In the Lands of Fire and Sun: Resistance and Accommodation in the Huichol Sierra, 1723–1930

The most satisfying and useful studies in ethnohistorical publishing are those that ignore imperial and national historical timelines and instead present a coherent study of a people within the bounds of the sources that inform what can be known of them. Stephens’s study of the Huichols, or Wixáritari, of the Sierra Madre Occidental near and in Real de Catorce, Mexico, is such a study. Her sources work with the lore of the people themselves, a connected cultural group that routinely thwarts Westerners’ expectations of how a people should band together to protect its own interests. She utilizes colonial documents, including military documents and religious orders’ records, and early national documents from the period of the revolt against Spain to the time of the Mexican Revolution. She also utilizes European and American traveling scholars’ writings, all to tease out something that can be known of an otherwise reclusive and often secretive small cultural enclave in the sierra. Spanning just a handful of towns and related villages, the region itself is negligible. What makes the study useful is what we find in Stephens’s subtitle: how and when the Huichol resisted the Spanish, the Mexican government, and local authorities, and then how and when they accommodated the same persons, foreigners, and other Indigenous groups.This study reflects the turn to studies of resistance and accommodation that mark North American Indigenous and American Indian scholarship since the later twentieth century. Stephens is clearly well trained in such methods and deploys proper skepticism of sources as she reads against the grain to hear, or sometimes just see, the Huichols in certain periods. Her work follows other studies of smaller cultural groups in Mexican sierras, notably those of Susan Deeds, that feature a similar marked trait in the archives: an extreme paucity of documentation about one’s subject. Stephens’s work is refreshing in that she is clear when the trail goes away, and when she does see, with convincing details, evidence that gives some inkling as to the Huichols’ motives as they responded to events and circumstances in the period in question.There is much to the study to commend its use for comparative scholarship in the region’s other Indigenous peoples, and to the study of greater Indigenous responses throughout Mexico, the west of North America, and other similar regions of the former Spanish Empire. Now that this book has been out a few years, it is clear that both Mexican history and ethnohistory classrooms benefit from including this title among the readings for such courses. It pairs well with the article on which the fourth chapter is based, published in this journal in the January 2015 issue. This book also is a model for how to produce a monographic study when sources are frustratingly sparse, and how expanding the timeline outside the immediate comfort area of the author pays dividends: this is partly a colonial-era study and partly one that spans the nineteenth century area in which the author is well trained, and into the territory of scholarship on the Mexican Revolution of the early twentieth century. That is daring, but well executed in this volume. The book is strongly recommended for these reasons.