The ancestors of Mexico's Yaqui people have inhabited coastal Sonora since long before the arrival of Europeans in the Americas. Yet, despite sixteenth-century Spanish accounts of conquest and conversion, the region remained, in many respects, politically and culturally independent of the central state even in the nineteenth century. Raphael Folsom's deeply researched and beautifully communicated history of the Yaquis explores this paradox from every angle. The stars of this narrative are the Yaquis themselves, a people whose “tenacious traditionalism and worldly sophistication” allowed them to defend a political position neither entirely inside nor entirely outside the Spanish Empire.

Folsom suggests that the very definition of “Yaqui” was bound up with their self-representation as Christians on one hand, and as outsiders and rebels on the other. The Yaquis viewed the Empire as a persistent fact of life, recognizing that the colonial state offered both risks and opportunities. Digging deep into the archival record, Folsom reveals the ground-level strategies employed by Yaquis to defend their personal and communal interests, concluding that “the main debates among the Yaquis were not about whether to collaborate with the agents of empire, but how to do so.”

This is in some ways a book on military and diplomatic history, but not of the old fashioned sort. Folsom approaches acts of rebellion, violence, and flight more anthropologically than ideologically—very much in the tradition of William B. Taylor and James C. Scott. Likewise, his attention to the micro-diplomacy of warriors, translators, and emissaries fits constructively with recent work by Juliana Barr and Yanna Yannakakis. Those interested in debates over frontiers and borderlands will certainly want to read The Yaquis and the Empire, and even those weary of the subfield's enduring debates will be pleasantly surprised. Folsom's insights are profound, but his discussions of theory are appropriately restrained. After so many books and articles on middle grounds, negotiation, agency, mediation, transculturation, and ethnogenesis, these approaches no longer need to be justified or belabored as they once did. Folsom is fully versed in this tradition, and he draws freely from a wide range of theoretical approaches to reconstruct individual and collective decision-making in a particular place and time.

The Yaquis and the Empire invites a wider discussion on the narrative of change as it occurred in the multiethnic society of Mexico's north. Studies of the Yaqui and their near neighbors typically focus on initial conquest and conversion, labor and the mining economy, the effects of the Bourbon reforms and Jesuit expulsion, and colonial rebellions, with the addition of the subsequent events of Yaqui rebellion, exile, and repatriation. Folsom's book offers something of value on all of these questions, but he also redirects our attention to underappreciated historical moments. Whereas most frontier historians have pointed to the late Bourbon reforms of the 1760s and 1770s (typically emphasizing the Jesuit expulsion and the reforms of Carlos III and José de Gálvez) as the historical watershed of the eighteenth century, Folsom places equal or greater emphasis on the changes of the 1730s, suggesting that the reforms of Felipe V and Governor Manuel Bernal de Huidobro were already upsetting the “colonial pact” and provoking resistance. Thus, the Yaqui rebellion of 1740 figures prominently in this book. Folsom describes the decade that followed as a time of declining missions, expanding imperial authority, Yaqui political resistance, and new alliances between formerly antagonistic Jesuits and Spanish settlers. It is worth reading this narrative beside works on the region by Cynthia Radding, Susan Deeds, José de la Torre Curiel (who takes a somewhat different perspective on the Jesuit enterprise) and Luís Navarro García (who emphasizes the later Bourbon Reforms). There are subtle differences in periodization and emphasis among these authors, but taken together, they show a world on Spain's northern frontier that was changing rapidly and profoundly long before national independence.

Though Folsom's main study ends in the early nineteenth century, his epilogue helps us glimpse the long-term implications of his discoveries: the Yaqui rebels, petitioners, deal makers, and cultural conservators of the nineteenth and twentieth century had deep roots. After reading this book, one is no longer surprised that Yaquis appear so often in the historical record as both rebels and imperial solders. Nor is one surprised that the Yaquis of the twentieth century could be first hated by the Porfirian regime and later favored by Cárdenas; enslaved and then emancipated; and reviled and finally redeemed in the eyes of the central state. Folsom shows us that these more recent events belong to a much longer and deeper history of Yaqui pragmatism and survival.