The Hummingbird's Daughter_ A Novel - Luis Alberto Urrea [192]
The train was moving faster now. The engineer dropped sand through the slots onto the tracks so they could build traction and climb. The train rumbled and howled, sparks swirled around them and smoke, and the whistle shrieked and the warriors never moved.
They climbed and approached the great curve out of the canyon, and the men still stood all along the line.
“There!” Teresita cried. “Look there!”
She pointed.
Tomás looked: sitting on his horse on the last rise beside the tracks, he found Buenaventura. He was laughing. He held his great old idiotic Texan cowboy hat in his hand. He waved it over his head.
And then, as if it had all been a strange dream, Mexico, and Cabora, and the wars, and President Díaz, and the Yaquis and Mayos and Apaches and Pimas and Guasaves and Seris and Tarahumaras and Tomochitecos were gone.
Nothing ahead of them now but night.
Night, and great, dark North America.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
TERESA URREA WAS A REAL PERSON. I grew up believing she was my aunt. Apparently, my great-grandfather, Seferino Urrea, was Tomás’s first cousin. She was a family folktale until César A. González, at San Diego Mesa College, showed me the first of many hundreds of articles I would read about her. Although I could claim to have been pursuing her story since my boyhood, my serious research into her life began in Boston in 1985.
Teresita’s sermons, her argument in the prison wagon with General Bandála, and Cruz Chávez’s heated discussion with Father Gastélum in Tomóchic are all based on Lauro Aguirre’s own notes. Although they are difficult to find, you can still uncover microfilms of his writings if you know a helpful librarian. The story the old woman tells Aguirre near the end of the novel is an eyewitness account told by a 101-year-old curandera in Benjamin Hill, Sonora. It was tape-recorded over a decade ago by my brother, Alberto Urrea. This is the first time it appears in any source.
The teachings of Huila are based on the Mayo medicine woman of El Júpare, Sonora—Maclovia Borbón Moroyoqui. Maclovia was the maternal grandmother and teacher of my cousin, Esperanza Urrea. Esperanza was one of my teachers as I learned a few of the secret medicine ways recounted here.
Two other teachers deserve mention: Elba Urrea, aunt and curandera-hechicera, delivered before her death a trunk full of documents, letters, pictures, and articles relating to Teresita. The Chiricahua Apache medicine man, “Manny,” at Rancho Teresita in Arizona shared much with me.
Please note that these, and many other, sources asked me to disguise certain details from readers. I was taught that it would be fun as an author to show off all the Yaqui and Mayo and curandera secrets I had been shown. But that kind of showing off would be wrong. So I have changed certain small details, and I have maintained the secret names of things. Written formulas are accurate, and all “miracles” attributed to Teresita are from the record, witnessed in writing in the archives.
This book took more than twenty years of fieldwork, research, travel, and interviews to compose. The acknowledgments I owe are extensive and would add several pages to this text. Writers, scholars, clergy, curanderas, and shamans helped me all along the way.
For those interested in sources and the like, a full bibliography and acknowledgments section can be found on my Web site (www.luisurrea.com) under the “Teresita” subheading. Michelle McDonald brilliantly designs and maintains the Web site.
Several books are quite valuable to the Teresita scholar. Everyone begins in the same place: Teresita, by William Curry Holden. It’s a fine old text, rich in detail. Lauro Aguirre’s Tomóchic! (also known by different titles) is interesting, since it suggests it was edited—if not cowritten—by Teresita herself. José Valades wrote the influential newspaper series on Teresita that appeared to great fanfare in the Southwest in the 1930s; this material went into his slender book, Porfirio Díaz contra