In 1614, the Jesuit missionaries Accompanying the expeditions of the conquerors, they arrived at what is known today as the Mayo Region and along the mighty river, which they named Holy Trinity Riverfounded the eight mission towns that were the beginning of the new life in this region. The Jesuit missions not only attended to the project of evangelization for the Catholic religion, but also integrated the communities into a new economic and social structure: they gathered and pacified the natives, their first task was education, they also taught them new agricultural practices, cattle raising and organized them for work.
All this gave rise to a nascent organization and social life when Andrés Pérez de Rivas and the Jesuit Father Pedro Méndez founded the Mission of the Nativity of St. Mary of Naabojowwaon September 8, 1614. Since then, gradually and progressively, the development of a new life took place, which was based on what we know today as the Old Town of Navojoa And upon entering the stage of modernity, the settlers moved to this new population center, which is currently our growing Navojoa city.
It is of vital importance to commemorate the founding of what we know today as Navojoa, because to commemorate is to respect, recognize, attend to diversity and strengthen our collective historical memory. To do so, it is necessary to analyze and disseminate the cultural wealth, as well as the contributions to development by the Jesuit missions in the Mayo Regionto get to know and understand each other from the interculturality of this population in four centuries of coexistence with our native peoples.
We have to assimilate that the world of the Mayos was favored by the processes of otherness and acculturation of the Europeans in the mission fields. culture The missions changed radically in such a way that they could now have fixed places to live and the nomadic era that they had had for centuries came to an end. The missions generated agriculture, livestock, cultivation, textile life, religious life with a European-style organization.
One of the purposes of missionary life was to offer a way of education that would transform the lives of those who were evangelized for the better. The Jesuit fathers who established missions offered the formation of children in the new world of liturgy, Latin, along with agriculture, livestock and manufacturing. These were the bases of the new education in mission lands.
Six years after the beginning of evangelization, the first Jesuit school was established in the Mayo region, founded in the mission of the Nativity of the Virgin Mary in Navojoaby the Canarian priest Diego de la Cruz, who called together the young people from the different missions who lived around the Mayo River and thus established the first educational center of what would later become the current state of Sonora. In this sense, we can affirm that education in Sonora was born in our Mayo Region.
On the other hand, the missionaries introduce liturgical objects and representations that, in the symbolic whole, form part of the strategy of evangelism and the significance of the artistic legacy left by the Society of Jesus in our lands. For example, the string music in the paskola dancesthe dances of matachinesits sounds and praises to the patron saints, represented a new way of connecting to the universe, to the cosmos, with a spiritual connection to nature and a new mysticism of the Faith of the new world and with a crucible of syncretism, which today defines its essence and presence in our culture, although for some scholars it is resistance and resilience, in the face of imposition, for others it is evolution, beyond everything, it is understanding interculturality and otherness as the development of our cultures and identities.
It is of utmost importance that we agree throughout the Mayo Region so that next year we celebrate and commemorate the Missions in Mayo, with a great cultural program that allows us to historically explore and understand where we come from and what is the cultural wealth and cultural heritage that the Jesuit missionaries left us, and above all to pay tribute to the Father Jesusita Pedro Mendez “The Great Missionary” to recognize their great contribution to the formation of our towns and communities.
It is worth noting that the Municipal Government of Navojoa and the Seminary of Mexican Culture Correspondence Navojoa Region of Mayo will carry out an interesting cultural program with conferences during this week alluding to the Jesuit missions.
Well, this Mexico, which is several Mexicos, in time and space, in form and substance, is the heir of different conquests, of different processes. Let us understand: The Mexican soul may be the soul of the arts, languages, food, religions; the soul of our cultural essence may not be in conflict, in division, but, in short, in addition. (Cortés does not remove Cuauhtémoc. Nor Moctezuma.)
#410th #Anniversary #Founding #Navojoa
