2003 CLAS Summer Research Report Delberto Dario Ruiz Ethnic Studies "Yoemem and Others on Both Sides of the US/Mexico Divide: Migratory Subjects, Etehoim (Tellings), Identity and Land"

In the course of centuries of invasion and conquest, many groups of Native American peoples found themselves divided, living on both sides of the borders created and re-created first by the imperial powers and subsequently by independent nation-states. One result of such tribal divisions has been a complicated history of cultural and legal accommodations, aimed at ensuring the survival of tribal identities, whatever the exigencies of the cultural/national identities that shape others living in a given state. In other words, for many Native peoples, “borders” have been less firm or identity-shaping than is usual for other peoples. For many, borders are both legal and cultural obstacles with which tribal people are forced to negotiate. In the process, Native Americans have become anomalies in the contemporary world, true dual citizens, cross-border nations.

One of the most enduring of such cross-border nations is the Yoeme (Yaqui) Nation. The Yoemem Nation includes two groups of citizens, those who live in Mexico, and are also citizens of Mexico, and those who live in the Untied States, and are U.S. citizens. More specifically, the Yoemem tribe includes one band living in Northern Mexico and one living across the border, in Arizona. As a result of this anomaly, each Native nation shares both a multitude of cultural commonalties, including language, ceremonies, art form, and other traditions and a similarly complicated range of differences.

I traveled to Rio Yaqui in the summer of 2003 to spend time among the inhabitants of the Hiakim (Yaqui Holy Lands) in order to examine the holdings in the Yaqui Museum in Ciudad Obregón, Mexico and to research archives at Hermosillo, Mexico as to conduct interviews. The bulk of my research had been conducted using library resources—both primary and secondary. My original objective had been to conduct a more recent historical backdrop of the Rio Yaqui juxtaposed with communities in the Tucson, Arizona area. While conducting previous research in Arizona I found a great diversity in the way in which Yoemem (Yaquis) identify. Some of the subjects I interviewed in Arizona identified as Chicanas or Chicanos. Others simply used the term Mexicans or Mexican-Americans. Still others adamantly refer to themselves as being Yaqui Indians or more correctly yoemem (the people).

The Rio Yaqui bridge signifies the area known to the Yoemem as the Hiakim or Holy Homeland and is where the eight ho'ara were established around 1617 by Jesuits. One of the original pweblam or ho'ara is no longer inhabited.

While in Rio Yaqui I came to learn that the majority of the people with whom I spoke all identified themselves as either being Yoeme or Yaqui. The term Yaqui was assigned to the Yoemem when the Spaniards first came in contact with the Yoemem in 1533 while on a slave-raid. The Yoemem had long lived along the Rio Hiaquim or as the Spaniards later renamed it the Rio Yaqui. The Yoemem had always identified themselves as Yoemem or simply “The people,” or “humans.” As in the past, the Yoemem today do not like to be referred to as “Mexicans” but rather prefer their own chosen name—Yoemem.

My initial stay in Mexico began in Hermosillo where I spent the night. The following day I made my way to the University of Hermosillo whereby I located the library and began my archival work. The University of Hermosillo houses many primary and secondary sources critical for my dissertation. After spending a week pursuing the library holdings I traveled to the Rio Yaqui. First stopping in Vicam and then on to a small town by the name of Esperanza where I “made camp” for the next five weeks off and on when not staying the night with the various people I encountered during my travels throughout the Rio Yaqui region and surrounding communities.

On my first day after spending a night in Esperanza I visited the Yaqui Museum in Ciudad Obregón. The museum houses many artifacts, photos, documents, dioramas as for critical primary resources linked to the history of the Yoemem and their original homelands.

I spent three days attempting to film the entire contents held within the museum.

On the following day a friend who had accompanied me from Tucson had arranged to have Yoemem musicians play for me as a welcomed guest. In Tucson, the Yoemem do not allow anyone—whether a tribal member or not—to record in any fashion any parts of the communities, its people, ceremonies or their music and so it was highly unexpected honor to be able to witness an actual session outside of sanctioned ceremony. The musicians consisted of a violinist, harpist, and tampaleo (drum/flute player). The violin and harp were first introduced by the Jesuits who were finally able to penetrate the Rio Yaqui in the early 1600’s. Since that time a mixing of Yoemem spiritual practices and beliefs have come to be interwoven with that of Roman Catholicism. On one occasion I was able to attend the ceremonies of San Ignacio de Loyola in Potam—one of the eight remaining Yoemem villages.

Following the music session, I conducted an interview with a woman who had been at a battle in Rio Yaqui in 1927. At the time of the battle she was quite young. As she only spoke in Yoem Noki (the Yoemem language), it was necessary to have my friend and assistant later interpret what the woman had conveyed. The entire session has not been transcribed, however, and so the following account is but one salient point that I would like to share at this time. The woman conveyed how she had witnessed horrific atrocities carried out by the Mexican soldiers. The entire incident, as has always been the case, and still remains so today, had to do with encroachment upon the Yoemem land. The Mexican government has long—as had the Aztecs before them, the Spaniards, the Federales, the Europeans and even Euro-Americans—had an avaricious eye on the Yaquis land. The rich alluvial soil of the Rio Yaqui along with a ready supply of water makes the Rio Yaqui land one most suitable agricultural growing areas much like California’s Imperial and San Joaquin Valleys. As such, the Rio Yaqui region has been one of the most sought after agricultural sectors throughout history.

One question I repeatedly asked community members throughout the Rio Yaqui region as well as of those who live outside its immediate vicinity were questions pertaining to present pressing issues. Time again the answer came to be predictably the same—issues of dispossession of lands and encroachment by outsiders remain relentless issues facing all members of the Yaqui Nation. Today, as in the past, elders relentlessly monitor, either on foot, horseback, or both, the entire perimeter demarcating the Rio Yaqui region.

Last summer, members of various Yoeme communities rallied together and completely shutdown the road leading into Vicam (one of the Yoemem towns). They requested the presence of President Vicente Fox. The Yoemem explained they had wished to hold a community meeting expressing their concerns to President Fox on the continual encroachment that continues to plague their lands. In the end, President Fox did not attend the meeting but instead sent the Governor of Sonora to hear the grievances as laid out by the Yoemem. In the end nothing concretely resulted from the meetings. Today, as in the past, the Yoemem, as other tribes throughout the world, continue to fight for what is rightfully theirs.

Issues related to land have long plagued the Yoemem communities since the first contact with outsiders, and always the Yoemem have somehow been able to maintain their respective lands.

For the Yoemem the lands were provided to them by divine fiat and thus they regard their homelands as sacred grounds. For the Yoemem there is no separation between humans, non-humans, the earth and its varied resources. Thus, the issue of land plays a significant and central role in their cosmologies.

This process of colonization paralleled the spread of “Euro-modernity” which underpinned the colonial projects that ruptured both Native nations, At the same time, both national and regional cultures developed all around the indigenous peoples of the Southwest. Secondly, a close examination of this so-called “Southwestern” culture that developed over the decades in southern Arizona and northern Sonora helps expose the key practices of US material hegemony, including economic exploitation in railroads, mines, the “Indian art market” and both nations efforts to exploit Native cultures (via, for example, the “collecting” of difference by anthropologist and the use of the region of “difference” by a thriving tourist industry). Finally, the military-industrial complexes of both Mexico and the Untied States have, since the turn of the century, increasingly impinged on the territories of both Native nations, first shaping the spaces allotted to each (taking any ground “ needed” by the military, or later by developers).and then utilizing native people as workers in the surrounding economy that supported both the wartime and peacetime expansion.

The second photo is of the desert and I especially chose to focus on the Pitahaya as it is termed in Yoem noki (the Yoemem language). I chose this scene because directly to my back is situated the town named Pitahaya which is also a Yoemem town located near the Rio Yaqui and where much violence was carried out against the Yoemem and other Amer-Indians on the part of the Spaniards, then Mexicans, French as for other Europeans and eventually Euro-Americans as well.

 

This study, therefore, is designed to illuminate the ways in which these complicated histories unfolded in both the U.S. and Mexico. Although chronologically and conceptually broad, its analysis will focus on one key area of cultural expression which offers critical insight into the complex and multiple identities that figure in the lives of the Yoemem people throughout the period. The ceremonial lore’s of both nations—including music, dance and art work were, and continue to be, vehicles of cultural survival and transmission which both, for example, connect and -in many ways- separate each nation’s two “halves.” For Yaquis, the drum, rattle, flute and (Spanish-introduced) violin and harp have all played important and continuing roles in all the many ceremonies that bind the Yoemem people together across the border. Yoemem ceremonies such as the Deer, Coyote and Matachin dances have not only continued to express Yoemem Nation’s collective identity but have at the same time assumed a place as key anthropological and tourist sites. Ceremonies which are widely known not only throughout the southwestern US but also across tourist North America and into northwestern Mexico. As such, these ceremonial dances are similarly widely practiced and popular to the tourist and scholarly markets.

A study of the history of the evolution of these ceremonial/musical forms in each nation will allow me to address several questions. First, to what extent has the creation of a national border between Mexico and the United States influenced these cultural articulations? What effect has differing citizenship had on the stimulation of syncretic changes in such cultural forms? How do questions of race, gender, and national identity play themselves out in the broader histories of these two Native nations? To what extent, for example, has the attempted imposition of Western spirituality, in its U.S. and Mexican forms, had on Native practices affected indigenous religious life?

Although this project remains in a preliminary stage, I envision my project to take the following form. Following an introductory chapter laying out the dissertation’s problematics, I shall begin by providing a subsequent chapter which will narrate the history of the Yoemem nation, from mid-19th century conquest to the present. In the process, I hope to use a hybrid writing style using both Native story forms and the more traditional history-writing forms, that will adequately reflect the differences in historical narrativity practiced by both indigenous and Western historians. Following these two substantial contextual chapters, the dissertation will then move to exploring practices of the Yoemem Indians such as music and tourism and the more current infusions of Casino gaming as well as the history of the Deer Dance as practiced then and now in the US and Mexico. My intent is to pay particular attention as to how they have become tourist attractions and the effects thereof. In my final and closing chapter I plan on explaining how initial issues revolving around land rights, sovereignty and self-determination continue to be figure as critical, complex and as sensitive an issue as when the Yoemem were first invaded by outsiders. In addition, I hope to show how such a legacy continues to figure central within present day-to-day lived experiences as Yoemem linked to others on both sides of the US/Mexican divide.