The life of the images

The Huichols io wixaritari (wixarika in singular) are one of the indigenous peoples of Mexico around which more stereotypes have been built. It has been said of them that they are mostly shamans-artists, who preserve pre-Hispanic customs, which are a kind of lost link between the ancient settlers of Mesoamerica and the current groups and who are the most authentic Mexicans, among other affirmations that have contributed to create around this town a kind of aura with the one 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 they inhabit, in addition to the Huicholes, Cora Tepehuanos from 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 gathered the first collections of what could be called the classic Huichol style, formed by embroidery and weaving, as well as ritual objects, among which stand out sculptures of wood and stone, votive arrows and jícaras adorned with beads. These servers are housed in the museums of New York, Chicago, Paris and Berlin.

The Huichols beyond stereotypes, it has been said of them that they are mostly shamans and artists.

Here began the international fame of the Huichol people, but it was above all just over forty years ago, with the origin of the counter-cultural movements of the United States, that Wixarika art saw the origins of this great boom, a real boom. They began producing multicolored tables made of yarn (yarn paintings) representing Huichol shamans and the zoomorphic or anthropomorphic figures of a pantéon complex. In these pieces the persionajes sing and manipulate ritual objects. Similar to many Amerindian prehispanic iconographic systems, it is not always clear whether they are shamans or gods, shamans identified with gods or gods working with shamans.

What makes Huichol art especially attractive to the horizons of the counterculture is its aesthetic that reflects experiences based on the use of hikuri (Lophophora williamsii, peyote), one of the hallucinogens that caught the attention of these groups hungry for experiences that would bring together the interior search with the ecstasy. Thus the names of the Huichol divinities became part of the Hippie general culture, as well as some of the ritual objects of this town. No one between Berkeley and Zipolite, Taos and Tepoztlan cionfunde Kauyumarie with Tatewari. The word mara'kame, which designates the Huichol ritual specialist, is often pronounced and pluralized in the wrong way, but everyone knows that it is a shaman who uses "hikuri". At this time some images of Huichol art began to reproduce and became icons that appeared on covers of books on very varied themes, on album covers, in fashion designs and so on.

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

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