American Indian Culture and Research Journal

The land was hard and spare, lean and dry, the struggle for survival harsh. The Yaqui infant, Refugio Savala, was just one more fugitive from the genocidal war against his people. His birth was unrecorded and his life tenuous in the chaotic flight toward asylum across the Sonoran desert to the Arizona border. Yet he was one of the fortunate ones, protected by a family still whole despite dangers, still rich in the tradition and belief of the Yaqui way. That tradition was not lost to the man who grew from the refugee infant. In the seventy years following flight to safety, Refugio Savala observed and recorded the renewal of his native culture in Arizona. He quietly and determinedly wrote about what he experienced. He transformed his experience into a body of Yaqui traditional lore and personal literature which speaks to his own people arid reveals the Yaqui way to the non-Yaqui world. Refugio Savala is a person of poetic sensibilities, a man of words. In his youth, he felt a strong urge to preserve in written form the Yaqui stories he had heard, and as he matured and came to broader and more complete knowledge of his culture, his desire to become a man of letters increased. His driving interest in language, and in Yaqui perception and way of life, inspired him to attempt non-Yaqui literary forms in order to communicate his personal and cultural vision to those who might otherwise never know -its existence. In the course of his lifetime, he has translated oral tales, written his versions of Yaqui legends, described Yaqui personalities and occupations in character sketches, recorded and analyzed ceremonial songs and sermons, composed original ballads, created a body of personal poems, and recorded his own and his family's history in a comprehensive autobiography.