Cáhita

Cáhita, group of North American Indian tribes that inhabited the northwest coast of Mexico along the lower courses of the Sinaloa, Fuerte, Mayo, and Yaqui rivers. They spoke about 18 closely related dialects of the Cahita language or language grouping, which belongs to the Uto-Aztecan family. When first encountered by the Spaniards in 1533, the Cáhita peoples numbered about 115,000 and were the most numerous of any single language group in northern Mexico. The speakers of most of the Cahita dialects had been culturally assimilated by colonial society or by other Cáhita peoples by the 17th century, however, and the only two surviving Cahita-speaking tribes in the 20th century were the Yaqui (q.v.) and the Mayo. They numbered approximately 10,000 and 50,000, respectively, in the late 20th century.

Despite initial Yaqui resistance to the Spanish conquest, both groups were rapidly gathered around missions by the Jesuits; during the 17th century all were converted to Christianity. During the 19th century they resisted Mexican domination, the Yaqui continuing the fight into the 20th century. After 1886 the Mexican government began a program of forcible dispersion under which thousands of Yaqui and some Mayo were deported to parts of Sonora, Oaxaca, and Yucatán; others fled to the southwestern United States.

The Cáhita peoples were subsistence farmers who lived mainly in desert lowlands, though some Cáhita were known from the highlands of western Durango. The highland Cáhita were dry farmers, depending entirely on summer rainfall. The lowland Cáhita relied heavily on the annual overflow of rivers, as well as on rainfall, and they planted the floodplains with corn (maize), beans, and squash; they raised two crops each year and supplemented their diet with a wide variety of wild foods. The Cáhita produced pottery, basketry, and woven cotton.

The Cáhita peoples lived in settlements called by the Spaniards rancherías, loose clusters of houses, usually of unrelated households. Each ranchería was autonomous, with an elder or group of elders as peacetime authorities. In time of war, however, the rancherías united in strong territorial tribal organizations.