During my college years, I was traveling up the coast of Nayarit with my mother when we came to the odd little town of San Blás, Nayarit (made famous in Latin America by a rock song from the band Maná). It was an incongruous mix of surfers, tourists, alligator-viewing excursions, local fishermen and their families, and a smattering of older American expats.
After a few days, we felt we had seen everything of interest and began asking locals where else might be worth a visit. An older American couple who regularly provided food and shelter to a few members of one of the region’s indigenous groups, the Huichol, during their ritual hallucinogenic pilgrimages from the mountains to the coast, suggested that we visit a Huichol community. We liked the idea and settled on a place accessible in less than a day by bus then shared motorboat.
We arrived mid-afternoon at the remote mountain village of some 2,000 souls, roughly half Huichol and half Mestizo, each living on their own side of the usually empty town square. Since the town was perched atop a hill one could see for miles into the expanse of arid mountains, rivers and lakes, without any sign of civilization. There was only electricity for a couple hours a day, just as dusk turned to night, which residents used to finish their chores and listen to music. Except for that period, with no motor vehicles in town and (at most) the half dozen boats a day usually at such a distance they could scarcely be heard, a profound silence reigned.
The night became frigid the moment the sun set. We spent it in the home of a man who had arrived with us in the public boat and later generously offered us lodging. In the only bedroom of his wooden house, in a bed next to another where his children and wife lay, my mother and I huddled under the covers, trying to stay warm, while the man slept on a bench in the kitchen by the fire. Gusts of wind blew all night through the walls and, more perilously, through the thatched roof where scorpions nested (I learned this later when I asked why the beds had plastic drapings rigged above them). We all rose the next morning stiff with cold, and our host agreed without much protest when we suggested it would be best if we sought shelter elsewhere, and pointed us towards the church.
When we reached the church, the priest in charge immediately invited us to sit down seemingly hungry for conversation with people from a more cosmopolitan environment. Even after a year living in the mountains alongside Huichol and campesinos, he was still astonished by much of what he witnessed. He spoke of Huichol women having to stand facing the wall while the men spoke with him when he entered a Huichol home; of how Huichol people looked down on him and others who were not members of their group; of alcohol abuse even during shortages of food amongst the townspeople. To illustrate the“strange” customs that still persisted, he opened a side chapel of the church, which housed a statue of the Virgin of Guadalupe. I’ve seen the Virgin of Guadalupe in many forms: decals, tattoos, t-shirts, trinkets, carved wooden icons from a hundred years ago… but this one was the most memorable. She was smeared with dark red stains where blood from sacrificed animals had dried. According to the priest, some decades back, a tremendous drought had jeopardized the existence of the entire community, and a child had been sacrificed, too.
With only a couple of rolled straw mats available to be used as beds and no extra blankets, the church did not turn out to be an enticing place to sleep. Instead, the priest directed us to a nearby convent. After savoring a slice of pound cake and hot tea given to us by the nuns for supper, we spent the night in a spartan room that was cold but with fully plastered ceiling and walls blessedly arachnid-free. The next morning bright and early we were on our way back down to the dock and Tepic, the state’s capital.
The Virgin of Guadalupe in this image has little connection to the hinterlands of Nayarit. This one is housed near Oaxaca, Oaxaca. She is striking in that she is illuminated by brightly colored fluorescent lights, that some might consider more suited to a bar or Mexican auto-mechanic shop. Yet she, too, is in a church - in this case, a colonial-era cathedral. Perhaps because of the contrast between her tawdry ornamentation and her somber location, she is the second most memorable image of the Virgin I have seen.