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Wixárika by Juan Felipe Herrera

Wixárika

Juan Felipe Herrera
| January 2015

Poem by Chicano poet Juan Felipe Herrera's anthology Border-Crosser with a Lamborghini Dream, 2015.

-----

What

did I know?

Tepic-Nayarit,

Ixtlan,

Ixcuintla. Where was I?

The Huichol smoke.

Coras

in Bogart

hats awaiting blessings from Big Al to hand them agricultural prowess, a drop

of chemical awareness from a new form of capitalism. This?

 

Read full poem here.

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Clause types and transitivity in Wixarika

Clause Types and Transitivity in Wixárika (Huichol): A Uto-Aztecan Language

Stefanie Ramos Bierge
| January 2017

"Wixárika, also known as Huichol, is an endangered Uto-Aztecan language spoken in Mexico. Published works on Wixárika include articles and brief sketches on different aspects of the grammar; however, much about the language remains unknown. This dissertation presents a systematic description of simple clauses in Wixárika, based on eight hours of naturally recorded speech and elicited materials. Using a functional-typological perspective, I explore Wixárika’s morphosyntactic devices to express different types of events.

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The living camera

The Living Camera in The Ritual Landscape: The Teachers of the Tatuutsi Maxakwaxi School, the Wixarika Ancestors, and the Teiwari Negotiate Videography

Lea Kantonen, Pekka Kantonen
| January 2017
Article discusses contemporary Wixárika institutions, such as the school and the museum, may receive as parts of ritual landscape and how the community-based videos shot in the context of these institutions may increase our understanding of ritual landscapes in general. We discuss how ritual landscape can be researched using community-based documentary video art in a way that takes the ontological conceptions of the human and non-human relations of the community seriously. In this case, we understand community-based video art as artistic research in which the work is produced with the community for the com munity. The making of art, discussed in this article, is a bodily activity as it includes walking with a camera in the Wixárika ritual landscape, interviewing people for the camera, and documenting the work and rituals of the pupils, teachers, and the mara’akate (shaman-priests) planning the community-based museum.
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Clause types and transitivity in Wixarika

Clause Types and Transitivity in Wixárika (Huichol): A Uto-Aztecan Language

Stefanie Ramos Bierge
| January 2017

"Wixárika, also known as Huichol, is an endangered Uto-Aztecan language spoken in Mexico. Published works on Wixárika include articles and brief sketches on different aspects of the grammar; however, much about the language remains unknown. This dissertation presents a systematic description of simple clauses in Wixárika, based on eight hours of naturally recorded speech and elicited materials. Using a functional-typological perspective, I explore Wixárika’s morphosyntactic devices to express different types of events.

Read more
The living camera

The Living Camera in The Ritual Landscape: The Teachers of the Tatuutsi Maxakwaxi School, the Wixarika Ancestors, and the Teiwari Negotiate Videography

Lea Kantonen, Pekka Kantonen
| January 2017
Article discusses contemporary Wixárika institutions, such as the school and the museum, may receive as parts of ritual landscape and how the community-based videos shot in the context of these institutions may increase our understanding of ritual landscapes in general. We discuss how ritual landscape can be researched using community-based documentary video art in a way that takes the ontological conceptions of the human and non-human relations of the community seriously. In this case, we understand community-based video art as artistic research in which the work is produced with the community for the com munity. The making of art, discussed in this article, is a bodily activity as it includes walking with a camera in the Wixárika ritual landscape, interviewing people for the camera, and documenting the work and rituals of the pupils, teachers, and the mara’akate (shaman-priests) planning the community-based museum.
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The Wixaritari Cleansing Themselves during Easter - Photograph ©Juan Negrín 1979 - 2025

Notes on Wixarika History: Post-Hispanic History

Juan Negrín
| October 2017
The Huichol were distinguished as xurute, according to a geographical map published in 1579, in the Atlas Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (reproduced in various sources: Rojas, Neurath). The term vizurita is used by Father Tello, in his Crónica Miscelánea, written in 1652. The first reference to the huicholes as guisoles appears in a briefing to the bishop Ruiz Colmenares (between 1640 and 1650). Father Antonio Arias y Saavedra used the terms xamucas and huitzolmes in his chronicle (1673), the first ethnological work on the Indians of this area of the Sierra Madre, according to historian Gutiérrez Contreras.
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The Wixaritari Cleansing Themselves during Easter - Photograph ©Juan Negrín 1979 - 2025

Notes on Wixarika History: Post-Hispanic History

Juan Negrín
| October 2017
The Huichol were distinguished as xurute, according to a geographical map published in 1579, in the Atlas Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (reproduced in various sources: Rojas, Neurath). The term vizurita is used by Father Tello, in his Crónica Miscelánea, written in 1652. The first reference to the huicholes as guisoles appears in a briefing to the bishop Ruiz Colmenares (between 1640 and 1650). Father Antonio Arias y Saavedra used the terms xamucas and huitzolmes in his chronicle (1673), the first ethnological work on the Indians of this area of the Sierra Madre, according to historian Gutiérrez Contreras.
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Probabilistic Finite-State morphological segmenter for Wixarika (huichol) language

Probabilistic Finite-State Morphological Segmenter for Wixarika (Huichol) Language

Manuel Mager, Dionico Carrillo and Ivan Meza
| January 2018
In this scholarly article, linguists present a morphological segmenter for the Wixarika language. Segmentation is fundamental for rich morphological languages, a common aspect of the Indigenous languages of the Americas, to improve other tasks like automated translation, dialogue systems, summarization, etc. On top of the agglutinative nature of the language, the low amount of resources and the lack of an orthographic standard among dialects add to the challenge. Their proposal is based on a probabilistic finite-state approach that exploits regular agglutinative patterns and requires little linguistic knowledge. They seek to show that their approach outperforms unsupervised and semi-supervised methods in a low-resource context. The dataset used in this work was openly released for future work by the community.
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Preventable perinatal

Preventable perinatal deaths in indigenous Wixárika communities: an ethnographic study of pregnancy, childbirth and structural violence

Jennie Gamlin and Seth Holmes
| January 2018

The Wixárika ethnic group of Northwestern Mexico is accustomed to high rates of maternal and infant mortal ity, and until the 1970s they had no vehicle access, schools or medical care of any kind. Although today their most accessible villages can be reached within 2 5 h by unpaved track, approximately half of their popu lation of approximately 35,000 continue to live a further six to 8 h away on foot. As we demonstrate and discuss below, distance from medical facilities is only one of the structural factors that continue to lead to high rates of perinatal mortality in their communities.

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Mothers of Corn: Wixárika women, Verbal Performances, and Ontology

Mothers of Corn: Wixárika women, Verbal Performances, and Ontology

Cyndy Margarita García-Weyandt
| January 2018
Wixáritari (pl.) from Western Mexico perform a series of ceremonies through the cultivation and harvesting of Corn. In communities outside Wixárika land, families align their ceremonies to the academic calendar and working calendar to ensure the families’ participation. This article discusses the active role of Maize within ceremony from cultivation to harvesting, emphasizing the role of women in preparing Corn-based substances for ceremonial offerings. Through storytelling and embodied practices such as gastronomic representations, women are active agents in transmitting the relationships between Corn and community members. Drawing from my ongoing ethnographic fieldwork among Wixárika families in Tepic, Mexico, the article analyzes the ontological relationship between Wixárika and Corn. Utilizing verbal performances such as storytelling, this article highlights the importance of Maize for purposes of continuing the community’s connection to geographies, identity and the significance of women in enabling inter-species relations.
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