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For the prestigious Mexican historian, Miguel León-Portilla, the Yumans of Baja California were not Indians of warfare, but rather Indians of peace. In the opinion of this researcher, it was because lived in the fossilized-paleolithic stage that these Indigenous groups did not present any kind of resistance against the European colonization, making possible their easy domination and posterior diminishment or assimilation. This paper questions these advancements not only because of their lack of technical precision, but also because they obscure the role of agency that these Indians played during the missionary period. On the contrary, this paper endorses Edward Spicer's (1962) assertion that resistance was present even among those groups that were not seriously engaged in significant fights against the Spanish conquerors. In the particular case of the Yuman people, this is a resistance challenging the Pueblo Indio project and its related implications in terms of sedentary lifestyle, agricultural economy and the adoption of a scheme of central authority. As we know, these patterns were opposed to those observed among the Yumans as nomads, hunters and gatherers, organized into a segmentary lineage system. Moreover, the kind of resistance described in this paper constitutes what James C. Scott (1990) refers to as the hidden and daily life transcripts, such as ingenuity, intelligence simulating ignorance, and irony, as well as, those economic and social practices studied by Jan Rus (1995), which include mobility and appropriation of the missionary site, all with the intention of perpetuating the presence of these Indigenous people and make possible their social reproduction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Between July of 1891 and May 1892, the Mexican Land and Colonization Company, a British enterprise with a concession over the major part of Baja California's wastelands, laid 27 kilometers of rail of what was to be known as the Peninsular Railway with the expectation of opening up lands to cultivation and settlement, and attracting investment. But the train's starting point was San Quintin, a shallow bay ill-suited to becoming an important shipping port and, as far as the tracks had been built, led to nowhere. However, the objective of this paper is not to analyze the reasons for which the railway project did not come to a happy termination. Rather, it focuses on the controversies and conspiracies which surrounded its construction, arising from the struggle between the United States and Great Britain for predominance in Mexico's far northwest. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]