Yaqui
The Yaqui are an Indian ethnic group of Mexico . The Yaqui are considered to be the Indian group of Mexico that defended itself most militantly and successfully against the white conquerors and thus achieved a symbolic character for the Indian resistance against colonial and neo-colonial domination. The Yaqui live today partly in the north of Mexico in the vicinity of the city of Ciudad Obregón .
resistance
At the time of the Conquista , the Yaqui formed eight nations who lived on a common territory , the center of which, the Sierra del Bacatete , was revered as a sacred land of origin and was monitored and defended by the eight peoples living around it. In 1533 there was a first armed conflict with the Spaniards under Diego de Guzmán , in which the Yaqui were not intimidated by firearms and cannons. Rather, they succeeded in repelling the Spaniards. As they lived far to the north in an inhospitable semi-desert, the Spaniards initially had no economic interest in them. Unlike the other Indian groups, they did not oppose evangelism, but asked in 1617 for the sending of Jesuits - missionaries , because they saw in this a preservation and strengthening of their territoriality . It was only through religion that the Yaqui achieved their actual ethnic identity. Under the protectorate of the Jesuits, they went through a process of selective, self-chosen acculturation , which only ended in 1740 with an uprising and the expulsion of the Jesuits. The Yaqui then withdrew to the Sierra.
At the beginning of the Wars of Independence, in 1810 , the Yaqui initially kept themselves on the edge of the conflict, as the concept of independence had a different value for them than for the Creoles or mestizos . Under the leadership of Juan Baderas , an Indian independence movement (Yaqui, Mayo , Pima and Opata ) with a messianic character was organized in the entire area of the present-day states of Sinaloa and Sonora , which in the name of the Virgin of Guadalupe was expelled in a series of uprisings between 1826 and 1833 the whites, the "yori", demanded from their Indian territory. So the government of Sonora never succeeded in completely colonizing their territory.
Under the leadership of Cajeme , the Yaqui Wars between 1867 and 1887 made the last attempt to drive the Mexicans out of Sonora. Cajeme was fusilized , half of the surviving Yaqui fled to Arizona, and thousands of Yaqui and Mayo were forcibly deported to sisal plantations in the Yucatán . Yet the Yaqui did not give up their struggle for their holy land; Ten years after the last bloody confrontation, in 1927, President Cardenas finally gave them the legal title over 750 hectares of land in 1936, a small part of what had once belonged to them, and recognized their right to self-determination. But through the construction of dams on the Yaqui River, their most important resource, water, was diverted for their rehabilitation and canal construction. Today they are trying to claim their water and land rights through negotiations.
Even if the militant resistance of the Indian peoples was broken in the long run, they nonetheless often offered resistance on another level: they were mostly able to assert themselves as a differentiated social unit, with their own identity that is manifested in an individual culture only the members of your own group participate. Bonfil Batalla characterizes these individual, adapted strategies in daily life as a “culture of resistance” (cultura de resistencia), which with the aim of preserving its own culture also accepts changes. This dynamic of Indian cultures can only be understood against the background of colonial domination, which prevents the culture from developing freely and constantly asserts elements that are alien and contrary to the needs of the group.
We find many examples of this cultural resistance in the specialist development literature: In one place, the improved seed varieties, the fertilizers, the insecticides are not accepted; the children are hidden from the vaccination campaign, a new type of house is rejected or is misused (chicken coop in the bathroom). One reason for the rejection is that these innovations usually mean a restriction of group autonomy. While seeds, insecticides and fertilizers would increase crop yields, so too does external dependency, since they have to be sold and, like the syringe and vaccine, are not part of the resources produced or controlled by the group. From this point of view, conservative behavior is part of a constant struggle for self-determination over one's own cultural elements.
Carlos Castaneda
In Carlos Castaneda's books , a certain Don Juan Matus , who allegedly belongs to the Yaqui ethnic group, plays the main role as a counterpart to the (real or fictitious) first-person reporter. It initially pretends to represent a “Yaqui Way of Knowledge” (as the subtitle of the first Castaneda volume “The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge”); in later volumes it is emphasized that his spiritual path is not necessarily linked to the Yaqui ethnic group. With the study mentioned, Castaneda obtained a master's degree from UCLA . With a later study on Juan Matus, he received his doctorate from the University of California in Los Angeles ("Trip to Ixtlan"). The books had caused a sensation worldwide and reached a circulation of several million; Castaneda and a hinted Yaqui Indian even featured on the cover of Time Magazine . Castanenda's books were described as proof that there was also spiritual knowledge in ancient America that “is comparable to the great system of the East” (according to the publisher's official advertisement). However, the thought structure of don Juan, as it was described by Castaneda, has no relation to the shamanism of the Yaqui. The prevailing opinion today is that the studies were bogus.
See also
literature
- Raphael Brewster Folsom: The Yaquis and the Empire: Violence, Spanish Imperial Power, and the Native Resilience in Colonial Mexico. Yale University Press, New Haven 2014, ISBN 978-0-300-19689-4 . ( Table of contents )
- Guillermo Bonfil Batalla: México profundo: una civilización negada , México: Grijalbo 2000. ISBN 970-05-0572-3
- Cécile Gouy-Gilbert: Los Yaquis. Una resistencia india. INI series de Antropologia social, No. 71, México 1985.
- Maria-Teresa Huerta & Patricia Palacio: Rebeliones indígenas de la época colonial. SEP-INAH, México 1976.
- Mark Münzel (ed.): The Indian denial. Latin America's natives between extermination and self-determination. rororo-aktuell, Hamburg 1978.
- Susanne Hammacher, INCOMINDIOS No. 52, 1989
- Paco Ignacio Taibo II : The Yaqui: indigenous resistance and a forgotten genocide . Translation by Andreas Löhrer. Berlin: Association A, 2017 ISBN 978-3-86241-442-0
Web links
- Literature about the Yaqui in the catalog of the Ibero-American Institute in Berlin
This article is based on the article Yaqui ( memento of July 1, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) from the free encyclopedia Indianer Wiki ( memento of March 18, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) and is under Creative Commons by-sa 3.0 . A list of the authors was available in the Indian Wiki ( Memento from July 1, 2007 in the Internet Archive ).