Where the sun was born

Mexico has a new World Heritage Site, plus the ongoing struggle to preserve Indigenous cultures

Welcome to The Mexpatriate.

On July 12, UNESCO announced the addition of 26 new sites to the World Heritage List, including the Wixárika Route through Sacred Sites to Wirikuta. This pilgrimage route (called Tatehuarí Huajuyé or “path of our Grandfather Fire” in Wixárika) extends over 500 kilometers through five Mexican states (Nayarit, Jalisco, Zacatecas, Durango and San Luis Potosí) and was highlighted as the first living Indigenous tradition in Latin America to be inscribed on the list.

Wirikuta, or “the land where the sun was born,” is the sacred destination of the pilgrimage and also a Protected Natural Area (ANP) located in San Luis Potosí. “Our people hope that this inscription will serve as an additional tool for the protection of our sacred lands, enabling us to eliminate the extractive and agro-industrial threats that harm our territories and culture,” read a statement by the Wixárika Regional Council.

The Wixárika (known in Spanish as huichol) people have shown resilience not only in upholding their sacred rituals for hundreds of years, but in fighting for restitution of their lands. On May 9, President Sheinbaum signed a decree to restore 2,471 hectares of Indigenous territory in Jalisco and Nayarit as part of implementing the 2022 Justice Plan for the Wixárika, Náayeri, O’dam-Au’dam and Mexikan People. This brings the total territory restored to the Indigenous peoples of the region to 6,000 hectares since 2016, which is 58% of the total land area they have fought to reclaim from cattle ranchers and other small landholders. The Wixárika community has also battled mining activity by companies that were granted extensive concessions in the Wirikuta reserve. Since 2012, all mining activity in the protected area has been suspended, but there has been no definitive judicial ruling to cancel the concessions.

The region has also been affected by turf wars between the CJNG and the Sinaloa Cartel—in December 2023, the leader of the Wixárika Regional Council, Maurilio Ramírez Aguilar, was kidnapped in Del Nayar, Nayarit and held for four days before being released. Earlier the same year, another Wixárika land defender, Santos de la Cruz Carrillo, was also abducted for a few days en route to Nayarit from Durango. Neither the two men nor the authorities provided details on who was behind the kidnappings.

In today’s edition, I’ve decided to re-publish a piece I wrote about the Wixárika caravan that traveled 32 days on foot to demand an audience with President López Obrador in 2022, and about the broader issues of Indigenous cultural preservation in Mexico.

The Wixárika people have made the pilgrimage to Wirikuta for hundreds of years. (Photo: Gob MX)

One state, many nations: Indigenous rights in Mexico

Originally published on June 6, 2022

“When a language dies, so much more than words are lost. Language is the dwelling place of ideas that do not exist anywhere else.”

Robin Wall Kimmerer

“We will continue our fight until our lands are restored. We can claim victory the moment that they have given back the last hectare, the last centimeter of land to our community.”

After a 32-day journey on foot from the north of Jalisco to the doors of the Palacio Nacional in Mexico City, 200 members of the Wixárika people, the “Caravan for Wixárika Dignity and Conscience,” finally achieved their goal: a meeting with the president himself. On May 30, three days after their arrival in the city where they set up camp outside the seat of government, President López Obrador held a meeting with five spokespeople and signed an agreement to intervene in their land dispute.

The Wixárika people (or plural, wixaritari) live in parts of what is now Jalisco, Durango, Nayarit and Zacatecas and also further north, in the southwestern United States. According to 2020 census data, there are about 60,000 speakers of Wixárika in Mexico, making up a small percentage of the 23.2 million people who identify as Indigenous in the country (comprising 68 distinct groups and languages). Known for their intricate, vividly colorful art and for sacred rituals surrounding the use of peyote, the Wixárika people have broader cultural recognition than most of the Indigenous nations who have lived here for thousands of years.

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Since 2007 the communities of Tuxpan and San Sebastián Teponahuaxtlán have been in a legal battle with cattle ranchers from Nayarit who moved onto their lands, where the wixaritari live as subsistence farmers and artisans. “They have defended their rights in civil and agrarian court cases that have lasted for decades; they have protested; they have marched to Guadalajara; and they have publicly denounced the trespassing; agrarian courts have ruled in their favor. There is just one thing missing: that the Mexican state enforce justice.”

In 2017, AMLO visited the community and promised to uphold the legal resolution to restore the lands, but according to the comuneros, nothing has happened since he became president.

“This government is very nationalistic and loves to identify with Indigenous peoples,” says Mixe linguist Yásnaya Elena Gil. “The president has demanded that the Spanish government issue an apology—on behalf of the Indigenous people—but in doing so, he completely usurps our voice.”

AMLO’s visit to the Wixárika community the year before he was elected was a part of this political strategy, a show of solidarity with the many nations within the Mexican state. But when it comes to policy, the rigid reality of nationalism—the promotion of the mestizaje and modern Mexico—clashes with the fluid plurality of ethnic and linguistic diversity on the ground. The tension between the impulse to preserve and celebrate multicultural traditions as curiosities or artifacts versus the desire of the peoples themselves for self-determination, can be witnessed all over the world. The creation of nation-states in the 19th and 20th centuries laid the foundation for the modern age and even today, states recoil from the movement towards autonomy of minority ethnicities or regions.

According to UNESCO, there are more than 7,000 languages spoken worldwide and 6,700 are classified as “Indigenous languages,” in other words, they are native to a particular region. Forty percent of these languages are endangered. In a decision that has been criticized by advocates for Indigenous languages in Mexico, the federal government has been considering—in the name of austerity—the absorption of the National Institute of Indigenous Languages (INALI) into another agency, the National Institute of Indigenous Peoples (INPI).

“The Indigenous communities insist that the INALI should remain as an agency devoted specifically to the development of these languages, in all areas, from research to public policy and the training of linguists, interpreters and translators,” explains Zapoteca activist and poet Irma Pineda. In 2003, the General Law of Linguistic Rights for Indigenous Peoples established that these languages have “the same validity [as Spanish] in the territory, location and context where they are spoken” and also for “any issue or procedure of a public nature”.

In 2008, the agency published a National Catalogue of Indigenous Languages (CNLI) after extensive research and data collection. Some of the languages in question had only a few dozen speakers left. The CNLI established that Mexico is home to eleven distinct language families, divided into 68 “linguistic groups” and 364 “variants”. Nahuatl is the most widely spoken of these, followed by Maya, and the distribution of Indigenous language speakers is concentrated in certain regions. For example, in Guanajuato only 0.2% of the population aged 3 or older speaks an Indigenous language while in Oaxaca, that figure is 31.2%.

“It has taken many years, and cost much blood and suffering in an as yet unresolved struggle, for the countries of Mesoamerica, notably Mexico, to recognize their multicultural and pluri-linguistic identity,” wrote renowned scholar and linguist Miguel León-Portilla in an anthology of Mesoamerican literature. “Global cultural trends induced by hegemonic powers—nation-states and transnational corporations—tend to homogenize worldviews, beliefs and moral values…Then and now, literary output has played and continues to play a crucial role.”

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