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1.Sonora The Opatería The fine overall condition of this tribe and their attraction toward the white race have contributed greatly to their mixing with it, so much so that the two are now confused. None of their pueblos can be truly called an Indian town, since their customs, their daily work, their dress and their food are the same as those of whites, from which they can be distinguished somewhat by their high moral standards and their love of work. —General Francisco Troncoso, 1905, discussing Ópatas They [Ópatas] are by nature malicious, dishonest and vindictive to the highest degree; in this the women stand out, for they are happiest when extracting vengeance that must have been inspired by the Devil.1 —Cristóbal Cañas, Jesuit priest at Aconchi, 1730 The Ópatas are gone. After four decades of searching throughout the backcountry of Sonora, I have found only a few persons in Mexico who profess to be Ópata. This seems odd, since four hundred years ago the loosely related peoples now referred to as Ópatas were the largest indigenous group in what is now Sonora, Mexico. The same reluctance to be saddled with one’s ancestors’ ethnicity turned up as well in a study Roger Owen carried out in the mid-1950s when he could find no one in an ancient Ópata village who would own up to being an Ópata.2 His experience was not unique, for Adolph Bandelier in 1884 expressed irritation at the unwillingness of people of obvious indigenous origins in Sinoquipe on the Río Sonora to acknowledge their Opatan ethnicity.3 William Hinton, who carried out a search for Ópatas in the same decade, concluded, “Most Ópatas . . . would apparently be happy to forget that they are Indians.”4 Other Sonoran aboriginal peoples survived—Guarijíos, Mayos, Ob, O’odham, Seris, and Yaquis—but the Ópatas have ostensibly vanished. The census of the year 2000 by Mexico’s National Institute of Statistics, Geography and Informatics does not even mention Ópatas in its statistics about native speakers of Sonora.5 Yet the Opatería, the region where they lived, is easily identifiable, and can even be said to retain its own personality. The former Opatan presence is still palpable in the mountainous part of northeastern and north-central Sonora. The many towns of eastern Sonora that bear present or former Opatan labels, places (to cite a few) with names pleasant and quaint to the ear—Arivechi, Bacerac, Batuc, Cumpas, Huépac, Mátape, Sahuaripa, Sinoquipe, and Tónichi—still reflect, in varying degrees, their ancient heritage. Until they were given revolutionary or 2 Chapter 1 nationalistic names, Moctezuma was Oposura, Villa Pesqueira was Mátape (and still is, according to its residents), and Villa Hidalgo was Óputo (and still is). A popular Sonoran joke claims that the residents of Óputo erected a monument to the letter O. Without the O, their town’s name would have been Puto, meaning homosexual. Hills, mountains, streams, and numerous plants also retain their Opatan names. Horacio Sobarzo, a prominent Sonoran historian, has catalogued them.6 One nearly extinct type of building structure sports an Opatan name and origin: the huuki, the semi-subterranean hut where the women of Buena Vista of Nácori Chico and (occasionally) a couple of women of El Sauz of Ures, transplants from now-disappeared Batuc and Suaqui, weave palm hats and baskets. Opatan women used such huts before the arrival of Spaniards.7 Men of eastern Sonora still wear the supremely comfortable, all-purpose teguas, moccasins of rather crude leather, now usually soled with rubber from tires.8 This book revolves around the Ópatas, a “vanished people,” or perhaps a group of “vanished” peoples. It also revolves around their land in the Opatería (as colonial writers referred to their homelands) where their descendants live, no longer identifiable primarily as Ópatas. Unlike some indigenous groups, the Ópatas were not exterminated; they were not victims of genocide.9 Indeed, the Spaniards seemed to view them with relative approval. The Ópata disappeared from view as a people because a combination of calamities, including disease and depredation, gradually undermined their cultural identity, while an invading society overwhelmed them, demeaned their institutions, took on their women as concubines or wives, gradually absorbed them, and proceeded to replace their languages—a word, a phrase, a sentence at a time—until they disappeared. The invaders appropriated ancestral Opatan lands for themselves, and evicted and marginalized them. Fiercely loyal to their...

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