Species of the River: Yaqui (Yoeme) communities in Mexico and the United States
Selina Martinez is a Yaqui architect from Penjamo – Scottsdale, Arizona (US) who has dedicated her efforts to meticulously collect and produce digital 3D models, capturing cultural assets and significant sites deeply intertwined with Yaqui culture. This endeavour aims to construct a digital archive, brimming with engaging and educational visual content through a project called Juebenaria.
The term juebenaria, translating to ‘plural’ in the Yaqui language, encapsulates the project’s essence of representing varied Yaqui narratives across the past, present, and future. This initiative aspires to create a dynamic collection of lived experiences that vividly illustrate the diverse identities of Yoeme people. Its overarching mission is to strengthen Yaqui communities through reconnection to build towards multigenerational collective visions that bridges immediate contexts with ancestral homelands.
This project with SDCELAR integrates fieldwork research in Sonora (Mexico) and Arizona (US), and collection research of objects in the British Museum and other UK institutions attributed to the Yaqui. The research results inform the design of a digital interactive exhibition, premised on multimedia storytelling, including historical and contemporary audio recordings and 3D models of spaces and objects.
The Yaqui people (or Yoeme), are originally from Sonora, Mexico and currently live in that area and Arizona, in the United States. Yoeme identities are explicitly in relation to the territorial homelands along the Rio Yaqui which has historically supported a dynamic ecosystem near the bottom of the Sonoran Desert biome.
Throughout Yaqui history, the presence of outside forces foretold by the Yaqui emergence story have come to fruition. They initially resisted the Spanish colonisers in the 16th and 17th centuries and the impositions during colonial Mexico. From the 19th century, the Mexican state applied tactics of assimilation and dehumanisation to assert control and power over territory under the guise of growth. Over time, the Yaquis developed a legacy of actively resisting oppression and capitalist exploitation, persistently standing up against each generation of Mexican political regime that have attempted to control their territory. Tensions over the territory brought about war, enslavement, and suffering influencing the escapism and migration of some Yaquis to flee North creating new communities across the U.S. border during the aggressions of the presidency of Porfirio Díaz.
Selina Martínez’s visit to Sonora, Mexico.
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Selina came to London in May 2023 to engage with the collection, conduct research and 3D scanned the Yaqui artefacts, while visiting other institutions across the UK that hold Yaqui collections and recordings, such as the Pitt Rivers Museum and the British Library.
As described by Selina, the gourd bowls are common among the Yaqui communities and are utilized for various purposes. For example during ceremony they are used for offerings, such as tobacco, when performances are happening. The painted flowers that can be seen on the surface symbolise life and are representative of the fruit that comes after flowering. The mask is used by a cultural performer called a Pascola during ceremony alongside the Deer Dancer, a tradition that persist in the present in Mexico and the US. The Pascola not only dances but humours and entertains audiences between songs.
During her visit, Selina also visited the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, which holds a collection of Yaqui bow and arrows and listened to different Yaqui recordings at the British Library Sound Archive. These findings, along with her fieldwork in Sonora during December 2022 and her prior research, is the foundation for a digital exhibition called ‘Species of the River’.
‘Species of the River’ focuses on storytelling through 12 notable species originating from the ancestral Yaqui homelands along the Rio Yaqui in Sonora, Mexico. Through this exploration, the project sheds light on how these species contribute to the contextualization of Yaqui identity, resulting in diverse expressions of identity and ultimately influencing the spatial aspects of Yoeme identities over time.
This digital exhibition is an outgrowth of the Juebenaria project. By synergizing Selina’s invaluable contributions with the British Museum’s collection, the exhibition seeks to amplify initiatives driven by the community itself, offering an elevated platform for authentic Yaqui voices to resonate. Leveraging cutting-edge software and technology, the project pays homage to the enduring and ancestral essence of Yaqui culture, transcending the boundaries of time and space.
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“3D-scanning the Yaqui collection with a Leica BLK 360 LiDAR scanner. A work by Selina Martínez (Arizona, US) for the collaborative digital exhibition about identities and species of the Yaqui River.
The homelands of the Yaqui are within Sonora, Mexico, and many families in the early 20th century during the Mexican Revolution migrated North to the United States to escape violence.
Today there are multiple Yaqui communities within the state of Arizona, descendants in Southern California, and even a community across the Gulf of California in Baja California.”
The incorporation of nature in Yoeme living artifacts reflects a deep ancestral connection to the Rio Yaqui homelands. Their intricate material culture draws upon a legacy of working with the natural world, adapting to changing influences. Through this iterative process, designs spatialize identity and shape the practice of Yaqui culture. The intersection of design and diverse lived experiences allows for efforts to reconnect with cultural knowledge, sustain physical spaces, and shape digital representations, fostering new dialogue in design.
A DIGITAL EXHIBITION
Click on the image to access the experience
Selina Martínez is a member of the Pascua Yaqui Tribe and Xicana born and raised in Phoenix, Arizona. She is currently an architect in training pursuing her architectural license. In 2020, Martinez was a recipient of the Radical Imagination grant from the NDN Collective, establishing the seed funding to create Juebenaria, a project focused on providing an evolving collection of a plurality of Yaqui lived experiences through digital media. Her project with SDCELAR examines questions of territorial identity, dispossession, community memory and storytelling, and design responses in Yaqui communities on both sides of the present-day US/Mexico border.
Publications related to women’s and maternal health with Wixárika communities by the author of this exhibition
Gamlin, Jennie B. (2013)
Shame as a barrier to health seeking among indigenous Huichol migrant labourers: An interpretive approach of the “violence continuum” and “authoritative knowledge”
Social Science and Medicine 97 75-81
Gamlin, Jennie B. (2023)
Wixárika Practices of Medical Syncretism: An Ontological Proposal for Health in the Anthropocene
Medical Anthropology Theory 10 (2) 1-26
Gamlin, Jennie B. (2020)
“You see, we women, we can’t talk, we can’t have an opinion…”. The coloniality of gender and childbirth practices in Indigenous Wixárika families
Social Science and Medicine 252, 112912
Jennie Gamlin and David Osrin (2020)
Preventable infant deaths, lone births and lack of registration in Mexican indigenous communities: health care services and the afterlife of colonialism
Ethnicity and Health 25 (7)
Jennie Gamlin and Seth Holmes (2018)
Preventable perinatal deaths in indigenous Wixárika communities: an ethnographic study of pregnancy, childbirth and structural violence BMC
Pregnancy and Childbirth 18 (Article number 243) 2018
Gamlin, Jennie B. and Sarah J Hawkes (2015)
Pregnancy and birth in an Indigenous Huichol community: from structural violence to structural policy responses
Culture, health and sexuality 17 (1)
