While we know our northern friends may not feel it, in the South, Spring is
here. So we thought we'd share a few of our gardening sites appropriate
for this time of the year. Along with gardening, there's grilling, and getting
ready to diet so that you can fit back into that bathing suit this summer!
Cahita. A group of tribes of the
Piman family, consisting chiefly of the Yaqui and the Mayo, dwelling in s.
w. Sonora and N. w. Sinaloa, Mexico, principally in the middle and lower
portions of the valleys of the Rio Yaqui, Rio Mayo, and Rio Fuerte, and
extending from the Gulf of California to the Sierra Madre. Physically the men
are usually large and well formed; their complexion is of medium brown, and
their features, though somewhat coarse, are not unpleasant. The dress of both
sexes is coarse and simple, that of the men consisting of a short cotton shirt,
trousers, straw hat, and leather sandals, the women wearing the typical cotton
cainisa and gown. The native blanket and sash are now rarely seen. The Yaqui
formerly tattooed the chin and arms. Owing to the semitropical climate their
typical dwellings were of canes and boughs, covered with palm leaves, but these
have been largely superseded by huts of brush and adobe. Al though belonging to
the same division of the Piman stock and showing no marked difference in
culture, the Mayo and Yaqui tribes have not been friendly; indeed the former
waged war against the Yaqui until they themselves were finally conquered, when
the Yaqui compelled them to pay tribute and to furnish warriors to aid the Yaqui
in their almost incessant hostility first toward Spain, afterward against
Mexico. They now hold aloof from each other, and while the Yaqui are habitually
on the warpath, the Mayo are entirely pacific. In the fertile valleys along the
streams respectively occupied by the tribes of this group, they engage in
raising corn, cotton, calabashes, beans, and tobacco, and also in cultivating
the mezcal-producing agave. They hunted in the neigh boring Sierra Madre and
fished in the streams that supplied the water to irrigate their fields, as well
as on the coast, where the Yaqui still obtain salt for sale, principally in
Guaymas. It has been said that neither the Mayo nor the Yaqui had a tribal
chief, each tribe being settled in a number of autonomous villages which
combined only in case of warfare; but there appears to have been a village ruler
or kind of cacique. In the first half of the 17th century the Mayo and Yaqui
together probably numbered between 50,000 and 60,000. There are now about
40,000, equally divided between the tribes, but like most of the southern tribes
of the Piman family, these have largely become Hispanized, except in language.
The Yaqui particularly are naturally industrious and are employed as cattlemen,
teamsters, farmers, and sail ors; they are also good miners, are ex pert in
pearl diving, and are employed for all manual labor in preference to any others.
They exhibit an unusual talent for music and adhere more or less to the
performance of their primitive dances (now somewhat varied by civilization),
engaged in principally on feast days, particularly during the harvest festival
of San Juan and at the celebration of the Passover. The chief vices of the
Yaqui, it is said, are an immoderate indulgence in intoxicants, gambling, and
stealing, while conjugal fidelity is scarcely known to them. There is some
uncertainty in regard to the tribal divisions of the Cahita group. Pimentel (Lenguas,
I, 453) and Buelna (Arte Lengua Cahita, x) divide it into three
dialects, the Yaqui, Mayo, and Tehueco, but the latter, in his Peregrinacion de
los Aztecas (21, 1892), mentions the Sinaloa, Tehueco, and Zuaque as distinct
groups. Orozco y Berra (Geog., 58) gives Yaqui, Mayo, Tehueco, and
Vacoregue. It appears that there was in fact a Sinaloa tribe which later lost
its identity through absorption by the Tehueco, while the Zuaque were apparently
identical with the latter. For the present condition of the Yaqui and the Mayo
see Hrdlicka in Am. Anthrop., n. s., vi, 51, 1904. (F. W. H.)
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includes some historical materials that may imply negative stereotypes
reflecting the culture or language of a particular period or place. These
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Handbook of American Indians North of Mexico, Frederick Webb Hodge, 1906
