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Belén de Sárraga (c. 1872-1950)

The excellent and deeply researched new book by Mexican historian María Teresa Fernández Aceves, Mujeres en el cambio social en el siglo XX mexicano (Women in Social Change in 20th Century Mexico) has one chapter in particular directly relevant to my own book on the Mexican Revolution: a mini-biography of Belén de Sárraga, whom Fernández Aceves calls "one of the most important leaders of her generation." Few people outside of the Spanish-speaking world have heard of or even imagined such a public figure as Belén de Sárraga; that should change.

A Spanish-born Spiritist, freethinker and feminist, differing from but a contemporary of Annie Besant, Sárraga visited Mexico in 1912 as part of an international speaking tour. What she said-- and the fact that her fellow Spiritist President Francisco I. Madero, the leader of Mexico's 1910 Revolution, both welcomed and celebrated her-- caused an uproar. Writes Fernández Aceves (my translation):

"[In a conversation with The Mexican Herald] Sárraga... commented on the Mexican Revolution and said the Catholic Church was responsible for the conditions under which the country lived. The type of education it provided did not allow freedom of thought. The clergy only promoted the masses' fanaticism and made women into slaves." 

Belén de Sárraga

Especially valuable is the detail Fernández Acevez provides about Sárraga's early involvement with and writings about Spiritism-- the French offshoot of American Spiritualism, lead by French educator Alan Kardec. At the same time, Sárraga, a committed anti-monarchist, ardently defended Spanish colonies' rights to independence. In 1896, she protested the execution of the leader of the Philippines movement for independence and she was jailed for protesting against the war in Cuba. For Sárraga, as for Madero, Spiritism led to political action for freedom and social justice.

Fernández Aceves (my translation):

"[In 1912] Sárraga gave a series of conferences in Mexico City's Xicoténcatl Theater. Among the attendees were the President of Mexico, the cabinet officers and their families, Spiritists, intellectuals, Masons, women, politicians, and workers. Most attended in formal dress. Sárraga lectured with great rhetorical eloquence and and attacked the Catholic Church. She covered the following topics: The Evolution of Thought; Religious Congregations; Woman as a Human Being; Education; Progress and Tradition; and Morality."

Francisco I. Madero
President of Mexico
(1911-1913)

In her 1914 book published in Lisbon, El clericalismo en América, Sárraga argued that the counterrevolution that ended in Madero's assassination was a coalition of the old-guard (porfiristas) and the clergy, and that the Zapatists, Madero's one-time peasant allies turned enemy, had a religious fervor and respected the clergy. Writes Fernández Acevez (my translation):

"Sárraga… did not recognize the legacy and neither did she understand the popular, radical and rural ideas of the Zapatistas and Villistas: Land reform. She did not take into account the Anarchist motto of Zapatismo: "land and liberty." From Sárraga's point of view, their fanaticism was incompatible with a liberal and modern revolution. For her, that was central to the Mexican Revolution."

Among those who protested against Belén de Sárragas were more than a hundred Mexican señoras who arrived at Chapultepec Castle, the Presidential Residence, in protest at these "outrages" against the Church and Mexican womanhood. President Madero, then frequently the butt of cartoons portraying him as a midget ghost whisperer, mildly replied that he was dedicated to protecting free speech-- theirs as much as Bélen de Sárraga's.

Nearly a decade later, when Sárraga returned to Mexico, the contratemps between the Mexican Church and State continued, and she because-- my translation-- "more vocal and active."

"She gave talks for Masons, teachers, soldiers, and workers in Aguascalientes, Colima, Chihuahua, Durango, Guadalajara, Morelia, Pachuca, Puebla, Oaxaca, Toluca, Torréon, Tulancingo, Xalapa and Zacatecas. All her talks attracted very large audiences. In Puebla, she had an audience of 20,000 workers."

Plutarco Elias Calles

By 1923 Belén de Sárraga was receiving financial and political support from Presidential candidate Plutarco Elías Calles-- her fellow anti-cleric and Spiritist. After Calles won the presidency, Bélen de Sárraga continued speaking to the same topics and in support of his administration in Mexico, New Orleans and Havana. In 1926 she became a Mexican citizen.

Fernández Aceves recounts in detail Sárraga's efforts with her magazine dedicated to universal freethinking, Rumbos Nuevos, which lasted from 1925 to 1927. But after 1928, suddenly, information about Sárraga dries up. Speculates Fernández Acevez (my translation), "Perhaps she did not approve of the armed violence of the Cristiada"-- that is, the civil war that had broken out between the adherents of the Mexican State under Calles and the Church. In 1931 Sárraga was back in Spain, where she soon fought against the fascists in the Civil War; when the Fascists triumphed in 1939, she found herself again in Mexico. She continued to give talks, though one imagines to less clamor, and was writing her memoirs when she died at age 78 in 1950.

Belén de Sárraga surely deserves a full-length biography, as does this outstanding collection of case studies of women in social change in Mexico an English translation.

>More about María Teresa Fernández Aceves's Mujeres en el cambio social en el siglo XX mexicano (Siglo XXI Editores, 2014).

COMMENTS always welcome.

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>More on this blog about Plutarco Elías Calles: Una ventana al mundo invisible (A Window to the Invisible World) or, Master Amajur and the Smoking Signatures

>My interview with historian Michael K. Schuessler about Alma Reed, Felipe Carillo Puerto, Pita Amor, and Elena Poniatowska.

>My knock-your-huaraches-off interview with historian John Tutino, "Looking at Mexico in New Ways"

>More about my book, Metaphysical Odyssey into the Mexican Revolution: Francisco I. Madero and His Secret Book, Spiritist Manual

Excerpt: José Fidencio Sintora Constantino, El Niño Fidencio

Another excerpt from my revised and much-expanded introduction to my translation of Francisco I. Madero's Spritist Manual (forthcoming in paperback, Kindle and iBook this year; the link goes to current first edition available only on Kindle). 

***UPDATE My book, Metaphysical Odyssey Into the Mexican Revolution, is now available***

Francisco I. Madero was the leader of Mexico's 1910 Revolution and President of Mexico 1911-1913. As Mexican historian Enrique Krauze eloquently argues in his biography, Francisco I. Madero: Místico de la libertad, in the case of Madero, "Politics does not displace Spiritism, it is born of it." So, whatever one's personal opinion of Spiritism may be, Madero's Spiritist Manual of 1911 (written in 1909-1910), becomes a key document for understanding the Mexican Revolution.

Note: The excerpt refers to Pachita, the Mexican "psychic surgeon"-- another excerpt about her will be posted soon.

José Fidencio Sintora Constantino
El Niño Fidencio 

Anyone who explores heterodox Spiritism in 20^th century Mexico comes to the enigma of José Fidencio Sintora Constantino, “El Niño Fidencio,” who laughingly predicted his own sudden death in 1938. As a healer, Fidencio is more famous than Doña Pachita and than his predecessor, Teresa Urrea, the “Santa de Cabora.” Throughout northern Mexico and in Chicano communities Texas and as far north as Chicago, it is not uncommon to see, right alongside those to Jesus, San Judas Tadeo (St. Jude Thaddeus), and Mexico’s patron saint, the Virgin of Guadalupe, candles, pictures, and even elaborate plastic flower-draped altars dedicated to Fidencio. Called niño or “child,” because of his high-pitched voice and

gentle, playful nature, as a boy, Fidencio was taken underwing by a German-born Spiritist named Teodoro von Wernich, who recognized and encouraged his development as a mediumistic healer. As news of Fidencio’s healing powers spread, increasing numbers of pilgrims arrived in his remote desert home in Espinazo, Nuevo León, so many that the place became a tent city, with its own post office, and far more substantial than Teresa Urrea’s colossal gatherings, or “romerías” of Mayo Indians, Yaquis and mestizos all yearning for her magic touch, that had so disturbed the Porfirian authorities. The apogee of Fidencio’s career came in 1928: President Plutarco Elías Calles, seeking healing for a skin ailment, pulled into Espinazo on his private train. 

Espinazo was not in my travel plans, but I was able to visit from my armchair by means of Juan Farré’s documentary, Niño Fidencio: de Roma a Espinazo. Ancient ranch people, their voices slow, eyes rheumy, remembered Fidencio, contradicting each other about the color of his skin. One said the Niño cured President Calles by slathering him in honey. The camera panned slowly over the jars immortalizing the tumors the Niño had extracted using his specially-chosen piece of broken glass. An old blind woman who had known Fidencio told the story of a boy who had been swimming in the ocean with two friends, and when the two were eaten by a whale, he was so shocked he could not longer speak. In Espinazo, Fidencio put him on a swing, pushing him so high he screamed and was cured. Another old woman said the Niño operated on cataracts using a razor blade. Another remembered that he fed the lepers boiled coyote and vulture, but they all died anyway.

More techniques: the Niño would smack people with an apple or a tejocote. On others he would sic his mountain lion, a declawed pet named Concha. He might climb up onto a swing, holding a paralytic close to his heart, and then, when the swing stopped, the man would walk—said one devotee.

The variety in Fidencio’s repertoire seemed endless: plants and herbs and the Charquito, or “little puddle.” In a sunny contemporary scene in the Charquito, men who might have been truck drivers spread their arms wide and fell backwards; a circle of pilgrims, the water jostling above their their knees, held hands, closed their eyes and prayed. Zombie-like men, women, children, hair and faces covered in mud, sloshed through the waist-high murk. Alongside the Charquita, to the pound of drums, dancers with headdresses of quetzal feathers and rattles on their ankles stomped and whirled. On the ground, a teenager slowly rolled, over and over, his T-shirt becoming yellower and yellower with dirt.

Fidencio, said another of the old timers, knew he was going to die. But he said, “Don’t bury me right away because I am going to rise on the third day.” With the news of his death, pilgrims rushed in from all over northern Mexico and parts beyond to witness the miracle. But their “saint” did not revive, or at least, not in the way they were expecting. Some of the fidencistas believed they could now enter a trance and receive his spirit, so that, through them, the Niño could continue his work. These materias, or mediums, call themselves cajitas, or “little boxes,” and they wear white robes trimmed in gold and capes the colors of popsicles. Their modus operandi is to stand close to their patient, a hand on his shoulder, and whisper into his ear words of compassion and instruction in Fidencio’s babylike voice. I watched as they, too, shiny capes and all, waded into the Charquito. Someone dumped a bucket of mud over a child’s head. More men fell backwards, stiff as planks, splash, into the chocolately soup.

The film’s finale was rare footage, a scratchy black-and-white flickering, of Fidencio, from on high, pitching fruit at his followers; then, like a rock star, writhing over a mosh pit of their arms; everywhere arising from that carpet-like tangle of humanity, hands, more hands, hands like hungry spiders on his hair, his hip, his shoulder, his foot.

When imagery such as this is the first thing that comes to mind for many of Mexico's intellectual and political elite when Spiritism is mentioned, perhaps we can understand the desire to suppress or ignore the Spiritist beliefs of a national hero.

Don Francisco I. Madero was also a healer who ministered to those too poor to pay a doctor, many of whom might have been no different than the grandparents of those old ranch people in the movie about Fidencio. But no, he did not perform “psychic surgery” nor thrash around in a mud pit or chuck apples at anybody. Madero performed hands-on "magnetic" healing, hypnotism, which he apparently learned from French books, and homeopathy, a German doctor’s innovation of treating illnesses with remedies of “like with like,” tiny white sugar pills infused with extremely  diluted substances. But Madero's true calling, as he understood it, was to heal the Mexican body politic.

When Madero finished with his studies in France and boarded his ship to Mexico, neither Fidencio nor Pachita had yet been born. Teresa Urrea, the “Santa de Cabora,” heroine to the Tomochitecos, had just fled to Nogales, Arizona. Madero’s fellow mystics would prove to be a more educated, more literary-minded type: among them, Porfirio Díaz’s own Secretary of Foreign Relations, Ignacio Mariscal.

And after Madero, a small but adventurous portion of Mexico's intellectual, political, and scientific elite was dedicated to communicating with disembodied consciousnesses. I send interested readers to Una ventana al mundo invisible (A Window to the Invisible World), a now very rare book published in 1960 which contains the detailed records of dozens of séances held from 1940-1952 and lists of their participants--among them, both in life and in spirit, Plutarco Elías Calles-- for the Instituto Mexicano de Investigaciones Síquicas (Mexican Institute of Psychic Research). 

Onward now to Madero’s metaphysical odyssey. As you know, it is going to end in a slick of blood.

Copyright C.M. Mayo all rights reserved.

>Visit the book's webpage, with more excerpts, Q & A, and resources for researchers.

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Francisco I. Madero's Commentary on the Baghavad-Gita

The Secret Life of a Secret Book: 

The Barcelona Edition of Francisco I. Madero's Manual espírita

William Curry Holden's Teresita, 

the Biography of Teresa de Urrea, la Santa de Cabora