In the spring of 2020, Robin Foster was teaching at a university in Virginia. And, like much of the rest of the education world during the early days of the pandemic, her classes went remote. But she didn’t want to continue doing that into the following school year, and not knowing what would happen, Foster decided to head west, to less populated areas.
She ended up in Wyoming that fall for a few weeks and liked it so much, the next summer she visited Montana. While she was there, she figured she’d uncover a local story nobody really knew and write about it.
ROBIN FOSTER: While I was staying near Yellowstone that summer of of 2021 I did some digging around and discovered that, in fact, at Yellowstone National Park, the first full time female park ranger was hired in the early 1920s a local woman named Marguerite Lindsley, and there was a collection of her some papers and some correspondence at the Yellowstone archives. And so that's where, you know, I started digging around and looking into her story and that's really where the first chapter came out of was that first summer out west in Montana.
That story became the first in Foster’s new book, called "Grit and Ghosts: Following the Trail of Eight Tenacious Women Across a Century." She decided to go from place to place across the West and Southwest and find the story of a woman who people probably don’t know about. She was looking specifically for stories of resilience and tenacity. Especially, she says, since life in the early part of the pandemic was so chaotic, she wanted inspirational stories of women confronted with unique obstacles and how they got through them.
One of those women is Teresa Urrea. She was, at one point, dubbed the “Mexican Joan of Arc.”
Foster joined The Show to talk about Urrea’s life, which was an interesting one, starting pretty much right at birth.
Full conversation
FOSTER: Yes, so she was born. This goes back to 1873, so this was, you know, almost about 150ish years ago. She was born in Sonora, Mexico. Her mother was very young, a local Indigenous woman. Her father was the son of a wealthy landowner, and she grew up in poverty with her mother and her aunt for her childhood. And when she was about 15, her father brought her into, you know, the big house on the ranch with his wife and his legitimate children, and then raised her as his daughter there with the rest of his family.
And then something happened to her when she was about 15. The way reporters talked about it later, the story was that she had been jilted by a lover, and she was heartbroken, and she went into this sort of coma-like trance. I mean, obviously that wasn't the story. If it wasn't, she was in this sort of coma-like state for about three months. They really didn't know what to make of it. And her father, in fact, thought that she had died. And the housekeeper, who was also the healing woman in the household, they thought she was dead, and they planned, her father … and Willa, the healer in their home, prepared a funeral for her.
And she woke up in the middle of this funeral, she sat, she literally sat up, upright and looking around, and what's going on here? And it was, you know, it was a miracle. And she told everybody who would listen that this vision she had had when she was, what they thought, they thought she had died. And she had this vision that she went, you know, she's she sees herself drifting, and she meets, the Virgin of Guadalupe comes to her and says, “It's not time for you yet you need to go back, because you have these gifts, these these gifts of healing, and you can go back and be a source of good,” for the mainly for the Indigenous peoples, the, the Yaqui and the Mayo Indians who lived in the region.
And then so overnight, she was a sensation. Pilgrims flocked to her from all across northern Mexico in the Borderlands and soon, sooner rather than later, the Diaz, the president Diaz administration and the church were not at all happy with this very young woman, sort of amassing this following and quickly being labeled a patron saint. And she was exiled to Arizona that year with her father.
BRODIE: So she clearly used that vision of the Virgin Guadalupe to decide what she was going to do next. Did it seem as though she had success as a healer? I mean, did she get training at some point, or did she mostly just use what she had learned during this vision to try to do what she was doing?
FOSTER: She had training back at home in her father's household with Willa, who was the household healer. The power of touch was, by her accounts, a gift, a gift from God that she just had this power of this healing touch. And eventually the Indigenous peoples found her, that the Mexican state wasn't going to say what happened to her. They didn't want her to become a martyr. They certainly didn't want you to know this trail of pilgrims going after her. But her whereabouts were found.
She lived in Tubac for a while and in the Tucson area, and people did find her and continued to see her. For healing and for treatments, and everyone said she was quite effective. And the papers, and we know this because the papers in Mexico, but also in the United States, reported on her almost continuously. This is about a decade or two leading up to the Mexican Revolution, so there's a lot of tensions and antagonisms between the Indigenous populations that's being expelled from their native lands in northern Mexico or killed, and people did flock to her, continue to see her and claim that she had healing powers.
But then what happens? The press went further with that. She was soon cited as instigating a lot of these raids and these attacks when the Mayo and Yaqui soldiers would attack, for example, the customs houses along the borders, and they were calling for her capture. You know, newspapers called for, you know, she must be captured. She's going to be killed, she's going to be hanged. So this aspect of her reputation began to trump that of her as a healer.
BRODIE: So obviously that reputation was not super helpful with the Mexican government, but I wonder what it did for the people who are coming to see her for healing purposes?
FOSTER: She still so she eventually left Tubac and Tucson, and she moved to El Paso, and eventually she had to leave. She was too close to the action. She and her father moved to Clifton, Arizona, and things did quiet down. It seems, once she moved away from the border, the number of pilgrims who came to her for healing did lessen, to an extent. And she really hoped to sort of quiet things down and have just sort of a normal, you know, she says, “I'm not a saint. I'm not, you know, I'm not a saint, I'm just, I'm just a woman.” And I think she really wanted to have just a regular life. She thought she fell in love with a man nobody really knew about, and on her wedding night, he shot her and tried to kill her. He tried to kill her family.
BRODIE: So what lessons do you take from her life? Or maybe, how do you see her story as being relevant to today?
FOSTER: Teresa Urrea and all of the women in “Grit and Ghosts,” like I said, I was looking to find these stories that would offer me inspiration and solace, you know, during a chaotic, chaotic time. And I was looking for examples of women who had gone through, you know, certain obstacles, and I have taken, I've kept that with me. I'm gonna keep that close to my heart.
But things have, for me, at least settled down the past, you know, year or two after the the wave of of the first, you know, couple years of the COVID pandemic, things have quieted down, but now we're entering a state where, you know, the world is, you know, we're potentially in an unrecognizable flux, again, with a new administration coming in January, and, you know, we don't really know what that's going to look like. And I've been thinking that none of the women in “Grit and Ghosts” had even close to the rights that I have today. Most of these women never had the right to vote. They didn't really have a right to legal autonomy. None of these women could, could get credit in their name. They couldn't seek a no fault divorce. There was no such thing as merit, marriage equality.
And so I'm sort of trying to assess, you know what, what's going to happen for us in the next four years? And I, and I think these women had so much less in the way of rights and autonomy that we have today, but none of them stopped. None of them gave up. And, you know, they never said, “OK, you win. I'll stop, I'm done.” That just didn't happen. So if I take that, there's always gonna be the next thing, right? You don't get to a place of sort of peace and stability and have that forever. There's always gonna be the next thing that's gonna come at you and come at you.
And so I've been reminded yet again that this has been the history of, you know, really, I think of women's experiences this, it has been the history and that Teresa Urrea, the other women, the story that that didn't, you know, sort of put a nice, clean box around what they let their lives become.
