Memories of the atrocity. Yaqui women and the inherited extermination and deportation narratives

Abstract

This article aims to explore the traces and forms of representation of a traumatic past through the intergenerational stories of indigenous women. For this purpose, a qualitative research with an ethnographic approach compiled a corpus of semi-structured interviews with women of the Yaqui tribe, whose purpose was focused on rescuing the memories transmitted by their ancestors about the genocidal practices perpetrated during the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz in the first decade of the 20th century and the subsequent post-revolutionary years. In several months of fieldwork carried out in the Yaqui towns, located in northwestern Mexico, narratives of Yaqui women were recovered that had remained invisible in historiography and those postmemories recounted only in the family space from one generation to the next, revealed unprecedented textures of the forced expulsion of Yaqui families from their ancestral territory, details of the brutality of State violence, silenced perceptions about slavery in haciendas in southern Mexico, the pain of deportation, the return and reinstatement to their communities, in addition to the struggle to preserve their political autonomy and identity.