Evelyn Hu-DeHart brings into focus the Yaqui in the nineteenth century, as the newly independent Mexico lurched through immense economic and governmental transformations, wars, insurgencies, and changing political alliances. This history includes Yaqui efforts to establish a native republic independent of Mexico, their resistance against government efforts to reduce their communal land to individual holdings, the value of their labor to mining and agricultural companies in northwest Mexico, their several revolts and guerrilla actions, the massive deportation of Yaquis from Sonora to Yucatán, the flight of some Yaquis across the U.S. border to Arizona, and their role in the 1910 Mexican Revolution.
In this revised edition of her groundbreaking work, Hu-DeHart reviews and reflects on the growth in scholarship about the Yaqui, including advances in theoretical frameworks and methodologies on borderlands, transnationalism, diaspora, and collective memory that are especially relevant to their history.