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| December 2023
On the first day of autumn, evening temperatures near Window Rock, Arizona, were brisk. Beneath the late September sky, a traditional round hogan in this remote corner of the Navajo Nation was enveloped in darkness. Ten tribal members gathered inside.
| December 2023
This year is quickly drawing to a close and we are happy to share some great news with you all in the hopes that this can lift your spirits and inspire you to continue to support Wixarika undergraduate students. This newsletter is long overdue in part because the Wixarika Research Center has had its hands full launching a new website and online archive. Our new site includes an updated special page dedicated to the Wixarika Scholarship Fund (formerly HSF or Huichol Scholarship Fund), which will include both student profiles and our yearly online application process.
| November 2023
The Indigenous Wixárika community of San Sebastián Teponahuxtlán in Nayarit has recovered 2,585 hectares of its ancestral lands – a quarter of the territory it has been struggling to reclaim for nearly 70 years. The transfer took place peacefully after the Presidential Commission for land restitution assembled to address the dispute negotiated compensation with 13 property owners to return the land to its ancestral inhabitants.
| November 2023
Isaías Navarrete Chino is a forestry engineer who graduated from the Autonomous University of Chapingo and was part of the first generation of scholarship recipients from our Wixarika Scholarship Fund. He was a recipient of the scholarship from 2018 until 2020. Currently he collaborates with the Wixarika Research Center on agroforestry work and he just completed his first post-graduate position in Baja California for the National Forestry Commission of Mexico. He is originally from the community of Kuruxi Manuwe or Tuxpán de Bolaños.
| August 2023
From July 12th through July 14th, 2023, a third face-to-face meeting was held in the Las Margaritas ejido with the participation of various organizations and with the purpose of promoting the ecological, economic, and social well-being of the Altiplano Potosi, also known as Wirikuta to the Wixárika people. The Wixárika Research Center oversaw general coordination, that included invitations to Wixárika communities and inhabitants of the Altiplano region, as well as some delegates Sonora and Jalisco who were invited to participate to share their environmental work.  
| March 2023
This past weekend was an intense and frightening one for many here in Western Mexico — at least among the people who care about the land and Indigenous people: high-profile Wixárika land defender and attorney Santos de la Cruz Carrillo had disappeared on Friday along with his wife and two children, including a three-month-old baby.
| March 2011

Those were the concerns expressed in an interview with La Jornada, by representatives of the Wixarika communities who are preparing a series of actions to reject the activities of the mining company. Last Thursday they paid a visit to the Senate to express their opposition.

| February 2011
Efren was one of eight Wixarika leaders chosen by their communities in the highlands of Jalisco, Durango and Nayarit to travel from their communities to this town in Mirando City, Texas. They were there to attend the International Convention of the Native American Church, a union of Native American peoples of North America dedicated to preserving the right to traditional use of the sacred peyote plant, or medicine as it is known.
| May 2016
At 57 years old, Marcelina López has a very active life. She sews her own clothes, makes beautiful jewelry, raises chickens, sells eggs, cooks, is a midwife and organizes the women of her community; all while faithfully conserving her traditions, those of the indigenous Wixárika people.
| May 2017

GUADALAJARA — As commissioner of public lands for the indigenous Wixárika territory of San Sebastian Teponahuaxtlán, Miguel Vázquez Torres was at the forefront of the legal fight to recover 10,000 hectares of indigenous ancestral lands from surrounding ranching communities. He was among those who repeatedly urged the federal and state governments to intervene to prevent violence in the increasingly tense region that had been the subject of land conflicts for more than a century and, more recently, an increasing presence on the part of the drug cartels.