The Yaqui

Detail of a late 17^thcentury Jesuit Mission

 Source - http://www.shutterstock.com/pic.mhtml?id=74095567&src=id

By the early 1600s, Jesuit missionaries had begun to penetrate northwestern Mexico. Unlike the Franciscans of the northern Rio Grande region, the Jesuits working in northwestern Mexico never imposed the hated repartimiento and encomienda systems and never banned the practice of indigenous rituals. As a result, they were generally favorably regarded by the native people. Impressed after observing Jesuits in neighboring lands, in 1617 the Yaqui invited missionaries into their territory. The Yaqui proved to be eager converts and within a few years virtually all Yaqui had been converted. In adopting Catholicism, however, they reworked its beliefs and rituals to incorporate their native ones and in the process created essentially a new, syncretic religion.

The Jesuit missionaries were to have a profound influence on Yaqui lifeways. Soon after their arrival the missionaries consolidated the eighty Yaqui settlements into eight densely populated towns, each of which held between 2000 and 4000 people. The focus of each town was an adobe-walled church set within a central town plaza; surrounding the plaza were the habitation buildings. A more formalized government system, closely linked with the church, accompanied this increase in population.

The Jesuits also introduced new crops (such as wheat and peaches), work animals (including sheep, cattle and horses), and more intensive agricultural techniques. These innovations made the Yaqui valley one of the most productive areas of the entire province and garnered the attention of Spanish settlers. Spaniards began to flood into the region, with their numbers further increasing when silver was discovered in Yaqui territory in 1684. By the late 1600's hostilities had erupted between the Yaqui and Spaniards. In 1740 the Yaqui successfully revolted and drove out all Spaniards except the Jesuit missionaries. (The Jesuits, however, were soon also expelled—though not by the Yaqui. In 1767, they were withdrawn from the New World by order of the Spanish Crown).