Shopping in Oaxaca
HANDICRAFTS IN OAXACA
The state of Oaxaca is one of the two most important regions of traditional handicrafts production in Mexico (Michoacan being the other), and handicrafts are what most visitors want to purchase. This section of the guide lists and briefly describes the most worthwhile and accessible crafts that can be bought today. Refer to the lists in the directories for the Central Valleys and the Coast for locations of the towns, markets and festival days, when shopping opportunities and the fun increase. The more you understand about the popular arts, the wiser will be your purchases and the more you will enjoy your new treasures. One of the best ways to learn (as well as to buy) is spending time in the shops with good selections of folk art. Books on popular art are sold in local bookstores; CORAZON DEL PUEBLO has the best selection in English (see BIBLIOGRAPHY). Learn more by talking with shopkeepers, the artisans and vendors in parks and markets, and visiting the community museums in the villages.
The majority of shops that cater to tourists carry folk art, as do large sections of the market places. Handicrafts were utilitarian at first and since early times have been sold in the large regional markets all over Oaxaca. Many buyers go to buy crafts directly from the artisans in the villages. It is easy to do this, taking inexpensive taxis from Oaxaca, collective taxis from the Central de Abastos, or local buses. Shopping in the villages means you will buy from the artisans themselves and see how they make their work. This is great fun and can mean a better sale price.
It is always polite to make a purchase if they have given you a lot of their time.
The artisan, highly inventive and observant by nature, takes up useful, lucrative ideas, makes and markets his product. This is not a new process brought in with the industrial age or capitalism; it was practiced by the Zapotecs and Maya, the Mixtecs and the Church. At Teotihuacan, the great ceremonial center outside of Mexico City, there were large districts where artisans imported from all over Mesoamerica produced work that was sold far and wide to further the ends of empire: commercial, social and political.
The Zapotecs and Mixtecs of ancient Mexico were unparalleled sculptors, potters, weavers, and goldsmiths. Zapotec merchants traveled throughout Mesoamerica trading cotton mantels, carved jade, featherwork, pottery, gold, and copper. The richest archaeological cache ever found in this hemisphere was the Mixtec Tomb 7 at Monte Alban, with fabulous jade, gold, turquoise, stone, and shell jewelry. The treasure is now on view at the Oaxaca State Museum in the old convent of Santo Domingo Church, along with pre-Colombian sculptures and a collection of native costumes that gives a good orientation to contemporary textile collectors.
The contemporary Indian artisans of Oaxaca have perpetuated this legacy of excellence in handiwork, in spite of Spanish destruction of the pre-Hispanic culture and its arts and crafts. Basket-weaving and pottery-making continued almost unchanged, and new costumes using European looms and materials were invented which startle us with their rich colors and design. And so it has continued for five hundred years since the Conquest. Many of the craft items have been produced in the same villages and regions for centuries: the women's basic costume, the three-panel, hand-woven huipil which has distinctive colors, embroidery and design in each village; the Coyotepec water jug, and the baskets and mats woven of reeds, straw and royal palm fronds from the Mixteca Alta.
The rebozo or shawl, the tanning of hides and elaboration of leather, metalwork including tin and iron (one of the greatest gifts of Spain to Mexico), all came with the Conquest. Except for the rebozo, woven on a backstrap loom and turned into a graceful and expressive part of a woman's dress by the coquettes of Andalusia, these crafts were made by Spaniards or "mestizos." Pottery, textiles and baskets have been the work of Indian artisans and retained their traditional forms to a remarkable degree. The design of the jar or bowl you bought yesterday may have been perfected 2,000 years ago.
Although the acculturation of Indians and Spaniards has been going on for five centuries, works of popular arts are most often made by people considered Indians (indigenous people is the official Mexican term), with "mestizos" involved in industries that were imported from Europe. Thus, as a general rule, basketry and pottery making are done by the descendant of Oaxaca's original native peoples in their ancient villages, and leather work, tinware and iron are produced in towns and cities.
Few writers have described the Indian artist better than John Skeaping, an English potter who lived and worked in an Indian village in Oaxaca in 1949. In his book "The Big Tree" he wrote: "The Indians do not think of themselves as artists; I doubt very much if they know what the word art means as they only apply the term 'artist' to persons who perform in the theaters.
A potter will also be a good ploughman behind a pair of oxen. He will know when it is going to rain or the wind change its direction. He will know a good ox from a bad one. He can build a house, a kiln, or a cart, and beat a wife as well as any other Indian. He is just a man who through centuries of tradition and practice has skill and knowledge in the use of clay. He likes working it, and that is all there is to it. The result is that his work has love and sincerity combined with the simplicity and skill which, to me, make the perfect work of art."
John Skeaping had an understanding of native life in a village that few foreigners obtain. One of the best things about his book is that he does not overly romanticize this life, for it is rife with tragedy and hardship. In spite of this, the popular arts are full of fun and good nature. They come from the world the people know, from the clay, stone, trees, flowers, and plants in their fields, the animals in their yards: ordinary and familiar, yet memorialized in song, story and magic ritual. Their crafts are often highly sophisticated, even when made using primitive tools and methods. Yet they speak of their work in simple language, the profundities hidden away. Laced with exotic legends and dimensions that to us seem like superstitions (if we can grasp their significance), the crafts often transmit a spiritual dimension missing in much of modern life and art. They emit an ancient force, an instinct to live and hope in the face of calamity. Even the Age of Plastic has only nicked at native life and crafts in Oaxaca, its goods and trappings absorbed into the great maw of the market places, where they become another swash of color among the piles of oranges, chiles and baskets, the yellow marigolds for the graves on the Day of the Dead, the Christmas moss and orchids.
The majority of handicrafts originally were for household use. Others, such as Coyotepec's clay bells with the silvery tinkle and tiny bird and animal whistles, were part of church rituals. Today craft items are made for modern Mexican homes, public and commercial buildings, collectors abroad, and tourist souvenirs.
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Some familiar contemporary crafts include the flat comal of red clay where tortillas are heated (a wonderful tray), plaited palm leaf, round baskets with square bottoms that fold flat, originally designed for tortillas but also good as wastebaskets; baskets of slender, interwoven palm strips from the Mixteca Alta region, from tiny to large sizes, plain or with green, purple and magenta geometric patterns, and the black clay water jugs now with cutout designs turned into lamps and vases. The "canastos," large split-bamboo baskets used to transport pottery from the village to the market are being used as laundry baskets; available for less than a dollar, they can be shipped abroad packed with handicrafts. Textiles in Oaxaca have many uses: rebozos for table runners, wool rugs for the whole house, blouses and huipiles for wear, larger fabrics for bedspreads and curtains. The best pottery looks good anywhere, even that which costs almost nothing in the markets.
Oaxaca folk art is now known around the globe. Tourists and dealers alike arrive with illustrations of ideas they want copied, special buying tastes and hungering for the traditional pieces or the latest fads such as Frida Kahlo figures. In the last thirty years the insatiable market for painted wood animals has changed life in a few villages forever, as well as some established perceptions of the nature of folk art. In Oaxaca is where folk art has crossed over into fine arts, the big time, the art gallery world abroad. Louis Valencia with his self-portrait wild, bearded men enacting erotic fantasies on giant, gross clay women, sells all over the world, and his kids are making little copies and selling almost as well. Carlomagno grown up in the tradition of making black clay pots in Coyotepec, makes black clay skeletons and life-size figures of Death and gets up to $7,000 for them from U.S. collectors. The most important contemporary artist of Mexico, Oaxaca native Francisco Toledo - his imagery derived from the same natural world and myths as the folk artists - freely acknowledges the debt he and other artists owe to popular art.
Copal resin incense has been burned in Oaxaca's braziers for millennium; today its fastest-growing industry is little carved and painted copal wood devils, angels, goats, and iguanas from three villages that don't have paved streets, private telephones or restaurants: Arrazola, San Martin Tilcajete and La Union Tepalapan. And while carving devils that are part of their religious life and snakes, cows, and festival scenes are their obvious and "authentic" subject matter, the artists also unhesitatingly fill orders for giraffes, polar bears, and Chinese dragons. (What the high priest orders, or the dealer from L.A.) The artisans are responding to the global market, and it has given them a never-imagined prosperity.
But it isn't all fast-forward. The weavers of Oaxaca's magnificent native textiles, the huipiles from villages near Pinotepa Nacional on the Pacific Coast and in the mountain villages of the Sierra de Juarez, are steadfastly resistant to change. Numerous well-intentioned outsiders have spent years on projects to commercialize these textiles but only a few have had any success. Most of the great textiles will disappear from the market in the next decades as the old weavers leave us, and the blue jean culture takes over. Thus it is worthwhile to buy the authentic native textiles, if that is your preference. Expensive abroad, in Oaxaca they are definitely a bargain. The kinds of textiles available and where to find them are listed below.
Folk art is a living art form that reflects the artisan's changing world, just as fine arts do and movies. The stimulation of being appreciated by strangers far away and the effect of their money is as positive as it is inevitable. The recent idea that objects have value for their decorative qualities as well as their utility, should be an acceptable point of view. Folk art, with its innocent, direct appeal, its good-natured humor (for even devils and tigers are more teasing than frightening), is a very positive influence in the prickly landscape of international politics and cultural misunderstandings.
You can hold a tiny object in your hand made by a village craftsman that carries within it his bittersweet humor, fascination with and embrace of death, easy acceptance of both tradition and novelty; his world of bright colors, dramatic skies, and ancient mysteries. Perhaps you will take home with you something of his sense of space and time that is not linear, like ours, with a beginning and an end. But Zapotec time, Indian time, more human time, the timelessness of works of art. In Mexico, "time is not so much a flowing river as very deep lake."
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