In the Lands of Fire and Sun

Michele McArdle Stephens's slim volume explores the complex intertwining of land, religion, and ethnic identity among the Huichol peoples of northwestern Mexico, arguing that over the course of more than two centuries of contact with state authorities they “successfully defended their culture and communities through . . . an ongoing process of selective appropriation and contestation” (p. xxii). McArdle Stephens presents a people (or, given her emphasis on Huichols' disunity, “peoples”) who engaged external authority—Franciscans, the Spanish colonial state, the modernizing Porfirian state—on their own terms. Key to their autonomy was retention of land, not simply community lands but lands spanning a wide swath of the Sierra Madre Occidental. That territory, incorporating parts of the present-day states of Jalisco, Nayarit, Zacatecas, and Durango, was foundational to Huichol identity; within this area were to be found not only Huichol towns but Huichol sacred sites, notably Wirikuta, the home of the gods they revered and the site of the sacred life-giving peyote.From the 1720s (when the Spanish crown claimed to have conquered the Huichols) to at least the 1930s, Huichol peoples resisted incursions intended to Christianize, civilize, or contain them and strategically deployed aspects of the Spanish and Mexican legal systems to sustain their autonomous existence in shifting political circumstances. Given the centrality of land to Huichol identity, McArdle Stephens pays particular attention to postindependence transformations in landholding—the impact of the end of the colonial fundo legal and the expansion of the hacienda, facilitated by changes wrought by the 1856 Ley Lerdo and subsequent Porfirian land laws—and finds that Huichols were increasingly willing to seek legal titles to their land and to stand fast against increasing encroachment of haciendas on their territories. The nineteenth century also witnessed increasing intertown tensions that laid bare the centrality of land to the sense of local identity. Huichol peoples recognized the threat posed by a modernizing state bent on mapping its territory and utilized strategies, sometimes including violence, to limit what the state could accomplish.McArdle Stephens's final chapter (followed by a brief conclusion) focuses on Huichol responses to the violence of the Mexican Revolution and the Cristero Revolt. Revolutionary violence washed over the Sierra Madre Occidental from at least 1912 forward, prompting many Huichols to flee and others to align with one or another faction, with loyalties shifting depending on the fortunes of each. An uneasy peace prevailed by 1920, but the Cristero Revolt brought a resurgence of violence that “scattered Huichols once more” and impeded any clear support for one or another side in that struggle (p. 94). But the absence of Huichol unity in the early decades of the twentieth century was not simply a result of that era's violence, although violence clearly exacerbated the situation; indeed, as McArdle Stephens notes in the concluding pages of her book, “the history of the Huichols is a history of political and ethnic resistance and accommodation in patchwork form, as opposed to a story of unity against a common enemy” (p. 95; emphasis added). What unity she finds among Huichol peoples, ultimately, is “in relation to their spirituality, which links land and religion” (p. 101). But even that narrowly defined unity allowed the Huichols to endure; McArdle Stephens argues that despite contemporary challenges, Huichols “still maintain a vibrant presence in their mountain homelands, paying homage to their gods and to peyote, whose celebrations ensure that life will continue in all Wixárika [Huichol] towns” (p. 102).McArdle Stephens's study redirects attention from central regions and better-studied indigenous groups to the margins peopled by groups unwilling to submit, illuminating in a regional setting the larger themes of cultural adaptation and persistence in the face of increasing presence of the state. Moving beyond the ostensible temporal end point of her study (1930s) in her conclusion, she addresses contemporary challenges posed by international economic interests (specifically mining) and drug cartels in areas sacred to the Huichol people.McArdle Stephens's treatment is nonetheless uneven, the result of a relative paucity of sources. The chapters on the earlier period tend to focus more on policy toward corporate landholding and impact on indigenous communities in general, with little specific to Huichols; what focus we do have on Huichols in the early period comes from Franciscan accounts that decry the barbarity of their culture. Her sources are richer for the period after the mid-nineteenth century, and chapters 4 and 5 offer a treatment of Huichols as Huichols that demonstrates how they increasingly and with confidence engaged the Porfirian state on matters of land even as they continued to deal with unscrupulous hacendados, intercommunity disagreements, and poverty. Judicious use of ethnographic studies from the turn of the century and from the 1930s allows her, in chapter 6, to assess the changes wrought in Huichol culture by two decades of revolutionary and Cristero violence. The unevenness of her treatment aside, this is an important addition to the scholarship on interactions between indigenous peoples and the state in peripheral regions

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