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Yelapa lies on the southern shore of the Bay of Banderas, on the west coast of Mexico in the state of Jalisco. It’s part of a much larger comunidad indigena, which stretches some 3000 square miles from this bay, down to its headland, Cabo Corrientes, and south and east through the steeply rising mountains of the Southern Escarpment. This is only one of Mexico’s several immense mountain ranges dividing and defining the country’s regions. Running almost the width of the land, this range cups the fierce volcanic crags of the high Central Mesa and drops quickly to two wide river valleys, the balsas, emptying into the Pacific and the Papaloapan, flowing into the Gulf of Mexico.
The land is quite densely foliated from the sea to the peaks, boasting a wide range of tropical flowering plants and trees, truly a nature lover’s delight. This is part of the Earth’s tropical rain forest system, where the wet or rainy season lasts to nearly half the year, leaving the land gradually drying in the winter and the spring.
As a comunidad indigena, this area shares with a handful of others in Mexico, a unique status. It is a land grant or reservation, which is legally set aside and protected for all time for the indigenous people who have always lived there. It is also land held collectively, or in common by the group as a whole. There is no private ownership of land by anyone, even it’s indigenous residents, and it is impossible for outsiders to buy or claim any land at all. The formal governing council for this comunidad is in El Tuito, the Original Township, or fundo legal, up the steeply climbing inland highway from the mouth of the Tomatlan River, making the end-point of Puerto Vallarta’s highly developed tourist industry. The comunidad includes Yelapa and several other tiny coastal and mountain villages.
Yelapa lies on the coast, about 15 miles southwest of Puerto Vallarta. A fairly large river, the Tuito, empties into the sea here, as well as a tiny tributary of an another mountain waterway. About 300 Mexicans live here, much as they always have, spreading back from the village into the mountains and rising and narrowing river valleys. The elders say that Yelapa was settled by four families who came down the mountain form the parent village of Chacala about 150 years ago. Today these close ties still hold; almost everyone is multiply related and has family in Chacala. About 50 persons from other places, mostly the USA. have settled full-time in Yelapa and anywhere from handful to 100 tourists may also be on hand, depending on the time of year
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The high mountains behind Yelapa have been crossed by roads, so the only ways to get there are to come by boat from a nearby town, Such as Puerto Vallarta, or walk or ride a horse or mule on the long, rocky coastal route or down the mountains from Chacala. There are no lines for telephones or electricity. Communication is thus restricted to mail and word of mouth. The simplest tasks of daily living that we are accustomed to doing via some automated device, such as ironing or washing clothes, getting around, lighting our home at night, disposing of our wastes,ect.must be done in a much more direct and personal way. Whatever you construct here too, has to be made of materials either found easily at hand or brought here from outside through considerable effort and then must operate easily in this simple setting.
All of this means that the most basic tasks of living can quickly acquire a new meaning and importance. For outsider’s it’s a unique opportunity to live more simply and holistically. Yelapa can often seem to visitors like an island outside of time and space. Living so simply, in the age-old ways of the Mexican Indian, contributes to the experience.
It is rare indeed to find a place of such age and tradition as accessible to outsiders as this one, yet as isolated and insulated still, or as its natives say, so “pura”.
It has been said the whole of Mexico is one vast archaeological dig. This is certainly apparent to the visitor of the Aztec pyramids, the ancient sites of Monte Alban and Milta, and the Mayan ruins in Yucatan. Yelapa’s region has had, by comparison, only a small amount of excavation. Isabel Kelley, however, has documented a rich pre-conquest civilization in the Autlan area, just south and east of the comunidad. Kelley stated, “Both archaeological and historical data indicate that the Autlan area was a zone of high culture. At the time of the conquest, the population was about as dense as it is today; sedentary village life was based upon agriculture; irrigation was practiced; there were markets; well water was drunk in areas where springs or perennial streams were wanting; clothing was of cotton and maguey; ceramic and presumably other arts were well developed.
These people’s first encounters with outsiders were with conquistadors. In 1524 Cortez led a party north through Autlan as far as Tepic, then returned the next year down the coast to the Bay of Banderas.
The first accounts are of this hot and weary army bludgeoning their way through the valley of present-day Puerto Vallarta, finally capturing 100 Indians for guides on their climb into what Tello called ”La Provincia de Los Frailes”, coast and mountain lands , culminating in Cabo Corrientes.
At El Tuito their journey took on another tone. They were met by a large welcoming group of friendly natives. Tello describes them as dressed in many beautiful and elaborately decorated headdresses and robes, and carrying standards of white wood, crosses made of cane and large feather wands of many colors; all of which he writes”… was truly much to see.” The natives pleaded with Cortez to retract his army from their lands, stating that they were not a war-like people, and that they had wished only for peaceful relations. Cortez was apparently taken aback by this great overture of friendship. Subsequently he did lay down his arms and take advantage of their hospitality. The historical accounts speak of feasting and dancing and of the Spaniard’s praise of this tranquil and happy place.
Cortez then left El Tuito and returned to Colima in the south for Easter. In 1527 he returned here nd called the inhabitants together at the newly built church of El Torito(Sancta Cruz de Los Ramos) to celebrate its first mass. He next established initial contact with two other villages some distance from El Torito, Tomatlan and Piloto. These are very important contacts for the comunidad, as they provided the legal basis later for the natives obtaining from the King of Spain official recognition of their status as an indigenous people, with their own defined lands that could not be usurped.
Less is documented about the comunidad for the next 200 years. Perhaps providentially, however, as this was the bloody time of the native people’s oppression and loss of their indigenous lands. This shameful and violent treatment continued throughout the Colonial period, in Maximillian’s brief mid-1800’s reign, even in the more supportive administration of Indian leader Benito Juarez, and certainly and perhaps at its worst, in the land-grabbing decades of Mexican Independence from the time Diaz up until the great revolution of 1910.
Peter Gerhard has tracked El Tuito as part of the larger region of Purification, which was briefly granted to a Spaniard, Ortiz de Zuniga, as an ecomienda in the late 1500’s. This status generally meant for the native people that though they could remain on indigenous lands, they were subjects of and owed regular tributes in grain or other resources to their “ecomiendor”. After 1608 he describes it as subject only to the Spanish Crown.
He has speculated that pirate raids of trading routes off the Pacific Coast of Mexico may have partially accounted for the Spaniards leaving this extensive area virtually undisturbed. Another reason might be its native’s reputation for occasional rebellions. Indeed, It came as a safe haven for manya, for example. African slaves escaping from their cruel fates in the low-land fields.
The comunidad indigena of Yelapa today enjoys the protection of the Mexican Constitution. The fight for land continues, however as Mexico struggles to enter the modern technological marketplace. It’s an uphill path, moreover, in this faltering, debt ridden economy, where about two thirds of the people still live in small rural villages, where at lest that number feed themselves through subsistence agriculture and where you are likely to see a wooden plow behind a mule as any kind of mechanized farming device.
Here in Yelapa this past and present merge, Residents live as they have for centuries on lands they hold in common. Yet just a short boat ride away in Puerto Vallarta, totally claimed and developed by foreign, corporate interests. Can Yelapa remain a true collective trust, or will its own inhabitants choose rather to sell or lease their lands to foreign developers, as did their neighbors in Puerto Vallarta just a few short decades ago? Will the beleaguered Mexican government appropriate this land for development without even giving its people a say? These struggles are those of the indigenous peoples the world over, and the outcomes bear great import for us all.
As visitors here, we can simply enjoy as honored guests to this precious land. We need, however to appreciate its unique context, for the tranquility and sense of community arise out of the whole cloth. Yelapa is rather a testament to a long, proud struggle of a native people who have, at least till now, been able to hold their land.
Carolyn McCall, PhD.
Based on historical research conducted at the University of California’s Bancroft Library,
April and May 1991, Original Article posted in Hola Amiga, Yelapa 1992
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