Yaqui Indigeneity : Epistemology, Diaspora, and the Construction of Yoeme Identity [1 ed.] 9780816538348, 9780816535880

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YAQUI INDIGENEIT Y

ARIEL Z ATARAIN T UM B AGA

YAQUI INDIGENEITY

Epistemology, Diaspora, and the Construction of Yoeme Identity

The University of Arizona Press www.uapress.arizona.edu

© 2018 by The Arizona Board of Regents All rights reserved. Published 2018

ISBN-­13: 978-­0-­8165-­3588-0 (cloth) Cover design by Leigh McDonald Publication of this book is made possible in part by the proceeds of a permanent endowment created

with the assistance of a Challenge Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, a federal agency.

Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data are available at the Library of Congress. Printed in the United States of America

♾ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments Introduction: Indigeneity, the Yaqui Nation, and the Yoeme People

vii 3

1.

The Mythification of Lo Yaqui 14

2.

The Warrior in Yoeme Cultural History

3.

Tambor y Sierra: In Search of an Indigenous Revolution in Mexican Literature

4.

61

The Yoemem and the Archive: Indigenismo, Motherhood, and Indigeneity

5.

29

95

Chicana/o-­Yaqui Borderlands and Indigeneity in Alfredo Véa Jr.’s La Maravilla

131

Conclusion: The Native “Word” and Changing Indigeneities

170

Notes Works Cited Index

179 195 217

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

T

is the culmination of many years of research, discovery, and late nights, and its existence would be impossible without the support of my family, especially my wife, Amy, whose patience and understanding allowed me the luxury of indulging in such a lengthy academic venture. To Amy, Mía, Noah, and Julian, I again give my deepest thanks. It is important that nontraditional academics—­those who are immigrants, mothers and fathers, or veterans—­have a mentor who believes in their potential. For me, that person is Héctor Calderón, a wonderful person who has consistently encouraged and believed in my work even during moments of self-­doubt. No one could ask for a better teacher. I am also grateful for the friendship of my UCLA cohort, best represented by Sandra Ruiz, Carolyn “Caro” González, and Argelia Andrade, who fully understand the ups and downs of being a PhD. Additionally, Alma Rosa Álvarez and John Almaguer, as well as Ed Battistella, provided indispensable moral support in at times adverse conditions. Many thanks to the erudition of Diana Maltz and the group of scholars she encourages and inspires every year (Sean McEnroe, Brook Colley, Kylan de Vries, Wesley Leonard, Megan Farnsworth, Devora Shapiro, and others). Finally, thank you to María Gonzala Zatarain, who had the fortitude to carry my brother and me from my birthplace in Navojoa, Sonora, to Mexicali, Baja California Norte, and finally to the hot agricultural fields of the Imperial Valley; sin ti, tampoco habría sido posible este libro. HIS BOOK

YAQUI INDIGENEIT Y

INTRODUCTION Indigeneity, the Yaqui Nation, and the Yoeme People

O

11, 2014, Yaqui activist Mario Luna was apprehended by police, along with Fernando Jiménez Gutiérrez twelve days later, in what many believe to be retaliation for their opposition to Governor Guillermo Padrés’s unlawful procurement of Río Yaqui waters. After the September 26, 2014, disappearance of forty-­three students from the Ayotzinapa teachers’ college in Guerrero, a school also known for its activism, the EZLN connected this incident to the earlier arrest of the Yaqui men and to crimes against indigenous and rural Mexicans in general. Addressing the family members of the disappeared students, Subcomandante Moisés expressed that their “words” of indignation and resistance would be valued by the EZLN and other indigenous Mexicans: N SEPTEMBER

Busquen a los pueblos originarios que, desde antes de que el tiempo fuera tiempo,

atesoran la sabiduría para resistir y que no hay quien sepa más del dolor y la rabia. Busquen al Yaqui y en ustedes se encontrará. Busquen al Nahua y verán que su

palabra es acogida. . . . Busquen a quienes levantaron estas tierras y con su sangre

parieron esta Nación desde antes de que “México” la llamaran, y sabrán que abajo la palabra es puente que cruza sin temor. (qtd. in Gómez 54)

4 Introduction

(Look to the Original People, who, before time was time, have treasured the

wisdom to resist and than whom no one knows more about pain and anger. Look

to the Yaqui and you will find him in yourselves. Look to the Nahua and you will see that your word is embraced. . . . Look to those who raised these lands and who

gave birth to this Nation with their blood since before it was called “Mexico,” and you will know that below the word is a bridge crossed without fear.)

The EZLN appeal to pan-­indigenous and pan-­racial indignation elevates aboriginal struggle—­and specifically names Yaqui struggle—­as the other side of the ongoing cycle of violence against indigenous and rural communities by government institutions. Many Mexicans would no doubt be surprised to know that in the United States they could be considered Native Americans through racial quantification alone. It might also surprise them that Mexican American activists, artists, and academics strategically reclaimed pre-­Columbian Native ancestry in the 1960s and 1970s to bolster a cultural nationalist political mobilization. And yet, Mexicans and Mexican Americans continuously perform a cultural and racial distancing from their indigenous identity in quotidian social practices. In Mexico, children study the Aztec Empire but cannot appreciate the history of living Native contemporaries in their own regions. Adults enforce a mestizo-­indio divide through acts of racism in order to maintain a sense of racial superiority. And today, indigenous communities live in disproportionate poverty, while indigenous women and children experience exploitation working for multinational corporations and abuse at the hands of corrupt government employees. In short, indigenous people are dehumanized. Subcomandante Moisés’s references to the “word” of the Ayotzinapa students’ surviving families—­some of whom are indigenous—­also point to the epistemic violence that has occasioned their historical silencing. In mainstream society, indigenous voices are inaudible. Aside from limited economic interactions in the form of labor, services, or commerce, or cultural interactions in the form of local cultural displays or tourism, Native people in Mexico tend to be represented more than they are encountered; that is to say, they are imagined through nonindigenous ways of thinking that fail to recognize their racial, cultural, and political agency. Despite the presence of indigenous Mexicans in large and small cities, mestizo Mexicans’ interactions with them are brief and often mediated through economic needs or tourism, if not violence. Literary representations of Yoeme people and culture are a case in point.

Introduction 5

The Yaquis—­or Yoemem, as community members refer to themselves—­ manifest Yaqui indigeneity in a variety of mediums.1 Participating in religious fiestas, speaking the Yoeme language, listening to etehoi (storytelling), identifying with the eight traditional pueblos, and wearing intricately flowered dresses are but some of these. The Yaqui nation exists in the Mexican imaginary as well. With a combination of anxiety and admiration based on warrior and traditional dance identities, local Sonorans feel both regional pride and racial-­ethnic disdain for Yaquis. They are, Mexicans recall, Indian warriors of legend. The Yaquis resisted the Spanish Conquest, and were in fact never defeated. José María Leyva Cajeme, like early nineteenth-­century insurgent Juan Banderas, led the Yaqui-­Mayo alliance from 1875 to 1886 and established an autonomous indigenous state in the homeland Hiakim that was unacceptable to the Porfirian regime. Despite military campaigns, massacres—­like those of Bacum in 1868 and Mazocoba in 1900—­and the deportation of entire families into slavery in Yucatán, the Yaquis proved their resilience time and again. The feats of Yaqui battalions in the Mexican Revolution, commanded by none other than Álvaro Obregón, solidified their warrior identity to Mexicans who had little interest in the Yoeme agrarian politics for which they fought. This identity continued even in the early Cárdenas era: Adrian A. Bantjes reveals that “in 1935 there was still some danger that the Yaqui would participate in an uprising” (40). Mexicans dualistically admire and misunderstand traditional Yaqui dances. In Waehma (Easter-­Lenten) festivities, chapayekas (or fariseos) perform antics, matachines dance for the Virgin Mary, and pascolas and deer dancers wow Yaqui and yori (nonindigenous) alike. Witnesses to a tradition of aboriginal dance and religious symbolism, mestizo Mexican spectators can revel in their role as tourists of indigenous culture while maintaining an anthropological distance afforded by Westernized Mexican culture and identity. Yoeme political and cultural agency, history, and race are represented in dominant culture through an indigeneity severed from a deeper notion of their material and spiritual realities. In colonial documents, historical records, and politically motivated documentation—­Jesuit ethnographies, military reports, and Ramón Corral’s “Biografía de José María Leyva Cajeme,” for example—­much is made of Yaqui warrior abilities, while their Native culture is in many cases belittled through Eurocentric ideologies. It should not be surprising, then, that government-­sponsored anthropological studies demonstrate great interest in deer dancers and pascolas, as well as in oral traditions, while simultaneously adhering to a belief in the inevitable and

6 Introduction

necessary assimilation of semi-­autonomous Native communities into the Mexican mainstream, a key tenet of post-­Revolutionary Indigenista anthropology. The resulting anthropological archive, which at times corroborates Mexican colonialist ventures, would later provide an indispensable source of creative inspiration for Chicana/o writers of Yaqui descent. The Yaqui nation’s renowned military defense of its homeland, while factual, obscures the complicated history of colonial resettlement and negotiation with the Spanish imperial government, and the Yaqui relationship with nineteenth-­ century post-­Independence Mexicans and their governments. It silences the fact that Yoeme leaders, contrary to popular mythology, were savvy politicians well versed in the language and procedure of the Spanish Empire. By the same token, the popular and institutional exoticization of Yoeme dance traditions through a discourse of semi-­civilized indigenous religious practices masks the intricacies of the Yoeme communities’ complex cosmological belief system and their rootedness to their traditional territory. As a result, few recognize Yoeme culture as a transcultural religion of Native Aniam and Roman Catholic origins. Some Yaquis born in the traditional pueblos stay and live in the communities’ cultural world, become embroiled in their politics, and deal with the state of poverty in which their people exist; unable to afford to farm their lands, they rent them for a pittance to yori (nonindigenous) companies with the means to harvest them. Sonoran Yaquis often face prejudices based on stereotypes of military ferocity and Indian backwardness. Others choose to leave the Río Yaqui, even trying their luck in the United States, and in so doing continue the history of diaspora that has beleaguered the Yaquis for over a century. Whether they join the Yaqui communities in Arizona or turn into Mexican immigrants, they are part of a transborder community with roots in the northern Mexican and southern Arizona borderlands. This book studies the representation of the Yoeme nation and its symbols in Mexican and Chicana/o literature through the genres and discourses that have partaken in the creation of Yaqui indigeneity. In interpreting Yoeme people and symbols, twentieth-­and twenty-­first-­century Mexican and Chicana/o writers have referenced an archive that reaches as far back in history as the missionary writings of the Jesuit Andrés Pérez de Ribas, nineteenth-­century ideologues the likes of Francisco Bulnes, and the Mexican Revolution. Colonial records offer the Yaqui nation as an element of a northern Native ambience menacing to settlers and a hindrance to evangelical efforts until 1617, when the Yaquis themselves accepted Jesuit missionaries into their fold. During the

Introduction 7

nineteenth century, Mexican politicians interpreted Yoeme efforts to remain on their traditional territory (known as Hiakim) as counter to national progress and representative of the Latin American barbarism portrayed by Domingo Faustino Sarmiento in Facundo o Civilización y barbarie (1845). Paradoxically, the pre-­Revolutionary repression by the Porfirian regime would bring the battered Yoeme nation to a position central to the dissident intellectual Francisco I. Madero’s argument for national revolt against the tyrannical Porfirio Díaz dictatorship. Novelists of the Mexican Revolution found ways to include the Yaqui battalions in their works, sometimes as exemplary northern troops, sometimes as Indian barbarians. And post-­Revolutionary Indigenismo would rediscover Yoeme dance as an aesthetically valuable tradition, while, ironically, disparaging Yoeme identity as a sociocultural barrier to national peoplehood (or mexicanidad). Consequently, Indigenista literature’s depiction of Yoeme psychology and dance reflects the hope of incorporating them into wider Mexican society. Belief in the Yaqui warrior myth and exotic deer dancers would cross the borderlands and into Chicana/o literature. Accordingly, while Mexican American representations demonstrate authors’ identification with Native ancestry, they also reproduce simplified Mexican myths of warrior prowess and exotic dance. Lacking access to Yoeme forms of self-­knowledge, Mexican and Chicana/o writers have found inspiration in the archive of nonindigenous discourses that have historically informed external notions of Yaqui indigeneity, and have thereby participated in the silencing of the Yoeme “word.” But Yaqui diaspora produced a Native community caught up in an experience of U.S. migration, labor, racialization, and identity seeking: a Mexican American experience. Like so many migrants, the Yoeme who came to the United States ran the risk of becoming “just another Mexican” in a society that disdained non-­ European people of color. As part of the process of reclaiming their indigenous heritage, the sons and daughters of the Yaqui diaspora have striven to capture the experience in literature. Consequently, the works of Miguel Méndez, Alma Luz Villanueva, Luis Valdez, Alfredo Véa Jr., and Michael Nava have established a new literary tradition that examines the material and cultural realities of transborder indigenous people. Chicana/o-­Yaqui literature challenges misconceptions about what it means to be Yoeme. These authors revise history from the perspective of indigenous participants in Mexican-­Chicana/o history, a history in many ways centered in the telos of Mexican mestizos. Indigenous epistemologies—­oral history, dance ritual, and cosmology—­are the tools with which they reconstruct the literary representation of the Yoeme nation. The

8 Introduction

works of these authors continue to impact Chicana/o literature in general, as is evident in the works of Montserrat Fontes and Luis Alberto Urrea. This study also concerns itself with the question of indigeneity—­that is, indigenous identity—­and with Yaqui indigeneity in particular. Indigeneity proves to be a highly problematic term due to its semantic fluidity and vagueness. The United Nations’ Working Group on Indigenous Populations (WGIP)—­an organization that advocates for an array of indigenous rights on a global scale—­defines indigenous identity as including: (a) priority in time with respect to occupying and using the resources of a particular territory; (b) the voluntary perpetuation of cultural distinctiveness (which

may include language, social organization, religious and spiritual values, modes of production, laws, and institutions); (c) self-­identification, as well as recognition

by other groups or by state authorities as a distinct collectivity; and (d) an experi-

ence of subjugation, marginalization, dispossession, exclusion, or discrimination, whether or not these conditions persist. (qtd. in Wilson and Stewart 14)

Certainly, the Yoeme communities meet the WGIP’s potential requirements. But the difficulty of defining indigeneity is evident, and Pamela Wilson and Michelle Stewart warn that such guidelines “do not and cannot constitute an inclusive or comprehensive definition.” After all, one might attribute some, if not all, of the WGIP’s characteristics to a number of originally colonial societies. Could we not inadvertently give credit to a xenophobic U.S. nativism that opposes immigration and emphasizes assimilation into predominantly Anglo-­American culture? The fact that indigeneity is frequently co-­opted by the nonindigenous—­however benignly or malevolently—­calls attention to its malleability. The Latin American and Latina/o mestizo appropriation of indigenous identity is instructive. George Hartley, like other critics included in this book, assesses the problematic use of indigeneity in identity politics: The category of indigeneity begins with but works quite differently from that

of mestizaje, primarily because the emphasis on indigeneity (the “Indian” half

of mestizo identity—­the notion of “half ” itself often serving to erase the third

African “half ” of the equation) works explicitly as an anti-­colonial strategy in the face of continuing Anglo-­American racism towards and exploitation of peoples of Hispanic descent—­where “anti-­colonial” signals an external strategy of

colonized versus colonizer while “decolonial” would refer to internal challenges

Introduction 9

within a given identity formation (such as an injunction among Chicanos/as to learn Nahuatl). (182)

Indigeneity may be appropriated to reinforce hegemonic identities, as evident in nationalist claims to a glorious indigenous past; counterhegemonic identities, visible in the Chicano Movement’s claim to a “bronze” identity; and ambiguous blends of both, as Hartley claims of Caribbean racial identities (182–­83). Indigenismo, or institutional appropriation of the culture and history of Native people, produces diverse indigeneities. This will be evident in the case of Yaqui indigeneities, which are subject to state, artistic, or social movements, and even individual interpretation.2 The terms Yaqui indigeneity and Yoeme indigeneity, then, refer not only to the identity with which Yoeme people themselves identify, but also to the many-­ layered versions of Yaqui-­ness (or lo yaqui) through which Spaniards, Mexicans, and Mexican Americans have imagined Yoeme history, culture, and community symbols. For example, the accepted interchangeability of the word Yoeme, with which the community identifies itself, and the term Yaqui, originally imposed by colonial authorities and in use in popular, academic, and political circles as well as in the Yoeme community itself, reflects the different and indeed differing manners in which the community is conceptualized by others and conceptualizes itself. The question of how indigeneities are produced, and in this case Yaqui indigeneity, implies an examination of the epistemologies used to produce them. So, in addition to asking, what do we know about lo yaqui? we must also ask, how do we know lo yaqui? As such, this study examines the production of some of the Yaqui identities found in Yoeme origin stories, as well as those produced by Spanish colonial missionaries, Mexican politicians, anthropologists, activists, and of course Mexican and Chicana/o writers of fiction. This book should be read in the context of other literary studies dealing with Mexican and Chicana/o literature and with indigenous people in literature. I follow the work of Roberto González Echevarría’s Myth and Archive: A Theory of Latin American Narrative (1998) and its reading of internal Native Otherness in literary production. I am also indebted to the groundwork laid by Sylvia Bigas Torres in La narrativa indigenista mexicana del siglo XX (1990), which covers a massive collection of Indigenista literature. My study also looks to Indigeneity in the Mexican Cultural Imagination: Thresholds of Belonging (2009) by Analisa Taylor, who analyzes the question of gendered indigeneities in Mexican literature and highlights the historical and institutional contexts of specific works.

10 Introduction

Max Parra’s Writing Pancho Villa’s Revolution: Rebels in the Literary Imagination (2005) also provided me with some ways to examine the Mexican intellectual elites’ portrayal of rural and indigenous subalterns. Like Parra, I chose to limit my work to one subject, the representation of the Yoeme nation. David Delgado Shorter’s We Will Dance Our Truth: Yaqui History in Yoeme Performances (2009), a study on storytelling, dance, and Aniam cosmology as Yoeme epistemology, helped affirm many of my nontraditional analyses of Yoeme characterizations in Mexican literature. In the field of Chicana/o literature, Héctor Calderón’s Narratives of Greater Mexico: Essays on Chicano Literary History, Genre, and Borders (2004) served as an impetus to study the ways in which Mexican American, or Chicana/o, writers are expanding the meaning of Mexicanness in the United States. In his essays on the diverse racial, gender, class, cultural, and geographic identities of seven Chicana/o authors, Calderón illuminates this point regarding the relationship between identity and place: In the past century, studies by U.S. Mexicanista scholars have stressed “lo mexicano” and “mexicanidad,” relying essentially on cultural identities from south of

the border and, indeed, defined and promoted by intellectuals from the center, Mexico City. In the year 2003, I think that we can no longer ignore the many manifestations of Mexican culture both within and outside the political borders of the Mexican nation-­state. (xiv)

I see my work on Chicana/o-­Yaqui authors—­Miguel Méndez, Alma Luz Villa­ nueva, Luis Valdez, Alfredo Véa Jr., and Michael Nava—­as a step in that direction. These writers’ redefinition of Mexican and Mexican American identities on their own cultural and historical terms displaces traditional ideas and symbols of Mexicanness and Chicana/o identity into a matrix of indigenous history and knowledge. Their aesthetic reclamation of indigenous heritage posits Mexican and Mexican American identities and histories in the northern Mexican and southern U.S. borderlands. And their works transfer Chicana/o identity from a pre-­Columbian model to the cultural world of a living, transborder Yoeme nation. “The Mythification of Lo Yaqui” provides evidence for the acquisition of Yoeme identity through nonindigenous regional and national discourses. In a regional context, many Sonoran mestizos look upon Yaqui-­ness with a mix of emotions ranging from local cultural (and even racial) pride, especially in the case of Yoeme dance arts, to a sense of social stigma based on supposed

Introduction 11

indigenous insularity and retrograde lifestyles. At a national level, the Yoemem represent a definitive facet of the Mexican Revolutionary army, as well as the country’s tragic history of betraying its aboriginal people. Focusing on Ciudad Obregón’s monument to Yoeme insurgent Juan Maldonado Tetabiate and the deer dance performance by the Ballet Folklórico de México de Amalia Hernández in Mexico City, I explain the process of nonindigenous appropriation of Yoeme cultural symbols and history, recontextualized through Sonoran and national institutions and convenient discourses of patriotism and exotic indigenous identity. The result is the multiple Yaqui identities that silence the contemporary and historical realities of the community’s material and cultural existence. “The Warrior in Yoeme Cultural History” recognizes the inception of a Yaqui warrior myth in the colonial chronicle of Andrés Pérez de Ribas, a myth that would find itself firmly in place in the nineteenth-­century Mexican imaginary. While recognizing Yoeme military history, this chapter provides a Yoeme-­centered interpretation of the Yaqui warrior based in Yoeme origin stories. This entails a strategic transfer of Yaqui indigeneity to place-­based discourses of cultural belonging. Key to this chapter is an epistemic shift toward Yoeme forms of knowledge through which the people historically and culturally know themselves. These forms of knowledge—­cosmology, storytelling, dance, and ceremonies—­while delegitimized in nonindigenous academic and political discourses, reveal a Native perspective on historical events and a politics of territorial preeminence. Also important to this chapter is the concept of arraigamiento (rooting), which I employ to designate the profound cultural-­historical connection that Yoeme cosmology establishes between contemporary communities, the traditional Río Yaqui territory, and the ancestors residing therein. The cosmological establishment of arraigamiento is, as we shall see, key to the formation of territorial defense as a religious institution. This research serves as a reference point for the literary analysis presented in the ensuing sections. “Tambor y Sierra: In Search of an Indigenous Revolution in Mexican Literature” investigates evidence of a Native Revolution in the literature of the Mexican Revolution. Since depictions of the Yoemem are often limited to allusions to Yaqui battalions, war drums, and the Sierra del Bacatete, the goal is to provide a Native-­centered reading of examples of the Novel of the Mexican Revolution by central authors—­Rafael F. Muñoz, Francisco Rojas González, Gregorio López y Fuentes, Martín Luis Guzmán, and Carlos Fuentes—­to reveal the existence of a Yaqui Revolution. To achieve this goal, I recognize the impact on the Yoeme people of the Porfirian guerras de exterminio (wars of

12 Introduction

extermination), which included military massacres and state-­sanctioned deportations to Yucatán slave labor camps beginning in the late nineteenth century. I also employ the Yoeme history, origin stories, and dance ritual discussed in the previous section as analytical tools with which to examine indigeneity in the Novel of the Mexican Revolution. “The Yoemem and the Archive: Indigenismo, Motherhood, and Indigeneity” demonstrates Indigenista literature’s reliance on a colonial-­Mexican anthropological archive—­a compendium of political, historical, and early twentieth-­century ethnographic texts about the Yaquis—­to characterize specific depictions of the figure of the Yoeme mother as a conservative influence on Yaqui identity. Indigenista literature about the Yoemem grew out of post-­Revolutionary state Indigenismo, a political movement whose goal was to incorporate indigenous Mexicans into mainstream mestizo society, and it therefore reflects the ideological assumptions espoused by anthropologists regarding the cultural and social “redemption” of aboriginal peoples. While this chapter focuses on Francisco Rojas González’s depiction of pascolas and deer dancing as a secularized art in “La triste historia del pascola Cenobio,” I also examine ethnographic studies’ attempts to explicate the Yoeme refusal to assimilate into mainstream Mexican society partly by focusing on the role of the Yoeme mother as an enemy of post-­Revolutionary national progress. A review of Yaqui ethnography demonstrates Rojas González’s willing elision of the history of violence and land grabbing by nonindigenous institutions in order to depict a simplified retrograde Yoeme social order marked by xenophobia. “Chicana/o-­Yaqui Borderlands and Indigeneity in Alfredo Véa Jr.’s La Maravilla” is an examination of work by Mexican American writers of Yoeme descent. Chicana/o-­Yaqui authors, a part of the Yoeme community’s U.S. diaspora, have undertaken an artistic reclamation of their indigenous heritage by recuperating Yoeme history and cosmology and confronting hegemonic discourses of lo yaqui. Partly inspired by family oral tradition, their works also demonstrate an artistic handling of a Yoeme-­based anthropological archive from which they reclaim cultural heritage. I include Miguel Méndez’s Peregrinos de Aztlán (1974), a fundamental novel in which Yaqui and Chicana/o-­Yaqui characters live out the material and political realities of the borderlands. And I offer Alfredo Véa Jr.’s La Maravilla (1993) as a move toward a Chicana/o-­Yaqui literature consistent with postcolonial indigenous perspectives. Véa’s novel uses Yoeme epistemologies—­cosmology, dance, and oral history—­to reappropriate the Yaqui indigeneities found in the works of Mexican and U.S. writers and scholars like W. C. Holden, Rojas González, and Carlos Castañeda, and redefines key aspects

Introduction 13

of Chicana/o identity (indigenismo chicano and Aztec symbols, mestizaje, and the borderlands). Literature published after La Maravilla, such as Villanueva’s “La Llorona / Weeping Woman” (1994) and Luis Valdez’s Mummified Deer (1999), demonstrates a contestation of colonial and Mexican views of decontextualized warrior and dance identities. Significantly, Michael Nava’s historical novel The City of Palaces (2014) reimagines a Mexican-­Chicana/o history inseparable from the history of the living indigenous Yaqui nation. Novels, short stories, and dramas that re-­member Mexican and Mexican American history and experiences from Yoeme cultural-­historical perspectives, these works represent an effort to recognize and minister to a long-­silenced Yoeme “word.” The aforementioned epistemic shift favors an intellectual move toward Yoeme culture—­that is, the beliefs and practices through which Yoeme communities know themselves. Understanding Yoeme forms of knowledge is a necessary step toward the successful recontextualization of Mexican and Chicana/o literary characterizations that have been disconnected from the real existences of their subjects: the Yoeme people, culture, and history. It is also crucial to recognizing the Yoemem as a living people who presently reside between southern Arizona and northern Sonora, and not just as the imagined remnants of colonial Mexico or a part of the U.S. Old West. As such, this book at times leaps from the present to the past, and works to reconnect historical representations with contemporary beliefs about lo yaqui in the Mexican and Chicana/o imaginaries. Each section reemphasizes the questions what do we know about lo yaqui? and, more importantly, how do we know lo yaqui? as a guide to reading and understanding the array of arguments contained within.

1 THE MYTHIFICATION OF LO YAQUI

A

three-­month truce with state authorities, El Imparcial reported on July 16, 2014, the Yaqui community resumed its blockade of the strip of Federal Highway 15 running through the traditional pueblo of Vícam in protest of Governor Guillermo Padrés’s acquisition of their water (“Regresa bloqueo”). The blockade, which had spanned approximately ten months from late May 2013 to early March 2014, campaigned against illegal channeling of the Río Yaqui and the El Novillo reservoir through the Libertad aqueduct to supply water to Hermosillo and surrounding cities. After meetings with regional, state, and federal officials, a Supreme Court order in their favor, and the actions of a state governor determined to ignore legal limitations to state access to Yaqui waters, the indigenous nation was again at the center of a regional political storm that captured the attention of national newspapers and televised news programs. In most reports, the Yaquis—­who have identified their efforts as a “Movimiento Ciudadano”—­were characterized as fiery indigenous victims of a corrupt state government, thus reflecting both a post-­EZLN sensibility to the woes of Native citizenry and the Mexican people’s prevalent political cynicism. Despite other urgent Yaqui community problems—­poverty, dismal infrastructure, and an abusive federal loan system—­Mexican journalists chose to report on their more dramatic display of resistance to a corrupt state authority. Just as Yoeme political struggles for land resources are not new, neither F TER A

THE MYTHIFICATION OF LO YAQUI 15

is Mexican interest in the more conflictual and sensational aspects of those struggles. The Yaqui capacity to create an impressive and seemingly united front when defending their territorial rights has been a subject of official reports since 1533, when a Spanish expedition failed to defeat the indigenous nation in their first contact. This and other colonial-­era reports would precede nineteenth-­ and twentieth-­century documents—­religious, state, and academic—­which have served as the primary filter through which Mexicans have come to imagine the Yoemem. Institutional documentation has helped to undermine the Yoeme nation’s capacity to control its representation beyond its cultural borders, while at the same time bolstering exterior regional and national discourses of Yaqui-­ ness. A written record focusing on sensational and military acts of defiance has influenced nonindigenous Mexican and Chicana/o writers’ decisions about which aspects of Yoeme reality were deemed worth learning and narrating. The questions that beg answering here are: How do nonindigenous Mexicans imagine the Yoeme people? and, What are the factors that have led to what nonindigenous Mexicans and Mexican Americans know about the Yoemem? 1 In Mexico, Yaquis are mostly depicted in two ways: as dancers and as warriors. As dancers, the image most often conjured and exploited is that of the deer dancer. But as warriors, the referent is usually their history of resistance to colonization by Spanish and nineteenth-­century Mexican outsiders, or yoris. In literature, direct and indirect references are made to the belief that Yaquis are naturally warlike. My study sets out from the perspective that nonindigenous writers, who often find little value in the cultures they write about, tend to create questionable or deceptive representations of indigenous peoples. Authors reinter­pret or omit facets of Native culture and history that are key to community identity, thereby denying agency to indigenous self-­representation. As Analisa Taylor puts it, the literary characterization of Native people, and by extension the Yoeme people, “inhibits or detracts from indigenous self-­representation in both a political sense as well as in an aesthetic or symbolic sense” (“Ends” 76). Indeed, from a non-­Native perspective, Guillermo Bonfil Batalla has deduced, “they are seen as a blank page upon which each outside group has the right and the obligation to write its own particular message” (26). This process of appropriation also undergoes modification in accordance with changing political, historical, and academic discourses, as well as artistic movements. This tabula rasa approach based on a landscape of discursive transformation is duly noted by history professor Aarón Grageda Bustamante, who claims that “los yaquis han sido sujetos de las más diversas representaciones a lo largo de la historia”

16 CHAPTER 1

(the Yaquis have been subject to the most diverse representations throughout history) (29). Literary characterizations of Yoemem, while revealing much about Mexican and Chicana/o worldviews, say little about the indigenous nation’s heterogeneous views of its own culture, history, and identity. Rather, nonindigenous literature gives credence to depictions by authors who often subscribe to a nationalist, if not assimilationist, politics in conflict with Yoeme cultural and political self-­determination. What this means for the Yoemem is the production of identities exterior to their community, which occurs primarily through a process of reimagining Yaqui history and culture that is performed by nonindigenous intellectuals. This process is discernible in the monument to Juan Maldonado Tetabiate in Ciudad Obregón, which serves as an example of the regional and state manipulation of Yoeme politics and history. It is also present on a national scale in the Yaqui deer dance performance in Mexico City’s Palacio de Bellas Artes. Key to my analytical framework is the recognition of a nonindigenous epistemology that functions as the basis for the accepted notion of an inherent barbarous and bellicose Yaqui indigeneity; devoid of its cultural context, the Yoeme history of military and cultural struggle is converted into a Yaqui warrior myth. Yaqui indigeneity in Mexico, consequently, is the result of the appropriation of Yoeme history, culture, and community symbols by regional and national writers and institutions. But unlike the Chicana/o use of pre-­Columbian (primarily Aztec) culture and history, also based on an archive of nonindigenous documentation, the reinterpretation of Yoeme culture and history must be understood as the unauthorized cultural-­historical appropriation of a living people (Contreras 9). Because my primary interest in this chapter is to provide part of the analytical foundation for understanding Mexican and Chicana/o literature, I examine Mexican co-­optation of Yaqui history and aesthetics as part of a wider trend that underlies a set of hegemonic perspectives regarding lo yaqui.

“YAQUI” IN THE MEXICAN IMAGINARY The regional (cajemense), state (sonorense, or Sonoran), and national acquisition of Yoeme heroes, the deer dancer, and even the term Yaqui by cultural, economic, and governmental institutions reflects a Mexican way of knowing lo yaqui that emphasizes warrior history and dance culture. On a national level, deer dancers grace the stage of the capital’s luxurious Palacio de Bellas Artes, while in the Metrobús stop named “Sonora,” the state is represented by a simple graphic

THE MYTHIFICATION OF LO YAQUI 17

of a deer’s head. Locally, at one entrance to Ciudad Obregón, one finds a giant metallic stencil silhouette of a deer dancer. At the northern entrance to the city, a bronze statue of Tetabiate, the Yoeme guerrilla and hero, stands before a tricolor Mexican flag; Cajeme, his predecessor, is likewise honored at the south end of the city. In local grocery stores, Yaqui salsa picante, Yaqui milk, and Yaqui soy sauce copiously fill shelves; many of the sauce labels brandish varying images of the deer dancer. Regionally, the term Yaqui, the deer dancer, and Native heroes undergo semantic revisions. A quick examination of the uses of the word Yaqui reveals that the Yaqui warrior myth is not just a literary or political trope. Sonorenses are quick to boast Yaqui descent if they feel the indigenous “estereotipo bravío e indomable” (ferocious and untamed stereotype) will attract the admiration of non-­Sonorans; at the same time, it is considered offensive to refer to somebody as Yaqui Indian (Olavarría, Cruces 58). Subjective identification and disidentification with Yaqui indigeneity is justified by mestizo sonorenses who may consider themselves of Yaqui descent, just as many Mexicans and Mexican Americans might claim Aztec descent when convenient, the major difference being that the Yoeme people are today still very much part of Sonora’s daily existence (Cruces 58). María Eugenia Olavarría posits the aforementioned usages of Yoeme symbols as part of a “turístico-­comercial” (touristic-­commercial) discursive practice entitling local institutions to the right to exploit the indigenous nation as part of a local heroic past (Cruces 60). David Delgado Shorter, who has studied the co-­opted nature of the deer dancer in local, national, and international spaces, concludes that, like other highly visible indigenous symbols, the deer dancer has come to signify a Yaqui and Mayo indigeneity shared by sonorenses: “the image speaks to aboriginal ‘tradition’ in ways similar to the katchina image for Pueblo Indians or the totem pole stereotype of Pacific Northwest tribes” (23). However, while Yaqui indigeneity is casually claimed and rejected by the mestizo majority, the duplication of deer dancer symbols throughout the state results in “marking not Yoeme land exactly but a general Sonoran state symbol” (308). Mexican-­centered constructs of Yaqui indigeneity obscure aboriginal community conceptions of who the Yoeme people are behind a mantle of public and academic documentation that shapes popular opinion. As such, the deer dancer is another usurped indigeneity, a (re)formulation of indigenous identity serving the interests of agents exterior to the Yoeme community. Likewise, Mexican and Chicana/o literary productions reflect usages of Yaqui images, history, and culture in newly contextualized forms. Characterizations are included in classic Mexican novels like El águila y la serpiente (1928) and La

18 CHAPTER 1

muerte de Artemio Cruz (1962). Indigenista literature written by Francisco Rojas González and Armando Chávez Camacho also includes depictions of Yaqui dancers within varied ideological contexts. And well-­known Chicana/o writers like Miguel Méndez, Cherríe L. Moraga, and Luis Valdez have created works that employ the trope of Yoeme warriorhood, a trope that Chicana/o literature at times subordinates to the more widely accepted myth of the Chicana/o homeland Aztlán and pre-­Columbian motifs. Before dissecting the reasons many Mexicans in Mexico and the United States know the Yoeme nation in terms of dance and warrior identities, it is useful to recognize and understand the process by which Mexicans, Mexican Americans, and their institutions recontextualize indigenous identity for their own needs. The study of the early twentieth-­century guerrilla leader Juan Maldonado Tetabiate demonstrates some of the ways in which Yoeme history has been drafted into the service of regionalist and nationalistic discourses in many ways antithetical to the Yoeme community. An analysis of the deer dance performance in the Ballet Folklórico de México de Amalia Hernández, housed in the nation’s capital, reveals another type of Yoeme indigeneity subordinated to nationalist ideologies of archaic indigenous races and mestizo modernity. As the broader analysis illustrates the ways in which regional and national discourses—­be they cultural, commercial, or political—­have managed to dictate what nonindigenous people know about lo yaqui, it prepares the analytical framework with which to read the literary acquisition of the indigenous nation.

LO YAQUI AS MYTH In the Mexican national imaginary, indigenous communities’ identities undergo a process of semantic recontextualization based on Spanish colonial and Mexican models. Community symbols (the word Yaqui, the deer dancer, or a monument, for example) take on new meanings when posited within new contexts. This new “meaning,” infused with exterior discourses, reveals both its distancing from its previous history and its reinterpretation through new discourses: “it postulates a kind of knowledge, a past, a memory, a comparative order of facts, ideas, decision” (Barthes 117). Mexican intellectuals have written on this process of myth making. Octavio Paz studied a compendium of Mexican symbols—­the chingón, Mexican women, death, la Malinche, Benito Juárez, the “Indian,” and so on—­ in his El laberinto de la soledad (1950). Similarly, Rosario Castellanos has called

THE MYTHIFICATION OF LO YAQUI 19

attention to male interpretations of women and female writer-­intellectuals. In Mujer que sabe latín . . . (1973) she writes: “A lo largo de la historia (la historia es el archivo de los hechos cumplidos por el hombre, y todo lo que queda fuera de él pertenece al reino de la conjetura, de la fábula, de la leyenda, de la mentira) la mujer ha sido, más que una criatura humana, un mito” (“In the course of history [history is an archive of deeds undertaken by men, and all that remains outside it belongs to the realm of conjecture, fable, legend, or lie] more than a natural phenomenon, a component of society, or a human creature, woman has been myth”) (Castellanos, Mujer 9; translation by Ahern, “Woman” 236). Enrique Florescano notes how myths reinforce group identities, while he observes the important role that veracity plays in their acceptance. Myth, writes Florescano, does not produce community on the basis of whether or not it is factual, but instead on the basis of social recognition: “La verdad del mito no está en su contenido, sino en el hecho de ser una creencia aceptada por vastos sectores sociales. Es una creencia social compartida, no una verdad sujeta a verificación” (Myth’s truth does not reside in its content, but rather in the fact that it is an accepted belief among vast sectors of society. It is a shared social belief, not a truth subject to verification) (12). For the co-­optation of Native history and/or culture to successfully take hold, it must be hegemonic. In other words, it must be absorbed into a specific way of knowing that recontextualizes its meaning, and society must acknowledge it, if not as factual, then as truthful. This semantic distortion draws our attention to the potentially multiple interpretations of any particular indigeneity, interpretations which must be based on distinct traditions of knowledge: multiple indigeneities. However, a sudden return of the subject’s original meaning executes a dual effect: first, it recognizes the subject’s belonging to a prior system of knowledge; and second, it highlights the subject’s manipulation by exterior discourses. It is this notion of competing epistemic traditions that the following examinations of the monument to Te­tabiate and the performance of the deer dance in Mexico City uncover. At the northern entrance to Ciudad Obregón stands the bronze statue of a battle-­hardened and proud man, the barrel of his rifle in his hand, its butt resting on the ground. In his right hand he holds his sombrero, his chest is decorated with a canana (a belt of bullets), and his defiant gaze looks to the horizon. Behind, the Mexican tricolor waves patriotically in the wind. An inscription reads: Juan Maldonado “Tetabiate.” Tetabiate (Piedra Volteada). Fue el sucesor de

Cajeme. Mantuvo la lucha por estas tierras durante diez años y, en un intento de

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conciliación, firmó la Paz de Ortiz en 1897. Se levantó en armas otra vez en 1899 y

murió en 1901. Duerme el sueño eterno en el Cañón del Gallo, frente a Torim en la Sierra del Bacatete. El pueblo y el gobierno del municipio de Cajeme le recuerdan con admiración. Junio de 1985.

( Juan Maldonado “Tetabiate.” Tetabiate (Upturned Stone). He was the successor

to Cajeme. He sustained the struggle for these lands for ten years and, in an attempt at conciliation, signed the Peace of Ortiz in 1897. He rose up in arms again in 1899 and died in 1901. He sleeps the eternal dream in the Cañón del Gallo

facing Torim in the Sierra del Bacatete. The people and the municipal government of Cajeme remember him with admiration. June 1985.)

His weathered face and rustic uniform, rifle and typical canana, placed below the waving Mexican flag, are reminiscent of the revolutionary soldier. With a mindfulness to clarify his indigenous origins, the meaning of his name, Piedra Volteada (upturned stone), is explained. We read that he succeeded Cajeme, also referred to as el indio Cajeme, in “la lucha por estas tierras,” and that he was a peacemaker as well as a soldier. Like his name, his death is also indigenous, since Tetabiate “duerme el sueño eterno” (sleeps the eternal dream). However, the image of el indio Tetabiate is “remembered” through a regionalist and patriotic discourse. The meaning is clear. Indigenous people are Mexicans, but not just Mexicans. For in this context, who could argue that Tetabiate is not a proud and patriotic Mexican like those “mexicanos al grito de guerra” (Mexicans at the cry of war), defenders of their patria, described in the national anthem? The co-­optation of Tetabiate through regional and state discourses is not altogether apparent without in-­depth investigation. The intricacies of Tetabiate’s history go mostly ignored, although they are alluded to. According to Sanford Levinson, public artworks such as monuments are “both the terrain of, and often a weapon in, the culture wars that course through societies” (38). Because of the monument’s political didactics, the notion of “art for art’s sake” is inapplicable. Its clarity is further muddled when we consider that “one’s analysis (or response) to such art will inevitably be influenced by knowledge about its topical subject and the political resonance that surrounds it” (39). Only Yoemem, scholars, and some informed locals may fully appreciate the history of Juan Maldonado Tetabiate, who was indeed the successor to Cajeme’s rebellion against the sonorense and Porfirian federal governments. He is a beloved Yoeme leader—­ even more so than Cajeme, because, unlike the latter, Tetabiate was raised within

THE MYTHIFICATION OF LO YAQUI 21

the Yaqui territory and culture. State co-­optation of a Yoeme insurgent has its precedent in Cajeme, whom Ramón Corral, in his “Biografía de José María Leyva Cajeme,” paradoxically represented as both enemy Native and national hero—­fighting against the failed 1852–­53 filibuster expedition by Gaston de Raousset-­Boulbon and participating in Benito Juárez’s Reform Wars (151–­52). Corral, a major regional politico, emphasizes Cajeme’s nonindigenous education while also comparing him with Aztec hero Xicoténcatl and referring to him as “nuestro héroe” (our hero) (149); the biography, ironically, was published in 1887, the same year as Cajeme’s execution by the government. Thus, soon after his execution, Corral reimagines Cajeme as an ideal patriotic Mexican who insists on the value of Yoeme-­Mexican friendship and peace (190–­91). The comparison of Cajeme to Xicoténcatl, the Tlaxcalan warrior who tried to incite military action against Hernán Cortés’s invading forces, also reveals Mexicans’ (and later Mexican Americans’) penchant for interpreting Native contemporaries through the filter of pre-­Columbian or colonial history. As Robert McKee Irwin points out, “This revisionism lauds Cajeme alongside the very creole military leaders who sought to destroy him” (Bandits 193). Tetabiate’s monument embeds the figure of the Yoeme leader within a patriotic symbolic matrix. We see the tricolor waving behind him, suggesting his Mexicanness, and read that he “mantuvo la lucha por estas tierras” (sustained the struggle for these lands). The vagueness of this statement would have us believe that Tetabiate had defended Mexican soil against a foreign enemy. But the lands that he battled over were those of the eight Yoeme pueblos and the Río Yaqui region that includes what today is Ciudad Obregón. Here is a sonorense state acquisition of a Yoeme hero—­an indigenous separatist who killed Mexicans in his attempts to achieve his nation’s autonomy. The inscription replicates a Mexican perspective on Yoeme history, and betrays a patriotic fantasy of a noble savage. Notably, the 1985 inauguration of Tetabiate’s monument came at a time when the Yoeme nation was no longer a threat to Mexicans in Sonora, and in an era that saw the slow adoption of a pluriculturalista rhetoric by Mexican academics and politicians when dealing with indigenous issues. As the Yaqui warrior is turned into a forefather of mestizo sonorenses, the monument reveals the ways that dominant institutions venerate indigeneity only after Native peoples are stripped of influence, autonomy, and resources. A study of the monument’s geopolitics betrays nationalist discursive manipulation as well. Tetabiate’s representation is repeated in a monument to José María Leyva Cajeme at the southern entrance to the city, in similar style

22 CHAPTER 1

with a tricolor behind him. And it is noteworthy that in the plaza adjacent to the palacio municipal in the city center stands a bronze image of Álvaro Obregón mounted on a steed, behind which flies a larger Mexican flag. One absence stands out. This absence is a paradoxical incompleteness in the re-­ creation of the general’s body: he is represented with both arms. There is scarcely a cajemense (a resident of the municipality named Cajeme, which includes Ciudad Obregón, also formerly known as Cajeme) who could not tell you that Álvaro Obregón lost an arm during the Mexican Revolution. But a portrayal of Obregón as mocho (one-­armed) would signal a kind of weakness not worthy of the “transformador del México moderno” (transformer of modern Mexico), as his inscription reads. A Mexican perspective on the Mexican Revolution simplifies and depoliticizes Yoeme participation in the national struggle and exalts Mexico’s great men. The Novel of the Revolution, studied in the third chapter, similarly constructs Yaqui soldiers as curious accessories to individualized military leaders (mestizo or indigenous), while even Chicana/o literature, despite its adoption of indigenismo chicano, has often subordinated contemporary Yaquis to pre-­Columbian motifs; this tendency, charges Sheila Marie Contreras, “raises questions about Chicana/os’ relationship to the past and the present of contemporary Indigenous communities in the United States and Mexico” (113). In the case of Álvaro Obregón, the centrality of the general’s monument in a prominent public space and the peripheral positioning of the Tetabiate, Cajeme, and deer dancer monuments reify Mexican identity as nonindigenous and confirm the secondary—­albeit important—­role of indigenous nations in the construction of a mestizo mexicanidad. It is reminiscent of the Mexican-­centered history of Yoeme participation in the Revolution in the Yaqui battalions led by General Obregón. This symbolic geography subordinates an otherwise semi-­autonomous indigenous nation whose relationship to state and federal authority has historically been conflictual. My conversations with Mexicans in Ciudad Obregón revealed a sense of pride in the monuments to Tetabiate, Cajeme, and the deer dancer, while some Mexican and Yoeme scholars cast a critical eye on these monuments’ distorted representation of Native symbols. Public misrepresentation of Yoeme leaders as loyal Mexicans exhibits the state’s power to posit prominent indigenous figures in otherwise inconceivable terms and to silence indigenous peoples’ perspectives on their own histories. Monuments such as this one “are half-­amputated, they are deprived of memory, not of existence” (Barthes 122). The Janus-­faced nature of myth allows locals to feel pride in Tetabiate

THE MYTHIFICATION OF LO YAQUI 23

as a regional hero. But once the myth is exposed as such, we understand that the monument conceals Tetabiate’s history of anti-­Mexican fervor, and at the same time reveals the manners in which Mexicans interpret indigenous people in terms of national folklore and marginality. Scholars and the Yoeme people preserve Tetabiate’s history and identity—­though not without their own alterations—­aware that for many Mexicans the former insurgent leader is just another of Mexico’s many consumable “indio” figures. The acquisition of Yaqui history and culture plays out in the nation’s capital as well, where the deer dance is presented in the Ballet Folklórico de México de Amalia Hernández.2 Traditionally performed outdoors next to a ramada, the dance known as Maso Me’ewa (Killing the Deer) is a solemn religious institution that connects performers and spectators to the pre-­Columbian cosmology that endures in Yaqui Catholicism. This performance is one of the ways in which the community reestablishes cultural, territorial, and historical difference (Shorter 205). Upon entry to the Palacio de Bellas Artes, the spectator is handed a program graced with a photograph of a Yaqui deer dancer in costume, muscular legs extended in midair. Like the textual inscription to Tetabiate’s monument, the Ballet Folklórico de México’s program provides a context through which to interpret the performance. The short explanation of the dance describes the Yoemem as “la única tribu aborigen que conserva el país en su autonomía original” (the only tribe in the nation that conserves its original autonomy), and claims: Libre de todo mestizaje y compromiso con las modernas culturas, los yaquis siguen cazando con arco y flecha, cultivando la tierra según el método de sus

antepasados y celebrando sus danzas rituales con el mismo hermético fervor. La Danza del Venado forma parte del rito propiciatorio que se realiza en vísperas de las expediciones de caza. (Ballet)

(Free of all racial admixture and commitment to modern cultures, the Yaquis

continue to hunt with bow and arrow, cultivate their land according to their

ancestral methods, and celebrate their dance rituals with the same hermetic fervor. The deer dance is part of the propitiatory ritual performed on the eve of hunting expeditions.)

This description distances the deer dancer from his historical and religious context at the same time that it re-creates him as the living remnant of a noble

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savage past. It associates the deer dancer with contemporary bow-­and-­arrow hunting, an activity that is no longer a significant source of subsistence, and seems to touch on the role of deer dancers and pascolas in deer-­hunting rituals (Shorter 217). But at least with regard to deer hunting, Shorter finds that while “only a selected group of men continue to hunt, the form of these pre–­deer hunt ceremonies can be gleaned to a certain extent from oral and performative traditions” (218). Pascolas and deer dances are today a means of “celebrating the relationships between humans and all of the other-­than-­human persons of the wilderness (huya ania)” (217). But their roles in popular fiestas, Easter celebrations, and children’s funerals go completely unmentioned in the program. The program’s text describes a community of social hermits. One might conclude Yaquis to be neither modern nor mestizos—­the mestizo being the quintessence of Mexicanness—­though white Yoemem, or Yoemem with green or other-­colored eyes, tell a different story. Northwestern Mexico was shaped by Spanish military and missionary conquest, civil wars, a bloody revolution, and missions of rural educators, and yet the spectator is told that the Yaquis have managed to remain culturally, politically, and biologically unaffected. The truth is that Yoemem have participated in the region’s economy as valuable laborers since the nineteenth century. And of the eight traditional pueblos, Bacum and Cócorit have been lost to Mexican colonization. Finally, the description of their contemporary use of ancient agricultural practices is a blatant fantasy, as most impoverished Yaquis must rent their lands to Mexican agribusinesses because Mexican banks refuse to provide them with the loans necessary for the modes of production to cultivate their lands (Shorter 188–­ 90). Yoeme history and culture have little to do with the Ballet Folklórico’s “Danza del Venado,” which reduces the indigenous dance institution to “uno de los mejores ejemplos universales de la magia imitativa” (one of the best universal examples of imitative magic) (Ballet). In this image, what is called “the Yaquis” is in fact a Native symbol emptied of its indigenous historical and political substance, transformed into a quaint and marginally Mexican people through a discourse that redefines Natives and their culture as part of the nation’s folkloric past. With the deer dancer textually distanced from Yoeme history and culture, the performance of Maso Me’ewa can be turned into a reinterpretable aesthetic. The darkened stage presents a desert backdrop representing the Sierra del Bacatete; the Sierra del Bacatete itself is a Sonoran legend, the place of “Indian” outlaw refuge. The peculiar and strident recording of the Yaqui-­style drums

THE MYTHIFICATION OF LO YAQUI 25

and sonajas creates a tense mood. The deer dancer makes his dramatic entrance, sharply looking about with the deer’s head tied to his crown. He leaps about, thrusting his foot back, the way a deer might kick dirt with its hind legs. Out come the two coyote dancers wielding bows, who shoot imaginary arrows at their agile and combative foe. Finally, the deer is fatally wounded and the two coyote dancers make their exit. Convulsing about on the floor, the deer twists his body convincingly and finally expires. The crowd applauds thunderously and the lights go out. But, with a consciousness of the popularity of this number, the stage is lit once more so that the dancer may bow and the crowd may applaud yet again. A new message is forged: Yaquis, though primitive, contribute to the repertoire of grand national aesthetics via their dance, conceived by a sort of pensée sauvage. The Ballet Folklórico de México is intended as a review of Mexican dance arts—­of the dances that are most Mexican, one might argue—­and as one of the ways in which Mexico knows itself. In truth, Yoeme pascolas and deer dancers often choose to perform this very dance not just for its exciting dramatics but because it represents community identity, a way of “demonstrating how they knew themselves” (Shorter 225). But the tradition boasted in the program is violated by the performance. As a reinterpretable art form, the “Danza del Venado” in Mexico City is stylized to fit a modern dance aesthetic; the dancer’s costume is blatantly synthetic, while the deer’s head appears to have almost the quality of cardboard. Furthermore, the replacement of the traditional kilt worn by deer dancers with what can only be described as bikini underwear adds an erotic dimension to the performance.3 The already spectacular deer dance is further sensationalized, thereby creating a performance that disregards and in some ways undermines the Yoeme history of cultural autonomy and desire to retain it. Indeed, Shorter’s research sheds light on the importance of dance traditions with its suggestion that studying deer dances opens the possibility of rereading the history of Jesuit evangelization among the Yoeme people by “understanding Jesus [Christ] in terms of a deer figure and not vice versa” (Shorter 242). Mexican reinterpretation stages a sacred aesthetic as a part of the larger Mexican cultural heritage presented in the Ballet Folklórico de México’s “coreografías para 40 ballets” (choreographies for 40 ballets) (Ballet). The dance company’s approach to the deer dance accords with the Indigenista politics that sought to assimilate indigenous communities into the mestizo population, while identifying and preserving only those cultural traits deemed economically and culturally advantageous to the nation. As a state-­sponsored performance, it contains a convenient consolidation of Mexican dances in an attempt to

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incorporate Mexico’s pequeñas patrias (small nations), as Manuel Gamio once put it, into one neat program. The message is clear: the Yaqui deer dance—­a primitive and exciting number—­is as unproblematically Mexican as Jalisco’s charros and mariachis, the pre-­Columbian matachines, or the soldaderas (women participants) of the Mexican Revolution, and not a politically and culturally divergent element of the nation.

THE YAQUI WARRIOR MYTH IN LITERATURE Literary representations of Yoemem do not reflect the patriotic sentiments displayed in the monument to Juan Maldonado Tetabiate or the folkloric appeal of the deer dancer in the Palacio de Bellas Artes, but instead reflect a Yaqui warrior indigeneity through discourses that change with each literary movement. The two motifs these representations have in common are Yaqui warriorhood—­that is, the well-­known history of Yaqui bellicosity, their resistance to the Porfirian wars of extermination, and their participation in the Mexican Revolution—­and dance traditions. Less complicated than contrived nationalist interpretations, more straightforward than the narration of traditional Yoeme dances, the Yaqui warrior myth has provided authors with a wellspring of literary inspiration. As with the nineteenth-­century wars of extermination, Yoeme participation in the Mexican Revolution under General Álvaro Obregón made the indigenous nation highly visible. Mexican and Chicana/o authors have created Yaqui indigeneities using the most spectacular and visible elements of the Yoeme history of resistance, participation in the Mexican Revolution, and, finally, dance traditions. Indeed, this is part of the way in which nonindigenous people know the Yoeme nation, or the epistemic tradition on which Mexican and Chicana/o understanding of Yaqui indigeneity is based. The Yaqui warrior myth is a hegemonic phenomenon. That is, it is a commonsense belief and an identity exploited by regional Mexicans when deemed beneficial. At the root of this myth we perhaps find the colonial missionary literature of Andrés Pérez de Ribas, who, in his 1645 Triunfos de nuestra santa fe, documented the Yoeme victory in 1533 over Diego de Guzmán, who “swore that up to that time in the whole wide Kingdom of Nueva España they had never encountered any Indians who were so daring and brave” (Triumphs 328). In the 1533 first contact, during which a Yoeme military leader famously traced a line on the ground as a threat of war to Spanish forces, the indigenous nation

THE MYTHIFICATION OF LO YAQUI 27

established a reputation among the yori invaders as defiant warriors (Spicer, The Yaquis 5). After centuries of military resistance, the acceptance of a Jesuit presence in Yoeme territory, and relatively peaceful coexistence with the Spanish Empire, warriorhood emerged as the historical quintessence of Yoeme colonial identity. It obscured sophisticated cultural and political relations between the Yoemem, the Church, and the state, and solidified a terrifying and threatening Yaqui-­ness in the nonindigenous imaginary. “Their reputation in the 1700s as warriors,” writes Edward H. Spicer, “seemed to far overshadow that of any other living Indian group, except the Apaches” (The Yaquis 128). Nineteenth-­ century insurgent movements against Mexicans and Yoeme participation in the Mexican Revolution as soldiers, while real and exciting historical events, only reinforced a Yaqui warrior identity. In La evolución del noroeste de México (1930), anthropologist Miguel Othón de Mendizábal decried the failure of missionary and military “civilizing” campaigns to incorporate or even pacify the original nations of the Northwest; true to Indigenista form, the anthropologist calls for “una urgente solución” (an urgent solution) (53).4 He makes the accusation that post-­Independence Yoeme uprisings, like the 1825 rebellion of Juan Banderas, were a direct result of the incomplete missionization and incorporation of the Yaqui and other nations (137). In short, barbarism had triumphed over western civilization in the Northwest. In “La obra de paz,” Porfirian ideologue Francisco Bulnes justifies Porfirio Díaz’s wars against the Yaquis—­whom he calls barbarians—­by hurling legal accusations regarding the prohibition of collective landholdings and reducing the Yaquis to common Mexican citizens (66–­67). This review of some representative perspectives on the Yoeme nation must be understood as revealing a Spanish-­Mexican epistemology that delegitimizes indigenous forms of knowledge and history (Mignolo 43). It is the very basis for the hegemonic standing of the Yaqui warrior myth, and has influenced early twentieth-­century U.S. anthropologists as well, which is evident when Richard Arthur Studhalter asserts, “What more war-­loving race has there been on the American continent than the Yaqui Indians?” (114). It is not surprising, then, that George Mariscal, in his critique of war hero Roy Benavidez’s autobiography, notes the presence in the Mexican and Chicana/o imaginary of an essentializing belief in Yaqui warrior prowess. Maris­ cal responds with skepticism when the Yoeme American veteran recounts the racism and poverty in which he grew up, comparing the many fights he faced with Yaqui war history. In one such example, the Medal of Honor recipient explains his childhood retaliations against racist Anglo society by alluding to

28 CHAPTER 1

his indigenous race: “Little did those gringos realize that running in my veins was the blood of the fierce Yaqui” (Benavidez and Craig 9). Mariscal questions the decorated Yoeme American’s analysis of the discrimination he encountered: “Benavidez’s analysis falls apart as he attempts to reduce complex issues of class, ethnicity and masculinity in an oppressed Chicano community to the category of blood, that is, his Yaqui lineage” (32). But it is Edward H. Spicer who refers to the distorted portrayal of the Yaqui Rebellion of 1740 as one of the cornerstones of a “myth” in which “both Spaniards and Mexicans imagined the Yaquis to be fierce warriors who opposed the just authority of European civilization and the righteous truth of Christianity” (The Yaquis 50). As authors have taken Yoeme war history out of context and rewritten it in the ideological terms of each literary movement, they have contributed to an epistemology, an influential accumulation of texts whose “referential power” has been felt among researchers and eventually “in the culture at large” (Said 20). This nonindigenous tradition of knowledge perpetuates a Mexican way of knowing Yaquis through war and resistance, and it holds real repercussions in the indigenous community it re­inter­prets. Yoeme scholar Felipe Molina calls attention to potentially damaging effects of a nonindigenous epistemic view of Yoeme history when he expresses his feelings about the perpetual referencing of the 1533 “drawing of the line” story: “I like to imagine that encounter as much as you do. But all that language of being the ‘fiercest fighters in the New World.’ Who does that serve? Do we want our children proud of that quality instead of others?” (qtd. in Shorter 161). The hegemonic acceptance of a bellicose Yaqui nature (by nonindigenous people and Chicanas/os, as well as Yoeme people) could be understood as part of that damage. But an image that has been subordinated to myth (in this case Yaqui warrior history), although distorted, also demands recognition. It is the aim of the following chapter to uncover the cultural intricacies, or history (as Barthes calls it), behind representations of Yaqui bellicosity in order to question the essentialist belief in a Yaqui warrior myth.

2 THE WARRIOR IN YOEME CULTURAL HISTORY

I

previous chapter with the 2013–­14 blockades by the Movimiento Ciudadano in defense of Yoeme waters as an example of Mexican interest in Yoeme resistance to state authority and the defense of the sacred Yoeme homeland Hiakim and its resources. While other struggles are equally urgent—­ substandard healthcare, poverty, gross lack of infrastructure, and an abusive system of banks (Shorter 186–­90)—­these are less spectacular and exciting to the nonindigenous reporter than the rousing showdown between the long-­ established indigenous nation and the state’s corrupt governor. Furthermore, to the Mexican journalist, whose conception of the Yoeme nation is based on a Spanish-­Mexican worldview, extreme Yoeme poverty may seem to be just another characteristic of indigenous life. For many Mexicans, Yaqui indigeneity conjures up a history of relentless determination and bloody battles for the territory and resources finally returned to them by Lázaro Cárdenas’s 1937 presidential decree (Spicer, The Yaquis 262–­64). Shelley Streeby has duly noted the sensational side of the Yaqui past and present when analyzing the ways in which John Kenneth Turner’s Barbarous Mexico reproduces enslaved, tortured, and murdered Yoeme bodies as part of a strategy to link Yoeme resistance to a U.S. working-­class struggle against capitalist repression. Turner’s corporal emphasis, proposes Streeby, combines sensationalist conventions and socialist discourses against U.S. imperialism to induce “sympathetic acts of witnessing BEGAN THE

30 CHAPTER 2

the atrocities inflicted on Yaqui bodies” (139). But concentrating on highly visible historical acts of violence and resistance, while important and valuable, can effectively eclipse underlying political and economic conflicts faced by Native communities. Yaqui military history is a case in point. While the defense of Hiakim is indeed historically factual, the regional and national understanding of this history disregards the cultural and political details surrounding Yoeme uprisings, instead tending to interpret them through a mythologized Yaqui warrior identity. Mexican and Chicana/o authors have used pre-­Columbian or Conquest-­era indigenous history, more often than not mythologized, to represent nationalism (political or cultural) when writing about revolution and struggle. Allusions to pre-­Columbian mythology demonstrate Mexican and Mexican American writers’ acceptance of Aztec and Mayan motifs—­including deities, creation and foundational stories, and warriorhood—­as part of their cultural patrimony. In considering some examples, it is worth noting that this adoption is not always uniform. Martín Luis Guzmán titles his iconic book spanning the Revolution on a national level The Eagle and the Serpent, a reference to the mythological founding of Tenochtitlán by the Mexica migrants whose descendants would construct the Aztec Empire. Here, the violence that the bird of prey effects on its serpent prey metaphorically resonates in Mexico’s armed struggle. However, in Mariano Azuela’s Los de abajo (translated as The Underdogs), Captain Solís mockingly describes General Francisco Villa as “The Aztec eagle! He buried his beak of steel in the head of Huerta the Serpent!” (Underdogs 76). In Chicana/o literature, Alurista’s “Libertad sin lágrimas” is a poem that links the Chicano Movement’s focus on Mexican American racial dignity to pre-­ Columbian warriorhood. The poem portrays Chicano masculinity and free will through the image of “caballeros / clanes tigres / proud guerrero plumaje / free like the eagle / y la serpiente” (knights / tiger clans / proud warrior plumage / free like the eagle / and the serpent) (5). Alurista conceives of male dignity in terms of pre-­Columbian warriorhood, and freedom through the image of the Mexica founding of Tenochtitlán, a ubiquitous icon in Mexican American communities. This example is consistent with indigenismo chicano, to be discussed in the final chapter, which sought to redeem the indigenous lineage of Mexican American mestizos. Similarly, Luis Valdez’s Zoot Suit contains a scene in which the archetypal Pachuco, beaten and stripped by a gang of sailors and marines, recovers his racial dignity by rising dressed in a loincloth “as an Aztec conch blows” (81). In this sense, the defeated Chicano recovers his individual

The Warrior in Yoeme Cultural History   31

and collective Mexican American worth by transforming into a warrior from a great pre-­Columbian empire. Yaqui resistance and warriorhood have been the subject of literary and theatrical representations throughout the twentieth and early twenty-­first centuries as well. It is not my argument in this chapter that Yaqui warriorhood does not exist; I do in fact consider parts of the history of wars against the Yoemem in my study. What is in question is the representation of that history in Mexican and Chicana/o literature, whose fictional accounts of Yaqui indigeneity might lead readers to believe the indigenous nation to be either fundamentally warlike, naturally resistant to “modern” ways of life, or, in the best case, zealous defenders of their territory. In light of the process of mythification described in chapter 1, I work to recover the cultural and cosmological significance ignored by the Yaqui warrior myth (whether represented in the form of the regional hero, the deer dancer, or the word Yaqui), not just through a change in historical perspective, but through an epistemic shift with which I attempt to retrace the warrior’s cultural-­historical importance. To comprehend how Yoeme culture (and specifically religion) has shaped conflicts with nonindigenous individuals and institutions, this chapter provides a brief elucidation of Yoeme cosmology and the ways in which the performance of the deer dancer (one of Mexico’s two myths of Yaqui indigeneity) reflects Yoeme religion and identity. I analyze two sets of stories—­including the Testamento, or “Rahum Land Myths”—­told by Yoeme elders Lucas Chávez and don Alfonso Florez Leyva in order to provide an indigenous self-­representation and therefore an indigenous way of knowing the Yoeme history of armed conflict. These traditional stories, as Shorter concludes, are “one of the various ways in which Yoeme people historicize their homeland and their aboriginal relationship with the hiakim” (91). What is at stake in this analysis, then, is the establishment of a preexisting Yoeme epistemology for the purposes of recontextualizing the Mexican myth of Yaqui warriorhood. The traditional stories expose a fusion of two religious cosmologies, the pre-­Jesuit Aniam (spiritual realms) and the Jesuit Catholicism introduced in 1617 (Spicer, The Yaquis 64; Shorter 37). The uniquely Yoeme cosmology in these foundational narratives reveals the cultural arraigamiento, or deep rooting, of the indigenous nation in their territory, resulting in a sacred homeland (Hiakim) whose safeguarding is religiously mandated. By arraigamiento, I am referring to the ancestral community-­territorial relationship that Aniam-­inspired origin stories inscribe in the geography of Hiakim. Foundational narratives, a form of Native knowledge, produce a place-­based identity—­arraigamiento—­that recognizes

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both (1) the divine nature of Yoeme territorial belonging, and (2) the ancestors and supernatural entities residing in this territory. Consequently, the epistemic shift toward the origin stories analyzed in this chapter reveals the Yaqui fighter who is tasked with defending the homeland Hiakim as a cosmologically established aboriginal institution.

YAQUI HISTORY OF ACQUISITION OF CATHOLICISM Before delving into the world of traditional Yoeme stories, we should reflect on the history of Yoeme transcultural culture; by transcultural culture I am referring to the slow and complex process of syncretic blending by which the indigenous nation acquired and adapted Jesuit teachings, producing what Spicer has called “a religion not known before to either Jesuits or Yaquis” (The Yaquis 59). The narratives that will be examined are foundational myths inclusive of both pre-­Hispanic and Catholic cosmological perspectives. As such, they provide a Yoeme epistemic view of the history of colonial wars and evangelization. My attempt to reroute the reader through a Yoeme epistemology based on founding narratives and a Yoeme perspective on Yoeme history is supported by Olavarría, who claims that “en efecto para los mismos yaquis, su mitología se presenta como la propia interpretación de acontecimientos, creencias y prácticas, que no tiene fundamento más que en sí misma” (in effect, for the Yaquis, their mythology presents an interpretation of events, beliefs, and practices, which has no basis other than in itself ) (Análisis 121). Without a basic understanding of Yoeme culture, the traditional stories analyzed below may be incomprehensible.1 Thus the following summary aims to shed light on the acquisition of the syncretic Yoeme religion, and serves as an aid with which to study the influence of this unique transcultural mythology and the indigenous responses to colonialism in Hiakim. Contemporary Yoeme cultural history begins with failed sixteenth-­and early seventeenth-­century attempts at colonial military conquest and the indigenous diplomacy that followed. After having resisted incorporation into the territory of New Spain since 1533, the Yoemem delivered a crushing blow to Captain Diego Martínez de Hurdaide—­“the military commander of the west coast region”—­by definitively defeating his forces (Spicer, The Yaquis 13). After this, Hurdaide maintained his distance until the Yoemem sent emissaries to his base in Sinaloa to initiate peace talks with the Spanish authorities

The Warrior in Yoeme Cultural History   33

(17). The organizational and military competency that allowed the Yoemem to thwart imperial dominance created a window of political opportunity that they would use to engage Church and Empire. Spicer summarizes the stark contrasts between Yoeme-­Spanish relations and those involving most other indigenous communities during the Conquista: The most usual result of Spanish military and political conquest was the destruc-

tion of native institutions and an imposition of political and economic domina-

tion which, where it did not bring actual physical death, brought withdrawal and growing political apathy. Here, on the northern margin, among their immediate

neighbors, there took place instead a new growth, a vitalization that extended through all aspects of native life. (The Yaquis 13)

Yoeme leaders, perhaps informed about Spanish military capabilities and no doubt weary of eighty-­seven years of war, initiated peace through compromise. Yoeme-­Spanish diplomacy included tours of Jesuit missions along the Sinaloa, Culiacán, and Fuerte Rivers in which “at least one Yaqui delegation to Sinaloa included 400 members, representing most of the 80 Yaqui rancherías” (Spicer, The Yaquis 17). The fact that these missions housed indigenous people who spoke similar Cahitan languages would have been an advantage for the Yoemem. However, Hurdaide and Jesuit representatives also made strong efforts to move forward on peaceful terms: The missionaries placed emphasis on demonstrating their intentions by showing

the visitors not only the well-­furnished churches which their converts had set up in the vicinity, but also their schools and the agricultural establishments with horses, cattle, sheep, and goats. (Spicer, The Yaquis 17)

Jesuits, eager to win souls for their religion and assist in the pacification effort, showcased agricultural methods and livestock, which were seen as opportunities by Yoeme leaders who took advantage of their temporary political edge. After the Yoemem requested a Jesuit presence in the Hiakim territory in 1613, the Spanish honored their wishes by appointing missionary Andrés Pérez de Ribas and his assistant Father Tomás Basilio in 1617. The Jesuits quickly established a powerful landholding mission system which would bring the Company of Jesus into conflict with colonizers and the Spanish authorities, until their expulsion in 1767 (Deeds 455). The writings of Pérez de Ribas and Basilio would

34 CHAPTER 2

come to serve as sources for twentieth-­century ethnographers, both Mexican and foreign. Like Yoeme-­Spanish peace, the seeds of Yoeme Catholicism were planted through a sometimes tenuous and always highly controlled working relationship. The Jesuits sought to prevail where military conquest had failed by introducing Catholic-­Spanish hegemony through geographic and labor reorganization, along with the introduction of new language(s), prayer, and music (e.g., bells, songs, and dance), all of which served as means of cultural change and social control (Mann 4–­5). Missionization was not without dissidence. Some Yoemem expressed understandable mistrust, while others rejected the religion outright, leading to some initial thwarted acts of violence against Jesuits. As with other communities, baptisms occurred quickly and on a massive scale. However, the absence of a Spanish militia within Hiakim to protect the missionaries and reinforce church authority, as well as the limited number of missionaries—­ “about 1 to 4000” in the 1600s—­necessitated the role of Yoeme mediators, such as temastianes (catechists), tenebrae (functionaries in charge of Holy Week), fiscales (sacristans), and “farm managers” (Spicer, The Yaquis 21, 27). In this way, Yoeme intermediaries who possessed their own belief systems were empowered to begin the work of reinterpreting Jesuit teachings. With time, “the missionary’s words and ideas moved out through expanding circles of Yaquis,” while “all the many things and ideas which the Jesuits introduced passed through many contexts of meaning as the 30,000 Yaquis took hold of them and put them into action” (Spicer, The Yaquis 21–­22).2 Tempered by Yoeme intermediaries already endowed with their own cosmology, Jesuit influence quickly took hold in the community. By 1623, eight pueblos had developed around the new churches erected by indigenous labor. Similar to the Catholic churches built in Tenochtitlán, these eight churches were constructed on places of prior importance along the Río Yaqui. The Yoeme names of the pueblos were Hispanicized by the missionaries: Cócorit (Ko’oko’im), Bacum (Bahcum), Torim, Vícam, Potam, Rahum, Huirivis (Wibisim), and Belem (Beene) (Spicer, The Yaquis 27). The eight reducciones (resettlements) within Hiakim became hubs of cultural change and Jesuit economic power. Jesuits introduced new forms of agricultural subsistence, livestock, and social organization. By 1700, Yoeme agriculture and livestock supplied Californian and northern Sonoran missions, while Yoemem had begun to individually participate in the surrounding economy of New Spain (Spicer, The Yaquis 30). Culturally, Jesuits successfully translated prayers into the Yoeme language, and the Yoemem

The Warrior in Yoeme Cultural History   35

adopted and modified the Catholic compadrazgo (godfather) system (23). In this give-­and-­take between evangelization and preexisting Aniam culture, the Jesuits themselves worked to learn the indigenous language and culture, and “also selectively appropriated native forms and concepts for teaching purposes in both central and northern New Spain. Doctrine took on complex meanings when Christian texts, characters, or feast days were layered upon indigenous melodies, ceremonies, or circle dances” (Mann 70). In the 1730s, Jesuits complained of improper observance of Christian traditions by Yoeme neophytes (Spicer, The Yaquis 62). For not only did they refuse blind acceptance of Jesuit teachings, but they were scrupulous in what they chose to adopt; as Spicer points out, “whenever Yaquis made their selections, they adapted and altered them, so that the borrowings made sense and fitted their needs” (32). Thus Yoeme Catholicism developed an “oppositional integration” in which a dual spiritual system identified pueblo life with church obligations, while recognizing the wilderness and all that inhabited it as part of the pre-­Jesuit Huya Ania (70). The same might be said of the existing culture (e.g., dance and storytelling) and language, which would maintain a dialectical relationship with Spanish and Latin Catholic cultural indoctrination. The expulsion of the Jesuits in 1767 came at a time of strengthened Yoeme collective identity and provided a powerful impulse toward the development of the Yoeme religion, as thereafter “Yaquis assumed full control of their religious institutions” (Spicer, The Yaquis 62). Yoeme dance, like Yoeme traditional stories, reflects this fusion of ancient beliefs and Catholicism. As forms of cultural expression ubiquitous in ritual life, traditional dances can hold both secular and sacred functions within the community. For example, the pascola, a great entertainer and storyteller at secular Yaqui gatherings, also has an obligation of religious service to the community. The matachines, on the other hand, serve an exclusively religious function as part of the procession of the Virgin Mary. Pascolas and deer dances are at once associated with Catholic religious ceremonies and pre-­Jesuit religion. These dances are associated with the Huya Ania,3 the wilderness world, which encompasses the uninhabited places within Hiakim, including brushlands, forests, deserts, caves, and mountains—­home to mythological ancestors and heroes—­as well as the wildlife living there. In sum, “the huya aniya is one of the two parts into which the universe is divided with respect to . . . inner, ‘spiritual,’ or ‘spiritual power’ aspects” (Spicer, The Yaquis 64). Following the research of Felipe Molina and Spicer, Shorter connects the sacrificial nature of the pre-­hunt deer dance to the Yoeme Aniam, or spiritual realms:

36 CHAPTER 2

Each of these worlds provides a home for powerful beings, and Yoemem relate deer dancing to three worlds specifically—­yo ania, in that the deer emerges from

an enchanted home; huya ania, in that the deer goes into the wilderness world; and sea ania, in that the deer dances for us in the flower world. (219)

Pascolas and deer dancing are the continuing legacy of a cosmology unbroken by Jesuit teachings, which we will refer to as Aniam. Understanding this fusion of two divided religious views is no simple task for cultural researchers. Chicana-­Yoeme scholar Yolanda Broyles-­González argues that traditional Yoeme worship has disguised itself in Catholic forms as a means of surviving and resisting the history of violence against the Yoemem before, during, and after the introduction of Jesuit beliefs. She points to indigenous bilingualism and biculturalism: “With the onslaught of the European language, each tribe also adopted obligatory Catholic camouflage. . . . [E]ach tribe in the Americas did Catholicism and the Spanish language in its own native register” (“Indianizing” 121). Regarding traditional Yoeme dance and its role in the Waehma, a Lenten celebration building up to the Easter passion play, she contends that “Yaqui ‘Catholicism’ provides a socially protective veneer as well as ritual protection for the utterly un-­Catholic Deer Dancers and Pascola” (122). Broyles-­González presents a divided Yoeme Catholicism in which one form of worship is shielded (but not usurped) by the other. As if in support of Broyles-­González, Grageda Bustamante finds that “los yaquis fortalecieron, con la cruz y el bautismo, la riqueza de su antiguo simbolismo” (the Yaquis fortified the richness of their ancient symbolism with the cross and baptism) (31). Spicer views Yoeme Catholicism rather differently. For the anthropologist, the fusion of ancient cosmology and the slowly incorporated Jesuit teachings resulted in an altogether original religious phenomenon, “a religious way of life which is different in basic belief from what is found among the Yaqui’s Christian and non-­Christian neighbors” (The Yaquis 59). But like Broyles-­González, he refers to visibly non-­Western syncretic practices when describing a Sunday konti, or procession, from a nonindigenous perspective: They see, for example, in a procession before a Yaqui church on a Sunday morning

a group of men and women singing hymns to the Virgin Mary in modified Gregorian style and, accompanying them, a man bare to the waist wearing a headdress

in the form of a deer’s head, curtsying as he dances and beating a rhythm with a red gourd rattle in each hand. (59)

The Warrior in Yoeme Cultural History   37

Spicer does not exaggerate in describing this scene from the Waehma celebration, which may require ethnographic knowledge if a nonindigenous Christian is to comprehend it. The two radically different types of worshippers—­the hymn singers and the deer dancer—­are “carrying out joint religious devotions, in their strikingly different ways.” Spicer makes the case for a Yoeme religion that “included a conception of interdependence between the natural world and the world of Christian belief ” (The Yaquis 60). From this point of view, Yaqui Catholicism is not simply Aniam worship disguised in Catholic form, but rather a firm belief that both spiritual cosmologies, though separate, interact to play important roles in Yoeme spiritual life.4 Although I agree with Broyles-­ González’s conclusion that the incorporation of elements like the deer dancer into a Catholic passion play represents a subversive element unwanted and unexpected by early Jesuits, I cannot help but heed Shorter’s insistence on the heterogeneity of Yoeme religious belief.5 The Yo Ania, the enchanted world in which the supernatural ancestors known as the Surem reside, is believed to be “located by some mountain caves that open to the west”—­that is, within the Huya Ania (Shorter 37); at the same time, Shorter has found that some Yoeme Catholics fear the Yo Ania as a source of satanic power and witchcraft, while others relate the Sea Ania, or flower world, to Christianity (47–­49). While scholars work to define indigenous cosmology and culture, Yoeme indigeneity is continually in flux and subject to the community’s own cultural shifts. Even so, pascolas and deer dancing, both connected to the Aniam concepts and present in Catholic ceremonies, are Yoeme “ways of knowing” or “epistemologies” that are “at once emplaced, place specific, embodied, and performed” (Shorter 51). Pascolas and deer dancers are a visual manifestation of Yoeme transculturation and Yoeme forms of knowledge. Though they are active during Holy Week and in other important ceremonies, such as children’s funerals, their cultural value does not reside within Catholic traditions, but rather in the supernatural characteristics derived from Aniam cosmology. Both the Huya Ania, with its resident animal life, and the Yo Ania, the respected world from which special abilities (like dancing) may be obtained, contribute to the cultural vitality of the pascolas and the deer dancer (Spicer, The Yaquis 88). Deer dancers represent a solemn pre-­Jesuit spiritual veneration of nature: “the spirit of the songs is that of a World removed and with a sacredness connected with its remoteness, a ‘land beneath the dawn,’ a ‘flower place’. . . . One may guess that the Deer Dance was originally a sacred dance connected with the yo aniya aspect of the huya aniya” (103). Pascolas and deer dancers possess a constitutional sacredness that,

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although sometimes secularized, marks their place in Yoeme society as a bridge between pre-­Hispanic traditions and Catholic beliefs. On Holy Saturday, the deer dancer and pascola (cultural agents of the precontact Aniam) enter the temple and defend Christ, the saints, and children representing angels from the chapayekas (or fariseos) by hurling flowers at them—­flowers being an essential element of the Sea Ania, or flower world (Spicer, The Yaquis 88). The deer dancer’s performance restores the pre-­Jesuit Yoeme cosmology with which Catholicism coexists: “The deer dance,” explains Shorter, “brings the aniam into the present for the performers and audience and creates a distinctly Yoeme space” (30). In making visible both ancient Yoeme cosmology and Catholic characteristics, pascolas and deer dancers continually contemporize a collective identity based on Yoeme ritual epistemology (229). This Yoeme way of knowing is duly noted by Thomas McGuire, who comments that Mexican audiences of the Waehma performances, ignoring the representation of Jesus Christ as a Yaqui healer crucified in the Yoeme territory, unwittingly participate in one manner in which Yoeme “boundaries—­social and cultural—­are drawn and redrawn” (158). Yaqui Catholicism is the recognition of two historically antithetical cosmologies: the belief in both the Aniam and the Roman Catholicism that was brought by Spanish conquerors and later became the religion of the Mexicans, also seen as conquerors by the Yoeme. In some traditional stories, Jesus Christ walks among the Yaquis as a healer and a teacher of healing arts. Spicer conjures the example of the idea that “Jesus’ suffering took place in the Yaqui country . . . and that the grace is symbolized by flowers which grew from blood that fell from the wound of Jesus on the Cross”—­flowers which are also representative of the Sea Ania and associated with the deer dancer (The Yaquis 59). Shorter studies a Yoeme conception of the resurrection and crucifixion of Christ, which is understood through an Aniam epistemology, employing the precontact concepts of the flower and of the deer hunt as beneficent sacrifice, and relating the deer dance’s hunting scenario to the community’s persecution: “Yoeme-­deer relations provide a preexistent logic by which Jesuit stories of Jesus, as well as a history of colonial dynamics with the Mexican government, can be understood” (241). Upon close inspection, one finds examples of Yoeme Catholicism as a “socially protective veneer” for ancient Aniam worship, as Broyles-­González argues (“Indianizing” 122), and of “interdependence between the natural world and the world of Christian belief,” especially in the analyses of stories combining Catholic themes and the Huya Ania (Spicer, The Yaquis 60). The next section of this chapter will focus on traditional stories that reflect the complex

The Warrior in Yoeme Cultural History   39

collaboration of these two cosmologies and offer an indigenous epistemology through which to understand the cultural arraigamiento of the warrior in a sacred territory.6

TRADITIONAL YAQUI STORIES, CULTURE, AND ARRAIGAMIENTO Olavarría insists that a proper analysis of Yoeme mythology entails reading from within a Yoeme “closed history” to interpret the events, beliefs, and cultural practices that are the subjects of the narratives (Análisis 121). For Spicer, the traditional stories known as the Testamento contain the origin narratives that have helped shape the Yoeme people’s contemporary identity—­Yaqui indigeneity. These stories touch on the real cultural core of nineteenth-­century Yaqui life. By that I mean the ideals

and the principles, values, which kept Yaquis separate from Mexicans and which made them resist the Mexican encroachments. These values may be expressed in the behavior and attitudes of various individuals today. (“Excerpts” 115)

Yoeme stories are relevant to the community’s history and quotidian life, both past and present. They provide a cultural contextualization of the community’s geographical and cultural origins. Warriors, when mentioned, are characterized within this context. Narratives that describe the relationship between people, land, and culture prioritize Yoeme historical agency and displace Eurocentric historical constructs that undermine this agency (Shorter 117–­18). There is a great variety within Yoeme stories that includes origin myths (of rain, fire, and culture, for example), religious tales showing Jesuit influence, and ethical folklore that sometimes includes a personal relationship with nature. I make a point of focusing on stories in which the Conquista and the Yoeme-­yori conflict are anticipated or present. These are “Yomumuli and the Little Surem People,” “Leyenda yaqui de las predicciones,” and “Omteme,” as well as the Testamento, or “Rahum Land Myths.”7 These traditional stories are part of a mythology that not only establishes an ancestral attachment to the Río Yaqui territory, but also highlights its sacred and cultural values and the need for the defense thereof. They provide representations of warriors according to a Yoeme knowledge of history consistent with Aniam cosmology. To support my analysis, I will supply

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historical background when necessary. Contrary to the myth of Yaqui warrior identity promoted by Mexican and Chicana/o literatures, these traditional narratives also emphasize religious arraigamiento in the homeland through an ancestral topography endowed with cosmological significance, and therefore provide a cultural context for the Yaqui warrior’s defense of his territory. TRADITIONAL YAQUI STORIES

The variety of traditional Yoeme myths is consistent with Carlos Montemayor’s proposal that traditional indigenous tales have five sources: (1) European literature, (2) Spanish oral tradition, (3) African slave oral tradition, (4) written pre-­ Hispanic historical texts (codices, for example), and (5) pre-­Hispanic indigenous oral tradition (17). Some narratives are meant to entertain while others reinforce community culture and history—­that is, group identity. There are stories about brujos (sorcerers), Christian tales, moral fables, and origin stories that predate Jesuit teachings. While some describe traditional governmental structures, others foretell the coming of the Conquista. And, not surprisingly, some ancient origin stories embrace Catholic themes. Both Giddings and Spicer collected stories from Yoeme storytellers in the 1940s. Giddings’s take on Yoeme folklore is more secular and focuses on just one of its functions within the community: entertainment. Nevertheless, her collection includes a narrative considered sacred by Yoeme elders: “The Flood and the Prophets,” part of the Testamento, the text that establishes the boundaries of the sacred homeland Hiakim (Evers and Molina, “Holy” 23). Because of the secretive nature of many of these narratives, Giddings concludes, “Primarily, myths and legends are considered entertaining history and the tales as pure entertainment. As a body, the folklore is not considered sacred, although it is associated with native religion and ritual” (18). She also concludes that Yaqui storytelling “today is quite informal” (15). Giddings’s conclusion is due to the guarded nature of Yoeme storytelling during and prior to the 1940s. Larry Evers and Felipe S. Molina have written about Yaqui fears that, if published in Spanish, these narratives would be misused by Mexicans to take their land or alter their religion. The fear of Mexican manipulation of origin stories is not unfounded among indigenous people. Montemayor records the complaint of one Zapotec writer who relates the story of how a “brujo cristiano . . . venía a retar al brujo más poderoso de ahí” (Christian sorcerer . . . came to challenge the most powerful sorcerer there) (96). After the Christian brujo’s victory, the town is justly destroyed. The indigenous writer

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complains, “Pero una historia como ésta no puede ser un cuento indio, porque es contraria a nosotros. Sólo sirve para justificar que nos hayan matado, que hayan desaparecido nuestros pueblos” (But a narrative such as this one cannot be an Indian story, because it is contrary to us. It only serves to justify that they have killed us, and that our pueblos have disappeared) (96). Montemayor, who also analyzes the formalities of storytelling, promotes a vital function for traditional stories: “aunque se escuchen en reuniones familiares, no tienen como fin primordial la diversión, sino el fortalecimiento de tradiciones, creencias o datos religiosos y geográficos” (though they might be heard in family gatherings, their primordial aim is not to entertain, but rather to fortify traditions, beliefs, or religious and geographical information) (13). As far as who may tell stories, Montemayor finds that, despite occasions of informality, not just anybody can tell certain traditional stories, especially to foreigners, a fact that often leads scholars to believe that indigenous people have little formal structure in storytelling or that they have no stories at all. Thus, while Giddings finds informal storytelling in equally informal settings, Spicer describes how the “Rahum Land Myths” “were told under the most solemn circumstance” by elder Juan Valenzuela “with village elders and with most of the young men of the struggling new village present” (qtd. in Evers and Molina, “Holy” 16).8 The importance and formality of traditional Yoeme stories extend to a community literary tradition and function to produce collective identity. It helps to remember that Giddings’s collection, first published in 1959 as an article, was recorded in 1942, and that another collection was recorded by Alfonso Fabila in 1939 (Olavarría, Análisis 44).9 Evers and Molina find a written literary tradition in the pueblo of Rahum dated before 1927, interrupted by the turbulence of the Mexican military campaigns to drive the Yoemem out of their lands (“Holy” 43). The testimony of storyteller Lucas Chávez claims that nineteenth-­century insurgent José María Leyva Cajeme carried a copy of the group of myths known as the Testamento (Evers and Molina, “Holy” 33–­34). If true, Chávez’s testimony dates written traditional stories to sometime before 1887, the year of Cajeme’s capture. And Spicer indicates that Yoeme informants “all read Spanish and wrote Yaqui in a more or less standardized script which had been in general use since at least the early 1800s” (qtd. in Evers and Molina, “Holy” 16). According to this research, Yoeme collective identity has been formed in part by a formal written mythology that dates back more than 131 years and accompanies an even longer formal oral tradition—­it has been formed, that is, by both an oral and a written community voice. This is significant in that it demonstrates the Yoeme

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leadership’s recognition of the legal power nonindigenous societies attribute to the written word, and speaks to Native communities’ strategies to combat their silencing by outsiders. But it also calls into question Western tendencies to deem oral histories and cosmologies deficient and officially (read: academically and legally) illegitimate. ARRAIGAMIENTO IN TRADITIONAL YAQUI STORIES

The first stories analyzed here—­“ Yomumuli and the Little Surem People,” “Leyenda yaqui de las predicciones” (Yaqui Legend of the Predictions), and “Omteme”—­will be studied as narratives of the prior cosmological tradition that, though they may allude to Catholic beliefs, present those beliefs as secondary to Yoeme values. Though “Leyenda” comes to us from an anonymous informant, Giddings collected “Yomumuli” and “Omteme” from Yaqui elder Lucas Chávez, a survivor of the government’s guerras de exterminio residing in Pascua, Arizona. Because of the strong geographical references and creation of a Yoeme topography, these stories should be studied as what Montemayor has called “foundational stories” (80). Montemayor also describes another category of traditional narrative, cuentos tradicionales de entidades invisibles (traditional stories of invisible entities); though these narratives may include Western motifs—­European or Christian in theme—­they always subordinate such motifs to indigenous cosmology and worldview, because their ultimate aim is the preservation of the Native community’s cultural knowledge (50). In “Yomumuli and the Little Surem People,” “Leyenda yaqui de las predicciones,” and “Omteme,” Yoeme ancestors known as the Surem are dealt a shocking blow when a talking tree (or stick) predicts sweeping cultural and social change, including the Conquista and evangelization. The ancient Yoemem confront the invasion of their territory with community discussions, combat, and a supernatural and material attachment to this territory. New events, like the universal flood, the singing of Hiakim’s limits, and the founding of the eight pueblos, are narrated in the Testamento. Fusing Catholicism and the Aniam realms of the Surem, the Testamento is a traditional epistemic document that establishes a transcultural religious arraigamiento in the Río Yaqui territory. The chosen foundational narratives, as Ruth Giddings puts it, demonstrate “the tribe’s sense of superiority, the sacred and material value of their territory, and the antiquity and distinctiveness of their customs” (20). Shorter describes the act of retelling Yoeme mythology, deer dancing, and

The Warrior in Yoeme Cultural History   43

other rituals as “these ways of knowing, these epistemologies, [that] are at once emplaced, place specific, embodied and performed” (51). They are traditional narratives retold for the sake of the survival of community traditions, cosmologies, and geographies (Montemayor 13). In the following analysis we find the ways in which the intertwining of homeland and ethnicity, via religion and storytelling, promotes an identity of Yoeme warriorhood fully integrated into the complex web of community epistemology and distinct from the essentializing depictions produced by nonindigenous writers.

THE YAQUI WARRIOR IN EARLY TRADITIONAL STORIES The events of “Yomumuli and the Little Surem People,” collected by Giddings, take place in pre-­Jesuit, pre-­agricultural times when giant animals roamed: “Long before the Conquest of the Spaniards, when all of the land which is Mexico was wild, this country was called Suré” (Giddings 25). The inhabitants of Suré, the Surem, are all “children of Yomumuli,” including “the Hueleves, the Opatas, the Pimas, the Papagos, the Seris.” A talking tree, or “huge stick which reached from the ground to the sky,” appears one day on what is today Omteme Kawi (Angry Mountain) and speaks in a humming sound incomprehensible to the wise men: “Only Yomumuli could understand and she wanted to help her people whom she had created” (26).10 Yomumuli, providing a strict translation of the tree’s message, announces the new laws promulgated by it, ordering the people and animals where and how to live, teaching about hunting and agriculture, and prophesizing the invention of flying apparatuses. Finally, the Conquista is prophesized: It told how, someday, Jesucristo would appear, as he was to appear to all people. . . . Many people said that Yomumuli was just making all this up. According to her, the talking tree said that the people would soon have leaders, captains, and would be baptized. The people did not believe this. (26)

Yomumuli, who disagrees with some of the talking stick’s laws and prophecies, becomes upset at her people’s mistrust of her. Leaving for the north, she “left a chief on each hill and the hills were named for these men” (27). The people also react:

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The people did not like the prospect of this Conquest which was coming. So they

either descended into the earth to live inside of hills or they went to live in the sea. (27)

And yet, the powerful little Surem have not left: They still live in the hills and the sea. They favor man and help him when they can. Some, in the sea, are like sirens and live on islands. Others are whales who come

near to a boat to warn it when it is in danger. All the Surem are wild pagans. If a Yaqui is lost in the monte, these little people help him by bringing him food and fire, and then they go away. (27)

After some of the Surem “descended into the earth,” others awaited the Conquista and baptism, and “grew to be taller than the Surem.” “Yomumuli and the Little Surem People” offers two simultaneous readings, insofar as it explains the origins of Yoeme culture before the Conquista and at the same time anticipates the introduction of Western ways of life. The mythological time of the narrative is general, and the place supernatural. Considering Spicer’s history, the narrative’s enchanted mythological setting suggests that the Yoeme ancestors in this traditional story lived in the Huya Ania.11 Yomumuli, creator divinity of the Surem, benevolently translates the laws and prophecies of the talking tree, most of which deal with Yoeme society and relationships to nature. The central role of Yomumuli in this important origin story—­in different versions she is a “Sea Hamut (Flower Woman), a woman with special powers,” an old wise woman, a great hunter, or a poetess (Shorter 123; Erickson 31)—­ may be indicative of Yaqui women’s precolonial cultural leadership. The conflict arises in the foretelling of the Conquista, an invasion that will bring about a new way of life, and which provokes ancestral arraigamiento in the Río Yaqui territory.12 Some of the people are so upset by the prophecy of the Conquista that they accuse their divine mother of lying. But the tree foretells not only the military conquistadors but also the eventual introduction of Catholic life through the appearance of Jesus Christ and baptism. The offended Yomumuli leaves and assigns a chief to each mountain, setting the stage for the next story, and the talking tree’s presaging of Jesus Christ also anticipates a rupture with ancestral culture. But the simultaneous proclamation of Yoeme societal laws—­ which govern hunting, agriculture, and residence—­and the divining of Catholic evangelization are more indicative of the Aniam-­Christian transculturation that

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defines Yoeme culture. The divinity Yomumuli carries out the task of translating the prophecies that lead to the end of her direct influence among her “children” and the eventual introduction of Catholicism. In this foundational narrative, baptism becomes an indigenous choice, not an imposed means of domination. And the story describes a key moment in which Surem ancestors choose to embrace a new identity, a Yaqui indigeneity which Kirstin Erickson explains as “the ethnogenesis (the coming into being) of the Yaqui people” (25). Further­more, this origin story subordinates Catholicism to Yoeme Aniam, seeing as the divine or supernatural statuses of Yomumuli, the talking stick, and the Surem are never in question. Still, when the two cosmologies in­directly confront each other, a schism occurs. Yoeme ancestors unhappy with the prophecy literally “descended into the earth,” becoming powerful entities associated with the Huya Ania and therefore with the Yoemem; thus, upon the birth of their identity, the “Yoeme ground their indigeneity in the landscape, providing their communities with aboriginal kinship solidarity” (Shorter 130).13 Here begins the contemporary Yoeme connection to the Yaqui Valley through the mythological “deep rooting” (arraigamiento) of their ancestors in the Hiakim territory. “Leyenda yaqui de las predicciones” relates the pre-­Hispanic war between the Yoeme nation and a giant serpent. In Suré, in a mythological time when the Surem reinaba sobre sus hermanos de las naciones Apache, Euleve, Mayo, Opata, Pápago, Pima y Seri, siendo centro de la gran confederación india, existió en el Cerro Surem un pueblo de yaquis enanitos, ascendientes de los actuales cuyo suelo estaba siendo asolado por una enorme serpiente. (Olavarría, Análisis 82)

(ruled over their brothers of the Apache, Euleve, Mayo, Opata, Papago, Pima, and

Seri nations, being the center of the great indigenous confederacy, there existed in Cerro Surem a pueblo of small Yaquis, ancestors of today’s, whose land was being devastated by an enormous serpent.)

This invader has been prophesized by a talking tree. Because of the prophecy, the people have established strategic points of defense throughout the territory. Unable to harm the monster in the first battle at a place known as Tetabampo (agua caliente, hot water) or Vejulbampo, and then defeated at Zauguomúguri (zahuaros balanceados, balanced saguaros), the leader Napohuizaimgizácame

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(el que tiene como penacho la Vía Láctea, he who wears the Milky Way as a plume) commissions the swallow Gocobábasela to appeal to the grasshopper Guóchimea, a powerful brujo, for help. The swallow Gocobábasela solicits the grasshopper in the name of “la Santísima Trinidad” (the Most Holy Trinity) to help the eight tribes destroy the terrible enemy prophesized by the talking tree. Guóchimea first prays and then promises to help in the name of “Dios Padre . . . Dios Hijo y Dios Espíritu Santo” (God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit). With his sharpened powerful leg spurs, the grasshopper climbs to the top of Cerro Júparo (mezquites cojos, wobbly mesquites) and leaps the distance to a place called Gochimea (muerto por el chapulín, killed by the grasshopper), where the Surem are still awaiting the swallow (Olavarría, Análisis 83). Camouflaging himself with the juices of local vegetation, the wise brujo remains unseen by the giant serpent, whom he suddenly decapitates with his spurs as he slithers by. Defeated, the snake addresses the Supreme General Yazicue (nombre del cerro que se halla a la orilla del mar, name of the hill found at the edge of the sea), foretelling a new threat: Te advierto e invito a que se cuiden mucho porque pasando los años vendrán del

Oriente y el Sur unos hombres blancos con armas poderosas que vomitan fuego. Si quieren salir avantes en la lucha, quítenles sus propios medios ofensivos y com-

bátanlos sin miedo y descanso; de lo contrario serán esclavizados, despojándolos de su territorio. (83)

(I warn and advise you to beware for in the coming years there will come from

the East and the South White men with powerful weapons that vomit fire. If

you wish to succeed in the struggle, take their own offensive means and fight them fearlessly and tirelessly; otherwise, you will be enslaved and stripped of your territory.)

Yazicue orders his generals and captains—­among them Omteme, Cúbae, Corasepe, and Akimore, whose names are attached to particular mountains and other landmarks in the Hiakim territory today—­to prepare. The giant snake’s body then turns to stone and becomes the elevation known as Guóchimea. “Leyenda yaqui de las predicciones” furthers the theme of the foretelling of the Conquista and reproduces the pre-­Jesuit conception of Yoeme culture found in “Yomumuli and the Little Surem People.” The story also provides characterizations of geographical origins and depictions of a productive Yoeme

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bellicosity in an indigenous register. The setting of the narrative is still Suré, and the action takes place in the same type of mythological time. However, the story situates the Surem in an interstitial moment. There is a reference to the talking tree’s prophecy of an invading force, although in this narrative the threat is not the Conquista but rather the enormous serpent. And it is the defeated serpent who foretells the coming of the White men with firearms. Here, the story anticipates colonial history and also depicts Yoeme encounters with European conquistadors and Catholic missionaries as involving conscious decision, thereby perpetuating “the talking tree as a native discursive practice” in which, writes Shorter, “Yoeme mythohistory displaces European centrality” (130–­31). Catholic themes, though many, still remain subordinated to pre-­Jesuit cosmology. The Catholicism of the main characters does not contradict this thematic subordination, because it does not inhibit their non-­Catholic supernatural qualities. Guóchimea is still a speaking grasshopper who also happens to be a powerful brujo. Likewise, the Yoemem continue to be described as little people and the giant serpent is not associated with the devil. Like the previous story, “Leyenda yaqui de las predicciones” reconciles Aniam cosmology with Catholic themes, much as the participation of the pascola and the deer dancer in Holy Saturday and Sunday can be seen as the reconciliation of Aniam tradition with Catholic ritual. “Leyenda yaqui de las predicciones” presents Native centrality in the narration of the origins of certain geographical landmarks—­which promotes arraigamiento in homeland—­and in the warrior’s origins in relation to the preservation of the Yoeme ancestral territory, Hiakim. The identification of important warriors as the namesakes of mountains and caves creates an indigenous topography that allows the Yoeme community to recognize the territory as their own through popular cosmological narrative. At the same time, warrior ancestors are conceded a venerable place within indigenous culture. The enormous serpent’s body transforms into the Guóchimea cerro, named after the brujo grasshopper who slays it. In turn, Gochimea, the name of the area in which the serpent and the indigenous leaders await the brujo, means “killed by the grasshopper.” Furthermore, as previously mentioned, the names of important Yaqui military leaders, guardians of Hiakim, are inscribed onto mountains. The origin story is thoroughly represented in the Río Yaqui territorial geography, granting cultural priority to warrior ancestors. “The tribe’s sense of superiority,” visible in the origin story’s claim to an ancient leadership role over local indigenous nations and in its telling of the

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origins of Yoeme warriorhood, has its historical complements (Giddings 20). The introduction refers to the “gran confederación india” (great Indian confederation) in which Yaquis reigned over “naciones Apache, Euleve, Mayo, Opata, Pápago, Pima y Seri” (Apache, Euleve, Mayo, Opata, Papago, Pima, and Seri nations) (Olavarría, Análisis 82). Here, we can perhaps only allude to a few historical references. Pérez de Ribas claims in his chronicle that the Yaquis had no allies among the other indigenous nations in 1617, declaring that “the Mayo, who were in part their neighbors, were at that time [1605–­10] attempting to become Christians, these Indians were the Yaqui’s principal enemy and were continually at war with them” (Triumphs 327). In describing their character, he writes that the Yaquis are prone to “speak loudly, with unusual zest, and they are extremely arrogant” (329). This description, along with the Jesuit’s previous one of their prowess in combat, paints a portrait of a proud and confident people. It is worth remembering that the Jesuit missionary had been allowed into the Hiakim territory only after the Yoemem had successfully fought off Spanish military conquest. In allusion to intertribal conflicts, Miguel Othón de Mendizábal’s history describes Jesuit presence in Sonora and Sinaloa as a welcome buffer between Yaquis, Seris, Apaches, and the other indigenous nations with whom they competed for resources (118). The self-­depiction of regional leadership in “Leyenda yaqui de las predicciones” resembles the 1826 vision of Juan Ignacio Jusacamea, or Juan Banderas, of an army made up of regional indigenous nations to thwart further yori invasion. Historian Evelyn Hu-­DeHart explains that “Banderas made overtures to the Pimas, Opatas, Eudeves, Pápagos, Seris, and even the Apaches to join the Yaqui rebellion and form a permanent Indian alliance for the purpose of regaining possession of their land[s]” (Yaqui Resistance 26). And, in the late nineteenth century, Cajeme’s uprising gained substantial support from the Mayo nation for some time. Even today, Yoeme people who live in their ancestral territory and speak their own language tend to be openly proud of this fact, despite prevalent local racism. Thomas McGuire, in Politics and Ethnicity on the Río Yaqui: Potam Revisited, studies the nexuses between Yoeme ethnic identity and political mobilization in two distinct political struggles undertaken in the 1970s: the 1975 move to reclaim traditional territory south of the Río Yaqui, and the 1972 petition to ensure exclusive rights to shrimp fishing in the Bahía de Los Lobos, which is part of the official territory granted by President Lázaro Cárdenas’s decree. Yoeme pride and the Yoeme history of struggle—­or warriorhood, depending on how we define it—­based on the defense of territory and resources are hardly myths.

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A study of indigenous identity based on sustained military leadership and campaigns appears dangerously similar to the Yaqui warrior myth perpetuated by Mexicans, and would be incomplete without considering the place of Yoeme warriorhood within the mythohistory inscribed in the Río Yaqui territory. The cultural link between fighter and territory lies in the second prophecy of the Conquista announced by the serpent, who warns that in order to secure victory over the armed White men coming from the southeast, they must strip them of their weapons and fight fearlessly and tirelessly, or else become landless slaves. Even though the talking tree has prophesized the serpent’s coming, the people still find themselves incapable of defeating the monster, who is only vanquished by the brujo Guóchimea. This failure provides a lesson for the ancient Yoemem. First, it is apparent that they were insufficiently prepared, for their foe devastates their army. Thus, in response to the dying serpent’s prophecy, the Supreme General Yazicue immediately orders heightened vigilance and readiness; the yori invaders will be coming for their freedom and for Hiakim, the territory into which many Surem have already descended. Second, they learn that to win they must master the yori ’s weapons, or firearms. However, the advice “quítenles sus propios medios ofensivos” (take their own offensive means) may also be symbolic. While the Yaquis’ ceaseless combat has been recorded by nonindigenous writers, there are other “means” by which the Spanish and Mexicans have sought to defeat the Yoeme people and strip them of their land. Catholicism is perhaps the most obvious—­changes to language, religion, social organization, and economy that came with the Jesuit presence, which allowed the Yoemem to live relatively undisturbed through most of the seventeenth century and part of the eighteenth. Acquisition of Catholicism was another means by which the Spanish Empire sought to conquer and pacify the Yoemem; instead, Yoeme Catholicism fortified the indigenous nation’s collective identity and social structures. In short, the indigenous nation succeeded in “indigenizing Catholicism” and using the Christian God and saints to resist Spanish colonial and Mexican encroachment (Evers and Molina, “Holy” 5). As I discussed in earlier sections of this chapter, the complex interplay between Aniam and Christian cosmologies reveals the tension between two epistemic systems that have undergone a fusion necessary for material and cultural survival. “Leyenda yaqui de las predicciones” serves as the origin story of the warrior according to Yoeme cosmology. In other words, in its perpetuation of the talking tree’s discourse of ethnogenesis, or Yaqui indigeneity, it serves as a Yoeme figuration of a culturally mandated warriorhood of pre-­Columbian origin.

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The third of the origin stories I examine in this section, “Omteme,” begins by reminding the listener that, after translating the prophecy of the talking tree, Yomumuli (the creator of the indigenous people of Sonora) “left governors behind for each region,” and that “these chiefs lived on the tops of mountains along the Río Yaqui” (Giddings 65). One of these chiefs, the wise Omteme (whose name means “he is angry”), “knew that the Conquest would come and all of the things it would bring with it. He knew that it would come with two words—­good and bad” (65). Atop his hill, he witnesses the moment “when Columbus came into the port of Guaymas” and angrily awaits the Spanish treachery to come. Columbus, on a hill now named Takalaim (located near Guaymas), is confronted by Omteme, who remains atop his own hill and asks: “On what conditions do you want to make the Conquest?” Columbus, since he “did not have a good heart,” responds to Omteme twice with gunfire. Unfamiliar with firearms, the wise and angry Omteme realizes he is being attacked after the third shot: “He took his bow and he shot. The arrow hit the top of the hill on which the conqueror stood, splitting the mountain in two. The conqueror fell into the sea and drowned” (66). Omteme then addresses his people, declaring that he is leaving, “and descended into the heart of his hill.” After this, “most of the people also went into the mountains or into the sea, for they could not accept the Conquest. Like their chief, Omteme, they said, ‘I am leaving now’” (66). “Omteme” is a Yoeme origin story. But which origins does the oral narrative reveal? To begin with, “Omteme” further reveals the divided nature of Yoeme culture after Jesuit arrival and defines Yoeme-­yori relations. The action occurs in the ancient Yoeme territory, during a mythological time in which supernatural events are possible. But its introduction of a real historical character in Christopher Columbus reveals a rupture with the previous two stories and with other origin stories in which European motifs are completely subordinated to ancient Aniam cosmology, if present at all.14 The arrival of Christopher Columbus strongly suggests Yoeme historical precedence. Here, Columbus sails the Sea of Cortez to dock at Guaymas and directly affronts a Yoeme ancestor. And yet, Aniam cosmology continues to be dominant. The manner of Columbus’s death and Omteme’s descent exemplify the sort of magical feats also found in “Yomumuli and the Little Surem People” and “Leyenda yaqui de las predicciones.” The divided nature of Yoeme Catholicism, visible in its syncretic or transcultural ritual practice, is represented in the view of the Conquista held by Omteme, who wisely “knew that it would come with two words—­good and

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bad” (Giddings 65). The good may refer to the baptism prophesized by the talking tree; we may assume this, as Omteme was not one of the Surem who descended into the earth when baptism was foretold. The bad is related to Christopher Columbus, whose appearance makes Omteme “very angry because he knew that the Spaniards were coming with treachery”; Omteme encounters not a priest, but rather a violent “conqueror,” just as the Yoemem did in 1533. Importantly, Omteme provides the European ample opportunity to explain himself and his intentions. It is Columbus who, without speaking, attacks the Yoeme leader and ancestor. Omteme, consistent with prophecies spoken by the talking tree and the giant serpent, retaliates in defense of Hiakim. This origin myth narrates the first encounter between Yoeme and European, and thereby creates a Yoeme-­yori (Omteme-­Columbus) paradigm that establishes the mythological origins of the warrior as defender of Hiakim. The depiction of Columbus’s silence and cruelty demonstrates both a historical mistrust of nonindigenous people and a Native perspective on the nonindigenous conquistador in particular. Accounts of the 1533 encounter with Diego de Guzmán’s army could serve as a guide. When this legendary historic clash is retold, the focus is often on the indigenous desire to communicate hostility through the “drawing of the line.” An anonymous chronicler of Diego de Guzmán’s 1533 expedition through the Northwest of Mexico left a record of its encounter with the Yoemem. Coming from the Mayo territory, the Spanish military force encountered a Yoeme leader, surrounded by agitated warriors, described as an old man more distinguished than the others, because he wore a black robe like a scapulary, studded with pearls and surrounded by dogs, birds and deer and many

other things. And as it was morning, and the sunlight fell on him, he blazed like

silver. He carried his bow and arrows, and a wooden staff with a very elaborate handle, and was in control of the people. (qtd. in Hu-­DeHart, Missionaries 15)

It was with this notable staff that the leader drew the famous line to communicate the limits of Spanish advance. Perhaps through his Mayo guide, Guzmán communicated his desire for peace and asked to be fed. Consistent with Pérez de Ribas’s later description of their character, the proud and confident Yoemem responded with an outrageous request: that “they would gladly oblige if the Spaniards would allow themselves and their horses to be tied up” (Hu-­DeHart, Missionaries 15).15 The Spanish responded with a sudden act of deceit, firing a cannon at the indigenous army, but, unable to defeat the Yaquis, were forced to

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retreat. Recall that, like the solemn leader of the 1533 encounter, the confident Omteme also attempts to communicate with the European invader on peaceful terms, is attacked, and manages to defeat his aggressor. Both Yoeme ancestors—­ one a historical legend and the other mythological—­are informed of and upset by the yori presence. Displeased with the devious nature of the European, Omteme disappears into the ground, rooting himself deep “into the heart of his hill,” taking along with him most of the people, who “went into the mountains or into the sea” (Giddings 66). Just as Omteme bequeaths his name and story to his hill, the 1533 indigenous leader inscribes himself in Yoeme history by performing the boundaries of Hiakim before Spanish soldiers and Yoeme fighters, through what Shorter calls one of the “native cartographic practices” in place before European arrival (286). “Omteme” displays the same act of arraigamiento that occurs as a result of the schism produced by the Conquista in “Yomumuli and the Little Surem People.” The act of arraigamiento itself can also be seen as a form of defense; for indeed, to remove Omteme from his territory is to move a mountain (specifically, the one named Omteme Kawi). “Omteme” is an allegory of the first encounter in 1533, an indigenous epistemic document of oral tradition that serves as an interpretation of events, beliefs, and practices. The narrative’s mythological Omteme-­Columbus paradigm has a broader equivalency as Yoeme-­yori, and more precise correspondences to the encounter between the 1533 Yoeme leader and Guzmán, the one between the 1610 Yoeme leader and Hurdaide, and perhaps any other encounter between outsiders and indigenous community leaders—­Juan Banderas, Cajeme, Tetabiate—­who have found the need to reestablish and defend Hiakim’s geographic and cultural borders. These three origin stories represent a warrior identity tied directly to the Yoeme land through an inherited mythohistorical topography of major landmarks and the belief in an ancestral arraigamiento in which the community’s forebears continue to live within the soil. As such, the warrior is a pre-­Hispanic institution, and one that, like the rest of ancient Yoeme culture, is impacted by European contact. This cultural context was not taken into account during the colonial era. And, of course, a resentful image of innately violent Yaquis emerged. The purpose of this chapter is not to promote yet another Yaqui warrior myth (i.e., the warrior as defender of Hiakim) available for external acquisition, nor is it to deny the Yoeme history of war.16 Instead, this chapter seeks the indigenous epistemology that contextualizes the warrior’s relationship to Yoeme land, history, and culture. In this way, representations of stoic and bloodthirsty Yoemem

The Warrior in Yoeme Cultural History   53

in the Mexican imaginary and in literature can be better understood as part of an externally performed mythification of the warrior through which ideologues (be they positivistas, indigenistas, or chicanistas) acquire the concept of the indigenous fighter as a medium through which to communicate varying discourses.

THE YAQUI WARRIOR AND THE TESTAMENTO The second set of traditional stories, known collectively as the Testamento, recounts the religiously ordained territorial borders of the Yoeme homeland Hiakim. The version of the Testamento discussed here is a translation provided to Evers and Molina by don Alfonso Florez Leyva, a Yoeme elder residing in Las Guásimas, Sonora, who lived through various episodes of Mexican encroachment and community political activism. For Spicer, this set of traditional stories comprised “the real cultural core of nineteenth-­century Yaqui life . . . the ideals and the principles, the values, which kept Yaquis separate from Mexicans and which made them resist the Mexican encroachments” (“Excerpt” 115). What separates the Testamento from the previous set of origin stories is its expression of indigenous origins through the transcultural vision of Yoeme Catholicism that formed as a result of Jesuit teachings and continued to develop after Jesuit expulsion in the eighteenth century. In addition to its influence in daily religious life, the Testamento has also served as a political document, and reflects the ongoing relationship between oral traditions and written text in surviving indigenous cultures. This section treats the set of oral/written narratives as foundational stories of place that employ motifs from the dominant colonial society and yet present these Catholic motifs as possessing indigenous traits (Montemayor 80). I draw upon Evers and Molina’s body of research, which is vital for understanding the significance of the Testamento, as well as Shorter’s analyses. My summary originates from the English version of Evers and Molina’s “Don Alfonso Florez Leyva’s ‘Testamento’: Holograph, Transcription, and Translation.” The first line of the Testamento reads, “Principal testament of the Dividing Line,” and the text describes the universal flood that occurred “on the 7th day of February . . . in the year 614” and lasted “40 days and 40 nights,” destroying all life on earth (Florez Leyva et al. 93). The waters subsided between the 17th of July and the 1st of November:

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And Llaitowui and 13 others were saved and 11 women on the Hill of Parvas. Today it is Mataehale. And on the Hill of Jonas, Aitey and 11 souls and one woman

named Enac Dolores and she disappeared in the year, month of September, she

turned into a statue of stone and today it is Matuakame. And on the Hill Eoposim

6 were saved and today it is Tosal Kawui and on Towuai 3. Today it is Repa Kawui. And on the Hill Goljota Fauc Enak and 2 more. Today it is Tepparia. Today it is called Otam Kawui. And on Mount Sinai one who is Vakula.

And one woman Domicilia who is a seraph, and 7 birds and 7 donkeys and 7

little dogs. Today it is Samahuaka. And on Mount Baber one who is Equitollis and one woman who was called Parsenovis. And today it is Totoitakusepo. (94)

Vakula, Fauc (or Fau) Enak, and Seraphin are then visited by “two angels at Mount Sinai at dawn,” who prophesize the coming of a chosen one. On the 7th of November, the Angel Graviel commands them to repent and to hear the voice of God. The Yoemem form a pact with God, who warns them: “Let nobody deceive you. This is my house of prayer. And you will be called by all the people ‘false prophets’. . . . If anyone speaks to you, saying: ‘I am God,’ do not believe him” (95). Belief in false prophets, God warns the survivors, will result in fratricide. Between 1414 and 1417, Ratbi Kuawuamea, along with Isiderio Sinsai, Andres Cusmes, and Andres Quiso, orders his people, “walk ye through all the wilderness and hills and villages, preaching the Holy Dividing Line announcing the Gospel of the Kingdom of God, to leave one place which is Takalaim”; from Takalaim they are told to go to Kavorca (or Caborca) (96). The narrative style now shifts to something resembling a sermon that lists Yoeme authorities and ends with “the Bow Leader’s Society, the group responsible for the protection of the Yaqui homeland and the Kohtumbre, the group that oversees all the Yaqui Lenten ceremonies” (Evers and Molina, “Holy” 22). Then, citing the Holy Trinity, the narrative explains that the “three Gods that are like this, gave us this inheritance [the Yoeme territory], lords, fathers” (Florez Leyva et al. 97). Then follows the actual march and the singing of the Holy Dividing Line: from the mountain Mojonea to Takalaim, from Kokoripo to Kokoraqui, and so on. In Kokoraqui, the prophets announce that “in the course of some years will come some wicked men from Getsamanix, that is Nueva España [New Spain], those men, the image of Isiper, are invaders and enemies of our life and they do not respect others and they will keep these properties” (98). Finally, the Testamento lists the eight pueblos and the names of the leaders “who were being given” these pueblos (100–­101). The text ends: “Well, fathers [referring

The Warrior in Yoeme Cultural History   55

to the authorities of the eight pueblos], this is all our elders’ earth inheritance, that which sits, like this it is written, our principal maehtom [Yoeme religious leaders] left it like this to the Yoemem” (101). What first needs addressing are the strong Catholic motifs present in the Testamento, a narrative that establishes indigenous authority over the homeland Hiakim. It is a foundational story relating the establishment of the eight pueblos, which repeats the prophecy of the arrival of the Spanish conquerors and alludes to territorial defense. At first glance, one is tempted to view the Testamento, with its biblical overtones—­clear evidence of Jesuit influence—­as a sort of reproduction of the story of Noah’s ark. Rain ravages life on earth for forty days and forty nights, leaving only a small number of worthy survivors to inherit the land. As in the story of Noah, the Yoeme leader Llaitowui is a righteous man, “a perfect, just gentleman who in his generations walked with God,” and he and the Yoeme survivors also enter into a covenant with God, a “pact between God and all living souls” (Florez Leyva et al. 93–­95).17 Montemayor tells us that some indigenous foundational stories may reproduce Catholic themes, while actually subordinating these themes to dominant indigenous ideologies (80). So, while the Yoeme community has adopted the biblical flood story as a result of Jesuit influence, the strong presence of what I have chosen to call Yoeme arraigamiento casts serious doubt on any interpretation of straightforward indigenous acculturation. Evers and Molina study the acquisition of the flood myth as a key component but note the ways in which the Testamento concentrates on establishing the Yaqui nation’s geographic boundaries: “the versions and contexts that we bring forward from Yaqui community settings focus much more attention on the definition of the Holy Dividing Line and emphasize the continuing importance of defending it” (“Holy” 23). It is important to remember that the first line of the Testamento labels the sacred narrative as the “Principal testament of the Dividing Line” (Florez Leyva et al. 93), and that the myth refers frequently to the Hiakim territory and the eight pueblos as “our elders’ earth inheritance” (101). Despite clear biblical references, the concept of arraigamiento already analyzed in stories related to the talking tree can be found at work in the Testamento in at least two themes: the mythological Yoeme topography and the foretelling of Spanish invasion. The landmarks mentioned in the Testamento, like those mentioned in “Yomumuli and the Little Surem People,” “Leyenda yaqui de las predicciones,” and “Omteme,” are part of contemporary Yaqui topography; that is to say, the mythological geography of Hiakim is congruent

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with the territory’s material existence. More than biblical references, the Cerro de Golgotha, the Cerro de Parvas, and the Sierra Sinai are physical evidence of a religiously ordained right to the Hiakim territory. The flood myth portion of the text must be read as the demarcation of the territorial boundary (the Holy Dividing Line) through Catholic narrative convention, resulting in a Yoeme religious topography inclusive of the Surem ancestors who continue to inhabit the Huya Ania. The Testamento, then, is also an epistemic document that delineates the pre-­Columbian boundaries of Hiakim and the Yoeme nation’s cultural relationship to it; as Shorter explains, it “works as a narrative map, a cartographic speech act, and a textual practice that define Yoeme aboriginal rights to their land” (68). The Testamento’s demarcation of the Yaqui Valley is linked to the territory’s defense from invaders. The Testamento reveals as threats not only false prophets, but also Spaniards, who “are associated with ‘Lucifer’ and are ‘invaders and enemies of our life’” (Evers and Molina, “Holy” 24). Perhaps more importantly, we learn that “they will keep these properties” (Florez Leyva et al. 98). Here the origin myth continues the discourse, begun by the talking tree’s prophecy, with which indigenous community experience displaces nonindigenous Western history (Shorter 130–­31). Unlike in the “Omteme” narrative, here it is the Yoeme Catholic God who upholds warrior identity as a mandate for territorial sovereignty. Even the religious nature of the Hiakim topography expresses God’s favor toward the Yoemem. Evers and Molina remind us: Yaquis managed to appropriate those gods as their own. Yaqui interpreters [of Christian mythology] in this way attempted a bold reversal to protect their home-

land. They have turned the authority of the gods they appropriated from the

Spaniards back on the waves of Euro-­Mexican colonists who have followed in the long wake of the Conquest. (“Holy” 5)

The Testamento advances the themes and logic found in “Yomumuli and the Little Surem People,” “Leyenda yaqui de las predicciones,” and “Omteme”: (1) the divine nature of their land, (2) an ancestral arraigamiento in the Yaqui territory, and (3) the importance of the defense of this territory against invaders. The talking tree’s prophecy and the serpent’s warning in “Leyenda yaqui de las predicciones” reverberate in the way Aniam epistemology and Catholic mythology coalesce in the Testamento, turning the invaders’ own weapon of religious pacification against them.

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It is also important to recognize the political history of this text. Part of the Yoeme oral tradition, the Testamento is also a text written for and by the Yoeme community (within which it circulates) in a language that is a blend of Yoeme and Spanish—­a difficult language to decipher at times, but mostly understandable by Mexicans (Evers and Molina, “Holy” 36–­37). Evers and Molina’s research uncovers that the Testamento has been worked on both orally and textually. They cite Yaqui community meetings involving the authorities of the eight pueblos, in which the Testamento was a topic of discussion and possible modification. “It seems to us,” conclude Evers and Molina, “that this is a reference to a process of community or group decision making by consensus” (25). And they observe that the traditional narrative “provides another case for ongoing inquiry into the complex relations between oral and textual practice” (5). As a written document, it has been linked to José María Leyva Cajeme, who is thought to have carried it on him, along with other important community symbols, when he waged his revolution for Yoeme autonomy. When Lucas Chávez—­a contributor to Giddings’s collection—­spoke with Spicer about the text in 1942, he claimed that Cajeme had buried it: When the war started, Cajeme made up from these documents a series of papers which serve as title to the Río Yaqui. . . . [Porfirio] Díaz wanted to get these

papers; because if he could have them in his possession he could say of the Río Yaqui defining the Yaqui territory exactly, “This is mine.” (qtd. in Evers and Molina, “Holy” 33–­34)

Then he sheds light on the geopolitical value of the Testamento: The Mexicans, in their hunt for a Yaqui who could be made to tell them this secret

[the whereabouts of the Testamento], were like Herod, who killed all the children at that time, in order that one, Jesucristo, might not live. Pues, no tiene Mexico ninguna cosa a probar que el Río Yaqui es de Mexico (Well, Mexico has nothing to prove that the Río Yaqui belongs to Mexico). (34)18

The secretive nature of this text may have grown out of the Yoeme need to map and protect what was theirs. At least for Chávez, the struggle against the Porfirian wars of extermination was as much about securing a mythohistorical document dealing with Yoeme cultural and geographical borders as it was about community survival.

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Considering the cultural and political values implied in the Testamento, it should not come as a surprise that it has become a document utilized in matters of external politics as well. Evers and Molina speculate that the purpose of the text’s “Yaqui vernacular writing,” understandable to Mexicans, is to reach potentially sympathetic individuals willing to support Yoeme sovereignty (“Holy” 37).19 In 1992, the two scholars reported that the Testamento had been considered in “recent debates over implementing a ‘municipality,’ a proposed alternative to the traditional Eight Pueblo governance system that is rumored to be supported by the Banco de Crédito Rural del Noroeste and other Mexican interests” (37). There are also rumors that Yoeme leaders sent copies of the document to Washington, D.C., and to the governor of Arizona in the 1950s when soliciting intervention on their behalf against ongoing Mexican encroachment on their lands (37–­38). While it is difficult to know how Yoeme authorities may have modified the language or content of the Testamento to make it more accessible to nonindigenous readers, the nineteenth-­and twentieth-­century political rumors surrounding the traditional narrative draw our attention to the Yoeme history of diplomacy. We know that the Yoeme leader in 1533 engaged in talks with Diego de Guzmán until the Spanish launched a surprise attack. We also know that in 1610, the year in which the Yoemem defeated Hurdaide’s army, it was they who initiated peace talks and instigated the introduction of the Jesuits. This is the historical moment when the Yaqui nation entered what Cynthia Radding calls a “colonial pact,” in which the Native community negotiated service and allegiance to empire in exchange for a certain level of autonomy and other benefits (52–­53). The 1740 rebellion occurred amidst unrest due to Spanish and clerical abuses, and it happened despite diplomatic overtures by indigenous leaders Muni and Basoritimea, who voiced their complaints before the viceroy in Mexico City (Spicer, The Yaquis 41–­42). This episode, opines Raphael Brewster Folsom, reflects “the diversity, eclecticism, and sophistication of Yaqui political thinking” (149). And as late as the mid-­1970s, when the community sought to recover ancestral lands south of the Río Yaqui, Yoeme authorities commissioned a number of groups to travel to Mexico City to present their case before the federal government (Evers and Molina, “Holy” 38). Building on the work of Evers and Molina, Shorter connects the 1533 Yoeme leader’s “inscriptive act of control” over Hiakim’s borders to the Testamento, as two acts of geographical and cultural border maintenance (76). Today, the Yoeme community reenacts these same boundaries in their Sunday religious processions, or kontim, creating

The Warrior in Yoeme Cultural History   59

a symbolic remapping of the boundaries of Hiakim decreed in the Testamento (Shorter 287). Did a version of the Testamento play a role in Yoeme acts of diplomacy? Considering the “worked-­on” nature of this foundational story, this is not unlikely—­especially in incidents occurring after the eighteenth century, when the expulsion of the Jesuits helped the community achieve complete control over their religious and cultural practices (Spicer, The Yaquis 62). At the very least, we can discern both before and after the introduction of the Jesuits a Yoeme-­based knowledge, preserved in origin stories, of the boundaries of the homeland Hiakim and aboriginal authority over it. The warrior as defender of Hiakim carries a mythological context that roots the warrior’s identity deep within a sacred territory, which is defined through a topographical history stemming from Aniam and Catholic cosmologies. When we apply this context to literary representations of naturally bellicose and senselessly resistant Yaqui warriors, we find an irreparable contradiction, an epistemic lacuna almost impossible to breach.

CONCLUSION It is important to recognize the Yoeme community’s cultural heterogeneity as well. Versions of the talking tree story, “Leyenda yaqui de las predicciones,” and “Omteme,” along with the Testamento, form two of the cultural-­historical pillars of Yaqui indigeneity. They are the spoken and written indigenous “word” cultivated by Yoeme elders familiar with the realities of commitment to the struggle for Yoeme sovereignty. And yet, far from being monolithic, Yoeme religious practice also includes individuals with different perspectives on Yaqui Catholicism that vary in their orthodoxy. While some find in the Sea Ania, or flower world, a type of Christian paradise, others identify the Yo Ania, the venerated realm from which Yaquis can acquire a variety of talents, as a source of unholy witchcraft (Shorter 47–­49). In his autobiography, Refugio Savala instructs the reader in the differences between seataka (flower body), which he characterizes as one of God’s divine gifts, and the Yo Ania, which he associates with “devil nature” (23). In dealing with daily issues like child-­rearing, education, financial advancement, and religiosity, Yoeme pueblos and communities in and outside of the Hiakim territory also confront the challenges of maintaining a cohesive group identity. Furthermore, internal strife caused by more secular community members wishing greater incorporation into the social and economic Mexican

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mainstream has been a concern for Yoeme leaders, as has the corrupting reach of regional drug lords (Olavarría, Cruces 69, 75). And yet, in studying the cultural context of the Yaqui warrior myth, one finds in practice cultural and historical discourses that exalt the Yoemem’s place in Hiakim, indeed in the world. These community discourses can doubtless be related to those of other nations. Here I defer to Kristin Dutcher Mann, who reminds us that the Bible, an ideological foundation of so many Western countries, “is full of songs and poems composed for the purpose of communicating praise and supplications to God, as well as accessing spiritual power for healing, success in battle, and righteous living” (43). Mexican representations of the Yoeme community are typically expressed in the form of two sorts of myths: the warrior and the dancer. Not only is this evident in the monuments to Tetabiate, Cajeme, and the deer dancer in Ciudad Obregón, it is visible too in Sonora’s state seal, which displays a deer dancer at its center; ironically, the very state that venerates Yoeme symbols is now systematically and institutionally draining the Yoeme community of its resources and livelihood. Because mythification distances the Yoeme warrior from his cultural history, it is necessary, before studying the representations of Yaquis in Mexican and Chicana/o literature, to concentrate on the cultural context that is ignored in nonindigenous representations. The cultural recovery of a key indigenous institution like the Yoeme fighter requires a shift in epistemic perspectives. And this cultural context—­the transcultural Aniam and Catholic cosmologies—­leads us to a concept of the warrior as defender of Hiakim defined through a mythological, or mythohistorical, process that I have chosen to name arraigamiento. This process is the culturally inscribed deep rooting of indigenous identity, or Yoeme indigeneity, in the community’s sacred territory. It is not difficult to identify projections of Yoemem as barbarous or as noble savages in the Novel of the Mexican Revolution, created through científico discourses about civilización y barbarie.20 Indigenista literature’s employment of ethnography in its depiction of the Yoeme community to promote Indigenista political action—­that is, the racial, economic, and political incorporation of indigenous peoples—­is today more readily discernible. But to analyze more than the ideological shortcomings of a certain literary movement, we must hold a basic understanding of the Native people depicted. Before analyzing the Yaqui warrior myth in Mexican literature, it is necessary to be familiar with all the parts of the myth, including the sign itself (the Yoeme warrior) and the cultural history from which it has been distanced.

3 TAMBOR Y SIERRA In Search of an Indigenous Revolution in Mexican Literature La verdad es que los yaquis lo hicieron todo.  ¡Malditas alimañas! Los había entre las ramas de los huizaches, detrás de los cercados, metidos hasta el cuello en los vallados. The fact is that the Yaquis did it all. They’re holy terrors! There were Yaquis in the brush, Yaquis behind walls, Yaquis in the ditches! The place was crawling with with the bastards! I can still feel ’em in my pants. —­M A R I A NO A Z U E L A , L A S M O S C A S ( TR A NSL AT I ON B Y L E SL I E B Y RD S I M P SON )

T

nation was a battered community when the Mexican Revolution ignited in late 1910.1 José María Leyva Cajeme’s successful re­establishment of Yoeme autonomy from 1875 to 1887 had entailed years of heavy offensive and defensive measures against overwhelming state and federal campaigns. Juan Maldonado Tetabiate, the successor to Cajeme, had been killed in 1901 by Mexican forces, and small disorganized bands of guerrillas led by Luis Bule sustained the resistance against the colonization of their territory by Mexican and U.S. settlers and businesses. The relentless military campaigns were accompanied by the Porfirian policy of deporting Yoeme men, women, and children to slave labor camps in Oaxaca, Quintana Roo, and, most notoriously, Yucatán’s henequen plantations. Nevertheless, in 1914, four years after the start of the armed struggle, Yoeme revolutionary fighters marched triumphantly into Mexico City, preceded by a well-­documented history of repression and a legendary military reputation. Why had the Yoemem joined the Revolution? HE YOEME

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Alan Knight portrays Yoeme participation in the Mexican Revolution as similar to other popular agrarian revolts, a regional serrano uprising whose motives defied national political ambitions; but he describes their cause as “fundamentally traditional” (2: 375). Paco Ignacio Taibo II coincides with Knight’s assessment, referring to the Porfirian-­era insurgencies as nearly forty-­two years of popular revolt (13). But a prevailing view existed of Yoeme-­Porfirian struggle as “an apolitical caste war” (Knight 1: 335). Yoeme agrarian politics were shaped by the precious water source of the Río Yaqui and the cultural relationship between the Hiakim territory and its people, which I have chosen to describe as arraigamiento. History tells us that the Yoemem, staunch defenders of their homeland Hiakim, are not the senselessly bellicose people of Mexican mythification. Like the colonial negotiations that led to a Jesuit presence in their territory, Yoeme participation in the Mexican Revolution would be a gamble, a leap of faith that, if they were to lend their combat experience to yori revolutionary leaders, these leaders would honor a pledge to return their lost lands. By 1910, the Yoemem had survived a war of extermination that included deportation, genocide, and atrocities against even the most vulnerable members of the community. And still Yoeme battalions would support the Sonoran general Álvaro Obregón’s rise to the military-­political forefront. In his biography of Obregón, Enrique Krauze writes, “Aunque temblaba al ritmo de los tamborines yaquis, la ciudad de México temía mucho más la amenaza del Atila del Sur: Emiliano Zapata” (Although Mexico City shook to the rhythm of Yaqui drums, it feared even more the threat of the Attila of the South: Emiliano Zapata) (33). Krauze expresses the dread of so many “civilized” urban Mexicans faced with the possibility of an invading indigenous Other—­Yoeme or Nahua. Indios, up to that point, were those “Others.” Indigeneity had a fixed set of connotations that included inferior intellect, lack of culture, and indolence, all of which may well be summed up as barbarism. White and mestizo gente de razón (people of reason) knew to disassociate themselves racially and culturally from indios. A potential monkey wrench in the machine of national progress, the Yoemem had failed to be converted by nineteenth-­century politicians into productive members of the proletariat in a modernizing Mexico. Ultimately, the Yoemem joined the Revolution—­and, from a military standpoint, successfully. But how would the yori (mestizo and White) revolutionary leaders and intellectuals receive the Yoeme decision to participate in the national armed struggle? And how would writers interpret the participation of an indigenous nation whose oppression Francisco I. Madero upheld as one of the justifications for the overthrow of the dictator Porfirio Díaz?

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Literary efforts to represent the armed struggle resulted in the Novel of the Mexican Revolution, a literature depicting the years before, during, and soon after the Revolution, and recognized for its blending of fiction with historical accuracy and its inclusion of the Revolution’s ethnic, racial, and class diversity. In truth, in most literary representations the Yoemem are treated as a necessary ingredient in re-creating the Mexican Revolution’s ambience. The need to include Yoeme soldiers is a testament to the indigenous nation’s ubiquity and importance in the armed struggle. Perhaps the Yaqui of the Novel of the Mexican Revolution most closely resembles Omteme, the Yoeme ancestor described in the previous chapter, who encounters and kills none other than the treacherous conqueror Christopher Columbus before magically descending into the hill in the Sierra del Bacatete that to this day bears his name. “Omteme” is a traditional narrative, a cosmological perspective on the community’s landright and the defense thereof. But without his cultural context, the angry Omteme becomes an example of the Yaqui warrior myth: the simplistic belief that the Yoeme people reject “good” Spanish and Mexican civilization and jealously, perhaps nobly, defend their lands. The Native defenders of their homeland were perceived as semi-­savage Others, a sector of Mexico that intellectual and political leaders preferred to characterize as specimens of premodern national folklore. Authors writing about the Revolution were immersed in an intellectual tradition that looked to Europe for its cultural and racial justifications. Therefore, indigenous cosmologies were not a concern of theirs, as they once had been for Jesuit missionaries and later would be for Indigenista writers. And yet the angry Yaqui (Omteme) still loomed large in the Mexican imaginary in the years following the Revolution, when many of these works were published. Concerned with re-creating what had transpired during the armed struggle, authors employed limited conceptions of lo yaqui premised on a Spanish colonial and nineteenth-­century positivist epistemology. Authors like Rafael F. Muñoz, Francisco Rojas González, and Carlos Fuentes would re-create a politically muted Yoeme presence as part of a mythification of the Revolution—­sometimes vaguely through allusions and symbols, other times through historical events. For writers who experienced the Revolution firsthand, like Gregorio López y Fuentes and Martín Luis Guzmán, the Yoeme presence represented the Revolution’s cultural diversity, and at times its very barbarism. Looking for an indigenous revolution between the pages of Mexican Revolutionary literature is an impossible task if we continue to read from within a Spanish colonial–­Mexican

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epistemology. But an epistemic shift relying on indigenous forms of knowledge helps us reread this literature through Native perspectives. Because of the historical nature of the Novel of the Revolution, this chapter begins with the historical contextualization of Yoeme participation in the Mexican Revolution. It also examines the different forms of Yaqui indigeneity created by authors of the Revolution, who frequently relied on nineteenth-­century discourses concerning race and modern progress. As such, indigenous Otherness is examined as the basis for many of the characterizations of lo yaqui in literature of the Revolution. Nonetheless, using these various though limited literary depictions, this chapter ends by piecing together a Yoeme account of the Mexican Revolution that highlights the community’s motivations for entering the national armed struggle and (re)historicizes the Novel of the Revolution from an indigenous-­ centered perspective.

THE MEXICAN REVOLUTION AND THE YOEME NATION Yoeme participation in the Mexican Revolution can best be understood as the continuation of the indigenous nation’s wars with the state of Sonora and the Porfirian regime. Yoeme resistance to the colonization of Hiakim posed a challenge to nineteenth-­century efforts at development by the state and federal governments. The spectacular Yoeme autonomy achieved under the leadership of José María Leyva Cajeme between 1875 and 1886 had ended after a large and committed federal military campaign succeeded in overwhelming his forces and capturing him (Hu-­DeHart, “Development” 75). Cajeme’s leadership was, writes Evelyn Hu-­DeHart, “the natural extension” of the Juan Banderas insurgency of the 1830s, “because he finally brought to fruition that separate Yaqui state which Banderas had envisioned” (Yaqui Resistance 7). As Nicole M. Guidotti-­Hernández has written, a pre-­1910 “Yaqui revolution in essence was about sustaining autonomy and economic stability and enacting an imagined vision of nation that portrays themselves as full-­fledged historical actors” (182). Indeed, the period of autonomy, not surprisingly, saw a renaissance of traditional Yoeme culture, further promoting community arraigamiento in a divinely sanctioned territory. But state and federal leaders were indifferent to the implications of appropriating the lands in which supernatural ancestors resided and which were understood by the Yoemem through a transcultural cosmology that included the birth and death of Christ in Hiakim.2 Yoeme resistance to state

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incorporation was a conspicuous embarrassment to President Díaz and bad for Sonoran business development. For elite Mexican mestizos and criollos, official recognition of a Yoeme nation would have destabilized the belief in a modern Mexico in the European mold and effectively barred government access to the Río Yaqui indigenous lands. Running through the Hiakim territory, the Río Yaqui promised a precious source of water, often scarce in northern Mexico. The Díaz regime was interested in attracting U.S. and other foreign investment to the Yaqui Valley. After the construction of a British-­made railroad between the United States and Mexico in the 1880s, the government began to encourage colonization of the Yaqui Valley as early as 1894, a period that coincided with a state mining boom (Hu-­DeHart, “Development” 76). Yoeme lands were designated as baldíos, or vacant lands, ripe for development by mining and agribusiness companies. The government conceded cheap land and access to local water, and the Richardson Construction Company of Los Angeles received the federal government’s blessing to resettle displaced Yoeme families as salaried proletarians in their former territory (Hu-­DeHart, “Development” 77).3 Yoeme defense of Hiakim reinforced the old Mexican belief in senseless Yaqui resistance and bellicosity. To resentful Mexicans, victims of violent nineteenth-­century uprisings under Cajeme, the Yoemem had become a terrifying threat to their property and personal safety; in Spicer’s summation, “Yaquis began to appear as something less than human” (The Yaquis 156). But after Cajeme’s capture and execution in 1887, Yoeme resistance did not end. The challenge to Mexican authority in Hiakim led by Juan Maldonado Tetabiate would result in the short-­lived 1897 Peace of Ortiz and end as a considerable military movement with the 1900 Mazocoba Massacre, which left “more than 400 dead and 800 prisoners” (Hu-­DeHart, “Development” 79). In his autobiography, Rosalio Moisés, a survivor of the federal wars of extermination, relates the Arizona-­Sonoran community’s horrific memories of the Mazocoba Massacre: “Over one thousand Yaquis died that day at Mazocoba. Women and children were shot. Babies were killed by hitting their heads against trees. Many women and children jumped or were pushed off the cliff ” (15). Moisés recalls treatment of children as spoils of war: “Those between two and twelve were given away like puppies. Girls over twelve were given to the Mexican soldiers” (25). Yoeme resistance had indeed resulted in their dehumanization by nonindigenous institutions and individuals.4 And yet, the tenacious resistance of scattered guerrilla fighters effectively frustrated the federal army’s attempts to completely pacify the Yoemem or wipe their presence from the Yaqui Valley. A government

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passport system for Yoemem traveling within the state and a coercive policy of deportation to slave labor in Yucatán provoked a diaspora that dispersed families to urban areas of Sonora and into Arizona. In effect from at least 1895 onward, the deportation of Yoemem reached its highest levels in 1908, during which time entire families were captured and enslaved into forced labor (Hu-­ DeHart, Yaqui Resistance 181). The government’s deportation of Yoeme men, women, and children to Yucatán was a business decision as well: fertile Yoeme lands were vacated for development while a new workforce was provided for the booming henequen plantations in Yucatán (Hu-­DeHart, “Development” 84). During this guerra de exterminio, many Yoemem saw their daily work and family lives crumble before their eyes. Yoemem became disposable chattel, surviving children became orphans, women became widows, and many became refugees in often dysfunctional families (Moisés et al. 15–­16; Kelley 131). Yaqui Otherness was largely premised on the colonial discourse of the “semi-­savage Yaqui.” Mexicans, who paradoxically considered Yoeme religiosity to be a blend of good Christianity and outright “fanaticism,” were unable to reconcile their important role as laborers in the state’s economy with their history of insurgency; in sum, to Mexicans, “Yaquis were not fully civilized, only half so” (Spicer, The Yaquis 157). In 1909, Luis Bule, a successor to Cajeme’s and Tetabiate’s resistance movements, surrendered and his faction was enlisted into the federal army as a special auxiliary force tasked with hunting still-­defiant Yoemem (Hu-­DeHart, “Development” 90). And yet even after the start of the Revolution, Yoeme guerrillas were still active in relatively peaceful Sonora: “In the summer of 1911, attempts to disarm Yaqui contingents provoked resistance; up to 1,000 Yaquis were said to be roaming the river valley, molesting mestizo towns (once the site of Yaqui communities) like Bacum and Cocorit” (Knight 1: 335). Yoeme military participation was a conspicuous element of the Mexican Revolution, in part because of Porfirio Díaz’s involvement in their oppression, and because of revolutionary leaders’ courtship of their support. Pascual Orozco, Álvaro Obregón, and Francisco I. Madero were among the caudillos (strongmen) who would solicit Yoeme soldiers.5 This may have begun when Francisco I. Madero, in La sucesión presidencial de 1910 (1908), openly protested the persecution of the Yoemem by the Porfirian dictatorship and lauded the Yaquis’ exemplary resistance. Yoeme soldiers collaborated with Sonoran strongman José María Maytorena, legendary general Francisco Villa, and the eventual victor of the Revolution, Álvaro Obregón. In September 1911, Madero solicited the Yaqui tribe’s support. The Yoemem agreed, but only under the condition that

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all of their traditional territory be restored, and that they be given fair pay and financial support for schools and agriculture in the Río Yaqui territory (Spicer, The Yaquis 227). Madero would have his Yaqui battalions. But, as Spicer notes, eighteen months later Madero would be dead and the agreement would remain “a scrap of paper” (The Yaquis 227). Obregón would also garner Yoeme forces in 1913, after Madero’s assassination. Obregón’s familiarity with the Mayo and Yoeme peoples was one based on business and paternalistic politics, a relationship that would continue during the Revolution.6 But this alliance also reveals Yoeme politics at play, and the basis for their indigenous revolution; the indigenous nation’s backing of the yori officer was again premised on their demands for land and political authority. Yoemem liberated in Yucatán would find their way to cities taken by Obregón’s Northwestern Division and join—­or be re­cruited—­as soldiers or soldaderas (Kelley 166–­67). Yaqui battalions, endowed with a unique culture and a recognizable uniform, would be an identifiable part of the Mexican Revolution worth writing about. Nonetheless, participation in the Mexican Revolution was not a uniform community decision. The Yoemem divided into factions. Those reticent about joining a yori war were referred to as broncos (rebellious) or legítimos, while mansos (tame) or militaristas like Luis Bule, Lino Morales, and Francisco Urbalejo made careers in the revolutionary armies (Spicer, The Yaquis 227). After the Revolution, artists and intellectuals would focus on the importance of Mexico’s native population. Public murals would depict indigenous and rural masses as agents in the armed struggle and as nation-­builders. Images of the oppressed Natives stood side by side with “the image of the Indian as dignified and self-­actualized” (Taylor, Indigeneity 96). Intellectuals like Manuel Gamio, José Vasconcelos, and Moisés Sáenz worked to fix Mexico’s “Indian problem,” which they understood as an essential factor in the rebuilding of the nation. However, the Yoemem would find themselves marginalized once again, victims of broken promises, until the intervention of president Lázaro Cárdenas in 1937 and 1939.

THE NOVEL OF THE MEXICAN REVOLUTION The writers of the Novel of the Mexican Revolution did not try to “reinvent” the indio yaqui as Indigenista authors would, nor did they invoke Yaqui indigeneity to represent a politicized Chicana/o Otherness. The fourth chapter will

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reveal, among other examples, the ways in which Francisco Rojas González secularizes pascolas and deer dancers through Indigenista discourses and Ramón Rubín attempts to represent a Yaqui warrior psychology. Writers of the Novel of the Revolution instead had at least two referents—­Spanish colonial texts and nineteenth-­century Mexican depictions of barbarous Yaquis in newspapers, political discourses, and historical documents—­that provided them with a system of knowledge about the indigenous nation. Grageda Bustamante summarizes the major ideologies that reigned over the representation of the Yoemem from the seventeenth century until the 1930s—­colonial Catholicism, científico positivism, and the concept of civilización y barbarie (civilization and barbarism), as well as Mexican cultural nationalism: Han pasado de considerarse parte de las “tribus más fieras y bárbaras del nuevo orbe,” a “comunidades remisas al progreso nacional” o, como sucediera durante los años de la hegemonía sonorense en los tiempos de la Revolución mexicana, un ejemplo de la tenacidad, carácter y fortaleza de los hombres del norte. (29)

(They have gone from being considered part of the “fiercest and most barbarous tribes of the new world” to “communities resistant to national progress,” or, as

would be the case during the era of Sonoran hegemony during the Mexican Rev-

olution, an example of the tenacity, character, and fortitude of the northern men.)

Central to all these representations is the notion of the Yoeme people as resistant or warlike. It would serve us well to remember that the authors writing about the Revolution were not part of the group they represented—­ revolutionary leaders, fighters, or indigenous people—­but rather external to it. Max Parra proposes that foundational novels of the Revolution by Mariano Azuela and Martín Luis Guzmán “became the ‘master narratives’ for a literary tradition in which cultural Otherness is celebrated and endorsed as well as, paradoxically, discredited and suppressed” (139–­40). Like their nineteenth-­century predecessors, literary and intellectual authorities continued to conceive of mestizo and indigenous masses from an outside perspective and through external ideological discourses. An educated middle class with a limited appreciation of rural and indigenous cultures wrote from its own privileged position, interpreting what it perceived to be the Other’s activities—­ linguistic, gastronomical, psychological, sociological. This is true of literary representations of the Yoemem by nonindigenous writers. Depending on the

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author, Yaquis are brave, yet barbarous; loyal soldiers, yet ever bloodthirsty; a symbol of the Revolution’s fighting man from the Northwest, yet a hindrance to national modernity. The reliance on the Yaqui warrior myth created a perceived “cultural void” that made it possible for outside groups to replace indigenous cultural agency (e.g., religion, social structure, community politics) with nonindigenous discourses as an explanation for Native resistance. The following section provides a background with which to better understand the literary depictions of Yoemem in the Novel of the Revolution. The Yaqui presence in the genre cannot be seen as a given, but must rather be attributed to factors integral to the Mexican Revolution and to perspectives that influenced authors’ portrayals of indigenous people in general. These factors include the historical nature of the genre and the post-­Revolutionary tendency to include indigenous people in artistic interpretations of the Revolution. But just as important were the cultural models in place that upheld a limited conception of indigenous people. HISTORICAL PRESENCE IN THE NOVEL OF THE MEXICAN REVOLUTION

As a type of historical literature, the Novel of the Revolution narrates the events during, after, or (as in the case of Agustín Yáñez’s Al filo del agua) preceding the different phases of the Mexican Revolution; the case of Yaqui participation is enlightening in this respect.7 Referring to the genre’s urgency and periodical origins, Max Aub calls its author a type of reporter of his or her lived experiences (230–­31).8 Manuel Pedro González goes so far as to describe the Novel of the Revolution as “‘historicismo’ realista” (realistic historicism), with the author’s creative contribution being limited (99). González’s labeling of the writer of the Revolution as a “simple cameraman” (96) becomes questionable, however, when we consider the portrayals of indigenous people in the works of Azuela, Guzmán, and José Rubén Romero. Nonetheless, after Madero’s public sympathy for the Yoemem and their military service under Obregón and Villa, the Yoeme presence in the Revolution became a highly visible historical phenomenon. We can attribute the inclusion of Yaquis in various novels partly to this historical nature. Ideologically, Mexican cultural nationalism, a post-­Revolutionary current of thought that emphasized the importance of the rural masses in the Revolution, also played an important role in the portrayal of the Yoemem, and indigenous

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people in general, in literature. The inclusion of dark indigenous people and mestizos was gradual but definite in the post-­Revolutionary muralismo movement. Soon, Mexican intellectuals and artists conceptualized an authentic mexicanidad intimately tied to the nation’s aboriginal people, “whose traditions derived from pre-­Columbian times” (Franco 90). While the exaltation of indigenous martyrs and heroes as constitutive of lo mexicano was not new, the emphasis on the masses and their participation in nation building was. The Novel of the Revolution also incorporated the rural masses in their diversity of race, class, regional heteroglossia, and uniforms. The cultural nationalist emphasis on battlefield heroics and indigenous people consequently compelled writers to recognize a Native presence in the Revolution. Possessing limited knowledge of and interest in Native Mexicans, writers represented indigeneity in different ways: through ethnicity (Otomí, Yaqui, Mayo, Tarasco, etc.), racial allusions to phenotype and skin tone, or use of the culturally generic umbrella term indio. Mariano Azuela’s Los de abajo (1916), the first example of the Novel of the Mexican Revolution to achieve national and international acclaim, and therefore a point of departure for the genre, expresses indigenous identity through race.9 Azuela’s novel follows the trajectory of a local band of rebels, campesinos led by a “pure” indigenous man, Demetrio Macías, described as possessing “mejillas cobrizas de indígena de pura raza” (bronze cheeks of pure Indian race; translation mine) (55). Their speech, regional outlook, and disregard for middle-­class culture contrast greatly with the rhetorical abilities and modern medical knowledge of educated Luis Cervantes, the group’s intellectual. Azuela makes a point of contrasting Cervantes’s beautiful whiteness with the indigenous ugliness of the character Camila, degrading her through zoomorphism as a “little plump monkey with her bronzed complexion, her ivory teeth, and her thick square toes” (translation by Munguia; Underdogs 32). The novel never distinguishes Macías’s specific Native ethnicity, thereby bestowing the protagonist’s indigeneity with a generalized indio symbolism; he is the noble origins and the uprooted fighting man of Mexico.10 It is noteworthy, though, that E. Munguia chooses to translate the phrase in Azuela’s description of Macías above as “pure-­blooded Aztec cheeks,” in an effort to express a historicized and national indigeneity (Azuela, Underdogs 58). Most examples of the Novel of the Revolution, to some extent, follow the social types established in Azuela’s text and often include the roles of intellectuals, generals, rural foot soldiers, and indios. This is true of Martín Luis Guzmán’s autobiographical El águila y la serpiente (1928), another central novel of the

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genre. Much of this novel’s action revolves around the relationship between the middle-­class intellectual author and the revolutionary caudillo Francisco Villa. This iconic text highlights intellectuals and rural soldiers—­either as individual leaders or the fighting masses—­while it relegates its treatment of lo indígena, through Zapatista and Yaqui soldiers, to ruminations on national progress. Gregorio López y Fuentes, in Campamento (1931), makes a point of describing the heterogeneity of the Revolution’s military forces: the diverse uniforms, sombreros, ages, and weaponry (20). In addition to a brief representation of Yaqui soldiers in Mexico City, the author includes the cruel death of an indio guide and a rare depiction of a verbose indigenous intellectual who protests, “La re­volución se está haciendo con sangre de indio” (The revolution is being fought with Indian blood) (84). In Tierra: La revolución agraria en México (1933), López y Fuentes includes a cast of characters typical of the Novel of the Revolution—­ the general, the foot soldiers, the officer rising in the ranks—­as well as characters often found in Indigenista literature, like the hacendado, the priest, and the peones. López y Fuentes constructs the latter as indigenous through allusions to their cultural and racial traits.11 Cecilio, the protagonist’s brother, has a “rostro de indio” (Indian face) (López y Fuentes, Tierra 64), while Marcial Ramírez’s mestizaje is described through blood and phenotype: “tiene sangre de indio en buena proporción” (he has a good proportion of Indian blood), evident in his “barba negra y lacia” (straight black beard) (35). Nellie Campobello’s Cartucho (1931) mentions two Mayo soldiers via limited cultural and racial allusions, namely their inability to speak Spanish and their not-­uncommon white complexion and blue eyes. The girl narrator, who befriends them and playfully chases them with a large syringe, finds them shot to death one day. Upon examining their dead bodies, she breaks the syringe as the only way of coping with her loss (Campobello 64). In this case, the Mayo characters not only serve as a display of the racial-­ethnic variety present in the Mexican Revolution, but also demonstrate the effect that the Revolution’s violence has on a young narrator not yet tainted by racist thinking (Portal 273). In Apuntes de un lugareño (1932), by Revolutionary intellectual José Rubén Romero, indigenous identity serves a moral function as well. Romero describes his childhood teacher as an ugly man nicknamed Morelos (after the Afro-­indigenous Independence hero José María Morelos) who scolds one of his students for stealing from an indigenous man and yelling “¡Yo no soy indio!” (I am not an Indian!) (37). Phenotype takes priority again when the teacher is described through the old trope of the ugly Indian.12 As the students develop sympathy for their teacher, they change his

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nickname from Morelos to Benito Juárez, referencing the most venerated indigenous person in Mexican history (37). The same author, in Desbandada (1934), represents Tarasco merchants through their stoicism, exoticized language, and mastery of the terrain. Employing zoomorphism, he calls them poor Indians who “viven sobresaltados igual que reses paciendo en solar ajeno” (live startled just like cattle grazing in foreign domains) (150).13 Francisco Rojas González’s La negra Angustias (1944) gives a racially pluralistic description of the southern Zapatista rebels. Indigenous presence is represented by haughty “indios tlapanecos” (Tlapanec Indians), who are, along with mestizos, criollos, and talkative and mischievous “negros de la Costa Chica” (Blacks from the Costa Chica), another facet of the Revolution’s ethnic diversity (Rojas González, La negra 118–­19).14 Rafael F. Muñoz’s ¡Vámonos con Pancho Villa! (1931) briefly characterizes the Villista general Francisco Beltrán, a Yaqui, in stereotypical stoic manner (172). In another instance, a pair of the Punitive Expedition’s Apache guides torture the protagonist Tiburcio Maya to extract a confession regarding the whereabouts of Villa; a U.S. Army officer intervenes and apologizes for their bloodthirstiness (197). Finally, in Al filo del agua (1947), Agustín Yáñez makes limited references to lo indio through curanderos and the reenactment by indigenous people of the Conquista (355). The novel also includes an admonishment of the Church’s tolerance of “las mojigangas de los indios” (the Indians’ theatrical farces), religious fiestas seen by the mestizo population as shameful indigenous customs (127). Yáñez’s marginal recognition of Mexico’s indigenous presence reveals a pre-­Revolutionary shame over Mexico’s indigenous roots and a general disregard for all things indigenous. Lanin A. Gyurko criticizes the attitude toward indigenous people in the same author’s Las vueltas del tiempo (1973): “The Indian consciousness, still divorced from the mainstream of modern Mexico, is represented by the character significantly named Juárez, reference to the Zapotec Indian Benito Juárez, president of Mexico and a liberal reformer” (Gyurko 261). Gyurko’s assertion can be extended to the vast majority of characterizations of indigenous people in the Novel of the Revolution. From Los de abajo to Al filo del agua, and even to an extent in Carlos Fuentes’s La muerte de Artemio Cruz (1962), these Mexican novelists demonstrate their limited interest in and/ or understanding of indigenous people. While the rural revolutionary and his intellectual counterpart are central in the Novel of the Revolution, representations of indigenous people in most cases are achieved through limited allusions to racial and cultural traits. In many ways, characterizations of Yoemem follow this paradigm.

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YOEME INDIGENEITY IN PRE-­REVOLUTIONARY TEXTS

The literary representation of the Yoeme people before the Revolution depended on writers’ knowledge of a colonial and Mexican historical context and not on the Yoeme community’s own cosmology and history. As an example, we may consider texts by Amado Nervo and Francisco I. Madero, two very different authors writing on the cusp of the Mexican Revolution. Modernista poet Amado Nervo’s posthumously published short story “La yaqui hermosa (sucedido)” (1921) tells the story of a beautiful Yoeme woman deported and sold to a Campeche hacienda. As an act of loyalty to her lover left behind in Sonora, she covers her face in mud to conceal her attractiveness.15 When the well-­meaning hacendado orders that she be treated better than other Yaquis, she starves herself to death in an act of defiance. Nervo places his beautiful Yoeme character within a colonial Mexican historical context. He explains that she is part of a warlike tribe that has never known peace (33). He recalls the 1533 first contact and reaffirms Yaqui bravery against the colonial army of Captain Martínez de Hurdaide. Nervo includes a brief ethnography re-creating the “semi-­savage” discourse; he notes their “comarca fértil y rica” (fertile and rich region) and their strange language called “cahita (perteneciente al grupo lingüístico mejicano-­ opata)” (Cahita, belonging to the Mexican-­Opatan linguistic group) (33). The Yoemem are “altos, muchas veces bellos . . . duros para el trabajo, buenos agricultores, cazadores máximos . . . y, sobre todo, combatientes indomables siempre” (tall, often beautiful . . . hard workers, good agriculturalists, supreme hunters . . . and, above all, always indomitable combatants) (33). Here is the literary manifestation of the Yaqui warrior myth. Luis Leal questions why Nervo focuses on the intriguing case of an individual woman, thereby denying the possibility of a social protest narrative (Cuentos ix). After all, Nervo sets the narrative around 1909, when “recientemente” (recently) the government had decided to “descepar familias enteras de la tierra en que nacieron, y enviarlas al otro extremo de la república, a Yucatán y a Campeche especialmente” (uproot entire families from the lands in which they were born, and send them to the other end of the republic, especially to Yucatán and to Campeche) (Nervo 35). That is, Nervo was informed of the Porfirian guerras de exterminio against the Yoeme nation. Leal justifies Nervo’s narrative as a modernista’s aesthetic take on a serious social issue. If, as Seymour Menton writes, modernistas were commonly appalled by what they understood as their nation’s indigenous barbarie, Nervo did not arrive at isolated conclusions about the Yoeme people (162). Instead, Nervo reproduces

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colonial Spanish and Mexican knowledge of a categorically resistant indigenous nation. “La yaqui hermosa” reveals a vague admiration for Yoeme resistance and independence at the same time that it describes an outright barbarous people. The beautiful Yoeme woman’s fatal resistance to a compassionate landowner—­ never mind that such hacendados benefited from the government’s wars of extermination—­appears senseless.16 All the while, Nervo summarizes all of Yoeme history in one word: “guerra” (war) (33). Yoeme indigeneity is reduced to inherited bellicosity and strict defense of aboriginal lands. However, Leal is right not to place full blame on the author. Nervo, after all, wrote from within a history and an ideology that identified the Yoeme nation as a recalcitrant element in a modernizing nineteenth-­century state. Francisco I. Madero’s key political essay La sucesión presidencial de 1910 (1908) placed the Yoemem at the center of contemporary Mexican politics. Published near the height of the government deportations, it provides a sympathetic interpretation of the Yoeme nation in opposition to Porfirio Díaz’s dictatorship. Presidential hopeful Madero protests the repression and deportation of the Yoemem by the Porfirian regime, declaring himself an ally of the Yaquis. He bemoans the government’s concessions of indigenous lands to friends of the administration and foreigners. To his credit, Madero attempts to sidestep the “semi-­savage” discourse by upholding the Yoemem as model citizens who contribute greatly to the Sonoran economy; further, he advocates for a Yoeme landright, calling theirs “a perfect title” because “the Yaquis from time immemorial by right of origin are in quiet and pacific possession of those lands” (Presidential 138). But he evokes a version of the Yaqui warrior myth when referring to the Yoeme people as “lions in combat—­and . . . brave men [who] know how to value their liberty” to describe their fighting spirit in the face of government land grabs (136). He describes the Mexican people too, just like the Yoemem, as a lion preparing to combat the authoritarianism that has paralyzed their sense of justice (137).17 And Madero again strategically likens Mexicans to Yoemem when warning of the dire consequences of indifference to the Porfirian guerras de exterminio: “That chain which now weighs down the Yaquis, we shall very soon have to pull off ” (140). Through the metaphorical connection of the lion, Mexico becomes a noble Yaqui tribe ready to fight against its oppressor; indeed, Madero suggests, Mexicans should look to Yaqui resistance as an example of what must be done. Madero’s depiction of the Yoemem as a community of farmers and laborers with the aptitude for great military might parallels that of Nervo. And though sympathetic and well-­intentioned, Madero’s characterizations still ignore the cultural

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motives that made Yoeme resistance irreconcilable with the goals of a liberal state: namely, the belief in a religiously ordained corporate aboriginal territory.18 Writing the first major depiction in essay form of twentieth-­century Yoemem, Madero employs the Yaqui warrior myth when he uses Yaqui bellicosity as a symbol for the anti-­reelectionist movement. Madero and Nervo wrote about the Yoemem as they did because of the cultural and intellectual models in place by 1908. The dominant epistemology informing their notions of Yaqui indigeneity—­that is to say, what Mexicans know about the Yaquis—­was largely comprised of a Western-­based history emphasizing indigenous barbarism and connoting the racial inferiority of indigenous and mestizo people. It would not be until after the 1930s that Yoeme culture would capture the attention of Mexican Indigenista writers. As such, cultural justifications for the defense of their territory remained foreign to representations of their resistance to Mexican intrusions and their involvement in the Mexican Revolution. For Mexicans, Yoeme participation in the national armed struggle would indeed be chronicled as the time of Omteme, the angry Yaqui warrior, although it would be a version of this figure emptied of cultural values and possessing an innately violent nature. IDEOLOGY IN THE NOVEL OF THE REVOLUTION

Critics have noted the influence of ideological discourses on the literary representations of rural mestizo and indigenous masses in the Novel of the Mexican Revolution. Inspired by the depictions of indigenous people in the art of the muralismo movement, novelists too incorporated indigenous people like the Yoemem—­an undeniable historical presence—­into their own works.19 Nonetheless, critics have also emphasized the importance of pre-­ Revolutionary ideologies in the Novel of the Revolution and the influence of científico positivism in the years preceding the Revolution. After all, Mexican literature was nonindigenous in language, form, and content, and adhered to European traditions of prose fiction, such as romanticism, costumbrismo, realism, and naturalism (Aub 228). The Eurocentric nineteenth-­century intelligentsia rejected contemporary Native cultures and folk literatures, which therefore did not successfully enter discourses dealing with the nation’s indigenous communities or the so-­called “Indian problem.” Jean Franco maintains that Mexican positivism, informed by Social Darwinist thinkers like Spencer, Gobineau, and Le Bon, fomented among the ruling and intellectual elites a view of rural

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mestizos and aboriginal communities as dangerous (55–­59); the simple indio could always rise against them as a united and threatening indiada.20 Another prominent ideology was Arielismo, a school of thought founded in José Enrique Rodó’s essay on the moral superiority of the Latin American intellectual, Ariel (1900). Arielismo, which influenced a group of prominent young Mexican writers known as the Ateneo de la Juventud, also upheld an elitist view of an intellectual minority based on “a European standard of civilization” (Franco 82). The pre-­Revolutionary Europhile intellectual, Franco maintains, would “use his knowledge of civilized and European standards to attack the backwardness of his own country” (15). This was true of Sonoran and federal intellectuals and politicians who protested Yoeme autonomy as a “semi-­savage” menace to state modernity. The concept of civilización y barbarie, championed by Argentine thinker Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, would provide the prevailing discourse for depicting Native peoples during the second half of the nineteenth century and beyond. In Facundo o Civilización y barbarie (1845), Sarmiento divided America’s cultural clash distinctly into “la barbarie indígena” (indigenous barbarism) and “la civilización europea” (European civilization) (7).21 For Sarmiento, indigenous peoples, whose lands were still in the process of colonization, were a “pack of hyenas” that threatened the lives of defenseless Argentines (19–­20). Indigenous people, to whom he frequently referred as savages, could, however, serve at least one purpose as the subjects of a national literature. Here, indigenous-­criollo conflict provided a sensational study of the nation’s peculiarity and its identity.22 Sarmiento’s ideas on race and culture would loom over the writers of the Mexican Revolution. The Novel of the Mexican Revolution did not make a clean break with nineteenth-­century ideologies. At the same time that the literature of the Revolution demonstrates a tendency to include indigenous characters, it also reveals a limited understanding of, and interest in, indigenous perspectives on the Revolution. Instead, the works of Azuela, Guzmán, Romero, and others reveal the authors’ remoteness from indigenous people through colonialist perspectives and nineteenth-­century race science. Authors of the Revolution resorted to facile positivist and Social Darwinist discourses and reproduced Western views of contemporary Natives. Literary scholars have consistently supported Lanin Gyurko’s claim that “Indian consciousness” appears “still divorced from the mainstream of modern Mexico” (261).23 Azuela’s Los de abajo is again a case in point. The novel, whose protagonist is indigenous, is a clearly fearful upper-­class take on the oppressed masses as backward and criminal (Franco 80). Regarding

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Azuela’s “cosmovisión” (worldview) in Los de abajo, Joseph Sommers highlights the revolutionary characters’ bestial phenotypes, the criminal injustice of the masses, and the lack of the positive influence of education and ideas within the armed movement (“Novela” 739). John Rutherford describes Azuela as “a man steeped in Positivism and Naturalism,” whose fatalism “often takes the form of positivistic racialism” (221). Often, Marta Portal deduces, Azuela’s physical characterizations of the rural masses in the novel are more “psico-­somáticas que sociológicas” (psychosomatic than sociological) (79). And Max Parra asks of Azuela, “First, what image does a Liberal writer molded by the positivist education of his time construct of the rebellious peasant, and what vision of society does this image support?” (25). One could ask a similar question of other authors of the Revolution: what kind of portrayals of indigenous people result from authors heavily influenced by pre-­Revolutionary ideologies? Because the Novel of the Mexican Revolution is the product of the author’s desire to capture the historical and social realities of revolutionary Mexico and at the same time create a new vision of lo mexicano, its writers must have felt compelled to incorporate the undeniable indigenous participation. However, as Joseph Sommers notes, the novel failed to produce narratives comparable to muralista art in their integration of Native people and pre-­Hispanic cultures (“Novela” 745). As Gyurko proposes, the majority of the middle-­class intellectuals charged with producing national aesthetics in Mexico were as out of touch with the indigenous population as their nineteenth-­century predecessors had been. Instead of patiently exploring indigenous cultures and political desires—­the task undertaken by Indigenista writers—­novelists of the Revolution would conveniently look to colonial and Porfirian discourses, the cultural models already in place, regarding lo indio. Thus, the Novel of the Revolution was not only a search for la mexicanidad and an affirmation of a national indigenous presence, but also evidence of the influence still exercised by positivism, Social Darwinism, and the concept of civilización y barbarie during and after the Revolution.

ACTS OF YOEME PLACE-­M AKING DURING THE REVOLUTION Generally, authors of the Revolution had a limited knowledge of Yoeme culture, though Yoeme history was a different matter. A matter often represented simplistically in the Novel of the Revolution, land tenure in Hiakim was actually

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predicated on the ancient and colonial cosmologies that laid claim to the geographic borders delineating the territory; the document known as the Testamento narrates the Yoeme marching and singing of the “Holy Dividing Line.” Literary representations instead frequently mention the Sierra del Bacatete, a legendary part of the Yaqui territory, and the sound of indigenous drumming as the distinguishing characteristics of Yaqui revolutionary battalions. These representations only hint at the history of the community’s material and cultural survival in the wake of the Porfirian guerras de exterminio. A Yoeme perspective on the history of the Revolution is seldom explicit. Rather, the literature of the Revolution offers a Mexican history that incorporates the Yoemem as soldiers. The intricacy and contradiction of the community’s participation in the armed struggle are often obscured by a Yaqui identity focused exclusively on military prowess. It is helpful to (re)historicize the indigenous nation’s role in the Revolution to better understand its depictions in literature of the Revolution. When the Revolution ignited in 1910, the Porfirian war against the Yaqui nation, including military campaigns and deportations, had torn apart Yaqui families, all while nonindigenous colonization of Hiakim continued: “The few communities that remained nominally in Yaqui hands were but faint reflections of their once-­proud vitality” (Hu-­DeHart, Yaqui Resistance 202). Francisco I. Madero solicited Yoeme support in September 1911, promising to restore their territory. But Yoeme participation in the Mexican Revolution was a complex community issue. Luis Bule, more or less successor to Tetabiate after his death, was among those who had surrendered and enlisted in the enemy federal army before joining the Revolution. After a delegation of Yoeme leaders arrived at an agreement with Francisco I. Madero in 1911—­which included a promise to return their lands and supply other government aid—­many would eventually follow local hacendado and strongman José María Maytorena into the Revolution. Luis Bule and other incorporated Yoeme officers led Yaqui auxiliary battalions against Madero’s revolutionary forces in early 1911 (Dabdoub 161). Though the federal manso (tame) Yoemem were fighting alongside Maderista Yoemem by mid-­1912, the community remained divided (Dabdoub 164–­65). Yoemem who refused to either surrender or join the Revolution thought themselves “yaquis legítimos” (legitimate Yaquis) because they adhered to “la ley yaqui” (Yaqui law), which Spicer describes as the “system of social order which had originally been sanctified at the time of the founding of the Eight Yaqui Towns and which required for its maintenance the full organization of the Eight Yaqui Towns with governors, church, and other authorities” (The Yaquis 227). Concerned with

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Yoeme traditional life, some legítimos—­whom Hu-­DeHart further divides into broncos (wild) and “the most hardcore, uncompromising Yaqui rebels” (Yaqui Resistance 208)—­participated at different times with either Maytorena or Obregón. Legítimos were traditional Yoeme nationalists. Their aim was to preserve the integrity of the “Holy Dividing Line” ordained in the Testamento, which had been compromised by U.S. and Mexican colonization and development. While Potam and Torim had been evolving into nonindigenous towns, Cócorit and Bacum were almost completely Mexican by 1911 (Spicer, The Yaquis 225–­26). Hence there existed a divide in the Yoeme community between those who saw the opportunity to work with the Mexican government to achieve territorial autonomy and those who rejected the yori revolution altogether. Participation in the Revolution would further the Yoemem’s reputation as a bellicose people and obscure the community’s own views of the armed struggle. When Álvaro Obregón, a landowner and politician from Huatabampo, Sonora, took command of the forces of the Northwest in 1913, he would assure Yoeme military support as well. About the Yaquis’ reputation in combat, Hu-­DeHart writes that they were “widely acclaimed as among the best revolutionary fighters, overpowering the enemy even with their primitive bows and arrows” (Yaqui Resistance 208). Successful cooperation with revolutionary generals created an unproblematic mystique of warrior indigeneity in which “the ‘terrifying’ Yaqui troops struck fear to [sic] opponents’ hearts” (Spicer, The Yaquis 233). Dabdoub, whose history is an indispensable source, often essentializes Yoeme military success; as a result, Yoeme officer Lino Morales’s ability to command indigenous and mestizo soldiers is indicative of “las cualidades que indudablemente tiene la raza yaqui” (the qualities that the Yaqui race undoubtedly possesses) (169). Their military success, we should recognize, was not attributable to any inherent traits. More precisely, Yoeme fighters had been engaged in various levels of warfare throughout the last third of the nineteenth century and the first ten years of the twentieth, earning them abundant military experience.24 Further complicating the revolutionary Yaqui warrior myth, legítimos like Luis Espinosa and Luis Matus had concurrently taken up arms to defend the Yaqui landright and harass nonindigenous colonizers of their territory. This would lead to future conflicts between revolutionary leaders and enlisted Yoeme soldiers. When President Madero was assassinated in the Decena Trágica event in 1913, Yoeme soldiers proved themselves in decisive victories in Sonora and Sinaloa under the leadership of both their old ally José María Maytorena and Álvaro Obregón. Significantly, it was in these battles that legítimos joined Obregón,

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under the agreement that, once victorious, he return their lands (Spicer, The Yaquis 230); and in the Battle of Santa Rosa, near Guaymas, Luis Bule was killed and Obregón ascended to the rank of general (Dabdoub 170–­7 1).25 Once the northwestern forces moved southward from Sinaloa, many legítimos returned to Hiakim. Simply put, they saw problems outside the reaches of their homeland as none of their concern. But others traveled south, solidifying an incredible reputation for their exploits in Sonora and Sinaloa, and in the bloody march toward Mexico City (Spicer, The Yaquis 230). While Luis Bule would become a Yaqui legend, Yoeme officers like Lino Morales and Francisco Urbalejo would become generals and enjoy distinguished military careers (231). As was the case with other depictions of indigenous people, authors of the Revolution were often aware of the Yoeme nation’s history of resistance, as told in Mexican history. Thus the novelists of the Revolution filtered Yaqui indigeneity through references to the legendary Sierra del Bacatete and war drums. Whereas the Yoeme drum invoked aboriginal cultural Otherness, the Sierra del Bacatete’s symbolic power resided in its known history as a locus of Native resistance. Guzmán narrates the capturing on film of Yoeme soldiers in the Re­volution in his novel El águila y la serpiente (1928). A key event in Mexican and Yoeme Revolutionary history was the occupation of Mexico City by Obregón’s Northwestern Division on August 15, 1914. In the episode “La película de la Re­volución” in Guzmán’s book, revolutionaries at the Convention of Aguascalientes watch footage of Obregón’s triumphant entrance into Mexico City: Pasó, marchando dentro del marco luminoso, la fila interminable de yaquis, inconmovible, serpeante como las veredas de sus peñas abruptas. Lucían al sol, cual si fueran

de bronce, los pómulos bruñidos; los sombreros, adornados de cintas y plumajes, se movían al ritmo felino de los pasos. Cuando asomó, esbelto, largo, enjuto, el yaqui que golpeaba en un tamborcito como de juguete, el vozarrón de antes gritó: —­¡Vivan los vencedores de Occidente! (El águila 352)

(Marching past within the luminous frame went the interminable file of Yaqui

soldiers, grim, sinuous as the trails of their craggy hills. Their burnished cheek-

bones glowed in the sun as though made of bronze; their hats, adorned with

ribbons and feathers, moved to the feline rhythm of their steps. When the tall, slender, lean Yaqui who was beating a drum the size of a toy appeared, the same stentorian voice as before cried:

“Long live the victors of the West!”) (translation by de Onis, Eagle 290)

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Guzmán interprets the Yoemem of the Northwestern Division as a symbol of Sonora’s fighting man. Still, Guzmán re-­creates Yaqui indigeneity by alluding to the Sierra del Bacatete (“the trails of their craggy hills”), the place so important to Yoeme resistance movements, and to the symbolic indigenous drum. Seen as the army of Obregón, Yaqui battalions are the “victors of the West.” In a chapter titled “1914” in Tierra: La revolución agraria en México (1933), Gregorio López y Fuentes similarly represents Yoeme soldiers entering Mexico City, focusing on their peculiar drumming: “No es el tambor más o menos conocido en todas las columnas. Es un ruido seco, un golpe al parecer dado en un tronco sembrado de oquedades” (It is not the drum more or less recognized in all the columns. It is a dry sound, a blow that seems to be delivered on a trunk planted with hollowness) (119). Yoeme drumming, audibly out of place in Obregón’s rank and file, disconcerts the narrator. But no questions are made of their motivations. Why had the Sonoran aboriginals fought their way to Mexico City all the way from Mexico’s northern borderlands? Instead, Yoeme presence in the Revolution was interpreted through exotic peculiarity. Jorge Aguilar Mora reconsiders the Northwestern Division’s spectacular 1914 march into Mexico City: Traían todavía la indumentaria con la que habían salido de Sonora: los mismos

pantalones cortos de manta, los mismos huaraches, las mismas camisas bordadas, las mismas cintas de sujetarse el cabello. Algunos se habían acostumbrado a las botas y otros habían aceptado el sombrero tejano, sin renunciar por supuesto a

sus atuendos. Todos venían armados con carabinas Winchester 30/30 y aprovisionados con varias cananas de parque bien surtido; y ninguno había dejado su

arco, su carcaj, su honda y su cerbatana, objetos pavorosos para el civilismo de los capitulinos. (qtd. in Krauze 31)

(They still wore the same attire in which they had left Sonora: the same short cotton pants, the same huarache sandals, the same embroidered shirts, the same

hairbands. Some had become accustomed to wearing boots and others had

accepted the Texan sombrero, without giving up, of course, their own attire. All came armed with Winchester .30-­30 carbine rifles and supplied with var-

ious well-­stocked cartridge belts. And none had left behind his bow, quiver, slingshot, and his blowpipe, fearful objects to the civilian nature of the capital’s inhabitants)

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Yaqui battalions preserved an identity separate from nonindigenous battalions that was at the same time hybrid. From a Mexican point of view, the juxtapositions of sandal/boot, headband/sombrero, and rifle/bow suggest Yaqui indigeneity as a fusion of civilización/barbarie, or more specifically as “semi-­ savage.” Nonetheless, Aguilar Mora chooses to emphasize their frightening indigeneity. Returning to López y Fuentes’s Tierra, the author confirms warrior indigeneity with exaggerated characterizations of indigenous stoicism: “La ciudad los mira con la admiración que siempre tiene para los vencedores. Las leyendas que los han procedido los hacen más valientes, más estoicos, más soldados” (The city looks upon them with the admiration it always holds for the victors. The legends that have preceded them make them braver, more stoic, more soldierly) (120). Here, the entire capital city admires the Yoeme soldiers. And it is as if, writes López y Fuentes, a collective indigenous eye allows the soldiers to see through the experiences of every individual Yoeme, “como si llevaran familiarmente la visión de todas las andanzas de la raza: los que han sido enviados a las selvas chicleras de Quintana Roo. Los que fueron a la campaña del Maya” (as if they carried with them the familiar vision of all the race’s adventures: those sent to Quintana Roo’s gum-­collecting jungles. Those sent to the Mayan campaign) (119–­20). References to deportations and military conscription are significant here. These details set Yoeme history and identity apart from that of the generic indio. Nevertheless, in another depiction, Yaqui stoicism is combined with a near-­natural hatred and an unnatural affection for their weapons. But their presence was perhaps not so uncommon. The Yoemem were ubiquitous in the Revolution as a result of their military participation and the Porfirian-­era deportations. The examples captured on text and film would not have been anomalous. After being liberated from slavery in Yucatán, Yoeme men and women joined Yoeme and sometimes Mayo battalions in southern cities. Chepa Moreno, who had survived Yucatán, became a soldadera in “the Sixty-­seventh Battalion under General Chito Cruz,” a mainly Mayo unit (Kelley 140). True to the diaspora provoked by the guerras de exterminio and now the Revolution, Moreno recounts her unexpected reunion with her long-­lost father, Francisco Moreno, who had “joined the Twenty-­second (Yaqui) Battalion commanded by General Lino Morales from Huirivis” (141). And through all of this—­as slaves in Yucatán and soldiers of the Revolution—­Yoeme families and individuals struggled to maintain their cultural identity.

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Though Yoemem were active revolutionary soldiers and leaders, authors continually depicted Yoeme displays of culture as uncommonly exotic. Displaying the Indigenista-­style ethnography that would later appear in his El indio (1935), López y Fuentes provides a snapshot of traditional Yoeme dance performed by a military contingent: Ya en los cuarteles celebran a su manera los acontecimientos o acaso alguna fecha

memorable; al sonar del tambor ejecutan la “danza del venado.” Tres, cinco, veinte

horas. El tiempo es lo de menos. Danza de movimientos nerviosos, los nervios

propios de la cacería. Uno de los danzantes simula la presa perseguido en los montes del Bacatete, mientras que el otro danzante representa al cazador. (Tierra 120)

(Now in the barracks they celebrate in their way events or perhaps some mem-

orable date; they execute the “deer dance” to the sound of the drum. Three, five, twenty hours. Time is inconsequential. A dance of nervous movements, the very nerves of the hunt. One of the dancers simulates the prey followed in the hills of the Bacatete, while the other dancer represents the hunter.)

For the author, the staging of the deer dance during the Revolution is a spectacular and exotic manifestation of a Native Other’s culture. Why they perform it, he is not sure. It is just “their way” of commemorating something significant to them; although who can blame López y Fuentes for his awestruck captivation by the deer dancer, whose movements, as Evers and Molina concur, in fact “can be astonishing and mesmerizing” (Yaqui Deer Songs 73). The long dance that provokes the author’s wonder is a typical characteristic of the fiesta, in which the pascolas and deer dancers perform what don Jesús Yoilo’i called “one night of songs” (Evers and Molina, Yaqui Deer Songs 73). At first, this appears to be a rare glimpse of an indigenous ritual during the armed struggle. However, another former soldadera, Dominga Ramírez, recalls other performances of Yoeme and Mayo traditional dances. According to Ramírez, Yoeme fiestas and rituals had been accepted as customary among the Northwestern Division: In Torreón, Yaquis and Mayos of the Twenty-­second, Forty-­second, Twentieth, and Thirty-­fifth battalions put on a special performance for Generals Carranza

and Obregón. Provisions were issued for the preparation of fiesta food by the

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Yaqui women. Just before the dignitaries arrived by train, the women were lined up and given flowers to throw as the generals walked to the ramada where Yaqui

matachines, pascolas, and deer dancers performed. The fiesta was a great success. (Kelley 167–­68)

Clearly, some Yoeme and Mayo battalions included soldiers who were also traditional dance specialists. But even as slaves in Yucatán, some Yoemem had been able to successfully fulfill their obligations to perform traditional dances and religious rites. Ramírez reports that in 1915, “General Obregón ordered another fiesta in celebration of the victory” in Saltillo, while Yoeme soldiers observed a Waehma, or Easter, celebration in Parral in 1919 (Kelley 168). In recognizing the consistency of Yoeme religious practices during the Revolution, we begin to understand the silencing effect of López y Fuentes’s exoticism. Performing traditional dances and rituals such as Waehma, funerals, and processions, writes David Delgado Shorter, serves the community as a means of “place making”: “But deer dancing as an art form also expresses a specific indigeneity, coming from a particular place” (221). As a dance that brings the Aniam (or spiritual realms) to the material world, the deer dance and its symbols provide a Yoeme religious and historical epistemology to the community and to nonindigenous spectators regardless of geography (228). That is, by performing their culture, Yoeme revolutionaries were also performing their identities and making an indigenous place, be it in Yucatán, Mexico City, Chihuahua, or across the border in Arizona, where their diaspora would also fling them. Djed Bórquez’s novel Yórem Tamegua (1923), which follows the Mayo Fieles de Tésia Battalion under the command of the Yoeme protagonist Colonel Bartolo Bacaségua, provides another literary depiction that both recognizes and undermines Yoeme culture in the Revolution. A Sonoran writer of Yoeme descent, Bórquez provides uncommon insight into indigenous practices. The novel mentions a Captain Matus, “antiguo pazcola” (old pascola), who entertains his troops in typical pascola style, with biting humor (Bórquez 163). In an episode occurring in the wake of the 1915 Battle of León, Bórquez offers this description of Yoeme ritual:26 La vida en el campamento de los indios era de lo más pintoresca y cada vez que se presentaba una oportunidad—­San Juan, por ejemplo—­se organizaban pazcolas

y animados bailecitos. Con alguna regularidad se sucedían las fiestas alegres y los

funerales, pues frecuentemente fallecían soldados o familiares suyos. . . . Entonces

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se veían los velorios, tan pintorescos como los pazcolas. Al verificarse un velorio, era indispensable que la mayor parte de la noche se lanzaran al cielo cohetes a

intervalos cortos y que desde el anochecer hasta el cementerio el “mestro” y las viejas de mejor voz cantaran interminables letanías. (174–­75)

(Life in the Indian camp was most picturesque and every time that the opportu-

nity presented itself—­San Juan, for example—­pascolas and little animated dances were organized. With some regularity happy fiestas and funerals, for soldiers or their relatives frequently died, occurred. . . . Then the vigils were seen, as pictur-

esque as the pascolas. Once a vigil was confirmed, it was indispensable that for most of the night rockets be launched into the sky at short intervals and that

from nightfall the “mestro” and the old women with the best voices sing endless litanies.)

Despite Bórquez’s pro-­Yaqui and pro-­Mayo position and his significant ethnography, his description of rituals is condescending. Pascolas and death vigils are “picturesque,” as if they are merely curiosities of a peculiar people. He goes on to characterize the hymn singers as incomprehensible old women instead of essential participants in a religiously ordained rite of death (175). Finally, the “mestros,” or Yoeme and Mayo maehtom (religious heads), “pretend to read Latin,” thereby performing a mimesis of cultured Mexican identity. Nonetheless, Bórquez’s Indianist portrayal again demonstrates the ubiquity of the community’s cultural practices—­performed “every time that the opportunity presented itself ”—­in the revolutionary theater. Considering the above evidence, there is reason to believe that deer dances continued to be held during special etehoi (storytelling) events, during Pakho fiestas, and on holy days such as Santísima Trinidad or, as Bórquez notes, San Juan Day (Evers and Molina, Yaqui Deer Songs 74–­75). Yoeme dance was not, therefore, some infrequent occurrence fortuitously captured in text, but rather a common practice through which members of the indigenous nations exercised their indigeneity through acts of place making. The exotic portrayals of Yaqui revolutionaries by Guzmán and López y Fuentes are but the surface of a parallel Yoeme history of the Revolution. Many indigenous soldiers chose to dress distinctly from other northern troops and practiced their religious rites and dances when possible. They maintained a Yoeme indigeneity through public displays of cultural identity, even before people who had little understanding of what those traditions represented. Nonetheless, the

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indigenous Revolution written by nonindigenous authors can be summed up in a sequence from Francisco Rojas González’s short story “Lancaster Kid”: ¡1914! La ametralladora paseó su prestigio de gran perforadora de vientres a lo largo del país.

Sobre las espigas de los trigales llovió el chahuixtle de las granadas.

Los campesinos ampararon su corazón entre la doble cruz de las cananas. La

palabra del camarada Máuser se impuso en aquella algarabía.

El bule tequilero dejó su lugar a la caramañola y la voz ronca de la tambora fue

acallada por el cántico desconcertante de los tamborcillos del Bacatete. (Cuentos completos 196)27

(1914! The machine gun paraded her prestige as a great perforator of bellies throughout the country.

The plague of the grenades fell upon the sprigs of the wheat fields.

The farming peasants shielded their hearts between the double cross of their

cartridge belts. Comrade Mauser imposed his word among that jubilation.

The tequila bule gourd ceded to the canteen and the bass drum was silenced

by the disconcerting chant of the tiny drums of the Bacatete.)

As if in summary of other authors, Rojas González alludes to Yoeme participation metonymically: first, through their 1914 march into Mexico City, and second, through the unsettling beating of “los tamborcillos del Bacatete” (the little drums of the Bacatete)—­a double reference to Yoeme drumming and the Sierra del Bacatete. The Yaquis become another symbol of the Revolution’s diversity: the indomitable warriors of the north. This symbolism no doubt presents a representational double-­edged sword. One the one hand, Yaquis are agents in the national struggle; on the other, literary depictions of exotic drumming and dance assign a disturbing racial Otherness to nonindigenous Mexicans. Thus, literature of the Mexican Revolution undermines Yaqui cultural ubiquity by reducing Yaquis to a state of Othered warriorhood.

READING YOEME CHARACTERS AS DEER It is not surprising that the Yaqui warrior myth is wholly present in the literary representation of Yoeme revolutionaries. According to Spicer, various factors

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contributed to the warrior mystique: (1) Yoeme military success; (2) their affiliation with Madero, Obregón, Adolfo de la Huerta, and other prominent revolutionaries; and (3) the perception that the Yoemem “were picturesque and independence-­loving” northern Indians fighting for agrarian reforms (The Yaquis 233). However, throughout the Revolution, Yoeme soldiers performed their identities whenever tradition dictated: liturgical days of obligation, vigils, and fiestas. The deer dance is a selected ritual performed for their community and for both indigenous and nonindigenous spectators. As Shorter articulates, the deer dance is one of the most frequent means through which the indigenous nation represents itself to others. But while it “is popular because of the highly dramatic hunt and death of the deer and because it suits certain images of the heroic hunter,” he affirms, it has also been a way of “demonstrating how they knew themselves” (224–­25). As an indigenous tradition of knowledge, deer dancing can provide an interpretive mechanism for and an alternative to the Yaqui warrior myth Mexicans are accustomed to. It is useful to look at both possibilities as we shift epistemic paradigms in an analysis of Carlos Fuentes’s La muerte de Artemio Cruz (1962). As we have already seen, the Yaqui warrior myth is a historical facet of the Novel of the Revolution. And in representations of Yoemem, literature mirrors history. Following the defeat of the federal forces, the October 1914 Convention of Aguascalientes was meant to reconcile the major revolutionary leaders—­ Carranza, Obregón, Villa, and Emiliano Zapata. It nonetheless resulted in a schism, with the Carrancista forces supported by Obregón set against a tenuous Villista-­Zapatista alliance. Despite Villa’s superior numbers and celebrity, his División del Norte suffered extraordinary defeats against Obregón’s men in 1915, from the Battle of Celaya (April) to the Battle of Aguascalientes ( June), after which Villa’s division ceased to be an effective military factor in the Revolution (Knight 1: 328). In Carlos Fuentes’s La región más transparente (1958), former peasant-­turned-­revolutionary Federico Robles remembers the Yaqui soldiers at the fateful Battle of Celaya in April 1915. In romantic Indianist style, Fuentes describes Yoeme Obregonistas stoically waiting in their foxholes, where “buried in clay, it was as if they had found where they belonged by nature” (Where the Air 81). Yaqui soldiers, here represented as bucolic noble savages, are eternally tied to the Mexican soil, and thus unproblematically enter into a colonialist relationship between this soil and nonindigenous institutions for whom both Indian and land are exploitable resources. But Yaqui warriorhood quickly rears its head when combat initiates:

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Villa’s cavalry was firing the plain with gallop and whinny and the rearing of

horses roweled by singing spurs, stung by rifle fire from the Yaquis who, imme-

diately after firing, ducked into their holes and stuck their bayonets straight up, stabbing at the horses’ bellies from the wet sanctuary of their clay burrows, until blood and intestines dripped down on their Indian faces. (81–­82)

Robles, now a powerful banking executive in Mexico City, attributes the demise of the Villista forces to the sensational feats of Obregón’s stoic warriors. But the display of Native fighters so eagerly bloodthirsty for combat restores and projects to the reader the myth of Yaqui bellicosity. Due to the factionalism of the Revolution, from 1914 to 1915 Yoeme soldiers once loyal to José María Maytorena found themselves following Francisco Villa, while others continued under Obregón. Nonetheless, “after the defeat of Villa in late 1915, Obregón wisely pardoned and graciously admitted back into his fold . . . Yaquis who had deserted him, thus regaining their precious support” (Hu-­DeHart, Yaqui Resistance 208). It is during this rift that Yoeme general Francisco Beltrán may have joined with Villa. In the classic ¡Vámonos con Pancho Villa! (1936), Rafael F. Muñoz briefly characterizes the Villista Beltrán by means of typical warrior stoicism. When, pursued by Carrancistas and the U.S. Punitive Expedition for his attack on Columbus, New Mexico, in March 1916, the injured Villa goes into hiding and grants Beltrán temporary command of Villista forces, the Yaqui general coldly responds, “El indio hará lo que ordene la general Villa” (The Indian shall do what General Villa orders) (Muñoz 172). Beltrán’s usage of the feminine article la before general, instead of the correct el, is the author’s attempt to re-create the oral voices of indigenous soldiers with a limited mastery of proper Spanish. But Muñoz’s linguistic description has the effect of characterizing the indigenous officer as falling short of a key component of Mexican identity. Here we have the stereotype of the indigenous fighting man. He is part noble warrior and part barbarian—­that is, “semi-­savage”—­his stigmatized speech connoting a limited grasp of the national language. In a manner reminiscent of Sarmiento’s gauchos, the reader is assured of the Yaqui general’s mastery of the northern terrain. Villa declares, “Me gustas porque hablas poco y pegas mucho. No te rajarás nunca, y conoces Chihuahua tan bien como Durango, y los dos tan bien como tu sierra de Sonora” (I like you because you don’t talk much and hit hard. You’ll never back down, and you know Chihuahua as well as Durango, and both just as well as your Sonoran sierra) (172). Beltrán’s stoicism and limited speech,

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indicative of nonindigenous production of Yaqui indigeneity, lend themselves more to anger and violence than to pride or resignation. He is the rebellious and angry Yaqui, Omteme, who has left his Sierra del Bacatete for the battlefields of the Revolution. La muerte de Artemio Cruz (1962), by Carlos Fuentes, is a founding work of the Boom and in many ways an example of the Novel of the Mexican Revolution. From the outset, it should be made known that the author himself has claimed Yoeme descent (Obras reunidas 673), though Fuentes has never admitted the influence of Yoeme culture in his works. The novel’s protagonist Artemio Cruz, a corrupt entrepreneur who has risen to power by betraying revolutionary principles, is an Afro-­Mexican man who has “passed” in Mexican society as mestizo. In narrating Cruz’s memories of his time as an officer in the Northwestern Division, Fuentes revisits tropes found in previous novels with his depiction of the arrival of Obregón’s forces in a train station filled with “sombreros yaquis adornados con ramas; los músicos con las varas entre las manos y los instrumentos metálicos al hombro” (“Yaqui Indian hats hung with leafy twigs: members of the band carrying their music stands in their hands, their metal instruments on their backs”), and the moment when “una plataforma de indios mayos llegaba al pueblo, con un tamborileo agudo y una agitación de arcos de colores y flechas rústicas” (“a flatcar of Mayo Indians was pulling in, to an accompaniment of high-­pitched drumming and a flutter of colored bows and primitive arrows”) (La muerte 72; translation by MacAdam, Death 66). The depiction of Yoeme and Mayo military participation further historicizes the novel and portrays the Sonoran army’s diversity during the stages of the Revolution following the assassination of Francisco I. Madero. But Yoeme characters also symbolize the major injustices of the Porfirian dictatorship. Following a battle, an outraged lieutenant standing before a group of bodies hanged by the federal soldiers lectures, “Vean bien. Así mataron a la tribu yaqui, porque no quiso que le arrebataran sus tierras. Igual mataron a los trabajadores de Río Blanco y Cananea” (“Take a good look. That’s how they killed the Yaquis, because the Yaquis didn’t want their land taken from them. The same way they killed the workers at Río Blanco and Cananea”) (La muerte 81; Death 74–­75). The novel directly references the federal abuses that Francisco I. Madero called the dictatorship’s “proof of ‘Absolute Power,’” which justified a revolution (Presidential 127). The officer’s diatribe likens the war of extermination, genocide, and deportations waged against the Yoemem to the federal repression of the Mexican people, much like Madero’s discourse does in La sucesión presidencial de

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1910. As such, and despite their Native Otherness, the Yoeme nation continues to symbolize Mexico’s anti-­dictatorial struggle. In an episode set in October 1915, the same year the U.S. government would recognize the authority of Venustiano Carranza, Cruz finds himself prisoner alongside his Yaqui subordinate inside a prison in Parral, Chihuahua. At the behest of a third fellow prisoner named Gonzalo Bernal, Cruz remembers Yoeme officer Luis Bule and other soldiers who lost their lives for the Revolution. The Afro-­mestizo Cruz, the White criollo-­descended Bernal, and revolutionary soldier “Yaqui Tobías” represent a racial allegory of Mexico’s three most recognized racial origins.28 The injured Tobías also projects the image of a loyal noble-­savage sidekick to Captain Cruz, whom the Yaqui soldier goes so far as to try to help escape on his own. Tobías’s Yaqui indigeneity is further evident in his indigenous monolingualism. Tobías’s character denies the reader a simple reference to the prevalent Yaqui warrior myth, however, as the author humanizes the indigenous soldier both through a physical manifestation of agony and a painful remembrance of the Yoeme history of resistance. Moreover, Cruz’s sympathy for Tobías is evident not only in his ability to speak the Yoeme man’s language, but also in his plan to save Tobías and abandon Gonzalo, the White intellectual, to his own fate. We can find racial commonalities between Artemio Cruz, who up until this point has denied his African descent, and Tobías, with whom he shares a legacy of racial Otherness, diaspora, and slavery. If at one moment Cruz seems not to recognize the dying Tobías’s face, he nonetheless honors his dark indigenous counterpart’s history by interpreting his dying testimony, as Alberto Ribas has noted (Ribas 104): —­Cuenta cosas. De cómo el gobierno les quitó las tierras de siempre para dárse-

las a unos gringos. De cómo ellos pelearon para defenderlas y entonces llegó la tropa federal y empezó a cortarles las manos a los hombres y a perseguirlos por el monte. . . .

—­De cómo tuvieron que marchar hasta Yucatán y las mujeres y los viejos

y los niños de la tribu se iban quedando muertos. Los que lograron llegar a las

haciendas henequeneras fueron vendidos como esclavos y separados los esposos

de sus mujeres. De cómo obligaron a las mujeres a acostarse con los chinos, para que olvidaran su lengua y parieran más trabajadores. (Fuentes, La muerte 190)

(“He’s telling things. How the government took away the land where his people

had always lived, to give it to some gringos. How they fought for their land;

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how the federal troops came, cut off the men’s hands, and chased them into the hills. . . .

“How they had to march to Yucatán and the women and the old people and

the kids in the tribe were dying. Those who made it to the hemp plantations

were sold as slaves, and husbands were separated from wives. How they made the

women sleep with the Chinese workers, so they’d forget their language and give birth to more workers.” (Death 181)

A survivor of Porfirian military campaigns and deportation, Tobías conjures not only his personal history, but also the collective Yoeme history of resistance, atrocities, and revolutionary participation. The sympathetic characterization of Tobías departs markedly from those made by Nervo, who in fact recounts the same history as Fuentes, and from López y Fuentes’s sensational but exotic Yaqui indigeneity. After Cruz’s attempt to broker a deal for their release backfires, both Bernal and Tobías are executed. Tobías’s execution is nevertheless notable in that the Villista colonel in charge pumps an extra round (a bullet meant for Cruz) into the dead Yoeme’s body, as if to express Mexico’s hegemonic disdain, be it Porfirian, Villista, or Obregonista, for its Native people. It is in this episode that we can interpret the death of Yaqui Tobías—­la muerte del yaqui Tobías—­through the epistemic paradigm of deer dancing. If we read the Yoeme soldier’s death as a deer dance, Tobías is transformed into Saila Maaso (Little Brother Deer), who dances from the Sea Ania (flower realm). If only in this episode, Tobías can be the central character of “this other drama of suffering, life, death, and spiritual continuance,” as Evers and Molina describe Maso Me’ewa (Killing the Deer) (Yaqui Deer Songs 128). It is appropriate that in the novel Tobías represents the indigenous soldiers who left the Huya Ania (wilderness world) in Hiakim. Yoeme soldiers practiced their traditional culture, performing their identities throughout Mexico, thereby indigenizing the landscape of the Revolution. And like Saila Maaso, whose dance replicates deer hunting, Tobías is also a sacrificial figure. Tobías’s slow death parallels the killing of the deer. In the deer dance, the otherwise friendly pascolas become coyotes and slowly, dramatically hunt Saila Maaso. Like Tobías’s initial injury during the ambush and his painful historical recollection in the Parral jail cell, Saila Maaso’s death too is slow and agonizing; eventually, the pascolam-­coyotes overwhelm the deer in a horrific display (Shorter 224). By allowing the deer dance to invade Fuentes’s narrative, we (re)allegorize Tobías as a sacrificial figure whose death is both obligatory to and regenerative of Yoeme cultural and material

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existence. For it was the Yoeme fighters, the legítimos within Hiakim and the militaristas (or mansos) throughout the revolutionary theater, who served as sacrifices on behalf of their territorial and cultural autonomy. The Carrancista Cruz and the Villista colonel in Fuentes’s novel, both representing allies at different moments during the history of the Revolution, can be understood as the pascolam-­coyotes with whom Saila Maaso dances, as they turn on the Yoeme soldier-­become-­deer—­Cruz doing so inadvertently, and the colonel quite resolutely. As such, Tobías resembles a Yoeme interpretation of Christ—­also a deer figure—­whose inevitable yearly Easter sacrifice signifies “community survival in the face of persecution” (Shorter 241).29 Still, as a deer, Tobías can also represent the losers of the Mexican Revolution. This is true of the Yoeme nation, which, like Tobías, aligned itself with nonindigenous revolutionaries-­coyotes in order to achieve territorial and political sovereignty. Continuing with the deer dance analysis, in 1915 the Yaquis’ ally Obregón agreed to meet with a Yaqui delegation to resolve the problems in Sonora. Once again Yoeme leaders were engaging the Mexican state through diplomacy. However, the general was outraged at continued demands for land and autonomy, calling this “the perpetuation of barbarism among them and [the extension of ] its dominion even where civilization had been planted” (Spicer, The Yaquis 230). From late 1915 to 1919, Carranza and Obregón’s Constitutionalist forces would again hunt down, detain, and deport men, women, and children—­as Dabdoub remarks incredulously, “¡En plena iniciación del régimen revolucionario!” (During the very initiation of the revolutionary regime!) (206). Tobías can also be read as Cruz’s alter ego, Cruz being a powerful Mexican who wrestles with the country’s (and his own) history of manipulation and repression of indigenous people, as Olavarría argues (Cruces 64). Like Álvaro Obregón and Plutarco Elías Calles, the protagonist is but another in a long line of Mexicans whose rise is derived partly from their exploitation of Native people. Despite Cruz’s status as a man of color (Afro-­Mexican), he is also decidedly different from his indigenous counterpart. Unlike most other Mexicans in the first decade of the twentieth century, Cruz possesses a basic education in letters and numbers. Cruz’s prominence and accumulation of wealth and power align him more with the aforementioned Obregón and Calles than with Tobías.30 If there is any doubt about the Mexican penchant for racism even when it comes to indigenous allies, let us consider Dabdoub’s illustration: “Obregón, blanco, apuesto, bien peinado y presentado—­Villa lo había llamado ‘yaqui perfumado’” (Obregón, white, handsome, and well-­groomed—­Villa had called him

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“perfumed Yaqui”) (188). Again, the Villista, Obregonista, and Carrancista view of the Yoeme soldiers is greatly utilitarian and discriminatory. Cruz’s sympathy for Tobías notwithstanding, the protagonist’s post-­Revolutionary trajectory consistently depends on his manipulation of indigenous people in Puebla and the betrayal of President Lázaro Cárdenas’s 1930s agrarian reforms, which would include the restitution of Yoeme lands. We can hypothesize with certainty that had Yaqui Tobías not died during the Revolution in 1915, Cruz, as a victor of the Revolution—­true to his coyote nature—­would have betrayed and killed him thereafter, either during the ensuing campaigns spanning from 1915 to 1919, or in the last Yoeme uprising of 1926–­27, which then second-­time presidential candidate Álvaro Obregón described as “una brillante oportunidad para acabar con una vergüenza para Sonora” (a brilliant opportunity to do away with an embarrassment to Sonora) (qtd. in Krauze 110). From the deer’s perspective, betrayal by Artemio Cruz, Obregón, and Villa—­whether fictional, hypothetical, or historical—­constitutes part of the community’s understanding of Yoeme-­yori (deer-­coyote) relations. As such, the notions of defeat and victory are relative.

CONCLUSION The Novel of the Revolution only hints at the colonial and Porfirian histories of repression through allusions to the Sierra del Bacatete, from which Yoeme insurgents launched their counterattacks under the leadership of Cajeme, Te­tabiate, and Bule. It is impossible to find an indigenous revolution in Mexican Revolutionary literature when confined to a colonial-­Mexican epistemology. This chapter enacts an epistemic shift, relying on indigenous forms of knowledge to reread this literature through Native eyes. By (re)historicizing Yaqui literary representations within a Yoeme perspective, we are able to unveil the deer dance and other rituals as vital and common practices among the soldiers of General Obregón’s nationally dominant Northwestern Division. However, when we apply the lens of the deer dance known as Maso Me’ewa, a “grounded, embodied ritual action” of aboriginal knowledge (Shorter 242), Carlos Fuentes’s sympathetic portrayal of a Yaqui revolutionary becomes a narrative of community survival revealing Yoeme-­yori relations. From a Yoeme perspective, survival and sacrifice, victory and defeat, are indeed interconnected and terribly relative terms. This becomes evident in a meeting between President Lázaro Cárdenas and a Yoeme leader:

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To the explanations of the President . . . the [Yaqui] Governor . . . answered . . . “When the government was defeated. . . .” General Cárdenas made the observation that the government had not been defeated, and invited the Governor

to continue: “You know, that when the government was defeated. . . .” General

Cárdenas repeated his explanation that the government had not been defeated; that it had thousands and thousands of troops, arms and airplanes with which

to fight, but that it preferred to come to a peaceful agreement and that that was

exactly the reason why he was there; and that if he understood this, he should continue: “Look, President, when the government was defeated and came to ask

us for peace. . . .” General Cárdenas responded: “Very well, when the government was defeated . . . please, go on.” (Bantjes 145)

As in the story of the leader Omteme, who defends his territory against the conquistador Columbus, the majority of Yoeme revolutionaries and insurgents embroiled themselves in the revolutionary drama in order to preserve the Holy Dividing Line promulgated in the Testamento. Nonetheless, as human beings, many had no alternative but to flee. The Porfirian guerras de exterminio had provoked the self-­exile of a population of Yoemem into Arizona in the decade preceding the Revolution. But the diaspora continued as a new wave of emigration to the United States followed Obregón’s 1916–­17 “renewal of the ‘Yaqui campaign’” (Spicer, The Yaquis 236). With the convenient discourses of civilización y barbarie and positivist progress providing justification, Yoemem who chose to preserve the Hiakim territory as their own were again dehumanized, becoming the victims of government violence and deportation even after the Revolution. It is this history of diaspora and emigration to the United States that would later be captured by Chicana/o writers of Yoeme descent.

4 THE YOEMEM AND THE ARCHIVE Indigenismo, Motherhood, and Indigeneity

T

“Yaqui campaigns” would culminate in the 1926–­28 “last Yaqui revolt,” precipitated by an incident between former president Álvaro Obregón and Yoeme leaders in the Hiakim territory.1 Yoeme women and men had played pivotal roles in the Revolution’s inception and conclusion. Victims of the Porfirian deportations and soldiers and soldaderas under the triumphant General Obregón, they had been a renowned presence in the Revolution, in both ideology and combat. In 1937, President Lázaro Cárdenas, who had participated as a colonel in the 1917 “Yaqui campaign,” decreed the Yoeme landright to a large portion of the indigenous nation’s traditional territory (Spicer, The Yaquis 265). It was a time in which the Mexican government seemed committed to making amends for more than a century of repression against its aboriginal citizens. This sort of national attention captured the interest of Mexican writers who came to be known as Indigenistas. Indigenistas coincided with a newly expanding anthropological archive on indigenous Mexico; as such, late nineteenth-­and early twentieth-­century binaries—­civilización y barbarie, indio and mexicano, primitive and modern—­proved insufficient to describe the myriad of frequently non-­Spanish-­speaking communities whose cultures differed often strikingly from one another. Authors like Gregorio López y Fuentes (El indio, 1935) and Mauricio Magdaleno (El resplandor, 1937) would draw upon new ethnographies to create works critiquing the revolutionary government’s impact HE POST-­R EVOLUTIONARY

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on indigenous Mexico. These novels and short stories placed indigenous communities front and center. And through ethnographic detail, they pretended to, as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has put it, “speak for” indigenous perspectives by harnessing and reproducing aboriginal subalterns’ “subjugated knowledge” (281). As with the Novel of the Mexican Revolution, exteriority would be an inescapable feature. It should not be surprising, then, that the new anthropological archive—­itself an extension of the Spanish colonial–­Mexican epistemology of lo indio—­was as much a display of indigenous cultural exoticism as a celebration of indigeneity. But Indigenismo was both political and artistic. Promoters of Manuel Gamio’s incorporationist thought, as expressed in his Forjando patria (1916), sought to homogenize the nation’s Native inhabitants into one coherent ethnic citizenry: Spanish-­speaking, mestizo, proletarian, self-­identified Mexicans. Gamio’s Indigenismo became a governmental mandate to Mexicanize indigenous people—­that is, to de-­indigenize Mexico. Among the many communities that received literary attention, the Yoeme nation was represented in the literature of José Revueltas, Ramón Rubín, Francisco Rojas González, and Armando Chávez Camacho. These literary representations scarcely compete with the more popular literature depicting the Tzeltal and Tzotzil communities of Chiapas, works collectively dubbed by Joseph Sommers “el ciclo de Chiapas.”2 Even so, they demonstrate the continuing interest the Yoeme nation inspired in the nation’s politicians, anthropologists, and creative writers. While Yoeme bellicosity, dance, and insularity are topics oft alluded to in Indigenista representations, much as they were in the Novel of the Revolution, the complexity that had been made evident to Mexican intellectuals through a surge of Yoeme ethnographies made the tabula rasa approach of the homogeneous indio problematic. The Yaquis were no longer popular heroes of the Revolution or colonial barbarian subjects; through its examination of race, culture, and gender, the field of anthropology produced a new Yaqui indigeneity for national consumption. Anthropological research made available from the 1930s onward compelled Mexican novelists to acknowledge Native epistemologies—­which is not to say respect them. Writers would now have to innovate as they engaged with a new archive of what we know about lo yaqui. This chapter centers on post-­Cárdenas Indigenista literature written in an era in which the Yoeme nation had secured federal recognition of its current territory and a degree of political and cultural autonomy. Focusing on Francisco Rojas González’s “La triste historia del pascola Cenobio,” I analyze

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the relationship between literature, anthropological authority, and the writers’ claim to cultural authenticity in a literature that inscribes government ideologies into its re-creation of living indigenous communities. Because anthropological claims about Yoeme warriorhood, xenophobia, and motherhood directly impact Indigenista literature and politics, this chapter examines anthropological archives as new epistemological authorities guided by state ideologies. Anthropological perspectives on Yoeme race, nationhood, and gender roles are at work in Rubín’s “La mula muerta” (1958) and “El yaqui” (1969), Chávez Camacho’s Cajeme: Novela de indios (1948), and José Revueltas’s “El dios vivo” (1944). My analytical focus on the politicization of anthropological work, it should be noted, is not meant to disparage the field of anthropology proper, but rather to draw attention to the ideological influences it reveals, and the administrative and artistic abuse thereof. This chapter’s final section provides analysis of Rojas González’s “La triste historia del pascola Cenobio” (1952) as a blend of narrative and ethnographic research that strategically engages an archive of lo yaqui. The author’s goal is to represent Yoeme elders and the Yoeme mother as propagators of an archaic and repressive traditional society. Of particular interest is Rojas González’s recovery of research on the mother figure as a perpetuator of aboriginal isolation and senseless generational hatred toward nonindigenous people in the community’s youth, a figure who retards Yoeme incorporation into modern Mexican society. Just as important is the simultaneous secularization of traditional dance and the portrayal of the pascola as an individualistic artist.

ANTHROPOLOGY AND “REFERENTIAL POWER” While discourses of civilización y barbarie and Social Darwinism are easily detectable in the representations made by the Novel of the Mexican Revolution through allusions to the Yaqui warrior myth—­the facile representation of Yoeme resistance—­these become more complex and difficult to identify as such in Indigenista literature. This is partly due to new literary techniques: individualization of indigenous characters, greater psychological depth evoked through stream of consciousness, and the development of plotlines involving interaction between indigenous people, to name a few. Equally critical to the representational complexity of the Yoemem is the ethnographic detail largely due to a boom in anthropological activity in Mexico. This anthropological

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activity, it must be noted, was part of the Mexican government’s efforts to solve the “Indian problem” through acción indigenista, the investigation of aboriginal social ailments and the intervention therein by government officials—­in other words, anthropology at the service of government. Government authority over the representation of indigenous people was in this way transferred from purely political institutions to collaborative political-­ academic ones related to the field of anthropology. But despite increasing collaboration between social scientists and Native informants, indigenous communities were not granted a direct voice; as in the colonial era and the nineteenth century, exteriority continued to be a key feature of the understanding of indigeneity by nonindigenous Mexicans. Including colonial documents and nineteenth-­century political discourses, Indigenistas—­literary, anthropological, and political—­shaped a new archive of what we know about indigenous people; this archive was fueled by an army of domestic and foreign anthropologists spearheaded by Manuel Gamio. Texts dealing with a panoply of topics—­illness, herbology, religious ceremonies, traditional dress and ceremonial garb, dance, etc.—­were made available to functionaries charged with implementing acción indigenista: government officials, anthropological investigators, doctors, and rural teachers. Gamio, in his landmark publication Forjando patria (1916), openly promoted the role of anthropology in the nation-­building project. Gamio’s desires to “elevate” indigenous peoples via their cultural and racial incorporation was premised on mestizaje as a national telos into which the small indigenous nations would have to “evolve.” His strategy is pragmatic and revealing: Para incorporar al indio no pretendamos “europeizarlo” de golpe; por el contrario, “indianicémonos” nosotros un tanto, para presentarle, ya diluida con la suya, nuestra civilización, que entonces no encontrará exótica, cruel, amarga e incomprensi-

ble. Naturalmente que no debe exagerarse a un extremo ridículo el acercamiento al indio. (Forjando 96)

(We do not intend to incorporate the Indian by “Europeanizing” him in a single blow. On the contrary, we should “Indianize” ourselves a bit, offer our civilization

to him in a form that is diluted with his own. Then, he will not find this civilization exotic, cruel, bitter, and incomprehensible. But naturally, our approximation

to the Indian should not be exaggerated to a ridiculous extreme.) (translation by Armstrong-­Fumero, Forging 98)

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Gamio’s incorporationist design is clear: Mexico must find innovative ways of making a national Mexican culture (more European than indigenous) available to indigenous communities to draw them out of their cultural isolation. Not all Indigenistas adhered to the tenets of incorporation. Pluriculturalismo, a school championed by Moisés Sáenz in his 1939 México íntegro, promotes degrees of indigenous political and cultural autonomy. Sáenz criticizes the tendency to fetishize indigenous people as easy-­to-­archive objects of scientific study instead of as living, breathing people. While the National Museum of History and Ethnography—­“institución de notables cosas muertas” (an institution of notable dead things)—­conducted costly monographs on “the Indian,” Sáenz argues, indigenous communities were left to their misery and vulnerable to exploitation (139). On the question of mestizaje as a means toward “la ‘incorporación’ del indio a la familia mexicana” (the “incorporation” of the Indian into the Mexican family), Sáenz does not deviate from the narrative of Mexico as mestizo nation, but opposes making mestizaje a requirement for full citizenship (136). Nonetheless, early official Indigenista efforts, argues Alexander S. Dawson, “laid the foundations for the ‘state simplifications’ that would be central to the mandate of anthropology as an exercise in state making” (8). Anthropologist-­authors like Rojas González and Ricardo Pozas participated in practices that, on the question of indigenous race and assimilation, would perpetuate nineteenth-­century Social Darwinist claims. Dawson criticizes Gamio’s practice of anthropometry in Teotihuacán, published in La población de Teotihuacán (1922), for example, as an affirmation of “the racializing tendencies of Mexican scientific circles” (Dawson 9). Thanks to the field of anthropology, nineteenth-­century ideas of atavism and eugenics continued to be reproduced by “many teachers, social scientists, and intellectuals . . . to describe the Mexican Indian,” despite their scientific irrelevance (Dawson 15–­16).3 Not surprisingly, one of the highlights of Rojas González’s 1941 ethnographic article “Los tzotziles” is an anthropometric chart detailing height, cephalic index, and nasal index (Ensayos 140). Treating it as a scientific requirement, Rojas González engages in the question of indigenous racialization as a legitimate site of inquiry, making Native bodies the locus of a clinical (often dehumanizing) scrutiny. The result is the perpetuation of Mexico’s colonial disdain for its Native population. The impact of the Mexican Revolution and its search for a distinct identity, or mexicanidad, notwithstanding, Europe still served Mexican intellectuals as their primary ideological reference—­or, as Walter D. Mignolo describes it, “the locus of enunciation; that is, the epistemic location from where the world was

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classified and ranked” (42). However, there now existed a new supply of “scientifically” valid texts, opinions, and manuals bestowing authority over said classifications and rankings on nonindigenous Mexicans. In its textual manifestation, Indigenista authority over aboriginal subalterns is formed and reproduced through what Edward Said called “strategic formation, which is a way of analyzing the relationship between texts and the way in which groups of texts, types of texts, even textual genres, acquire mass, density, and referential power among themselves and thereafter in the culture at large” (20). The anthropological archive, then, is capable of connecting colonial documents, Porfirian ethnographies and history, and twentieth-­century ethnographers. It is the labor of what Ángel Rama dubbed the “lettered city” (27), a new caste of “letrados” exercising, in John Beverley’s words, a “high-­minded discourse of ethical benevolence and epistemological privilege, especially at those moments when that discourse claims to speak for the other” (Beverley 39–­40). Consequently, there grew a population of fiction writers whose work was informed by Indigenista efforts as readers of ethnographies or as investigators themselves. The key to Indigenista literary production, therefore, is a paternalistic exteriority that, Taylor proposes, demonstrates “the white or mestizo intellectual’s persistent sense of him-­or herself as mediator between the state and a population at once edified and silenced by that state” (“Between” 97). This archival-­intellectual interpellation of lo indio reveals a kind of Mexican Orientalism, a way of understanding Mexican indigenous peoples through an academic infantilization, which reproduces itself through social authority, be it academic, political, artistic, or popular. Denying indigenous peoples an unmediated voice in their own cultural, historical, and political representations, Indigenista literature would depict Yoemem from the perspective of those privileged with solving the “Indian problem,” often employing what Said called “the constricted vocabulary of such a privilege, and the comparative limitations of such a vision” (44). But, unlike the Novel of the Mexican Revolution, Indigenista literature, a literature of social protest, would go beyond an adjectival portrayal of Yoemem.

THE YOEME NATION AND THE ANTHROPOLOGICAL ARCHIVE Francisco Rojas González, like many Indigenista authors, was concerned with the “authentic” portrayal of his indigenous characters, and relied on an archive

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of ethnographic information and Indigenista policy essays to construct his literary works. But if anthropology became a literary “hegemonic discourse,” its origins, writes Roberto González Echevarría, were colonial (200). Gamio himself readily recognized Mexican anthropology’s connection to the ethnographic efforts of Bernardino de Sahagún and Bernal Díaz and the letters of Hernán Cortés, to name a few (Forjando 16). Knowledge of Yoeme nationhood and identity was essential to colonial projects. The Jesuit evangelist, the Porfirian capitalist-­colonizer, and the post-­Revolutionary anthropologist studied Yoeme resistance and its connection to social structure, gender roles, and, of course, warriorhood. An essential group of anthropologists would create a body of work with “referential power” and scientific authority over Yoeme race, warriorhood, and motherhood as related to the maintenance of a conservative Yoeme identity. Early twentieth-­century Yoeme ethnographies were indeed the continuation of colonial-­era and nineteenth-­century studies. The most prominent colonial document on the Yoemem is Andrés Pérez de Ribas’s Historia de los triunfos de nuestra santa fe entre gentes las más bárbaras y fieras del nuevo orbe. Pérez de Ribas considers the Yoemem to be indios bárbaros (a religious label meant to clarify their non-­Catholic status) from a peculiar small nation, and persistently highlights Yoeme bellicosity and sensational battlefield feats (Triumphs 328). Colonial Yoeme women, writes Pérez de Ribas, are industrious weavers as culturally exotic as “the Moorish women of Barbary” (329). But he also downplays the role of two diplomatic delegations of Yoeme women in the pivotal peace talks with Captain Hurdaide (338). Here, the missionary is quick to compare Yoeme women to a familiar North African Other. Interestingly, it seems Captain Hurdaide himself had insisted that “in order to negotiate peace, men, not women, should come,” thereby imposing Western diplomatic standards that may have undermined Native women’s agency (339). In merging indigenous bellicosity and non-­Catholic religiosity to define Yaqui warrior indigeneity, Pérez de Ribas initiates the epistemic “struggle for knowledge that has been going on since the colonization of Tawantinsuyu and Anáhuac,” as Walter Mignolo puts it, which favors colonial epistemology over Yoeme forms of knowledge (115). At stake, of course, is the representation of the living Yoeme community before the legal and intellectual authorities of Nueva España. Pérez de Ribas’s depiction of Yaqui bellicosity is required reading for every scholar working on Yoeme-­related topics. Another document is Arte de la lengua cahita por un padre de la compañía de Jesús, which compiles two colonial texts, Arte de la lengua cahita (Art of the Cahita Language) and Catecismo de la doctrina Cristiana en

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lengua cahita (Catechism of the Christian Doctrine in the Cahita Language), authored by Jesuit missionaries Juan Bautista de Velasco and Tomás Basilio, respectively, in the seventeenth century (Buelna vi-­vii). Both texts were originally published in 1737 by the Catholic Church in Mexico for the purpose of evangelizing the indigenous people of the area from the Sinaloa River to the Yaqui River (viii). The documents were republished in 1890 and edited by Eustaquio Buelna. Buelna’s introduction compiles an impressive list of missionaries and conquerors involved in the conquest of the Mexican Northwest; among these are Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, Diego de Guzmán, and Andrés Pérez de Ribas. Paving the way for almost every Yoeme ethnography or history to come, Buelna provides a short history of uprisings starting with the 1533 first encounter, continuing with the defeat of the Spanish forces led by Hurdaide and the 1740 rebellion, and ending with the insurrections of Juan Banderas (1825 and 1826) and Cajeme (1875 to 1886). The republication of Arte de la lengua cahita assured the survival of the Yaqui warrior myth in anthropological research, and by extension perpetuated the silencing of Yoeme community voices regarding their history and culture. But Buelna also prefigures Indigenista ethnographies by predicting the eventual cultural and racial incorporation of Native nations into Mexican civilization (lxii). Buelna insists that if the Yoeme people are to inevitably vanish, their culture (like that of the Aztecs) should be preserved for national posterity (lxii). Similar to Buelna is Fortunato Hernández, a medical doctor turned anthropologist who conducted the state-­sponsored study Las razas indígenas de Sonora y la guerra del Yaqui (1902). Hernández sees contemporary Natives as the descendants of a once-­great, albeit violent, people whom the Conquista has left “indolent” and cultureless (iv). Despite the admiration he demonstrates for the Yoemem, Hernández optimistically predicts their inevitable extinction, and also describes his anthropological duty to preserve their “historia y caracteres” (history and characteristics) before they vanish forever (vi). Taking a psychological perspective, Hernández says that centuries of caste wars have perpetuated a generational hatred of yoris (90). His racial data are both anthropometric and characterological. For example, in addition to measuring Yoeme skulls and studying somatic features, he explains that Yoeme men are arrogant, with wide chests and “musculación magnífica” (magnificent musculature), while the women are attractive, graceful, and agile (77–­78). The female body and its biological gender roles are of particular scientific interest: “He visto entre estas indias madres de doce años, alimentando á sus robustos hijos con la leche de su pecho y

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poseyendo glándulas mamarias perfectamente desarrolladas” (I have seen among these Indians twelve-­year-­old mothers feeding their robust children with the milk of their breast and possessing perfectly developed mammary glands) (95). He conflates Yoeme education with the authoritative and rancorous mother figure, who “sólo tiende á perpetuar y fomentar el odio á los Yoris, y á cultivar los instintos guerreros sugiriéndoles ideas de exterminación [de mexicanos] y avivando el amor á la libertad y á la imposible autonomía de su raza” (only tends to perpetuate and foment hate toward Yoris, and cultivate warrior instincts suggesting ideas of extermination [of Mexicans] and exciting their love of liberty and the impossible autonomy of their race) (98). Hernández understands the fomentation of an ideology of resistance as a function of motherhood. As such, the Yoeme nation’s xenophobia is maintained by a history of yori violence and maternal indoctrination of their children into a community of hatred.4 But what was the official Indigenista position on Yoeme nationhood and women? For Gamio, the Yoemem are representative of what he considered pequeñas patrias, small ethnic communities endowed with their own language and culture, and therefore damaging to a coherent national culture. Gamio compares the Mayan and Yoeme nationalities to the indigenous people of the Zapatista movement during the Revolution. The latter are a people on the verge of becoming Mexican, because the Zapatistas had incorporated various ethnic groups into their revolutionary cause of tierra y libertad (land and liberty), while Yoeme and Mayan insurgencies, suggests Gamio, had not as of yet arrived at that necessary stage of proto-­mestizaje (Forjando 181). Yoeme resistance to Mexican nationhood, from Gamio’s Indigenista perspective, connoted an unmodern and culturally un-­Mexican indigeneity. And regarding the question of Yoeme women, Gamio classifies Mexico’s women into three groups: “la mujer sierva” (“the servile woman”), “la mujer feminista” (“the feminist woman”), and “la mujer femenina” (“the feminine woman”), of which he argues that the “mujer femenina” is Mexico’s true representative (Forjando 119; Forging 115). Based on two racial ancestors, the indigenous and the Spanish, the feminine woman is most influenced by her European predecessor (Forjando 121). Gamio insists that the problem of the “mujer sierva” is primarily a moral and civilizational one, rather than racial (127). And yet he persistently racializes otherwise culturally and economically determined gender roles. Mexico, writes Gamio, still possesses a large number of servile women, most of whom are living aboriginals; this category is nearly animal-­like in its functions of labor, pleasure, and maternity (119). He further divides primitive indigenous nations (Yoeme, Seri, and

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Cora) from advanced nations (Tarasco, Aztec, Zapotec), alleging that the female descendants of Native peoples like the Yoeme are necessarily of the “mujer sierva” stripe because these nations never evolved culturally (126–­27). For Gamio, the Yoeme woman represents a sort of maternal automaton, an uneducated female of a lower Indian moral order. U.S. anthropologists also contributed to the scholarship on what we know about Yaqui nationhood, warrior identity, and motherhood, and in so doing both fomented Native coloniality and contributed to a source of archival cultural knowledge that would benefit U.S. writers of Yoeme descent. Ethnographer Ralph L. Beals takes interest in the organization of warfare and evidence of “head taking” and ceremonial cannibalism among the Yoeme (Comparative 114, 192).5 In a 1943 publication, Beals makes reference to the importance of the cultural history of pre-­Columbian Yaquis, Mayos, and other now-­extinct Cahitan language groups to “the growing interest in acculturation studies in the Mexican field,” in hopes that “acculturation studies and historical ethnology indeed come close together” (Aboriginal v). Texas anthropologist W. C. Holden’s two 1934 expeditions produced an anthropological study that hoped to be exhaustive; it is worth noting that this text, Studies of the Yaqui Indians of Sonora (1936), is relatively independent of Mexican sources and is easily one of the pioneering works in early twentieth-­century Yoeme anthropology. But the questions of race and warriorhood stand out. Regarding the question of Yoeme warriorhood, Holden reports that Yoeme boys are “taught to hunt with bow and arrow and with slingshot” (31), and outlaw “mountain Yaquis” continue their territorial defense “from time immemorial”: “Ten men in the mountains can defend the passes against hundreds below by rolling rocks down on them. . . . They will never be completely conquered so long as they continue to occupy them” (10). It is not the fact that Holden’s expeditions study Yoeme warriorhood that is problematic so much as the way Holden perpetuates an inflated warrior indigeneity. Carl Coleman Seltzer characterizes the Yoeme nation as “belligerent by nature, but certainly belligerent in the matter of self-­preservation,” making the assessment that “they have perpetrated the largest series of revolts against the reigning governments that are to be found anywhere in the annals of American Indian tribes” (91). Ethnographic studies presupposing a collective bellicose community psychology and highlighting a warrior indigeneity reproduce General William Tecumseh Sherman’s opinion that the “Yaquis are the Spartans of America” (Taibo 177). A case in point is Richard Arthur Studhalter’s question: “What more war-­loving race has there been on the American continent than the Yaqui Indians?” (114).

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The Holden expeditions also drew conclusions about race, women, and motherhood as related to group insularity. Physical anthropologist Carl Coleman Seltzer, basing his determinations on anthropometry, concludes that the Yoeme people are a racially heterogeneous group that, interestingly, demonstrates “negroid features,” evident in darker skin tone and in nasal and lip formations (112). Holden’s observations of Yoeme women coincide with Fortunato Hernández’s hyperfemininity: “The women have large breasts which produce an unusual amount of milk. Occasions have been noted where a woman would be nursing a baby a few months old, a child of two, and a child of four, all at the same time” (Holden 29). As a result, “women seemed to be more unfaithful than men and . . . [f ]rom all appearances, Yaqui women as a whole are highly sexed” (28). Holden also highlights Yoeme xenophobia in their opposition to interracial marriages and their frequent rejection of Mexican schools. In the latter case, older Yoemem “feared the Mexicanizing influence of the schools” (31). In addition, Yoeme children grow up to be just as distrustful as their parents: “When strangers are about the place, the little ones cling to their mothers, their dark big eyes riveted on the visitors” (32; emphasis mine). He describes the rigid nature of the traditional government and its juridical system. For Holden, Yoeme tribunals held to judge capital crimes are popular assemblies “as purely democratic as the primary conventions of Switzerland” (16) in which “the verdict is reached by a sort of mass agreement” (19). He warns, however, that “with a less orderly procedure it would be called mob agreement” (19). Here, Holden diverges from Hernández, who describes a chaotic Yoeme societal structure (like Yoeme religion) as a haphazard mixture of traditional and “White” influences (Hernández 90). The anthropological research of Alfonso Fabila in Las tribus yaquis de Sonora: Su cultura y anhelada autodeterminación (1940) demonstrates signs of pluriculturalismo, a school of thought promoting degrees of indigenous political and cultural autonomy. This is evident when Fabila speaks of the importance of the Yoeme nation as an authentic Mexican people, “poseedores de una cultura viva” (possessors of a living culture) (xv). Fearing that the Yoeme nation may go the way of the Seri—­impoverished, geographically isolated, and xenophobic—­he protests that living indigenous cultures ought not be sacrificed for the sake of Western modernity. He goes further, arguing for the return of two Yoeme pueblos not included in the 1937 presidential decree; the loss of Bacum and Cócorit, writes Fabila, is comparable to the loss of one of Mexico’s states (xiii). His racial characterizations resemble Hernández’s in their more subjective and humanizing use of physical details: the Yoeme man is tall, “de rostro agradable”

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(of handsome and agreeable visage), “inteligente y receloso” (intelligent and mistrustful), and he carries himself with the pride and arrogance of an unconquered people (Fabila 63). Furthermore, the robust Yoeme male is endowed with bronze skin, “pecho amplio y erguido, musculatura recia” (an ample and erect chest, robust musculature) (63). Fabila’s racial study suggests a Herculean/heroic race whose bodies are a physical manifestation of their intelligence and pride. In his explanation of the Yoeme judicial system, Fabila follows Holden’s research, revealing a tough, even cruel, but effective traditional organization. Documenting one homicide per year in the Hiakim territory and comparing this to other parts of the nation including Mexico City, where up to 40 percent of deaths each year can be homicides, he defends the effectiveness of the indigenous judicial system; as harsh as it may be, Fabila argues, it yields superior results to those of the system in Mexico’s center of civilization, and produces less criminality among its citizens (174).6 Fabila also studies women—­whom he finds as attractive and proud as Yoeme men—­and their familial roles (70). In addition to describing the reverence showed to family elders, he reiterates the role of women in Yoeme moral education, for it is the woman who teaches the children a que odien al blanco, porque éste es el que ha matado a los padres, a los abuelos,

a los hermanos, a los parientes y el que siempre les ha hecho daño con las guerras, quitándoles las tierras, las cosechas, el ganado, los pastos y las maderas, sometiéndolos a toda clase de torturas y vejaciones. (116)

(to hate the White man, because it is he who has killed their parents, their grandparents, their brothers and sisters, their relatives, and who has done them harm

with wars, stealing their lands, their harvests, their livestock, their pastures and lumber, subjecting them to all forms of torture and vexation.)

To Fabila, like Hernández, women are the Yoeme nation’s locus of cultural continuity, as well as a vehicle for its territorial and psychological conservatism. The anthropologist’s conclusion regarding a maternally driven indoctrination into resistance and caste hatred is not a new one. In an effort to reeducate Yoeme children, Porfirian state authorities had enacted a policy of separating them from their mothers and distributing them to wealthy Sonoran families (Padilla Ramos 45). Yoeme survivor Rosalio Moisés recollects the ironic “kidnapping” of Yaqui children living as servants in nonindigenous houses by their own parents,

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with whom they had lost contact as a result of government deportation (41). The Porfirian regime subjected the widows of the 1900 Mazocoba Massacre to deportation to Yucatán; children deported along with their mothers were expected to be reeducated in night schools. One Porfirian officer reported in 1900 that “uno de nuestros principales enemigos es la mujer yaqui” (one of our principal enemies is the Yaqui woman), because of her role in educating her people in “el odio al Yori (blanco)” (hating the yori [White man]) (Padilla Ramos 46). In southern henequen plantations, the women were forced to breed with non-­Yoeme men, Chinese especially, as a measure to increase the workforce and dissolve Yoeme identity (Taibo 223). During times of Porfirian repression, Yoeme women, and mothers in particular, instead of being spared the rigors of war, became the targets of a discourse that conflated them with dangerous propagators of aboriginal resistance. Carlos Basauri’s monograph La población indígena de México: Etnografía (1940), a work meant as an ethnographic compilation of all Mexican indigenous communities, problematizes the cultural validity of the Yoeme people. Like the investigators previously examined, Basauri offers details of the Yoemem’s harsh judicial system, war history, and pascolas and deer dancers, relying heavily on Holden’s Studies of the Yaqui Indians; his dry and mathematical racial descriptions imply his pretenses of scientific objectivity.7 However, Basauri undercuts his own scientific objectivity when he censures Yoeme social backwardness by making the accusation that “todos sus actos están dictados por su religión, aun sus borracheras” (all their acts are dictated by their religion, even their drunkenness) (271).8 He further makes the criticism that “en sus templos se nota una promiscuidad de elementos paganos y católicos” (in their temples there is a notable promiscuity of pagan and Catholic elements) (271). Offering no Native community voices to provide Yoeme cultural-­historical perspectives, Basauri reverts to the colonial discourse of the “semi-­savage” Yaqui, yet again leveled against the transcultural reconciliation of Catholicism (the national religion) and Aniam cosmology. Basauri’s staunch belief in mestizo racial superiority, placing him in Gamio’s incorporacionista camp, betrays attitudes in favor of Social Darwinism and natural selection (Basauri 127). His ethnological approach to the “Indian problem” is mestizaje, and, like José Vasconcelos, he perceives the role of indigenous people as an inevitable “buen puente de mestizaje” (good bridge of mestizaje) (Vasconcelos 22). Basauri’s monograph on the Yaqui nation, in sum, is an assimilationist indictment of non-­mainstream indigenous civilization.

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The anthropological research of Rojas González, which contributes to the archive on Yaqui indigeneity, positions Yoeme culture in a hierarchy culminating in Aztec civilization and examines it in accordance with Indigenista cultural utilitarianism. In his essay “La institución del compadrazgo entre los indios de México,” Rojas González identifies Yoeme society as possessing “una tradición cultural mucho más baja que los aztecas o mexicanos” (a cultural tradition inferior to the Aztecs or Mexicans) (Ensayos 71). While the Aztecs symbolize a proud national patrimony and the height of a pre-­Columbian teleology, Yoeme culture, on the other hand, is the living antithesis of indigenous incorporation and poses a stubborn obstacle to the use by Mexican capital of the Río Yaqui lands and their inhabitants’ labor. Rojas González subscribed to Gamio’s theory of distinctly Mexican markets (Gamio, Forjando 147). Just as Gamio felt that indigenous folk culture should be improved upon for national consumption, Rojas González took it upon himself to criticize Otomí sarapes as insufficiently commercial, while inversely lauding the marketability of Otomí bags and artisanal weavings (Ensayos 110). Ultimately, indigenous products, according to the author, needed to be modified and/or improved to fit the market’s needs (Ensayos 112). In this sense, his story “La triste historia del pascola Cenobio” reflects the national interest in the Yoeme dance so widely performed during the Mexican Revolution. In a nonfictional example, the deer dance, writes Spicer, “roused the Mexican artistic imagination, and it accordingly became of some importance in Mexican culture between about 1930 and 1970” (The Yaquis 275). But true to Indigenista theory, the Ballet Folklórico de México took it upon itself to secularize pascolas and deer dancers, modifying the costumes, music, and style of the dance to the point that “the meaning of the dance . . . [was] based on [a] fundamental misunderstanding of Yaqui life” (Spicer, The Yaquis 276). Nonetheless, in its modified form, it remains a highly successful commercial product of the national dance troupe. Pre-­1950s ethnographic research on the Yoeme nation is an essential piece of the authorial archive contributing to the maintenance of a colonial-­Mexican epistemology of Yaqui indigeneity. It bestows authority over Yoeme cultural and political matters on the nonindigenous, and entails, in the words of Spivak, a new paternal-­colonialist relationship dependent on the work of Mexico’s “best prophets of heterogeneity and the Other” (272). That is, if one is to truly “know” the Yaquis, one must necessarily seek out the ethnographer, and not the Yaquis themselves. Like Orientalism, Indigenismo is also a productive and reproductive epistemology that functions through “a dynamic exchange between individual

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authors and the large political concerns” of the Mexican government (Said 15). The union of academic discipline and the government’s assimilationist aspirations hinder anthropological conclusions about Native Mexican communities. Nineteenth-­century anxieties about race and modernity that encumber academic and state Indigenismo inevitably resurface in Indigenista scholarly production. This knowledge is thereafter reproduced by other anthropologists, politicians, schoolteachers, painters, authors, and so forth—­that is, Mexico’s official intermediaries between indigenous people and the rest of the nation. At stake is the privileging of a nonindigenous academic epistemology and the simultaneous devaluing of the capacity of indigenous forms of knowledge to speak for their communities. Regarding Quiché indigenous rights activist Rigoberta Menchú’s testimonial, John Beverley opines that “behind the good faith of the liberal academic or the committed ethnographer or solidarity activist in allowing or enabling the subaltern to speak lies the trace of the colonial construction of an other—­an other who is conveniently available to speak to us (with whom we can speak or feel comfortable speaking with)” (69–­70). More directly, Said reminds us that, as the colonialist relationship would have it, “subject races did not have it in them to know what was good for them” (37). As the studied, Yoeme voices were relegated to, and thereby erased by, a web of government and academic interlocutors, the experts in all things indigenous. Yoeme warrior indigeneity and Mexico’s secular appreciation of Yoeme traditional dance would be reinscribed in ethnographically detailed, and therefore even more exotic, literary forms.

INDIGENISTA LITERATURE Indigenista literature in Mexico is generally understood as a literature of social protest that developed out of the Novel of the Mexican Revolution. One of the reasons that the Yoemem received significant attention in the Novel of the Mexican Revolution, as Bigas Torres proposes, is the perception that “la población indígena permaneció al margen de la actividad revolucionaria” (the indigenous population remained at the margins of revolutionary activity) (49). This is not to say that indigenous people did not participate, but rather that, as entire communities, they seldom shared the spotlight with the caudillos in the way that the Yaqui battalions did. If the pequeña patria, or semi-­autonomous indigenous community, was a major obstacle to national identity, the Indigenista also understood Native peoples as potential Mexicans who, as Taylor explains,

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“inhabit a threshold between a local, static reality and a national, modern one” (Indigeneity 14). When dealing with Native people who are considered neither culturally “Mexican” nor full citizens, state-­mestizo interpellation is the gold standard of academic-­literary representation. By the mid-­1930s there existed a sufficient archive of anthropological monographs and essays on Mexico’s “Indian problem” from which the nation’s fiction writers could draw. This research supplied writers with the details with which to create a sense of cultural authenticity as well as new ways of imagining Native communities after the Mexican Revolution. Nonetheless, the alliance between anthropology and literature resulted in a more exotic and infantile characterization of indigenous Mexico. A major push in the alliance between anthropology and fiction came in the form of the 1940 Primer Congreso Indigenista Interamericano in Pátz­ cuaro, Michoacán. Major figures of anthropological and literary Indigenismo—­ including, as Taylor reports, “Manuel Gamio, Alfonso Caso, Miguel O. de Mendizábal, and Moisés Sáenz . . . Mauricio Magdaleno and Ermilo Abreu Gómez” (Indigeneity 117–­18)—­called for justice and the cultural integration of indigenous communities. They also prioritized the need to make indigenous culture diffusible and understandable (i.e., consumable) to a wider audience through literature (Bigas Torres 50). By choosing to inform their works with government-­sponsored ethnographies, Indigenista writers like López y Fuentes (El indio, 1935) and Magdaleno (El resplandor, 1937) sought to represent Mexico’s internal Others by acquiring their knowledge, in order to consequently expose aboriginal woes and cultural-­social inferiority (González Echevarría 208). Indigenista literature featured extensive ethnographic detail in representing Native peoples’ dress, languages, religious beliefs and practices, social mores and customs, and phenotypes. Jean Franco refers to a “document-­type literature,” among whose producers she includes López y Fuentes, Ramón Rubín, Francisco Rojas González, and Ricardo Pozas, the latter two being trained anthropologists (123–­34). A case in point is Ricardo Pozas’s Juan Pérez Jolote: Biografía de un tzotzil (1952), a hybrid bildungsroman that provides thorough ethnographic detail related to Tzotzil attire, religious practices, marriage rites, government, and traditional stories. “The documentary type of writing about the Indian,” writes Franco, “helped to show that the concept of the ‘primitive’ Indian was quite inadequate” (124). But it also ran the risk of turning into nothing more than an anthropological artifact—­that is, another epistemological document in the state’s archive. What this would mean is that the Yaqui warrior myth would

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have to share its literary space with culturally spectacular counterparts such as the pascola and deer dancer, and with more ethnographically complex literary depictions. Although they are a literature of social protest, Indigenista works accept the official anthropological premise of the need to modify indigenous communities; after all, an expanding ethnographic archive reinforced an exoticizing and repressive vision of Native societies. The representations in these works, claims Taylor, promote a discourse of Native victimization and of Native people as “a backward, infantile, and passive entity standing in the way of progress” (Indigeneity 12). Yes, indigenous culture was more complex than authors had previously admitted, but now it was all the more exotic. We will see this at work in the short story by Rojas González and the writings of other authors. Consequently, instead of vibrant and detailed narratives of indigenous communities, Indigenista literature tended to re-­create a portrait of Native societies as sullen, exotic, and archaic.

PLURICULTURALISMO AND INCORPORACIONISMO IN LITERARY DEPICTIONS OF YOEMEM We can perceive the trajectory of representations of the Yoemem and the recurrence of prior themes by comparing the ideologies at work in Indigenista literary depictions. López y Fuentes’s Tierra: La revolución agraria en México (1933), a Novel of the Revolution, provides the most basic portrait of the Yoeme deer dance. Sonora-­born Chávez Camacho’s Cajeme: Novela de indios (1948), influenced by Fabila’s pluriculturalista ethnography, represents dance culture within its religious context in a chapter titled “La Virgen del Camino.”9 The traditional summer fiesta of La Virgen del Camino, honoring the patron saint Isabel, is part of “the second most active ceremonial period of the year after Lenten, or Waehma, season” (Spicer, The Yaquis 189). Chávez Camacho treats the Yoeme community, their manner of dress, their children, their horses, as a collective character: “Y empieza el baile” (And the dance begins) (265). He begins by connecting the religiosity of the fiesta to the sacredness of the dance: “Hay quienes realizan su función en cumplimiento de alguna manda prometida al santo de su devoción” (There are those who carry out their function in observance of a vow promised to the saint of their devotion) (266).10 First in line, Chávez Camacho describes the pascola dance with a significant degree of ethnographic detail.

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He includes the pascola costume’s ténabaris (a type of rattle worn around each calf muscle), the belt of deer hooves worn around the waist, and “una máscara con barbas” (bearded mask) that covers the dancer’s face (266–­67). Cajeme also renders pascola music, instruments, and dance style less mysterious by contextualizing these within their social functions. Following Fabila’s ethnography, Chávez Camacho emphasizes the pascola’s role as a jokester and storyteller. The author insists on the pascola’s initial presence before introducing the deer dancer. This latter dance is livelier and more agile, like a deer; wearing a deer’s head, “el hombre-­venado se estremece, cimbrando el cuerpo, moviendo los brazos y agitándose por entero” (the man-­deer shudders, shaking his body, moving his arms and agitating himself entirely) (267). Interestingly, Chávez Camacho chooses to limit his description of the hunting segment of the deer dance to the statement “entre venado y coyote hay pláticas” (between deer and coyote there is conversation) (268). Instead of giving a lengthy portrayal of the well-­known Yoeme dance, he follows the coyote and deer performance with a very serious man explaining Christ as a good yori killed by the “yoris sáncoras” (bad White men) (268), and a “compadre” telling a humorous story about hunting a deer for “la Virgen” (269). While Chávez Camacho never explicitly connects the three sketches—­the coyote and deer performance, the persecution of Christ by bad yoris, and the connection between deer hunting and Yoeme religion—­they seem to support findings by Larry Evers and Felipe S. Molina, as well as Shorter, of a Yoeme interpretation of Christ as a sacrificial deer figure, and of the deer hunt performance as symbolic of a Yoeme understanding of the relationship between yori persecution and community continuity (Evers and Molina, Yaqui Deer Songs 129; Shorter 241). Chávez Camacho finishes with an ethnographic narration of the coyote dance, a more solemn dance that “simula la imaginaria caza, a flechazos” (simulates the imaginary hunt, with arrows) (270). Dance, writes the author, “descubre la fortaleza que caracteriza a los cuerpos y a los espíritus de los indígenas” (uncovers the fortitude that characterizes the indigenous people’s bodies and spirits) (271). Chávez Camacho’s re-­creation of Yoeme dance demonstrates the author’s commitment to its physical characteristics and religiosity, cultural details not easily consumable in literary form. But Chávez Camacho says little of the cosmological relationship—­or arraigamiento—­between Yoeme culture and the homeland Hiakim. The deer dancer as a representative of the Sea Ania (flower realm) and the performance as an act of indigenous “place making” (Shorter 221) are lost on the author. This representational deficiency, if we choose to so interpret it, must be understood as a consequence of

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an ideologically skewed and culturally exclusive archive. Despite the author’s efforts, Yoeme dance in Cajeme: Novela de indios remains what Analisa Taylor calls “a studied simulacrum of ‘el indio’” (“Between” 96–­97). As if in recognition of the novel’s cultural shortcomings, Chávez Camacho also places two Yoeme traditional stories within his novel, both taken directly from Fabila’s ethnography: “Cuando el indio hablaba con los animales de uña y ala” (When the Indian Spoke with Hoofed and Winged Animals) and the origin story “Leyenda yaqui de las predicciones” (Yaqui Legend of the Predictions). “Cuando el indio hablaba” tells the story of the deer hunter Terohoqui, whose wife runs away with her lover. The story transpires in a mythological time in which the “yoreme” can communicate with regional animals—­mountain lions, buzzards, hawks, and the quelele bird. These help find Terohoqui’s wife and her lover, and therefore play a role in bringing them to justice (Chávez Camacho 137–­38). The Yoemem mentioned in this story resemble the little Surem ancestors, inhabitants of the Huya Ania (wilderness realm), who possessed similar supernatural abilities before the prophecy of the talking tree came to pass. 11 And the animals are among those mentioned in traditional songs and dances honoring the Huya Ania and Sea Ania (Evers and Molina, Yaqui Deer Songs 142–­47). Chávez Camacho makes no effort to contextualize the myth’s pre-­Jesuit cosmological references. Similarly, “Leyenda yaqui de las predicciones” takes place in the mythological time of the Huya Ania in which the “little Yaquis,” or supernatural Surem, are told by a wise talking tree that a giant monster will attack them (Chávez Camacho 133). When the prophecy is realized in the form of a giant serpent, they recruit the help of supernatural animals to defeat it. After the serpent is killed, the Yoemem post military leaders throughout their territory, thus founding a Native topography—­Omteme, Cúbae, Corasepe, Akimore—­and establishing the origin of the tradition of the Yoeme warrior as defender of Hiakim. Though mediated through Fabila’s ethnography and the Spanish language, these origin stories introduce a level of indigenous self-­ representation through Yoeme oral tradition. They tie the novel to the transcultural Yoeme religion, based on both Catholic and Aniam cosmologies, which is essential to understanding the relationship between culture and territory—­ what I have chosen to call arraigamiento. And, through the novel’s focus on indigenous language, indigenous characters (albeit as a collective), and links between culture and territory, the warrior archetype—­represented by the enigmatic Cajeme—­takes its place in the gamut of Yoeme culture. Using Alfonso Fabila’s work as one of his primary inspirations, Chávez Camacho manages to

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promote degrees of Yoeme cultural and political self-­determination. Yes, Chávez Camacho’s insertion of decontextualized depictions of traditional dance and oral tradition lends itself to Indigenista exoticism, but we may also understand it as the author’s avowal that he could not “speak” for the Yoemem as well as they themselves could. The pluriculturalismo of anthropologists like Moisés Sáenz and writers like Chávez Camacho, however, was not the dominant vein in Indigenista circles, whether academic or literary. Gamio’s incorporationist model provided the ideological base for Indigenista policies, which included Lázaro Cárdenas’s agrarian reforms, the publication of ethnographies, and the posting of rural teachers. Cárdenas, who held a pragmatic political view of indigenous peoples, thought of them as constituting a redeemable sector of the Mexican proletariat burdened with a history of repression, isolationism, and vice (Dawson 73). But the more autonomous cultures of certain communities posed a threat to their national incorporation. As one of those communities, the Yaquis, with their myth of innate bellicosity, remained an easy target for nonindigenous literary representations. Ramón Rubín’s short story “La mula muerta” (The Dead Mule, 1958) is a case in point. The story’s conflict arises when mestizo landowner don Leonel Gurria confronts a group of Seris who, suffering through a season of famine, have encroached on his hacienda to feast on a rotting dead mule. Don Leonel confronts the Seris along with his Yaqui compadre, Leocadio Huitimea, who, “por cristianizado y por yaqui, era un enemigo enconoso de aquellos aborígenes y además afecto a hacerla de sayón en las arbitrariedades” (as a Christianized person and as a Yaqui, was a rancorous enemy of those aboriginals, and in addition had a fondness for playing the role of executioner) (Rubín, Segundo libro 14). Huitimea’s religiosity and contact with “civilized” Mexicans do not quell his desire to enact his archaic vengeance, for Seri and Yaqui are ancient enemies, and that is enough. And his sense of justice is generally harsh, similar to descriptions in the ethnographies of Holden, Fabila, and Basauri; predictably, he takes pleasure in doling out punishment. The mestizo don Leonel’s brand of coolheaded leadership is in sharp contrast to the demeanor of the armed and hot-­blooded Huitimea, who becomes frustrated at the possibility that there might be no conflict. Huitimea’s anachronistic, nearly atavistic, vendetta is on full display when don Leonel has to contain his Yaqui compadre’s merciless whipping of the defenseless Seris—­even the children (16). The implacably violent Yaqui’s intertribal war is foiled only as a result of Leonel’s horse falling on the soft ground, breaking both front legs. In the end, the bloodthirsty Huitimea

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seems satiated when he assumes the task of shooting the horse between the eyes. Though the mestizo landowner don Leonel recognizes that the Seris have done no wrong, his ethical respect for private property inhibits him from tolerating their encroachment on his land. Also, the narrative suggests that Huitimea’s violent Yaqui nature incites the otherwise reasonable Mexican to viciously pursue the harmless Seris. But the Yaqui warrior myth in “La mula muerta” is ironic. While Rubín’s narrative redeems the autochthonous and nomadic Seri community as a passive and inoffensive people, the more socially and culturally incorporated Huitimea’s bellicosity symbolizes a senselessly vindictive Yoeme psychology with no redemption in sight. He is violent precisely because he is Yaqui. Huitimea resembles Juan Balomea, the protagonist of “El yaqui” (also by Rubín), who idly looks on as two yoris burn to death. The psychoanalytical pretensions of Rubín’s story culminate when Balomea recites the “trágica letanía maternal” (tragic maternal litany) taken from Fabila’s research on Yoeme mothers: “El yori te quitó las tierras; / el yori te robó tus ganados; / el yori violó a tus hermanas; / el yori asesinó a tu padre” (The yori took your lands; / the yori stole your livestock; / the yori raped your sisters; / the yori murdered your father) (Rubín, Las cinco 119). In Rubín’s fiction, the Yaquis, as represented by Huitimea and Balomea, are a psychologically damaged tribe incapable of separating all nonindigenous people from a yori bogeyman archetype. This, of course, contradicts the long history of Yoeme-­yori labor relations in which nonindigenous people view the Yoemem as valued workers, which would seem to be an impossibility were Rubín’s assessment correct. The dependence on a Yaqui anthropological archive demanded more nuanced interpretations of Yoeme resistance, which explains how the warrior myth came to share literary space with the Yoeme dancer. Chávez Camacho, whose Cajeme reveals a pluriculturalista sensibility to indigenous culture, religiosity, and oral tradition, also demonstrates a respect for indigenous epistemologies. Nonetheless, Rubín’s “La mula muerta” is more revealing of the usages of anthropological research accessed by rural teachers, writers, and politicians. Here, a Yoeme character (Huitimea) embodies the same type of violent attitude—­archaic, bloodthirsty, confrontational—­that placed Yaquis among the barbarians of Domingo Faustino Sarmiento’s civilización y barbarie paradigm. Francisco Rojas González would also strategically deploy ethnographic research, fusing it with Gamio’s incorporationist ideology, to represent the Yoeme nation’s resistance to mexicanidad, demonize Yoeme motherhood, and secularize traditional dance.

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“LA TRISTE HISTORIA DEL PASCOLA CENOBIO” Rojas González developed as an intellectual through service in the Revolutionary government, as a diplomat, and as an ethnologist (Sommers, Francisco 21–­23). In reading El diosero (translated as The Medicine Man), it becomes evident that two things set him apart as a writer. The first is his genuine concern for the state of indigenous people and a desire to participate in their “redemption.” Second, and just as important, is his talent for merging anthropological research with fiction, which grants him the ability to create complex literary representations of indigenous people that are also accessible to the nonindigenous reader. This is especially true about representations of Native characters in El diosero, in which indios are at once humanized through character development and demeaned through humor, Mexicanized and made exotic through ethnographic detail. In accordance with the basic anthropological tenets of Gamio’s incorporationist theory, Rojas González creates a culturally sensational literary depiction of the Yoemem that suggests the necessity of incorporating them into mainstream society. Specifically, “La triste historia del pascola Cenobio” (“The Sad Story of Pascola Cenobio”) (1) utilizes ethnographic research in order to create a sense of narrative Native authenticity, (2) constructs a Mexican nationalist–­Indigenista view of a xenophobic community resisting incorporation into modern Mexican society, and (3) deploys an archival epistemology to fault the Yoeme mother as the cause of the community’s cultural resistance. Rojas González’s conception of lo yaqui is not unlike that of other writers. As a professional anthropologist, Rojas González both relied on and contributed to the Indigenista archive that reproduced an “epistemic colonial difference” privileging a nonindigenous interpellation of the Yoeme community and its views (Mignolo 43). Rojas González had already explored the place of Yaquis in Mexican history and national culture in other literary works. Joseph Sommers notes the author’s intent to portray historical moments through symbols—­drums, the Sierra del Bacatete, and the 1914 Yoeme battalions’ occupation of Mexico City—­in “Lancaster Kid” (Francisco 190).12 In Lola Casanova (1947), Yaquis are a reference point used to elucidate the status of Sonoran indigenous peoples circa 1854. Captain Néstor Arizpe, a military officer known for his practice of massacring indigenous peoples and dispossessing them of their lands, is introduced as a proud “yaquero” (Rojas González, Lola 14); here, “yaquero” denominates Sonoran Indian hunters who engage in the unjust persecution of the Yoemem, the Pimas, and the Seris. And in the story “El cenzontle y la vereda”

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(“The Mocking Bird and the Footpath”), the Yoemem are briefly characterized among other communities as victims of Mexico’s oppressive, intellect-­stifling history instead of as a steadfast semi-­autonomous nation within Mexico’s borders (Rojas González, El diosero 53). In this case, the Yoeme nation is but another indigenous community not at fault for its backward nature or arrested intellectual development. Rojas González held fast to many of the anthropological principles that demeaned and exoticized indigenous nationalities with high levels of political or cultural autonomy. Next, I will turn to Rojas González’s fusion of ethnography and literary technique in “La triste historia del pascola Cenobio,” used to reimagine a Yoeme community in line with dominant nationalist-­Indigenista premises.

SECULARIZING THE PASCOLA IN “LA TRISTE HISTORIA DEL PASCOLA CENOBIO” “La triste historia,” which relates the story of a skilled pascola in love with a young woman, Emilia Buitimea, whom he wishes to marry, is written in three parts. The first section secularizes the young and attractive Cenobio as a talented practitioner of a redeeming aboriginal cultural institution: Yaqui dance. The second section ensues when, as a poor artist, he must find ways of quickly earning money for his wedding. Cenobio consequently hires himself out as a guide for a group of yori mining speculators, a decision that brings him into conflict with the older generation, which still maintains a custom of hostility toward outsiders. Here, “La triste historia” pits post-­Revolutionary Yaquis against their resistant and xenophobic progenitors. The tragic outcome is a violent confrontation between Cenobio and an older Yoeme, whom Cenobio kills after the elder accuses him of having become a torocoyori (traitor). In the third section, he faces two Native institutions: a traditional tribunal obligated to declare him guilty of murder, and the severe Yaqui mother. In an ironic twist, the old widow Marciala Morales, a representative of the hate-­breeding motherhood found in Yaqui ethnographical studies, invalidates Yaqui law when she grants Cenobio clemency under the condition that the handsome young dancer marry her to provide for her fatherless children. Despite its accessibility, the majority of the narrative is in fact heavily informed by the ethnographies of Hernández, Holden, and Fabila. An analysis of “La triste historia” reveals the author’s efforts to re-­create a sense of indigenous authenticity simultaneously guided by his nationalist-­Indigenista

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agenda. In this sense, the story creates an indigenous-­centered fictional community that purports to speak for a Yoeme nation already silenced by political and anthropological Indigenismo. From the outset, Rojas González enumerates the ethnographic details that mark Cenobio’s cultural difference, separating him from more traditional “Mexican” performers (a mariachi, a son jarocho ensemble, or Tapatío dancers, for example). The introductory paragraph is instructive: Cenobio Tánori lived in Bataconcica. Young and handsome, esteemed by men and

a friend to women, the Yaqui liked to dazzle everyone at fairs, festivals and wakes, where he displayed his talent for dancing. It was reported that not a soul in the

entire territory was his equal in the art of dancing, in performing rugged, chal-

lenging ancestral dances. . . . Tánori felt no greater glory than when he showed off his brilliance in the graceful leaps of the pascola, like a young, wild animal, shaking his legs lined with vibrant ténavaris, those small bells made from caterpillars or

cocoons. Everyone admired the grace and elegance of Cenobio Tánori, his face

covered by a horrifying goat mask, as he raked his bare toes across the strip of loose dirt, recently sprayed with water, and sometimes covered with rose petals or

wild shrubbery, to the music and rhythm of the pentaphonic reed-­flute. And in

the way his naked, Herculean torso undulated, shuddered, imitating the animal

that has been brought back to life at its most passionate moment: anger, fear, heat, while the disk-­timbrel on the dancer’s left side resounded to the heart beat of

the drum, the main musical instrument that accompanied totemic choreography. (Rojas González, Medicine Man 102)

His dance style—­“ bestial,” since in some cases Cenobio imitates deer or other local animals—­is revealed, along with his costume’s ethnographic details: the percussive leggings, the flower-­covered ground, and the goat mask. The author concludes with a material description of the non-­Western music that accompanies his attire and dance style, all of which is exotic to a nonindigenous Mexican reader, but nonetheless spiritually emptied. As the narrative continues, traditional “Mexican” names are avoided, replaced with names like Tánori, Tojíncola, and Buitimea.13 Even the pueblo, Bataconcica, has a peculiarly Cahita, non-­Nahuatl etymology. In this way, Rojas González strategically constructs a Yoeme cultural ambience and makes it readily available to the nonindigenous reader.

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Still, Rojas González concurrently makes his protagonist available to the reader by portraying him in terms of the artist and the hero. Cenobio is a dance virtuoso, a pascola capable of executing “the drawn-­out, lively dances of The Deer or The Coyote,” described as primitive in origin, barbaric, and as sublime as his surroundings (Rojas González, Medicine Man 103). But Cenobio also struggles financially. And his poverty is summarized in culturally specific terms: his dance feats earn him “a steaming, mouthwatering pot of guacavaqui, a piece of roast beef cooked over hot coals, a couple of soft, warm flour tortillas, and a handful of cigarettes made with dark, pungent tobacco” (103). As in the introduction, Rojas González executes a two-­part maneuver in which he (1) establishes his protagonist as a struggling artist, thereby ensuring his accessibility to the reader; and (2) interweaves ethnographic detail to create an ambience of Yoeme authenticity—­that is, the reader enters “Yaqui society” while also identifying with the indigenous protagonist. His status as a dancer, writes Rojas González, provides Cenobio with a degree of social prestige. While the author’s depiction of the indigenous dancer as “Herculean” suggests his hero status, we should recognize that this characterization is borrowed directly from Fabila’s Las tribus yaquis de Sonora (Fabila 63). What further makes the protagonist accessible is the fact that the story gravitates around the young aesthete’s desire to marry and the conflict that this desire creates with the older generation, who wish to avoid contact with the yoris. But Rojas González’s omniscient narrator is mindful not to reproduce an overtly mediative anthropologist-­like voice, and the yoris in the story remain external to the indigenous community. The narrative’s characters, then, are credible counterfeits produced for nonindigenous consumption, an ahistorical and fictional Native community passing through an episode of strife. It is important to note that Rojas González secularizes pascolas and deer dancers in order to make his protagonist more comprehensible to a Mexican audience. Cenobio is first and foremost a respected aesthete who has a following of adoring Yoeme girls “trying to attract the attention of that wild bohemian, that rustic, arrogant aesthete” (Rojas González, Medicine Man 103). But the community’s appreciation for Cenobio is limited to his artistic merit, and little is said about the pascola’s religious and traditional pre-­Columbian traits. The pascola’s goat mask and leggings, as well as the vegetation-­covered ground and symbolic flowers, allude to his connection to Aniam cosmology and pre-­Columbian supernatural realms—­the Huya Ania, Sea Ania, and Yo Ania. Pascolas and deer dancing evoke the talking tree’s mythohistorical discourse of

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Yoeme origins and territorial primacy. Though Cenobio’s dancing at wakes and fiestas is mentioned, pascolas also perform and practice entertaining storytelling. During the Easter celebration they dance nearly nonstop for an entire night and then proceed into the chapel to wage a mock battle against the chapayeka (or fariseo) dancers. While we cannot fault Rojas González for not being informed about Aniam cosmology, the author nonetheless chooses to overlook the origin story “La pascola encantada” (The Enchanted Pascola) in Fabila’s text, which deals with the supernatural relationship between the dancer and the mountain goat in a magical place in the mountains of Hiakim (Fabila 239–­40). Instead, the pascola is stripped of his sacredness and reconstructed as an important community artist whose performance is enjoyable to Yoeme and yori alike, a depiction more in tune with the deer dancer of the Ballet Folklórico de México de Amalia Hernández in Mexico City. Described in such universal artistic terms, the pascola Cenobio becomes a “bohemian,” not unlike a dancing and singing charro from Mexico’s Golden Age of Cinema.14 In the second section, Cenobio’s desire to marry the young Emilia Buitimea—­a universal love story—­and the generational rift provoked by a tradition that prohibits him from working for nonindigenous explorers in Yoeme territory demonstrate a strategic use of ethnographic and historical research. This research is employed to cast a shadow on the Yoeme community’s assertion of cultural and territorial self-­determination. It is through the theme of generational conflict, caused by Cenobio’s breaking of the social more against working with yoris, that we can uncover the author’s nationalist-­Indigenista motives. The basis for the community rift is Cenobio’s attempt to earn money for his wedding, for which he gives up dancing to explore more lucrative employment “as a peon; working behind the yoke that he pushes as he labors to break through the big, deep land of the Yaqui Valley; carrying sacks stuffed full of garbanzos on his back, or gathering spikes of wheat into bundles”—­work described as “a drudgery that no one thought he would one day have to accept” (Rojas González, Medicine Man 104).15 “La triste historia” introduces an economic problem when local indigenous farming techniques cannot provide for the basic needs of two young Yoemem, Cenobio and his bride-­to-­be. Once again referring to historical and anthropological research, Rojas González describes the documented fertility of the Yaqui Valley territory and the low-­income traditional Yoeme labor, unbecoming of an artist. Cenobio’s choice to work as a guide for mining speculators can also be partly traced back to anthropological research by W. C. Holden, who reports excluding a geologist from his 1936 excursion because, he

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explains, “we had been repeatedly told by persons who knew that the Yaquis are jealously guarding their minerals and that one man examining rocks and geological structures would jeopardize the entire expedition” (9). Rojas González notes this territorial jealousy: The Indians, the yoremes, his own people, did not think highly of greedy white men

digging in the ground of the sacred mountains, and even less acceptable to them was the idea that a Yaqui of Cenobio’s distinction should lead the hated yoris down the hidden pathways and mysterious trails of El Mazocoba. (Medicine Man 104)16

The disdain Cenobio is shown by older community members on his return, and the admiration he receives from its youth despite (or perhaps as a result of ) his social transgression, are stripped of their community history. And while the text refers to the Mazocoba elevation, the elder Yoemem’s anger is decontextualized from the 1900 Mazocoba Massacre, a traumatic event noted by nearly all historians and many ethnographers, which some older Yoemem would have even survived; in fact, there are no references at all to the Porfirian and Obregonist wars of extermination or other Mexican crimes and atrocities. The conflict between traditional elder and young progressive Yoemem is exemplified in a pivotal confrontation between Cenobio and Miguel Tojíncola, “an enormous, old man with a black face carved up by a little ax who, staggering drunk, came right up to the dancer to poke fun at him with derisive laughter” (Rojas González, Medicine Man 104). Tojíncola, who publicly insults Cenobio by animalizing and feminizing the popular dancer, finally levels the decisive insult: “‘Torocoyori,’ he said slowly. ‘Torocoyori,’ he repeated, which is to say: traitor, villain, sold out to the white man . . . ‘Torocoyori . . . Torocoyori . . .’” (105–­6; ellipses in original). The Cahita expletive is so offensive to Yaquis, perhaps even authentically so, that the prideful Cenobio succumbs to violent impulses and plunges a knife deep into the chest of Tojíncola, thus concluding the second part of “La triste historia.” The author’s strategic use of ethnography, both inclusions and exclusions, is not always apparent. The drunken verbal assault by Tojíncola and the immediate escalation of the confrontation into violence on the part of the dancer demonstrate two foci typical of ethnographic studies: alcoholism and violence. At the same time, the use and definition of the term torocoyori is taken virtually verbatim from Fabila (89). In addition, Tojíncola’s black face, which appears to have been carved by rough axe strokes, is the basic description of a wooden

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idol. But the image also touches on two registers, the anthropological and the aesthetic. While it is certainly clear that Tojíncola’s “blackness” represents his standing as a villain, it also refers to the anthropological race research of Carl Coleman Seltzer, who had concluded that the Yoemem were of African racial origin (Seltzer 112). In this way, Rojas González seamlessly weaves race science into the narrative. All of this amounts to what Analisa Taylor dubs a “studied simulacrum” of indigeneity (“Ends” 56). Cenobio’s act of transgression and the violent generational conflict that ensues change the mood of “La triste historia” from an indigenous love story to Indigenista-­guided social literature. Painted as a progressive-­thinking secular artist instead of a practitioner of religious dance rituals, Cenobio is a young man limited by the rigid and xenophobic traditions of aging community leaders. With the history of Mexican wars of extermination and attempts at land theft conveniently elided, in “La triste historia” Yoeme culture serves to limit the possibilities of the young artist. Like Miguel Tojíncola, Marciala Morales (the Yaqui mother) is also a very dark—­“black”—­Yoeme who represents the social boundaries that deny indigenous youth participation in Mexico’s nonindigenous social practices.

LAUGHING AT CIVILIZACIÓN Y BARBARIE IN “LA TRISTE HISTORIA DEL PASCOLA CENOBIO” The third, and final, section of “La triste historia” aggressively reestablishes Yoeme society as one of Gamio’s pequeñas patrias, racially and culturally autochthonous and outside the parameters of mainstream Mexican social structures. Furthermore, if we follow the logic put forth in the first and second parts of “La triste historia,” the Yoeme people are needlessly xenophobic. For the story detaches the feared mining speculators from the community’s history of land theft and colonization. And in his portrayal of the elders’ anger at the prospect of miners in the Mazocoba mountain, nominally portrayed as a “sacred” part of the Yaqui territory, Rojas González chooses to exclude the 1900 Mazocoba Massacre—­a topic taken up by Chicana novelist Montserrat Fontes in Dreams of the Centaur (1996). Most of the remaining narrative is also dedicated to portraying the artist-­hero as an individual whose aspirations are frustrated by an archaic modus vivendi, and as the positive element in a binary in which Marciala Morales (the Yaqui mother) is aligned with the defunct authorities of indigenous ways of life.

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Rojas González represents ley yaqui (Yaqui law) through Cenobio’s incarceration following his murder of Tojíncola, and his subsequent subjection to a traditional Yaqui trial, which pits the protagonist against the whole of an “archaic” traditional society. True to his role as hero, Cenobio surrenders without resistance, “but proud and dauntless” (Rojas González, Medicine Man 106). Cenobio’s individualism, as an artist and a proud young man, is contrasted with the insular collectivism of older Yoemem, thus symbolically turning Cenobio into his generation’s bridge to Mexican identity. His transgression, carried out in the name of love, and his crime, committed in the defense of his publicly damaged pride, are both consequences of the xenophobia and insular thinking that keep the community from becoming Mexican. And yet, while the story leaves anti-­Mexican attitudes unexamined, Cenobio is thrown to the mercy of this tradition. But even from jail his nearly divine and universal individualism stands out, as the young women bring him food and gifts: “Cenobio Tánori, magnificent, proud as an offended god, silently and gravely accepted this tribute from his priestesses” (106). The young women’s support of the forward-­thinking Cenobio, suggests Bigas Torres, represents the indigenous youth’s tenuous rebellion against the old ways (120). Thus, while Cenobio is the potential new (and more Mexican) Yaqui, Emilia Buitimea and his young followers hint at a new Yaqui woman—­one who, like Gamio’s feminine woman, is capable of appreciating secularized dance arts, for example, and can exist intellectually beyond her labor, pleasure-­based, or biological-­maternal functions (Gamio, Forjando 119). Following the trend of so much ethnographic research, the all-­male Yoeme judicial system and xenophobic tradition itself—­represented by Marciala Morales—­are put on trial in “La triste historia,” in a judgment delivered through the use of humor and the concept of civilización y barbarie. The indigenous justice system’s rigidity and anachronistic laws in particular become representative of ridiculous indigenous backwardness, in an attitude comparable to Gamio’s assertion of an aboriginal knowledge base stuck four hundred years in the past. The trial, which is held in Bataconcica and presided over by the elderly “Pueblo Mayor” of Vícam, begins with the sound of the peculiar Yaqui drum. Here, the basic elements that have been used to represent Yaqui traditional society (drum, dance, semi-­autonomous government, and mother) are reunited. The trial is a mere formality: “So said the tradition, and so it must be carried out, unless the relatives of the deceased Miguel Tojíncola should grant mercy to the killer, and change his death penalty to a less cruel punishment” (Rojas González, Medicine Man 106–­7). The clause allowing the surviving relatives of

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the murdered man the right to leniency is suggestive of an outdated vendetta system rather than a modern judicial system established for the community’s good. In fact, Basauri opines that “desde el momento en que está sentenciado es consi­derado como una persona muerta” (from the moment that one is sentenced, he is considered a dead person) (Basauri 283). Rojas González further depicts the indigenous justice system as inefficient: “Yaqui justice is contained by a ring of rigid formulas and intransigencies. The village, assisted by the masculine high authorities of the tribe, has the final word after discussions, after speeches that go on hour after hour, in a current of dramatic rigidity and then concession” (Medicine Man 107). Again, borrowing Fabila’s research nearly word for word, the story describes Yoeme authorities as “the cobanahuacs or governors, serious and silent, and the severe village representatives who carry the entire civil power of the tribe on their shoulders” (107). The presiding Pueblo Mayor of Vícam is he “whom the law charges to make an accusation, to make an accusation that is always in defense of the interests, the peace and harmony of the group” (109). Yaqui authorities, all old men, are inextricably linked with Yaqui tradition and insular attitudes: the conservative status quo. This status quo holds no tolerance for individualists like Cenobio. And the trial, presumably a search for justice, is a farce. As Fortunato Hernández describes, Rojas González’s Yoeme legal institution is a confusing aboriginal system with a “White” veneer (Hernández 90). Fabila’s pluriculturalista view goes completely unheeded in “La triste historia” as the trial reaches its artistic climax. When the Pueblo Mayor of Vícam explains the law, “our most venerable heritage,” stating that the murder Cenobio has committed must necessarily result in his execution, the community opines, “Ehui máuser [yes Mauser] . . . ehui, máuser . . . Máuser . . . Máuser . . .” (Rojas González, Medicine Man 109; ellipses in original). What might be understood by some—­W. C. Holden, for example—­as a popular democratic judiciary (Holden 16) is narrated by Rojas González as barbarian groupthink. The people’s verbose verdict grows. Finally, writes Rojas González, “there was a moment when no one would have been able to make out even one syllable from that roaring of beasts, that chattering of birds, that noise of flooding waters” (Medicine Man 110). The Pueblo Mayor loses control of the trial, whose jury—­the people of Bataconcica—­spirals into a state of emotional outburst and disorganization described purely through zoomorphism; as such, the Yaquis become bestial, birdlike in their senseless noisemaking. Again, in reference to Rojas González’s anthropological sources, I point to W. C. Holden’s view on the subject:

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The chief presides and all the people, men and women, constitute the jury. . . . The

verdict is reached by a sort of mass agreement. With a less orderly procedure it

would be called mob agreement. Within the memories of the old men still living, no mass jury has ever failed to convict a person accused of murder. The penalty in such a case is death. (Holden 18–­19)

Rojas González’s ley yaqui perpetuates a primitive and archaic savagery that plunges the Yoemem into bestial social atavism. Once the Yoeme law has been established as backward and irrational, Rojas González changes the focus to the Yaqui mother as a symbol of traditional cultural continuity and, consequently, aboriginal backwardness and irrationality, or barbarie. The very name of Marciala Morales symbolizes both Yoeme bellicosity (marcial, or martial) and morality, alluding to an indigenous military ethics: the Yaqui warrior myth. She is consistently “spiteful and horrible” or demonstrates “aggressive behavior” (Rojas González, Medicine Man 109). This takes on racial proportions: “The widow was an ugly woman of about fifty, with a huge body, large bones in every line, black in color, with the profile of an old eagle . . . [who] left no one with any illusions about the chance that she might be forgiving” (107). Her skin tone, as black as ­Tojíncola’s, singles her out as a villain. Physical darkness, a trait noted by at least one anthropologist, is coupled with stoic aggression. But, unlike the male Yaqui authorities who level a dispassionate death sentence before a fanatical community, Marciala’s demeanor as widowed victim and propagator of a culture of xenophobia is “stubborn, strong-­willed and vengeful” (107). Furthermore, her size, which serves to create an imposing image of the aboriginal matron, also coincides with Holden’s description of Yoeme mothers as abnormally large and oversexed (Holden 29). Through Marciala Morales, Rojas González depicts Yoeme women as, to use the words of a turn-­of-­the-­century article, “the modern Amazons . . . active participants in the interminable warfare that the Yaquis wage against the Mexican soldiery” (“The Yaqui Women”). Marciala is unequivocally aligned with the traditional authorities, standing at their side during Cenobio’s trial. Animalized as hen-­like (again the bestial metaphor hurled against the Yoeme people) and surrounded by her abundant nine offspring, Marciala is just as harsh and authoritative as the presiding elders (Rojas González, Medicine Man 107–­8). She is Gamio’s “servile woman,” a culturally unevolved Indian whose identity hinges on her reproductive functions (Gamio, Forjando 126–­27). If Cenobio is “an offended god” adored by the

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young Yoemem, especially the women, Marciala also commands a religious respect earned through tradition and severity. Marciala Morales’s powerful and overbearing personality is influenced by Alfonso Fabila’s research, but also echoes Hernández’s, Holden’s, and Basauri’s takes on the respect commanded by Yoeme adults over the younger community members, and the role of mothers in educating children: La madre es la que educa a los niños, a los que instruye en la moral y en las tradi-

ciones de la raza; enseña a los varones y aun a las niñas a que odien al blanco, porque éste es el que ha matado a los padres, a los abuelos, a los hermanos, a los parientes y el que siempre les ha hecho daño con las guerras, quitándoles las tie­ rras, las cosechas, el ganado, los pastos y las maderas, sometiéndolos a toda clase de torturas y vejaciones. (Fabila 116; emphasis mine)

(The mother is the one who educates the children, whom she instructs in morals and in the traditions of the race; she teaches the boys and even the girls to hate

the White man, because it is he who has killed their parents, their grandparents, their brothers and sisters, their relatives, and who has done them harm with wars, stealing their lands, harvests, livestock, pastures, and lumber, subjecting them to all forms of torture and vexation.)

If Cenobio’s transgressive act of collaborating with yoris epitomizes a centrifugal move toward mexicanidad, Marciala embodies a conservative centripetal force that maintains Yoeme nationalist identity. In accordance with ethnographic research, the Yaqui mother is the principal indoctrinator of anti-­yori hatred and community separateness. She is one of the chief propagators of Gamio’s pequeñas patrias in the post-­Cárdenas era. According to Kirstin Erickson, Yaqui women are in fact a focal point of Yoeme culture and cultural maintenance. Erickson’s research explores the ways in which Yaqui women embody indigenous identity through discourses of endurance, motherhood, and ceremonial work, as well as traditional “sea hiki clothing . . . the white cotton skirts, slips, blouses, and handkerchiefs embroidered with yarn in large fuchsia, magenta, Kelly green, aqua, and orange flowers”—­flowers (or sewam) being symbolic of Sea Ania religious symbolism (77). As Bigas Torres notes, “Marciala Morales, la viuda del hombre muerto, es la imagen del atraso, de la barbarie” (Marciala Morales, the dead man’s widow, is the image of backwardness, of barbarie) (121). Although not all of Yoeme culture is depicted as barbarous, the indigenous

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traditional government falls short of post-­Revolutionary modernity and damages Cenobio’s chances at happiness. As the story bends to the whims of the hot-­blooded matron, “La triste historia” changes moods from romantic tragedy to humorous irony, resulting in the total negation of Yaqui legal traditions. As the story nears its end, it synthesizes its earlier themes. Cenobio spectacularly appears before the tribunal in full pascola regalia, reminding us of his individuality as an artist and his (secular) importance to the community. A Native Apollo, he represents the clash between redeemable indigenous artistic qualities and anachronistic notions of indigenous self-­determination, according to Indigenista thought. The young women commit a final act of solidarity, pleading with the black widow to look upon his beauty and show him mercy. True to ethnographic data—­and Gamio’s primitive “servile woman” theory (Forging 115)—­the lascivious Yaqui mother surprisingly demands legal clemency under the guise that the young dancer marry her to care for his victim’s children (Rojas González, Medicine Man 110). The trial becomes a mockery of justice, and the dancer’s agency is nullified by the mass ridicule that drowns out his protests. The Pueblo Mayor drops his heavy hand like an executioner’s axe, sanctioning the legality of the request, thereby crushing the secular aesthete under the full weight of indigenous traditionalism. The outcome is comical precisely because Marciala’s “clause” is both archaic and irrational by the standards of modern (read: Mexican) jurisprudence (Bigas Torres 120). The story consistently references belief in the Yaqui mother’s oversexed nature when, followed by her abundant offspring, the indigenous black widow declares, “From now on you’ll sleep next to me, so that you can rest from all the work you’ll have to do to support this drove of kids you’ve inherited from old Tojíncola” (Rojas González, Medicine Man 110–­11). Faced with a sentence worse than death, trapped in the black widow’s web, Cenobio looks forward to a lifetime of fostering a new generation of Yaqui conservatism and unreasonable xenophobia, never mind the history of Mexican genocide and land grabbing. This is the individualistic aesthete’s punishment for his transgression and his crime. In the end, his defeat under the animal-­like “servile” woman, whose primary functions are based on pleasure and reproduction, is profusely clear: “he followed his horrible executioner who smiled triumphantly while passing the young girls who would not look directly at a fallen star, at the death of an idol, shattered in the muscular, black hands of Marciala Morales” (111). To be sure, Cenobio is a broken man. The narrative shift, Henri A. Casavant opines, is tragicómico (154). The mockery made of ley yaqui shows that “un pueblo ignorante y atrasado es

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el que decide el destino de Cenobio” (it is an ignorant and backwards people that decides Cenobio’s destiny) (Bigas Torres 121). The narrative interweaving of ethnographic detail to create an ambience of “authenticity” also has the effect of anthropological authority in “La triste historia.” At the same time that Rojas González creates a beautiful vision of indigenous folkloric dance traditions, he also deploys his knowledge of Yoeme culture to create an aura of barbarism around the governing system. This depiction willfully ignores the fact that both Yoeme culture and social structure have collaborated to conserve the cultural and political integrity of the Yoeme nation. The story’s resolution effectively puts an end to the generational conflict in favor of the older generation; as Bigas Torres concludes, “En el medio indígena siempre vence la tradición” (In the indigenous environment tradition always wins) (120). Elder, conservative authorities and a tradition of maternally driven xenophobia effectively neutralize Cenobio’s transgressive and individualistic tendencies, as well as their effect on younger Yaquis.

CONCLUSION Rojas González skillfully interweaves narrative and ethnographic research, none of which was conducted by him, to create a feeling of Yaqui “authenticity” throughout his short story. He employs Yoeme language and many names, such as Buitimea, that are undeniably of Yaqui or Mayo (Cahita) origin. The community interactions that exclude direct yori, or nonindigenous, agents, further add to the idea that “La triste historia” is a story that occurs within an “authentic” Yaqui society dealing with “authentic” Yaqui desires. In this sense, Rojas González presents Yaquis as, to use the words of Bigas Torres, “maravillosas criaturas que viven una realidad distinta, regida por la tradición” (marvelous creatures who live in a distinct reality ruled by tradition) (54). At the same time, universal themes create a world with which nonindigenous readers can easily identify. However, the ideological undertones beneath the love story, the character of the individualistic artist, and the generational conflict reveal the official Indigenista position of stripping indigenous people of their cultural and political autonomy while incorporating their traditions of folklore (dance, ceramics, textile arts, etc.) into the national economy. The pascola, both a secular and a sacred dancer, a jokester and a storyteller, is also a pivotal agent in

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religious ceremonies. In “La triste historia,” Cenobio is a “star” in la nación yaqui, an indigenous Pedro Infante–­like figure. His rough, beautiful, and even sensual dance represents an artistic cornerstone of Mexican civilization. Nonetheless, Rojas González chooses to exclude the pascola’s true significance in Yoeme identity, and instead turns to an archaic, irrational, and finally ridiculous representation of traditional government and the Yoeme mother. The governments and social structures of semi-­autonomous indigenous people, the narrative suggests, prevent the individual—­the lovestruck man, the secular artist, the proud man—­from achieving his full potential. The well-­crafted and entertaining narrative and its carefully interwoven ethnography make the promotion of Yaqui barbarie less obvious. The author, himself an accomplished anthropologist and authority on the “Indian problem” in Mexico, makes the exteriority of his literary representation of Yoemem less apparent; for who knows indios better than the anthropologist? If these anthropologist-­writers are in fact experts on indigenous communities, masters of the density of knowledge that has accumulated about them, would it not stand to reason that their depiction is the most faithful, the most trustworthy? But far from being a reliable depiction of Yaqui community aspirations, the literature of Rojas González—­like that of his anthropologist predecessors—­reveals his devotion to a belief in the national incorporation of indigenous peoples, be it racially, culturally, or economically. The dependence on an anthropological archive in representing Yoemem was not special, but rather a common practice in Indigenista literary circles. Literary depictions, even when pretending to speak for Native communities’ concerns and from Native perspectives, were contingent on the author’s intent, Indigenista ideology, and contemporary and past research on each given community. As Joanna O’Connell writes: “For while it is true that Castellanos, Arguedas, Asturias, and others have more accurate knowledge of indigenous cultural traditions than some of their literary predecessors, they still present this material in a highly mediated form” (78). This mediation is wide-­ranging: aesthetic, ethnographic, and above all ideological. Like other Indigenista writers, Rojas González exemplifies this tradition by relying on the volumes of ethnographic research being produced in his time for aesthetic inspiration and ideological guidance. His literature draws from and reestablishes the anthropological archive that verifies Mexican knowledge of lo indio. In short, it is a literature entrenched in the anthropological archive. Indigenismo, like Orientalism, “is after all a system for citing works and authors,” but not just any

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works and authors (Said 23). As I demonstrated in my nonexhaustive list of early twentieth-­century ethnography on lo yaqui, nonindigenous experts (anthropologists, politicians, philosophers) were the final word on Yaqui indigeneity.

5 CHICANA/O-­YAQUI BORDERLANDS AND INDIGENEITY IN ALFREDO VÉA JR.’S LA MARAVILLA “ You are Indians!” Zeta had never forgotten the chill down her backbone. Lecha had cowered closer to her. Their cousins had jumped up screaming and fled inside. —­L E SL I E M A R M ON S I L KO, A L M A N A C O F T H E D E A D

A

Jr.’s novel La Maravilla (1993) is in great part a negotiation of Mexican and Chicana/o portrayals of the Yaqui nation of Sonora, Mexico.1 Discourses based on racial and cultural perspectives discernible in científico positivism and state Indigenismo have resulted in the mythification of Yaquis as an innately bellicose and culturally backward people: fierce warriors and exotic dancers. These discourses appear in literary representations of Yoeme people and culture in the writings of foundational Chicana/o authors, including Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales, Alurista, and Cherríe L. Moraga, who often surround their interpretations of lo yaqui with the symbolism of the mythological Chicana/o homeland Aztlán. As such, these portrayals represent the extension of a body of work established by key twentieth-­century Mexican writers such as Amado Nervo, Martín Luis Guzmán, and Carlos Fuentes. This chapter studies Alfredo Véa Jr. as a member of a community of Chicana/o-­Yaqui authors that includes Miguel Méndez, Luis Valdez, Alma Luz Villanueva, and Michael Nava. But La Maravilla is not only important as a literary work based on Chicana/o-­indigenous perspectives, but also as a text that in many ways initiates a literary tradition that adopts Yoeme forms of knowledge to write a Chicana/o-­Yaqui borderlands experience of diaspora, race, and cultural identity. While literary portrayals of the Yoeme nation reflect an acknowledgment of Chicana/o racial indigeneity—­indigenismo chicano—­a focus on military and LFREDO VÉ A

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cultural resistance and a dearth of references to Yoeme forms of knowledge encourage the persistence of facile indigenous tropes. By thinking about the Yoeme nation in ways that are based on colonial Spanish and Mexican perspectives on history and culture, Chicana/o literature often has the effect of disconnecting the Yoeme community from the traditional origin stories that confront their history of colonial invasion and promote the defense of their ancestral territory Hiakim. If, as Edward H. Spicer has noted, Mexicans “imagined the Yaquis to be fierce warriors who opposed the just authority of European civilization and the righteous truth of Christianity” (The Yaquis 50), Chicano scholar George Mariscal, in his Aztlán and Viet Nam, similarly points out that Mexican and Chicana/o imaginaries express an essentialist belief in Yaqui warrior prowess (32). This chapter places Véa’s novel at the center of a representational shift in ­Chicana/o literature that emphasizes Yoeme culture and history. Véa’s La Ma­ravilla is a pivot point in the way Yoeme people are characterized in ­Chicana/o literature. This is the case because Véa is part of a community of Chicana/o writers who have turned to Yoeme forms of knowledge (e.g., cosmology, oral tradition, and history) and ethnography in order to question previous representations made by Mexican authors. The descendants of the diaspora that survived Porfirian, Revolution-­era, and post-­Revolutionary wars of extermination, these Chicana/o writers relate peculiarly Yoeme accounts of the Chicana/o experiences of immigration and acculturation, and explore the cultural and social changes that families experience as a result.2 Thus, their personal and literary Yaqui indigeneity in many ways reflects Mexican and Mexican American histories of Native identity, ranging from curiosity to acceptance, and in some cases family denial of indio lineage. Véa’s influence is evident in the historical novels of Montserrat Fontes, Luis Alberto Urrea, and Michael Nava, which recover Native history and Native historical perspectives as essential facets of Chicana/o-­Mexican history. But representations of Yoemem in Chicana/o literature written after the 1993 publication of La Maravilla demonstrate an emphasis similar to Véa’s on a Yoeme-­centered perspective on Chicana/o and Mexican experiences. Véa’s process in La Maravilla of appropriating previous literary and anthropological depictions of Yoeme people and culture, in order to redeploy them through an aboriginal epistemological filter, results in the advancement of a Chicana/o-­Yaqui identity. Key to the novel’s concept of indigeneity is Véa’s re-­ creation of the traditional links between Yoeme culture, resistance, and ancestral territory—­what I have chosen to call arraigamiento. Arraigamiento has its basis in Yoeme traditional stories that recount cultural, religious, and geographical

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origins.3 La Maravilla also presents a Chicana/o-­Yaqui relationship of opposition to U.S. mainstream culture and challenges the use of Aztec motifs to represent Chicana/o identity.4 As such, the Yoeme identities of Chicana/o-­Yaqui authors—­Véa, Valdez, Villanueva, and Nava—­redefine a Mexican-­Chicana/o borderland beyond the concept of Aztlán that privileges the experiences and epistemologies of living Native peoples and their cultures.

CHICANA/O AND CHICANA/O-­YAQUI WRITERS Véa and the community of writers to which he belongs are the daughters and sons of a Yoeme diaspora—­the consequence of late nineteenth-­and early twentieth-­century guerras de exterminio. These Chicana/o-­Yaqui writers include Miguel Méndez, Luis Valdez, Alma Luz Villanueva, and more recently Michael Nava. Their identity can best be understood as diasporic Yaqui indigeneity, meaning that the ways in which they identify as indigenous Mexican Americans are largely dependent on a family sense of Yoeme geopolitical belonging based in Arizona and Sonora (in particular the Hiakim territory) and on the general Yoeme histories of migration, self-­exile, and resettlement in the United States. In some cases, Yoeme culture is a key, if limited, part of authors’ upbringing, an upbringing in which they may neither speak the Yoeme language nor fully comprehend traditional cultural forms (dance and storytelling, for example), yet nonetheless possess a strong sense of Native lineage fostered through family influences and identification with the Yaqui territory. In other cases, an author raised with only a basic understanding of his or her Yoeme ancestry may turn to academic history and anthropological studies—­what I have called the anthropological archive—­to reclaim and cultivate indigenous identity. Ultimately, the work of these authors—­novels, poetry, and plays—­springs from a distinctly Yaqui epistemic register that results in what Alicia Gaspar de Alba has called a “place-­based aesthetic” interconnecting Native culture, history, and territorial belonging (104). They assert a Chicana/o identity and contest nonindigenous perspectives on Yoeme history and culture by adapting ethnographic texts and oral histories and depicting religious practices. In this sense, works like Méndez’s “Tata Casehua,” Villanueva’s “La Llorona / Weeping Woman,” and Valdez’s Mummified Deer work to re-­create the Yoeme acts of cultural place making—­dance, storytelling, and ritual—­that are the basis for much of Yoeme identity (Shorter 221).

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A brief illustration will clarify the heterogeneity of this literary community. Born in 1933 in Bisbee, Arizona, Miguel Méndez grew up in a Mexican-­Yaqui migrant family in which Yaqui history was part of the family’s storytelling tradition (Bruce-­Novoa, Chicano 87). Through his family, whose members would have been well acquainted with the Yaqui revolt sparked in 1926–­28, he learned a Yoeme oral history that would be expanded upon when his family reestablished itself in El Claro, Sonora (an ejido town with a significant Yaqui population), after being deported as a result of the Great Depression. After Méndez’s migration to Tucson, Yaqui identity manifests itself in his 1969 “Tata Casehua,” a short story dealing with the relationship between a Yoeme boy and his dying grandfather as well as with the theme of arraigamiento, prefiguring Alfredo Véa Jr.’s La Maravilla. The narrative’s aging protagonist Juan Manuel Casehua faces his inevitable death by instructing his grandson in Yoeme mythology and history. Interchangeably, Casehua and the boy become the sand, clay, and stone of the uninhabited part of the Hiakim territory, otherwise known as the Huya Ania. The boy learns to recognize the cultural significance of Yoeme forebears in the Yoeme territory. “Those faces existed before the ancestors; when they came to be, they took their faces from there; they died, but the profile of their faces is still there, more alive than those who lived, look at them, mother. It is they, in all their dignity,” declares Casehua’s young pupil (Méndez, Tata 12). At one point in his tutelage, “the boy adhere[s] himself to the ground,” thereby embedding his existence in the desert (14). In Casehua’s didactic outbursts, the theme of arraigamiento is a constant one pertaining to Yoeme identity and yori settler colonialism. Casehua connects contemporary Mexican land grabbing to the history of yori wars and massacres. “The last son of [the nearly mythical Seri leader] Coyote-­Iguana is dying of hunger,” the old Yoeme explains to his grandson, and then recalls a painful and highly personalized counterhistorical account of the Mazocoba Massacre of January 18, 1900 (20). Faced with extermination, the community takes the suicidal action of leaping from the Mazocoba mountain to its collective death: Dolores Buitimea guided her three children until she could no longer see them

at the bottom, then tenderly squeezing the infant she carried in her arms, she followed the others. Pablo Omocol helped his elderly father who had been wounded

in the leg; together they jumped into the precipice. To that same end went young Juan Cuchi, tall and athletic. He advanced carefully, embracing his beautiful wife who was in a stage of advanced pregnancy. Hundreds died. (24)

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Tata Casehua’s own death comes in the form of his body’s submergence into the sands of Hiakim as he invokes the spirits of Tetabiate and Cajeme, resistance leaders martyred in the name of Yoeme material and cultural autonomy. From his grandfather, the Yoeme child inherits an aboriginal identity that is as contemporary as it is intimately linked to aboriginal cosmology and centuries of Mexican invasions. Méndez further elaborates Yaqui indigeneity within a borderlands experience in Peregrinos de Aztlán (1974), a novel that juxtaposes the war experiences of two Yoeme men: old Loreto Maldonado and the young Frankie Pérez. Méndez’s protagonist, ex-­revolutionary Loreto “El Yaqui” Maldonado, recalls the Yaquis’ brutal struggle for survival. Dispelling the popular myth of innate Yaqui bellicosity, Loreto criticizes Rosario Cuamea, a fellow revolutionary turned obsessed insurgent, as a man who “se engañaba a sí mismo creyéndose justiciero; como todo idealista fanático” (“had deceived himself into believing that he was a seeker of justice. Like all fanatical idealists”) (Méndez, Peregrinos 174; translation by Foster, Pilgrims 167). In rendering Loreto’s disapproval of Cuamea’s inflexible rebelliousness, the novel hints at the Native community’s political heterogeneity during the Mexican Revolution. At the same time, Loreto recognizes that Frankie Pérez, a Chicano of Yoeme descent, is a frightened boy condemned to service in the Vietnam War rather than a willing warrior. A flash-­forward into Frankie’s future reveals his torturous tour of duty: “The horrendous slaughter of the bombardments, thousands of children, women and old people burning like coals, impregnated with napalm and screaming horribly. The massive extermination of the villages” (Pilgrims 151). Much as Mexican soldiers did to the Yoemem, the young Chicano-­Yaqui is forced to commit atrocities against a dark, marginalized enemy in obedience to a government that simultaneously oppresses his own people. The modern Yaqui’s journey into the Aztlán borderlands brings about his own extreme material poverty and psychological degradation instead of a triumphant return to a pre-­Columbian homeland.5 California-­born Alma Luz Villanueva, in contrast, assumes Yaqui indigeneity through her mother’s family. Raised in San Francisco, Villanueva was greatly influenced by her Yoeme grandmother, Jesús Luján de Villanueva, who cultivated her Yaqui identity (Villanueva, “Alma Luz” 299–­300). Given Villanueva’s birth in 1944, her grandmother would have been intimately familiar with the dangers of being a Yoeme mother in the age of Mexican military campaigns and deportations. From her, Villanueva learned of Yaqui curanderismo (traditional healing) and dreaming, which is connected to the Yo Ania realm; in her grandmother

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Jesús and her great-­grandmother, Villanueva discovered models for Chicana feminism (300). Villanueva embraces Yoeme ancestry and warrior history by employing matrilineal curandera tradition to represent women’s agency in her poem “La Chingada.” She conjures Yoeme Catholicism when explaining the origins of the poem: “I think this poem may have been started with my great-­ grandmother Isidra. . . . She was a Yaqui Indian converted to Christianity and dared to name her daughter, my grandmother, Jesús” (Villanueva, “La Chingada” 140). The poem is Villanueva’s response to male oppression of women, including rape. The poetic narrator describes herself as a warrior, walking along a beach, “hooded, masculine parka, / the dog, my knife open in / my hand . . . I / hear my grandmother saying, / ‘No te dejes’” (145). The Yaqui grandmother voices resistance (“No te dejes”) to heteronormative violence perpetuated against Chicanas. Villanueva’s short story “La Llorona / Weeping Woman” (1994) presents a further development of Chicana-­Yaqui identity based on Yoeme history and culture. “La Llorona” demonstrates a Yoeme-­centered indigenismo chicano in a conversation between Mexican American child Luna and her Yaqui grandmother Isidra, or “Mamacita,” whose center of identity is the Río Yaqui. Isidra recounts the Yoeme history of Mexican persecution through a tale about La Llorona, the mythological indigenous woman who drowned her own children. But the grandmother explains that, instead of drowning her children, “when the great flood came, and the terrible men from the great ocean came, she turned her children into fish” (Villanueva, Weeping 2). Mamacita explains her beautiful metaphor in the context of cowardly acts committed against dehumanized Yoeme families: “‘The Indians knew they were evil when they killed even the little children for nothing, sending them to the dark side of the moon, so that mothers couldn’t even see their little ones in the Full Moon face. Evil!’ she spat” (3). In referencing the yori (nonindigenous) repression foretold after the great flood remembered in the Testamento, Villanueva creates a Llorona steeped in Yoeme culture and history. In light of the atrocities committed by Porfirian soldiers, then, La Llorona is a compassionate Native spirit offering Yoeme children a merciful death. Playwright Luis Valdez, born in 1940 in Delano, California, of Yoeme ancestry, has negotiated between Yaqui indigeneity and pre-­Columbian indigenismo chicano throughout his career. Like other members of El Teatro Campesino, Valdez embraced his own indigenous identity through a philosophy dubbed Theater of the Sphere, which Broyles-­González refers to as an indigenous “cultural reclamation project” (El teatro 84). A case in point is the troupe’s didactic focus

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on Mayan and Aztec knowledge at the same time that it seeks to interact with and learn from U.S. and Mexican indigenous communities (88). El Teatro Campesino viewed pre-­Columbian mythology, according to Broyles-­González, as tantamount to a non-­Western classical mythology, the likes of Homer’s The Iliad and The Odyssey. However, the Yoeme critic reveals, “when El Teatro Campesino sought to ground the Theater of the Sphere in Mayan and Aztec mythology it did so with the conviction that those myths constituted an active force within Chicana/o reality” (90). Valdez’s pre-­Columbian/Yaqui tension is on display in his long essay “Pensamiento Serpentino” (1971), in which he offers Chicana/o Aztec aesthetics while underscoring a “neo-­Mayan” pacifism unpopular with many Chicana/o activists. In advancing a more spiritual view of Chicana/o culture, he places Western and Aztec deities on equal terms: “Jesucristo is Quetzalcóatl / The colonization is over / La Virgen de Guadalupe is Tonantzín / The suffering is over / The universe is Aztlán / The revolution is now” (Valdez, Early Works 177). And yet, Valdez evokes Yaqui indigeneity alongside venerated pre-­Columbian cultures: “For I have never read a single / poem by an Azteca, Tolteca, Maya / or Yaqui ATHEIST” (176). He then hints at Yoeme pascolas and deer dancers when recognizing that living indigenous dance arts constitute a form of knowledge: “El indio baila / He DANCES his way to truth / in a way INTELLECTUALS will / never understand” (176). In Mummified Deer, which debuted in 1999, Luis Valdez offers the historical and cosmological knowledge of a living Yoeme nation as an alternative to the Aztec motifs pervasive in Chicana/o literature. Valdez’s play is a particularly ambitious work that follows the protagonist’s voyage from the end of the nineteenth century in Mexico to the Yoeme diaspora that followed the Mexican Revolution. The play tracks the Chicana/o experience of migration and labor hardship through the Mexican guerras de exterminio and the Yoeme traversal of the U.S.-­Mexico border into Arizona and westward. Mestizaje and indigenous identity are reinterpreted through a variety of racial origins, all revolving around the protagonist’s Yaqui identity (Huerta x). The protagonist Mama Chu exhibits the fiery temper typical of the mythical Yaqui warrior. But she carries a mummified Yaqui fetus that, Jorge Huerta writes, “becomes a metaphor for the Chicanos’ Indio heritage as seen through the lens of his own [Valdez’s] Yaqui blood” (x). Her warrior status as a former revolutionary soldadera is tempered by the presence of a silent deer dancer named Cajeme—­her unborn son—­whose performance represents the survival of Yoeme culture and cosmology. Mummified Deer historically contextualizes the protagonist’s warriorhood; for example,

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Mama Chu becomes a soldadera only after procuring her freedom from Yucatán slave labor, a consequence of Porfirian deportations of women and children. Historical and cultural context converts Valdez’s alternative Yaqui indigeneity into a material reality onstage. Significantly, Valdez engages the Chicana/o preoccupation with vendidos, or traitors, through the obscene and corrupt clown named Cosme Bravo. Bravo, the proprietor of the Circo Azteca (a reference to the mythological homeland Aztlán), is revealed to be a torocoyori, a Yaqui who has betrayed his own (Valdez, Mummified 50). In contrast to works by writers of Yoeme descent, literary representations of Yaquis by other Chicanas/os tend to demonstrate a pervasive assimilation of Aztec motifs and a continuing de-­emphasis of the cultural links between armed resistance and Hiakim origin myths. One could argue that these representations of the Yoeme nation indeed constitute a historical recognition on the part of their authors. Nonetheless, this approach perpetuates the Spanish-­Mexican representations of a Yaqui warrior myth and exotic dance that have served to silence Yoeme voices. Among these writers are Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales, Cherríe L. Moraga, and Alurista. On the other hand, we will see how historical novels by Montserrat Fontes and Luis Alberto Urrea demonstrate a changing trend toward more Yoeme-­centered, if not Yoeme-­sympathetic, literary representations that envision an intertwining of Chicana/o origins and Mexico’s living indigenous communities (Cantú, “Hybrid” 157).6 Prominent for his leadership in the Denver Crusade for Justice and the 1969 Denver Youth Conference, Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales was a key intellectual of the Chicano Movement and an author of what Cordelia Candelaria would identify as “movement poetry” (39–­40). Movement poetry, in addition to its core promotion of social protest and Chicana/o nationalism, also carried a strong dose of pre-­Columbian indigenous aesthetics in which “the compatibility of Chicano history with the formidable cultural heritage of Mesoamerica” figured prominently (Candelaria 40). In his seminal 1967 poem I Am Joaquín, Gonzales creates an analogy between Western and Chicana/o history, the latter at times represented through allusions to pre-­Columbian leaders like Nezahualcóyotl, Cuauhtémoc, and the goddess Tonantzin. Gonzales includes Yaquis when connecting indigenous-­Mexican wars to mestizaje: “The chattering machine guns / are death to all of me: / Yaqui / Tarahumara / Chamula / Zapotec / Mestizo / Español” (39). In I Am Joaquín, the Yaqui nation is but one of many indigenous peoples sacrificed in the Chicana/o’s epic history of mestizaje. The poet Alurista, often referred to as “the poet laureate of la raza,” helped produce the Plan de

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Aztlán along with Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales and the Crusade for Justice in March of 1969. The Plan’s manifesto (“El plan espiritual de Aztlán”) created a separation between the “foreigner,” the “gabacho,” and the “Chicano inhabitants and civilizers of the northern land Aztlán,” a “mestizo nation” composed of “a bronze people” with a “bronze culture” (Anaya and Lomelí 1). The choice of Aztlán as the Chicana/o homeland and the focus on a dark indigenous phenotype would resonate throughout Chicana/o cultural production. In his first collection of poetry, the groundbreaking Floricanto en Aztlán (1971), Alurista quotes from Carlos Castañeda’s controversial The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge in the epigraph: “Fear! A terrible enemy—­treacherous, and difficult to overcome” (qtd. in Alurista ii). The quotation originates from a section in which don Juan Matus explains the acquisition of knowledge as if it were war: “Every step of learning is a new task, and the fear the man is experiencing begins to mount mercilessly, unyieldingly. His purpose becomes a battlefield ” (Castañeda 62; emphasis mine).7 Similarly, in Cherríe L. Moraga’s The Hungry Woman: A Mexican Medea, the playwright posits her Medea, a lesbian Yaqui warrior, in a futuristic borderland and surrounds her with a chorus of Aztec female divinities. Moraga, a key intellectual involved in advancing Chicana/o progressive gender and race politics, has also engaged with Aztec symbolism in various works, notably the essays “La Fuerza Femenina” and “Queer Aztlán: The Re-­formation of Chicano Tribe” (in The Last Generation, 1993); in the latter, she develops a critique of Chicano-­Mexican machismo as epitomized by a Coyolxauhqui-­Huitzilopochtli binary (Calderón 131). For Moraga, the Chicana/o Aztlán has often been an unwelcoming space for people diverse in race and gender. In The Hungry Woman, the Yaqui Medea names her son, who is fated for sacrifice, Chac-­Mool, after the stone sculpture used for pre-­Columbian sacrificial offerings. Despite the protagonist’s identity as a Yaqui lesbian—­an identity that opens the possibility of queer Chicanas/os from other living indigenous nations—Moraga’s futuristic Aztlán teems with Aztec culture and symbolism, deploying, like much of the Chicano Movement’s cultural production, lo azteca as a blanket indigeneity. Notably, scholar-­director Patricia Ybarra, who directed a performance of the play in 2006, took measures so that the set would not appear “more ‘classical’ and museological than the author intended” (Ybarra 82–­83). Ybarra de-­emphasized Greco-­Aztec presence by, for example, excluding Aztec dances and limiting Aztec costume. Here, Ybarra wrestles with staging a play that was written with a tendency to imagine Chicana/o indigeneity primarily in pre-­Columbian

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mythological terms. Nonetheless, Moraga’s Yaqui Medea is a powerful character who represents the Chicana’s struggle for gender equality in her own community. While the representations of Yaquis in the works of Gonzales, Alurista, and Moraga recognize the Yoeme nation’s historical importance and military prevalence, they obey a Mexican nationalist perspective that treats the Yoemem as an admirable episode in Mexico’s war history. Chicana/o authors have made use of Yaqui (Yoeme) characterizations to represent Chicana/o struggles for race and gender identity in highly politicized works. But by subordinating Yoeme characters to pre-­Columbian motifs and separating them from their cultural context, they inadvertently perpetuate the Yaqui warrior myth into the twenty-­first century and subvert the representational agency of living aboriginal and Chicana/o-­indigenous contemporaries. .

YAQUI INDIGENEITY IN RECENT CHICANA/O HISTORICAL NOVELS Published after Véa’s La Maravilla (1993), the Chicana/o historical novels of Fontes, Urrea, and Nava retell events in which Yoeme historical presence is significant to Chicana/o communities and the individual authors. The Chicana/o historical novel is in many ways a reconstruction of Mexican American identity through the narration of significant community (regional or national) events. Authors with roots in the Sonoran and Arizona borderlands, they offer literary visions that are exceptional in that Mexican-­Chicana/o history is inseparable from the indigenous histories of the borderlands. The borderlands include regions in which, today, Yaqui can signify either regional pride and an exciting historical bellicosity, or a paradoxical shame in indigenous racial origins (Olavarría, Cruces 58). In these places, the Yoeme community may experience racism in social and labor contexts at the same time that government and business institutions use its symbols and ceremonies to promote tourism and generate commerce (60). The novels of Fontes, Urrea, and Nava re-­create, respectively, a pre-­Revolutionary Alamos, Cabora, and Mexico City (the former two both in Sonora) that must be understood through the culture and politics of the country’s Native inhabitants, specifically the Yoemem and Yoremem (Mayos). While Fontes and Urrea claim family ties to Sonora, and Nava is a Chicano-­ Yaqui writer, all three look to recent indigenous-­centered histories and research

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in cosmology to inform their novels. As José David Saldívar has written about Rolando Hinojosa’s historical novels, these authors write a collective narrative that “counters historical amnesia by restoring to the materiality of its signifiers the buried reality” of, in this case, Yoeme history ( J. Saldívar 67). So, while these novels continue to examine Yaqui indigeneity through warriorhood, this examination is carried out via a cultural-­political recontextualization of Yoeme struggle and a confronting of the uncomfortable social attitudes of Mexicans toward indigenous contemporaries. Montserrat Fontes’s Dreams of the Centaur (1996) is a marked exception in its treatment of Yaqui warrior identity as an examined dialectic. Dreams, whose plot revolves around the Mexican Durcal family in Alamos, Sonora, can be considered a novel about the Mexican frontier and a border novel, since the protagonists eventually cross the U.S.-­Mexico border into Arizona, mirroring the Yoeme diaspora. Guidotti-­Hernández qualifies Fontes’s novel as a form of counterhistory “in which the discursive fills the unspeakable gap [of violence] in the nationalist historiography” (238). In Dreams, the Mexican protagonists’ cohabitation with Yoeme workers and the overshadowing presence of the Porfirian guerras de exterminio—­in the form of massacres and deportation to slave labor in Yucatán—­create a lens through which to understand the material and semantic tension between nonindigenous and indigenous perspectives on Yaqui indigeneity. The tragic developments in the Durcal family—­father José is murdered, mother Felipa is left widowed and at the mercy of her husband’s murderer, and son Alejo is imprisoned and conscripted into federal military service after avenging his father’s death—­parallel the lives of the Yoemem whom they employ on their ranch in Alamos, and those with whom they share the state of Sonora. Perhaps in an authorial response to the admitted “really strong anti-­ Indian attitudes” of Fontes’s own family, mother Felipa demonstrates strong racism against Yoeme people, while father José supports Cajeme’s Yoeme autonomy as an important regional resistance against federal land concessions to foreign (and especially U.S.) investors (Fontes, “Interview” 145). Arguments between José and Felipa reveal a lexical tug-­of-­war, the former preferring the term Yoeme and the latter Yaqui, indicative of the contention over Yaqui identity among nonindigenous Sonorans.8 When chiding José for his indiscretions with the young Yoeme worker named Rosario, Felipa appeals to the state of war pitting Yaquis against yoris: “Felipa shuddered at the word ‘Yoemem.’ Why did he insist on calling Yaquis by the name they used for themselves?” (Fontes, Dreams 20). This dynamic continues in an argument over the execution of Yoeme men

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by federal rurales, which turns into an economic debate with the Yaqui nation at its center: “The Yaquis,” she corrected, “will kill us quicker than the gringos.” Felipa won-

dered if José would ever see that his beloved “Yoemem” had no love for him whatsoever.

“They defend their lands! Are you blind? Sonora is full of Americans, Span-

iards, Germans, Arabs, Chinese—­all of them here to steal from Mexicans and

Mexico’s primera gente, the Indians, and especially the Yoemem.” (47; emphasis mine)

The couple’s lexical struggle over the terms Yoeme/Yoemem, meaning “the people,” and Yaqui reveals the nonindigenous Mexican struggle over indigenous identity. According to José’s liberal ideology, the Yoemem are living contemporaries symbolic of state autonomy. While José’s insistence on the term Yoeme demonstrates a level of cultural respect and a recognition of the indigenous nation on its own humanizing terms (as people), Felipa’s constant reassertion of Yaqui, the term established by colonial conquerors and missionaries who emphasized the Yoemem’s roles as dangerous fighters, represents an essentialist Mexican perspective. In a nonindigenous Mexican context, Yaqui represents the resolve to deny contemporary Yoeme “peoplehood” (i.e., nationhood and cultural-­political self-­determination) and humanity, and to grant authority over Native identity to Mexican-­Western concepts. But Felipa, like the Yoemem themselves, is a victim of the Yaqui-­Mexican wars, during which many nonindigenous Mexicans felt only fear and disdain toward the Yoemem and, as Spicer writes, “Yaquis began to appear as something less than human” (The Yaquis 156). Accordingly, Yoeme survivors Refugio Savala and Rosalio Moisés both recall children playing at killing yoris, or Mexicans (Moisés et al. 22; Savala 47). While Dreams exposes Sonora’s Yaqui wars “through the prism of quotidian violence,” as Guidotti-­Hernández calls it, the lexical fight between the Sonoran couple is also one of epistemic violence: that is, a fight over the ability to represent indigenous people as more than postcolonial Mexican subjects (237). The problematic question of racial disunity between criollos, mestizos, and Natives is engaged with in Dreams through the characters of Charco, who is Alejo’s illegitimate brother and the son of the Yoeme girl Rosario, and the laborer Tacho. Charco’s mestizaje holds the key to uniting the nonindigenous and mestizo members of the Durcal family (read here: “Mexican family”) by

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reconnecting them to Yoeme cultural and political struggles (Canfield 257–­59). As a result of the murder of Alejo’s father, the old Yoeme Tacho, a former temastián (catechist) during Cajeme’s leadership, assumes a paternal role in Alejo’s life. Yoeme culture looms large over the young Mexican protagonist; Tacho and Alejo perform a Native baptism of the boy’s horse, and Alejo, who is familiar with the Yoeme language, feels “hurt to be called Yori” by Tacho (Fontes, Dreams 105). When Tacho sacrifices himself by surrendering to federal soldiers who would happily have taken Alejo’s life if provoked, the boy appropriately connects his Yoeme mentor to the Waehma ceremony. He ponders the deer’s head hanging over his fireplace: “Maso [Deer]. Tacho, mi Tacho [my Tacho], his heart cried. He saw the deer and fireplace as a shrine, his own secret shrine where in silence he could mourn Tacho” (121). But even in this, the Mexican struggle to define Yoeme identity remains. For example, Tacho fascinates Alejo when he explains the ritual of becoming a Yaqui warrior, but “what didn’t make sense was that according to Tacho, the sufferings of Jesus Christ had taken place in Yaqui country. Or that flowers grew from the blood that fell from Jesus while he hung on the cross” (58). As a nonindigenous boy, Alejo continues to find Yoeme religion incomprehensible. As a federal conscript tasked with escorting Yoeme prisoners to Yucatán, Alejo remembers the origin story of the girl Yomumuli who translates the talking tree’s prophecy, realizing “the dark part he [himself ] played in that legend” of Spanish conquest (197). Nonetheless, Alejo also engages in indigenous epistemic practices when he begs Tacho for “Etehoi, etehoi”—­the Yoeme practice of disseminating political, historical, and cultural knowledge (Spicer, The Yaquis 178; Shorter 68–­69)—­and in his relationship with his Yoeme half-­brother, Charco, who recounts the fateful Mazocoba Massacre (Fontes, Dreams 300). Roberto Cantú points out that the indigenous plight in Dreams may be read as an allegory for Chicana/o struggle. But just as José Durcal sees the future of Sonorans as being tied to the destiny of the Yoeme communities, Cantú finds a certain irony in a Chicana/o interpretation in which “the historical contradiction found in Anglo-­American settlers/squatters and Californio landowners after the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo is homologous to that of Mexicans and Yaqui Indians in Sonora from the nineteenth century to the present” (Cantú, “Hybrid” 153). While Mexican Americans from the mid-­ 1900s on have resisted U.S. racism, labor exploitation, and land grabbing, Mexican governments have enacted very similar measures against Mexico’s aboriginal population. In this sense, Dreams undermines official histories in which “the United States, Mexico, and the imagined Chicano nation . . . selectively forget

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the roles they have played in intracultural, intranational, and international violence and genocide” (Guidotti-­Hernández 239). By remembering a concurrent Native and mestizo borderlands history of violence, survival, and diaspora, the novel makes indigenous experience as central as mestizo experience. While Fontes’s novel is limited in its characterization of the Yoeme community, it is nonetheless a significant improvement upon previous literary representations based on warrior mythification and cultural exoticism. Luis Alberto Urrea’s historical novel The Hummingbird’s Daughter (2005) is also exceptional in its treatment of Yoemem, Yoremem (Mayos), and other indigenous peoples of Sinaloa and Sonora. It is a Chicana/o historical novel that recounts the life of the pre-­Revolutionary Santa Teresa de Cabora (Teresa Urrea), a Cahita mestiza girl who provokes anti-­Porfirian rebellions in indigenous Sonora and the Chihuahuan town of Tomóchic.9 The novel is mainly based on the life of Teresa, the illegitimate daughter of Tomás Urrea, a wealthy hacendado who eventually recognizes her as his daughter. But characters like don Refugio Moroyoqui, a Yoeme survivor of the 1868 Bacum Massacre, and María Sonora, or “Huila,” a Mayo curandera from El Júpare, Sonora, function as nodal points in the development of a literary ambience sympathetic to the borderlands’ Native inhabitants. The Mayos who work Tomás’s haciendas in Sinaloa and Sonora are referred to only as the People, an unromantic poverty-­ stricken community of laborers. Don Refugio, like Tacho in Dreams of the Centaur, mentors the young and orphaned Tomás Urrea, teaching him basic lessons about hacienda life and indigenous ways. In this sense, Refugio is representative of the importance of Yoeme and Yoreme people in the Sonoran and Sinaloan economy and culture (Urrea 42). But as both a valued worker and a massacre survivor, he also symbolizes the Sonoran inability to reconcile Yoeme labor and self-­determination, thereby fixing the Yoemem in a paradigm that assigns them a semi-­civilized identity. The wars of extermination are ever present in The Hummingbird’s Daughter, which is made clear when don Refugio is unable to endure the burden of seeing Yaqui women (a principal enemy of the Porfirian regime) taken prisoner and mutilated. In reaction, don Refugio burns himself alive in order to teach the future master of the hacienda one final grim lesson: “‘You, boy,’ he said. ‘Don’t be like your fathers.’ He struck the match and exploded in flame” (Urrea 46). Stripped of social agency and political voice, Refugio offers his horrific sacrifice in meager hopes of influencing a generation of future landowners. Huila, the old Yoreme who teaches curanderismo to Teresa Urrea, reflects the interstitial

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existence of certain indigenous people of Sinaloa and Sonora. Huila, who “had lost her betrothed in one of the great killings,” is revered as a healer among the People (Mayos), while she is simultaneously a subaltern in relation to the Urrea family. This reality proves difficult for the People to accept (47). The flipside of this is the adult Tomás’s respect for the irreverent Huila. She explains to don Tomás that “they respect me,” and derisively asks, “Have you done anything respectable?” (41). Though he would be well within his rights as landowner to punish the old Mayo healer, he instead recognizes her importance to the hacienda community he leads. In this way, aboriginal servants, while politically weak and vulnerable, are nonetheless indispensable to Sonora’s economic and social fabric. As such, Yoeme identity is examined in The Hummingbird’s Daughter through the perspective of don Tomás, whose cohabitation with don Refugio and the Mayos has engendered in him a level of respect and sympathy for the First Peoples of Sonora. The hacendado and his servants arrive at what appears to be the aftermath of a Yaqui raid and massacre in Cabora.10 Tomás chooses to reject a facile belief in a Yaqui warrior myth, and meets with the neighboring Yoeme community alone—­a terrifying and humbling experience for the hacendado. As a willing yori listener, Tomás continues a process of self-­education begun during his childhood relationship with don Refugio: So they had sat with him and told him of their lives. Of the destruction of their

homelands, of the Yori invasions and the starvation that twisted their children and

weakened their old ones, of the massacres and hangings, the tortures and assaults.

Of whole villages emptied by Mexican troops, of families marched into the sea, of children pierced by tree branches and left to rot, fed to sharks, trampled by

horses. Of scalps collected from lone wanderers and sold to the state for bounty. Of fear. (Urrea 185)

Tomás and the Yoeme leaders come to an agreement of mutual protection, in which Cabora will serve the indigenous community as a place of work and refuge from military repression, while the Yoemem (and later Sonoran Mayos) will in turn protect Cabora against indigenous attacks. As with the relationship between Tomás and Huila, the civilización/barbarie paradigm breaks down here. Rather, the landowner and the Yoemem form a mutually beneficial alliance in which they provide protection and economic support to each other; this part of the narrative hearkens back to the many colonial and nineteenth-­century

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instances of Yoeme diplomacy. Yaqui warriorhood is also contextualized with the beginning of the Yucatán deportations and concessions of Yoeme land to U.S. companies: “The army collected Yaquis from unprotected villages and herded them toward the sea. No one knew where they went—­whole families vanished overnight. The devil, children said, was a gringo” (Urrea 266). Finally, Tomás demonstrates his sympathy for the Yoeme people with his knowledge of their history and culture. This is clear when he recounts the 1533 first contact story to his friend Lauro Aguirre: So the Spaniards marched on to the Río Yaqui. They walked right up the valley, where the Yaquis were waiting. And the Spaniard leader said something along

the time-­honored lines of “In the name of the king of Spain, and the power of

God Almighty, we have come to bring you the gospel of Jesus Christ our Lord. Oh, and where’s the gold?” And the Yaquis ran out like red ants and killed all of them. (Urrea 161–­62)

When Aguirre, frightened out of his wits, accuses the Yoemem of being killers, the hacendado simply retorts, “We’re killers” (162). Tomás, himself an atheist, defends Yoeme Catholicism to his Protestant friend by explaining the Waehma celebration: “And—­perhaps God, that old trickster, was really at work after all—­the Jesuits allowed the tribe to exercise its own rituals along with the new Roman high jinks. Imagine, Lauro—­deer dancers in the Mass. A native Easter!” (162).11 Despite a clear belief in his own racial and cultural superiority, Tomás nonetheless is capable of admiring Native epistemologies in the form of history and religious practices that challenge his Western identity. Michael Nava’s The City of Palaces (2014) brings to light the Yoeme cultural connection to the Hiakim territory and elevates the importance of Yoeme politics in the national struggle of the Mexican Revolution. It addresses Yoeme historical relevance in the decade and a half leading up to the Decena Trágica, the 1913 assassination of President Francisco I. Madero and overthrow of the revolutionary government. A Mexican American writer from California, Nava possesses Yoeme ancestry based on his refugee great-­grandparents’ flight to Arizona. Nonetheless, perhaps due to the trauma of the family’s persecution, Yoeme heritage remained an unappreciated part of his family history (Nava, personal interview). In this sense, Nava’s historical knowledge of his Native ancestry is cultivated through academic reclamation. But the author’s literary assertion of Yaqui indigeneity has also had its own trajectory: for example, in

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the final novel of his detective noir series, Rag and Bone (2001), the protagonist, lawyer Henry Ríos, reconnects with his family and sparks a love interest with a Mexican American man of Yaqui descent, thereby implying the formation of a new kind of family inclusive of Yoeme ancestry. The City of Palaces focuses on Mexico City’s pre-­Revolutionary upper class’s negotiation of its racial and gender diversity, and its encounter with the Porfirian Yaqui diaspora. The Yoemem who arrive in the capital are reinterpreted through the sympathetic eyes of criollo protagonists Miguel Sarmiento and Alicia Gavilán. White inhabitants of a country immersed in Native history and culture, The City’s primary characters are themselves social pariahs in one sense or another: Miguel is tainted by his father’s political opposition to Porfirio Díaz, Alicia by her smallpox-­scarred visage, and Jorge Luis by his clandestine homosexuality. Their own racial prejudices notwithstanding, the outsider status of these elitist Mexicans in many ways opens them to a sympathetic view of indigenous Sonorans faced with government repression. Nava introduces Yoeme culture in the initial two chapters in the form of a flower-­decorated cross commissioned by the Marqués de Guadalupe Gavilán, Alicia’s colonial ancestor, which serves as a kind of didactic tool for Yoeme cosmology (City 11). To explain the unique religious relic, Alicia recalls to Miguel what she has learned from her indigenous servant Graciela: “Nahuatl, like us,” she explained, “but when the rest of us came to Tenochtitlán, the Yaquis stayed behind in a river valley that was like the Garden of Eden. They

worshipped the deer who gave up his life to give them meat to eat and hides for

clothes. When the priests came and told them about Jesus, well, to the Yaquis, Jesus and the deer were the same and they converted.” (29)

As in Urrea’s The Hummingbird’s Daughter, Yoeme identity is partially explained through the Waehma (Easter) ceremony and the deer dancer’s important cultural symbolism, ways in which the Yoeme nation publicly represents itself to others. In order to explain the cosmologically transcultural artifact that is the flowered cross, Alicia must school Miguel in the sacredness of flowers (sewam) in Yoeme religion: “They call heaven the flower world. They say that when Jesus was on the cross, flowers sprang up where his drops of blood touched the earth. . . . For him they are the blood and resurrection of Jesus” (29). In connecting religious belief to the Yaqui soil, Nava hints at the cultural deep rooting that will be elaborated on later in the novel. But the protagonists’

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Mexico is immersed in aboriginal history and culture. Nava conjures Aztlán, the mythological Mexica homeland, to create a historical tie between Mexico City and contemporary Yoeme people and their culture; in this way, The City foreshadows the intimate connection between the future of nonindigenous Mexicans during the Revolution and the fate of the Yoeme nation.12 But Yoeme perspectives are also a lens through which to interpret the cruel reality of the Porfirian wars of extermination. Vice President of Mexico Ramón Corral, former governor of Sonora, “is a corrupt, syphilitic Indian killer” (Nava, City 185). Alicia inquires to Father Cáceres, who gives refuge to Yoemem who have escaped Yucatán, about the Yoeme children and mothers. The priest refers to the government’s view of Yoeme mothers as a principal enemy in the Porfirian-­Yaqui wars: “The children are taken from their families and placed in orphanages or given to Mexican families to adopt. The women are killed, so that they will not bear other children. It is the policy of our government to wipe these people off the face of the earth” (Nava, City 155). In reaction to this history of state violence and diaspora, Nava imagines a Mexican “underground railroad” in which enlightened clergy protect and assist Yoeme escapees in their voyage of exile to southern Arizona (154). In reaction to the wars of extermination, Alicia explains to Miguel her belief that the Yoemem are “a kind of holy people” by recalling the cultural-­territorial deep rooting present in the Testamento: The Yaqui believe God gave them their homeland. They say his angels came down

from heaven and established the boundaries of their land with prayer and music. They describe a river valley at the edge of the desert that is like paradise. . . . “In

their minds, Miguel, our war to take their land is a war against their faith. If they are driven off their land, they will be driven away from God.” (Nava, City 180)

Alicia, a devout Catholic, identifies and sympathizes with Yoeme resistance. With religiosity serving as a bridge, her identification with the Yoeme nation is based on her ability to perform a sympathetic epistemic shift toward a Native religious geopolitics. And as the Yoemem are a people who dedicate their lives to God via the practice of mandas, their resistance to the Mexican government is therefore made just in terms of both the Native Aniam cosmology and Western Christianity. Yoeme cultural politics resurge in The City of Palaces with Yoeme participation in the Revolution. Initially, the Yoeme soldiers are part of “the improbable collection of revolutionaries—­farmers and lawyers, university students and horse thieves, men with great names and men who could not spell their names,”

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an ethnic mosaic worthy of a Novel of the Mexican Revolution (Nava, City 233). And, echoing Spicer’s research on the Yaqui warrior myth and accounts of the Revolution, the Yoeme battalions are comprised of legendary stoic warriors embroiled in national politics: “Madero had promised the Yaquis he would return their homeland in Sonora to them. They fought with a ferocity so legendary that their mere appearance on a battlefield could cause opposing troops to take flight” (Nava, City 235). However, the novel captures the political tensions of 1912, when, like the Zapatistas, Yaquis had grown disgruntled with the revolutionary president’s inaction on their behalf. To Miguel’s disbelief, Jorge Luis tries to explain the political importance of Yoeme Catholic religion and its connection to the Hiakim territory: “They say Jesus walked among them practicing his arts as a healer and was crucified in the arms of his mother, who had transformed herself into a tree to embrace her son at the moment of his death” (266). “Yaqui agrarismo,” as Alan Knight dubs the indigenous nation’s telluric politics, is partly based upon a cosmology incomprehensible to Western notions of Christianity (Knight 1: 26); nevertheless, Yoeme revolutionaries practiced their cultural politics throughout the Revolution’s landscape.13 Not to be seen as a peripheral tribal issue, Yoeme politics are placed by Nava alongside the contemporary national principles competing with Maderismo: “So, Zapata in the south, Orozco in the north, and now the Yaquis” (City 266). Dreams of the Centaur, The Hummingbird’s Daughter, and The City of Palaces are historical novels that enact a recovery of pre-­Revolutionary Yoeme and Mayo histories in their re-­creation of Mexican-­Chicana/o history. Reconstructing regional Sonoran and national Mexican history, they expand the foundations of Mexican American identity. All three novels address the roles of Yoemem and/ or Yoremem (Mayos) in Mexican history, be it as key participants in the regional economy and its vibrant culture, or as staunch defenders of their cultural and territorial rights before and during the Mexican Revolution. Not to be seen purely as victims of the Porfirian regime, Yaquis are a militarily and politically engaged sector in Mexico’s history of revolution and diaspora. All three works can be read as border novels in which their Mexican protagonists, like Yoeme refugees, must ultimately leave the northern frontier for the U.S. Southwest. Like the exiled protagonists in Urrea’s The Hummingbird’s Daughter, Dreams of the Centaur’s Alejo Durcal is displaced to the U.S. Southwest and rebuilds his life alongside Yaqui refugees in Arizona. The City of Palaces ends with Miguel Sarmiento crossing the border into exile with his son, taking refuge in the border town of Douglas, Arizona (358). These characters all become part of the U.S.-­ Mexico borderlands in which Anglos, Mexicans, Mexican Americans, Chinese,

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Yoemem, Yoremem, and Apaches, as Robert McKee Irwin proposes, “destabilize notions of unified U.S. or Mexican identity” (“Santa Teresa” 97). Urrea’s novel, concludes Desirée Martin, “serves as a way to associate his family history to Chicano and borderlands history in general,” with the Yoeme nation playing a significant role in that history (55). Urrea’s personal motives notwithstanding, The Hummingbird’s Daughter also impacts literary portrayals of Chicana/o indigeneity by making Yoeme people a visible part of borderlands history. Although Dreams of the Centaur is a work about its Mexican protagonists becoming aware of the Porfirian guerras de exterminio, including the deportation of families and the Mazocoba Massacre of 1900, “Fontes’s novel, on the contrary, contains a hidden subtext: it tells the story of how her family played a leading role in the Mexican Revolution” (Cantú, “Hybrid” 143). And yet, the Durcal family’s drama is inseparable from the Yaqui nation’s historical trauma. Nava, himself of Yoeme ancestry, portrays the nineteenth-­century guerras de exterminio and the advent of the Mexican Revolution as one phenomenon. But as a Chicano-­Yaqui writer, Nava also works to provide a degree of historical voice to his great-­grandparents’ experience as Sonoran refugees in Arizona. In light of the racist social and political tendencies of nineteenth-­century Mexican politicians, these novels explore the ways that “the rethinking of ‘politically unfashionable’ eras in Mexican/ Chicano history may lead to productive paths” (Cantú, “Hybrid” 142). Their Chicana/o and Chicana/o-­Yaqui authors embrace an epistemic shift toward the inclusion of indigenous versions of Mexican-­Chicana/o history. They recognize contemporary indigenous people as a silenced voice in Mexican American historiography and literary production. If Mexican Americans are to identify with the territorial struggles of the Yaquis and Mayos—­the living indigenous nations of the U.S.-­Mexico borderlands—­in order to explain the Chicana/o history of political and cultural disenfranchisement, these narratives warn that we must first come to terms with the racist Mexican (and Mexican American) policies and social practices still enacted against the Yoemem and other indigenous peoples whose histories we share.

LA MARAVILLA Alfredo Véa Jr. is a writer-­attorney who has studied and assimilated Mexican and U.S. discourses on the Yoeme people. In La Maravilla he initiates a Chicana/o-­Yaqui literary tradition that reexamines the stereotypes of Yaqui

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bellicosity and dance found in literary texts that equally urged the need to “Mexicanize” the Yoeme people and celebrated their traditional dances. The Novel of the Mexican Revolution, a genre that helped define Mexico’s post-­ Revolutionary identity, includes Yoeme soldiers in some of its most representative works.14 These literary depictions share certain motifs—­stoicism, barbarism, a cultural void, and/or exaggerated warriorhood—­that reveal the prevalence of racist nineteenth-­century discourses regarding Yaqui backwardness and bellicosity among post-­Revolutionary writers. Indigenista literature follows a similar trend, but was greatly influenced by the anthropological mission of incorporating indigenous peoples into a unified Mexican state. Indigenista literature dealing with the Yoemem found inspiration in ethnographic research and was part of a movement to spread consciousness of indigenous cultures among nonindigenous Mexicans.15 Unlike actual ethnographies, however, Indigenista representations tended to ignore Yoeme cosmology and histories (written and oral) about their homeland, resistance, and origins. Like other Chicana/o-­Yaqui writers, Véa is open about his ancestry and readily admits to the autobiographical nature of La Maravilla. The main character’s grandparents are based on his own Yoeme grandfather and Catholic Spanish grandmother (Aldama 279). Like Méndez and Villanueva, Véa connects his detailed construction of characters to his family’s oral tradition (Aldama 283). And, similar to Valdez and Nava, Véa redeploys Mexican and U.S. anthropological research on the Yoeme community, filtered through a Yoeme-­centered indigenismo chicano, as an act of cultural reclamation. The result is a Chicana/o novel written in a Yoeme historical-­cultural register that challenges hegemonic epistemologies with what Stacy Alaimo identifies as “a rootedness to place and an identity tied to history” (169). The novel unfolds in the multicultural community of Buckeye Road, Arizona, which defies 1950s U.S. hegemonic ideals of race and culture. Its enclaves of Yaqui, Pima, Black, Okie, Chinese, and other members maintain a harmonious respect despite their prejudices toward one another.16 The plot focuses on nine-­year-­old Alberto and the grandparents with whom he lives: Manuel, a Yoeme shaman and refugee of the Mexican guerras de exterminio, and Josephina, an Andalusian immigrant and curandera. A survivor of the Yaqui diaspora and now a marginalized Native American in the United States, Manuel is a member of Buckeye Road’s community of carnivalesque characters. He and his friends are representative of 1950s Native migrant experience. But his identity is still rooted in the geography and culture of Cócorit, his pueblo of origin. Through Native history and cultural

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practice, Manuel re-creates his aboriginal homeland in the Arizona borderlands. Poverty-­stricken and living in a sometimes violent place, the family members “cannot be severed from [their] material conditions,” which makes it difficult for the nonindigenous reader to become a tourist of these “Other” cultures (Alaimo 166). The novel is filled with indigenous (and nonindigenous) “visions” and apparitions, as well as incidents that are typical of magic realism.17 Carlston warns, however, that “Véa’s ghosts are as real as history” (114), and that indigenous shamanism (like curanderismo) presents an epistemic practice that “coincides with a pragmatic political agenda of resistance to oppression” (116). The Yoeme characters in La Maravilla oppose the dominant U.S. culture—­ under the representational umbrella of the Chicana/o immigrant family experience—­but they also counter accumulated Mexican knowledge about Yoeme identity. This is evident in the author’s redeployment of anthropological research dealing with Yoeme communities. Manuel explains to his grandson that, unlike himself, Alberto is Mexican because he is a Yaqui mestizo, and that he is also Chicano because he is from Aztlán—­the Southwest (Véa 35). The ideology of indigenismo chicano allows Véa to reconcile the mythological Chicana/o homeland with the simultaneous presence of a living indigenous nation, thereby redefining the U.S.-­Mexico borderlands through Native identity. In La Maravilla, Véa draws from a wide-­ ranging nonindigenous epistemology—­history, ethnography, literature—­to represent oral tradition and cosmology as types of Native knowledge. It is by acquiring this knowledge that the Chicano-­Yaqui protagonist is able to establish a cultural identity with which to resist assimilation into U.S. mainstream culture, based on a process of arraigamiento. By arraigamiento I refer to the history of Yoeme military and cultural resistance that is religiously (mythologically) rooted in Hiakim, found in origin stories like “Yomumuli and the Little Surem People,” in which the pre-­ Columbian deity Yomumuli translates a talking tree’s prophecy of the impending Conquista and the baptism of the Yoeme people, after which the Yoeme ancestors descend into the wilderness, or Huya Ania, of the traditional territory. Other stories in this sequence include “Leyenda yaqui de las predicciones” and “Omteme,” the story of the angry one who, after defending the Yoeme territory by killing the conquistador Christopher Columbus, “descended into the heart of his hill,” which to this day is known as Cerro Omteme (Giddings 65). Véa follows the lead of Mexican Indigenista Armando Chávez Camacho, who represents arraigamiento through Yoeme forms of knowledge in Cajeme: Novela de indios (1948). Cajeme incorporates “Leyenda yaqui de las predicciones,” a

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story taken from Alfonso Fabila’s ethnography, in which the Yaquis defeat an invading giant serpent through magical intervention and prepare for the inevitable Conquista (Fabila 234–­38). This origin story confronts the question of the conquest of Hiakim and endorses its defense, concurrently rooting Yoeme ancestors deep within Hiakim’s geography.18 Here, Yaqui culture, resistance, and sacred territory intertwine. But Véa’s ethnographically rich description also owes much to the fictional and anthropological work of Francisco Rojas González. Rojas González’s “La triste historia del Pascola Cenobio” (1952) depicts pascolas and deer dancing as aesthetically valuable features of an otherwise violent and culturally isolated Yaqui tribe. The dancer Cenobio is an individualist and virtuoso for whom traditional dance means little more than a form of personal expression.19 Unlike the Yoemem in La Maravilla, the religious adherence of Rojas González’s elder characters to their traditional (read here: un-­Mexican) ways validates Manuel Gamio’s insistence that the Yoeme nation would inevitably have to racially and culturally “fuse” with the dominant national race (Gamio, Forjando 175).20 ARRAIGAMIENTO, ANTHROPOLOGY, AND CHICANA/O-­YAQUI IDENTITY

In La Maravilla, Véa reappropriates the ethnographic research of Castañeda, Rojas González, and Spicer—­the latter being the leading scholar of Yoeme society and culture—­as well as Indigenista literature by Chávez Camacho and Rojas González, to re-­create arraigamiento in Alberto’s acquisition of a Yaqui indigeneity. This move is significant because nonindigenous scholarship holds substantial influence over the identities (indigeneities) of studied Native communities. Véa’s aesthetic reappropriation of nonindigenous research in order to redeploy it as a reclamation of Yaqui identity is therefore also a political move. In sequences dealing with Yoeme peyote rituals, Véa reappropriates facets of Castañeda’s The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge (1968), a text emblematic of what we know about Yaqui culture in the United States. This proves to be an interesting choice considering that Castañeda’s work has long since been the subject of academic scrutiny, not only with regard to his research methods, but also with regard to the very Yaqui identity of the legendary don Juan Matus. In Castaneda’s Journey: The Power and the Allegory (1976), Richard de Mille scrutinizes Castañeda’s ethnographic credibility, the secretive nature of the author’s field notes, and what he describes as the UCLA Department

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of Anthropology’s anomalous conferral of a doctoral degree based on deficient research. De Mille also takes anthropologists like Spicer to task for not recognizing the questionability of Castañeda’s work (69). He is nonetheless generous, if sarcastic, about Castañeda’s accomplishments as a writer of fiction, affirming, “Don Juan lives! That is his inventor’s prime achievement on this earth” (90). In truth, Spicer is gracious in his review of Castañeda’s Don Juan, affirming moments of ethnographic value. But Spicer questions the emphasis on don Juan’s Yaqui identity and even the inclusion of the term “Yaqui” in the title, “for the text itself provides no data for such a connection” (“Teachings” 321). After a decade of controversy, Ralph L. Beals responds to his former student’s critics by going further in questioning don Juan’s identity as a Yaqui shaman: “Yet Don Juan is not a Yaqui nor is he a shaman or a sorcerer in the customary anthropological or even general public meanings of these terms. The result is misleading and has some appearance of being deliberately so” (“Sonoran Fantasy” 356). Addressing Castañeda’s possible fabrication of don Juan Matus, Beals concludes that the author may have borrowed the shaman’s surname from revolutionary general Luis Matus, whom Beals himself had mentioned in a publication (“Sonoran Fantasy” 357). Without stunting the popularity of the don Juan narratives, the Castañeda controversy was academically definitive, which is evident in Chicano literary critic Juan Bruce-­Novoa’s severe stance. In analyzing poet Alurista’s use of Don Juan, Bruce-­Novoa describes “Carlos Castañeda’s counterculture social science-­fiction, which many took seriously at first” (RetroSpace 81). More literature than social science, Castañeda’s ethnography conjures sensational images of shamanism and peyote tripping, and nonetheless serves as a ripe source for Véa’s creative inspiration.21 In Véa’s opening chapter, for example, old Manuel sits in a rocking chair after drinking his peyote tea, “riding on that hot air outside,” heading with “his tips spread and his neck down toward lost Sonora, the homeland—­the lodestone”: that is, the source of his ethnic and spiritual identity (Véa 10). Describing the location of the chair, Véa writes that “his chair rocked under a roof [in his adobe home] instead of in its rightful place, its spirit place . . . [t]he spot that faced east and the sunrise” (27; emphasis mine). Castañeda’s influence on the depiction of Manuel as a bird in flight and in his “spirit place” is evident. Castañeda describes his own power spot or sitio as facing “in a southeasterly direction” (Castañeda 20–­21). And like Castañeda’s don Juan, who warns of the perils of this dreamlike state—­“A man could be gone for months. . . . The lizards could take a man to the end of the world” (Castañeda 126)—­Josephina recounts an incident in which

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Manuel “stayed a gila monster for three days, tasting the air with his tongue and crawling on the cracked bones of his heathen fathers . . . and he couldn’t get back here” (Véa 12). The reference to flight is repeated in La Maravilla when Alberto partakes of an initiation ritual with his grandfather and his indigenous compadres. After drinking the peyote tea, Alberto becomes a hawk and sees the other indigenous men as made of light (Véa 224), just as Castañeda reports that as a crow he extended his wings and flew, seeing, with sensitivity to light, “silvery birds!” (Castañeda 135–­36). Unlike Valdez, for whom The Teachings of Don Juan represents a psychedelic hippie acquisition of Yoeme knowledge, Véa reappropriates aspects of Castañeda’s rich text as a type of literary inspiration and a source for his protagonist’s developing Yoeme identity.22 Véa engages the anthropology and literature of Rojas González—­whose works reflect Manuel Gamio’s philosophy of incorporation—­to emphasize the role of peyote as an expression of cultural resistance in young Alberto’s initiation ritual. In the Arizona desert, Manuel surrounds his grandson with his compadres: “the old yoeme” Salvador, a Yaqui-­Tarahumara mestizo named Pascual, and Epiphanio, a Huichol (Véa 215). Véa refers to Salvador as “the old yoeme” instead of Yaqui. An eighty-­nine-­year-­old deer dancer, Salvador symbolizes the longevity of Yoeme culture and the Yoeme people’s material survival during Porfirian and Revolution-­era wars of extermination: “He is the only one of us who knew the rio Yaqui before the occupation, when people were still together, in the great days before Porfirio Díaz y los otros [and the others]” (216). Manuel explains the function of peyote as a means of communicating with the supernatural realm: “The genius was an in-­between spirit that could make that communication possible. There are other words for that genius, naguales y tonales, though these words now have many more meanings” (222). Véa is referring here to Rojas González’s 1944 essay “Totemismo y nahualismo,” in which the anthropologist-­ author describes the concepts of tona and nahual and notes the many similarities between the two. The advice that Manuel gives his grandson—­to resist the American mainstream—­is also relevant in the light of Rojas González’s finding that the tona-­nahual concept “tiene como características originales oponer a las enseñanzas cristianas, la fuerza de las creencias religiosas ancestrales, reviviendo al efecto las prácticas toltecas” (has as its original characteristics the opposing of Christian teachings and the power of ancient religious beliefs, effectively reviving Toltec practices) (Ensayos 86). Véa and Rojas González agree that peyote use is a form of cultural resistance, as are the tona and nahual, but the Mexican anthropologist’s intention—­the

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incorporation of indigenous people into mainstream culture—­is manipulated differently by the Chicano-­Yaqui author. In another instance, Véa references Rojas González’s 1948 anthropological essay “Jículi ba-­ba,” as Rojas González himself does in his short story “Hículi Hualula” (1952). In the essay, the anthropologist-­author describes the use of peyote by the Tarahumaras and the Huicholes, who are represented in La Maravilla, respectively, by the characters Pascual and Epiphanio. Rojas González attributes peyote’s most sacred use to the Huichol people (El diosero 32), and in La Maravilla it is, appropriately, the Huichol Epiphanio who brings the hikuli (peyote) to Manuel (Véa 220). Later, Epiphanio says, “The Huichol believe that the hikuli is God, not just a way to see him. The hikuli, the peyote itself, is God. They believe that the deer and the corn and the peyote are one and the same, that the gift of corn and peyote sprang from the head of a deer” (222). Rojas González, noting peyote’s close relationship with corn, explains that “los huicholes llaman ‘venado’ al jículi y lo consi­ deran como tal en el complejo concepto que tienen del cactus y de sus atributos extraordinarios” (the Huicholes refer to the hikuli as “the deer” and consider it as such in their complex concept of the cactus and its extraordinary attributes) (Ensayos 101). Véa’s reappropriation of Rojas González’s work is political in that the author restores the cultural knowledge retrieved from the anthropologist’s research to the mouths of characters representing the indigenous people who live that very culture. Véa’s adaptation of Rojas González’s ethnography and literature has distinct political aims. As Carlston suggests, the supernatural experiences in La Maravilla “may, in fact, reflect not only a spiritual belief system but also a historically informed consciousness of the mechanisms of repression and eradication that have been brought to bear on numerous populations in the Americas” (114). Consuming peyote is an act of cultural resistance not only for the Yoemem but also for the Chicano protagonist. As a Spanish-­Yaqui mestizo—­alone among his grandfather’s indigenous friends—­Alberto “signifies the potential for the mestizo/a to bridge and embrace difference” (Alaimo 167). Véa may rely on Rojas González for this episode, but the outcome far outstrips the anthropologist’s case against a backward Yaqui culture. Instead, the author offers an example of cultural continuity in which Yoeme ancestral knowledge is congruent with a politicized, counterhegemonic Chicana/o identity. In his treatment of Yoeme dance, Véa again appropriates Indigenista literary styles and reworks earlier literary depictions through the lens of indigenismo chicano, thereby shifting discursive emphasis away from assimilation. As in Rojas

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González’s “La triste historia del pascola Cenobio” and Chávez Camacho’s Cajeme, Véa employs ethnographic precision to describe traditional dancers. For instance, Salvador is described donning his traditional deer dancer costume: He wore a skin belt with hooves hanging from it and leggings covered with hundreds of dried cocoons. . . . Over his head he wore a mask, the skin and horns

of a deer. Only his mouth could be seen in the open neck stitching that had torn loose over the years. (Véa 220)

Then the Yaqui-­Tarahumara, Pascual, is given a similar treatment as a pascola; he is described by Véa as wearing a strange shirt without a front or a back. He had leather pantalones held

up by a belt of yellow-­white cocoons, and he was placing upon his head a black mask with blood-­red cheeks and with goat’s hair that sprang from the eyebrows and below the mouth. He wore the mask near the back of his head, as though looking in two directions. He had gourd rattles in each hand. (220)

Whereas Rojas González depicts a virtuoso pascola largely detached from social obligations, La Maravilla’s ethnographically detailed dancers assume their roles in Alberto’s acceptance of a cultural legacy. They are indigenous immigrants who, living out their diaspora, conduct the quotidian work of identity maintenance. ARRAIGAMIENTO, HIAKIM, AND YOEME COSMOLOGY

Véa’s focus on the theme of arraigamiento demonstrates the influence of Edward H. Spicer’s The Yaquis: A Cultural History (1980), a U.S. anthropological study that explores the links between Yoeme history and religious culture. Still the leading authority on Yoeme ethnography, Spicer removes his work from racial concerns like those expressed in Carl Coleman Seltzer’s study of anthropometric measurements (Seltzer 92), the sensationalism of Castañeda’s writings, or the assimilationism of Mexican anthropologists.23 Spicer collected and recorded information regarding the origins of deer dancers and pascolas, Yoeme Catholicism, and pre-­Columbian realms including the Huya Ania—­the magical wilderness realm—­and the related Yo Ania and Sea Ania. While Luis Valdez alludes to these realms with the presence of the deer dancer and dream states, Véa employs both the terminology and concepts. Though he does not use the

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term Huya Ania, he nonetheless refers to it when describing Manuel’s spirit “spot” outside the house (à la Castañeda), a positioning that meets the required Yaqui division between the pueblo, a space of human activity, and the Huya Ania, where, writes Spicer, “great beings [like the angry one, Omteme] had once lived and perhaps still live” (The Yaquis 64). In this way, Véa subordinates Castañeda’s spectacular ethnography by positing it within the less subjective research of Spicer. Véa elaborates the three sacred realms in relation to the Yoeme territory by employing Spicer’s anthropological research, and in so doing secures an alternate homeland and identity for the Chicano-­Yaqui boy. Manuel ties Alberto’s initiation ceremony to its territorial origins when he reminds him that “Salvador there is from Potam, and you, Beto, are from Cócorit; your blood, tu sangre, is from Cócorit” (Véa 217).24 He continues: “Something in you will remember a place and time when the smallest, driest seed seemed to grow right when you pressed it into the silt of the [Río] Yaqui. It remembers how sewam, the numberless flowers, clogged the banks. . . . It was a flowered world, a seeya-­aniya” (217). Manuel connects Cócorit to Yoeme dance and to the Sea Ania, the magical flower realm conjured by the deer dancer, who “addresses a mythical deer spoken to as Malichi (Flower Fawn)” (Spicer, The Yaquis 103). Manuel has introduced his Chicano grandson to Hiakim (via Cócorit, one of the eight Yoeme pueblos) as an alternate homeland. In addition to mythological Aztlán, Cócorit represents a spiritual, cultural, and material reference and place of identity. The choice of Cócorit as Alberto’s center of indigeneity is significant because, along with Bacum, Cócorit is one of the two pueblos the Mexican government did not return to the Yoeme nation in the 1937 presidential decree (Fabila xiii). Like that of Alberto, Cócorit’s existence is caught between two worlds: indigenous and Western, Yoeme and Mexican. But the Yoemem of La Maravilla continuously reclaim Cócorit as part of the traditional sacred territory through Native cultural practices and concepts. In another moment, Manuel’s upset wife recalls an incident pitting her spiritual world against his: “You see, the evening of the flash flood, it was the Holy Trinity that rescued him from his yoan-­ya, his crazy religion” (Véa 16). Véa’s dreamlike depiction of the Yo Ania is consistent with Spicer’s, in which Yo Ania and Yoeme are connected through “the vision, intangible and in fact unidentifiable outside of the dream state” (Spicer, The Yaquis 68).25 While “dreaming” is an important part of Loreto, the Yaqui protagonist of Méndez’s Peregrinos de Aztlán, there is a key difference there. The dreams of Loreto, a homeless Yoeme in Tijuana, are powerful signifiers of his

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dire existence. He dreams of material wealth “with his eyes wide open” (Méndez, Pilgrims 56). He relives his personal history: “Loreto, the nostalgic Yaqui, lived for a few minutes the dream of an episode in his life, a dream that was more intense than actual fact” (98). And he dreams of Hiakim. But his dream is murky: “Perhaps Loreto’s dreams had already been corrupted by the influence of television, vomiting out its filthy stories” (99). The Yo Ania dreaming of Manuel and the other indigenous men in La Maravilla, on the contrary, is a type of clarity. And the cultural knowledge behind this dreaming continuously reintroduces the Yaqui homeland as key to their borderlands identity. In a final example, Véa evokes pre-­Jesuit cosmology in connecting Alberto to his Yoeme ancestry. During his initiation ceremony, Alberto flies as a hawk to a timeless mythological place in Sonora and encounters his great-­grandfather as well as his grandfather Manuel in the form of a child, perhaps also undergoing his own initiation. When Alberto asks the boy Manuel if it is true that the return of Apache (their dog) means that he will die as his grandmother has predicted, Manuel affirms: “When the singing tree spoke to us so long ago, it told us that death is the gift we must give in thanks for the bounty the world gives to us” (Véa 227). In this dialogue, Manuel refers to “Yomumuli and the Little Surem People,” in which, writes Spicer, “the Tree told the consequences of the acceptance of baptism: those who accepted baptism would ever after be subject to death and those who did not would be immortal” (The Yaquis 67). Those immortal ancestors known as the Surem still survive in the Huya Ania. Véa employs Spicer’s research to re-­create a Yoeme-­specific epistemology through dance heritage and the cosmology found in the oral tradition, and to construct a cultural center that will tie traditional spiritual culture (the Yo Ania) to Hiakim (and Cócorit specifically) as the locus of Alberto’s identity and his alternate homeland. The ample variety of nonindigenous literature and ethnographies incorporated into La Maravilla serves to re-­create Yoeme forms of knowledge that are key to Alberto’s acquisition of a Yoeme identity and his identification with his ancestral homeland Hiakim. Given Alberto’s autobiographical characteristics, these reappropriations amount in essence to a Chicano-­Yaqui author’s reclamation of his indigenous heritage. Véa challenges the epistemic traditions of what we know about Yaqui history and culture that helped spawn the very nationalist and at times racially informed anthropological and literary texts he redeploys. But he also uses disputable sources of knowledge, like the works of Rojas González and Castañeda, along with more objective research, like

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Spicer’s, for inspiration in re-­creating a Yoeme cultural attachment, or arraigamiento, to Hiakim-­Cócorit in Aztlán. Véa’s Hiakim, contrary to nineteenth-­ century assertions, is home to a real and living Yoeme nation whose concepts of knowledge, in the form of cosmology, oral history, and dance, can be defined neither as barbarous nor as in need of rescue by (post)colonial Western cultures. ARRAIGAMIENTO AND ACTS OF RESISTANCE

La Maravilla’s Yoeme characters define their identity through an act of cultural resistance that is bound to the homeland, Hiakim. The ritual itself is framed as “etehoi,” a telling of the knowledge through which Alberto will gain the capacity to survive as a Chicano-­Yaqui (Véa 218).26 Manuel reminds his Chicano grandson: “If you follow what is true you will find yourself paying more for every breath, but it’s sweeter air. Stay in the gaps, mijo. Love for the land is here. Resistance is here. The company’s better in here” (221; emphasis mine). The “here” in question is an ethnic culture located within Hiakim. It is a source of subaltern identity and resistance on the fringes of mainstream U.S. and Mexican culture. The interstitiality of the Chicana/o empowers Alberto but also leaves him vulnerable in an assimilationist U.S. society. Here Manuel, “in contrast to the deracinated dominant culture . . . affirms a rootedness to place and an identity tied to history” (Alaimo 169). During the initiation ceremony, moments before Alberto claims his indigenous identity, he becomes connected to his Yoeme homeland. As Manuel commences the etehoi, so begins the night in which he and his peers perform dances and sing stories that evoke Yoeme cosmology and bring the Aniam (spiritual realms) and Cócorit-­Hiakim to the material reality of the Arizona desert. Traditional dance performance, explains David Delgado Shorter, serves the purpose of making a Yoeme place—­that is, it transforms space into an aboriginal cultural conduit (221). Alberto experiences a spiritual connection to Hiakim: “It seemed to him that the clay was rising up from the ground beneath him and was somehow claiming him before his time” (Véa 223). As in the traditional origin stories in which Yoeme ancestors descend into the earth, Alberto becomes affixed to the place of origin, both physically, through magical experience, and metaphorically, through the acquisition of Yoeme culture. Resistance and cultural arraigamiento are one. The night of etehoi and songs carries on with the reverberation of water drums and cocoon rattles. Alberto’s spirit sees his origins more clearly as Aztlán is invaded by Hiakim—­“then, instantaneously

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the profound darkness was shattered by the blinding, searing light of Sonora” (226)—­where he communes with his grandfather (who is now a child) and his great-­grandfather. Described as a tall and dark Yoeme bearing “a battered Remington lever action and a cloth bag for carrying bullets,” his great-­grandfather is a symbol of Native resistance to Mexican extermination campaigns (Véa 227). Here, Véa gives voice to a history of Yoemem who have struggled to maintain their cultural-­geographic identity. And through his Yo Ania experience Alberto “affirms a rootedness to place and an identity tied to history”—­not purely to mythology (Alaimo 169). Alberto assumes an active indigenous identity that will allow him to resist assimilation into U.S. mainstream culture. The theme of cultural resistance allows for the recovery of the mythological Omteme as an archetype of the concept of arraigamiento. Omteme, whose name means “he is angry,” is recounted as the Yoeme ancestor who resists European colonization by killing the treacherous Christopher Columbus. Thereafter, he becomes disillusioned with the prospect of the Conquista announced by the talking tree and chooses to become part of the magical wilderness (or Huya Ania) in Hiakim. In La Maravilla, Manuel’s transition into death is depicted as a cosmological descent into the earth: “Each rock forward in his chair pushed his eyesight deeper into the earth below the adobe and brought visions from farther and farther away” (Véa 234). Between life and a mythological plane, like Omteme, he is confronted by the specter of Porfirio Díaz, the Yoeme nation’s greatest enemy and “instigator of the Yaqui diaspora”; Díaz is “summoned up by the sheer power of the old man’s hatred. The toothless and transparent general strode through the adobe in his Austrian epaulettes and French boots to stand before Manuel” (234). Continuously recollecting his people’s history, Manuel is now Omteme, for “he is angry.” A survivor of the Mexican government’s guerras de exterminio, Manuel continues his resistance knowing full well that “every Yaqui spirit would rejoice if only he could reach the monster’s neck” (234). But, like the mythological ancestor, the old shaman performs one final act of arraigamiento in his final descent: “Now he could taste the pura tierra mojada, the pure moist earth of his home” (235). Finally, Alberto, described as being claimed by the rising “ground beneath him,” also becomes an agent of resistance against an overbearing racial-­cultural uniformity that threatens from beyond Buckeye Road. When his estranged mother Lola returns with her boyfriend to claim Alberto and ridicules the ethnicities of both grandparents, Alberto defends his Yaqui indigeneity by escaping to Hiakim, his spiritual source: “The boy behind their backs was too far away

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to hear either of them. He was screeching over ciudad Moctezuma [in Sonora], following the sun-­silvered rio Yaqui south to Cócorit and Bacum” (Véa 297). The car whisks his body away to California, while Alberto dreams/flies from Aztlán (the Southwest) to Hiakim-­Cócorit, his alternative homeland. He transforms into a “blinding light in the backseat,” visible only to other indigenous people along the desert road. The Chicano-­Yaqui boy’s arraigamiento is complete as he becomes, in Alaimo’s words, one of those “insurgent knowers who disrupt dominant epistemological paradigms” (170). With Alberto’s establishment of a counterhegemonic identity by acquiring a Yoeme knowledge of history and culture, Véa contests the very Spanish-­ Mexican epistemology used to construct Alberto’s Chicano-­Yaqui identity. The “referential power” of colonial and early twentieth-­century ethnographies established a Yaqui warrior myth as the main discourse for political, literary, and popular portrayals of Yoeme people and culture. But unlike those depictions of a backward Yaqui nation, the pascolas and deer dancers of La Maravilla are always reaffirming their religious identity through dance, sacred rituals, and historical memory—­indigenous epistemologies that question fixed concepts of U.S. and Mexican national identities and the Western intellectual tradition.

INDIGENOUS HIERARCHIES IN AZTLÁN Véa also redefines the concept of Aztlán through an indigenous Arizona-­Sonora borderland. In La Maravilla, indigenismo chicano becomes a site of conflict in which Véa disputes the reliance upon Aztec themes in Chicana/o identity by reconciling pre-­Columbian motifs with a Yoeme epistemology. The wide acceptance—­albeit not without controversy—­of what Gaspar de Alba has called “Aztlán aesthetics” in the political and creative texts of the 1960s established the mythological homeland Aztlán as a principal motif that was invaluable for the creation of a Chicana/o identity (114). But the Chicano Movement’s embrace of mestizaje through “a race toward the Indian” does not necessarily address Native American needs or realities (Pérez-­Torres, Mestizaje 16). Similarly, Sheila Marie Contreras notes how the reliance by Gloria Anzaldúa, and no doubt many other Chicana/o authors, on a pre-­Columbian mythological pantheon “effectively dehistoricizes the relations between Chicanas/os and Natives” (Contreras 117). The function of the mythological homeland of Aztlán has generated heated academic debates. While scholars like Rafael Pérez-­Torres and David Cooper

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Alarcón argue for the preservation of the Chicana/o homeland, others have questioned certain ethnic and cultural implications of indigenismo chicano.27 In “Who’s the Indian in Aztlán?,” Josefina Saldaña-­Portillo describes the acquisition of indigenous culture by frequently more privileged Chicanas/os in the First World, whom she contrasts with indigenous Mexicans, “the rural subaltern in the Third World” (404). In particular, she faults the focus on Aztec deities for “ignoring contemporary Native American inhabitants of the Southwest and their very different mytho-­genealogies” (415). Gaspar de Alba questions the value of Aztlán as a basis for a Chicana/o identity, calling it “a ‘no place’ land, a utopia” (108). In response to Moraga, Gaspar de Alba notes that “you can’t really drive to Aztlán. . . . You can follow a road map to one of the Indian pueblos in New Mexico [other homelands]. But to get to Aztlán, you have to suspend your disbelief ” (135).28 Without pretending to reach a conclusion on the Aztlán debate, I nonetheless consider it useful to know that other scholars and authors have recognized the symbolic potential of Yaqui history and culture. Robert McKee Irwin identifies José María Leyva Cajeme, the leader of the Yoeme resistance against Díaz, as a cultural icon of a different borderland, that of the Mexican Northwest, in contrast to the notion of a southwestern Aztlán (Bandits 189). Chicana-­Yaqui scholar Yolanda Broyles-­González proposes Yoeme religious and historical knowledge, along with that of other living indigenous nations, as a rich source for elaborating a Chicana identity (“Indianizing” 130)—­perhaps more so than the pre-­Columbian iconography that Chicana/o authors and cultural critics continue to appropriate. Prominent Laguna Pueblo writer Leslie Marmon Silko places Yaqui characters at center of her epic novel Almanac of the Dead (1991). True to a Yaqui perspective on the homeland Hiakim, Almanac opens with a “Five Hundred Year Map,” which reads, “The Indian Wars have never ended in the Americas. Native Americans acknowledge no borders; they seek nothing less than the return of all tribal lands” (15). Members of a borderlands people, Yaqui twin sisters Lecha and Zeta are the custodians of the sacred almanac, a collection of written and transcribed oral Native histories that serves as a counter-­archive of indigenous knowledge; but they are also instigators of a hemispheric Native rebellion stretching from Chiapas to the United States. “Old” Yoeme, the twins’ grandmother whose story of survival of the Yaqui wars is inscribed in the almanac, is Lecha and Zeta’s source of indigeneity. In revealing to her granddaughters that they are indigenous, “Old” Yoeme stands in as the symbolic accusatory finger pointing to Mexico’s historical racial and cultural

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denial of indigeneity (114). Notably, not having been raised in a Yaqui community, Lecha and Zeta are the recipients of a diasporic borderlands identity that symbolically connects Yaqui indigeneity to southern and northern aboriginal struggles. The counterhegemonic position of Chicana/o literature against discourses that present people of Mexican descent as inferior is evident in La Maravilla’s establishment of a Yoeme identity grounded in Hiakim (R. Saldívar 17). Véa explains that he “would rather be characterized as an author who is Chicano” than as a Chicano author because of the expectations placed upon the artist: “Implicit in the concept of ‘Chicano’ literature is the political agenda rather than the agenda of sighting the artistic bar and endeavoring to surpass it” (Biggers 34). Instead, opines Véa, “The act of rising [artistically] is political, the result is art” (34). This perspective matters when Véa engages the dominance of pre-­Columbian mythology and the academic debates over the utilization of Aztlán as the Chicana/o homeland and the basis for a Chicana/o identity. From within indigenismo chicano Véa embraces the iconography of Aztlán, while at the same time, through the affirmation of Alberto’s, and his own, Yoeme heritage, he questions the utility of a general Chicana/o-­Aztec identity. Consequently, Véa treats indigenous subject matter with the sensibility proposed by Saldaña-­ Portillo: he places Chicana/o identity partly under the stewardship of a living Yoeme nation. Thus the protagonist Alberto, because of his mixed ancestry and place of birth, identifies as Chicano, but he also embodies the acceptance of “different archetypes” of indigeneity, as the novel puts it (Véa 304). In La Maravilla we find the conditional acceptance and use of the Aztlán motifs that have dominated Chicana/o cultural production since the Chicano Movement’s inception. The novel agrees with Movement discourses insofar as it identifies the Southwest (here, Arizona) as the location of “Aztlán, this land, right here where the Nahua people began” (Véa 35)—­that is, Alberto’s Chicana/o homeland. Véa employs these motifs to define the way of life of many of the novel’s characters. For example, Josephina wrathfully identifies Lola, Alberto’s mother, as “Malinche” for abandoning the family and her Catholic and Yoeme traditions (22). Manuel mocks his wife’s fanatical Catholicism after she baptizes Alberto four times, joking, “They are all so scared that Christ will turn out to be Quetzalcóatl” (35). Manuel equates people of any culture whose identities are in question—­but especially Anglos—­with Xipe Tótec: “‘They are Xipe,’ he said, referring to the ancient god the Aztecs distorted into the God of the Flayed Skin. It was Manuel’s word for those people on earth who do not

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know where they belong” (35). Manuel’s view of Anglos challenges U.S. consumer society in the 1950s and the assimilationist “melting pot” theory, in which immigrants abandon their native culture to become American. Rather, Manuel appeals to Alberto’s indigeneity and his relation to Hiakim to forestall the boy’s becoming a cultural tabula rasa, a Xipe. Manuel explains: “They have no heroes, just celebrities. . . . The White man has all the rights in this country, but we have the rites, the rituals. Their children see a world without mysteries” (231).29 The novel’s title also reflects an acceptance of Aztec mythology. When their dog, Apache, returns to claim the old Yaqui’s life, Manuel explains that it is really Maravilla, “the dog that comes to lead its master to Mictlan, the land of the dead, or to the other worlds there” (Véa 186). This commingling of Aztec motifs from the past with the Yoeme cultural present is consistent with the novel’s focus on exploring “different archetypes” of culture and knowledge. This is perhaps best illustrated by a statement Josephina makes after Manuel’s death: “The Mexicanos and the Indios have different arquetipos than the gringos. Though today, many Mexicanos deny their Indian blood” (304). Here, Véa refers to three groups—­Mexicans, indigenous people, and Anglos—­each with its own epistemic model. But Alberto’s dual Chicano and indigenous identity “signifies the potential for the mestizo/a to bridge and embrace difference” (Alaimo 167). Although every indigenous nation differs markedly from others, Chicana/o mestizaje can extend to non-­Aztec indigenous identities, like the protagonist’s Chicano-­Yaqui identity; this also includes the potential Chicana/o-­Tarahumara and Chicana/o-­Huichol identities in La Maravilla, as well as those recognized by Broyles-­González (“Indianizing” 12–­21).30 Even though Aztec motifs hold a prominent place in La Maravilla, Véa reaffirms a Yoeme epistemology of culture and history that is relevant to the cultures of the indigenous peoples living in today’s Arizona-­Sonora borderlands. Ruth W. Giddings, compiler of traditional Yoeme stories, finds that “Yaqui folk literature expresses the tribe’s sense of superiority, the sacred and material value of their territory, and the antiquity and distinctiveness of their customs” (20).31 La Maravilla reflects this sense of ethnic preeminence by re-­creating an indigenous hierarchy that places the Yoeme nation at its center and is unknown to the typical nonindigenous reader. For example, Josephina’s longtime marriage to a Yoeme allows her to explain that “the Papagos are more heathen than the Yaquis. . . . But not as dumb as the Pimas. The Pimas let the white man have it all. Then the Navajos stuck it to ’em” (Véa 51–­52). Her biased perspective is consistent with the one present in the traditional origin story “Leyenda yaqui

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de las predicciones,” which exemplifies the concept of arraigamiento. The tale takes place “hace muchos siglos, en tiempos remotos, cuando el Yaqui reinaba sobre sus hermanos de las naciones Apaches, Euleve, Mayo, Opata, Pápago, Pima y Seri, siendo centro de la gran confederación india” (many centuries ago, in ancient times, when the Yaqui ruled over the brother nations of Apache, Euleve, Mayo, Opata, Papago, Pima, and Seri, and was the center of the great Indian confederation) (Olavarría, Análisis 82).32 Véa’s novel represents the continuation of this indigenous hierarchy, in which the Yoemem are ethnically and geographically superior to other living indigenous peoples. This is clear when Salvador exclaims, “Shit, our way is the best!” (Véa 219). Not surprisingly, Véa creates moments of opposition and even conflict when juxtaposing lo yaqui and lo azteca, breaking with the Mexican epistemic tradition that informs indigenismo chicano. To illustrate this point, we can examine the history of Yoeme resistance in La Maravilla, when the nation collides with the armies of the Mexican Revolution: “The river people chose to fight just as they had four hundred years before when they turned from fighting the Aztecs to fighting the Spanish” (Véa 9). True to arraigamiento, the unconquered Yoemem are identified by their territory and its defense: “The river people, once the best soldiers of the revolution, now fought them all” (9). Véa makes a special point of contrasting Yoeme and Aztec identities: “‘We were not Aztecas,’ they howled. ‘Now, we are not you’” (9). Resistance, both cultural and military, is not limited to Spanish, Mexican, or U.S. hegemonies. As the collective voice denies the cultural dominance of invading Aztec forces, it executes a “counterhegemonic resistance to the dominant ideology” of Chicana/o-­Aztec aesthetics and identity (R. Saldívar 17). The aesthetics of Aztlán, writes Gaspar de Alba, create a homeland defined by a Mexican-­Chicana/o history that includes pre-­Columbian symbols and a heroic iconography spanning the Conquista, the Mexican Revolution, and the Chicano Movement (114). Contreras argues that the Aztec aesthetics “is at times aware of its own paradox, that is, the longing for a pre-­ colonial past that can never be known” (165). The shift to a Yoeme historical perspective disrupts the museum-­style erasure of a living indigenous people and concomitant praise of Aztec civilization, and thereby problematizes the foundation of indigenismo chicano. Véa questions a strict reliance on Aztlán motifs by contesting the post-­Revolutionary Mexican belief in the cultural superiority of the Aztecs to living Native peoples. The indigenous hierarchy presented by Véa, as expressed by the old Yoeme Salvador, reverses the Aztec-­ based paradigm:

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The Yaquis, the Mayos and even the Aztecs in their beliefs are concerned only

with the idea of well-­being, the health of the universe and the health of the things in it. I tell you, I wouldn’t give you a dime for the Aztecs, but they weren’t completely stupid. . . . Some say the Aztecs actually harvested the beating heart like

a fruit. And they called us the Chichimeca, the sons of dogs—­the barbarians. (301)

Toward the end of La Maravilla, an adult Alberto enters a cemetery only to see “armored Spaniards and feathered Aztecs” who had been “turned back again and again by the barbarians in Sonora, the chichimecas” (279). Even the souls of those who had failed to conquer and exterminate the Yoemem—­whether Aztec warriors, Spanish conquistadors, or Mexican federales—­are doomed to an existence that signifies their inferiority to a living transborder Yoeme nation culturally rooted in Hiakim. All the military bravado notwithstanding, Véa takes the opportunity to counterbalance the Yaqui warrior myth early in the novel, writing that the indigenous nation “walked away from the Yoris and their wars and their God; walked away from the slave camps in the Yucatán. . . . [M]en who knelt by the water as farmers and hunters saw homeless guerrillas staring back at them. They saw only sadness” (9). Instead of glory, legendary Native warriors reap the decimation of their community, the theft of their territory, and diaspora: “Manuel’s father, the boy’s great-­grandfather, walked north with this changeling tribe” (9). Peaceful farmers pushed to warfare by Mexican death squads and victims of slave labor, Yaqui migrants became meek Arizona laborers, having more in common with Méndez’s Loreto Maldonado and Frankie Pérez than with the combatant warrior Yaquis of Gonzales’s Yo soy Joaquín and Moraga’s Hungry Woman.33 That is, they represent a living aboriginal history instead of a pre-­Hispanic mythological mystery. In spite of the abundance of La Maravilla’s Aztec themes, Véa, like Saldaña-­Portillo, chooses to confront the pitfall of “ignoring contemporary Native American inhabitants of the Southwest and their very different mytho-­genealogies” by positioning Yoeme ethnicity above Aztec culture through a focus on a historical and cosmological indigenous epistemology (Saldaña-­Portillo 415).

CONCLUSION Véa responds to the denigration of Yoeme culture in twentieth-­century Mexican literature by reappropriating literary and ethnographic works based on

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a colonial Spanish–­Mexican epistemology of what we know about lo yaqui. The Yaqui warrior myth, created from hegemonic discourses of barbarism and anthropologist-­legitimated beliefs in senseless resistance to Spanish and Mexican culture, collides with a wall of historical contextualization, cosmological stories, and relevant Native rituals. Through recovered Yoeme cultural and historical knowledge, Véa establishes a rendering of arraigamiento—­the traditional link between culture, resistance, and ancestral territory—­that subverts the colonial and Mexican nationalist portrayals that promote Yaquis as backward internal Others in need of incorporation. In the context of the Chicana/o novel, Véa’s deployment of Aztec motifs demonstrates his commitment to the indigenismo chicano established during the Chicano Movement, and this is one of the mediums through which he explores identity in his work. As a member of a community of Chicana/o writers of Yoeme descent, however, Véa turns indigenismo chicano into a site of contested identity. Alberto is appropriately Chicano: his Yoeme ancestry is combined with what we might call a Chicana/o experience of family life, immigration (or diaspora), assimilation, and a search for identity. Still, the author’s desire to transcend a politically determined aesthetic results in an inquiry into alternative paradigms of identity and homeland that privileges Yoeme culture and its pointed peculiarities, yielding a Yaqui-­specific transborder narrative of Aztlán. In La Maravilla, Véa recognizes the importance of the mythological homeland Aztlán at the same time that he represents it through “the tribe’s sense of superiority, the sacred and material value of their territory, and the antiquity and distinctiveness of their customs” (Giddings 20). This is clear when he juxtaposes lo yaqui and lo azteca to highlight an indigenous hierarchy that upholds the prominence of the Yoeme nation among other living indigenous people and exposes the limitations of a pre-­Columbian basis for Chicana/o identity. Focusing on his own Chicano-­Yaqui identity, Véa redirects Chicana/o identity, if not away from Aztlán, then toward the ancestral knowledge of today’s living indigenous nations. In addition to redefining Chicana/o indigeneity, the novel initiates a new literary tradition that gives credence to indigenous historical presence and provides a voice for a community of Yoeme migrants. Published in 1993, La Maravilla moves beyond the recognition of the material reality of Yoeme borderlands experience depicted in Miguel Méndez’s Peregrinos de Aztlán (1974) and into a deeper cultural understanding of Native American ontology. Véa’s turn to the ethnographies of Edward Spicer as well as Larry Evers and Felipe Molina,

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along with the history of Evelyn Hu-­DeHart, is also discernible in Luis Valdez’s depiction of Yoeme cosmological worlds (or Aniam) and history in Mummified Deer (1999) (Huerta x). Luis Alberto Urrea’s The Hummingbird’s Daughter (2005) and Montserrat Fontes’s Dreams of the Centaur (1996), both historical novels, similarly demonstrate a growing respect for Yoeme epistemologies—­religion, storytelling, and historical perspectives—­which, if not fully understood by nonindigenous writers, are still deemed worthy of mindful representation. These authors replace a facile warrior identity with a historical and cultural contextualization of Yoeme soldiers. As such, the pre-­Revolutionary historical novel The City of Palaces (2014), by Chicano-­Yaqui author Michael Nava, deals with criollo Mexican protagonists whose Mexico is submerged in Native histories and cultures and whose most crucial moment—­the Mexican Revolution—­is fundamentally interconnected with the fate of the Yoeme community. Like the Mexicans in Dreams of the Centaur and The Hummingbird’s Daughter, Nava’s protagonists must confront their country’s social prejudices and its abuses of indigenous contemporaries in the form of Yoeme wars of extermination, death marches to Yucatán, and all-­out massacres. Alfredo Véa Jr.’s La Maravilla initiates an elaborate Yoeme-­centered indigeneity that recasts the indigenismo chicano of Aztlán by way of Arizona-­Sonoran Native history and culture.34

CONCLUSION The Native “Word” and Changing Indigeneities

I

study with the connection drawn by the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (EZLN) between the September 26, 2014, disappearance of the forty-­three Ayotzinapa students and the repression of Yaqui activist leaders Mario Luna and Fernando Jiménez Gutiérrez. The media-­savvy EZLN, an organization synonymous with indigenous resistance, appeals to an indigenous and rural Mexican “word” disregarded by Mexican elites. In so doing, Subcomandante Moisés simultaneously creates a space in which the country’s Native “word” can be heard and tended to by Mexico’s First Peoples. The EZLN’s creation of such a space is an effort to change the Mexican political paradigm into one in which Native communities are encountered on politically equal footing, instead of through violence and corruption. Just as importantly, it envisions a world in which indigenous people are no longer subject to interpellation by government officials; it envisions spaces in which Native communities express their politics without having to seek the permission of others. Similarly, as proof of the Ayotzinapa protesters’ resistance to metropolitan intermediaries, demonstrators during a Mexico City event on October 7, 2014, stalked, chanted at, and finally beat popular politician Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas. This unfortunate incident was a rejection of Cárdenas’s institutional government presence in the march. Cárdenas is a national moral authority, but his association with the Partido de la Revolución Democrática (PRD), the political party of the BEGAN THIS

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accused mayor of Iguala, had tainted his moral standing. By his presence at the Mexico City protest, Cárdenas had nothing to lose, while the families of the disappeared students had only their dignity and voice. Cárdenas is the son of President Lázaro Cárdenas, whose Indigenista positions earned him the paternalistic title of “tata Lázaro.” For indigenous and rural Mexicans, the well-­ meaning Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas is but another link in the long chain of post-­ Revolutionary political intermediaries. It is a general truth that in mainstream Mexican society, Native people are represented more than they are encountered; that is to say, daily encounters are oftentimes economically exploitative and even violent, while indigenous voices are filtered through nonindigenous institutions and their agents, when not altogether ignored. Living Mexican indigeneities, as in the case of Yaqui indigeneity, are the subject of popular shame and derision and of paradoxical regionalist and nationalist pride. Literary representations of indigenous people reflect this truth. Depictions of Yoeme people and culture in literature demonstrate a reimagining through nonindigenous discourses that highlight Yoeme racial, cultural, and political Otherness. This book presents a methodology for reading the representation of indigenous people in Mexican and Chicana/o literature through a recuperation of indigenous forms of knowledge, or epistemologies, with the power to recontextualize—­and, in the case of Chicana/o-­Yaqui writers, to reclaim—­often culturally deracinated literary depictions. This approach critically engages nonindigenous history and anthropology, disciplines in many ways suffused with coloniality, to define an exterior archive of Yaqui/Yoeme indigeneity, and from there to employ Native epistemologies (examples of Native self-­representation) as an aboriginal-­centered interpretive device. In applying Native epistemologies to reinterpret three distinct literary movements—­the Novel of the Mexican Revolution, Indigenista literature, and Chicana/o literature—­I have sought to demonstrate authors’ engagement with the archive, at times complicit and at times critical. On the other hand, this book recognizes the complexities of approaching Western archives of indigenous knowledge, for as much as scholars may censure the archive’s colonialist/imperialist origins, it nonetheless offers a precious source of at times “vanishing” knowledge. The recognition of what Aníbal Quijano might call a “coloniality of knowledge” detectable in “specific social discriminations which later were codified as ‘racial,’ ‘ethnic,’ ‘anthropological’ or ‘national,’ according to the times, agents, and populations involved,” is by now a well-­engrained facet of literary analysis (Quijano 168). However, it is noteworthy that this approach requires the curiosity to investigate what

172 Conclusion

one can only speculate about not knowing (i.e., Native epistemology and history) and the willingness to dedicate oneself to the recognition of a people’s history that may be antithetical to the Western intellectual tradition in which scholars are trained. As I have demonstrated throughout this study, indigenous people have been and still are consistently reimagined through nonindigenous, indeed Eurocentric, discourses that reinforce a criollo-­mestizo dehumanization of Latin America’s living Native peoples. An examination of the depictions of one indigenous nation through indigenous and nonindigenous epistemologies unearths hegemonic ways of thinking about lo yaqui—­and about lo indio more ­generally—­in Latin American and Latina/o literature. The accumulated research on Yoeme history and culture in this book is drawn from Native knowledge that has been reinterpreted and contained in archival textual form by a “lettered city” of intellectuals considering themselves to be the experts in all things indigenous. The recognition of this archive permits, and even demands, an epistemic shift through which to recontextualize twentieth-­and twenty-­first-­century literary portrayals of the Yoemem, portrayals that reflect the dangerous and exotic Otherness that Mexicans and Mexican Americans imagine them as possessing.

SHIFTING FORMS OF KNOWLEDGE Because the term Yaqui, like Indian, holds multiple meanings in Mexico and in the United States, it reflects the ways in which regional and national institutions consistently appropriate and redefine symbols of Yaqui warriorhood and dance (representative of Yaqui history and culture), principally in order to benefit those institutions. Mestizo Sonorans conveniently don Yaqui identity where Yaqui warrior history may prove impressive. I am of Yaqui descent, in these cases, means, I am a formidable or dangerous opponent (Olavarría, Cruces 58). This is the case in Luis Valdez’s film La Bamba (1987), when Ritchie Valens’s Chicana-­Yaqui mother, Connie Valenzuela, threatens: “They don’t know who the hell they’re dealing with. My granddaddy was a full-­blooded Yaqui Indian!”1 Valdez’s early artistic engagement with diasporic Yaqui indigeneity reveals the ways in which regionalist discourses on Native identity manifest in the Mexican American imaginary. Ciudad Obregón abounds in deer dancer symbols and emblems, and boasts recontextualized monuments to Juan Maldonado Tetabiate and José María Leyva Cajeme in which the Yaqui insurgents appear as Mexican patriots and local heroes. Many of these representations, indeed regional

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forms of knowledge, are promoted by local and state governments engaged in abusive relationships related to Yoeme territorial resources. Certainly, Governor Guillermo Padrés’s unlawful acquisition of Yoeme waters is but the most publicized example. And still yoris gape at pascola and deer dancer performances in southern Sonora, in Arizona, and in Mexico City, where El Ballet Folklórico de México de Amalia Hernández reinterprets Yoeme culture and history to fit the nation’s vision of primitivistic indigeneity in national dance arts. Native American historian Philip J. Deloria insists, “At stake in discursive/ ideological formations throughout U.S. history has been the body of accepted knowledge about Indian people, the ways in which knowledge helped constitute individuals and groups as subjects, and the new and old ways in which power was to be applied to Indians and non-­Indians alike” (11). Mexico’s colonial and nineteenth-­century ideologies and discourses produced a Yaqui warrior myth which has persisted to the present day in Mexican and Chicana/o literary production. From the perspective of frustrated missionaries, Yaqui Catholicism signified semi-­savage culture, while Porfirian politicians interpreted political-­ military resistance as counter to progress. It is difficult to adequately critique the mythification of Yaqui indigeneity from a nonindigenous Mexican point of view. This study instead turns to Yoeme epistemologies—­origin stories, cosmology, dance, and written history—­to carry out its analysis. An epistemic shift toward Yoeme forms of knowledge permits alternative views of Mexican history and contemporary events. Perhaps the most enduring form of derision created by colonial and nineteenth-­century Mexicans, the Yaqui warrior myth nonetheless proves reframable within a discursive matrix of cosmology, traditional origin stories (“Yomumuli and the Little Surem People,” “Leyenda yaqui de las predicciones,” “Omteme,” and the Testamento), and cultural practices that establish the Yoeme fighter as a pre-­Hispanic Native institution for the material defense of the homeland Hiakim. By delving into Yoeme cosmology (via origin stories and dance traditions) and history, we comprehend a Yoeme relationship to territory involving a cultural deep-­rootedness, an ancestral arraigamiento, that serves as the basis for community politics tying the people to their homeland Hiakim. The Novel of the Revolution replicates the national acquisition of Yaqui warriorhood and dance through allusions to the Sierra del Bacatete and war drums, and reaffirms Mexican expectations of what it means to be Yaqui. It silences the indigenous “word,” as is evident in characterizations of Yoeme soldiers in terms of innate bloodthirst and seemingly anomalous acts of exotic dance. But a contemporaneous Native revolution is also discernible in

174 Conclusion

the Novel of the Revolution. Exotic warrior representations begin to fissure when authors like Martín Luis Guzmán and Gregorio López y Fuentes paradoxically represent Yaqui battalions as symbols both of the liberating Northwestern Division and of nineteenth-­century barbarism and semi-­savage Indianness. These fissures permit a glance into a representational lacuna in which Yaqui history and culture await remembrance. As such, the history of Yoeme agrarian politics reveals indigenous revolutionary motivations divorced from national politics: a Native revolution. And an investigation into the ubiquity of Yoeme dance practices and their role in reinforcing identity throughout the revolutionary arena reveals a bolstering of Yoeme identity among the Native fighters beyond the borders of Hiakim: a Yoeme indigeneity also ostentatiously performed before yori observers. This Native epistemic analytical register permits the application of the Maso Me’ewa (Killing the Deer) dance—­one of the ways by which the Yoemem know themselves (Shorter 225)—­as an analytical tool with which to reconsider literary depictions of Yaqui revolutionaries and their role in the national struggle as a whole. A reading of Carlos Fuentes’s sacrificial character “Yaqui Tobías,” in La muerte de Artemio Cruz, as an indigenous man engaged in a deer-­coyote dialectic—­that is to say, the violent cycle of Yoeme historical survival—­transfers analytical authority to a non-­Western perspective on indigeneity.

YAQUI INDIGENEITY AND THE ANTHROPOLOGICAL ARCHIVE The Indigenista literary acquisition of Yoeme social types, social structure, and culture shows us the ways in which fictional reconstructions of indigeneity possess the power to usurp Native epistemologies—­dance, storytelling, and cosmology—­through the guise of “authenticity.” Indigenista authors not only fictionalized Native communities, but also politically recontextualized them by using their own forms of knowledge (cosmology, social structure, language, dance) against them. To reinvent Yaqui identity, Francisco Rojas González’s “La triste historia del pascola Cenobio” represents pascolas and deer dancers, as well as community perspectives on Yoeme-­yori relations, by sampling the most cynical aspects of the colonial-­era and nineteenth-­century works of Andrés Pérez de Ribas and Eustaquio Buelna, as well as state-­sponsored ethnographies by Fortunato Hernández, Alfonso Fabila, and Carlos Basauri, and works by foreign anthropologists such as Ralph L. Beals and W. C. Holden. “La triste historia” removes community cultural resistance from its context of Mexican

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crimes—­massacres, deportation, land grabbing—­and reconstructs motherhood as the essence of Native insularity and generational hatred. The narrative reproduces the epistemic gender violence originating in Mexico’s treatment of the Yoeme mother as a teacher of anti-­yori hate and an enemy of the state. It reproduces ethnographic detail readily available in the colonial-­anthropological archive of Yaqui cultural scholarship to make credible the representation of Yoeme culture and judicial institutions as backward and ridiculous. The narrative’s Yaqui tribunal is a laughable type of “mob rule” detached from any sense of a modern legal system. It is incumbent on the reader, trustful of anthropological authority, to discern the way in which fuller ethnographic detail is not only incongruent with a faithful depiction of indigenous identity, but even affirms Mexican expectations of indigenous societies. Consequently, the critical reader is not only up against the façade of accurate ethnographic characterizations but also hegemonic notions relating to intellectual authority over lo yaqui. Tragic Indigenista portrayals of indigenous women are consistent with those found in popular films like María Candelaria (Xochimilco) (1943) and Maclovia (1948).2 The media coverage of the 2006 stoning of Tlapanec woman Adriana Manzanares, who was sentenced by a community tribunal for the crimes of adultery and abortion, suggested the folly of recognizing local Native autonomy. Indigenista literature’s mocking tone, indicative of the arrogant assumption on the part of educated Mexicans that they are the “experts” on all things Indian, can be felt in the disparaging description of an indigenous leader by Lorenzo Córdova Vianello, head of the INE (National Electoral Institute), following a 2015 meeting with Native community representatives.3 Córdova’s “encounter” with indigenous leaders in Guanajuato, in which the official was meant to represent Mexico’s interest in indigenous political participation (in essence, a Native voice), demonstrates the nonchalance with which institutional intermediaries continually dismiss aboriginal politics and representation. In these cases, nonindigenous institutions (media and government) offer up indigenous social structures as a sad commentary on Native life that reinforces the stereotypes found in popular culture, politicized history, and anthropological research.

YAQUI INDIGENEITY IN THE BORDERLANDS Chicana/o-­Yaqui writers have already embraced the epistemic shift that this study has striven toward. The Yaqui warrior myth, dance exoticism, and the anthropological archive reappear in Chicana/o literature; that is, indigenous

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stereotypes also cross borders. And yet, some crucial novels, short stories, and dramas written by Chicana/o-­Yaqui authors—­Michael Nava, Alma Luz Villa­ nueva, Luis Valdez, Alfredo Véa Jr., and Miguel Méndez—­challenge Spanish colonial and Mexican indigeneities constructed by centuries’ worth of textual accumulation purporting Yoeme cultural, social, and at times racial inferiority. As they are U.S.-­born, theirs is a diasporic indigeneity based on varying degrees of geographic distance and cultural knowledge. Méndez, who grew up in a Mexican community heavily influenced by Yoeme settlers, is in some ways the exception. His writing reflects storytelling (etehoi) and history learned from a family and community intimately acquainted with pre-­and post-­Revolutionary Yaqui experience. Like Méndez, the Californian Villanueva and the Arizonan Véa assert a Yaqui-­ness connected to a Yoeme grandparent who fostered their indigenous identities. Valdez’s work demonstrates a long trajectory of balancing an indigenismo chicano grounded in pre-­Columbian culture with his own family’s Yoeme history. Similarly, Michael Nava’s noir detective novels and The City of Palaces (2014), based on an impressive amount of academic knowledge, also reveal a gradual assertion of Mexican American and Yaqui identities. The Chicana/o-­Yaqui authors’ reclamation of Yoeme epistemic practices within the Mexican and Mexican American experience creates a literary space in which, as Subcomandante Moisés puts it, a Native “word” can be heard and tended to. Their works prove that the archive of what we know about Native people is vulnerable to reappropriation, and, more importantly, to reclamation. Alfredo Véa Jr.’s La Maravilla (1993) is exemplary of the ways the sons and daughters of the Yoeme diaspora confront the archive. The protagonist Alberto’s journey toward a politicized Yaqui-­Chicano identity is historical and cultural, and involves etehoi storytelling and dance culture representative of Aniam cosmology. As such, colonial documents, pre-­Revolutionary anthropological accounts, and state-­sponsored Indigenista ethnographies are all fair game for Véa’s creative process. Like La Maravilla, Valdez’s Mummified Deer (1999) and Villanueva’s “La Llorona” (1994) each in their own way confront the Yaqui warrior myth with cosmologically inspired representations. Valdez’s Mama Chu, a survivor of pre-­ and post-­Revolutionary guerras de exterminio, battles her demons from within a Yo Ania experience and dance tradition, while Villanueva’s Llorona represents the fate of Yoeme children, the community’s most vulnerable members, during those same campaigns. But theirs is not only a case of challenging the archive. Just as important is the Chicana/o-­Yaqui dialectic with indigenismo chicano—­ that is, Chicana/o indigeneity and the aesthetics of Aztlán used to represent

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it. Aztec aesthetics are an accepted feature in the representational gamut of Chicana/o-­Yaqui writers; Aztlán, then, still serves as a locus of identity tied to a historically central Aztec/Mexica empire and its mythological homeland. In this sense, indigenismo chicano has some things in common with Mexican nationalism. But the Chicana/o-­Yaqui literary tradition prioritizes the identity, history, and culture of a living Native people. Reclamation of Yaqui indigeneity by Chicana/o writers necessarily occasions a semantic-­representational friction when Yoeme cosmology and history brush against the aesthetics of the mythological Aztlán. Just as the Yoeme nation redefined Catholicism, this book’s analysis finds that Chicana/o-­Yaquis are redefining Mexican American identity. The turn toward Yoeme history and knowledge is impacting Chicana/o literature at large. The historical novels of Montserrat Fontes and Luis Alberto Urrea reflect the newly recognized value of indigenous cultural and historical perspectives, as well as the historical centrality of these perspectives to Mexican American borderlands identity. And Nava’s The City of Palaces, essentially a fictional rendering of the Mexican Revolution, presents Mexican history as indivisible from Yoeme history in the Revolution. Considering the popularity of Urrea’s and Nava’s works, we can only conjecture a continued, perhaps growing, interest in Chicana/o narratives that bring living Native nations to the historical forefront, be it in nineteenth-­or twentieth-­century Mexico, or 1950s Arizona. An interpretive move that entails a willingness to work for the recovery of the silenced aboriginal voices whose Native communities have shared the Mexican American experience necessarily engages our individual and collective mestizo-­ indigenous pasts. In reenvisioning Mexican American culture and history in this way, it is clear that Chicana/o-­Yaqui authors are changing what it means to be, or not be, Mexican American or indigenous. But they are also redefining what it means to be Yaqui, and challenging the Western attitude toward what Deloria called “Indians in unexpected places”—­that is, the limited cultural expectations according to which nonindigenous people define Native identity (3). The Yoemem are part of a Mexican American experience, a transborder history of geography, language, culture, and identity.4 Many live as active members of the federally recognized Pascua Yaqui tribe near Tucson, Arizona. Some are lawyers and writers. Some have worked U.S. agricultural fields and have employed their talents as labor activists. Others write gay Mexican American detective novels and serve in the California Supreme Court. They write poetry and teach at prestigious universities. Though some frequently participate in religious ceremonies

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in Arizona and Sonora, others practice a mostly secular Western culture while still recognizing their Native ancestry: a Chicana/o-­Yaqui indigeneity. And just as Chicana/o-­Yaqui literature challenges the identities that have been “defined and promoted by intellectuals from the center,” it also draws our attention to the ever-­changing nature of ethnicity (Calderón x). The Yoeme “word” is being transformed as Chicana/o-­Yaqui authors rewrite Yaqui indigeneity. It is a premise of mestizaje, a key facet of indigenismo chicano, that we are of indigenous descent. Perhaps these writers will succeed in reconnecting Chicana/o identity to the many living Native communities that are part of Mexican American history, and from whom we descend.

NOTES

INTRODUCTION 1.

2.

Yoeme (Yoemem in the plural) means “person,” and is the word by which the Yaquis referred to each other before Spanish intervention. The Mayo version is Yoreme and will be avoided here. Throughout this book I interchangeably use both Yoeme and Yaqui, to avoid overuse of either term. Here my definition coincides with Joshua Lund’s: “Broadly put, indigenismo indicates the various intellectual movements, government programs, and aesthetic projects that take as their primary goal the advocacy for the social and cultural condition of the Indian” (5).

CHAPTER 1 1. 2.

Here we should recognize that the term Mexican Americans includes people who may identify as either nonindigenous or indigenous, be it racially, culturally, or through their ancestry. Perhaps the predecessor to the Ballet Folklórico’s deer dance is Carlos Chávez of the Orquesta Sinfónica de México, who sampled Yoeme percussion in his 1930s “Sinfonía India” (Spicer, The Yaquis 276). “Sinfonía India” includes “a melody of the Huichol Indians of the state of Nayarit” and boasts Seri and Yaqui musical adaptations (Carmona 3). “The second theme is a melody of the Yaqui Indians of the state of Sonora, from whence also comes the third theme” (3).

180 NOTES TO PAGES 25–37

3. 4.

This is different from the Yoeme disapproval of the monument to the deer dancer in Sonora, which is criticized for the “primitive”-­style loincloth it brandishes. Othón de Mendizábal pieces together the region’s history and interprets the Yoeme, Mayo, Seri, Apache, and other indigenous nations largely through the nineteenth-­century discourse of civilización y barbarie.

CHAPTER 2 1.

2.

What we would like to avoid is a reaction of the sort Spicer describes having after reading the Testamento, provided by Juan Valenzuela in 1942: “But I had not expected a mythology which would read like, let us say, Mrs. Eddy’s or someone else’s Key to the Scriptures. . . . It flashed across my mind for a moment that he had probably gotten them by mail order from some ‘Religious House’ in Los Angeles” (“Excerpts” 116). Kristin Dutcher Mann warns that the accepted transculturation of missionary teachings came with its dangers. For example, as Jesuits and Franciscans established educational systems for Native children, these children would in turn be transformed into “cultural intermediaries” in the Church’s evangelization efforts: The method of doctrinal instruction reversed the order of cultural transmission in mission communities. Previously, children had learned from their elders the history and cosmology of their societies, including songs that told of the creation of the universe. In this system, missionaries empowered children to transmit knowledge of the Christian world and its meanings to their elders. (89)

3. 4.

5.

As religious reeducation shifted children’s sense of cultural authority to missionaries, traditional cultural and religious authorities ran the risk of being undermined by newer generations within their own communities. Spicer spells this term “huya aniya,” but I will instead use Felipe S. Molina’s spelling of “huya ania” since it is more consistent with the Yoeme pronunciation; see Evers and Molina, Yaqui Deer Songs. Grageda Bustamante concurs, commenting on the originality of Yaqui syncretism: “Ésta no fue por mucho ni española ni cristiana, aunque tampoco la yoeme original, desconocedor de la cultura europea” (This religion was neither Spanish nor Christian, nor was it the original Yoeme one, which was ignorant of European culture) (31). It should also be taken into account that some ancient traditions have been lost in Yaqui dance and storytelling (Giddings 16). An inspection of the Yaqui flag reveals a crucifix at the center with a sun directly above it and a moon directly below, expressing male and female creator divinities respectively.

NOTES TO PAGES 39–52  181

6. 7.

8. 9. 10. 11.

12. 13.

14.

15.

16.

Here I heed Spicer’s reiteration of “the all-­important point that Yaqui ‘aesthetic’ expression is inseparable from Yaqui religion,” which is a complex blend of two traditions (The Yaquis 96). Spicer collects a version of the first story entitled “The Talking Stick and the Surem,” which is, however, incomplete. The version examined in this chapter is “Yomumuli and the Little Surem People,” included in Giddings’s Yaqui Myths and Legends. It is curious, though, that Giddings describes storytelling “in the evenings when a group happens to be gathered in the ramada or in the house by the fire,” for the ramada (or enramada) is a space of domestic and ritual practices (15). Alfonso Fabila will be examined in the fourth chapter as one of many anthropologists who contributed to the inclusion of Yaqui literary representation in the Indigenista movement. Shorter’s research on this story reveals that, in most versions, it is on Omteme Kawi that the talking tree appears (113). It should be noted that the description of Suré as “wild” reveals its connection to the Huya Ania, or wilderness world, which is both material and supernatural. Before Yoeme reorganization into the eight pueblos, native flora grew between the ranchería homes; these areas were not cleared ground, as in European fashion, but rather literally part of the wilderness world (Spicer, The Yaquis 63). Curiously, the plot of the next story also revolves around an invasion that is not the Conquista, and mentions the talking tree’s foretelling of the invasion. With regard to baptized Yoemem who “grew to be taller than the Surem” (Giddings 27), Andrés Pérez de Ribas, the Jesuit missionary who carried out reconsolidation and baptism, notes in Triunfos de nuestra santa fe that the Yaquis were in fact taller than other indigenous peoples (Triumphs 329). The mythical growth of the Yoemem may also serve as a pre-­Jesuit interpretation of physical characteristics. As far as origin stories with minimal or no European influences, I refer the reader to the set of origin myths about the culture hero Bobok the toad, who is depicted as recovering water and fire, as well as promoting the agriculture of corn for the Yaquis. El Museo de los Yaquis, in Cócorit, includes Bobok in its display dedicated to ancient Yaqui cosmology. Relevantly, Pérez de Ribas seems aghast at the lack of respect shown him by the Yoemem upon his arrival: “When I entered their lands they came to greet me in their manner, and they spoke in such a loud voice that I found it strange. It seemed to me that this was a sign of their arrogance not used by other nations I had known. In order to repress and moderate it, I thought I should tell them that it was not necessary for them to speak in that brash tone if it was in peace that they come to greet the priest who was coming to teach the word of God” (Triumphs 329). To further contextualize the important concept of the warrior as defender of Hiakim, I refer to Shorter’s summary of the Yoeme “Coyote Society, an aboriginal religious

182 NOTES TO PAGES 55–65

group that is affiliated with the Aniam and the protection of all Yoemem,” whose “coyote songs are similar to deer songs in subject matter” and whose ceremonies are like “pahko’ola [pascola] ceremonies in form” (281). 17. Evers and Molina uncovered a great number of biblical passages that either influenced the text of the Testamento or are cited directly, but they are far too numerous to consider in this chapter (Florez Leyva et al. 102–­6). 18. In light of this research, we may consider some of the sensational-­sounding reports made by John Kenneth Turner concerning captured Yaquis in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A colonel explains the process of trying to bribe detained Yaquis with liberty or money: “The alternative was the rope, yet I never knew of one of these captives turning traitor. ‘Give me the rope,’ they would cry, and I have seen such a man run, put the rope round his own neck and demand that it be tightened quickly, that he might not again be subjected to so base an insult” (Turner 32). Shelley Streeby analyzes the sensationalist conventions in Turner’s book as a strategy to create “sympathetic acts of witnessing the atrocities inflicted on Yaqui bodies” in order to “make a difference” (139). 19. A look at the twentieth-­century history of the Testamento in particular reveals a process of consensus seeking, modification of the text, and inscription by the authorities of the eight pueblos (Evers and Molina, “Holy” 15). This is why, Evers and Molina say, “the ‘Testamento’ thus provides another case for ongoing inquiry into the complex relations between oral and textual practice” (5). 20. The científicos were a political group that grew out of the Mexican positivists, who based their politics on Comtian positivism. Most científicos, however, were unapologetic Social Darwinist Francophiles and were closely aligned with the Porfirian dictatorship (see Zea 397).

CHAPTER 3 1.

2. 3.

As in previous chapters, I will use the terms Yoeme and Yaqui interchangeably, but frequently prefer Yaqui to express nonindigenous points of view. It is the case that the terms Yaqui and Yaqui tribe are often employed by the community to express its identity to nonindigenous people and institutions, who in turn almost exclusively use Yaqui, Yaqui tribe, and occasionally Yoreme (which the Mayos use in reference to themselves). But Yoeme, and its plural Yoemem, are the terms the community uses to refer to itself. David Delgado Shorter writes about the popular Yoeme legend that places the handprint of Jesus Christ somewhere in Hiakim (30). Under Davis Richardson’s leadership, the railroad was extended in 1907 from the Yaqui Valley to Guaymas, which connected the valley to Arizona (Evans 363–­96).

NOTES TO PAGES 65–70  183

4.

Interestingly enough, many hacendados would protest Yoeme deportation as an economically damaging measure. Chicana/o authors Luis Alberto Urrea (The Hummingbird’s Daughter) and Montserrat Fontes (Dreams of the Centaur) examine Sonoran landowners’ appreciation of valuable Yoeme and Yoreme labor in their works. 5. From 1906 to 1908, Ricardo Flores Magón made overtures to persuade the Yoeme nation into an anarchist rebellion, with no success (Hu-­DeHart, Yaqui Resistance 189). James D. Cockcroft summarizes the Magón brothers’ own indigenous background in Oaxaca and the participation of Yoeme PLM leader Javier Buitimea and Mayo Fernando Palomares (19). 6. Enrique Krauze highlights the opportunistic side of the general’s view of indigenous people: “Obregón no sería el único jefe sonorense reclutador de yaquis, pero sí el principal, el más astuto y quien más provecho militar y psicológico les sacaría” (Obregón would not be the only Sonoran leader who recruited Yaquis, but he would be the principal and most astute one, and the one who would most benefit militarily and psychologically from them) (29). Krauze’s Machiavellian description is suggestive of the criollo and mestizo Mexicans’ utilitarian attitudes toward indigenous people. 7. Manuel Pedro González identifies three key factors in the creation of the genre: (1) the international and national attention bestowed upon the novel Los de abajo, culminating in 1930, and the resulting praise of this novel as an example of national literature; (2) the 1928 appearance of El águila y la serpiente by Martín Luis Guzmán, which began the second wave of literature about the Mexican Revolution; and (3) muralista art, which depicted indigenous masses in its positive portrayals of revolutionaries (96–­97). It is for this reason, and because of its historical nature, that critics frequently refer 8. to Tomochic (1893) by Heriberto Frías as the precursor to the Novel of the Mexican Revolution. In addition to federal forces and rebellious rural townsfolk, Tomochic includes a panoply of indigenous people and even makes mention of the “yaqui rebelde” (137). 9. Los de abajo has often been examined as a text that is representative of the Revolution’s rural masses. See Patrick J. Duffey’s “A War of Words: Orality and Literacy in Mariano Azuela’s Los de abajo,” Robert Kirsner’s “La actuación del pueblo en la novela de la revolución mexicana: visión literaria de la historia,” and César Valverde’s “Bajtín y Azuela: la revolución como carnaval en Los de abajo.” 10. Most of the other rural rebels, presumably mestizos, also seem to represent the general Mexican ranchero type: their language is rural Mexican Spanish, they have limited education, and they are farmers who come into conflict with local hacendados and authorities. This is the serrano rebel described by Alan Knight (1: 6). This is why Joseph Sommers dubbed Los de abajo the “novela de las masas” (novel of the masses) (“Novela” 745).

184 NOTES TO PAGES 71–76

11.

For example, the nonindigenous administrator expresses his disapproval of the prearranged marriages practiced by the peons, dismissing them as a custom “propia de los indios” (typical of the Indians) (López y Fuentes, Tierra 30). They also have “nombres de indios auténticos” (authentic Indian names), which are described as vulgar and either taken from their environment or created from variations of President Porfirio Díaz’s name (35). 12. Joshua Lund analyzes Ignacio Manuel Altamirano’s manipulation of the ugly Indian trope in reference to his own stigmatized phenotype as a point of pride (Lund 37). 13. Additionally, Romero notes the exotic usage of their own language, and utilizes it himself: “La capilla del Hospital sirve de huatapera a los indios” (The Hospital’s chapel serves the Indians as a huatapera [meeting place]) (153), and, “Pero para rezar y contarle a la Virgen sus cuitas al són de la melancólica chirimía, emplean solamente el dulce tarasco nativo, con el zig-­zag de su armoniosa fonética” (But to pray and recount to the Virgin their sorrows to the chirimía’s melancholy music, they only employ the sweet Tarasco native tongue with the zig-­zag of its phonetic harmony) (153). 14. Rojas González’s “mosaico étnico” (mosaic of ethnicity) is reminiscent of the photograph of Francisco Villa in the presidential throne, next to Emiliano Zapata, surrounded by dark and light, northern and southern revolutionaries. 15. Here we might be reminded of a scene in Emilio Fernández’s film María Candelaria, in which the protagonist offers to cover her face in mud to avoid being coveted by nonindigenous strangers. 16. A paternalistic character, the hacendado benevolently offers his Yoemem pay, rifles to hunt with, and land. 17. Madero called for open protest against the Porfirian government’s crimes—­ genocide, forced deportation, slave labor, and land grabbing. Madero also protests the lack of journalistic opposition to the war of extermination against the Yaquis, which he criticizes as “the Silence of the grave!” (Presidential 137). 18. More specifically, I am referring to the belief system, of pre-­Columbian and Jesuit influence, discussed in chapter 2, which explains the origins of the Hiakim territory as divinely decreed. 19. Unlike the foundational works of Azuela and Guzmán, muralista art depicted indigenous masses in positive revolutionary contexts (González 96–­97). It is in muralista art that the masses and “la tragedia del indio mexicano” (the tragedy of the Mexican Indian) were first incorporated into national aesthetics (100). 20. The term indiada generally means a multitude of indigenous people, but often has negative connotations. 21. Sarmiento alleged, though, that Spanish colonialism had also contributed to Argentine barbarism. 22. Sarmiento cites James Fenimore Cooper (Last of the Mohicans) as a North American example, and Esteban Echeverría, author of “La cautiva” and “El matadero,” as an Argentine writer of great potential in this capacity.

NOTES TO PAGES 76–92  185

23.

Joseph Sommers, who dubbed Los de abajo the “novela de las masas” (novel of the masses), noted the difference between muralismo, which was a product of Mexican cultural nationalism, and the Novel of the Revolution: “La novela pudo nutrirse de la cultura popular, pero no de una narrativa indígena comparable al arte plástico de las culturas prehispánicas” (The novel was able to nourish itself on popular culture, but not on an indigenous narrative comparable to the pre-­Hispanic cultures’ plastic arts) (“Novela” 745). Parra, however, has found similarities between some depictions of the revolutionary masses in Guzmán’s El águila y la serpiente and mural paintings by José Clemente Orozco (Parra 83). 24. Yoeme military success was also limited to their pre-­Revolutionary military experiences. In the 1913 Battle of Naco, reports Dabdoub, the Yoeme unit initially refused to obey the order to engage fortifications because “no estaba acostumbrada” (it was not accustomed) (169). 25. The controversy lay in whether Obregón made this agreement himself, or dubiously through Colonel Fructuoso Méndez, considered a trustworthy yori by the Yoemem (Spicer, The Yaquis 229–­30). Claiming to have authority to fulfill Yoeme demands, Dabdoub writes, Méndez recruited Ignacio Mori and his broncos to participate in the defense of the Guaymas area (173–­74). With Bule gone, Mori would lead Yoeme fighters along with the so-­called mansos of Francisco Urbalejo and Lino Morales. 26. The Carrancista forces met with constant harassment on their way to León, and were slowly surrounded and forced into a defensive position by the Villistas (Knight 1: 326). Considering Colonel Bacaségua’s serious forewarning to his men that soon they would be entering combat in León, I place the approximate date of the episode as June 1, 1915. 27. Joseph Sommers notes the author’s intent to portray historical moments through symbols in “Lancaster Kid” (Francisco 190). 28. In this sense, La muerte de Artemio Cruz is part of what Raymond L. Williams described as Fuentes’s “lifelong meditation on the history and identity of Indio-­ Afro-­I bero-­América” (39). Because of this problematic tripartite view of racial mexicanidad, Marco Polo Hernández Cuevas reads the novel “as a link in the chain of canonized criollo works reflecting the cosmic race-­discourse on nation whose iron-­like determination, from the start, was the cleansing of blackness from the population, if at least psychologically” (10). Hernández Cuevas argues that while “La muerte contributes to the erasure of the path that leads to the African family tree, of Mexican mestizaje,” a rereading of the Parral prison episode also forces the reader to contemplate la tercera raíz (the third root) beside the Spanish criollo and Yaqui indigenous experiences as part of the racial allegory of Mexico’s origins (15). 29. Evers and Molina write about the confluences and divergences between the deer and Christ figures in other contexts as well: “the epithet ‘flower person,’ when it is used in a deer song sung on Holy Saturdays, seems to allude not only to saila

186 NOTES TO PAGES 92–107

30.

maso of aboriginal Yaqui belief but to the risen Christ as well” (Yaqui Deer Songs 129). Nevertheless, Mexican presidents in the twentieth century, although perhaps mestizos, have been notoriously light-­skinned.

CHAPTER 4 1. 2.

3. 4. 5.

6.

7.

The “last Yaqui revolt” ended in a war that included armed soldiers, deportations into military conscription, and air raids in 1928. The Indigenista literature of the Chiapas Cycle includes books by Rubín (El ca­llado dolor de los tzotziles, 1949), anthropologist Ricardo Pozas (Juan Pérez Jolote: Biografía de un tzotzil, 1952), and Rosario Castellanos (Balún Canán, 1957; Ciudad Real, 1960; and Oficio de tinieblas, 1962), as well as well-­known works by Rojas González. See Joseph Sommers, “El ciclo de Chiapas.” Moisés Sáenz, who also connected colonial ethnography to early twentieth-­century race anthropology, satirizes the obsession of some anthropologists with measuring skulls (Sáenz 139). But Hernández also places partial blame on the temastianes, or church authorities, for perpetuating Yaqui rebellions and hatred toward the yoris (Hernández 91). In 1932, Beals, who was keenly aware of his part in accumulating an archive of indigenous knowledge, reveals his sources: “The first is ethnographic work among surviving peoples; the second, intensive study of the Spanish literature, particularly of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; the third, archaeology” (Comparative 94). In addition to referencing Pérez de Ribas, Beals describes his contribution as “stimulating to future work in the same field” (94). Making a great effort to present Yoeme heterogeneity as well, he first presents a favorable history of José María Leyva Cajeme and his late nineteenth-­century insurgency. Then he turns this representation on its head by providing a dissenting Yaqui perspective in which Cajeme “tuvo fallas enormes desde el punto de vista de los propios yaquis” (had great faults from the perspective of the Yaquis) (Fabila 89). Because of his service in the federal army and his participation in campaigns against the Yaquis, as well as his controversial taking command of the Yoeme pueblos, some dubbed him a “‘torocoyori’, vendido a los blancos y traidor y por eso mismo lo repudian con asco, no pudiendo hacer confianza en él para siempre” (“torocoyori,” sold out to the Whites and a traitor, which is why they repudiate him in disgust, forever unable to trust in him) (89). The importance of the term torocoyori will be evident in the literary analysis of Rojas González’s short story, as well as in the work of Luis Valdez. Yaqui race is determined by measurements—­“Estatura [height]: 1.726 m. (altos [tall]); índice cefálico [cephalic index]: 77.9 (subdolicocéfalos [subdolichoce-

NOTES TO PAGES 107–133  187

phalic]); índice nasal [nasal index]: 50.29 (mesorrinos [mesorrhine])”—­and concise detail: “Color de la piel, bronceado; bien musculados, cabellos negro y abundante” (Skin color, bronzed; well-­muscled, hair black and abundant) (Basauri 266). 8. It helps to remember that extreme religiosity, at least in intellectual circles, was a national malady, thus revolutionary Mexico’s anticlericalism. 9. It is noteworthy that the novel’s plot revolves around the search for legendary Yoeme insurgent leader José María Leyva Cajeme, and is based on Cajeme’s nineteenth-­century rebellion against state and federal control of the Hiakim territory (Bigas Torres 326). 10. Indeed, many dancers—­pascola, matachín, chapayeka, etc.—­assume a sacred responsibility, or manda, in gratitude for divine intervention in the recovery of good health. 11. See my analysis of origin stories referring to the talking tree’s prophecy in chapter 2. 12. Rojas González follows the trend of other authors discussed in the last chapter. For example, Martín Luis Guzmán alludes to a film that captures a Yoeme battalion’s entrance into Mexico City. And in Tierra: La revolución agraria en México (1933), López y Fuentes similarly chronicles this 1914 moment, making particular note of the Yaqui drum (119). 13. These names can be found in Fabila’s text, and Buitimea figures prominently in the lists of those deported to Yucatán (Padilla Ramos 53–­56). 14. Sommers has noted the influence of film in the work of Rojas González, and it serves us well to remember that El diosero was interpreted on film in the 1955 Raíces (Sommers, Francisco 35). 15. As further evidence of the secularization of the Yaqui dancer, note the ironic employment of the word trotamundos (globetrotter) in the Spanish version, a moniker hardly justifiable for a local indigenous performer. 16. Though the dancer is consistently secularized, here Rojas González makes a point of noting the sacred nature of the Yaqui geography.

CHAPTER 5 1. 2. 3. 4.

My frequent use of the terms Yaqui and Yoeme as interchangeable in this chapter reflects the unstigmatized usage of Yaqui in literature by Chicana/o and Chicana/o­-­ Yaqui authors. I admit to the obvious generalization of what I call “a Chicana/o experience,” which must differ for every individual. I acknowledge that more complex questions of class, gender, and race differentiate these experiences. See my discussion of the concept of arraigamiento in chapter 2. I will use the terms Chicana/o-­Aztec aesthetics and the aesthetics of Aztlán, by which I am referring to the collection of pre-­Columbian motifs employed by Chicana/o

188 NOTES TO PAGES 135–148

authors and artists and amounting to what Gaspar de Alba has called “place-­based aesthetics, a system of homeland representation that immigrants and natives alike develop to fill in the gaps of the self ” (104). 5. For a discussion of Méndez’s Aztlán as social and material realism, see Luis Leal’s “Mito y realidad social en Peregrinos de Aztlán” and Francisco A. Lomelí’s “Peregrinos de Aztlán de Miguel Méndez: Textimonio de desesperanza(dos),” both in Keller, Miguel Méndez in Aztlán. 6. Cantú notes, “Accounts of Yaqui culture and history are a developing genre in Mexican-­American literature, and well established in novels by Ana Castillo (Sapogonia), Alfredo Véa, and Alma Luz Villanueva” as well as in Graciela Limón’s The Memories of Ana Calderón (“Hybrid” 157). “In most cases,” writes Cantú, “Yaqui ancestry forms an important part of the characters’ family background, but factored in as a ‘repressed’ spirit of insurrection and vitality” (157). 7. The complete epigraph is: “Fear! A terrible enemy—­treacherous, and difficult to overcome. It remains concealed at every turn of the way, prowling, waiting. And if the man, terrified in its presence, runs away, his enemy will have put an end to his quest” (Alurista ii). Floricanto en Aztlán was groundbreaking for its incorporation of Nahuatl. 8. See my discussion of ambivalent acquisition of Yaqui-­ness by Sonoran mestizos in chapter 1. 9. In The Hummingbird’s Daughter, Teresa Urrea’s mother is of three Cahitan ethnicities. Huila explains, “Your grandfather was Catholic, and your grandmother followed the old ways. She was Mayo, and her own mother was Yaqui. Your grandfather was Tehueco, and the soldiers put him in a tree before you came” (70). 10. Escaping political reprisals for his support of an anti-­Porfirian candidate, Tomás moves his entire hacienda from Ocoroni, Sinaloa, to Cabora, Sonora. 11. Tomás’s pro-­Native perspective is carefully constructed in The Hummingbird’s Daughter. Though his belief in his own racial and cultural superiority is undeniable, Tomás nonetheless reaches degrees of understanding and respect for the Yoemem, Yoremem, and other borderlands First Peoples. Whether he is quietly agonizing over another hacienda owner’s live burial of two indigenous lovers who secretly married (Urrea 178), or expressing shock when his daughter Teresa (herself racially and culturally mestiza Native) informs him that “everybody in the big house has lice” (401), the erosion of his ignorance and racist beliefs is an ongoing and unresolved process throughout the novel. 12. Here Nava also introduces the idea of a Chicana/o borderland that the protagonists will eventually have to traverse. To be sure, the novel ends with Miguel Sarmiento crossing the border into exile with his son. As Nava has announced in an interview, The City of Palaces is the first of four interconnected novels based on the life of Mexican American silent film star Ramón Novarro (Nava, “Three Questions”).

NOTES TO PAGES 149–154  189

13.

See my discussion in chapter 3 on evidence of Yoeme cultural practices during the Revolution in Djed Bórquez’s Yórem Tamegua (novela) (1923), Jane Holden Kelley’s Yaqui Women: Contemporary Life Stories (1978), and Gregorio López y Fuentes’s Tierra: La revolución agraria en México (1933). 14. See my discussion in chapter 3 of Carlos Fuentes’s La region más transparente (1958) and La muerte de Artemio Cruz (1962), Gregorio López y Fuentes’s Campamento (1931) and Tierra: La revolución agraria en México (1933), Martín Luis Guzmán’s El águila y la serpiente (1928), and Rafael F. Muñoz’s ¡Vámonos con Pancho Villa! (1936). 15. Roberto González Echevarría has explained how Indigenista literature became a simulation of dominant anthropological practices, turning authors into ethnographers who explained each country’s “internal Others” (208). 16. Regarding terminology, Véa often prefers Yaqui over Yoeme in La Maravilla. This choice may be suggestive of the synonymy of the terms in a U.S. Native context. On the other hand, Okie, another term used throughout the novel to refer to poor Whites, was once a very real racist epithet in the Southwest. 17. In this sense, the novel demonstrates some affinities with Ron Arias’s The Road to Tamazunchale (1987), also notable in the strong presence of two frequently oppositional seniors in Arias’s novel and the appearance of the protagonist’s deceased wife in the form of a ghost. 18. Biggers notes, “His [Véa’s] fiction recognizes history as geography, a history that is vital and still breathing life into a world that has not vanished” (34), an observation consistent with the timeless nature of the cultural connections held by the Yaquis to their traditional territory in La Maravilla. 19. See my discussion in chapter 4 regarding Cenobio as individualistic aesthete. 20. The Mexican-­Hispanic opposition to Yoeme culture is present in the cultural tug-­ of-­war between Manuel and the very Catholic grandmother. Josephina, who disparages Manuel’s “yoan-­ya, his crazy religion” and the apparition of Manuel’s “dead heathen father” wearing “a máscara chapayeka, a Pharisee mask,” constantly engages Alberto with her adherence to Catholicism (Véa 16). For her, the Yoemem and Mayos are “Christians on the outside but moreakame, bad witchcraft” on the inside (17). Here we can connect Véa’s Josephina-­Manuel dialectic to Fontes’s Felipa-­José dialectic, an ideological struggle that plays out in the Yaqui-­Yoeme lexical binary (Fontes, Dreams 20). 21. Véa demonstrates his knowledge of ethnographic research throughout the novel. In the sixth chapter, the omniscient narrator alludes to a mythological time, an often-­cited theme in studies of creation stories: “There is a mythological time; the time of gardens; of Eden and Aztlán. It is a time when all times, past, present and future, may coexist” (Véa 97). This is what allows the warrior Omteme to confront Christopher Columbus in the Sonoran desert, for example. Early on, the narrator refers to the talking tree when expounding on the connections between culture and

190 NOTES TO PAGES 155–163

language (Véa 31), and again when Alberto flies to the mythological Yaqui territory, in Cócorit, to meet his great-­grandfather (227). 22. Valdez immediately distances his play from the work of Castañeda. In the fictional prologue to Mummified Deer, Armida Bravo, a professor of cultural anthropology, mentions Castañeda’s work within a U.S. cultural framework: “If it hadn’t been for Carlos Castañeda, I never would have known what deep secrets Mama Chu was hiding. In the Spring of 1969, The Yaqui Way of Knowledge was a bestseller . . . in Berkeley. . . . With tales of indio sorcerors [sic], power spots and peyote hallucinations, Castañeda opened the doors of perception to parallel universes and blew the minds of my hippy generation. . . . But for me, The Yaqui Way led back home . . . to reality” (Valdez, Mummified 3). Right away, Valdez addresses the inevitable presence of Castañeda’s don Juan Matus, the cultural reference for Yaqui culture in the United States. Once mentioned, Castañeda’s disputed anthropology is quickly forgotten as Armida immediately shifts his focus to reality, in the form of a memory of Mama Chu, onstage, “waltzing” to the song “Sonora Querida.” For a discussion of Castañeda’s academic legitimacy, see Yves Morton’s “The Experimental Approach to Anthropology and Castañeda’s Ambiguous Legacy” (1994). 23. Nonetheless, Spicer notes his own difficulties in understanding Yoeme culture as a Western scholar. With regard to the Testamento, the flood story delineating the boundaries of Hiakim, Spicer admits his initial unpreparedness “for the interweaving of Christian and pagan names as well as concepts in the mythology” (“Excerpts” 115–­16). 24. The eight traditional Yaqui pueblos are Cócorit, Bacum, Huirivis, Belem, Torim, Vícam, Potam, and Rahum; the Río Yaqui and what is today Ciudad Obregón also make up part of this territory (Spicer, The Yaquis 27). 25. This is also consistent with Alma Luz Villanueva’s description of the dreaming taught to her by her Yaqui grandmother (“Alma Luz” 300). 26. In reality, the old indigenous men practice everyday forms of resistance to U.S. consumer society. For example, Manuel insists that Alberto attend the rite wearing “no store-­bought clothing” (Véa 214). And while some of the men proudly claim never to have used telephones or electric lights, others claim not to have eaten in restaurants or used modern toilets (215–­16). 27. See Alarcón’s “The Aztec Palimpsest: Toward a New Understanding of Aztlán, Cultural Identity and History” (1992) and Pérez-­Torres’s “Refiguring Aztlán” (1997). For the sake of brevity, I have excluded many participants in discussions of this theme, including other contributors to Aztlán: Essays on the Chicano Homeland, edited by Rodolfo A. Anaya and Francisco A. Lomelí (1989), an essential collection by premier Chicana/o thinkers that contains some poignant criticism of the concept of Aztlán. On the question of Latina/o Indigenismo, George Hartley summarizes the problems involved in the strategic claim to indigenous identity:

NOTES TO PAGES 163–165  191

1) the all-­too-­easy charges of “nostalgia,” “romanticism,” and “essentialism” used against every ethnic or traditional revival . . . 2) the charge of anti-­ black racism, wherein the turn to an indigenous identity reputedly masks an attempt to erase blackness; and 3) the charge of illicit cooptation of signs of indigeneity at the expense of “real living” indigenous groups and people. The last category involves in part the Latin American tradition of state indigenismo, wherein various criollo (or European descendants born in the Americas) and mestizo (mixed European and indigenous) nationalists, as part of their independence struggles, hold out their indigenous past as a way to claim hemispheric priority in the face of European and Yankee forms of imperialism. (182–­83) 28.

In “Queer Aztlán,” Moraga calls for a tribal model for the Chicana/o nation on the grounds that it would be more inclusive of gay and lesbian Chicanas/os, rejecting early usages of pre-­Columbian culture by males who at times “took the worst of Mexican machismo and Aztec warrior bravado” to oppress Chicana agency (156–­ 57). With regard to her conception of Aztlán, she alludes to the appearance of the word “Aztlán” on the side of a mountain she drives by and writes that “it had nothing to do with the Aztecs and everything to do with Mexican birds, Mexican beaches, and Mexican babies right here in Califas” (151). 29. The novel also refers to a group called “the chemical people,” described as African Americans who mutilated their skin in attempting to whiten their faces to conform to 1950s mainstream racial standards. They are also Xipe: “Their skin was blotched black and pink where lye compounds or sulfuric acid mixtures had been applied to whiten the skin” (Véa 88). Alaimo proposes that as “the chemical people attempt to put on the skin of those in power [they represent] cautionary mirror images of how the exchange of identities within oppressive economies becomes a violent and scarring transaction” (168). Since the controversial practice of cosmetic whitening is beyond the scope of this book, I recommend Jemima Pierre’s “‘I Like Your Colour!’ Skin Bleaching and Geographies of Race in Urban Ghana” (2008); and, for a U.S. focus, Evelyn Nakano Glenn’s “Yearning for Lightness: Transnational Circuits in the Marketing and Consumption of Skin Lighteners” (2008). Identification with the Aztec divinity of flayed skin is also applied to a group of transgender men known as the maricones. But in this instance, their Xipe identity “invokes the more ancient god who represents new life emerging from the old” (Alaimo 168). Noteworthily, Véa’s insistence on the slur maricones reveals a realist depiction of transgender people who, while accepted into Buckeye Road’s community, remain gendered Others. 30. Poet Lorna Dee Cervantes, for example, openly embraces her Chicana-­Chumash heritage. Ana Castillo, who identifies with her mother’s family’s indeterminate indigenous descent from the Guanajuato region, on the other hand, insists, “But

192 NOTES TO PAGES 165–175

with her, they are not Aztec. It is just that we have more information about the Aztecs than we do about the other tribes” (Castillo 22). 31. Yaqui ethnic superiority here should not be read as equivalent to Western (U.S.-­ European) ethnocentricism, fraught with racist science and military justifications of dominating barbaric peoples. Instead, I propose that the Yaqui sense of ethnic superiority be understood as an example of a nationalist tendency through which many populations define their place among neighboring nations. A further investigation of origin stories of nations big and small would no doubt reveal this to be true. 32. However, Josephina’s use of heathen is meant to qualify the Spanish curandera’s Eurocentric sensibilities as well as engage the concept of civilización y barbarie, according to which Yaquis have been historically depicted. 33. It is noteworthy that just as Peregrinos’s Frankie Pérez is drafted, Alberto has returned from the Vietnam War at the end of La Maravilla. And again, his experiences are harrowing: “Only days ago he had apologized for the world into the ear of a dying friend who had been lovingly overdosed. A corporal whose brown face was gone but whose windpipe had sucked and wheezed with maddening tenacity” (Véa 279). 34. Nava’s next novel, for example, will deal specifically with a Yoeme community during the Porfirian repression, while Fontes’s upcoming novel develops the mestizo-­Yoeme Charco as a general in “the Yaqui battalion [that] wanted no Mexican to ride with them” to Yucatán (Fontes, “Interview” 160).

CONCLUSION 1. 2.

3.

At the same time, it can prove difficult to find “mainstream” mestizo Mexicans and Mexican Americans who openly identify with their Native ancestry. María Candelaria (Xochimilco) (1943) and Maclovia (1948) are Golden Age melodramas directed by Emilio “Indio” Fernández; the former portrays a Nahuatl community in Xochimilco and the latter the Tarasco people of Janitzio, Michoacán. In both films, “Indian law” decrees that women who deviate sexually, whether by carrying on an affair with a nonindigenous man or being raised by a mother who is a known prostitute, be stoned to death. These sorts of depictions insinuate innate savagery in indigenous juridical organizations. In the leaked telephone recording, Córdova, who had just met with indigenous leaders, makes fun of Guanajuato indigenous leader Mauricio Mata Soria’s limited Spanish. Córdova’s rant includes derisive parody such as, “A ver güey, Edmundo ( Jacobo), no mames, no voy a mentir, te lo voy a decir como hablaba ese cabrón,

NOTES TO PAGE 177  193

4.

te lo voy a decir: yo jefe gran nación chichimeca, vengo Guanajuato, yo decir a ti o diputados para nosotros o yo no permitir tus elecciones” (Cabrera). Arizona communities include the New Pascua reservation, Old Pascua in Tucson, Barrio Libre in South Tucson, and Guadalupe in Phoenix.

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“The Yaqui Women Show Great Bravery.” San Francisco Call 21 October 1903. Print. Ybarra, Patricia. “The Revolution Fails Here: Cherríe Moraga’s The Hungry Woman as a Mexican Medea.” Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies 33.1 (2008): 63–­88. Print. Zea, Leopoldo. El Positivismo en México: Nacimiento, apogeo y decadencia. 1943. Mexico City: Fondo De Cultura Económica, 1988. Print.

INDEX

Aboriginal Culture of the Cahita Indians, The (Beals), 104 acción indigenista, 97–­98 agriculture, 24, 33, 34 Aguilar Mora, Jorge, 81–­82 Alarcón, David Cooper, 163 Al filo del agua (Yáñez), 69, 72 Almanac of the Dead (Silko), 163–­64 Altamirano, Ignacio Manuel, 184n12 Alurista, 30, 131, 138, 139 Aniam cosmology: Catholicism and, 31–­39, 49, 50–­51, 180n4, 181n6; foundational narratives of, 31–­32, 39–­53. See also deer dance (Maso Me’ewa); pascola; Testamento (“Rahum Land Myths”); traditional (origin) stories anthropological archive, 6–­7, 12, 174–­75; The Aboriginal Culture of the Cahita Indians, 104; Arte de la lengua cahita por un padre de la compañía de Jesús, 101–­2; Chicana/o–­Yaqui literature and, 133–­34, 152–­57, 169, 189–­90n21 (see also La Maravilla [Veá]); The Comparative Ethnology of Northern Mexico before 1750, 104, 186n5; Forjando patria, 96, 98–­99, 103–­4, 108, 123; Historia de los triunfos de nuestra santa fe entre gentes las más bárbaras y fieras del nuevo orbe, 101; Indigenista literature and, 12, 95, 96, 100–­109, 110–­11, 129–­30, 171–­72, 174–­75

(see also Indigenista literature); “La institución del compadrazgo entre los indios de México,” 108; La población indígena de México: Etnografía, 107–­8, 187n7; Las razas indígenas de Sonora y la guerra del Yaqui, 102–­3; Las tribus yaquis de Sonora: Su cultura y anhelada autodeterminación, 105–­7, 119; Studies of the Yaqui of Sonora, 104–­5 anthropometry, 99, 102, 105, 122, 157, 186n3 anticlericalism, 187n8 Anzaldúa, Gloria, 163 Apache, 27, 45, 48, 72, 150, 166, 180n4 Apuntes de un lugareño (Romero), 71–­72 Arias, Ron, 189n17 Arielismo, 76 arraigamiento (rooting), 11, 173; in Cajeme: Novela de indios, 112–­13, 153; definition of, 31–­32, 60, 62, 152; in La Maravilla, 132–­33, 152–­53, 157–­62, 166, 168, 189n18; pre-­1910 Yaqui revolution and, 64–­65; in “Tata Casehua,” 134; in Testamento, 55–­56; in traditional stories, 31–­32, 39, 40, 42–­43, 44, 45, 47, 52–­53, 166 Arte de la lengua cahita por un padre de la compañía de Jesús, 101–­2 atavism, 99, 114, 125 Ateneo de la Juventud, 76 Aub, Max, 69

208 INDEX

Ayotzinapa protest, 3–­4, 170–­7 1 Aztlán aesthetics, 30–­31, 131, 137, 162–­67, 177, 188n4, 190–­91n27, 191n28 Aztlán and Viet Nam (Mariscal), 132 Azuela, Mariano, 30, 68, 69, 70, 76, 77, 183n7, 183n9, 183n10, 185n23 Ballet Folklórico de México de Amalia Hernández, 11, 16, 18, 23–­26, 108, 173 Banderas, Juan, 5, 27, 48, 64, 102 Bantjes, Adrian A., 5 baptism, 45, 51, 181n13 Barbarous Mexico (Turner), 29–­30 Basauri, Carlos, 107–­8, 174, 187n7 Basilio, Tomás, Fr., 33–­34, 101–­2 Basoritimea, Bernabé, 58 Battle of Leon, 84–­85, 185n26 Battle of Naco, 185n24 Battle of Santa Rosa, 80 Beals, Ralph L., 104, 154, 175, 186n5 Beltrán, Francisco, 88 Benavidez, Roy, 27–­28 Beverley, John, 109 Bigas Torres, Sylvia, 9, 109, 123, 126–­27, 128 Biggers, Jeff, 189n18 Bobok the toad stories, 181n14 Bonfil Batalla, Guillermo, 15 borderlands, 10, 13, 81, 85, 133, 135, 139, 140, 149–­50, 152, 159, 162–­65, 176–­77, 193n4 Bórquez, Djed, 84–­85, 189n13 Bravo, Armida, 190n22 Broyles-­González, Yolanda, 36, 38, 137, 163 Bruce-­Novoa, Juan, 154 Buelna, Eustaquio, 102, 174 Bule, Luis, 61, 66, 67, 78, 80 Bulnes, Francisco, 27 Cajeme. See Leyva, José María (Cajeme) Cajeme: Novela de indios (Chávez Camacho), 97, 111–­14, 115, 153 Calderón, Héctor, 10 Campamento (López y Fuentes), 71 Campobello, Nellie, 71 Candelaria, Cordelia, 138 Cantú, Roberto, 143, 188n6 Cárdenas, Cuauhtémoc, 170–­7 1 Cárdenas, Lázaro, 29, 48, 67, 94, 95, 171 Carlston, Erin G., 152, 156 Cartucho (Campobello), 71 Casavant, Henri A., 128 Castañeda, Carlos, 12, 139, 153–­54, 155, 190n22

Castaneda’s Journey: The Power and the Allegory (De Mille), 154 Castellanos, Rosario, 19, 186n2 Castillo, Ana, 188n6, 192n30 Catholicism: in The Hummingbird’s Daughter, 146; in “La Chingada,” 136; in La Maravilla, 189n20; in “Leyenda yaqui de las predicciones,” 47; in “Omteme,” 50–­51; in Testamento, 42, 53–­59; Yaqui acquisition of, 32–­39, 49; in “Yomumuli and the Little Surem People,” 44–­45, 47. See also Jesuit missions; Waehma (Easter-­Lenten) festival Cervantes, Lorna Dee, 192n30 Chávez, Carlos, 179n2 Chávez, Lucas, 31, 41, 42, 57 Chávez Camacho, Armando, 18, 96, 97, 111–­14, 115, 153, 157 Chicana/o-­Aztec aesthetics, 137, 188n4 Chicana/o literature: Dreams of the Centaur, 122, 141–­44, 149–­50, 169, 183n4, 189n20; Floricanto en Aztlán, 139, 188n7; The Hummingbird’s Daughter, 144–­46, 149–­50, 169, 183n4, 188nn9–­11; The Hungry Woman: A Mexican Medea, 139–­40; I Am Joaquín, 138–­39; “Libertad sin lágrimas,” 30 Chicana/o–­Yaqui experience, 132, 133, 176–­78, 188n2 Chicana/o–­Yaqui literature, 7–­8, 9–­10, 12–­13, 131–­69, 171–­72, 176–­7 8; The City of Palaces, 13, 146–­50, 169, 177; historical novels, 140–­ 51, 177; “La Chingada,” 136; “La Llorona/ Weeping Woman,” 133, 136, 176–­77; La Maravilla, 12–­13, 132–­33, 151–­62, 189n20 (see also La Maravilla [Véa]); movement poetry, 138–­39; Mummified Deer, 13, 133, 137–­38, 169, 176–­7 7, 190n22; Peregrinos de Aztlán, 135, 159, 169, 192n33; pre-­ Columbian history and, 16, 30–­31, 133, 137, 139–­40, 176, 177, 188n4; “Tata Casehua,” 133, 134–­35; Zoot Suit, 30–­31 Chicano Movement, 138–­39, 162–­63, 164–­65 científico positivism, 60, 68, 75–­76, 131 científicos, 182n20 City of Palaces, The (Nava), 13, 146–­50, 169, 177, 189n12 civilización y barbarie (civilization and barbarism), 60, 68, 77, 82, 95, 97, 115, 192n32; The Hummingbird’s Daughter and, 145–­46; “La triste historia del pascola Cenobio” and, 122–­28; Sarmiento on, 76, 185n22

INDEX 209

Cockcroft, James D., 183n5 coloniality of knowledge, 171–­72 Columbus, Christopher, 50, 51, 52, 63, 94, 161, 189–­90n21 Comparative Ethnology of Northern Mexico before 1750, The (Beals), 104, 186n5 Contreras, Sheila Marie, 22, 163 Convention of Aguasclientes, 87–­88 Cooper, James Fenimore, 185n22 Córdova Vianello, Lorenzo, 175, 193n3 Corral, Ramón, 21, 148 Cortés, Hernán, 101 coyote dance, 112, 119 Coyote Society, 181–­82n16 Cruz, Chito, 82–­83 “Cuando el indio hablaba con los animales de uña y ala”: in Cajeme: Novela de indios, 113 Cuidad Obregón: monuments of, 16, 17, 19–­ 23, 172–­73 cultural nationalism, 30, 68, 69–­70, 185n23 curanderismo, 136, 145, 152 Dabdoub, Claudio, 92, 93, 185n24, 185n25 Dawson, Alexander S., 99 Decena Trágica event, 80, 146 deer dance (Maso Me’ewa), 11, 12, 174; at Ballet Folklórico de México de Amalia Hernández, 11, 16, 18, 23–­26, 108; in Cajeme: Novela de indios, 112–­13; Edward H. Spicer on, 36–­38, 108; graphic appropriation of, 17; as interpretive paradigm, 91–­93; in “La triste historia del pascola Cenobio,” 117–­22, 129, 187n15, 187n16; Mexican aesthetic reinterpretation of, 25–­ 26; monument to, 22, 180n3; nonindigenous appropriation of, 17; in Novel of the Revolution, 83–­84, 87–­93, 94; performance program for, 23–­24; spiritual realms of, 35–­ 36, 37–­38; in Sunday kontim, 36–­37 Deloria, Philip J., 173, 177 De Mille, Richard, 154 Denver Crusade for Justice, 138, 139 Denver Youth Conference, 138 Desbandada (Romero), 72, 184n13 Diaspora, 7, 12, 66, 94, 133, 137, 141, 148, 152, 157, 161, 167, 176 Díaz, Bernal, 101 Díaz, Porfirio, 7, 11–­12, 27, 65, 74, 147, 155, 184n11; in La Maravilla, 161 Dreams of the Centaur (Fontes), 122, 141–­44, 149–­50, 169, 183n4, 189n20

Echevarría, Esteban, 185n22 El águila y la serpiente (Guzmán), 18, 30, 70–­ 71, 80–­81, 183n7 el ciclo de Chiapas, 96, 186n2 El diosero (Rojas González), 116, 187n14 “El dios vivo” (Revueltas), 97 El indio (López y Fuentes), 83, 95–­96, 110 El laberinto de la soledad (Paz), 19 El Novillo reservoir, 14 El resplandor (Magdaleno), 95–­96, 110 El Teatro Campesino, 137 “El yaqui” (Rubín), 115 epistemology: nonindigenous, 16, 26, 28, 68, 96, 99–­100, 108–­9, 142, 151–­52, 160; shift in, 11, 13, 31–­32, 60, 64, 87, 93, 148, 150, 173; systems of, 49; Yoeme, 29, 37–­39, 42–­43, 52, 56, 84, 132–­33, 143, 145, 163, 165, 168–­69 Erickson, Kirstin, 45, 126 Espinosa, Luis, 79–­80 etehoi (storytelling), 5; deer dance during, 85; in Dreams of the Centaur, 143; in La Maravilla, 160–­62, 176; in Miguel Méndez’s writing, 176 Evers, Larry, 40, 41, 53, 56, 57, 58, 83, 169, 182n17 EZLN (Zapatista Army of National Liberation), 3–­4, 170 Fabila, Alfonso, 41, 105–­7, 113, 114, 120, 153, 174, 181n9, 186–­87n6; Las tribus yaquis de Sonora: Su cultura y anhelada autodeterminación, 105–­7, 119 Facundo o Civilización y barbarie (Sarmiento), 7, 76, 185n22 Fernández, Emilio, 184n15 Florescano, Enrique, 19 Florez Leyva, Alfonso, 31, 53 Floricanto en Aztlán (Alurista), 139, 188n7 Folsom, Raphael Brewster, 58 Fontes, Montserrat, 8, 122, 132, 138, 140–­44, 149–­50, 169, 177, 183n4, 191n34 Forjando patria (Gamio), 96, 98–­99, 103–­4, 108, 123 Franco, Jean, 76, 110–­11 Frías, Heriberto, 183n8 Fuentes, Carlos, 11, 72, 87–­88, 89–­93, 174, 185n28 Gamio, Manuel, 26, 67, 96, 98–­99, 101, 103–­4, 108, 110, 114, 123, 153 Gaspar de Alba, Alicia, 133, 162, 166, 188n4

210 INDEX

gender: in The Hungry Woman: A Mexican Medea, 139–­40. See also Yaqui mother/ motherhood; Yaqui women Giddings, Ruth W., 40–­41, 42, 165–­66, 181n8 Gonzales, Rodolfo “Corky,” 131, 138–­39 González, Manuel Pedro, 69, 183n7 González Echevarría, Roberto, 9, 101, 189n15 Grageda Bustamante, Aarón, 15–­16, 36, 68, 180n4 Guidotti-­Hernández, Nicole M., 64, 141, 144 Guzmán, Diego de, 27, 51, 58 Guzmán, Martín Luis, 11, 18, 30, 63, 68, 69, 70–­7 1, 76, 80–­81, 174, 183n7, 187n12 Gyurko, Lanin A., 72, 76–­7 7 Hartley, George, 8–­9, 190–­91n27 Hernández, Fortunato, 102–­3, 174, 186n4 Hernández Cuevas, Marco Polo, 185n28 Hiakim (Yaqui homeland): foundational narratives of, 31–­32, 53–­59, 78, 184n18; Jesuit presence in, 33–­35, 48; Yaqui defense of, 6–­7, 47–­48, 64–­66, 78–­79, 95–­96. See also arraigamiento (rooting) “Hículi Hualula” (Rojas González), 156 Hinojosa, Rolando, 141 Historia de los triunfos de nuestra santa fe entre gentes las más bárbaras y fieras del nuevo orbe (Pérez de Ribas), 101 Holden, W. C., 12, 104–­5, 121, 124, 125, 175 Hu-­DeHart, Evelyn, 48, 64, 79, 169 Huerta, Jorge, 137 Hummingbird’s Daughter, The (Urrea), 144–­46, 149–­50, 169, 183n4, 188nn9–­11 Hungry Woman: A Mexican Medea, The (Moraga), 139–­40 Hurdaide, Diego Martínez de, 32–­33, 58, 101 Huya Ania (wilderness), 180n3; in Cajeme: Novela de indios, 113, 153; in deer dance, 24, 36, 37 (see also deer dance [Maso Me’ewa]); definition of, 35; in La Maravilla, 158–­59, 161; in “Tata Casehua,” 134–­35; in “Yomumuli and the Little Surem People,” 44, 181n11. See also Sea Ania (flower world); Yo Ania (enchanted world) I Am Joaquín (Gonzales), 138–­39 incorporacionismo, 98–­99, 114–­17 indiada, 76, 184n20 indigeneity, 8–­9, 17, 19, 22, 153, 174 indigenismo, 7–­8, 9, 12, 96, 109, 131, 179n2. See also Indigenista literature

indigenismo chicano, 13, 22, 30, 131, 136–­37, 139–­ 40, 151–­52, 162–­64, 166–­69, 177–­7 8. See also Chicana/o–­Yaqui literature Indigenista literature, 109–­11, 171–­72; anthropological archive and, 95, 96, 100–­109, 110–­11, 129–­30, 189n15; Cajeme: Novela de indios, 97, 111–­14, 115, 153; documentary style in, 110–­11; el ciclo de Chiapas and, 96, 186n2; “El yaqui,” 115; incorporacionismo in, 98–­99, 114–­17; Juan Pérez Jolote: Biografía de un tzotzil, 110–­11; “La mula muerta,” 97, 114–­16; “La triste historia del pascola Cenobio,” 96–­97, 108, 116–­28, 153, 174–­75 (see also “La triste historia del pascola Cenobio” [Rojas González]); literary techniques in, 97; Lola Casanova, 116–­17; Mexican state making and, 99; pluriculturalismo in, 99, 105–­6, 111–­14, 115, 124 indio, 62, 70–­72, 76, 82, 95, 129 Irwin, Robert McKee, 150, 163 Jesuit missions, 27, 33–­35; education and, 180n2; expulsion of, 35; resistance to, 34, 35; Yaqui delegations to, 33–­34; Yaqui intermediaries in, 34. See also Catholicism Jesus Christ, 38, 182n2; in Cajeme: Novela de indios, 112; as deer figure, 92, 186n29; in Dreams of the Centaur, 143; in “Yomumuli and the Little Surem People,” 44. See also Waehma (Easter-­Lenten) festival “Jículi ba-­ba” (Rojas González), 156 Jiménez Gutiérrez, Fernando, 3, 170 Juan Pérez Jolote: Biografía de un tzotzil (Pozas), 110–­11 Kelley, Jane Holden, 66, 67, 82–­83, 84–­85, 189n13 Knight, Alan, 62, 149 kontim, 36–­37, 58–­59 Krauze, Enrique, 62, 183n6 La Bamba, 172 “La Chingada” (Villanueva), 136 “La institución del compadrazgo entre los indios de México” (Rojas González), 108 “La Llorona/Weeping Woman” (Villanueva), 133, 136, 176–­7 7 La Maravilla (Véa), 12–­13, 132–­33, 151–­62, 176; aboriginal epistemological filter of, 132–­33, 151; anthropological research and, 12–­13, 152–­57, 169, 189–­90n21; arraigamiento in,

INDEX 211

132–­33, 152–­53, 157–­62, 166, 168, 189n18; autobiographical nature of, 151; Aztlán motifs in, 162–­67; “chemical people” in, 191n29; etehoi in, 160–­62; flight image in, 155; Hakim-­bound cultural resistance in, 160–­62, 166–­67, 190n26; indigenous hierarchies in, 162–­67, 168; literary impact of, 132, 168–­69; Mexican Revolution in, 166; pascola in, 157; peyote ritual in, 153–­ 57; three sacred realms in, 158–­59, 190n25; Vietnam War in, 192n33; Xipe designation in, 165, 191n29; Yaqui dance in, 157; Yaqui superiority in, 165–­66, 168, 192n31, 192n32; Yaqui/Yoeme in, 189n16 La muerte de Artemio Cruz (Fuentes), 18, 72, 89–­93, 174, 185n28 “La mula muerta” (Rubín), 97, 114–­16 “Lancaster Kid” (Rojas González), 86–­87, 185n27 La negra Angustias (Rojas González), 72 “La pascola encantada,” 120 La población de Teotihuacán, 99 La población indígena de México: Etnografía (Basauri), 107–­8, 187n7 La región más transparente (Fuentes), 87–­88 Las razas indígenas de Sonora y la guerra del Yaqui (Hernández), 102–­3 Las tribus yaquis de Sonora: Su cultura y anhelada autodeterminación (Fabila), 105–­7, 119 La sucesión presidencial de 1910 (Madero), 74–­75, 184n17 Las vueltas del tiempo (Yáñez), 72 “La triste historia del pascola Cenobio” (Rojas González), 96–­97, 108, 116, 117–­28, 153; ethnographic influence on, 118, 119, 121–­22, 124, 128, 129, 174–­75, 187n13; naming in, 118–­19; Yaqui dance depiction in, 118, 119, 129, 187n15, 187n16; Yaqui judicial system (ley yaqui) in, 123–­25, 127–­28; Yaqui mother in, 125–­27, 175; zoomorphism in, 124–­25 “La yaqui hermosa (sucedido)” (Nervo), 73–­74, 184n16 Leal, Luis, 73 Levinson, Sanford, 20 “Leyenda yaqui de las predicciones,” 39, 42, 45–­49, 59, 173; in Cajeme: Novela de indios, 113, 153; in La Maravilla, 166 Leyva, José María (Cajeme), 5, 61, 64, 93, 102; Alfonso Fabila on, 186–­87n6; biography of, 21; monument to, 17, 22; Robert

McKee Irwin on, 163; Testamento copy of, 41, 57 “Libertad sin lágrimas” (Alurista), 30 Limón, Graciela, 188n6 Lola Casanova (Rojas González), 116–­17 López y Fuentes, Gregorio, 11, 81, 82; Campamento, 71; El indio, 83, 95–­96, 110; La muerte de Artemio Cruz, 18, 72, 89–­93, 174, 185n28; La región más transparente, 87–­88; Tierra: La revolución agraria en México, 71, 81, 82, 111, 187n12, 189n13 Los de abajo (Azuela), 30, 70, 77, 183n7, 183n9, 183n10, 185n23 “Los tzotziles” (Rojas González), 99 Luján de Villanueva, Jesús, 135–­36 Luna, Mario, 3, 170 Lund, Joshua, 184n12 Maclovia, 175, 192n2 Madero, Francisco I., 7, 66–­67, 74–­75, 78–­79, 184n17; assassination of, 80, 146 Magdaleno, Mauricio, 95–­96, 110 Magón, Ricardo Flores, 183n5 Maldonado, Juan (Tetabiate), 11, 18, 61, 65; monument to, 16, 17, 19–­23 Mann, Kristin Dutcher, 60, 180n2 Manzanares, Adriana, 175 María Candelaria (Xochimilco), 175, 184n15, 192n2 Mariscal, George, 27–­28, 132 Martin, Desirée, 150 Maso Me’ewa. See deer dance (Maso Me’ewa) matachines, 5, 26, 35, 84 Matus, Luis, 79–­80 Mayo, 5, 17, 45, 48, 51, 67, 71, 82, 84–­85, 89, 104, 144–­45, 149–­50 Maytorena, José María, 66, 78, 79, 80, 88 Mazocoba Massacre, 5, 65, 107, 121, 122, 150; in “Tata Casehua,” 134–­35 McGuire, Thomas, 38, 48 Memories of Ana Calderón, The (Limón), 188n6 Menchú, Rigoberta, 109 Méndez, Fructuoso, 185n25 Méndez, Miguel, 7, 10, 12, 18, 133, 134–­35, 159, 169, 176 Mendizábal, Miguel Othón de, 27, 48, 180n4 Menton, Seymour, 74 mestizaje, 8–­9, 23, 71, 98–­99, 103, 107–­8, 137, 156, 165, 178

212 INDEX

Mexican Americans, 4, 7, 150, 179n1, 192n1. See also Chicana/o literature; Chicana/o–­Yaqui literature Mexican Revolution, 5, 7, 22, 26; in The City of Palaces, 149; literature of, 11–­12, 22, 60, 63–­64 (see also Novel of the Revolution); Yaqui participation in, 61–­63, 64–­67, 78–­ 87, 83–­84, 95; Yaqui place making during, 83–­84, 85–­86; Yaqui resistance to, 78–­79 México íntegro (Sáenz), 99 Mignolo, Walter D., 99–­100, 101 Moisés, Rosalio, 107 Molina, Felipe S., 28, 40, 41, 53, 56, 57, 58, 83, 169, 182n17 Montemayor, Carlos, 40–­41, 42, 55 monuments: in Cuidad Obregón, 16, 17, 19–­ 23, 172–­73 Moraga, Cherríe L., 18, 131, 138, 139–­40, 191n28 Morales, Lino, 67, 79, 80, 83, 185n25 Moreno, Chepa, 82–­83 Moreno, Francisco, 83 Mori, Ignacio, 185n25 Movimiento Ciudadano, 14–­15, 29 Mujer que sabe latín . . . (Castellanos), 19 Mummified Deer (Valdez), 13, 133, 137–­38, 169, 176–­7 7, 190n22 Muñoz, Rafael F., 11, 63, 72, 88–­89 muralismo movement/muralista art, 67, 70, 75, 77, 183n7, 184n19, 185n23 myth making, 18–­28; deer dance and, 23–­26 (see also deer dance [Maso Me’ewa]); in literature, 26–­28 (see also specific literary traditions and specific works); monuments and, 19–­23. See alsoYaqui warrior myth/ Yaqui warriorhood Narrative of Greater Mexico: Essays on Chicano Literary History, Genre, and Borders (Calderón), 10 National Museum of History and Ethnography, 99 Native American literature: Almanac of the Dead, 163–­64 Nava, Michael, 7, 10, 13, 131, 132, 133, 140–­41, 146–­50, 169, 176, 177, 189n12, 192n34 Nervo, Amado, 73–­74, 91, 131, 184n16 Noah’s ark story, 55 Novel of the Revolution, 11–­12, 22, 60, 63–­64, 67–­7 7, 171–­72, 173–­74; Al filo del agua, 69, 72; Apuntes de un lugareño, 71–­72; Campamento, 71; Cartucho, 71; deer dance and,

83–­84, 87–­93; El águila y la serpiente, 18, 30, 70–­7 1, 80–­81, 183n7; historical value of, 69; ideologies of, 68–­70, 75–­7 7; indio symbolism in, 70; La muerte de Artemio Cruz, 18, 72, 89–­93, 174, 185n28; “Lancaster Kid,” 86–­87, 185n27; La negra Angustias, 72; Las vueltas del tiempo, 72; Los de abajo, 30, 70, 77, 183n7, 183n9, 183n10, 185n23; Mexican cultural nationalism and, 69–­70; peones in, 71, 184n11; pre-­revolutionary texts and, 73–­ 75; race in, 70, 71–­72, 77, 93; ranchero type in, 183n10; Sierra del Bacatete in, 80–­81; social types in, 70–­72, 183n10; Tierra: La revolución agraria en México, 71, 81, 82, 111, 187n12, 189n13; ugly Indian trope in, 71–­72, 184n12; ¡Vámonos con Pancho Villa!, 72, 88–­89; Yaqui representation in, 68–­73, 76–­ 77, 80–­82, 83–­93, 97, 189n14; Yaqui ritual depictions in, 83–­86, 93–­94; Yaqui speech depiction in, 88–­89; Yaqui war drums in, 80–­81, 86–­87; Yórem Tamegua, 84–­85, 189n13; zoomorphism in, 72 Obregón, Álvaro, 5, 87; last Yaqui revolt and, 95, 186n1; monument to, 22; Yaqui support of, 62, 66, 67, 79, 80–­81, 88, 183n6 O’Connell, Joanna, 129 Okie, 189n16 Olavarría, María Eugenia, 17, 32, 39 “Omteme,” 39, 42, 50–­53, 63, 173 Orientalism, 100, 109, 129–­30 origin stories. See traditional (origin) stories Orozco, Pascual, 66 Padrés, Guillermo, 3, 14, 173 Parra, Max, 10, 68, 77, 185n23 Partido de la Revolución Democrática (PRD), 170–­7 1 pascola, 5, 12, 24, 25, 35, 37–­38; in Cajeme: Novela de indios, 112; in La Maravilla, 157, 162; in “La triste historia del pascola Cenobio,” 117–­22, 153; in Yórem Tamegua, 84–­85. See also deer dance (Maso Me’ewa) Paz, Octavio, 19 Peace of Ortiz, 65 “Pensamiento Serpentino” (Valdez), 137 Peregrinos de Aztlán (Méndez), 135, 159, 169, 192n33 Pérez de Ribas, Andrés, 26–­27, 33–­34, 48, 51, 101, 174, 181n13, 181n15 Pérez-­Torres, Rafael, 163

INDEX 213

peyote ritual: in La Maravilla, 153–­57 place-­based aesthetic, 133, 188n4 place-­based identity. See arraigamiento (rooting) Plan de Aztlán, 139 pluriculturalismo, 21, 99, 105–­6, 111–­14, 115, 124 Portal, Marta, 77 positivism, 60, 68, 75–­76, 131 Pozas, Ricardo, 99, 110–­11, 186n2 pre-­Revolutionary literary texts, 73–­75 Primer Congreso Indigenista Interamericano, 110 “Queer Aztlán” (Moraga), 191n28 Quijano, Aníbal, 171–­72 race/racism, 4, 93, 99, 186n30; in Novel of the Revolution, 70, 71–­72, 77, 93 race science: of Carl Coleman Seltzer, 122 Radding, Cynthia, 58 Rag and Bone (Nava), 147 Raíces, 187n14 railroad, 65, 182n3 Ramírez, Dominga, 83–­84 Revueltas, José, 96, 97 Ribas, Alberto, 90–­91 Richardson Construction Company, 65, 182n3 Río Yaqui, 14, 48, 65; eight pueblos/towns along, 34, 79, 190n24 Road to Tamazunchale, The (Arias), 189n17 Rodó, José Enrique, 76 Rojas González, Francisco, 11, 12, 18, 63, 68, 100–­101, 153, 186n2; El diosero, 116, 187n14; “Hículi Hualula,” 156; “Jículi ba-­ba,” 156; “La institución del compadrazgo entre los indios de México,” 108; “Lancaster Kid,” 86–­87, 185n27; La negra Angustias, 72; “La triste historia del pascola Cenobio,” 96–­97, 108, 116, 117–­28, 153, 174–­75, 187n15; Lola Casanova, 116–­17; “Los tzotziles,” 99; “Totemismo y nahulismo,” 155–­56 Romero, José Rubén, 69, 71–­72, 76 Rubín, Ramón, 68, 96, 97, 114–­16, 186n2 Rutherford, John, 77 Sáenz, Moisés, 67, 99, 186n3 Sahagún, Bernardino de, 101 Said, Edward, 100, 109 Saldaña-­Portillo, Josefina, 163, 167 Saldívar, José David, 141 Sapogonia (Castillo), 188n6

Sarmiento, Domingo Faustino, 7, 76, 184n21, 185n22 Savala, Refugio, 59 Sea Ania (flower world), 36, 37, 38, 59, 91, 112–­ 13, 120; clothing and, 126; in La Maravilla, 158–­59 Seltzer, Carl Coleman, 104, 105, 122, 157 Sherman, William Tecumseh, 104 Shorter, David Delgado, 10, 17, 24, 25, 31; on deer dance, 35–­36, 42–­43, 84, 87, 160; on traditional stories, 42–­43, 47, 56 Sierra del Bacatete, 63; in Novel of the Revolution, 78, 80–­81, 86–­87, 93 Silko, Leslie Marmon, 163–­64 “Sinfonía India,” 179n2 skin lightening, 191n29 Sommers, Joseph, 77, 96, 116, 183n10, 185n23, 185n27, 186n2, 187n14 Spicer, Edward H.: on deer dance, 36–­38, 108; La Maravilla influence from, 157–­60; on oppositional integration, 35; on The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge, 154; on Yaqui cosmology, 36–­37, 39, 180n1, 190n23; Yaqui story collection by, 40, 41; on Yaqui warrior myth, 27, 28, 87, 132; on Yoeme-­Spanish relations, 33 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 96, 108 Stewart, Michelle, 8 Streeby, Shelley, 29–­30, 182n18 Studhalter, Richard Arthur, 27, 104–­5 Studies of the Yaqui of Sonora (Holden), 104–­5 syncretism, 31–­39, 49, 50–­51, 180n4, 181n6 Taibo II, Paco Ignacio, 62 talking tree story. See “Leyenda yaqui de las predicciones” “Tata Casehua” (Méndez), 133, 134–­35 Taylor, Analisa, 9, 15, 100, 110, 111, 122; on Cajeme: Novela de indios, 113 Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge, The (Castañeda), 139, 153–­54, 155, 188n 7, 190n22 Testamento (“Rahum Land Myths”), 31–­32, 39–­40, 41, 42, 53–­59, 180n1, 182n19; arraigamiento in, 55–­56; Cajeme’s copy of, 41, 57; Catholic motifs in, 55–­56; community modifications of, 57; formal context of, 41; geopolitical value of, 57–­59; “The Flood and the Prophets” of, 40; vernacular language of, 57, 58; in Yaqui diplomacy, 58–­59 Tetabiate. See Maldonado, Juan (Tetabiate)

214 INDEX

Theater of the Sphere, 137 Tierra: La revolución agraria en México (López y Fuentes), 71, 81, 82, 111, 187n12, 189n13 Tomochic (Frías), 183n8 tona-­nahual concept, 155–­56 torocoyori, 121–­22, 138, 186–­87n6 “Totemismo y nahualismo” (Rojas González), 155–­56 traditional (origin) stories, 39–­43; arraigamiento in, 42–­43, 45–­46, 47, 52–­53; collection of, 40, 41; entertainment function of, 40; formal context of, 41; functions of, 40, 41–­43; historical secrecy of, 40–­41; of invisible entities, 42; “Leyenda yaqui de las predicciones,” 39, 42, 46–­49, 113, 173; Mexican manipulation of, 40–­41; “Omteme,” 39, 42, 50–­53, 63, 173; sources of, 40; “Yomumuli and the Little Surem People,” 39, 42, 43–­46, 159, 173, 181n7. See also Testamento (“Rahum Land Myths”) transcultural culture, 32–­39 Turner, John Kenneth, 29–­30, 182n18 United Nations: Working Group on Indigenous Populations of, 8–­9 Urbalejo, Francisco, 67, 80, 185n25 Urrea, Luis Alberto, 8, 132, 138, 140–­41, 144–­ 46, 149–­50, 169, 177, 183n4, 188nn9–­11 Usacamea, Juan Ignacio (Muni), 58 Valdez, Luis, 7, 10, 13, 18, 30–­31, 133, 136–­38, 169, 172, 176–­77, 190n22 ¡Vámonos con Pancho Villa! (Muñoz), 72, 88–­89 Vasconcelos, José, 67, 107 Véa, Jr., Alfredo, 7, 10, 12–­13, 151–­62, 176. See also La Marvilla (Véa) Velasco, Juan Bautista de, Fr., 101–­2 Villa, Francisco, 66, 71, 87, 184n14; literary depiction of, 88–­89 Villanueva, Alma Luz, 7, 10, 131, 135–­36, 176–­ 77, 188n6 Waehma (Easter-­Lenten) festival, 5, 36, 37, 38; in The City of Palaces, 147–­48; in Dreams of the Centaur, 143; in The Hummingbird’s Daughter, 146; during Mexican Revolution, 84

We Will Dance Our Truth: Yaqui History in Yoeme Performance (Shorter), 10 Williams, Raymond L., 185n28 Wilson, Pamela, 8 Working Group on Indigenous Populations of the United Nations, 8–­9 Xicoténcatl, 21 Yáñez, Agustín, 69, 72 Yaqui(s)/Yoeme(m): borderlands, 176–­7 8, 193n4; cultural heterogeneity of, 59–­60; deportations of, 65–­66, 74–­75, 78, 94, 107, 183n4; ethnic preeminence/superiority of, 42, 47–­48, 165–­66, 168, 192n31, 192n32; guerrilla actions of, 65–­66; literacy of, 41–­ 42; pre-­1910 resistance of, 64–­66; settlement history of, 6–­7; terminological use of, 5, 17, 141–­42, 172, 179n1, 187n1, 189n16 Yaqui body: ethnographic characterizations of, 99, 102–­3, 105–­6, 107 Yaqui dance/dancers, 5, 6, 7; in Cajeme: Novela de indios, 111–­13, 187n10; Catholicism and, 35–­36; deer (See deer dance [Maso Me’ewa]); in “La triste historia del pascola Cenobio,” 117–­22, 129, 187n15, 187n16; literary depiction of, 18, 83–­86 Yaqui deportations, 65–­66, 74–­75, 78, 94, 107, 183n4 Yaqui drumming, 78, 80, 81; in “Lancaster Kid,” 86–­87, 116; in “La triste historia del pascola Cenobio,” 118, 123; in Novel of the Revolution, 86–­87, 173 Yaqui flag, 180n5 Yaqui indigeneity: anthropological archive and, 6–­7, 12, 100–­109, 174–­75 (see also anthropological archive); appropriation of, 6–­8, 9, 15–­18 (see also Chicana/o literature; Chicana/o–­Yaqui literature; Indigenista literature; Novel of the Revolution); definition of, 8–­9; ways of knowing and (see arraigamiento [rooting]; deer dance [Maso Me’ewa]; pascola; traditional [origin] stories) Yaqui judicial system (ley yaqui), 79, 105, 106; in “La triste historia del pascola Cenobio,” 123–­25, 127–­28 Yaqui mother/motherhood, 12; children’s education and, 103, 105, 106–­7, 126; in The

INDEX 215

City of Palaces, 148; in La Maravilla, 162, 164–­65; in “La triste historia del pascola Cenobio,” 97, 117–­18, 122–­23, 125–­27, 175. See also Yaqui women Yaqui-­ness (lo yaqui), 9; as myth, 9–­11, 18–­26; nonindigenous appropriation of, 15–­18, 60 (see also deer dance [Maso Me’ewa]; Yaqui warrior myth/Yaqui warriorhood) Yaquis: A Cultural History, The (Spicer), 157–­58 Yaqui warrior(s), 5; in Battle of Naco, 185n24; contemporary political actions and, 14–­15, 29–­30, 48, 58; Coyote Society of, 181–­82n16; divisions among, 78–­79; institutional documentation on, 15; in Mexican Revolution, 61–­63, 64–­67, 78–­87; productive Yoeme bellicosity of, 46–­47; Spanish conflicts with, 26–­27, 28, 32–­33, 51–­52, 58; stoicism of, 72, 82, 88, 89, 151 Yaqui warrior myth/Yaqui warriorhood, 11, 15–­16, 26–­28; in Campamento, 71; in Chicana/o–­Yaqui literature, 7, 18, 135; in The City of Palaces, 149; in Dreams of the Centaur, 141–­44; in El águila y la serpiente, 70–­7 1, 80–­81; in El indio, 83, 95–­96, 110; in El resplandor, 95–­96, 110; in The Hummingbird’s Daughter, 144–­46; in Indigenista literature, 7, 95–­97; in La muerte de Artemio Cruz, 89–­93; in “La mula muerta,” 114–­15; in “Lancaster Kid,” 86–­87; in La región más transparente, 87–­88; in La sucesión presidencial de 1910, 74–­75; in “La yaqui hermos (sucedido),” 73–­74; in “Leyenda yaqui de las predicciones,” 47–­48; in Lola Casanova, 116–­17; in Mummified Deer, 137–­38; nonindigenous appropriation of, 15–­18, 28; in Novel of the Revolution, 7, 30, 63–­64, 67–­7 7, 80–­94, 173–­74; in Peregrinos de Aztlán, 135; in pre-­revolutionary texts, 73–­75; in Testamento, 53–­59; in Tierra: La revolución agraria en México, 71, 81, 82, 187n12; in traditional origin stories, 43–­53, 59–­60, 173; in ¡Vámonos con Pancho Villa!, 72, 88–­89 Yaqui women: Alfonso Fabila on, 106–­7; Andrés Pérez de Ribas on, 101; classification of, 103–­4; colonial era leadership roles of, 101; Fortunato Hernández on, 102–­3; in The Hummingbird’s Daughter, 144; in The Hungry Woman: A Mexican

Medea, 139–­40; in “La Chingada,” 136; in “La Llorona/Weeping Woman,” 136; Manuel Gamio on, 103–­4; W. C. Holden on, 105; in “Yomumuli and the Little Surem People,” 44. See also Yaqui mother/ motherhood Yaqui Women: Contemporary Life Stories (Kelley), 67, 82–­83, 84–­85, 189n13 Ybarra, Patricia, 139–­40 Yo Ania (enchanted world), 36, 37, 59, 120, 158; in La Maravilla, 159, 161 “Yomumuli and the Little Surem People,” 39, 42, 43–­46, 181n7; in La Maravilla, 159 Yórem Tamegua (Bórquez), 84–­85, 189n13 Zapata, Emiliano, 62, 87, 184n14 zoomorphism, 72, 124–­25 Zoot Suit (Vladez), 30–­31

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ariel Zatarain Tumbaga is an assistant professor of Spanish at Southern Oregon University. His scholarship has been published in the peer-­reviewed journals Aztlán: The Journal of Chicano Studies and Hispanic Issues Online, and in the edited volume Equestrian Rebels: Essays on Mariano Azuela and the Novel of the Mexican Revolution (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2016). His research interests are in twentieth-­century Mexican and Chicana/o literature and culture with a focus on the representation of indigenous people; he is also pursuing research on race concepts in Mexico and Latin America, and among Mexican Americans / Chicanas/os. This book is a heavily revised version of his dissertation, “The Yaqui Warrior Myth: Literary Representation of the Yaquis in Twentieth-­and Twenty-­First-­Century Mexican and Chicana/o Literatures and Cultural Production.” Tumbaga received his PhD in Hispanic languages and literature from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 2009.