Cultures in Motion: The Huichol Film Project, 1973-1975 - Part I

 

Young Huichol man sitting on a cliff overlooking the Western Sierra Madre, Summer 1974

Frame grab from HSFA 1989.3.1-8

Before arriving in the Western Sierra Madre of Mexico in April 1973 to produce one of the richest visual ethnographic collections of the Huichol community of San Andres Cohamiata to date, Hungarian-American filmmaker Kalman Antal Müller (1939 – ) had already had a wealth of experiences. By his mid-thirties, Müller had traveled extensively across Africa, Latin America, the Middle East and the South Pacific, making films and writing articles for popular and academic outlets such as Atlas, National Geographic, and the Journal de la Société des Océanistes along the way. Müller had also worked as an administrator for the United Nations in Zaire (now D.R.C.) and as a translator for the Department of State in the U.S.— all while moonlighting as a doctoral student in French Literature at the University of Arizona.[i]

Like most of the places where Müller had spent time through the 1960s and early 1970s, San Andres Cohamiata was not a town one could easily get to. This village or rancho (in Huichol lore) sat (and still sits) in a high plateau, some 6,000 feet above sea level, amid deep, treacherous barrancas—in what is perhaps one of the roughest landscapes in Mexico and the Americas. That the Huichol ancestors settled in this difficult terrain some four hundred years before Müller arrived on the scene was not an accident. Around 1530, following a series of military conflicts known today as the Mixtón Wars, through which the Spanish state and their Nahuatl indigenous allies sought to subjugate northern Mesoamerican peoples, the Huichol ancestors fled west from the lower and drier valleys of what is now the Mexican State of San Luis Potosi to the Sierra Madre highlands.[ii]  One could imagine that the smallpox, measles and other epidemics which decimated Mesoamerican populations to about five percent of its pre-contact numbers would have also provided a strong incentive for the Huichol ancestors to seek geographical isolation.

By the early seventeenth century, the Huichol environment was so uninviting to the eyes of the Spanish government and their indigenous allies that they referred to it as Colotlán--Nahuatl for “the place of scorpions.”

 Carrying a French-made,16-mm Eclair movie camera, a Swiss-made Nagra sound recording system, and a Japanese-made Pentax 120 still camera, along with enough batteries and film rolls to make these gadgets work, what Müller found and recorded upon his arrival in San Andres was one of the most culturally (and geographically) isolated communities in Mexico in the 1970s. At the same time, the residents’ way of life had been increasingly changing over the last few centuries. While Huichols had been relatively successful in evading colonial governments by taking refuge amid the Sierra Madre, they had been less successful escaping other influences such as the Catholic Church and, increasingly, Mexican bureaucrats. Thus, what Müller found on his first visit to San Andres, and what his film footage would most clearly depict, was a Mesoamerican culture in motion: a community with so well preserved a heritage that the traces of its cultural transformation were still fresh.

Huichol man and children, 1975.  Photo by Kalman Müller.

The Hikuri Neixa ceremony is a case in point, as it was the first ceremony Müller documented in the Sierra Madre (HSFA 1989.3.4).   He recorded this ceremony, which formally marks the end of the Huichol year, on his first visit to San Andres in April 1973 and 1974. 

Huichol peyote seeker painting his face during the Hikuri Neixa ceremony, Winter 1974
Frame grab from HSFA 1989.3.2-4

The film of this ceremony shows a group of indigenous people under a midday sun painting bright yellow figures (such as suns, snakes, rain drops, and maize plants) over each other’s faces, while other people drink, dance, and make more yellow paint by grinding up in a molcajete[iii] a root named urra (Mahonia trifofiolata)[iv], Huichol for spark. The painted images represented (and that participants sought to elicit) the blessings and protection of Tatewari, or the god Fire, one of the main deities for the polytheistic Huichol and the most important one for assuring a good harvest for the upcoming year.  Tortillas and beans as well as tepe (a kind of beer made of maize) flow in abundance during the celebration.

Peyote pilgrims on their way to Wirikuta, the sacred land. Summer 1974

Frame grab from HSFA 1989.3.1-4

 Beyond drink and food, during this ceremony Huichols share and consume their sacred peyote plant (Lophophora williamsii).  The Hikuri Neixa (the name of which comes from hikuri, Huichol for peyote, and neixa, Huichol for dance), is as much a celebration marking the end of the Huichol year as a celebration of the end of the peyote pilgrimage to the Huichol sacred land Wirikuta.[v] This is no coincidence, as the peyote pilgrimage is one of the most important rituals for pleasing Tatewari and other Huichol deities. During the pilgrimage to Wirikuta, Huichols gather many of the sacred plants they will use for rituals throughout the year, such as the yellow urra itself. For the Huichol, returning to one’s community with ample quantities of peyote, urra, and other goods to share with the community indicated a successful pilgrimage.  Judging by the liberal amounts of tepe the peyote seekers or kawiteros[vi] drank during the Hikuri Neixa ceremony of 1973, one could assume the peyote hunt for that year was a fruitful one.[vii]

To learn more about the Huichol Film Project check back soon for part 2!

José Carlos Pons Ballesteros

Graduate Fellow
NMNH-Department of Anthropology

Original film footage of the Huichol Film Project, along with sound recordings and associated documentation, form part of the collections of the Human Studies Film Archives.  You can find more information about this film collection here.

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[i] Information about Müller for this paragraph drawn from The Huichol Film Project, Kalman Müller’s 1975 C.V.  Human Studies Film Archives, Smithsonian NMNH.. 

[ii] According to Peter Furst’s Rock Crystals and Peyote Dreams (2006) and to Stacey Shaefer’s Huchol Women, Weavers, and Shamans (2015) linguistic proximity suggests the people today identified as Guachichils as the most likely ancestors of the Huichol.

[iii] The stone-made traditional Mesoamerican equivalent to the mortar and pestle. 

[iv] Ethnobotanist James A. Bauml et al. were the first scholars to uncover the scientific classification for the urra plant. Their findings were published in the Journal of Ethnobiology in 1990. Bauml, James, Gilbert Voss, and Peter Collings. 1990. “Uxa Identified.” Journal of Ethnobiology 10: 99–101. 

[v] Indeed, according to Schaefer and Furst (1996), the main purpose of the Hikuri Neixa (The Dance of the Peyote) Ceremony would be to prepare the soil for planting and to call upon the rain. The successful “hunt” of peyote would thus be an activity important as a means to both supply the community with this sacred plant as well as invoke the blessings of the Gods for the growing season. As a ceremony linking hunting and agriculture, the Hikuri Neixa represents the hybrid ecological and productive heritage of the Huichol people.  Schaefer, Stacy B., and Peter T. Furst. 1996. People of the Peyote: Huichol Indian History, Religion & Survival. UNM Press. Other scholars such as french anthropologist Michel Perrin (1994), and Kalman Muller himself referred to this same ceremony as “Hikurineira.”  Perrin, Michel. 1994. “Notes D’Ethnographie Huichol: La Notion de  ‘ma’ive’ et  la  nosologie.” Journal de La Société Des Américanistes 80: 195–206.

[vi] The peyote seekers or kawiteros are identifiable by their large squirrel-adorned sombreros. 

[vii]Information about the Hikuri Neixa for this paragraph drawn from: The Huichol Film Project, Document #3, p. 9.  Human Studies Film Archives, Smithsonian NMNH. August 2019. Schaefer and Furst (1996) also provide important information about this ceremony in their book People of the Peyote.