Mayo people

The Mayo are an Indian nation that lives on the west coast of Mexico in southern Sonora and northern Sinaloa. They speak a dialect of the Cahita language, which belongs to the Uto- atekischen language family.

The history of the Mayo before the Spanish conquest lies in the dark. In the early 17th century, they allied themselves with the Spaniards at once against their northern neighbors, the Yaqui. But ongoing Spanish pressure on their land drove the Mayo in 1740 and in the years that followed riots until they were pacified permanently in the 1880s by the Mexican central government.

The Mayo inhabit the fertile, irrigated by the rivers Mayo and Fuerte valleys that lie in the middle of a semi -desert area, thrive in the only thorny bushes and cacti. The Mayo are sedentary farmers, whose traditional cultivation of corn, beans and squash (pumpkin ) was partially replaced by cotton, wheat and safflower ( for oil). The Mayo combine Roman Catholicism with Native American religious practices. The people who at the end of the 20th century, about 80,000 members.