Florita Almada’s trance and prophecies

Florita Almada’s trances and prophecies give the killings of women in Santa Teresa a voice that official accounts repeatedly fail to provide. Her visions move from an unnamed northern city to a public declaration of Santa Teresa itself; her warnings accuse the police of inaction and insist that the governor must be informed. The episodes are neither presented simply as spectacle nor treated as a reliable investigative method: the novel shows their theatrical setting, Florita’s own apprehension as a trance takes hold, and the bodily cost of a later attempt to reach a victim’s spirit.

Television and the first public warning

Florita’s first major televised vision unfolds on Reinaldo’s entertainment program, where she has just listened to a ventriloquist describe his work and has encouraged him to seek help from an acupuncturist familiar with craniopuncture. Reinaldo, meanwhile, signals that she should disregard the ventriloquist, whom he considers unwell. Florita’s attention to him and her readiness to respond compassionately establish a contrast with the show’s light, performative atmosphere before her own appearance becomes a public crisis.

When Florita begins to describe what she has seen, she speaks of dead women and girls, a desert oasis, and a city in the north where girls are killed. She realizes that a trance is coming on and fears that it may become violent; she is also conscious that this is her first time on television. Reinaldo asks whether she feels well and offers water, while she tries to keep her eyes open because closing them is when she sees what the possessing spirit sees. Her effort to remain composed makes the transition into trance visible as a struggle, not a seamless performance.

The vision then supplies the name she has been trying to identify: Santa Teresa. Florita declares that women are being killed there and cries that they are killing her daughters. In a deeper voice, she accuses the police of doing nothing and asks what they are watching. She calls on the state governor, Jose Andres Briceno, to learn what is being done to the women and girls, and says the silence must be broken. Her account also includes a fragment about some victims being driven away in black cars, while others are killed elsewhere; it does not identify a perpetrator or resolve the crimes.

The broadcast turns abruptly from speech to physical disruption. Florita leaps from her chair and falls to the floor, captured by the studio cameras. When Reinaldo and the ventriloquist try to help her, she angrily tells them not to touch her and insists that they have failed to understand what she said. She then gets up, asks Reinaldo what happened, and apologizes to the camera. The return to ordinary awareness does not undo the warning: television has carried the name of the city and the accusation of official inaction to an audience that witnessed the episode.

Visions, dreams, and the language of witness

Florita later describes her visions outside the immediate drama of a trance. In a further television appearance, she says that dreams show her the crimes as if a television set had shattered, leaving horrible scenes and seemingly endless tears in fragments around her bedroom. After these visions she cannot sleep; medication for her nerves does not help, and she stays awake until dawn trying to read or occupy herself. The account connects the public warning to a recurring private experience, while showing that the visions bring distress rather than comfort.

She identifies the victims not as an abstract category but as women, girls, mothers, and workers who are found dead in neighborhoods and on the outskirts of Santa Teresa. She repeats the city’s name, making explicit what her earlier trance had struggled to bring into speech. Her insistence that the crimes are happening in her home state of Sonora frames this testimony as a personal and civic obligation, while her claim that her supposed miracles arise from years of reading and working with plants complicates any simple distinction between learned knowledge and supernatural authority.

Recurrence and physical cost

In October, Florita returns to Reinaldo’s program and says that the people she consults—sometimes described as friends, sometimes as protectors—have told her that the crimes will continue. They have also warned her to be careful because some people wish her harm. She responds that, as an old woman, she is not worried. The warning extends the prophecies’ scope: they do not promise that the killings will stop, and they suggest danger to the person who speaks about them.

Florita tries to communicate with the spirit of one of the victims, but she cannot establish contact and faints. Reinaldo initially thinks the collapse is staged and tries to revive her by patting her cheeks and giving her water. The narration clarifies that this is a real blackout, not a performance, and that she ends up in the hospital. The failed attempt to reach a dead woman therefore has a concrete consequence for Florita herself, and it exposes the risk of treating her appearances as entertainment even when they take place on an entertainment program.

Narrative significance

The prophecies make a repeated gap in the novel newly audible: the women are being killed, but their deaths do not reliably produce public recognition, accountability, or even secure identification. Elsewhere, bodies are discovered in lots, fields, or near industrial areas; some victims remain unnamed, and police statements can evade responsibility. Against that landscape of incomplete records, Florita’s televised insistence on the city’s name and on police inaction becomes a form of witness. It is not a substitute for evidence or an answer to the murders; its force lies in refusing the silence that surrounds them.

The contrast between the stage and the subject sharpens that role. A program designed to entertain viewers becomes the venue for a warning that its host tries to manage and that the cameras record without making it less disturbing. Florita’s trance gives the warning a dramatic public form, but her later account of sleeplessness and her hospitalization return attention to its personal cost. Across the appearances, prophecy is both a contested performance and an urgent act of naming: Santa Teresa’s violence is placed before viewers, and the demand that someone listen remains unanswered.