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1 The People and the Land baseball, pascolas, and plants In 1980 one of the most popular major league baseball players was a Mexican named Fernando Valenzuela. On the nights he pitched his legendary screwball for the Los Angeles Dodgers, management could count on as many as ten thousand additional admissions. For five years bleacher seats were sold out for every home game in which Valenzuela pitched. He is a Mayo Indian from southern Sonora. While public relations technicians extolled Fernando’s humble peasant origins in promoting his image, little was made of the fact that in his youth Valenzuela had danced the pascola, the traditional Mayo dance, and that he spoke la lengua, the tongue of the Mayos. Nor did the North American press recall his Mayo origins and talk about the Mayos’ pre-Columbian presence and their forcible eviction from their aboriginal lands. Local legend has it that Cerro Bayájuri, a volcanic inselberg, or mostly buried mountain, jutting from the coastal plain near Etchohuaquila, Valenzuela’s native village, is home to powerful spirits. Those Mayos who embark on important missions visit the steep, rocky hill to receive inspiration and benediction for their undertakings. The supplicant of good heart may be blessed. Others may be frightened by demons. Valenzuela, it is said, climbed Bayájuri and asked the spirits for power to be a good baseball player. Etchohuaquila is a nondescript town whose name in Mayo means “skinny etcho cactus.” It is one of dozens of small towns in the agriculturally fertile delta region of the Río Mayo, which empties into the Gulf of California.1 It has little to o¤er pilgrims who visit the sacred birthplace of their sports hero. To the east and north is low thornscrub, an apt name for the short leguminous trees, cacti, and shrubs that scratch, prickle, pierce, and tear. It is heavily overgrazed , and overcut by those in search of firewood and fence posts. To the west 3 and south lie hundreds of square miles of irrigated fields that look no di¤erent from those in California’s San Joaquin Valley. Etchohuaquila itself is a drab, dusty town where the air is perpetually tinged with the acrid smell of agricultural chemicals. One might wander for many miles through the irrigated lands without finding a single native tree. In the 1930s, Etchohuaquila, like most towns in the delta of the Río Mayo, Sonora’s second largest river, was surrounded by rich coastal thornscrub. Scattered farms exploited the deep delta soils, irrigating with water pumped from deep wells or siphoned from a few canals connected with diversion dams that washed out every time the river flooded. Farmers grew cotton and wheat, for Mexican consumption, and garbanzo beans, most of which were sold to consumers in Spain and the Middle East. The natives of Etchohuaquila and most of the more than a hundred other Mayo towns wandered routinely in this thorny landscape (see, for example, Valenzuela Y. 1984). Here they spent countless hours gathering, gleaning, harvesting, cutting, chopping, and picking various roots, trunks, limbs, leaves, flowers, fruits, sap, and bark for an almost unending variety of purposes—for food, medicine, and firewood, of course, but also for tending to and feeding their livestock, and for dyes, mordants , fixatives, glues, adhesives, caulks, catalysts, cements, and excipients; for boards, logs, beams, joists, posts, rods, poles, sticks, timbers, and clubs; for beads, crucifixes, rosaries, talismans, nosegays, and festoons; for spoons, bowls, trays, weaving sticks, tripods, bags, rope; and for myriad other items whose need arose in their day-to-day lives. Natives would even cut trunks of mezquite, chop wedge-shaped steps, and lean them against a tree so that chickens could have predator-safe roosts, or against a house so people might more easily climb to the roof. For many centuries this low, wild semiforest of small trees, bushes, and cacti served the Mayos well. They sweated through the scorching summers— choking on the dust of May and June, and sweltering in the steamy vapor of the July and August rainy season. The Río Mayo flooded twice each year, leaving behind fertile silt in which the Mayos sowed their seeds. Combining their crops of corn, beans, squash, and chiles with the free harvest of the monte, the Spanish term for the natural vegetation, they were strangers to hunger. The lands of the Mayos and those of the Yaquis to the north were too fertile , too arable, and too lucrative to escape...

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