Why they matter
Much of Scottsdale’s water still arrives by canal, and a great many of the people who dug and cleaned those canals in the early twentieth century were Yaqui. They had fled war and persecution in Sonora, and the Valley’s water users’ association hired them in numbers, housed them near the work and came to rely on them. Some of those families settled in Scottsdale by the 1920s, and their descendants still live here.
Their history in town is a history of moving. The families lived in company housing, then in a village called Penjamo, then, after repeated flooding by most accounts, in four cul-de-sacs in south Scottsdale they named Penjamo again. That neighborhood marked fifty years in 2023. Along the way they helped build the Old Town church its own congregation made by hand.
Where to find them today
Vista del Camino. Vista del Camino Park at 7700 E. Roosevelt Street holds the community center and the Yaqui Mural; Penjamo is just south.
The Old Adobe Mission. The Old Adobe Mission on Brown Avenue, raised with Yaqui help and finished in 1933.
The wash. The Indian Bend Wash Greenbelt runs past the neighborhood, turning the floodway that once pushed the families out into parkland.
Reading the mural
Mario Martinez’s 1999 mural is the best short history of the community anywhere. The left section shows three crosses in front of a map of the Río Yaqui in Sonora, where the families came from. The center is given to Yaqui workers and their part in the Valley’s growth. The right shows Scottsdale’s three Yaqui villages: the Salt River Project housing, Old Penjamo, and today’s neighborhood. Companion panels show a Deer Dancer and a Pascola dancer, the Talking Tree of Yaqui creation stories, and children’s paintings. The mural helped spark a revival of neighborhood pride after it went up. For the wider south Scottsdale story, see the South Scottsdale guide.
The full story
The Yaqui, who call themselves Yoeme, fought the Mexican state for their homeland on the Río Yaqui through the nineteenth century, and around 1900 persecution and deportations drove families north across the border. In Arizona they formed communities at Tucson, at Guadalupe near Tempe and in the Scottsdale area.
Work drew them to the Salt River Valley. The Salt River Valley Water Users’ Association, the forerunner of the Salt River Project, recruited Yaqui laborers to build and maintain its canals and kept using them into the 1940s. By the 1920s Yaqui men were working on the Arizona Canal at Scottsdale, and the association built housing for them, which is a large part of why they stayed. Farm work came too: a history of Goodyear’s Southwest Cotton Company, which began planting on the west side of the Valley in 1916, records Yaqui workers from the villages near Guadalupe and Scottsdale among the laborers brought in to work its fields.
In Scottsdale the Yaqui families were neighbors to the Mexican-American community that the cotton boom had brought to town. When that community set out to build a church, Yaqui neighbors worked beside the parishioners making roughly 14,000 fifty-pound adobe bricks, and the Old Adobe Mission was finished in 1933. The builders are named in the Corral family profile, and the design came from Robert T. Evans.
Housing was never secure. The families lived in Salt River Project housing into the 1950s, then in the Old Penjamo village from the early 1950s, and moved repeatedly through the 1950s and 1960s. Accounts say flooding in the Indian Bend Wash kept driving them out. In 1972 they settled for good in four cul-de-sacs between Miller and Hayden roads, south of Roosevelt Street, and named the place Penjamo, after a popular Mexican song, taking it to mean love of neighborhood however modest.
In 1999 the Pascua Yaqui painter Mario Martinez, a member of the Pascua Yaqui Tribe from Penjamo, painted the Yaqui Mural at the Vista del Camino Community Center, and neighbors credited it with a renewal of pride and interest in Yaqui tradition. In November 2023 the neighborhood held a heritage celebration for its fiftieth year. The families’ early years belong to the farm town era, and their story runs through every chapter since.