Rag Radio: Mystical Artist and Storyteller Luis Guerra on ‘Repopulating the Huichol Deer’

Luis Guerra is a painter, sculptor, writer, storyteller, and activist born in Piedras Negras, Coahuila, and raised in Laredo, Texas. Since 1985, he has divided his time between Austin and Real de Catorce, a remote mountain village in the Mexican state of San Luis Potosí. Guerra’s award-winning art is in museums and collections in the United States and Mexico, and he has told stories on National Public Radio’s Latino USA since the program began in 1993.

In recent months, Luis Guerra has been involved in the Huichol Deer Repopulation Project which has relocated 33 deer from northern Mexico to the Sierra Madre, in Jalisco. On Rag Radio, Luis discusses the amazing and ambitious adventure of securing and moving the Huichol deer. He reminisces on his years with the Huichol Indians, with emphasis on shared mystical experiences, and reads three stories about being in the mountains of Jalisco with the Huicholes.

According to Guerra, “The dream of repopulating the Sierra Madre of Jalisco with deer actually came to me about 28 years ago, when I attended the Huichol Festival of the Drum, the Corn, and the Squash. It was then that I learned that encroachment and poaching had decimated the deer population in Huichol land. Which was truly tragic, given that deer are sacred to the Huichol, an integral and major part of their cosmology.”

Luis was also our guest on Rag Radio in June 2014.

Rag Radio is produced in the studios of KOOP 91.7-FM, an all-volunteer, cooperatively-run community radio station in Austin, Texas, in association with The Rag Blog and the New Journalism Project, a Texas 501(c)(3) nonprofit. The host and producer of Rag Radio, Thorne Dreyer, is a prominent Austin-based activist and writer who was a pioneer of the ’60s underground press movement. The show’s engineer and co-producer is Tracey Schulz and the staff photographer is Roger Baker. The syndicated show is broadcast (and streamed) live Fridays, 2-3 p.m. (Central) on KOOP in Austin, and is later rebroadcast and streamed on WFTE-FM in Mt. Cobb and Scranton, PA., on Houston Pacifica’s KPFT HD-3 90.1-FM, and by KKRN, 88.5-FM in Round Mountain, CA — and is a featured podcast at VT. All Rag Radio podcasts can be found at the Internet Archive. Contact: ragradio@koop.org.

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Rag Radio with Thorne Dreyer

Rag Radio is produced in the studios of KOOP 91.7-FM, an all-volunteer, cooperatively-run, solar-powered community radio station in Austin, Texas, in association with The Rag Blog and the New Journalism Project, a Texas 501(c)(3) nonprofit. The host and producer of Rag Radio, Thorne Dreyer, is a prominent Austin-based activist and writer who was a pioneer of the ’60s underground press movement. Visit the Rag Radio Archives.

Contact:ragradio@koop.org

www.theragblog.com/rag-radio