Ejido Cucapah Indígena

Ejido Cucapah Indígena is a farming settlement in the southern Mexicali Valley, 8 meters above sea level, with 678 people and 229 homes at the 2020 census. It lies east of Federal Highway 5 among irrigated fields, with the Cucapá range to the west; the Hardy River, an arm of the Colorado delta, runs farther south.

Its name tells its origin. In January 1937 the land invasion known as the Asalto a las Tierras forced the expropriation of the Colorado River Land Company's holdings, and by the end of that year 140,000 hectares had been handed out to 44 communities in the valley. The Cucapá, the Yuman people who had lived for centuries by fishing, hunting and planting along the delta's banks, received two neighboring ejidos: Cucapá Mestizo and this one, granted 2,160 hectares by presidential resolution on May 5, 1937, with the aim of giving each member of the tribe a plot. The grant was less than a quarter of the land they had used before, and over the years many Cucapá ejidatarios sold or walked away from their plots; some of the families who founded the ejido moved to Pozas de Arvizu, on the Sonora side of the river, or to the United States.

The Cucapá are still here, though few: the 2020 census counted 349 in Mexico, and their language is endangered. Their best-known settlement is the indigenous community of El Mayor, about 20 km south on Highway 5 at the foot of Cerro El Mayor beside the Hardy River, where families fish for Gulf corvina and women make beaded chaquira breastplates. El Mayor is home to the Museo Comunitario Cucapá Juan García Aldama, the first indigenous community museum in Baja California, which turned 34 in 2025 and was in need of repairs.