionary newspaper editor Lauro Aguirre and she was an icon to the insurrectionists of Tomochic.  I choose to locate her radical opposition in her religious beliefs.  In my story "Passion Flower" she is enraged by the actions of her white neighbors who stole children from Mexican families.  But those women are waiting in line outside her home for healing, nevertheless.  And she heals them, nevertheless, because that is what she feels the Virgin Mary has called her to do.

I offer no evidentiary reason for my interpretation over the others.  I have yet to read Brianda Domecq's La insolita historia de la santa de Cabora, and I will probably have to return to this question when I am finished with that book.  For now, though, let's say that the Healer in my story is just somebody that I imagine when I read about Teresa Urrea.