Yaqui Indigeneity: Epistemology, Diaspora, and the Construction of Yoeme Identity

by Ariel Zatarain Tumbaga

The Yaqui warrior is a persistent trope of the Mexican nation. But using fresh eyes to examine Yoeme indigeneity constructs, appropriations, and efforts at reclamation in twentieth- and twenty-first-century Mexican and Chicana/o literature provides important and vivid new opportunities for understanding. In Yaqui Indigeneity , Ariel Zatarain Tumbaga offers an interdisciplinary approach to examining representations of the transborder Yaqui nation as interpreted through the Mexican and Chicana/o imaginary.

Tumbaga examines colonial documents and nineteenth-century political literature that produce a Yaqui warrior mystique and reexamines the Mexican Revolution through indigenous culture. He delves into literary depictions of Yaqui battalions by writers like Martín Luis Guzmán and Carlos Fuentes and concludes that they conceal Yaqui politics and stigmatize Yaqui warriorhood, as well as misrepresent frequently performed deer dances as isolated exotic events.

Yaqui Indigeneity draws attention to a community of Chicana/o writers of Yaqui Chicano-Yaqui authors such as Luis Valdez, Alma Luz Villanueva, Miguel Méndez, Alfredo Véa Jr., and Michael Nava, who possess a diaspora-based indigenous identity. Their writings rebut prior colonial and Mexican depictions of Yaquis—in particular, Véa’s La Maravilla exemplifies the new literary tradition that looks to indigenous oral tradition, religion, and history to address questions of cultural memory and immigration.

Using indigenous forms of knowledge, Tumbaga shows the important and growing body of literary work on Yaqui culture and history that demonstrates the historical and contemporary importance of the Yaqui nation in Mexican and Chicana/o history, politics, and culture.

Genres: History, Indigenous

224 pages, Hardcover

Published March 27, 2018

Reviews

[Jack · Rating 3 out of 5]

Yoemem - how community members refer to themselves. They resisted the Spanish conquest and were never defeated. Yori is non indigenous. Authors: Miguel Mendez, Alma Luz Villanueva, Luis Valdez, Alfredo Vea Jr, Michael Nava. Deer dances were performed on the eve of a hunting trip, today they celebrate the relationships between humans and all of the other-than-human personas of the wilderness. They’re also performed in popular fiestas, Easter celebrations, and children’s funerals. Flowers are important and tie back to Jesus on the cross - his blood making a flower in the ground where it landed. Draws from a wide range of sources and serves as literary criticism while tracking Yaqui through story and representation.