The Ópatas: In Search of a Sonoran People

Preface

Preface During Holy Week in 1964, some friends and I ventured into the backcountry of eastern Sonora south of Douglas, Arizona, heading, we hoped, for the Sierra Madre. The highway then was a rough, dusty, unpaved road infrequently traveled, that wound for one hundred kilometers through interminable mountainous wilds before finally dipping into the valley of the Río Moctezuma. As we passed through the ancient town of Cumpas, the washboarded roadway was blocked by a procession of Easter celebrants decked out in odd costumes with strange and fantastic masks. They were bearing a huge effigy dressed in ragtag clothing and stuffed till nearly bursting. From time to time, the celebrants as a group would toss the flabby figure into the air and let it drop onto the streets. As we watched, they dragged the dummy through the dirt, kicking it from time to time, all to the delight of the substantial crowd. I asked an onlooker what was going on. He replied that the masked men were fariseos (Pharisees) and the effigy they were punishing represented Judas. The procession had been part of Easter in Cumpas since the time of the Ópatas, he said. At Easter time a few years later, I took my wife and young son on the remote but delightful drive up the Río San Miguel in central Sonora. The trip began in Ures, on the Río Sonora, and the dirt road intersected the San Miguel in Rayón, the former Pima town of Nacámeri. We stopped for lunch under the shade of enormous old cottonwoods at a place where the very modest current flowed by placidly. (For a goodly portion of the river’s course, the river, flowing due south between steep but low cliffs of the Báucarit Formation, is the highway.) While we ate, a cowboy on horseback happened by on the other side of the river. In rural Mexico I’m inclined to chat with almost anyone that will take the time to fill me in on local knowledge. This fellow was more than willing, curious at the gringos driving a Land Rover where only an occasional Mexican truck usually appeared. He approached us, reining in his horse midstream (the “river” was only thirty feet wide or so and less than a foot deep). I asked him about the earliest people on the San Miguel, who they were and what had happened to them. He leaned forward on his saddle and considered the question. “They were Ópatas,” he finally said. I asked what happened to them. “Well, they just ran out” (Se acabaron). From that point on I wanted to find out more about Ópatas. I had heard of them before. In 1962, I had been fortunate enough to take a class at the University of Arizona entitled “Peoples of Mexico” taught by the noted ethnographer and Yaqui historian Edward Spicer. Ned, as his many friends and admirers knew him, lectured on the peoples of Sonora—Mayos, Pimas, Seris, and Yaquis—but barely mentioned the Ópatas. They were extinct. In Cycles of Conquest, his classic 1962 study of native peoples of southwestern United States and northwestern Mexico, he devoted forty pages to Mayos and Yaquis, but only thirteen to Ópatas. The reason was apparent: ethnographic materials about the Ópatas were sparse at best, and ethnohistorical documents were also hard to come by. I never thought to ask Ned about the Ópatas, and I wish I had, although I suspect that my life would have been irrevocably changed had I asked, for I would probably have done my Ph.D. dissertation in anthropology under Spicer’s direction rather than in philosophy. I have since taken advantage of Spicer’s archival research. This present work can reasonably be viewed as an expansion of the material he presented in Cycles of Conquest. Over the years, I have traveled extensively in that part of central and northeastern Sonora known historically as La Opatería and now simply (and vaguely) as la sierra.1 In the early twenty-first century, I finally got around to writing about the Ópatas. My wanderings have formed the basis for some of what is in this book. Most of the rest comes from ancient documents and manuscripts and from other people’s writings about this indigenous group that vanished long ago. I find it difficult to write about native peoples without first considering the land that is or was their home. I have visited the Opatería dozens...