The Cahuilla people originally inhabited the Coachella Valley and surrounding territories — a vast territory encompassing desert, mountain, and high-elevation zones that they navigated with comprehensive geographic knowledge. In 1875, during the federal government's policy of concentrating indigenous people on reservations, the Cahuilla Band relocated to the Anza area, establishing the reservation that covers the Cahuilla Valley and surrounding land. The move from the lower desert to the mountain zone — from the hot, flat Coachella Valley to the cooler, higher Anza area — was a significant relocation, though the Cahuilla's territorial knowledge extended through both areas. The reservation's 18,884 acres represent both what was allocated and what has been maintained through more than a century of tribal governance.

The Cahuilla cultural traditions that survive among the Band are not museum artifacts but living practices maintained by community members across generations. Bird singing — a ceremonial musical tradition in which songs are connected to specific places, events, spiritual meanings, and tribal history — continues as one of the most important cultural expressions among the Cahuilla and neighboring tribes. Each song carries knowledge encoded in its melody and words, preserving information about geography, relationships, and cultural identity. Cahuilla basket weaving reaches extraordinary technical refinement: the coiled baskets produced by Cahuilla weavers are among the most technically accomplished in North America. The Cahuilla language, a member of the Uto-Aztecan language family, has faced serious pressure — only approximately 35 fluent speakers remained in 1990 — but revitalization efforts have continued.

John Tortes "Chief" Meyers was born in 1880 in Riverside and played Major League Baseball from 1909 to 1917, primarily as the catcher for the New York Giants. Of Cahuilla descent, Meyers was one of the first Native American players to achieve significant recognition in professional baseball, and he played alongside some of the most famous figures in the early twentieth-century game. He caught Christy Mathewson, one of baseball's first great pitchers. He appeared in four World Series. His nickname, like many assigned to Native American players of his era, reflected the casual racism embedded in the sport's culture — but his career, spanning eight seasons at the highest level of professional play, represented genuine achievement. Meyers lived to 91, dying in 1971, his life spanning from the frontier era to the space age.

The Cahuilla Casino opened in 1996, part of the broader expansion of tribal gaming that followed the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act of 1988. Gaming has provided the Cahuilla Band with economic resources that support tribal programs, services, and the kinds of infrastructure that self-governance requires but that the federal government has historically underfunded. In May 2020, a new casino and hotel opened on the reservation, expanding the facility. The economic model of tribal gaming is complex — it has provided genuine resources to some communities while raising questions about dependency on a single revenue stream — but for the Cahuilla Band, it represents a tool for funding the programs and governance that tribal sovereignty requires. The reservation's casino now draws visitors from the Coachella Valley and surrounding region to the mountain terrain of the Anza Valley.