CCS Assistant Professor of Humanities Dr. Anabel Galindo will present her paper In The Land of Sunshine: Yaqui Mobility, 1770-1920 at the end of October as part of the 63rd Annual Western History Association Conference in Los Angeles.
Abstract: Little is known of Yaquis in California before the 1900s. Local newspapers printed sensationalized headlines like “Yaquis Washing their war paint on the Los Angeles River Bottom” that described Yaquis as bloodthirsty Indians or defeated warriors migrating to Los Angeles, stirring the curiosity of Angelenos about these new foreigners. Angelenos read about the violence in Rio Yaqui, Sonora, and the efforts by the Mexican government to eradicate Yaquis and turn the valley into an agricultural oasis. This era of dispossession led to migration, which scholarship has fixated into a diaspora narrative. Well movement did occur; this paper argues that this fixation has consequently landlocked our understanding of Yaqui indigenous mobility and belonging. Yaquis were not “new” immigrants to the Sunshine state, but rather were settling in places where ancestors had once done before. Uncovering the multiple experiences of Yaquis in Alta California from the mid-eighteenth to the early twentieth century and the interconnections with peoples of California provide a much more complex view the Indigenous world.