Country: Mexico

Group: Yaqui

Finalized Date: 3/23/2020

Team: Payton Thompson (lead), Colleen Clauss, Jayline Martin

Content Warning: homicide, forced labor, torture

Approximate Time Period: 1533-1929

In the late 19th to early 20th century, the state of Mexico attempted to “modernize” by centralizing customs, economic production, and military power, in accordance with the Mexican state (Guidotti-Hernández and Silverblatt 2011). Mexico, at the time, saw Western modernization as the only way to maximize efficiency to therefore compete with the US and other countries in trade. In order to do this the state marginalized ethnic minority groups in order to force them to comply with the norms of the Mexican state and to reduce the chances of uprisings by indigenous peoples. Over the course of more than a century, Yaqui faced lethal violence perpetrated by the Mexican government and settlers (Hu-Dehart, 2016). One specific event that illustrates the lethal violence inflicted on Yaqui was a 1902 massacre, whereby Mexican soldiers killed 124 Yaqui men, women, and children in a surprise attack in Sierra Mazatán, Sonora. Tactics such as; lynching, confessions, deportation, forced labor, torture, public executions, and massacres, were all used in order to slowly erase the Yaqui identity and “modernize” their livelihood’s through death and destruction (Hu-Dehart 1974, Darling et al. 2015).  The data quality is a three given numerous well-documented sources of evidence.

Sources

  1. Guidotti-Hernández, N. M., & Silverblatt, I. (2011). Unspeakable violence: Remapping U.S. and Mexican national imaginaries. Duke University Press
  2. Hu-Dehart, E. (1974). Development and rural rebellion: Pacification of the Yaquis in the late Porfiriato. The Hispanic American Historical Review, 54(1), 72-93.
  3. Hu-DeHart, E. (2016). Yaqui resistance and survival: The struggle for land and autonomy, 1821–1910. University of Wisconsin PreDarling, J., Lewis, B., Valencia, R., & Eiselt, B. (2015). Archaeology in the Service of the Tribe: Three Episodes in Twenty-first-Century Tribal Archaeology in the US-Mexico Borderlands. KIVA, 81(1-2), 62-79.