We Will Dance Our Truth: Yaqui History in Yoeme Performances

In this innovative, performative approach to the expressive culture of the Yaqui (Yoeme) peoples of the Sonora and Arizona borderlands, David Delgado Shorter provides an altogether fresh understanding of Yoeme worldviews. Based on extensive field study, Shorter’s interpretation of the community’s ceremonies and oral traditions as forms of “historical inscription” reveals new meanings of their legends of the Talking Tree, their Testamento narrative of myth and history, and their fabled deer dances, funerary rites, and church processions.

Working collaboratively with Yoeme communities, Shorter has produced a scrupulous investigation that challenges received wisdom from both anthropological and New Age perspectives, demonstrates how Yoeme performances provide a counterdiscourse to earlier understandings of colonialism and conquest, and updates our knowledge of contemporary Yoeme society. Shorter’s vivid descriptions and penetrating analyses vividly show how today’s Yoeme peoples navigate the tribulations and opportunities of the twenty-first century.