Cócorit

Cócorit is one of Cajeme's five comisarías, a town of 7,424 people (2020) right on the edge of Ciudad Obregón in the Yaqui Valley. Its name comes from ko'okoi, the Yaqui word for chile, meaning the wild chiltepín. It is far older than its big neighbor and was the first seat of the municipality; the seat only moved to Ciudad Obregón in 1928.

Jesuits Andrés Pérez de Ribas and Tomás Basilio founded the mission of Espíritu Santo de Cócorit in 1617, one of eight missions that gathered the Yaqui people. What followed was turbulent. The Yaquis drove the Spanish settlers out, the town was re-established in 1835 under Buenavista, and in 1875 the Yaqui leader Cajemé attacked and burned it. It was resettled under army protection in 1885, two years before Cajemé was captured and shot. In the early 1900s American settlers arrived under the Conant family's land concession, German and Yugoslav families followed around 1917, and in 1918 Herman Bruss brought the valley's first internal-combustion tractor.

Visitors come for the preserved adobe houses and for the Museo de los Yaquis at Obregón and Sinaloa streets. The museum fills a former guesthouse built in 1890 and opened as a museum in 2008, with eleven rooms on Yaqui history, language, ceremonies and music, two of them designed for children. Another 19th-century house, La Casona Cócorit, is an art museum with paintings and crafts.

Cócorit is known for its craftspeople, who make the masks and drums used in Yaqui dances, along with pieces depicting local landscapes and old buildings. Food is the other draw: empanadas filled with fig, guava, pineapple, piloncillo or cajeta, oversized flour tortillas and, for the heat, obispos, shaved ice with syrup and ice cream. The Feria de San Juan takes place every June 24. The town applied to become a Pueblo Mágico in 2016 and 2019 but was not named.