A Desert Called Wirikuta and the Claims Filed Against It

Each year Wixarika pilgrims travel from the sierra hundreds of kilometers east to Wirikuta, a stretch of high desert in San Luis Potosi state the tradition holds as the place their people originated and where the sun is said to have first risen. In 2010 the Mexican government granted mining concessions covering much of that desert, most of them to a Canadian silver company, over land Wixarika organizations and their allies had never ceded for that use, and the legal fight over the concessions ran for more than a decade. In 2025 UNESCO inscribed the pilgrimage route itself, the Wixarika Route Through Sacred Sites to Wirikuta, on its World Heritage List, a serial listing of twenty sites across five states that the Committee named the first inscription anywhere in Latin America for a still living Indigenous tradition rather than a historical monument.

Michoacan answers a different history. The Purepecha empire, centered at Tzintzuntzan on Lake Patzcuaro, was the one major power of central Mexico the Aztec empire never conquered, its bronze and copper metallurgy giving it a military strength the Aztecs could not overcome in open war, so Michoacan entered the colonial period never having been an Aztec tributary the way many of its neighbors eventually became. That independence ended only in 1530, when Spanish forces succeeded where the Aztecs had failed, a defeat the Wixarika of the high sierra were spared for a further two centuries by the same remoteness that today still keeps outsiders from Wirikuta's own more private ceremonial ground.