YURATA

The Yw’rata, or Yurata, is a huichol community that is in the state of Nayarit. The name Yurata means: that which is growing little by little.

It has that name because we have been on this land we purchased barely four years and we are growing little by little.

The Yurata community has 65 inhabitants who are all family of the Mara’akame or healer, Eustolio Rivera Lemus, and his wife, Rosalia Lemus Rios.

We are indigenous Wixaritary or Huicholes, we live by our ways and customs, but we are in a very difficult situation for the development of our tradition and customs because there are many needs in the community.

Water, school and clinic are our most important priorities at the moment.

The Yurata community strives to survive being different and being what we are, an indigenous Huichol community, and to maintain our way of seeing the world. We work for our autonomy and like many other communities that are fighting to rescue their roots and traditions, we also fight to maintain and fortify the self-determination and sustainability of the Yurata.

We must provide for our basic needs and generate autonomy for our community and our customs. It is through our art that we see a way to share our vision of the world and generate economic resources for projects for the community. For that reason we established our cooperative of Huichol art.

Thus the intention of this site is to show our art, to reach people and to break with the problem of the resale of the art where the intermediary, he who profits from the work of others, wins affecting both the producer and the buyer. This site also aspires to be a more direct form of communication with those of us who make the art.

We often see that in today’s world the “art” does not have value, but it does have price.

We believe we are able construct better ways to make our art known and to make it available to more people.

We know that there are many people who are with us and that we have many friends that have supported us and walked with us in this time and who we have brought to Yurata, but we also want to enlarge our network and our capacity to fortify our autonomy; the autonomy of our roots and our community.

Here in Yurata we maintain our form of traditional government with its officials and their responsibilities toward those who live within our customs and thus we determine how and where we shall direct our steps.

PROJECT YURATA is a site where we will go to chat about the projects that we have in the community such as education, health and potable water, among others, so that we can have feedback from those who want to help us.

We think that development is good as long as it is inherently taking into consideration the communal spiritual and cultural development of communities and indigenous nations. We are opposed to integrative development where they try with government programs, and monks (religious sects) to integrate us into modern Mexico-- to the “train of progress”.

For us, a people that identifies with its culture is an invincible people.

This is our struggle and our means to survive as HUICHOLS.

We hope that this website works and we construct it among ourselves to know each other, to help each other and to benefit each other in this our difficult work that is to maintain the tradition and custom of our vibrant roots.

SUERTE Y ÁNIMO