Bacobampo

Bacobampo sits on the west bank of the Mayo River in southern Sonora, an agricultural town ringed by fields a little over 20 meters above sea level. It lies about 20 km north of Huatabampo and is the second largest settlement in Etchojoa municipality, with 8,267 people in the 2020 census. The Mayo people have lived in this valley since before the Spanish arrived, and Mayo families founded the town around 1880.

Its first name was Cumbrocoa or Cumbrocobe. The current one, from the Mayo Baakot béampo, "snake in the water", stuck in 1895, when the river ran dry and people noticed snakes in the pools left behind. In 1903 the Salido brothers came down from Álamos to farm here; two years later the ranchería was made a delegación, and in 1920 the brothers split their land, Ildefonso and Epifanio keeping Bacobampo while José María moved to Basconcobe. They grew wheat, maize, beans and chickpeas. On 1 January 1929 Bacobampo became a comisaría.

The federal dams of the 1930s set off a farming boom and a rush of newcomers. In 1938, under the land reform, the Bacobampo hacienda was handed to 802 peasants as a collective ejido. They soon split into "collectivists", who wanted to keep sharing the profits, and "individualists", who wanted to farm their own plots, and the quarrel turned violent. It got bad enough that President Lázaro Cárdenas came in person in June 1939 to restore the peace.