The life of images - Wixarika

The life of images

The Huichol io wixaritari (wixarika in singular) are one of the indigenous peoples of Mexico around whom most stereotypes have been built. It has been said of them that they are mostly shaman-artisans, that they preserve pre-Hispanic customs, that they are a sort of missing link between the ancient inhabitants of Mesoamerica and the current groups and that they are the most authentic Mexicans, among other statements that have contributed to create around this people a sort of aura with which they have learned to move. But, who are the Huichol people and why have so many idealized discourses been coined around them?

Settled in the Gran Nayar - a region that includes the regions of Nayarit, Jalisco, Durango and Zacatecas - and in the region inhabited, in addition to the Huichols, by the Coras Tepehuanos of the south and Mexicaneros - this is a group of great vitality, "discovered" by the then nascent anthropological science at the end of the 19th century. Carl S. Lumholz, Leon Diguet, Kondar Theodor Preuss and Robert M. Zingg put together the first collections of what could be called the classic Huichol style, consisting of embroidery and textiles, as well as ritual objects including wood and stone sculptures, votive arrows and jícaras decorated with chaquiras. These objects are kept in museums in New York, Chicago, Paris and Berlin.

Beyond the stereotypes, it has been said that the Huicholes are mostly shamans and artists.

Here began the international fame of the Huichol people, but it was especially a little over forty years ago, with the origin of the countercultural movements in the United States, that Wixarika art saw the beginnings of this great boom, a real boom. They began to produce multicolored yarn paintings representing Huichol shamans and the zoomorphic or anthropomorphic figures of a complex pantheon. In these pieces, the figures chant and manipulate ritual objects. Similar to many pre-Hispanic Amerindian iconographic systems, it is not always clear whether these are shamans or gods, shamans identified with gods or gods working with shamans.

What makes Huichol art especially attractive to the counterculture horizons is its aesthetics that reflect experiences based on the use of hikuri (Lophophora williamsii, peyote), one of the hallucinogens that attracted the attention of these groups eager for experiences that brought together inner search and ecstasy. Thus the names of the Huichol divinities became part of the general hippie culture, as well as some of the ritual objects of this people. No one between Berkeley and Zipolite, Taos and Tepoztlan confuses Kauyumarie with Tatewari. The word mara'kame, which designates the Huichol ritual specialist, is often mispronounced and pluralized, but everyone knows that this is a shaman who uses "hikuri". At this time some images of Huichol art began to be reproduced and became icons that appeared on book covers on a variety of subjects, album covers, fashion designs and so on.

But to understand the complex image of the Huicholes in the indigenous world, we must point to the construction of another stereotype: the Mexican indigenist middle class that considers them "the most Mexican group". As Paul Liffman (2003; 2011; 2012) points out, the Huicholes have assumed this role. They know that they are the other of their other and they know their external image.