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...

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