Significant anthropological and political attention has been given to the Yaquis in Mexico and the United States. They have received consideration in national political debates in Mexico before, during and in the period following the Revolution. And although Yaquis have been represented in important Mexican literary works and by important Mexican authors—Amado Nervo, Gregorio Lopez y Fuentes, José Revueltas—few have preoccupied themselves with criticism regarding these representations. Writers of the Novela de la Revolución, like Martin Luis Guzman, Carlos Fuentes and Rafael F. Munoz, include Yaqui characters or allude to Yaquis in regards to military prowess. Novela indigenista authors Francisco Rojas González and Armando Chavez Camacho write about Yaquis, although through an ethnographic lens, thus giving an added importance to Yaqui culture—dance, cosmology and traditional stories, regional geography and the Yaqui/Yori racial dichotomy—while still focusing on resistance. Chicana/o writers have also realized works including Yaquis. Some of these include Rodolfo "Corky" Gonzales, Cherríe L. Moraga, Miguel Méndez, and Luis Valdez: all major figures in Chicana/o literature and theatre. A major feature in nearly all literary representations is a focus on Yaqui bellicosity and a distancing of Yaqui cultural history from the warrior figure: a Yaqui warrior myth.

In this dissertation, I investigate the interpretation of Yaquis in twentieth century literature in the three above mentioned literary movements: the Novel of the Mexican Revolution, the Novela Indigenista and Chicana/o literature and theatre. Each of these movements demonstrates the changing trajectory in Yaqui representations. As a guide and a point of comparison, I propose Yaqui origin myths, legends and other popular stories as folk literature, and as a means of attaining examples of Yaqui self-representations. Each of the three literary movements depicts Yaquis through historically determined conditions and, accordingly, ideologies. And with the exception of the Chicano-Yaqui writers—a community of Chicano-Yaqui writers that create literature from their complex tripartite identity (Mexican-American-Yaqui)—I argue that each of three major literary movements imposes a new variation of the aspect of Yaqui ethnicity that has become the core of literary depictions by non Yaquis—the Yaqui warrior myth.