This groundbreaking new study examines the history of the Yaqui people and their interactions with the Spanish Empire from first contact through Mexican independence. The Yaquis and the Empire focuses on three ironies: the Yaquis both resisted and came to value their ties with empire; processes of violence and negotiation were ongoing and intertwined throughout the colonial period; and the empire, though weak in manpower and distant from its bases of military and financial strength, was surprisingly effective in its drive to transform the Mexican northwest.
Using extensive, newly unearthed documentation from archives in Mexico, Spain, the United States, and Italy, Folsom shines brilliant light on the dreams, struggles, and tragedies of all participants in the drama of encounter. This finely wrought portrait of the Yaqui people in colonial times shows in vivid detail how natives, Jesuits, settlers, and government officials together brought a distinctive borderlands society into existence.
“The Yaquis and the Empire is a textured, surprising, and engrossing narrative of colonial compromises in New Spain’s fraught northwestern borderland. Folsom builds honestly and intelligently on previous Yaqui scholarship. But in ways small and large he surpasses existing literature through his pioneering archival research, his shrewd analysis, and his gifted narrative prose. This book is indispensable for understanding the Spanish-Yaqui relationship, and a provocative meditation on the limits of early modern imperialism more generally.” — Brian DeLay, author of War of a Thousand Deserts: Indian Raids and the U.S.-Mexican War.
Winner of the 2015 Latin American Studies Association Social Science Book Award.
"Folsom’s insights are profound. . . After reading this book, one is no longer surprised that Yaquis appear so often in the historical record as both rebels and imperial soldiers. Nor is one surprised that the Yaquis of the twentieth century could be first hated by the Porfirian regime and later favored by Cárdenas; enslaved and then emancipated; and reviled and finally redeemed in the eyes of the central state. Folsom shows us that these more recent events belong to a much longer and deeper history of Yaqui pragmatism and survival.”—Sean McEnroe, The Americas.
Runner-up for the 2015 David J. Weber-Clements Prize given by the Western History Association.
Winner of the 2016 Phi Alpha Theta Book Award for the Best Book on the American West, the award is jontly sponsored by the Charles Redd Center for Western Studies at Brigham Young Uiversity and Phi Alpha Theta.
Winner of the 2016 Border Regional Library Association's Southwest Book Award.