The Huicholes are one of the ancient indigenous inhabitants of the states of Jalisco and Nayarit, maybe the most well-known and numerous. Other ethnic groups include the Coras, Tepehuanes and Mexicaneros.
They call themselves Wixárika or Wixáritari (plural), which means “Children of the Sun”; the word Huichol is a Spanish deformation of those words.
The Huichol oral tradition talks of a grand migration of their people at one undefined point in the past, it’s impossible to know exactly when this happened, but we do know that they were already living in the region of Jalisco and Nayarit when the Spaniards arrived in the 16th century. Their original territory was located in the area of the current states of San Luis Potosí and Zacatecas.
Until these days, the Huichol people embarks on a yearly peregrination to their ancestral lands in one of the most fascinating rituals of their culture, and one that is central to their whole body of beliefs. We’ll get to it in a moment, but let’s first introduce us into the basic elements of the Wixáritari.
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The estimated population of the Huichol is 26,000, with only around 7,000 living in their homeland. When they arrived to the region of the Bolaños Canyon in the mountains of the Western Sierra Madre, they were looking for refugee and settled among the Tepehuanes settlements that already existed there. That’s why it is frequently said that the Huichol comprises different ancient ethnic groups that got mixed at a historically-speaking ‘recent’ time.
Their language is an Uto-Aztecan language, which is related to Cora. As we have seen, the Coras are other of the indigenous people living in the region. One can only imagine that when the indigenous world came to an abrupt end, the mountains of the Sierra Madre were seeing as a haven where they were able to re-create their culture in this micro-cosmos relatively safe from the outside world.
The three central elements of their religious beliefs are: the corn, the deer and an hallucinogenic cactus known as peyote (hikuri). Their whole existence is centered in their relation with each one of these natural elements.
Corn is “the wheat of America”, central to every known ancient culture of the Americas, with a long list of myths related to its origins. So, an outsider can easily understand the importance of corn for the Huichol, as it is their most basic food. Their whole culture is based on the agricultural cycle of corn.
Their relationship with the white-tailed deer can also be understood on terms of subsistence. As the deer is the biggest animal on this part of Mexico. The Huicholes share the veneration of the deer with other peoples of the North of Mexico, like the Yaquis and the Mayos; there is even a ritual deer dance.
The characteristic indigenous cosmogony helps to explain this veneration of their food. Both the corn and the deer served were pillars for their existence, when they couldn’t get enough of any of them, they got in trouble. But their veneration of both of them showcases a fundamental aspect of the indigenous culture. This spiritual relationship to the nature world is called animism, which is the belief that non-human entities are spiritual beings, a central belief closely related to the veneration of Mother Earth, a practice widely extended in the indigenous peoples of the Americas.
The third and the most intriguing element of the Wixárita religious beliefs is the peyote. Every year they travel across the country to the territory they call Wirikuta, a region located in Real de Catorce, in the state of San Luis Potosí. That’s their original homeland and in there, the peyote is abundant. The whole peregrination is full of symbolisms, but at the heart of Wirikuta is Reuu’nax+, the Cerro Quemado (Burned Mountain), this is the place where the tradition tells the Huicholes that the sun was born. It is the center of their universe.
Once there, the Mara’akame (shaman) celebrates the ritual of eating hikuri. Peyote becomes a door to the spiritual world, where the Huicholes can get in contact with their ancestors and deities. The visions they have after eating peyote are later represented in their artistic expressions; the colorful creations of the Huicholes might be the best testimony of this fascinating ritual.
The jaguar, the eagle, the scorpion and even the ancient Aztec god Quetzalcoatl, are also worshipped by the Huichol.
The Huichol are an enigmatic people that have managed to preserve alive and relatively intact their ancestral tradition. In modern times, they have become more proactive in the protection of their environment. When they noticed that one of the pillars of their cosmogony, the deer, was in danger of extinction, they started a 600 mile pilgrimage to the zoo of Mexico City in order to obtain 20 white-tailed deer; this amazing effort to repopulate the Sierra Madre forests with deer, won them the National Ecology Prize from Mexican authorities in 1988.
In 1992 the Cousteau Society launched the Punta Mita Project in the state of Nayarit, an attempt to develop the state's tourism in a way that will protect the magnificent biodiversity of the Pacific coast and the interior homeland of the Huicholes.
