The Pascua Yaqui: Exile from Hiakim

The Yoeme, who call themselves the People, and whom outsiders call the Yaqui, did not come to Tucson seeking opportunity. They came because there was nowhere else to go.

Their homeland, Hiakim, lay along the Yaqui River in the Mexican state of Sonora, south of the current border. The Yoeme had maintained their independence through the Spanish colonial period, negotiating a semi-autonomous existence that preserved their language, their ceremonies, and their river valley settlements. In the eighteen eighties, that independence collapsed under the Porfirio Diaz government's modernization campaign, which sought to open Yaqui River lands to commercial agriculture and railroad development. The government waged military campaigns against Yoeme communities. Then it escalated. Yaqui people were rounded up, loaded onto trains and boats, and transported to plantation labor in the Yucatan peninsula, enslaved in all but legal name. Thousands died. Families were separated across thousands of miles. The forced deportations continued from the eighteen nineties into the nineteen tens.

Those who escaped fled north. Refugees began arriving in Tucson in the eighteen eighties and nineties, establishing the community of Pascua, named from the Spanish word for Easter, in a settlement west of downtown. They came as refugees with nothing, and they rebuilt their ceremonial life in the Sonoran desert on the American side of a border that had not existed when their great-grandparents were born. Their Easter ceremony, the Waehma, a weeks-long Lenten observance that blends pre-contact Yoeme tradition with Spanish Catholic observance into a form found nowhere else on earth, took root in the Tucson desert.

The United States government did not recognize the Pascua Yaqui as a federally recognized tribe until September eighteenth, nineteen seventy-eight. That date, eighty-eight years after the first Yoeme refugees crossed the border, made the Pascua Yaqui Tribe of Arizona the only federally recognized Yaqui tribe in the United States. The tribe today has more than thirteen thousand citizens and an active tribal government in Tucson.

The Waehma is performed publicly each Lenten season at Pascua Pueblo on the west side of Tucson. The ceremonies the Mexican government tried to eradicate are still here.