A Pilgrimage the Wixarika Still Walk to Wirikuta

Wixarika, or Huichol, religion centers on an annual pilgrimage from the Sierra Madre Occidental to Wirikuta, a desert region in San Luis Potosi, Mexico, where pilgrims gather peyote under the guidance of mara'akate, trained shaman singers who interpret the visionary experience the cactus opens. This article does not set out the ceremonial content of that pilgrimage or the wider cycle tied to maize, deer and rain that surrounds it. Wixarika artists express the cosmology publicly instead, through nierika and yarn paintings, individually authored visionary works sold and exhibited as art; the scholarly literature on peyote religion, including Omer Stewart's history of the practice across North America, documents both the pilgrimage's long continuity and the art tradition it has produced.

Access to Wirikuta has come under real and public pressure in recent decades from mining concessions and agricultural development on land the Wixarika consider sacred, a conflict that has drawn Mexican and international attention to the pilgrimage's survival. The tradition remains actively practiced today, carried by mara'akate and by pilgrims who continue to walk the route their tradition names as sacred, even as the land it crosses is contested around them.