by Hope MacLean
Alejandro remembers that when he was young, he did not have any understanding about the Huichol religion or traditions. He wasn’t interested in explanations of the paintings. Since he had no ideas of his own, he just sold the paintings “as though they were apples.” As he grew older and began making pilgrimages, he became more interested in the paintings’ meanings. Through his cargos, he began to understand the concepts underpinning the religion, and the reasons the Huichol sacrifice themselves by fasting and undertaking arduous pilgrimages. Now he tries to present this knowledge in the yarn paintings he makes, and he tries to explain the paintings to any buyers who ask about them.
When I met Alejandro in 1993, he was not a mara’akame. He began the process of becoming a shaman and made the necessary pilgrimages to Wirikuta for five years. Unfortunately, he said that the gods did not grant him the abilities he asked for. Now he is more interested in understanding Huichol philosophy and learning explanations of the stories and images that are presented in yarn paintings. He is equally interested in learning about the customs of other indigenous peoples.
Santos Daniel Carrillo Jiménez
The artist Santos Daniel Carrillo Jiménez is another artist who left the Sierra as a youth and lived in Mexico City. Santos, who is from San Andrés, was born in about 1964. His father was a mara’akame, and Santos participated in all the ceremonies as a boy. In 1977, when he was about thirteen, he left San Andrés with an uncle to work in the fields on the coast of Nayarit. One day, he went to a nearby town to have fun at a fair. There he met a Huichol friend who told him that they could make a lot of money in Mexico City and that people were practically giving money away in the streets. Santos joked that he thought that sounded wonderful. So after persuading his uncle to give him his wages, he paid for two tickets to Mexico City. Then his friend asked him to pay for materials for yarn paintings—wax, three-ply boards, and Colibrĺ (Hummingbird) brand yarn. Santos watched his friend make paintings and began to learn how to do them. Then his erstwhile friend vanished suddenly, taking the paintings and materials with him.
Santos stayed on in Mexico City in a house where there were a number of Huichols making crafts. Since Santos did not really know how to make any crafts, he would take ten or twenty god’s eyes to sell on the street, then bring the money back to the owner, who would give him a few centavos for himself.
One day a Huichol from Santa Catarina came by and persuaded Santos that he should learn to paint with wool and beads. Santos learned from him, but said that the resulting paintings were not very good. Santos intended to stay in Mexico City. He had registered in an elementary school for adults because he loved to study. Then in 1978, his father sent Santos’s brother to retrieve him. His father invited Santos to go on the pilgrimage to Wirikuta, and Santos went two times.
The following year, when he was fifteen, Santos began primary school in the Franciscan convent in Santa Clara, a village close to San Andrés. He spent the next few years in school in the Sierra and forgot about art. He stayed five years at the convent, then finished sixth grade in the government school in San Andrés. This completed his primary education, but he wanted to learn more, so he went on to secondary school in Guadalajara. While there, he got married; needing money, he began to make yarn paintings again. He has been making them on his own for more than twenty years and is now one of the top-ranked artists, according to the dealers.
Santos now lives in Tepic. He maintains close contact with friends and relatives from San Andrés, who are constantly visiting on their way to and from the Sierra. After continuing his studies in an extension program, he finished preparatoria (similar to high school graduation), a comparatively high level of education among the Huichol. His goal was to become a schoolteacher, but he found the jobs were scarce and poorly paid. For a while, he supplemented his income as an artist by working as a night watchman.
He wants to stay in Tepic so that his children can get a good education, but costs are high for rent, food, and school fees. Some Huichol artists are returning to the Sierra, where it is cheaper to live, and Santos has considered making the move as well.
The stories of Alejandro and Santos illustrate typical career paths for artists who started making yarn paintings in the 1960s and 1970s. As I interviewed more artists, I found that several themes were repeated.
One theme is the casual, almost accidental way that young Huichol learned to make yarn paintings. Many artists mentioned similar experiences: at some point, they encountered a teacher who knew how to make paintings and who encouraged them to learn. Their stories emphasize the importance of transmission from one Huichol to another.
Their stories also challenge the idea that the early yarn paintings were made only by acculturated Huichols who lived in the cities and who had no roots in the culture (Weigand 1981, 17–20). On the contrary, all the artists whom I interviewed and who began to make paintings during this period grew up within the culture. They had parents or family members who were mara’akate. They had learned the myths and ceremonies as children and then used this knowledge as a basis for their paintings. Many spoke only Huichol as children.
Formal schooling can be a major force for acculturation among Native peoples. Therefore, I asked whether these artists had attended school as children. Only two had, and those two only for a year. Several artists began attending schools as older teenagers or young adults, doing so willingly because they wanted to learn. Most others had never attended school and were illiterate. Therefore, schooling per se does not seem to have been a major force for acculturation during this early period.
While urban living can be a cause of acculturation, it should not be used as the only indicator of cultural change. It is possible to live in a city for many years yet remain relatively uninvolved in the dominant urban culture. Nor is it necessarily true that a Huichol artist who lives in a city for a time will lose his or her culture. The reality is that there is a great deal of movement back and forth between the Sierra, the coastal agricultural region, and the cities. It is quite common for artists to commute regularly outside the Sierra to work, or even to live for a few years in the city, and then to go back to the Sierra.
A tendency to move around may well be a traditional Huichol custom. The peyote pilgrimage involves a long trip across the central desert of Mexico. Weigand (1975, 20) suggests that the Huichol were once travelling traders who moved caravans of salt, feathers, shells, and peyote back and forth between the Pacific Ocean and the desert of San Luis Potosĺ. I have seen Huichol who were deeply engaged in a ceremony in the Sierra a week earlier calmly demonstrating art for tourists in Puerto Vallarta. They seem to move back and forth between two worlds rather than lose one when they take part in the other.
The artists’ stories also demonstrate the economic value of art for young Huichol. As indigenous people with little or no education, the artists had few options for making a living. Most started out working in the fields, doing physically taxing work for low pay. Art gave them a career path outside of field labor, and a way of supporting themselves in the cities (although one wonders whether they could have supported themselves fully without the free rent provided by institutional donors such as the church or the government). It is not surprising that many young Huichol began to consider art as a career during the 1970s.
Making art was also a career path that brought some respect and acceptance within Mexican society. Prejudice and discrimination toward indigenous people is still widespread in Mexico, as I can attest after having travelled with the Huichol. Even now, I have seen Huichol ejected from stores and restaurants and pushed out of their seats on buses. Therefore, artists appreciate buyers’ praise, people’s interest in the stories, and the validation of their culture and ethnicity.
Some artists were prompted to learn more about their culture at least partly because of buyers’ interest in it. They began to explore the mythology and ceremonies in order to improve their art. For some, the result was a stronger commitment to traditional values rather th
an a movement away from the culture. For others, the art may at least have stimulated an interest in the culture, although their motivation may have mainly been commercial.
Exhibitions and International Recognition
By the early 1970s, yarn painting was becoming more widely known. Several authors helped promote the art. In 1969, Alfonso Soto Soria published a second article on the Huichol in the popular Mexican magazine Artes de Mexico. The cover featured a yarn painting of a shaman conducting a ceremony. In 1972, Furst and Salomón Nahmad Sittón published Mitos y Arte Huicholes in Mexico; the book contained color reproductions of the Ramón Medina yarn paintings collected by Furst. Then in 1974, Artes de Mexico published two full issues on Huichol art and culture, both written by Mexican author Ramón Mata Torres.9 One issue included a short article on ceremonial art forms and commercial yarn paintings as well as yarn-painting illustrations. Unfortunately, the artists of the paintings were not identified. Mata Torres (1980, 31) noted that commercial yarn paintings were an urban phenomenon and that he saw only small sacred paintings in the Sierra.
During the 1970s, there was a new effort to move commercial production of arts and crafts into the Sierra communities. The impetus came from Plan HUICOT (Huichol-Cora-Tepehuan), a government development project that opened up the previously inaccessible Huichol Sierra. In 1993, I interviewed Alfonso Manzanilla González, formerly the executive coordinator of the program. He provided me with a mimeographed copy of the final report on the program (Manzanilla n.d.) and many helpful insights into its activities. The following description is based on this interview. The skeptical comments on development are my own.
Plan HUICOT was part of an even larger program known as Plan Lerma, conceived in the 1950s and taking more than half a century to come to fruition. I will jump forward in time for a moment here. Plan Lerma is the ongoing Mexican government plan to develop the Santiago (or Lerma) River system, which includes several rivers draining the Sierra, such as the Huaynamota, Chapalagana, and Bolaños Rivers. In the mid-1990s, the government built a gigantic dam on the Santiago River, called the Presa de Aguamilpa. It is one of the largest dams in North America and a major source of electricity exported to California. The government intended to make the reservoir behind the dam into a tourist resort comparable to the recreation area surrounding Lake Mead in the United States, but so far has not succeeded in encouraging much tourist development except for a few seedy restaurants at the boat launch. A second huge dam, named El Cajón, was completed in 2006; it lies farther up the Santiago River in the heart of what have been isolated Huichol communities. These projects have been funded by the World Bank, despite heavy criticism and belated recognition by the World Bank itself that dam megaprojects are almost inevitably expensive disasters for the environment and for surrounding populations. If the planned tourist resorts materialize, the Huichol may end up as golf caddies and hotel chambermaids in their formerly isolated homeland.
Plan HUICOT preceded the building of these dams. The plan, which operated in the early to mid 1970s, was a massive effort by the Mexican government to develop modern services in the indigenous communities of the Sierra. Alternately, Plan HUICOT can be seen as an effort to create economic participation and dependency among people who up until then had little interest in the products of a Western economy. Even now, the Huichol buy remarkably few consumer goods, limiting their consumption to a few products such as soap, bleach, cotton manta cloth, beads, acrylic yarn, and the occasional bottle of Coca-Cola.
The government built an access road through the north end of the Sierra from Valparaĺso to Ruiz; this road opened the Huichol community of San Andrés to vehicular traffic. Land for airstrips was bulldozed in a number of communities. The government also brought in services such as subsidized grocery stores (CONASUPO), radio, electricity, and potable water systems, as well as health clinics, day schools for lower elementary grades, residential schools with dormitories for higher elementary grades, and agricultural instruction for adults.
There were some efforts to foster the production of commercial arts and crafts in the Sierra, but generally crafts had a relatively low priority in Plan HUICOT, according to Manzanilla. Perhaps more influential was the improved access to the Sierra, as well as the novelty of being able to visit there. In the mid-1970s, during the heyday of Plan HUICOT, planes flew in and out of the Huichol Sierra almost daily. One man from Nueva Colonia told me that it was easy to visit San Andrés because planes went back and forth so often carrying government officials and hitchhiking Huichols. Now communication is more difficult than it was then because few planes are flying in or out; sometimes there are none. Now everyone has to walk or go by vehicle.
The Mexican government’s craft-marketing agency (Fondo Nacional para el Fomento de las Artesanĺas, or FONART) began flying into the Sierra to purchase crafts. Some observers commented that FONART contributed to a decline in quality of the crafts because it purchased almost everything that was offered, regardless of quality. Several Westerners who moved to San Andrés during this period also helped make it a center for the production of arts and crafts. In particular, two Americans—Peter Collings and Susan Eger—supplied materials, encouraged the Huichol to do higher-quality work, and marketed the products.
With the new air and road transportation, it became possible to make yarn paintings in the Sierra and ship them out. Nonetheless, it does not appear that many yarn paintings were made in the Sierra. Muller (1978, 96) discusses governmental efforts to foster a commercial arts-and-crafts program, but notes that yarn paintings were seldom made in the Sierra because of the cost of transporting the heavy plywood.
Even today, my observation is that most artists do not try to make yarn paintings in the Sierra and carry them out. The plywood is too heavy to carry in any quantity, and the paintings are too fragile. I met one artist who made yarn paintings in the Sierra, but he lived in Nueva Colonia at the end of one of the few roads. Most Huichol live farther down narrow mountain trails, where the only transportation is by foot or animals. Instead, artists from the Sierra go to the city to make yarn paintings. There, they can buy materials, sell the paintings, and then go back to the Sierra with needed cash or goods. Because beadwork and textiles such as embroidery and weaving are lighter to carry, they tend to be made more often than yarn paintings in the Sierra.
In the 1970s and 1980s, a growing Mexican and international excitement about Huichol arts was fostered by gallery and museum exhibitions. An exhibition of Huichol art was held in 1975–1976 in California (Sacramento and San José). The exhibition was curated by Juan Negrĺn Fetter and featured work by José Benĺtez Sánchez (Huichol name: Yucauye Kukame) and Tutukila (Spanish name: Tiburcio Carrillo Carrillo). Negrĺn mounted further exhibitions in Guadalajara, Mexico City, and Europe and published several books, articles, and catalogues featuring Benĺtez, Tutukila, Juan Rĺos Martĺnez, Guadalupe González Rĺos, and Pablo Taisan (Huichol name: Yauxali); for descriptions of these exhibitions, see the accounts by Negrĺn (1975, 1977, 1979, 1985, 1986).
In 1978–1980, the Museums of Fine Arts in San Francisco sponsored a major exhibition of Huichol arts, which also toured to Chicago’s Field Museum and New York’s Museum of Natural History.10 The exhibition included artifacts collected by Carl Lumholtz in the 1890s and Robert Zingg in the 1930s as well as contemporary Huichol crafts. The Huichol artist Mariano Valadez demonstrated yarn painting on-site, and his then wife, Susana Eger Valadez, answered questions (Berrin and Dreyfus n.d.).
The catalogue for this exhibition, Art of the Huichol Indians (Berrin 1978), is a superb source for photographs of traditional and modern Huichol arts. Unfortunately, as Berrin explains, a decision was made not to illustrate many modern yarn paintings because they are not, in themselves, sacred objects used by the Huichol, although they do illustrate sacred stories or mythology (1978, 14). The catalogue presents yarn paintings by five early artists: Ramón Medina Silva, Guadalupe de la Cruz Rĺos, José Benĺtez Sánchez, Cresencio Pérez Robles, and Hakat
emi (whose Spanish name is not recorded). Furst (1978), in an article in the catalogue, describes his collaboration with Ramón Medina.
During the 1970s, some smaller exhibits of Huichol art were organized, perhaps through local art galleries and museums. Several artists told me that they had participated in tours to the United States and Canada, but there is little reference to most of these exhibits in the literature. In September 1978, Stacy Schaefer curated a small exhibition of Huichol art, including yarn paintings, at the University of California, Santa Cruz. The catalogue (Schaefer 1978), entitled Las Aguilas Que Cantan: The Eagles That Sing, shows paintings by Eligio Carrillo, Raymundo de la Rosa, Fidela de la Rosa, and Martĺn de la Cruz.
A collection of forty paintings was purchased in Tepic in 1977–1979, and exhibited in Vancouver in 1980. The collection provides a valuable record of the types of paintings produced in the late 1970s. Although only a photocopy of the catalogue (Knox and Maud 1980) is available, it illustrates the paintings in black and white and gives the artists’ names, the Spanish text written on the back of each yarn painting, and reasonably accurate English translations.
Nancy Parezo calls the twenty-year growth in popularity of Navajo sand paintings one of the quickest rises of a craft on record (1983, 189). Clearly, yarn paintings had a growth in popularity that was equally meteoric. In just twenty years, yarn paintings were transformed from a little-known religious offering to a commercial product sold on the world market. In 1950, the paintings were made only as religious offerings. Commercial painting did not begin until the mid-1950s. By the late-1970s, yarn paintings were being exhibited and sold around the world.
Both Huichol artists and non-Huichol supporters have played a part in this growth. Westerners recognized the commercial potential of the art, created opportunities for the artists to sell their art, and promoted the art commercially. Anthropologists such as Soto Soria, Furst, and Myerhoff brought the art to public attention by exhibiting and writing about it. The Franciscans of Zapopan and governmental officials of the INI marketed the art and established workshops to encourage the artists to teach other Huichol. Huichol artists such as Ramón Medina and Guadalupe de la Cruz Rĺos responded to this encouragement with consistent creativity and innovation. They saw the opportunities that these new markets provided their traditional art forms, and they evolved an art that was able to transcend cultural barriers and appeal to buyers around the world.
