The Hummingbird's Daughter: A Novel [Hardcover]

Luis Alberto Urrea (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 17, 2005

This historical novel is based on Urrea's real great-aunt Teresita, who had healing powers and was acclaimed as a saint. Urrea has researched historical accounts and family records for years to get an accurate story.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. "Her powers were growing now, like her body. No one knew where the strange things came from. Some said they sprang up in her after the desert sojourn with Huila. Some said they came from somewhere else, some deep inner landscape no one could touch. That they had been there all along." Teresita, the real-life "Saint of Cabora," was born in 1873 to a 14-year-old Indian girl impregnated by a prosperous rancher near the Mexico-Arizona border. Raised in dire poverty by an abusive aunt, the little girl still learned music and horsemanship and even to read: she was a "chosen child," showing such remarkable healing powers that the ranch's medicine woman took her as an apprentice, and the rancher, Don Tomás Urrea, took her—barefoot and dirty—into his own household. At 16, Teresita was raped, lapsed into a coma and apparently died. At her wake, though, she sat up in her coffin and declared that it was not for her. Pilgrims came to her by the thousands, even as the Catholic Church denounced her as a heretic; she was also accused of fomenting an Indian uprising against Mexico and, at 19, sentenced to be shot. From this already tumultuous tale of his great-aunt Teresa, American Book Award–winner Urrea (The Devil's Highway) fashions an astonishing novel set against the guerrilla violence of post–Civil War southwestern border disputes and incipient revolution. His brilliant prose is saturated with the cadences and insights of Latin-American magical realism and tempered by his exacting reporter's eye and extensive historical investigation. The book is wildly romantic, sweeping in its effect, employing the techniques of Catholic hagiography, Western fairy tale, Indian legend and everyday family folklore against the gritty historical realities of war, poverty, prejudice, lawlessness, torture and genocide. Urrea effortlessly links Teresita's supernatural calling to the turmoil of the times, concealing substantial intellectual content behind effervescent storytelling and considerable humor.
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From The New Yorker

Twenty years in the making, Urrea's epic novel recounts the true story of his great-aunt Teresita. In 1873, amid the political turbulence of General Porfirio Díaz's Mexican republic, Teresita is born to a fourteen-year-old Indian girl, "mounted and forgotten" by her white master. Don Tomàs Urrea later takes his illegitimate daughter into his home, where she learns to bathe every week and read "Las Hermanas Brontë." But Teresita also continues a folk education as a curandera, discovering healing powers and a mystical relationship with God. Indian pilgrims swarm to the Urrea ranch, where "St. Teresita," a mestiza Joan of Arc, kindles in them a powerful faith in God and a perilous hunger for revolution. The novel brings to life not only the deeply pious figure whom Díaz himself dubbed "the Most Dangerous Girl in Mexico" but also the blood-soaked landscape of pre-revolutionary Mexico.
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 512 pages
• Publisher: Little, Brown and Company; First Edition edition (May 17, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0316745464
• ISBN-13: 978-0316745468
• Product Dimensions: 6.2 x 1.5 x 9.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (77 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #80,568 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #70 in Books > Literature & Fiction > World Literature > Latin American

More About the Author

Luis Alberto Urrea, 2005 Pulitzer Prize finalist for nonfiction and member of the Latino Literature Hall of Fame, is a prolific and acclaimed writer who uses his dual-culture life experiences to explore greater themes of love, loss and triumph.
Born in Tijuana, Mexico to a Mexican father and an American mother, Urrea has published extensively in all the major genres. The critically acclaimed and best-selling author of 13 books, Urrea has won numerous awards for his poetry, fiction and essays. The Devil's Highway, his 2004 non-fiction account of a group of Mexican immigrants lost in the Arizona desert, won the Lannan Literary Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the Pacific Rim Kiriyama Prize. An historical novel, The Hummingbird's Daughter tells the story of Teresa Urrea, sometimes known as the Saint of Cabora and the Mexican Joan of Arc. The book, which involved 20 years of research and writing, won the Kiriyama Prize in fiction and, along with The Devil's Highway, was named a best book of the year by many publications. It has been optioned by acclaimed Mexican director Luis Mandoki for a film to star Antonio Banderas.
Urrea's most recent novel, Into the Beautiful North, imagines a small town in Mexico where all the men have immigrated to the U.S. A group of young women, after seeing the film The Magnificent Seven, decide to follow the men North and persuade them to return to their beloved village. A national best-seller, Into the Beautiful North, earned a citation of excellence from the American Library Association Rainbow's Project. A short story from Urrea's collection, Six Kinds of Sky, was recently released as a stunning graphic novel by Cinco Puntos Press. Mr.Mendoza's Paintbrush, illustrated by artist Christopher Cardinale, has already garnered rave reviews and serves as a perfect companion to Into the Beautiful North as it depicts the same village in the novel.
Into the Beautiful North, The Devil's Highway and The Hummingbird's Daughter have been chosen by more than 30 different cities and colleges for One Book community read programs.
Urrea has also won an Edgar award from the Mystery Writers of America for best short story (2009, "Amapola" in Phoenix Noir). His first book, Across the Wire, was named a New York Times Notable Book and won the Christopher Award. Urrea also won a 1999 American Book Award for his memoir, Nobody's Son: Notes from an American Life and in 2000, he was voted into the Latino Literature Hall of Fame following the publication of Vatos. His book of short stories, Six Kinds of Sky, was named the 2002 small-press Book of the Year in fiction by the editors of ForeWord magazine. He has also won a Western States Book Award in poetry for The Fever of Being and was in The 1996 Best American Poetry collection. Urrea's other titles include By the Lake of Sleeping Children, In Search of Snow, Ghost Sickness and Wandering Time.
Urrea attended the University of California at San Diego, earning an undergraduate degree in writing, and did his graduate studies at the University of Colorado-Boulder.
After serving as a relief worker in Tijuana and a film extra and columnist-editor-cartoonist for several publications, Urrea moved to Boston where he taught expository writing and fiction workshops at Harvard. He has also taught at Massachusetts Bay Community College and the University of Colorado and he was the writer in residence at the University of Louisiana-Lafayette.
Urrea lives with his family in Naperville, IL, where he is a professor of creative writing at the University of Illinois-Chicago.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

52 of 52 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars entrancing, painful, wonderful, unforgettable and very special, September 11, 2005

By 

Charlie_in_la "charlie" (los angeles, CA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Hummingbird's Daughter: A Novel (Hardcover)

I read a lot of books. Some are just for fun, some are silly, some are educational, some are not very good. But, every now and then, I find one that is so special that I will read it again, and probably again a few more times.

You can read a "summary" of the book in other reviews, both publishers' and readers'. So, why did I like it and why should you read it.

First, the story is incredible. A child born in poverty begins to show amazing intelligence, skills...and grows to womanhood having had profound effect on her country of birth. Truth is indeed "stranger than fiction".

Second, the author has an amazing talent with words. He gives you the sights, sounds, smells of the world in which Teresita lived. He also uses words to bring each person to life. I actually called a friend to share a quote...Tomas Urrea to Lauro Aguirre...."Although it is true that you are insufferable and irritating, and rightly famed for your endless posturing and platudinous pontificating..." (don't worry, potential reader, though, the book is not full of big words, just, occasionally, one creeps in...I loved that quote because it reminded me of someone.)

Third, I was able to experience a time and place distant from me. Some of what happened was horrific, but, it happened. I was able to begin to understand.

Finally, I loved this book, and will read it again because it contains a message of love and hope that I can understand.

Books do many things, entertain, enlighten and sometimes enrich.

This book enriches, enlightens and entertains.

79 of 84 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Para Dar A Luz, August 3, 2005

By 

Margaret L. McQuaid "magmcq" (Anchorage, Alaska United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Hummingbird's Daughter: A Novel (Hardcover)

In Latin America, instead of saying "to give birth to", the people say "para dar a luz", to bring to the light. Luis Urrea has brought to the light his remarkable great-aunt, La Teresita, a curandera who came to be known as la Santa de Cabora. His painstaking research has resulted in what I can only term a biography written in the style of magical realism. (I've never been able to understand the difference between magic and realism in the first place.) This book is part cultural anthropology, part Mexican history, and wholly enchanting. Urrea is a powerful, masterly writer who sure knows his stuff. He brings his readers to the light of understanding, of feeling, of acknowledgement. I think he may have inherited some of his ancestor's talent for transformation.

Teresita Urrea was a real person. She is buried in a small town in eastern Arizona, where I spent some time growing up. I went to her graveside at age 17, looking only for cheap thrills. (We thought back then that the grave contained the body of a woman who had fought in the Mexican Revolution with Pancho Villa, and whose ghost was rumored to haunt the cemetary.) I wanted to be scared. Instead, on that bitterly cold November night, I found the air around her grave to be soft and warm, and I could smell roses. No roses bloom in the Clifton cemetary in November. Instead of being frightened, I came away with what was then an inexplicable sense of peace. I didn't understand at the time, but now I do. Her healing ways still linger.

Luis Urrea has given us the spirit of La Teresa, warm, alive, and still wearing the scent of roses. I loved reading this book. You will too.

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars I Didn't Want It to End, April 23, 2006

By 

Steve Koss (New York, NY United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Hummingbird's Daughter (Paperback)

Not since I read Mario Vargas Llosa's THE WAR OF THE END OF THE WORLD several years ago have I come across a novel whose characters, story, and general aura captivated me so completely that I was sorry to see it come to its inevitable end. Until I read THE HUMMINGBIRD'S DAUGHTER.

Luis Alberto Urrea proves himself to be a consummate storyteller, creating a cast of memorable characters whose intersecting lives blend the traditions of hacienda-owning, Christian Mexico with the pantheistic mysticism of Indian Mexico. Urrea depicts Mexico's ironic mixture of warmth and harshness through countless small touches and turns of phrase, creating a remarkably strong sense of place. In fact, Mexico itself becomes one of the book's major characters - its people, its history, its austere and unforgiving climate and geography. The end result is a novel that traces the evolution of Mexico in the late 1800's and the birth of the modern Mexican state in an America-dominated age. It is no coincidence that a book so deeply rooted in Mexico at its beginning ends a number of years later in a train headed for the United States.

The Hummingbird is Cayetana, a poor but strong-willed woman who gives birth to a daughter. Believing that the choice of name will dictate her child's future, Cayetana christens her daughter Nina Garcia Nona Maria Rebecca Chavez. The Hummingbird abandons her daughter at an early age, leaving her with her aunt and disappearing from sight. The young girl, unusually bright and inquisitive, is eventually given over to the tutelage of Huila, the estancia's resident midwife, medicine woman, and all-around mystical healer. As if to prove her absent mother correct even if her choice of names was wrong, the young girl rechristens herself as Theresa, after Saint Theresa. "I am going to be her," she explains to the dubious Huila.

Theresa's father, we soon discover, is Tomas Urrea, the rich landowner of the Sinaloan estate where they live. Teresita, as she is called, demonstrates mystical powers exceeding those of her teacher, to the point where she becomes widely known as a faith healer and ultimately a threat to a ruthless but inexplicably skittish government. Urrea's characters are beautifully drawn, from the saintly Teresita to the cranky but lovable Huila, from the liberal-thinking Tomas to his jewel- and tradition-encrusted wife Dona Loreto, from the radical but inventive engineer Don Lauro Aguirre to the scampish boy Buenaventura (another of Tomas's illegitimate children) and the honor-bound outlaw, Cruz Chavez.

While Urrea's prose is neither as dense nor as introspective as Garcia Marquez's or Cormac McCarthy's, his storytelling flows at a graceful pace that easily sustains the reader's interest. The writing is filled with small touches that evoke the sights and sounds and smells of rural Mexico: "Segundo shifted in the saddle, and it made its three hundred leather sounds." Then there are the cruel oddities of Mexico, such as the rural policemen who travel the countryside exhibiting the floating head of a captured bandit as a way to intimidate the peasants into obedience, or the Hummingbird's sister, Tia, whose smoking habit includes flicking the burnt ash on her tongue as though it was a naturally consumable part of the cigarette.

Best of all, however, are the stories and traditions Urrea integrates into the people's daily lives, such as the fabled visit of the Virgin Mary to Teresa's ancestors. Mary's heavenly descent ends with the Mother of God stuck on top of a huge cactus, from where she spoke. "What did she say?" Teresa asks. "Get me a ladder," Huila answers. And that's what the people did for the Mother of God. "This is how Heaven works," Huila explains. "They're practical. We are always looks for rays of light. For lightning bolts or burning bushes. But God is a worker, like us. He made the world - He didn't hire poor Indios to build it for him! God has worker's hands. Just remember - angels carry no harps. Angels carry hammers."

Readers who want to be immersed in a story, lose themselves in another place and time and culture, and allow the marvel of great fiction to transport them to a world both forever lost and beyond their own, will surely enjoy THE HUMMINGBIRD'S DAUGHTER. Like me, their only regret will probably be reaching the 495th and last page.