The Yaquis of Guadalupe

Preserving a 300-year-old tradition... The Yaquis

Text by Cathryn Retzlaff Creno Photographs by Tom Ives A coppery sun sinks behind South Mountain as some 200 costumed men march solemnly through the hard-packed dirt plaza. It is Friday evening in the village of Guadalupe, adjacent to Phoenix and Tempe. The annual Lenten ceremonials, an impressive Yaqui Indian observance depicting the events leading up to the crucifixion of Jesus Christ and his resurrection, have begun.

Chapayekas wear masks while other men portray Roman soldiers. The weeks-long ritual is grueling, and at times some of the younger participants drop from exhaustion as children and their grandmothers, heads draped in dark rebozos, watch and wait.

The Yaquis are Roman Catholics, but their Catholicism is interpreted in their own fashion. While it may appear to the casual visitor to be just a confusion of men in strange costumes, shuffling back and forth in columns to the haunting music of wooden flutes and rustic violins, to the Yaqui people the meaning of the dramatic ceremony goes much deeper than mere ritual. In a sense, it is a celebration of freedom from oppression, and more.

Misunderstanding on the part of outsiders is nothing new to the Yaquis. It's something they've contended with since the beginning of their recorded history. Sustained by theirlanguage, history, and culture, they have obstinately managed to endure, despite even severe persecution and threatened extermination by a government that sought to enslave them. In the early 1600s, the Yaquis invited Jesuit missionaries into their territory in northwestern New Spain, today's Sonora, Mexico. In addition to consolidating the Indians into eight villages, the blackrobed padres taught them planting and husbanding skills and helped develop more sophisticated irrigation and harvesting systems. But their most profound influence was the introduction of Christianity. This was achieved by dramatizing the story of Christ, probably in a New World interpretation of the old European miracle plays, which the Indians incorporated into their own rituals.The resulting fusion was fated to become the cement that fortified the Yaqui spirit, enabling these people to endure the adversity awaiting them in the 19th century. Conflicts between the Yaquis and the Spanish colonials and later the Mexican officials were of long standing. As early as the 1740s, armed fights resulted from efforts to confiscate the Indians' rich farmlands. But the critical period in the history of the tribe, when its virtual existence was threatened, did not begin until the mid-1800s. Then northern Mexican landowners determined to wrest Yaqui farmland from the Indians. Armed conflict resulted, and many Yaquis fled the region or blended into the peon population.

"This rich zone is not properly exploited by the Indians and progress requires that it be" reason enough for the seizure, wrote Manuel Balbas. The Mexican military physician was one of the representatives of the most highly educated Sonorans whose task it was to formulate a working theory of the conflict from the hacendado (property owner) point of view. "It cannot be permitted that such riches remain indefinitely in the power of men who do not know or care to exploit them usefully.... The ignorance of the Yaqui tribe," he concluded, "is the cause of the greater part of their evils."

When the Yaquis rebelled against the confiscation of their traditional lands, the Mexican government labeled them "semi-savages" and placed them under federal jurisdiction. Then, in 1876, Mexican President Porfirio Diaz proposed to develop the former lands of the Yaquis further and use them as slave laborers. A resistance movement ensued, led by Jose Maria Leyva, a former captain in the Mexican Army. For 28 years, from 1876 to 1904, the Yaquis continued to fight Mexican troops. But eventually, battlefield casualties, deportation of Yaqui workers to hemp plantations in the Yucatan Peninsula, and emigration took a serious toll. By the turn of the century, the Yaqui population in Mexico had been reduced from an estimated pre-Columbian high of 30,000 to fewer than 3,000.

By the year 1910, more than 1,500 Yaquis had taken refuge in the Territory of Arizona, becoming, according to the late Edward H. Spicer, author of The Yaquis: Yaqui A Cultural History, "the most widely scattered people of North America."

Among those refugees in 1904 was Francisco Goitavena, great-grandfather of Alberto Tavena, capitan of Guadalupe's Easter ceremonies. "There were many tragedies along the way," Tavena said, recalling stories of his ancestor's adventures. "The Mexican federales were chasing them during the day, so they had to hide and travel at night. People had to kill their own children-suffocate them to keep the federales from hearing where they were.

They had to keep going and leave the ones that wouldn't or couldn't behind." Once safe in Guadalupe, a settlement founded on a 40-acre federal grant, one of Goitavena's first decisions was to shorten his name to Tavena, which he hoped would let him blend more easily with other Mexican immigrants working the cotton fields and canals south of Phoenix.

"Husacamecas suddenly became Valenzuelas, but also the Valenzuelas of yesterday became the Molinas of today," wrote Spicer. "There was total instability with regard to family name." Refugees, unaware that the United States law would protect them from deportation, often changed their surnames to avoid detection.

In addition to Guadalupe, the Yaquis chose Pascua Village and Barrio Libre near Tucson for their new settlements. Other areas were Marana, Eloy, Chandler, Scottsdale, and Yuma, picked primarily for their proximity to farms and ranches which offered work for the Yaquis.

In the interim, to further salve fears of deportation to Mexico, the Yaqui immigrants put such rituals as the Easter ceremony on indefinite hold.

Juan Tavena, Goitavena's grandson and Alberto Tavena's uncle, said his grandfather and other Yaquis who settled around Phoenix and Tucson waited until the 1920s before they were comfortable enough in their surroundings to resume the Easter ceremony. But some Yaquis did perform the ritual in secret as early as 1909 in the Tucson area. Eventually, old ways were fully resumed, and in 1976 the United States government officially recognized the Yaquis as an American Indian tribe.

The Yaquis

Today in Guadalupe, wrote Lawrence W. Cheek in a recent issue of the Tucson Citizen, "The streets are lined with small adobe or wooden cottages, some neat, some advancing toward dereliction.

There are few lawns but many testaments. Crosses made of plastic flowers, wrapped twigs, or even dried Anaheim chile peppers adorn the porches. One small home, made out of corrugated steel, offers a shrine: a hillock of rocks (and one cow skull) supporting statues of Mary and Jesus, who are protected by a generous wooden roof....

"On a Sunday afternoon, most of the town is blessedly quiet. Most of the noises are animal: chickens and roosters pecking out a living in dirt yards, the odd donkey pressed into duty as playmate for a half-dozen children."

Here one still finds Yaquis practicing such traditional arts as folk healing, methods their ancestors developed in Mexico. Raw eggs and herbal teas often are more popular remedies than aspirin for aches and pains.

Teas are used to cure caida de la fontanel, a skull depression resulting from dehydration. Raw eggs cure mal ojo, "the evil eye" that is said to afflict attractive Yaqui children.

"One time I went to a curandera, a folk healer, with a friend whose baby had all the symptoms of the evil eye," said Octaviana Salazar, director of Native American Studies for the Tucson Unified School District. "She took a fresh egg and rubbed it all over the baby, then broke it into some holy water." The child recovered immediately, said Salazar. "Mal ojo is quite common and not something evil per se," she added. "It occurs when someone sees a beautiful child and wants to touch it but does not.

That's why when we have a child we always give the baby to an admirer to hold. Mal ojo is a reality in our culture." Traditional values have been retained by many families, Alberto Tavena pointed out. These people place a higher priority on family and religion than on houses and savings accounts, and this sometimes leads to conflicts with more upwardly mobile Mexican-Americans in the community, he said. "You can build the biggest house and have two cars and a swimming pool, but there are more important things in life," he added. "You can't buy friendship. We value that more than money."

Octaviana Salazar said many Tucsonarea Yaquis share the same values. "I see Yaquis' priorities as their families, their religion, and their culture," she said. "If money is saved, it's not for a car or something, it's to be able to feed people who participate with them during a special occasion. They know that every year they will be involved in something very important to their culture." Yet centuries of conflict have left their mark on the Yaquis. They are hesitant About revealing too much about themselves or their traditions. And they remain reserved with outsiders. Recently, fear of developers and land speculators has begun to haunt Guadalupe residents. While the Pascua Yaqui reservation near Tucson is protected by the federal government, Guadalupe is under the jurisdiction of a municipal government. Within a short distance of the square-mile community are acres of prime industrial land and a large resort. The Yaquis, comprising about 40 percent of the community of 4,800, are concerned that their Mexican-American neighbors might sell land for commercial or industrial development.

There are other uncertainties, too. Juan Tavena said he does not know whether his grandchildren and other members of the younger generation will continue the Lenten ceremonials and other Yaqui traditions in the future. "Every year I wonder, will there be another Easter ceremony?" he said. "I worry about the younger generation."

But despite internal disputes and concerns about the future, Alberto Tavena is among those who refuse to believe that their friends and neighbors will sell their land to developers. Instead, they remain firmly convinced that a brighter tomorrow is in store for the Yaqui people. They are much like the Jews, the Irish, the Basques, and other "enduring peoples" who have preserved their cultural identities and fought domination by other groups, Spicer believed. "For fullest appreciation of Yaqui cultural history, we must see Yaquis not only in terms of their own culture and historical development but also in terms of other people who...have come to participate in a general human type which we may call an 'enduring people.'"

Alberto Tavena puts it more simply: "We Yaquis can adjust to anything."

It appears certain, too, that Yaqui life will continue to be enriched by those solemn and impressive Easter ceremonies which have strengthened and sustained them for more than 300 years. Alberto Tavena intends to see to that.

The Yaquis