| In his essay "The Parable of the
Tapeworm," Mario Vargas Llosa argues that at the heart of the writer's will to
write is rebellion, a "rejection and criticism of life as it is." Moreover, he
speculates, it is even possible that good literature may inspire actual acts of
rebellion when the reader compares the better world of the book to the relative
junk heap of real life. Whether or not this is universally true, it's an
attractive idea, and, in its way, a comforting one. Language is a lever that
might move the enormous weight of the fickle, war-torn world we live in. It's
free, universal and highly portable: better than plastic bomb and difficult to
govern. Vargas Llosa's idea is also, of course, a writerly sort of realpolitik, a wish that a good novel -- or story or poem -- can literally remake history. When Luis Alberto Urrea began his epic novel, "The Hummingbird's Daughter," 20 years ago, the United States was in the first phase of a conservative backlash, the culture wars were gathering steam, and the left felt itself to be under a dark cloud. Two decades later, the situation seems even graver: the culture wars are more intense and the left feels under not a cloud but an anvil. With the election of a new, deeply conservative pope, Urrea's timing couldn't be better: his main character, Teresita, is a saint as envisioned not in the marble reaches of the Vatican but in the populist pueblos of liberation theology, a Mexican saint of dust and blood, with lice in her hair and dirt under her fingernails. Poor, illegitimate, illiterate and despised, Teresita is the embodiment of the dictum that the last shall be first, and her ascension over the course of 500 pages is a myth that is also a charmingly written manifesto. Urrea, who was born in Tijuana to an American mother and a Mexican father, is the author of 10 previous books of nonfiction, fiction and poetry; the best known of these are probably "The Devil's Highway" and "Across the Wire," nonfiction accounts of hardscrabble lives on the Mexican-United States border. For "The Hummingbird's Daughter," he reached back into his own family history, or what he calls "a family folk tale." Teresa Urrea, known in the novel as Teresita, was a distant relative and, as Urrea discovered, the subject of some earlier scholarship, an "influential" series of newspaper articles in the 1930's and at least one other novel. Urrea's book re-imagines her story on a grand scale, as a mix of leftist hagiography, mystical bildungsroman and melancholic national anthem. The half-Indian child of a wealthy Mexican landowner, Teresita, born in 1873 with a red triangle on her forehead, is also possessed of a supernatural gift for healing that becomes much stronger as she grows up, and stronger still after suffering a terrible assault that kills her. She rises from the dead and begins to perform miracles. The sick, the halt and the dying gather around her, and so do Mexican revolutionaries. "Everything the government does," Teresita preaches to them, "is morally wrong." This democratic groundswell inevitably results in a showdown with the Mexican authorities. Teresita's endurance -- and survival -- are literally and spiritually linked to the struggles of Mexico itself, a struggle that Urrea sees firmly from the bottom up. "God is a worker, like us," Huila, an aged curandera, instructs the young Teresita. "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." |