Accurately reviewed elsewhere as “unpretentious” and “astute,” Kirsten Erickson’s Yaqui Homeland and Homeplace fills a gaping hole in the scholarship on Yaqui culture and identity specifically and on indigenous women’s roles more generally. After spending more than a year living in one of the central pueblos of the Yaqui homeland in northwest Mexico, Erickson aptly demonstrates how communities maintain their culture not simply through vivid and dramatic rituals, or the reliable and structured kinship or governmental systems, but through the common, habitual, laborious, gendered, and day-to-day, living. As people who have spent much time in Potam Pueblo, we were delighted to see the care and attention to ethnographic detail that Erickson brought to her book. As men, we valued that Erickson was shedding light upon and indeed showing her readers how to respect those women’s spaces to which most men simply do not have much access. In that latter manner, Erickson brings a welcome and needed female voice to the scholarship on Yaqui Identity.
Erickson divides her book into two sections. She first provides three chapters on how Yaquis frame their past and how those framing devices (myths, prophecies, stories, etc.) reflect conscious strategies for ethnic identity in the face of genocide, colonization, and assimilation. The second half of her book aims more narrowly to cover women’s self-definitions as Yaquis, their domestic and ceremonial labor, and divisions in the community between women and men’s spaces, with a final section on Yaqui ceremony. While the first half largely duplicates her previously published materials, the book’s second half provides readers with substantial ethnographic research on Yaqui domesticity and gender relations. Her last section is simply too short to contribute much to the larger body of Yaqui ethnography, but it does provide a nice ending to her study.
Felipe Molina was deeply touched by the stories of the Yaqui wars, which reminded him of his grandmother’s stories. Erickson superbly elicits the sense of fear, and important to her analysis, a sense of constant movement. Felipe’s grandmother said that the Mexican government was “itom bwa’asuvaen,” trying to eat the Yaquis. Erickson’s fieldwork shows how that generational fear resonates from the elders through the younger generations. Moreover, Erickson does the difficult task of linking those memories of being “on the run” with the very contemporary and threatening need for the people to leave their homeland once again, this time for employment opportunities. The task is difficult because doing such ethnographic work means paying close attention to Yaqui discourse both in content and form. With such keen focus, Erickson similarly relates other Yaqui-isms as of yet unstudied and thus underappreciated. For example, she draws out the very real sense in Potam Pueblo that women are emotionally stronger than men, that racial discourse is in the Yaqui case very much synonymous with nationalist discourse, and that women’s daily contributions to family and kin are understood there to lead directly to tribal solidarity. She also does an amazing job of showing that the poverty is as thick and everywhere as the fine, powdery dust that flies, lands, and coats everything around the pueblo. This is perhaps where Erickson is at her best. She is a powerful writer, enabling anyone who as been to Potam another chance to relive the distinct and impressionistic scenes there, particularly of Yaqui femininity. And her combination of the native and ethnographer’s voice is about as good as it gets.
For all that the book does so well, its struggles are confusing. The book does not flow from chapter to chapter in a cohesive way, which, if intended as an ethnographic strategy, should have been highlighted explicitly. She covers so much ground in such little space that the reader might reasonably feel unsure as to why Yaqui life proceeds the way it does. She infers and nods often to theoretical articulations but often does not fully connect them in a sustained manner. For example, Erickson suggests there is a relationship between women’s notions of violence and endurance and the choices that women make. But the task at hand would be to actually show what the relationship is, not simply suggest there is one. Next, Erickson goes to great length to portray the Yaqui discourse about violence, but then says that real threats of violence may or may not be true (61). Their truth or falsehood seems to us directly relevant to whether Yaqui ways of speaking draw from actual Yaqui lived life. In the following chapter, Erickson wisely juxtaposes two different theories against each other for what they say about combined identity articulation (74). And although she has the data to effectively rearticulate the differences between the two theories, she seems content to simply mention them and move on. Lastly, it seems odd to both of us to focus on women’s roles without researching more general constructions of gender and sexuality.
The above drawbacks to her book are more academic than literary, meaning they are about her scholarly propositions, not whether the book succeeds ethnographically. That latter question is about whether she accurately represents Yaqui identity and culture. To differing degrees, we remain concerned that the book will lead a wide readership to misunderstand a couple of aspects about Yaquis. The notion of a Valley of Tears, or “inim bwan bwiapo,” is undoubtedly Christian and serves an oratorical function in the blessings. Erickson uses this Spanish loan-phrase as indicative of a pervasive Yaqui worldview or outlook and by doing so she runs the risk of locking them into old ways of thinking: the earth as weeping. An alternative course of research would be to see how Yaqui ways of speaking draw upon and contribute to the joy and promise of a vital future. Additionally, she links the proto-Yaqui beings, the Surem, to living in the hiakim, the Yaqui homeland in Sonora, Mexico. However, many stories both in the pueblos and ethnographic literature attest to Surem presence under the earth more generally. This would not be worth mentioning except that where the Surem live is foundational to Erickson’s claims about Yaqui geographical sovereignty, and by living outside the hiakim, the references to Surem greatly complicate arguments regarding Yaqui autochthony.
We are convinced, criticisms in hand, that Erickson’s Yaqui Homeland and Homeplace makes a distinguished and original contribution to the scholarship on Yaqui culture and indigenous domesticity. The book should be a frequent choice for college educators looking for a text that offers a broad range of foci in indigenous studies, as well as a sustained ethnographic examination of one tribe working multiple contemporary frontlines. In fact, Erickson’s writing is rich and eloquent because she maintains focus on her collaborators rather than digress into the theoretical exegeses called for in this review. We are left, then, with a shared perspective that, like all ethnographies, this book has its blind spots and just maybe is all the more richer for them.
David Delgado Shorter (shorter@ucla.edu) is an Associate Professor at UCLA’s Department of World Arts and Cultures. Felipe S. Molina (Yoeme) is an author, performer and educator in Tucson, Arizona. Both authors in their own writing utilize “Yoeme” for the tribe’s name, but respectfully defer to Erickson in their use of “Yaqui” for this review.
--------
[Review length: 1200 words • Review posted on June 23, 2009]