Missionaries, Miners, and Indians: Spanish Contact with the Yaqui Nation of Northwestern New Spain, 1533–1820
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Missionaries, Miners, and Indians: Spanish Contact with the Yaqui Nation of Northwestern New Spain, 1533–1820 Item Type book; text Authors Hu-DeHart, Evelyn Publisher University of Arizona Press (Tucson, AZ) Rights Copyright © 1981 by The Arizona Board of Regents. The text of this book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution- NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (CC BY- NC-ND 4.0), https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/. Download date 04/10/2021 08:46:19 Item License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ Link to Item http://hdl.handle.net/10150/632280 Spanish Contact With the Yaqui Nation of Northwestern New Spain 1533-1820 Missionaries Miners and Indians ·JJ -i;f.Jf .A''/ ... ',;J/,,f.f_f.[ From: Ernest]. Burrus, Obra cartografica de la Provincia de Mexico de la Compania de Jesus (Madrid:]. Porrua Turanzas, 1%7), map no. 43. Missionaries Miners and Indians Spanish Contact with the Yaqui Nation ofNorthwestern New Spain 1533-1820 Evelyn Hu-DeHart THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA PRESS Tucson, Arizona About the Author . Evelyn Hu-DeHart’s volume on the colonial experience of the Yaqui people was the first of a series covering the course of Yaqui history into the twentieth century. In 1972, she was awarded a Foreign Area Fellowship to do research in Mexico on the history of the Yaqui people of Sonora. In 1974, she began teaching Latin American history at Washington University in St. Louis. Professor Hu-DeHart received a Ph.D. in Latin American history in 1976 from the University of Texas at Austin. She has a B.A. in political science from Stanford University, and she has studied in Bra- zil with a Fulbright Scholarship and in Spain. Born in Chungking, China, Professor Hu-DeHart immigrated with her family to the United States in 1959. This Open Arizona edition is funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities/Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Humanities Open Book Program. The University of Arizona Press www.uapress.arizona.edu Copyright © 1981 by The Arizona Board of Regents Open-access edition published 2018 ISBN-13: 978-0-8165-3785-3 (open-access e-book) The text of this book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution- NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/. This book was set in 10/12 Bembo on a V.I.P. Typographical errors may have been introduced in the digitization process. The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows: Hu-DeHart, Evelyn. Missionaries, miners, and Indians. Bibliography: p. Includes index. 1. Yaqui Indians—Missions. 2. Jesuits—Missions Mexico. 3. Yaqui Indians—Government relations. 4. Indians of Mexico—Missions. 5. Indians of Mexico—Government relations. 6. Yaqui Indians— Wars, 1740. I. Title. F1221.Y3H82 972ʹ.00497 81-14658 ISBN 0-8165-0740-6 AACR2 ISBN 0-8165-0755-7 (pbk.) To my mother and father who taught me to survive To the Yaqui people who fight to survive and can teach us all Contents Chapter 1: The Colonial Legacy 1 The Influence of the Jesuits 3 The Influence of Spanish Secular Society 4 Chapter 2: Before the Jesuits 8 First Spanish Intrusions 14 Chapter 3: Enter the Jesuits 22 The Yaqui Mission 25 Sinaloa and Sonora: The Northwest Secular Society 39 Chapter 4: Exit the Jesuits 58 The Rebellion of 1740 59 The End of Jesuit Hegemony 87 Notes 105 Bibliography 131 Acknowledgments 144 Index 145 v111 Contents Tables Table 1: Population of the Yaqui Mission, 1662 and 1678 51 Table 2: Yaqui Census, 1751-1757 89 Table 3: Yaqui Census, 1759-1761 92 Maps Frontispiece: The Sonora and Sinaloa Missions, 1744 Maps IA and lB:Jesuit Missions and Rectorates of Northwestern New Spain, 1767 54-55 Map 2: Extension of the 1740 Yaqui Rebellion 69 CHAPTER 1 The Colonial Legacy In the last decades of the twentieth century, the Yaqui Indians were among the few remnant indigenous nations of the vast region com prising northwestern Mexico and the southwestern United States. Four centuries of contact and warfare with the yori or white man had not forcefully assimilated or decimated a proud people bent on survival. Thirty thousand strong at the time of Spanish conquest in the early sixteenth century, an estimated 15,000 still existed, the bulk of them in the vicinity of the Yaqui River, their traditional homeland in southern Sonora, Mexico. A few thousand were scattered throughout Mexico, western, and particularly southwestern United States, some clustering around their own communities-in-exile such as those just outside Tucson, Arizona, sixty miles north of the border and the Mexican state of Sonora. Since the Mexican Revolution of 1910, despite the rhetoric of social justice and agrarian reform, Yaquis had not exercised much control over the land and its resources. To be sure, in the late 1930s progressive [ 1 1 2 The Colonial Legacy President Lazaro Cardenas created a zona indigena - a de facto reserva tion -on the north bank of the Yaqui River to provide the Yaqui people with some land and territorial integrity. However, the Indians did not enjoy the concurrent guarantee of water, which is absolutely indispens able for making the rich soil produce at capacity. With few exceptions, those Yaquis who remained on the land were limited to subsistence agriculture, their poverty all the more sharpened in contrast to the pros perous commercial agriculture which large Mexican farmers practiced on the south side of the river. There, an abundance of water from govern ment-built dams, capital from private and public sources, and technol ogy derived partly from the Green Revolution* have developed the Yaqui River Valley into a well-known showcase of Mexico's postwar "economic miracle." In sum, it seemed ironic that, while alone among Mexico's Indian peasantry the Yaquis possessed rich land, they were not significantly better off. In addition to the paradox in the late twentieth century, or perhaps because of it, most Yaquis proudly claim a separate ethnic and cultural identity, the hallmark of their character being to regard themselves first and foremost as "the Yaqui people" -distinct from the Mexican cultural mainstream or from any social class in the larger social structure. This definite self-image has prevailed through the entire course of a long and often violent history of contact with yoris. Of course, Indian resistance to acculturation and assimilation is not uncommon in Mexican history. The Yaquis stand out for having waged the most determined, enduring, and successful war against involuntary absorption into the dominant culture or integration with the larger society. In response to persistent outside pressures to transform them selves irreversibly and on alien terms, they have held on tenaciously to their land, community, and culture, guarantees of their autonomy. Even as they are losing the battle in the course of the twentieth century, they have not yet surrendered the ethos of resistance. In the words *Ironically, the Rockefeller-financed Green Revolution, conceived to produce enough staple grains to feed the world's hungry masses, had served only to widen the gap between rich and poor, between subsistence and capitalist, commercial agriculture. In both Mexico and India, where the grain experiments took place, the actual beneficiaries of the new technology were the large private landowners, who alone could afford the heavy investment in farm machinery, fertilizer, and insecticide necessary for the cultiva tion of the new hybrid strains. For a general critique, see: Harry M. Cleaver, "'The Contradictions of the Green Revolution," Monthly Review 24 (1972), pp. 80-111; for a specific discussion of the Mexican case, see: Cynthia Hewitt de Alcantara, Modernizing Mexican Agriculture: Socioeconomic Implications of Technological Change 1940-1970 (Geneva: United Nations Research Institute for Social Development, 1976). The Colonial Legacy 3 of a Yaqui laborer, recorded in the 1960s, "There will always be a Yaqui tribe. The Yaquis are not like the Mayos or the Pimas, who have all become Mexicans."* The Influence of the Jesuits Significantly, the Yaquis' own historical memory in the twentieth century dated back to the period ofJesuit reorganization, but not earlier. And it was this legacy that Yaquis sought to preserve by themselves well into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The profound impact of the long, intense Jesuit missionary experience must be judged decisive in explaining the survival of the Yaqui people as a culturally intact and politically autonomous people at the end of the colonial period. Jesuits never intended their directed cultural change to prepare Yaquis for assim ilation into the larger, exploitative Spanish social structure. Rather, in reorganizing Yaqui society and economy, in protecting Yaquis against Spanish encroachment on their land and restraining indiscriminate uses of their labor, and in fighting a protracted war against secularization, Jesuits hoped to safeguard the Yaquis' welfare and, in so doing, their own institutional interests as well. For only when the indigenous peoples remained healthy and intact could the missions endure. Moreover, a productive mission economy guaranteed expansion of the Jesuit evangel ical empire. To the Yaquis, the tightly organized mission system gave them a more precise definition of their territorial boundaries, a stronger sense of cultural unity, and a greater degree of economic security. The imposed experience compressed in time social developments that would have taken much longer in a more natural evolution. In short, the mis sion accelerated in all Yaqui speakers the sense of being one people, or, in the Jesuits' preferred term, one nation. From the beginning, Jesuits confronted a paradox which they themselves had helped create. Like all institutions, the Jesuit empire sought to perpetuate itself. In order to keep the Indians in a permanent state of dependency, they took charge of every aspect of Yaqui life, going far beyond the original purpose of doctrinal education and ·conversion.