Evening star. [volume] (Washington, D.C.) 1854-1972, 1899-09-18
MARIA TERESA UREA,
The Remarkable Mexican Girl Who is
Now With the Yaqui Indians.

| From the Chicago Record.
The young Mexican girl, Maria Teresa
rea, who is devoutly believed by the Mex
lean Catholics to be endowed with divine
power, is now somewhere among the Yaqui
Indians in Sonora Mexico, and, although
they are the fiercest tribe in that republic,
and irreconcilable in their hostility to the
whites, they revere her as a priestess and
obey her if she were their queen. There
is something strange about Santa Teresa
as they call her. She Is modest, unas-
Stunning Mexican girl, the daughter of a
small farmer in Sonora with very little
education, but at an early age she develop
ed remarkable hypnotic mesmeric pow
ers, which caused the ignorant peasants to
look upon her as more than human. A
touch of her hand is believed to be a cure
for every mortal evil, and one of her pray
ers of interceSsion a passport to paradise
She does not claim divine power but con-
fesses that she does not understand the
source of her influence. Her family were
Catholics, but she has never been strict in
her observance of her religious duties At
the same time she recognizes that there is
something within her that gives her the I'M
usual influence that she enjoys.
In 1896 1 saw her at Ell Paso a plain
looking girl of twenty-one or twenty two
years. in a speckled calico dress and coarse
shoes, with black shawl thrown over her
head. Her hair fell in two braids to her
waist, and she looked much younger than
she really was. She was then living under
the care of a gentleman named Aguirre,
the editor of the Mexican paper FL Paso,
having been compelled to leave Mexico by
the authorities, who accused her of trying
to incite a revolution. A band of fanatics
somehow got a notion that she was to be
the mother of Montezuma, the long-looked-
for Mexican Messiah who is to liberate the
poems from servitude, and restore the splen-
dor Of the empire that Cortez plundered
and overthrow. Restless and dissatisfied
politicians took advantage of the mania
and. in the name of Saint Teresa, organized
revolution in Sonora, and attacked the
custom house and barracks at Nogales
Mr.. Aguirre may have given the move
ment some encoura cement, for he is an eX-
lie, and is wanted by the Mexican police
But 1 was assured that Teresa was not in
volved in any way. Trustworthy people
of girl, without any special force of char
acter or intellect, but possessed of a mys-
ferrous power like that of the magnetic girl
who came out of Georgia a few years ago
and seemed to have the strength of loco
motive in her slender fingers. Santa Teresa
has some such physical popularity which
gives her a mesmeric influence over people
to whom 1t may be applied. and she has
cured hundreds of sick and lame and blind
The MeXicans hang her portrait over their
little shrnes beside that of the Virgin
laughed at the suggestion of her divinity,
and indignantly denied that she was to be
the mother of the redeemer of the Aztec
race. She is now living among the Yaqui
Indians in an obscure mountain village in
Sonora, which is constantly visited by pill
grims and sick people in search of her
healing power.