In 2014, the Argentine filmmaker Hernan Vilchez released Huicholes: The Last Peyote Guardians, a feature documentary built around a single family's pilgrimage to Wirikuta, the desert sacred site where the Wixarika, known outside their own language as the Huichol, say the sun was born and where peyote grows wild.
Vilchez did not set out to make the film on his own initiative. By his own account, the commission came from the Elder's Council of San Andres Cohamiata, who asked him to document the community's fight to keep Wirikuta from being opened to Canadian silver and gold mining. The film follows the marakame, or shaman, Jose Luis Ramirez, known by his Wixarika name Katira, and his family as they make the journey their ancestors have made for generations, tying a specific threatened landscape to a specific living religious practice rather than treating Huichol spirituality as generic backdrop.
Rather than premiere at a festival, the filmmakers screened Huicholes first in Wirikuta itself, echoing the pilgrimage the film documents. The nierika, the yarn paintings through which Wixarika artists render their visions, are not reproduced in the film or here; what the documentary and this record both preserve is the fact of the pilgrimage, who undertakes it, and what is at stake if the land is lost.
Commissioned by the community's own leadership but made by an outsider asked to carry the story further than the community's own channels could reach, Huicholes sits close to the outside chronicler standard: independent, publicly released, and careful not to reproduce what does not belong to it.