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  • Yaqui Homeland and Homeplace: The Everyday Production of Ethnic Identity
  • David Martínez (bio)
Kirstin C. Erickson. Yaqui Homeland and Homeplace: The Everyday Production of Ethnic Identity. Tucson: U of Arizona P, 2008. ISBN: 978-0-8165-2735-9. 186 pp.

Kirstin C. Erickson, an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville, has written a sensitive and eloquent contribution to the non-Indigenous tradition of researching cultural groups completely alien from one's own. Erickson, a Euroamerican ethnographer trained at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, embarks on a quest to comprehend the ways in which Yaqui women play an active and even central role in the creation and maintenance of Yaqui culture and identity through "everyday" activities, whether they are preparing meals and tending children, hosting friends and relatives, or constructing altars for patron saints. More specifically, Erickson benefits from the close relations she made in the villages of Potam, Rahum, Vicam, and Loma de Bacum, which are located south of Hermosillo, Mexico.

By focusing mainly on women's lives, Erickson adds a much-needed discourse to Yaqui studies that hitherto have focused on the ceremonial lives of men, as exemplified by Edward H. Spicer's 1940 study of Pascua Village in Tucson, Arizona, which places particular emphasis on the padrinos and the elaborate rituals during Easter week. Erickson also demonstrates that there is more to Yaqui culture and history than the heroic political resistance to Mexican colonialism, [End Page 118] as detailed in the work of Evelyn Hu-Dehart—namely, Yaqui Resistance and Survival (1984), which covered the years 1821–1910, at a time when the mestizo population of Mexico was seeking its own form of liberation, but which did not adequately include the needs of Indigenous peoples. Of equal importance here is the emphasis that Erickson gives to everyday activities, such as household chores, which permits the Yaqui informants to speak in a more accessible, less ritualized voice, as opposed to the ceremonial poetry captured in the collaborative work of Larry Evers and Felipe S. Molina in Yaqui Deer Songs (1987).

At the same time, Erickson is respectful of the work by her predecessors, especially Spicer, whom she quotes recurrently throughout her book. Indeed, Erickson reflects on her subjects' lives within the context that Spicer originally gave to Indigenous existence in his epic 1967 treatise, Cycles of Conquest, which examined the episodes of invasion, settlement, and resistance between Indigenous communities, including the Yaqui, and their non-Indigenous counterparts from Spain, Mexico, and the United States that occurred in the Southwest during a four-century period beginning in the 1530s. What resulted from this consistently violent and racist series of conquests were Indigenous nations whose sense of self was diminished to "enclaves," ethnic islands in a sea of social and political hostility. As both Spicer and Hu-Dehart appreciated, and which Erickson acknowledges, an important aspect of modern Yaqui identity is a conscientious effort to withstand the forces of assimilation that engulf them. With respect to the narratives that drive Erickson's discourse, the author states: "Through ordinary social practices, particularly biographical narratives, Yaqui individuals produce the meaningfulness of their place by tracing a history of exile and return" (43). Despite adaptations of language and dress, the Yaqui have maintained a unique ethnic identity, even as lands were seized and a diaspora northward into the upper reaches of the Sonoran Desert ensued.

A mental as well as a cultural boundary persists between the Yaqui, who call themselves Yoeme, and the Mexicans, whom the Yoeme call "Yoris." The Yoeme are divided not merely along village [End Page 119] lines but also along kinship ties, in which a system of reciprocity is preserved as a foundation for collective identity. It is within this group dynamic that the women with whom Erickson consults take on their roles as creators of customs and values. At the same time, Erickson notes with some dismay that the Yaqui women with whom she spoke identified themselves as Yaqui first, women second. "It was difficult for me," Erickson writes, "to engage women in conversations about themselves exclusively as women; Yaquiness continually entered the equation" (74).

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