In the autumn of 1876, while attending the nation's Centennial celebration, Miss Harriet M. Barker contracted a case of typhoid fever that left her crippled. While she managed to “get about” on crutches for several years, Barker's health “was gradually failing.” By the spring of 1881, she was “completely prostrated.” For the next four years, Barker remained a “helpless invalid” whose case “seemed to baffle even the best medical skill.” Although she tried various treatments, “all remedies were of but little avail,” and her physicians eventually deemed her incurable, predicting that she had only a few months to live, at most. “During all these years of suffering,” Barker later recounted, “I prayed so earnestly for patience and resignation to God's will, and for the most part rested quietly, and, as I believed, submissively, under what I felt was His needed teaching of me.” But as “the weary years dragged on,” Barker recalled, “I began to think of the subject of Divine Healing.” At first, she reported, the possibility of healing by faith “seemed a great way off—something for only a chosen few.” Although she became “more convinced of the reality of this belief” through discussions with friends who were “deeply interested” in the possibility of faith cure, Barker confessed that she “was still much in the dark about the matter” and could not “see it clearly enough to grasp it for myself.”

On Monday, December 15, 1902, the Los Angeles Times proclaimed the feted arrival of the famed “Mystic Santa Teresa.” The paper regaled its readers with the circus like events that surrounded her arrival to the burgeoning West Coast metropolis: “Santa Teresa, the famous Mexican girl from the land of the Yaqui, in Sonora, who is implicitly believed in by the majority of Mexicans of the Southwest as a healer, who exercises supernatural powers, has settled in Los Angeles permanently, her followers say, and is daily besieged by a pitiful throng of Mexican ‘enfermos.’” According to the Times, wagonloads of hopeful “invalids” made the pilgrimage to Teresa's cottage at the corner of Brooklyn and State in the “Sonoratown” area of East LA. Noting the “Stream of Mexicans Flowing to Her Cottage,” it listed the diverse range of desperate immigrants seeking her healing touch: “The halt, the blind, the inwardly diseased, paralytics, almost helpless and others with bodies ravaged by consumption, are helped to her doors each day by friends and relatives; and none go there without the belief that by the laying on of her magic hands they will be cured.” The reporter attributed all the excitement to the inexorable pull exerted by this “magnetic young woman from the South.” He blithely summarized, “Santa Teresa … has been the subject of many fantastic stories, based more or less on fact. In some ways her influence is really remarkable.”

The centennial of the Azusa Street revivals of 1906 provides us with convenient poles for charting shifts in the landscape of Christian spiritual healing practices during the past century. Alongside unprecedented achievements in medical science, nearly 80 percent of Americans report believing that God supernaturally heals people in answer to prayer. Individuals who need healing, even after trying the best medical cures, readily transgress ecclesiastical, physical, and social boundaries in their quest for health and wholeness. The promise of a tangible experience of divine power, moreover, presents an attractive alternative to seekers disillusioned with what they perceive as the callous materialism of medical science and the religious legalism of traditional Christian churches. This essay calls for new narratives of sacred space that map the ways that pentecostal and charismatic healing practices have proliferated, diversified, and sacralized a growing number and variety of physical, social, and linguistic spaces in the past hundred years. At the turn of the twentieth century, modernist epistemological assumptions that privileged reason over experience encouraged fine intellectual distinctions between the sacred and the secular. In esteeming bodily experience as more trustworthy than disembodied doctrine and in resisting linguistic binaries as culturally constructed, postmodern epistemologies have multiplied the number and range of places available to be endowed with sacred meanings. I argue that boundaries between the sacred and the secular are dissolving at the same time that new boundaries are being established, privileging particular places and defining a new relationship among the United States, the Americas, and the world.