Yoli

The Yoli, known to the Spanish as Conchos, inhabited much of the Río Conchos basin in northern Mexico. Their communities lived along the river and its tributaries, from the mountain foothills toward the Rio Grande in the north. Colonial accounts named many distinct groups among them, reflecting a landscape of local communities rather than a single centralized state.

Spanish missions and mining settlements spread into Concho country during the seventeenth century. In 1653 people from Namiquipa sent a message to the Tarahumara offering an alliance against the Spaniards. Later uprisings brought Concho, Tarahumara and other communities together in resistance, while some mission villages also became places of negotiation and coexistence. The river remained a thread connecting the different peoples of this contested frontier.