As with other Indian peoples throughout Mexico, the Yaquis of Sonora are the heirs of a long and violently contested history of subordination. They have endured periods of armed combat with colonial forces and later Mexican national troops. During the regime of Porfirio Diaz many families were forcefully removed from their villages to specified locales in Oaxaca and Yucatan. Some escaped this removal by fleeing into the mountains of Sonora. Others gained sanctuary far to the north in Tucson, Arizona. The Yaquis have also lost most of their aboriginal territory, including their most valued asset...the fertile agricultural lands that parallel the Yaqui River. Despite these and many other clashes with the Yoris (their most commonly used term for all non-Indians), the Yaquis have not only retained, but actively promote, their ethnic identity and solidarity. As Erickson skillfully demonstrates in her ethnographic analysis of daily life in Potam, one of eight Yaqui pueblos, women play a critically important, though frequently overlooked, role in this process. While men are also engaged in expressions of tribal ethnicity, their arena of activity is largely public and linked to indigenous ceremonial activities. Erickson takes the reader into the homes and daily lives of Yaqui women. There we gain a highly contextualized and personal account of the ways in which women, in the course of their daily routines, maintain and reinforce Yaqui identity.
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