Contact Zone III
Nation, Revolution and the
Modernisation of Patriarchy
President Lázaro Cardenas with authorities of Tuxpan de Bolaños. Anonym,1935 © Ivan Alechine
After the Mexican Revolution (1910-1917), the state reinforced a gender order based on the nuclear family.
Revolutionary legislation defined men as heads of households with women and children as their dependents. Only widows could acquire land by inheritance, but women did participate in the political economy and social life of ejidos. As mothers and moralisers of the community women were expected to form anti-alcohol leagues and to support education. To raise healthy children, mothers had to have maternity services and be involved in childcare issues. These policies promoted the domesticity of women, in contrast to male citizenship: military service, wage work and civic engagement.
President Lázaro Cardenas with authorities of Tuxpan de Bolaños. Anonym,1935 © Ivan Alechine
Gender policies were put in place that sought the modernization of patriarchy.
Women remained second-class citizens, subject to male domination, but with roles in the domestic and social spheres that would assist the state as mothers in the modernising process, in education, health, morality, and child protection.
In the ejidos, men, women and young people should have access to schools and medical services. Although state-level policies such as these did not reach Wixárika communities, their establishment as hegemonic forms of social organisation had reverberations in all their interactions with state institutions and education systems.
New Ways to Inhabit the Nation
Revolution and agrarian reform
Huichols in the Mexican Revolution, Anonymous, circa 1916 © Photographic Archive of the Aguascalientes Cultural Institute.
The violence of the Mexican Revolution (1910-1917) and the Cristero war (1926-1929; 1930s) forced many families to leave their traditional territories, changing their everyday lives and rituals.
Huichols in the Cristera War. Anonymous, circa 1927 © Photographic Archive of the Aguascalientes Cultural Institute.
The withdrawal of missionaries and the institutionalisation of ‘modern’ political systems in Indigenous communities during the post revolutionary years was also accompanied by more frequent land invasions. Attacks by armed Cristero soldiers who burned homes, raped women and stole cattle are still within living memory.
The 'Cristeros' were leaving the ranches with nothing, literally. People said that when they arrived in Pochotita, after they did their misdeeds, they set fire to the ‘tuki’ and unloaded the ‘metates’ (grass matts) they had stolen, and they said to the women: “Prepare the nixtamal and make tortillas”. While my grandmother was cooking she saw how they sacrificed the stallion bull of my great-grandfather Kwainurie. It was the largest bull in the herd, it was called Tseɨyema. They loved the bull very much and my grandmother used to say that out of sheer sadness and anger she did not eat for five days.
Artists impression of the first school, Nueva Colonia. Field Diary. Colette Lilly, 1971. © Tom Eglington, 2023. CHAC-Lilly Archive
In the 1970s the first bilingual school opened in Tuapurie in the newly founded town of Nueva Colonia which was to become a centre for state led development interventions including a clinic, primary school with boarding facilities and in 1996 a Telesecundaria.
Visit from politicians and civil servants during the early stages of the Plan Huicot. Anonym, circa 1972 © Archivo CHAC-Lilly
The arrival of Modernisation and the National Indigenous Institute
The coloniality of state-Indigenous relationships once again changed with the establishment of the National Indigenous Institute (INI by its Spanish acronym) in 1948. The INI promoted an integrationist stance of assimilating Indigenous communities into mestizo economic, social and political life through protection and acculturation.
Their policy which ‘propose[d] to furnish indigenous communities with cultural elements of positive value, in the government’s view, as replacements for cultural elements which are valued negatively in the indigenous communities themselves’ (Alfonso Caso 1958, Human Organisation) reflected the gender order of the time.
After the political upheavals of 1968 a group of progressive anthropologists led by Guillermo Bonfil Batalla, whose definition of Indigenous peoples was as survivors who had managed to resist acculturation despite centuries of oppression, took over the INI’s leadership. Bonfil Batalla led the INI when the Plan Huicot was developed to serve Huichol, Cora and Tepehuano communities of the the Gran Nayar region. Soon 60 Indigenous Coordinating Centres were established across Mexico with the coordinator of each centre speaking for the state. This new indigenismo promoted self-management: whereas in the past Indigenous school teachers had returned to their communities to encourage integration, now their role was to support cultural difference though bilingual education.
In 1971 the Coordinating Centre for the Development of the Huicot region (‘Plan Huicot’) was created.
During the six-year term of President Luis Echeverría from 1970 to 1976, the federal government implemented the Plan Huicot which, according to the government report presented to the Congress of the Union in 1971 included ‘the initiation of a network of penetration roads, the construction of airstrips in 22 towns, the establishment of radio communication services, the construction of health centers and houses, 32 tents of the National People’s Subsistence Company, water systems in six villages and other services’.
This indigenismo was developmentalist, at a time when it was inconceivable that progress could mean anything other than modernisation.
Although the plan was well intentioned, it was founded on a poor understanding of Indigenous peoples and their historical relationship with the state, as the plan explains ‘penetrating the conscience of these nucleus’ of population so that they collaborate in the solutions to their own problems is not easy, especially in that which concerns land ownership’.
Casa de Salud Rural, Tuxpan de Bolaños. Anonym, circa 1972 © Archivo CHAC-Lilly
A specific focus on women or gender was entirely absent from the ‘Plan Huicot’, whose primary focus was on land security and disrupting ‘the barriers of distrust, insecurity and misery’ that Wixaritari, Coras and Tepehuanos faced.
The Wixárika people’s longstanding rejection of state and religious interventions was considered a barrier to development, not a concern to be understood, and development plans focused on creating the infrastructure for economic incorporation.
The plan was also primarily an infrastructure project, building schools with boarding facilities, clinics, roads and airstrips.
Alongside the clinic infrastructure, public health, education and sanitation programmes were proposed with a focus on reducing infectious diseases. The gender specific needs of women such as maternal healthcare provision or sexual and reproductive healthcare services would not come for many decades.
Technology reaches the Wixárika
The ‘Plan Huicot’ was being developed when Neil Armstrong landed on the moon. John Lilly had accompanied a group of Wixaritari to Wirikuta to gather peyote cactus when the radio broadcast the first moon landing. John photographed and audio recorded the occasion.
Resting in Huiricuta while hearing on the radio of man landing on the moon. ©Colette Lilly, 1969. Archivo CHAC-Lilly
Evangelisation efforts did not disappear in the 20th Century, they simply became more sophisticated and communities responded rapidly.
As part of their infiltration and indoctrination campaigns, during 1999 an evangelical religious group dropped radios with parachutes from small planes flying over the Sierra Huichol.
The community of Tuapurie took the unanimous decision to eliminate this threat, not only because of the ideological invasion it entailed, but also because of the ecological pollution that “the hallelujahs” were doing, as these North American sects are referred to in the Sierra.
The comuneros organised themselves to collect the radios scattered across their territory, stacked them and set them on fire during an assembly. By community agreement, the piece that is exhibited here as evidence and memory was safeguarded.
“Como parte de sus campañas de infiltración y adoctrinamiento, durante 1999 un grupo religioso evangélico arrojaba estos radios con paracaídas desde avionetas que sobrevolaban la Sierra de los Huicholes. En la comunidad de Tuapurie hubo un consenso unánime para eliminar esta amenaza, no solo por la invasión ideológica que suponía, sino también por la contaminación ecológica que estaban haciendo “los aleluyas”, como se refieren en la Sierra a estas sectas norteamericanas. Los comuneros se organizaron para recoger los radios dispersos en su territorio, los apilaron y les prendieron fuego durante una asamblea. Por acuerdo comunitario, se resguardó la pieza que aquí se exhibe como evidencia y memoria.”
And the evangelisation continues… portable radio dropped from parachute with access only to relgious channels. © Eduardo Abaroa, 2019. Acervo Conservación Humana AC
Gender in early 20th Century Ethnography
In earlier times, the union between a woman and a man was something of a match made in heaven: a partnership guided and governed by their shared responsibilities toward divine ancestors and ensuring an abundance of rain to grow their scared maize. As Catholic moral codes were gradually assimilated by Wixárika communities, so were a series of kinship patterns, heteronormative ideas about intimate life, social norms and transgressions.
Enrique making his wife Celia an offering for the safe birth of their child. © Jennie Gamlin. 2010
Since the early years of colonialism, how Wixárika women and men arranged their intimate lives has been influenced by many factors including the continued encroachment of Catholicism, local government structures and relations with the colonial state, codes of crime and punishment, national legislation regarding intimate partnerships and school attendance.
The primary task of Franciscan missionaries visiting the Sierra Wixárika was to instil the catholic notion of marriage in people’s minds. We know from confessionary documents, the writings of Franciscan missionaries and travellers that partnerships between men and women had never been very strong. Both were sexually freer and sex between two people of the same gender was not taboo. It is likely that women were held in high regard because of their fertility and this gave them a degree of sacred power over men.
Antonio with wives Lupita, Rosita and children. © John Christian, 1973. Archivo CHAC-Lilly
As the centuries progressed, catholic values influenced how women and men viewed each other. By giving governing authority to men, the colonial state introduced a gendered power relationship that probably did not exist before. Intimate as well as civil life was policed by judges, who had been given authority by the Spanish Crown to impose punishment, including the use of stocks and lashes, in order to enforce their laws.
Wixárika social dynamics assimilated the gross inequalities between men and women that had been defined by the colonial state: women were the possessions of men and they should respond to their husband or to a male relative. During the colonial period it became common for authorities to take a ‘tenancha’, an official housekeeper and cleaner who often became the man’s mistress. Such patterns may have led to the institutionalisation and social acceptability of polygamy. As the process of acculturation accelerated after Independence and in the post-revolutionary period, so too did inequality within intimate partnerships and polygamy became institutionally sanctioned. Having more than one wife is now less frequent, although Wixárika law still permits a man to take a second or subsequent partner. This gender unequal order also resulted in intimate partner violence becoming commonplace, a pattern that can be traced back along the lines of colonial and state interventions.
Carl Lumholtz’s ‘Unknown Mexico’ is one of the most detailed early ethnographic accounts of Wixárika life that pays particular attention to intimate partnerships.
Unknown Mexico: A Record of Five Years’ Exploration Among the Tribes of the Western Sierra Madre; in the Tierra Caliente of Tepic and Jalisco: and Among the © Jennie Gamlin 2023
Some years later, in the post-revolutionary 1930s, Robert Zingg again took up the topics of marriage and intimacy between Wixárika men and women:
“Nowadays adultery creates no more scandal than fornication, and the latter very little. Of adultery casual talk reached me often that such and such lovers, married to someone else, were meeting at the water hole of the arroyo. So little is adultery sanctioned that one of the severest vows taken by a Huichol for favour of the gods is to abstain from adultery for five years… ritually sexual offences are not treated harshly since any contamination of any sexual offence is removed by brushing the offender with grass”
Robert M. Zingg, p. 140
Robert. M. Zingg, 1938, cover. The Huichols, Primitive Artists. G.E. Stechert and Company, New York. © Jennie Gamlin 2022
Zingg also wrote of equality between the sexes, coinciding with accounts from central and southern Mexico that women were venerated for their fertility.
“Among the Huichols women suffer under no ritual handicaps, nor are they considered as inferior or unclean due to the sexual function. On the contrary, female sexuality ties up with Huichols conceptions of fertility and increase so as to give women a high ritual place… Most Huichol gods are women and the greatest of them all, Nakawé, grandmother Growth, is definitely conceived of as an old woman with grey hair. This gives all women, especially old women, a high ritual status as well as a social one”
(Zingg p145)
Women in ceremony, Tuxpan de Bolaños, cerca 1934. © Robert M. Zingg, 1934. Archivo CHAC-Lilly
The Coloniality Of Gender And Violence
Alfredo López Austin the eminent historian of Mesoamerica described how reciprocity in the family and the domestic-productive unit, visible in archaeological finds and mythology, strengthens the binary notion of the cosmos and the idea that human value is given as part of a couple.
These conceptions are the foundation of the coloniality of gender: before colonisation relations between women and men throughout the regions know as Mesoamerica were probably parallel and grounded in reciprocal rights and obligations.
Joined couple. Colima, 200 B.C. / A.D. 500. Ceramic © Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Proctor Stafford Collection, purchased with funds provided by Mr. and Mrs. Allan C. Balch, M.86.296.145
Writing at the turn of the 20th Century, Carl Lumholtz was witness to the changes that were happening in in Wixárika intimate lives:
“Demonstration of marital affection”. Tuxpan, 1934 By Robert M Zingg, © Amerind Foundation ZH14-17-353
The vara de mando (staff of office) was a crucial symbol of power that connected human beings to the realm of their ancestors.
The community of Tuapurie guards their original staffs for the annual ‘cambio de vara’ ceremony. Smaller more modern versions are used on a day-to-day basis and the staff continues to represent the endowment of authority to chosen individuals. In the past these scared items were only for men, as their power made them a potential source of illness for any woman who touched them.
Until very recently government posts were all held by men and this male empowerment defined the patriarchal structure of Wixárika communities, where the authority of the male heads of the family was law. Few crimes were committed but harsh punishments could be used against those who transgressed.
Staffs of Authority in the sacred house/xiriki of Waitekie, Tuapurie Varas de mando en el xirki de Waitekie, Tuapurie © Totupica Candelario Robles, 2022
'There remains practically nothing for the judge to do, but celebrate marriage and punish elopements, and to these duties they dedicate themselves with an astonishing zest and vim'
As far back as 1681 the Spanish Crown decreed that Indigenous judges had the authority to physically punish their subjects for minor crimes including civil and religious offences.
The law permitted ‘six to eight lashes as appropriate’ (Recopilacion de Leyes de los Reynos de las Indias, 1681). Zingg wrote about the use of the whipping post when he visited the Wixárika town of Tuxpan in the 1930s.
'Tuxpan officials seated on ‘bench of the mighty’. The whipping post is in the middle background' . Photo by Robert M. Zingg in 'The Huichols, Primitive Artists', Robert. M. Zingg, 1938
Tuapurie Oral History Project: Gender in living memory
Between 2013 and 2022 the Tuapurie Oral History project interviewed women and men from the community of Tuapurie to ask them how gender and women’s lives have changed over time. These conversations have helped us understand how gender relations have become fairer to women in recent decades and how they differed one and two generations ago.
Importantly they are a record of how Wixárika women experienced historical events including violent incursions, the arrival of clinics, school and roads and the role women played in making Wixárika history. Some of this history is told in the animated film ‘Ukari Wa’utsika’, The Stories of Women
Meeting to discuss women’s health needs, Nueva Colonia 2015. © Jennie Gamlin, 2015
(*Add video here with normal size screen)
You see, women cannot talk, they cannot express an opinion
Two young people in the stocks, Tuxpan .© Robert M. Zingg, 1934. Archivo CHAC-Lilly
The man was in charge, you had to obey what men said, men could marry as many women as they wanted, they could abuse us, before men beat their wives, even in public, all the time women had purple faces from the beatings
Many women talked about how relationships between men and women are far more equal now than they were in the past.
“Well, we are the ones that are changing things, because before they would say that women were worth nothing” (Wenima 2022)
‘Martha and Cirilo’ An older Wixárika couple.Pochotita, 2010. © Jennie Gamlin, 2010
Now they say that both men and women have the same value and I ask ‘how did we resist so much’? Now you can't beat any woman because they will sue him
