MEDIA LIBRARY
The Media Library is a multimedia archive (including documents, photographs, audio recordings, and videos) designed as a platform to integrate the historical, legal, and biogeographic collections related to the Huichol People and their biocultural corridor. Most of these archives are not accessible to the communities themselves, as they are scattered across museums, libraries, research centers, and private collections in Mexico, the United States, and Europe.
Our goal is to build, together with the Huichol People, a strategic empowerment tool that strengthens the exercise of their rights and the effective control of their territories from a decolonial perspective. To achieve this, we use new information technologies to rescue, preserve, and sustainably manage their documentary heritage.
At CHAC, we house one of the most comprehensive collections of photographs, films, audio and video recordings, field notes, and historical and legal documents related to Huichol culture. Some of these collections were created by CHAC-affiliated researchers, including those who conducted fieldwork directly with the Huichol since 1965. Other collections have been made available by institutions such as the American Museum of Natural History, the Smithsonian Institution, the Ethnological Museum of Berlin, and the Musée du Quai Branly, for the purposes of the Media Library.
"Without archives, there is no memory; and without memory, there is no history."
The Media Library includes a Geographic Information System (GIS) covering the 600 km from Nayarit to San Luis Potosí, featuring the most complete description and mapping of the Huichol Biocultural Corridor to date. It also involves the preservation of testimonies and oral memory from elders, through on-site audio and video recordings carried out in collaboration with young Huicholes, who are trained throughout the process.
In addition to compiling, safeguarding, cataloging, digitizing, and georeferencing thousands of records in multiple formats, the Media Library produces documentaries about museum collections held abroad, as a form of virtual repatriation. This revives the ancestral memory contained in these objects through their interpretation by cahuiterus (wise elders) and their transmission to new generations.
The Media Library is a long-term, participatory, and solidarity-based process. As progress is made in the development of its components, materials are transferred to Tuapurie—the most traditional of the Huichol communities. Little by little, facilities are being equipped and set up for community use in the Sierra.