(Video) Creating A Center For Mexico’s Indigenous Heritage In SMA [] Rotary Club Program

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YouTube Link: https://youtu.be/J8Z5GELjFgM

By: Elizabeth Adlung

Ancient Indigenous Tribe in Danger

This ancient tribe located deep in the mountains of central Mexico has lived there for at least 15,000 years according to carbon dating of the ashes from sacred fireplaces. Now, after surviving centuries of conquest and colonization, Mexico’s Huichol culture (also known as the Wixárika), is caught in gun battles between cartels.

This war endangers the Huichol Center for Cultural Survival and Traditional Arts, founded over four decades ago by Susana Valadez, Nobel Peace Prize nominee and anthropologist. The Center documents the Huichol cosmovision, language, spiritual traditions, ethno-botanical knowledge, traditional arts and more. Currently, the archive is relocating to a secure location in San Miguel de Allende.

The Huichol Center, a beloved humanitarian institution, is known for its unyielding efforts to help this ancient tribe overcome poverty and thrive in the modern world. The Center provides for those in need: hospital patients, single mothers, impoverished families, Huichol spiritual leaders and tradition keepers. Young and old learn to grow their own organic food, raise farm animals and fish. The Center also fosters economic self-sufficiency by training families to create high-quality native arts they market in lucrative tourist locations.

The Center’s Wixárika school teaches the Huichol language and computer literacy through archival jobs where students document their rich cultural legacy and build a repository of art forms, native dress, spiritual beliefs, ancestral wisdom, music, dance, mythology, gastronomy, botanical knowledge, folk medicines and more.  Students also learn computer graphic design to preserve their spoken, written, and iconographic language. The digital chronicles created by Huichol youth strengthen their resolve to preserve their cultural patrimony.

Susana Valadez, a UCLA anthropologist, is the founder and director of the Centro Indígena Huichol A.C., and the Huichol Center for Cultural Survival and Traditional Arts, a US 501c3 incorporated in 1991.  She has lived and worked among the Huichol people for more than four decades and dedicated her life to safeguarding the Huichol tribe and its precious cultural legacy. Since marrying into the culture in 1977, she has become the mother of three and grandmother of four.

Susana’s commitment to protect the Huichol people and their spiritual traditions resulted in the nomination of the Huichol Center for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2019.  She says, “The goal of the Huichol Center is to create sustainable lifelines between tradition and the future, lifelines that allow traditional wisdom to thrive in the 21st century by empowering people who carry their spirit and substance.”

Website: www.thehuicholcenter.org, Email: info@thehuicholcenter.org

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