Serrano (Maara’yam)

Background

A place called Maará was an important trade center on a traveling and trading route that ran north of the park's boundaries, Joshua Tree National Park's exhibit on the people of the desert records. The park writes the name Maara’yam for Serrano and says the lands it manages include parts of their homelands. The exhibit names Serrano alongside Cahuilla, Chemehuevi and Mohave as the four whose communities call the park part of their homelands, settled around springs, and says those desert communities had long ties with the peoples living on the Colorado River and the Pacific Coast. In the 1850s American survey parties arrived at the Oasis of Mara and found the area under cultivation by the Serrano, with corn, beans, pumpkins and squash grown on water rising along the Pinto Mountain Fault. A 1902 census counted 37 Serrano and Chemehuevi living there, both groups gone by 1913.

Parks on its homelands

Joshua Tree National Park

The Maara'yam (Serrano) homeland includes the land Joshua Tree National Park manages, and NPS describes the Serrano as one of the four desert peoples who settled around the springs of this country and knew it in depth. Source

Sources

• https://www.nps.gov/jotr/learn/historyculture/native-americans.htm
• https://www.nps.gov/subjects/peopleofthedesertexhibit/native-peoples.htm
• https://www.nps.gov/articles/oasis-of-mara.htm

Checked September 2026.

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