Yaqui Refugees: The Exile That Became a Nation

Between nineteen hundred and nineteen ten, the government of Porfirio Diaz in Mexico conducted a military campaign in the Sonora River Valley that reduced the Yaqui population by thousands. Those who survived armed resistance were deported to forced labor in the henequen fields of the Yucatan Peninsula, well over a thousand miles from their homeland. Several thousand more fled north across the border into Arizona and settled in communities near Tucson: Pascua, Barrio Libre, and a settlement outside the town of Guadalupe.

The United States government did not recognize them as a tribal nation for sixty-eight more years.

The Yaqui people had maintained a centuries-long resistance to Spanish and later Mexican colonial authority. Their traditional territory in the Yaqui River valley in Sonora gave them a geographic base from which they repeatedly negotiated, resisted, and recovered from colonial pressure. The Diaz campaigns of the early nineteen hundreds were the most sustained military effort to destroy that resistance, and they very nearly worked. The refugees who crossed into Arizona arrived without legal status, without federal recognition, and without the treaty frameworks that governed relations between the United States and its tribal nations.

They built communities anyway. They maintained the Yaqui Easter ceremony, an annual observance that synthesizes pre-contact Yaqui religious practice with Catholic elements in a form the community describes as distinctly Yaqui, not simply blended or borrowed. The ceremony is held each spring in Tucson and is one of the most significant living ceremonial traditions in the Southwest.

The Pascua Yaqui Tribe of Arizona received federal recognition on September eighteenth, nineteen seventy-eight, seventy years after the refugee communities were established. They have a tribal government and a land base southwest of Tucson. The Easter ceremony continues. The community that the Diaz government tried to disperse has persisted.