The Yaqui

FAMILY BY FAMILY they come across the border-the fear of death behind them. "Out of the hand of Yzabal," a Yaqui poet has written, remembering the relentless campaign of the Mexican General Yzabal to destroy the remnants of the Yaqui tribe; "Out of the hand of Yzabal, Through miracles of Saint Francis," the Indians escaped northward through Sonora. After ten years of warfare with the Mexicans, the great Yaqui leader Cajeme had been defeated and executed in 1887. From that year until 1910 there was an almost continuous effort to break up the tribe. They were shipped into virtual slavery in Vera Cruz and central Mexico. They were herded together and sent to Yucatan, where those who did not die work ed as miserable peons on the great henequen plantations. Many were simply shot in Sonora. Some escaped into the Bacatete Mountains and from there waged a guerilla warfare for almost a generation, laying waste large parts of southern Sonora. Those who could fled to the United States, where they and their descendants now number more than three thousand. These are the refugee Yaqui of Arizona, so often spoken of as "men without a country." It would be impossible to over-dramatize the recent history of the Yaqui Indians. Their country was a bloody battle-field for fifty years. Every middle-aged or older Yaqui I have talked to has a simple, true story to tell of almost incredible violence or hardship in his life.

THE YAQUI "Arizona's

One old man tells of the Battle of Buatachive during Cajeme's last stand, when he was a boy of fifteen. As he hid among the rocks, his father was shot before his eyes and later he saw his mother clubbed to death. Then for three weeks he wandered in the hills without food until he was captured and shipped off to work on a Mexican hacienda near Guaymas. Another man survived deportation to Yucatan, whence he escaped and came back to the Yaqui country, covering the full length of Mexico on foot and much of the time without even sandals. "Nosotros pobres, we poor ones," they say, "have suffered much." Their story of war, defeat, persecution, and flight is a familiar one in the history of the world. No doubt there was some right and some wrong on both the Mexican and the Yaqui sides of the conflict. For the Yaquis their common suffering has given them a sense of unity as a people. This has been a strong factor in keeping them separate with their own distinctive customs during the fifty years that they have been settled in the state of Arizona. There are seven places of Yaqui Settlement on this side of the border. In the vicinity of Tempe are Guadalupe and "Eskat-tale" (the Yaqui rendering of Scottsdale), each with about five hundred Yaqui in them. On the outskirts of Tucson, in Pascua Village and Barrio Libre, are another thousand or more Yaqui. Between Chandler and Tucson are two smaller villages, Campo Burro at Marana and Bacatete at Eloy; and south of Somerton in the Yuma Valley is the seventh village, Sibakobi, now almost deserted. In addition, Yaquis are scattered throughout southern Arizona, living in the Southern Pacific section houses, on the cotton ranches, and in cities of Tucson, Phoenix, and Yuma. The little villages remain centers of the old Yaqui civilization of Mexico. Here the women wear the Mother Hubbard full-flowing skirts, the brightly embroidered under-waists, and the beautifully-draped rebozos of Indian Mexico. Here the annual round of semi-Catholic cere-

Story By BY EDWARD H. SPICER

Tempe are Guadalupe and "Eskat-tale" (the Yaqui rendering of Scottsdale), each with about five hundred Yaqui in them. On the outskirts of Tucson, in Pascua Village and Barrio Libre, are another thousand or more Yaqui. Between Chandler and Tucson are two smaller villages, Campo Burro at Marana and Bacatete at Eloy; and south of Somerton in the Yuma Valley is the seventh village, Sibakobi, now almost deserted. In addition, Yaquis are scattered throughout southern Arizona, living in the Southern Pacific section houses, on the cotton ranches, and in cities of Tucson, Phoenix, and Yuma. The little villages remain centers of the old Yaqui civilization of Mexico. Here the women wear the Mother Hubbard full-flowing skirts, the brightly embroidered under-waists, and the beautifully-draped rebozos of Indian Mexico. Here the annual round of semi-Catholic cere-

Indian Refugees"

With Photographs and Drawings By

ROSAMOND B. SPICER

mony goes on year in and year out. And here the language of the home is Yaqui. Individuals may move out of the villages and for a time become assimilated to the Spanish-American population, but more often than not they move back again. The Yaqui customs maintain a surprising hold on younger Yaqui, and it is even true that some Mexicans are being assimilated to Yaqui ways as they marry into the Arizona villages.

The Yaqui are not reservation Indians. This makes their life very different from that of the Papago, the Apache, and the Hopi. There is no paternal interest on the part of the federal government, watching over them and helping to plan their economic life. As refugees they have the status of any immigrants in the United States. They must make their own way as best they can. The land of Guadalupe, alone of all the villages, has been set aside especially for Yaqui and is held in trust by a state judge. The village near Scottsdale is owned by the Salt River Valley Water Users Association; Yaquis live there merely on sufferance of that organization. Bacatete and Campo Burro are similarly situated on company land. Pascua Village is the property of a private individual and the Yaqui are either squatting there or are buying their lots as anyone else would. In Barrio Libre it is the same. Sibakobi is only a bit of waste land at the edge of the Yuma deseit which no one else happens to want. Without land, the Yaqui are subject to all the economic uncertainty of any of our lowest income groups. It is remarkable that they have maintained their identity as a people to the extent that they have. Pulled by the various forces of our economic life, they are nevertheless just as recognizable as a people with a culture of their own as are the Indians of the reservations who still have roots in their ancient land.

The Yaqui men are famous as adobe makers; little three-men crews of Yaqui go out constantly to work from the villages with their wooden adobe-forms. Yaquis are also traditionally railroad workers. Many of them came up originally out of Mexico working on the Southern Pacific section gangs. There is a whole literature of corridos (song ballads) composed and sung by the Yaqui working on the railroad some in Spanish and some in the An early morning scene during an all-night fiesta. At dawn the Pascolas rest and it is the privilege of any man or woman to have a try at dancing. This “amateur” morning is a regular feature of the activities of the Pascola ramada.

Yaqui language. In the course of their devotion to railroading the Yaqui have traveled widely with their families, living and working in California, Oregon, Nevada, and New Mexico, as well as in Arizona. But the great majority of Arizona Yaqui have, as best they could, gone back to the land. They are ranch workers, irrigators, cotton-choppers, and cotton pickers. The great recurring event in their annual economic cycle is cotton-picking time. Beginning in September they scatter out through the Santa Cruz, Gila, and Salt River Valleys. The villages are almost deserted. The families go out together, father, mother, and children, to live in the tents or the little frame houses that line the irrigation ditches under the cottonwoods and tamarisks. They love the work and the mingling with strange people, and these are the fattest months of the year from the point of view of income. They come back to the villages only with the last picking in January to settle down to preparing for their biggest ceremonial event, the long series of rites that take place during the Lenten season.

The picturesque character of life in the Yaqui villages lies somewhat obscured in the poverty of the surroundings. If you go to Guadalupe or Pascua, instead of painted teepees or terraced pueblos you see odd-looking shacks made of anything from flattened-out oil tins to dis carded road signs. These nondescript houses of miscellaneous odds and ends were the domi nant type ten years ago, but there is now a noticeable trend toward neat adobe dwellings with white-washed walls and blue-painted doors. Tamarisks and clumps of carrizo have been planted around the houses and here and there are tiny flower beds. The Yaqui have been making the difficult adjustment to our economic life; and increasingly they are transforming their villages into a semblance of Old Mexico.

Look more closely at these little houses and you will see the symbol of their Yaqui-ness. Almost every Yaqui house has a rough wooden cross set in the ground near it, a few paces to the east if possible, but as often as not to the west, north, or south, if there is no room to the east. This houseyard cross is as necessary a protection to the household as the roof itself. It stands throughout the year, sometimes lean ing crazily, in weather-beaten dilapidation. The family wash may hang above it, dogs sun them selves at its foot, children knock against it in their play. But it remains the symbol of the family's devotion to Yaqui ways.

Visit a Yaqui house on All Souls Day in early November; you will see a table set against the houseyard cross covered with a clean embroidered cloth. On the table there will be green melons, lengths of sugar cane, bowls of thick atole, jars of water and cocoa, some bright candy, offerings of food and drink for the ancestral dead of the household. Go again to the same house at Easter on Good Friday afterThe woman in the drawing is kneeling beside a coffin chanting the funeral service. The body lies in the coffin all night during a funeral with feet to the temporary altar set up in the houseyard. The funeral ceremony lasts from sundown one day until the next morning.

noon and you will see the same cross ripped out of the ground lying in ignominy with a green cottonwood bough on top of it; the Crucifixion has just been enacted near the church and the cross is up-rooted to symbolize the temporary triumph of evil in the world. Go once again to the house on the Day of the Finding of the Holy Cross, on the third of May, and you will see the battered old houseyard cross wrapped in bright green and blue and pink crepe paper, the loose ends fluttering gaily in the sunlight; the new spring has come and the cross has been made to bloom with the new year. It is not only on these days of the fixed calendar that the cross serves its purpose; at any time it may become the center of ceremonies for the household. A baptism, a wedding, a funeral all revolve about the little wooden cross. The religious life of any family is rooted there at its base.

The heart of a Yaqui village is its church and yet the churches are as weather-beaten and unspectacular as the houseyard crosses. In Guadalupe there have been a Catholic and a Presbyterian church, both fairly elaborate structures. In the other villages the churches have always been little more than open-front shelters-ramadas, as the Yaqui call them. In Pascua there was a brush ramada for years, until the Southern Pacific Railroad contributed a stack of discarded ties. Now there is an openfront building with walls of railroad ties, but the floor is still of dirt. The walls are lined with flattened cardboard cartons to keep out the winter wind, and the altar is made of a few boards set on saw-horses. Around the church there

is a wire fence, enclosing the plaza, and at the far end is a little rusty tin shack with an inscription in white paint: "Pascua Village, S. Y." The initials stand for the name of the patron saint of the village, Saint Ignatius (San Ygnacio) of Loyola, which is also patron of Torim, the old Yaqui capital in Sonora. This church in its plaza of bare caliche soil is the scene of all the village ceremonials, of the weekly Sunday services as well as the tremendous communal efforts of the Easter season It is to the village what the houseyard cross is to the family the symbol of everything Yaqui.

The Yaqui of Pascua will tell you a story about their church which indicates what living in the United States meant to them when they first came out of Mexico. They say, "When Mr. Franklin (the real estate man who formerly owned the land on which Pascua is situated) told us to make a village here, he said that he would give us free the plaza and the place for the church. He said that we should have the Fiesta de Gloria (Easter) here and that we should not be molested by Mexicans or any others. This was to be our own for carrying out our own religion." The church in Pascua is thus a symbol of religious freedom in the United States for the Yaqui. They have clung to it as the center of their community life, despite numerous efforts on the part of various sects to wean them away. Each year at Easter they fly from its top their own "Yaqui flag" along with the stars and stripes.

The Arizona Yaqui are not organized politically into a tribe. For many years during the early 1920's there was talk of such organization and the newspapers sometimes referred to the Yaqui as "a nation within a nation." There was an effort to establish a "chief of all the Yaqui in Arizona." For a time (1917-1922) a man named Juan Pistola (he was thus nicknamed because his right index finger had been broken and stuck out straight like a pistol barrel) assumed such a title and appointed a secretary and other assistants. Again in 1928 a politically minded newcomer from Sonora, Guadalupe Flores, posed as "chief" of Arizona Yaqui. There were letters to the governor of the state and even to the President of the United States to make these "chiefs" official. White men wanted to establish some authority among the Yaqui to deal with two activities which they regarded as undesirable. Yaquis were crossing the border in violation of all immigration laws, streaming in through the mountains east of Nogales and through the desert wilderness of the Papago reservation. Mezquitál, a Yaqui settlement south of Tucson, had become a center for the running of guns across the line to war-minded Yaquis in Sonora. Americans wanted these activities stopped and so they supported various chiefs in an effort to organize the Yaqui against such practices. But the organization remained white men's creations and never "took" with the Yaqui. If a Yaqui tells you he is a "chief" you may be sure that he is not. For no such office is recognized in any village and the Yaquis go quietly on ignoring the various selfappointed pretenders to the title.

If you want to get in touch with the head men in a Yaqui village, don't ask for the chief. Find out who the religious leaders are, for those are the only men and women with authority. A Yaqui village, insofar as it is an organization at all, is a theocracy. Around the little dilapidated churches are centered very definite organizations of men and women who manage the ceremonial life and who hold traditional offices which date from the time three hundred years ago when the Jesuit missionaries converted the Yaqui in Mexico. Each village has its ceremonial societies, made up of chanters, dancers, or singers; and each society has its recognized leaders. The real heads of a village are very likely to disclaim any special authority, for a tradition of democracy is strong. They often say, "I am no chief. I just do what the people want me to do." It takes months of patient association with the Yaqui to understand how they run their affairs. But as you watch and listen, going to the ceremonies, talking with men and women and children, slowly it becomes clear to you that the life of the village is in the hands of a group of perhaps five or six older men and women. These are usually the oldest members of the ceremonial organization called the Maestros, the Fariseos, the Matachinas, the Kiostim, and the Cantoras.

The head Maestro is at the top of the hierarchy. He leads all the religious services. He wears no special insignia of office and may be seen at the most important ceremonies clad only in blue jeans and denim shirt; but his knowledge of the intricate ritual is recognized as greater than that of anyone else. He knows all the prayers and chants, some in Yaqui, some in Spanish, and some even in Latin, which have been handed down for generations painfully written out in longhand on scraps of paper and in little notebooks. These notebooks might be thought of as the only symbols of office. At any vespers service you may see the Maestros scanning them diligently in the dim candlelight of the church-ramada.

The head Maestro shares his leadership with two women, the oldest Cantora or chief singer who accompanies him in his chants, and the head Kiosti who has charge of the altar. These three keep the yearly round of ceremony going in the church, but they in turn are dependent for the proper fulfillment of the ritual on the heads of the two men's dance societies-the Matachin Kobanau and the Fariseo Yaut. Dancing is as much a religious devotion among the Yaqui as is praying or singing. The churches always have open fronts so that groups of dancers may pass in and out during the course of ceremonies. The Matachinis with their feathered wands and brightly colored headdresses dance as a sort of offering to the Virgin Mary. As many as sixty-five men and boys in a village may belong to the Matachin society. Their dances on Saints' Days, at funerals, and during the simple Sunday services in the summertime are regarded as beautiful and reverent acts by all Yaqui. Only men may dance. Older Yaqui look with disapproval on what they call "Mexican dances," that is, our style of men and women dancing in couples for amusement. The dance devotions are the duty of the Matachin society and, to some extent, the Fariseos. From January until May,the winter ceremonial season, the men and boys in the Fariseo society supplement all ceremonies with their marching, dancing, and performance of the colorful Easter ritual. Dur ing the rest of the year they are, as it were, off duty, and the Matachinis are the ritual dancers.

These are the groups which maintain the religious life of a Yaqui community, and to their head men and women everyone looks for the leadership on which depend the survival of Yaqui customs. These men and women do not serve their communities through whim.

Map showing the Yaqui centers in Arizona and Sonora. These proud people for a long time waged war against the Mexican government, but under a more humane policy they live in peace. The Arizona Yaqui fledfrom their native home in Sonora to escape persecution.

They are members of the societies because of a religious vow. It is the custom of Yaqui families, when their children are sick, to vow that they will serve as Matachinis or Maestros or Cantoras if they get well. They pray and make the promise to the patron deities of the societies, the Virgin Mary or Jesus. If the child survives, then he must serve for the rest of his life. The service is regarded as a payment to the deity in return for the cure. It is strongly believed that the sickness will return if the child shirks his duties and fails to perform. Thus the whole church organizationrests on a profound belief in the benevolent powers of the Virgin and Jesus. The continuance of Yaqui ceremony depends on these individual promises of devotion. What is this religion that means so much to the Yaqui? Is it Christianity? Is it paganism? It is both, and it is moreover insisted on by the Yaqui that it is Catholicism. Yet Yaqui religion in the villages goes on independently of the organized Catholic Church in Arizona. The Maestros carry out what they call masses using much of the standard ritual, but they bear small resemblance to the mass in recognized Catholic churches. Baptism and marriages are sanctified in the churches of Tucson and Phoenix, but the Catholic rite is only a prelude in each case to a day of Yaqui ceremony in the village, no features of which would be recognized as essential by an orthodox Catholic. The Yaqui say that "the priests do not understand" the relation of the Maestro to the Catholic Church. When they say this they are thinking of the fact that in old days in Mexico when priests were able to visit the Yaqui villages only occasionally, their Maestros had a recognized status as a sort of lay priest. (Continued on Page Forty-two)