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Mexico Travel :: The North Mexican States

State of Sonora

Before the arrival of the Spaniards, the vast arid reaches of northern Mexico were occupied by a loose association of tribes known as the Desert Culture. These nomadic, warlike hunter-gatherers, called the Chichimec by the Aztecs, fiercely resisted attempts at subjugation by the 'civilized' south. The northwest was inhabited by tribes that were affiliated not with Mexico but with the kiva-building cultures of the southwestern United States. The apex of these groups in Mexico was Paquime, a highly-developed city near Casas Grandes in northern Chihuahua, which for two centuries was the crucial trade link between Aztecs and the southwest.

The first Europeans to travel across northern Mexico were Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca, two companions and an African slave, who were the only survivors of a 1528 shipwreck on the Texas coast. Cabeza de Vaca's party wandered across the southwest and northern Mexico for eight years, dependent on the Indians for food, water and clothing, before arriving at Culiacan on the Pacific Coast in 1536. The authorities eagerly questioned them about the existence of Cibola, a fabled country with seven cities of gold; Cabeza de Vaca confirmed that they had heard of cities to the north of their route. Cabeza de Vaca later conquered Paraguay and died in a Madrid jail. His tales lived on to fuel another Spanish rush for mythic gold and led to the colonization of the southern half of North America.

No state in Mexico had a longer and bloodier history of European-Indian confrontation than Sonora. It was the home of the Pima, Opoto, Papago and Yaqui tribes, who came under the influence of the Paquime culture. In 1531 and 1533, Spanish expeditions reached Sonora but were repelled by the indigenous tribes, particularly the Yaquis, who didn't stop fighting the Spanish and their descendants until 1910. After Cabeza de Vacaemerged from the desert in 1536, the viceroy sent Francisco Vazquez de Coronado to find the mythic cities of gold. He marched through Sonora all the way to Great Bend, Kansas, but only returned with tales of 'shaggy cows'-buffaloes. No Spanish settlements took hold until 1563, when Francisco de Ibarra entered Sonora from Durango and constructed a line of presidios (small forts) in the sierra. In the 17th century, the Jesuits led by Father Francisco Eusebio Kino began missionizing Mexico's northwest and had to face fierce Indian resistance. The colonizing of Sonora finally picked up momentum in the 1700s, after gold and silver mines were found in the mountains.

In the unsettled period after Mexico's independence, settlers faced almost continual raids by Yaquis, Papagos and Apaches forced out of the north by American ranchers. William Walker, the American adventurer, tried to form an independent Republic of Sonora in 1853, but was defeated by Mexican soldiers and forced to flee to San Diego. During Porfirio Diaz' reign, foreign copper companies purchased the major mines in Sonora, and the rebellious Yaquis were rounded up and sent as slave labor to the henequen plantations of distant Yucatan, where many of them died. They returned after Diaz was defeated in 1911 and fought in the revolutionary army of Alvaro Obregon, beginning their integration into Mexican life. Hermosillo, Sonora's capital, was originally an Indian village named Pitic; in the 18th century it became a Jesuit mission and then a presidio. Named after a general in the War of Independence, Hermosillo is the center of a rich farming district. Guaymas, which was discovered by Francisco de Ulloa in 1539, became the port for Sonora's mines during the 19th century. The US Navy bombarded it in 1846, William Walker looted the town in 1853, and the French occupied it between 1865 and 1866. Tourism is increas¬ingly important for Guaymas, but the port and a large copper smelter are the main industries.

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