Mapping Yaqui Mobility: Community, Identity, and Labor, 1770–1940

Abstract

This dissertation project seeks to move away from the view that Indigenous peoples’ and histories are solely place-bound and expands the concept of land and identity to understand Yaqui peoples’ role in the complex web of historical processes and social interactions. This project centers on mobility as a vehicle to elucidate the moments of flexibility, resistance, and adaptation that allowed Yaqui people to maintain cultural continuity by retaining and expressing their Indigenous identity, culture, and community. Examining the temporal and spatial mobility and everyday life of Yaqui individuals and families helped unravel where people moved and how they responded to Spanish colonial rule, American Independent era to Revolutionary Mexico. Yaquis moving throughout colonial Sonora, Nueva Vizcaya, and Alta California during the eighteenth century informs how Yaqui people coped with the regime while maintaining identity, culture, and community. During the transformative years of the nineteenth century in Baja California, Mexico, to twentieth revolutionary Mexico demonstrates that Yaqui people strategically learned to adapt and negotiate their presence in unexpected places while reinforcing their Yaqui identity. Collectively, these case studies intertwine individual and community experiences of mobility, adaptation, and resistance in everyday practices. It situates narratives during main historical processes unraveling the complexity of Indigenous histories. Each of the chapters examined here is a testament to the richness of Yaqui history, and together, these narratives weave unto a larger Yaqui tapestry.