Cajemé

Biography

Cajemé, whose given name was José María Bonifacio Leyba Perez, came into the world on May 14, 1835, in Hermosillo, Sonora. Though his birth is sometimes listed as 1837, that mistake originated with his biographer Ramón Corral and contradicts his official birth and baptism records. His father, Fernando Leiva, was born in Hermosillo in 1798, and his mother, Juana Maria Peres, was born in Potam, Sonora. When he was fourteen, Cajemé joined his father and many other Yaqui people from Sonora in heading to Upper California during the 1849 Gold Rush.

They came back to Sonora roughly two years later. It was during this time that Cajemé likely picked up English and faced his first armed conflict. His father apparently fared well in the goldfields, because Cajemé was able to attend the Colegio Sonora, the only school in Guaymas at the time, run by Cayetano Navarro, the Prefect of Guaymas. There he learned to read and write Spanish.

Corral’s statement that Cajemé was between sixteen and eighteen while in school lines up with the 1835 birth year. Cajemé got his first real taste of military action in 1854, serving with the Urbanos, the local Guaymas militia his teacher Navarro had organized. On July 13, 1854, at half past two in the afternoon, the fighting started when Count Gaston de Raousset-Boulbon’s force of more than 350 French, German, and Chilean fighters attacked the defenders in Guaymas’s town square.

After roughly two hours of combat, the invaders started pulling back. French vice-consul Joseph Calvo stepped in to arrange a truce, eventually including Raousset in the protection he offered. Under General José María Yáñez, the Urbanos and the rest of the Mexican forces came out on top.