In the past few years the Huichol have become ubiquitous presences in Sayulita, unmistakable in their brilliant, multi-hued matching pants and shirts as they create and market artworks, jewelry, and decorated clothing at their stalls by Choco Banana and other places around town. We all instantly recognize the vivid colors, the organic forms, and the snakes, deer, corn, peyote, and other symbols in the beadwork, yarn paintings, and other works created by these enigmatic men and women. While the inspiration and the powerful underlying aesthetic evident in the work remains grounded in the Huichol vision of the world—every animal, object, form, and color in the work has spiritual significance–the artworks have become commercial products, and frequently the artists utilize commercially manufactured beads rather than the natural objects—bone, clay, stone, turquoise, jade, and seeds—they formerly used. This has not, however, diminished the compelling visual energy of the work. Today, selling these pieces has become the Huichol’s primary means of economic survival in the modern world.
Prior to this inevitable and necessary commercialization, Huichol art expressed (and still expresses) a vision of reality that is far removed from ours, grounded in a shamanistic, pre-technological relationship to the natural world. It’s easy to construct a fantasy about this tribe, for they are more exotic, and more alien, than most Mexicans are to us—since most of the Mexicans we come in contact with, these days, dress and drive cars and surf and eat junk food and watch TV the same way Americans do. Even the Sayulita gypsies, the hippies from Argentina and London and Guadalajara and other points on the vagabond compass, with tats, dreads and piercings, with dream-catchers and jewels for sale, are recognizable types. Pursuing their visions of freedom, these characters and their kind have been wandering the world for the past forty years.
The Huichol are different. They come from a different world. A different time, a time before television and internet and pop music and jet planes–and while they ride the bus and talk on cell phones and probably watch TV, in many ways they still live in a different reality. When they come down from their mountains, they come from far away. You can see it in their eyes.
For decades, now, the Huichol have been struggling, as have so many other indigenous tribes, to maintain their culture, and mitigate the corrosive effects of Western civilization on their way of life. Theirs is a culture that has remained fairly intact, due in some measure to their physical isolation in the mountains of Jalisco and Nayarit, to which they retreated after the arrival of the Spanish–but today this way of life is under siege, threatened by the temptations of contemporary culture: media, drugs, promiscuity, alcohol, and all the other influences that have proven so disastrous to the indigenous tribes of the Americas.
There are many who have dedicated their lives to helping various native American tribes maintain their identities; one such person is Susana Valadez, an American anthropologist who has been working and living with the Huichol for decades. In 1981 Valadez and her Huichol compatriots founded the Huichol Center for Cultural Survival in Huejuquilla el Alto, in the mountains of Jalisco, which today continues to serve its original purpose of finding ways to diminish the threat of cultural extinction of the Huichol. To this end, the people of the Center are helping Huichol artists create and market their work; they are archiving the spiritual and botanical knowledge of the shamans; and they are teaching Huichol children to be computer-literate. They are at once helping to guide them into life in the modern world, and preserving that which keeps their culture separate, unique and intact.
Down here at sea level, the Center operates the non-profit Galeria Tanana in Sayulita, where you will find an impressive array of handmade Huichol artworks—not only yarn paintings but masks, statuary, jewelry of all kinds, and a selection of t-shirts decorated with gorgeous, brilliantly-colored Huichol imagery. Not every image in Huichol artwork these days is drawn from their pantheon, but that doesn’t mean the work isn’t authentic. It’s just that the world has invaded their world, and they have inevitably absorbed some of it. Thus, they sell t-shirts, not exactly traditional garb—but the image on that shirt is the real thing.
Be sure and stop by Galeria Tanana at Revolucion 22 (next door to Tacos on the Street, north side of the bridge, phone 329-291-3889). Money spent here helps the Huichol in their struggle for cultural survival. The gallery and the Center welcome donations as well. Checks made out to Huichol Center can be sent to The Huichol Center, 422 Evelyn Ave. #C, Albany CA 94706. Have a look at the website TheHuicholCenter.org for a more in depth exploration of the Center and the Huichol culture. Even a few minutes on the website will help you understand the struggle of the Huichol, and the importance of preserving their unique place in the world.
