Marisela Ugalde
Mexican founder of Xilam, a martial art drawing on Aztec, Maya, and Zapotec warrior culture, which she has led since the early 1990s.
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Marisela Ugalde is the Mexican founder of the martial art Xilam. She founded and registered it in the early 1990s and has led its organization ever since. We have not been able to verify the date and place of her birth.
From adolescence she trained in Asian and Pacific martial arts, including kempo, kung fu, and lima-lama. During the 1968 Olympic Games in Mexico she was inspired to train in judo at the YMCA. She also studied under Andrés Segura Granados, a leader of the Concheros dance, who influenced the philosophical side of her art.
Xilam draws on three warrior cultures, Aztec, Maya, and Zapotec; the terminology and counting used in training are in the Nahuatl language. The Aztec deities Quetzalcoatl, Tezcatlipoca, Xipetotec, and Huitzilopochtli are reworked in the system into concepts of energy linked to the four elements, rather than treated as literal deities. Training progresses through seven native animals, the snake, eagle, ocelot, deer, monkey, iguana, and armadillo, each with its own stances and techniques. Advanced levels introduce reconstructed pre-Hispanic weapons, such as obsidian clubs.