Vícam

Drive Federal Highway 15 between Guaymas and Ciudad Obregón and you pass right by Vícam, a town of 9,392 people (2020 census) at the southern tip of Guaymas municipality, also known simply as Switch. It lies barely above sea level in the farmland of the lower Yaqui River, and it is one of the eight Yaqui mission towns that Jesuits organized in the early 1600s, alongside Pótam, Tórim, Bácum, Cócorit, Huírivis, Belem and Ráhum. Only the port of Guaymas itself is bigger within the municipality.

Vícam matters less as a sightseeing stop than as the place where Yaqui politics play out. It hosted the Meeting of Indigenous Peoples of the Americas on October 11-14, 2007. In June 2013, Yaqui members of a water-defense movement started blocking all four lanes of the highway here on and off, protesting the Independencia aqueduct that pipes water from El Novillo dam to Hermosillo; the blockade was lifted on February 14, 2014, after more than eight months. On September 28, 2021, President López Obrador came to Vícam to apologize for crimes the Mexican state committed against Yaqui ancestors. Deer dancers received him, the ceremony moved into the sacred ramada where community business is settled, and the governors of the eight towns signed a justice plan, including a decree that returned 2,943 hectares to the tribe.

Some of that plan now stands on the ground. The Universidad del Pueblo Yaqui, handed over in December 2024, teaches law, education, community medicine and health, and sustainable production engineering, and it opened with 356 students. The Vícam Switch community hospital followed in July 2025, with 30 inpatient beds and six neonatal intensive-care beds serving more than 50,000 people from the eight towns.

If you visit, come for the ceremonies and keep a low profile. Lent is the core of the Yaqui ritual year: for forty days, chapayekas, or fariseos, in long-nosed masks move through town without speaking, using only gestures, and INAH specialists ask outsiders not to photograph or film. On June 24, the feast of St. John the Baptist, families carry the saint from the church down to the river before sunrise, with matachines, pascola dancers, women singers and deer dancers, and the pascolas baptize the crowd with river water.