Macurawe

The Guarijío, who call themselves Macurawe, the people of the bush, are one of the oldest peoples of the western Sierra Madre, scattered across the rugged borderlands of Sonora and Chihuahua. Their tongue belongs to the Tarahumaran branch of the Uto-Aztecan family.

They lived by hunting, fishing and gathering in a remote country of canyons, and their villages gathered for the tuburada, festivals marking maize planting and harvest with feasting, ritual smoking of wild tobacco and dancing.

Jesuit missionaries entered their valleys in the 1620s and built a mission at Chínipas, but Guarijío and Guazapare rebels rose against the friars; after Spanish troops retaliated, the Guarijío dispersed into two separate communities in Sonora and Chihuahua, a division that shaped their later history.