The Apocalypse of Santa Teresa: Tomóchic! Redención! as Exile Thought

Abstract

While the history of Teresa Urrea, a Mexican folk saint known as the “Saint of Cabora,” has been explored at length, “teresismo,” the name given to the phenomenon of revolts carried out in her name, has not been considered from the perspective of intellectual history. This essay analyzes Tomochic! Redención! (1896), a work written and published by Urrea and Lauro Aguirre in El Paso, Texas. In their retelling of the rebellion and massacre that occurred in Tomóchic, Chihuahua (1892), the authors politicize Spiritism, a doctrine that aims to find a balance between science and religion, in order to construct a form of rebellious thought. This entails the resignification of ideological materials and the intensification of discursive features, especially by articulating an intense social conflict. Focusing on the work’s “Introduction,” this essay examines a series of religious figures invested with new meanings in the context of border struggle: the narrator, a prisoner plagued by spiritual doubt; a spirit that consoles and advises him; and the visions the narrator experiences when he falls asleep. In conclusion, the essay suggests that this process of politicized syncretism was a widespread phenomenon in border journalism leading up to the Mexican Revolution, an ideological “exile” that accompanied physical exile: the final years of dictator Porfirio Díaz’s reign in Mexico created a situation in which expatriation, new conflicts and new forms of solidarity, and journalism worked together to produce new forms of thinking, writing, and doing. Though little-known, they represent a fascinating moment of intellectual history.