Ghosting Indigenous Cultures: Yaquis' Near Absence in Literature of the Mexican Revolution

When describing the tricky business of navigating through the Hollywood machine, Adam Beach, a prominent First Nations actor, remarks on how movie producers don't imagine Native people as they are in the present but rather "they like to see us in the 1800s."¹ His observation underscores a pervasive paradox associated with indigenous cultures' positioning within a dominant culture, whereby their communities are at times perceived as belonging to the departed ones, as ghosts of their past, and not as people in the here and now. Seeing Native communities as distant and immaterial ones is evidenced in other national discourses and accompanying cultural productions across the globe. Mechanisms behind nation building and modernization have particularly impacted the envisioning of indigenous people and their cultural traditions as relics of the past, thus contributing to their vulnerability. The exposure to manipulation is especially evidenced when outside entities threaten to take indigenous groups' resources: The Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in North Dakota, the Cochabamba water wars in Bolivia, and the Yaqui water crisis in Mexico are just a few salient and more recent examples of how communities are being run over (sometimes in actuality) by more powerful entities. Reacting to these threats Native communities make their rights and personhood known by gathering collectively, with allies, to fight against those who want to take the resources and lands essential to their existence. That is, when treated as the unseen, they emerge and actively make their bodies visible.

Focusing on the Yaquis, a Native community residing near the Yaqui River in the state of Sonora in northern Mexico, this article examines the mechanisms that have contributed to the vanishing and virtual ghosting of an indigenous people and their histories. More specifically, the literary treatment of the Yaquis in novels that address the Mexican Revolution (ca. 1910–1920) illustrates a type of ghost-like conditioning, and by ghosting, I mean treating the Yaquis as if they are invisible, destined to vanish, instead of as material people, who actively fought in the revolutionary war and survived.²

Fully fleshing out Yaquis' literary presence, or any other indigenous representations, becomes difficult because they are mostly missing as substantive characters within the pages of historically based texts.³ Yet, to illustrate this ghost-like conditioning, I focus on the Yaquis in particular because there are comparatively more textual examples that attest to Yaquis' presence in the war, albeit obliquely. Moreover, the case of the Yaquis also exemplifies how certain indigenous communities in literature are tacitly acknowledged, but their heroism or reasons for joining are rarely explained. Similar to the Yaqui people, the Mayo were critical of would-be president Álvaro Obregón's victories, but their literary presence is even more invisible when compared to the Yaquis. The same could be said for the Tarahumara or Huichol people, who fought alongside Pancho Villa and Venustiano Carranza, respectively, but they are mostly absent from this body of literature.⁴ Because there are more textual examples of the Yaquis' literary presence, I draw from them to point to the more general treatment of indigenous communities as illustrated in novels that address the civil war years.

The initial novels set during the Mexican Revolution (published between 1915 and 1947) shaped myths about the nation's heroes and villains, revealing the winners and losers: Porfirio Díaz, Victoriano Huerta, Francisco Madero, Álvaro Obregón, Pancho Villa, and Emiliano Zapata, for example. Yet the Yaquis' specific contributions to the war within this genre of literature remain obscure.⁵ How do the authors portray Yaqui characters compared to the consecrated heroes belonging to this revolutionary era? How does the tacit Yaqui literary treatment contribute to their near invisibility from dominant culture? Could their absence in literature be understood as a type of ghostliness?

Antonio Castro Leal compiled the important anthology La novela de la Revolución Mexicana (1960), which includes prose published from 1915 through 1947 and features such novels as Los de abajo (1915) (1992, The Underdogs) by Mariano Azuela, whose text is often cited as being the "founder and major exponent of the novel...