by Hope MacLean
Soto Soria’s account makes it clear that it was not the Huichol who had the idea of commercializing their sacred arts. The initial impetus came from Westerners, and they directed the shaping of yarn paintings into marketable forms. Moreover, the invention of marketable yarn paintings was far from casual. On the contrary, it was the outcome of more than thirty years of concerted effort on the part of Mexican politicians, bureaucrats, funding agencies, museum officials, anthropologists, and artists. All of these worked between 1920 and 1950 to develop marketable crafts that could be produced by indigenous communities. The Huichol were one of many communities that benefited from this concerted program.
In 1964, Soto Soria went on to curate an exhibit on Huichol culture for the new National Museum of Anthropology (Museo Nacional de Antropologĺa) in Mexico City. According to the museum’s archivist (Trini Lahirigoyen, personal communication), Soto Soria brought a group of Huichols from the Sierra to Mexico City to help construct the exhibits. Soto Soria also ordered a comprehensive set of yarn paintings from the Huichol. He particularly asked for a representative series with three examples of each type of yarn painting. Each design was sacred to a particular deity.
Judging by the catalogues, the yarn paintings of the 1950s and early 1960s were comparatively simple. Designs include a sun or spoked figure, two deer that may be facing each other or a spoked figure, an eagle with one or two heads, or a small group of animals such as serpents, birds, and deer. These designs are similar to the stone god disks and other offerings collected by Lumholtz and Zingg.
Within a few years, yarn paintings were filled with radically new images. The simple designs have continued to be used in small yarn paintings and often form part of larger compositions even today. But the 1960s also brought creative innovations in the range of designs and subject matter as well as the invention of a new visual vocabulary to express Huichol religious concepts.
Invention of a Visual Vocabulary: Ramón Medina Silva and Guadalupe de la Cruz Rĺos
I was remarkably fortunate that Lupe was my first contact with the Huichol world. Lupe and her late husband, Ramón Medina Silva, were the first Huichol to become internationally known by name as individuals rather than as anonymous “folk” artists. They were key innovators in the process of transforming yarn paintings from small sacred offerings into elaborate paintings depicting ideas and stories from Huichol religion. Between them, Ramón and Lupe originated a visual vocabulary for Huichol beliefs. Their influence on subsequent artists was impressive. Here I will explore their life histories, their styles, and their creative influences.
I never met Ramón Medina, who died in 1971. My knowledge of him comes from conversations with Lupe and her family and from what other authors have written about him.
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Lupe and I were at her rancho in the hills outside Tepic. It was 1994. We sat on plastic mats on the ground, working on our embroidery. I asked Lupe how she and her husband had started making art. She began by telling me the story of her childhood and how she met and married Ramón.
Lupe was born near the Santiago River in the state of Nayarit. She thought her birth year was about 1918, just after the Mexican Revolution ended.1 Her father was a Huichol from Santa Catarina named Humberto de la Cruz. Lupe’s cultural roots (and three of her four grandparents) were from Santa Catarina, and Lupe spoke the eastern dialect of Huichol.
Lupe’s mother, Jesusita Rosa Rĺos, was from a well-known family of mixed Huichol and mestizo ancestry. The family was named “Rĺos” because they lived along the Santiago River. The patriarch of the family, Inés Rĺos, was born in about 1850 to a Huichol mother. He achieved fame as a mara’akame, a healer, and a mariachi musician. He passed on his skills to his children and founded a dynasty of Huichol mariachi musicians in the Santiago region (Jáuregui 1993).
When Lupe was growing up during the 1920s, the Santiago River region was remote and isolated backcountry. There were no roads, and it was a twoday walk along a narrow trail to the agricultural town of Tepic. Many Huichol refugees from different parts of the Sierra settled along the river. There was considerable intermarriage between people from somewhat different Huichol traditions and dialects. There were no schools for the Huichol, and there was relatively little interference from the government or the Catholic Church. Huichol was the main language. Families maintained a traditional cycle of fiestas, and people continued to go on pilgrimages to Wirikuta.
Lupe’s parents arranged for her to marry when she was about thirteen, as was customary in Huichol families (Zingg 1938, 130–134). Lupe married a boy about her own age, but he died shortly after. From her description of how his foot swelled up after he cut it, he may have died of gangrene. A year later, Lupe was married to an older man as a second wife. The Huichol still practice polygamy even now, but Lupe said she did not want to be a second wife, and so she resisted this marriage. She never told me how it ended. When Lupe was about eighteen, probably sometime in the mid-1930s, she went with her sister Manuela to work in the fields on the coast of Nayarit. There she met her third husband, Ramón Medina Silva.
Ramón came from the Huichol community of San Sebastián in the Sierra, and was born at a rancho called Las Cuevas. His Huichol name was Ürü Temai, meaning Young Arrow Person (P. Furst 2003, 34). According to Myerhoff (1968, 17; 1974, 31–36), his paternal grandfather was a mara’akame, and his mother had made many trips to Wirikuta. His father left the family while Ramón was still a child, and so the family was quite poor. To support them, Ramón began to work on mestizo haciendas in his teens. Both Ramón and Lupe were working as migrant laborers on the coast when they met.
Ramón was a year younger than Lupe, and she said that she was not interested in him because he was still a wayward young man.2 However, Ramón held her tightly in his arms through a long night in front of the fire while he begged her to marry him. “What could I do?” she said to me. “I agreed to marry him.”
For the next twenty years, Lupe and Ramón lived a fairly traditional lifestyle, farming and attending ceremonies in the mountains, or going to the coast to work. Their life changed and entered the historical record when they moved to Guadalajara in about 1961.
In the early 1960s, Huichol art was just starting to become popular. The Franciscan priests at the Basilica of Zapopan, a cathedral on the outskirts of Guadalajara, were selling Huichol art to help support their missionary work in the Sierra. Ramón and Lupe moved to Guadalajara and began selling art through the basilica. According to Lupe, there were very few Huichol selling art at this time. They were almost the only ones.
The next part of the story comes from the American anthropologist Peter Furst. Furst went to Guadalajara as the director of the regional center of the Latin American Center at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA). A former journalist, Furst was finishing his doctorate at UCLA. He was researching the exquisite ceramic sculptures found in shaft tombs in Nayarit and Jalisco—the region inhabited by people who may have been among the ancestors of the Huichol. Furst told me that he was especially interested in shamanic themes used in the sculptures. One day, he saw a Huichol yarn painting in a government office in Guadalajara. He asked what it was, and was directed to the Basilica of Zapopan for more information. There he met Father Ernesto Loera Ochoa, a Franciscan priest who had an unusual affinity for Huichol culture. Padre Ernesto, as he was called, came from a well-to-do family in Guadalajara, and this may have protected him when he took the unusual step of allowing the Huichol to build a temple at the basilica.
In 1965, Padre Ernesto introduced Furst to Ramón and Lupe. Furst interviewed Ramón about Huichol shamanism, hoping to get some clues that might shed light on obscure elements in the shaft-tomb sculptures, such as the horns worn by some “warrior” figures. Furst said that, at first, he was mainly interested in seeing whether Ramón could help him interpret imagery in the shaft-tomb sculptures, and indeed, Furst’s dissertation (1966) uses information from Ramón extensively.
Shortly after, B
arbara Myerhoff arrived in Guadalajara. She was a young graduate student who was also working on a doctorate in anthropology at UCLA and looking for a dissertation topic. Ramón was proving to be a knowledgeable and enthusiastic source of information on Huichol mythology and shamanism. Furst and Myerhoff recorded Ramón’s myths and stories. Their productive collaboration led to a considerable output of articles by both of them.
In 1966, they published the first article resulting from their collaboration with Ramón (P. Furst and Myerhoff 1966). The article, which analyzed myths about an evil sorcerer and plant spirit called Kieri, is illustrated with three yarn paintings by Ramón. It is the first article in English to discuss yarn paintings in depth.3
Ramón invited Furst and Myerhoff to accompany him on a peyote pilgrimage in the winter of 1966–1967. Their accounts of this pilgrimage were something of an anthropological coup. Myerhoff’s dissertation (1968) and Furst’s articles (1972, 1975) are the first eyewitness descriptions of a Huichol peyote pilgrimage. While previous anthropologists, such as Lumholtz and Zingg, had discussed the pilgrimage, they had not personally experienced it. Myerhoff received her doctorate for her analysis of the pilgrimage and published the charming book Peyote Hunt (1974). In 1968, Furst and his wife, Dee, accompanied Ramón and Lupe on another peyote hunt. This time they made a film called To Find our Life: The Peyote Hunt of the Huichols of Mexico (P. Furst 1969). While Myerhoff died in 1985, Furst continues to publish material from this period (see, for example, P. Furst 2003, 30–46, 2006; Medina Silva 1996).
Ramón was in the process of becoming a shaman. His guide was Lupe’s mother’s brother, Don José Rĺos Matsuwa, who was quite fond of Ramón. (José Rĺos has since become well known as the mentor of American students of shamanism such as Joan Halifax, Brant Secunda, and Prem Das). Lupe herself began the process of becoming a shaman, and made her first pilgrimage in 1966.
Furst and Myerhoff described Ramón as the shaman who led the peyote pilgrimages they witnessed. There has been some controversy in the literature about whether Ramón was a shaman or not; in 1966, he had not completed the first five or six pilgrimages usually required (Fikes 1985, 54; 1993, 66–70). Lupe’s family told me that Ramón’s parents took him to Wirikuta when he was young. This is one way Huichol parents may single out and encourage children who show the potential to be a shaman; some develop shamanic powers while still in their teens. Therefore, when Ramón began the series of pilgrimages as an adult, he developed shamanic abilities very quickly.
Lupe’s niece, Kuka González de la Cruz, told me that both she and Don José Rĺos were on the 1966 pilgrimage that Ramón led.4 I wondered whether José Rĺos was really the one who had assumed the dangerous responsibility of caring for the pilgrims, while Ramón, with his greater cross-cultural fluency, had presented himself as sole leader. However, Kuka assured me that Ramón already had the ability to cure and that Don José considered him competent to lead a pilgrimage. Lupe and other members of her family also insisted to me that Ramón was a visionary—that is, he experienced shamanic visions, and these were the inspiration for the subjects he illustrated in his paintings.
Furst commissioned a collection of yarn paintings from Ramón on behalf of the UCLA Museum of Ethnic Arts. These paintings were exhibited at the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History (P. Furst 1968–1969). The catalogue shows twenty paintings with associated texts. Furst’s article from the catalogue was later translated into Spanish, and the same twenty pictures were reprinted in the Mexican book Mitos y Arte Huicholes (P. Furst and Nahmad Sittón 1972).
Ramón and Lupe went to Los Angeles for the exhibition. They stayed with Barbara Myerhoff, who later told Richard DeMille (1980) how the couple adapted to U.S. life. Having never lived in a Western-style house before, they camped out on the floor and tried to build a fire in the living room. Myerhoff took them to a department store and found that all eyes went to Ramón, even though he was dressed in American clothes: “He had a presence that was extraordinary . . . the glance of kings . . . There are people who have this sense of another realm, and they move differently through this realm because of it” (DeMille 1980, 344). Myerhoff introduced Ramón to Carlos Castaneda, her schoolmate at UCLA and author of the much-disputed Don Juan “novels” about a Yaqui sorcerer. The two men took an immediate liking to each other because they were both “tricksters,” and they spent a happy day together visiting power spots in the hills around Los Angeles.
Carlos Castaneda continued to visit Lupe in Mexico. When I asked Lupe what she thought of him, she commented that he was more interested in his books than in genuinely learning about Huichol shamanism. I feel that some of the characters and events in Castaneda’s books were modelled on the Huichol rather than the Yaqui.
An analysis of Ramón and Lupe’s paintings shows rapid evolution in design and subject matter. Within just a few years, Ramón and Lupe devised a new visual vocabulary in yarn painting. Ramón’s early paintings were typical of the simple paintings made in the 1950s. He usually painted either a single object or a group of symbols such as “deer, flowers, eagles, butterflies, snakes, sun, moon, clouds, trees (P. Furst 1968–1969, 21–22).” These symbols were drawn from Huichol arts such as sacred yarn paintings, carved stone god disks, and weaving and embroidery patterns. Ramón called his early paintings adornos (Sp.: decorations). Although the symbols had religious significance, Ramón disguised their meaning because he felt the priests wanted to learn about Huichol culture only in order to change it (P. Furst and Myerhoff 1966, 7). Padre Ernesto had already persuaded Ramón to make yarn paintings that depicted “the characters of Huichol ceremony or tradition,” but Furst (1968–1969, 22) maintained that Ramón continued to regard these paintings as purely decorative art without sacred meaning.
The first major innovation was the narrative yarn painting, which illustrates myths or traditional stories. Furst encouraged Ramón to make yarn paintings that illustrated Kieri myths (Furst tape-recorded Ramón’s accounts of the myths; see P. Furst and Myerhoff 1966). Ramón produced three paintings: a woman being tempted by Kieri; the deer god Tamatsi Kauyumari shooting Kieri with an arrow; and Kieri in his death throes.5 These paintings seem to be the first yarn-painting representations of people and deities carrying out activities in a story. The relatively few figures or objects in each painting are those central to the narrative, such as a kieri plant, a fox, and a takwatsi. The landscape is suggested in two paintings, which show the rocks of a cliff or hill. However, these landscape elements are very roughly indicated by geometric blocks of colored yarn, and the figures mostly seem to float in space.
The second innovation in the Kieri paintings was the depiction of a simple stick figure as an actor in the drama. A human stick figure was not new; it is used in several traditional Huichol arts. Lumholtz (1900, 105) illustrated a small embroidered offering of a person with arms upraised. Human stick figures were also represented in front-shields, made by wrapping colored yarn around sticks of split bamboo (Lumholtz 1900, 109, 117, 119). However, in the older arts, the human figure appeared as a single symbol or one of a group of symbols rather than as an actor in a story.
Ramón expanded his range of subjects in the next group of paintings commissioned by Furst (1968–1969). Some paintings illustrate more myths, such as a myth of the origin of the sun, or of how the Huichol acquired maize; other paintings branch out in new directions. Four paintings (P. Furst 1968–1069, 20; there is a similar painting in Berrin 1978, 163) illustrate the Huichol funeral ceremony and the journeys of the soul after death. Another painting shows the journey of a mara’akame’s spirit after death (P. Furst 1968–1969, 19; 2006, cover).6 These might be considered depictions of ongoing events in the supernatural world rather than myths per se. That is, the paintings show what is presumed to happen to the human soul after death. Since the Huichol believe that the soul travels after death, a depiction of its journey is not mythological or folkloric. It is an effort to show activities, invisible to most of us, happening in the supernat
ural world.
Another painting is of Tatewari, the fire god (P. Furst 1968–1969, 19; for a similar painting, see Berrin 1978, 139). Lupe told me that this painting represents a vision of how Tatewari appears when shamans are communicating with him. He shows himself as a head or face with glowing eyes among the coals.
These paintings begin to render the world as a shaman might see it. We might call this “nonordinary reality,” as opposed to the everyday reality that most people perceive. Harner (1980, 26–27) calls this the world as seen in a shamanic state of consciousness. Whatever term we use for it in Western science, the fact is that the Huichol illustrate it in some of their yarn paintings. Ramón Medina seems to have originated the use of yarn painting to depict nonordinary reality.
The representation of shamanic perception in yarn painting became even more explicit in four paintings made after Furst and Myerhoff accompanied Ramón and Lupe on a peyote pilgrimage (P. Furst 1968–1969, 23). Three paintings show a human interacting with events or deities in the spiritual world. In The Hunt for the Peyote in Wirikuta, Ramón ritually shoots peyote with an arrow. The life force of the peyote, called “kupuri” in Huichol, rises in a fountain of colors, an event that Ramón said he saw on a visionary level (Myerhoff 1974, 154). This painting is important because it created a visual vocabulary for the Huichol concept of kupuri, which is an aspect of the soul. Two paintings (Berrin 1978, 66–67) show Myerhoff and Furst receiving the names of deities. Ramón said these were shamanic dreams he experienced. The fourth painting is of a peyote vision, as Furst (1968–1969, 23) explained:
Fig. 6.2. Urra Temai, an early yarn painting of the myth of birth of the sun god at Reunar, c. 1975. 24” x 24” (60 x 60 cm). Multicolored rays of life energy (kupuri) radiate from the volcano, which is in Wirikuta. Photo credit: David E. Young.
