Documents List

"Meet the Huichol. The Huichol have been doing this from time out of mind, and here is some of their art. Time out of mind. In some of these yarn-images you will observe representations of the conquistadores of Coronado, who came among the Huichol 400 years ago and are still sung of in Huichol village myths. In others you will see Watakame, the farmer who survived a series of Job-like plagues and tribulations in the dark times long before even Coronado came, and whose body after death was dismembered, Osiris like, and rose up severally out of the earth as various medicine and drug plants. In still others you will see jet planes, anthropologists pith helmens, four-wheel-drive Toyotas, and - hey!- dope-seeking American hippies! Most of all, if you´ve ever done peyote, in these yarn panels you will see peyote."

"The images have the crude ferocity of ancient mythology: warriors brandish their weapons at fleeing victims; immense deities loom over their worshipers: otherworldly beats roam fantastic gardens.  Produced by pressing brightly colored yarn onto waxed wooden panels, these images indeed have their sources in centuries-old tradition. But the art in which they appear, practiced by a small group of México´s Huichol Indians and known as yarn painting, is in fact the product of a unique collaboration between the descendants of an ancient culture and the world of modern anthropology."

Complete document for the Plan Lerma-Operación Huicot, named as a reference to its intervention in the region occupied by the nombrado Huichol (Wixárika), Cora (Na'ayeri) and Tepehuan (O'dam) peoples. The Plan Huicot was the first major government infrastructure project in the Western Sierra Madre and was based on the Indigenista state ideology and its "Indigenista action plans" that sought to assimilate Indigenous peoples through schools, roads and small markets run by the government. 

Read the full Spanish language archive here.