From Nahua migrants to residents in Sonora, Mexico

Abstract

The ritual of the Holy Cross celebrated by ‘outsider’ Nahuas from Guerrero has caused conflicts between conservationists, migrants and local indigenous groups such as the Tohono O’odham (Pápago), who also consider El Pinacate part of their sacred landscape. In this text, we analyse the place-making practices of Nahua migrants in Sonora as one of the means by which collective social actors navigate the complexities of a modernity characterised by mobility, economic precariousness and ecological degradation. Institutional development policies, we argue, rarely consider the diversity of the populations they are meant to serve, or the diversity of these populations’ approaches to well-being.

Keywords:

• Nahuas of Guerrero
• Sonora
• place-making
• ritual
• indigenous migration
• development tourism

Notes

1. We greatly appreciate the comments made on an earlier draft of our text by anonymous reviewers, who challenged us to rethink some of our suppositions and provide more in-depth analysis of our case study.

2. Moore and Sanders, “Introduction,” 14–15. See also Comaroff and Comaroff, Modernity and its Malcontents.

3. Brow, Demons and Development.

4. Romberg, Witchcraft and Welfare. For other examples, see Johnson, “Introducción.”

5. Gould, cited in Lindón and Hernaux, Tratado de geografía humana, 8.

6. Di Meo, Géographiesociale et territoires, 26.

7. Di Meo, Géographiesociale et territoires, 34–5.

8. Lindón and Hierneaux, Tratado de geografía humana, 384.

9. Di Meo, Géographiesociale et territoires, 77.

10. Cited in Lindón and Hierneaux, Tratado de geografía humana, 385.

11. Garduño et al., “Shuk Toak,” 244.

12. Ibid., 248.

13. In Ibid., 256.

14. See Chester, Conservation Across Borders, 53–134.

15. UNESCO, “El Pinacate and Gran Desierto de Altar Biosphere Reserve, Statement of Universal Value.” 2013. https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/1410/documents.html.

16. www.nuestro-mexico.com/Sonora/Puerto-Peñasco. Consulted 20/09/16.

17. Translations from the Spanish by Anne W. Johnson.

18. By ‘the other side’, José is referring to the US side of the border.

19. Coastal towns in Guererro.

20. Although it is interesting to note that the nahua groups who now inhabit Guerrero were themselves originally migrated to the Altiplano from the northwestern part of the country in the thirteen century. Within a wider historical scale, their migrations to Sonora could be seen as a return.

21. See Good and Broda (2004) for more on these rituals in Guerrero. Johanna Broda, in particular, draws interesting parallels between contemporary Nahua rituals and prehispanic agricultural practices (Broda, 2003).

22. In Guerrero, the ‘water cross’ refers to a blue cross to which campesinos offer the corn seeds that will be planted that year to be blessed.