Estudios Fronterizos (Jul 2010)
Yumano groups of Baja California: Peaceful or warriors? An approach from the theory of passive resistance
Abstract
For the prestigious Mexican historian, Miguel León–Portilla, the Yumans of Baja California were not Indians of warfare, but rather Indians of peace. In the opinion of this researcher, it was because lived in the fossilized–paleolithic stage that these Indigenous groups did not present any kind of resistance against the European colonization, making possible their easy domination and posterior diminishment or assimilation. This paper questions these advancements not only because of their lack of technical precision, but also because they obscure the role of agency that these Indians played during the missionary period. On the contrary, this paper endorses Edward Spicer (1962) assertion that resistance was present even among those groups that were not seriously engaged in significant fights against the Spanish conquerors. In the particular case of the Yuman people, this is a resistance challenging the Pueblo Indio project and its related implications in terms of sedentary lifestyle, agricultural economy and the adoption of a scheme of central authority. As we know, these patterns were opposed to those observed among the Yumans as nomads, hunters and gatherers, organized into a segmentary lineage system. Moreover, the kind of resistance described in this paper constitute what James C. Scott (1990) refers as the hidden and daily life transcripts, such as ingenuity, intelligence simulating ignorance, and irony, as well as, those economic and social practices studied by Jan Rus (1995), which include mobility and appropriation of the missionary site, all with the intention of perpetuating the presence of these Indigenous people and make possible their social reproduction.
