By ANDREW BLOCK

 

Driving south of Oaxaca, the cosmopolitan bustle quickly becomes a countryside where artistic traditions of sparsely sprinkled towns are as firmly rooted as the forest in the nearby mountains.

Understanding the origins of Oaxaca’s indigenous crafts necessitates an intimacy each village is eager to indulge, thereby making an engaging journey for anyone interested in the region’s aesthetic roots.

San Martin Tilcajate is one such bastion of the region’s cultural history and friendly cheer. It is home to Vicente Hernandez Vasquez y Familia, a family-run studio that has been innovating wooden-craft figures - “alebrijes” - for three generations.
Upon entering the family’s home/studio, one is greeted by a menagerie of alebrijes. A glance along the walls and floor finds a rainbow of slinking iguanas, flirtatious mermaids, fire-spitting dragons, and one palm-sized cat pawing for a stomach-rub. Using a technique established before the arrival of the Spanish in the 16th Century, each figure is carved from the wood of the copal tree, which is more pliable than other varieties. This first stage takes up to three days, after which the alebrijes are painted by hand, a delicate process that can, in turn, take up to seven days.

Designs vary, but frequently Zapotec myth and folklore prove influential. One of the Hernandez’s most captivating pieces depicts the ancient Zapotec tale, La Danza del Venado (“The Dance of the Deer”), in which an indigenous man in a peacock headdress spears a kneeling man who wears a deer’s head. The story recalls the ancient civilization’s ritualistic killing of a deer to bestow honor upon man’s relationship with the rest of the animal kingdom.
Prices for alebrijes typically range from 50 to 1000 pesos, and though alebrijes have been an important source of income for the Hernandez family down the years, they were traditionally sculpted as playthings by the family elders for the children and as commemorative tokens at festivals and ceremonies.

San Martin’s esteem for the traditions of Oaxaca’s pre-Hispanic era is shared by Santo Tomas Jalieza, a pueblo 10 minutes down the road, which specializes in hand-woven garments, from hats to tablecloths. Like their neighbors in San Martin, the weavers of Santo Tomas constitute an artisanal network of 34 families, which have each inherited a distinct craft that has thrived for more than five centuries.

Anyone visiting Santo Tomas can bear witness to this weaving method, known as taler de cintura (“loom of the waist”), in which a weaver takes scores of cotton strands and ties one set of ends to the front of her belt, the other set to the ends to a pole, then sits at a distance from the pole such that the strings are taught and she has created a virtual canvas of parallel strings. At this stage, the weaver develops a design by passing new strands under and over the foundational strands. According to Hernandez, the smallest projects, such as belts, take two days to produce, whereas the larger ones, like jackets, can take up to a week.

The last and perhaps best-known junction on a day-long cultural retrospective is Ocotlan, the hometown of the late Rodolfo Morales, one of Mexico’s most-revered painters and a dedicated curator of the region’s artistic artifacts. The House of Rodolfo Morales serves as a museum of the artist’s personal life, a gallery of his works, as well as home to his surviving family members. The colonial architecture, blooming courtyard, and mini-amphitheater, located at the back of the home, all tell of how the artist embraced the various media of art outside painting.

Down the street, The Rodolfo Morales Foundation Museum stands as a panorama of Oaxaca’s artistic history, exhibiting everything from pre-colonial pottery, to 17th Century sculptures of the crucifixion, to a photo-biography of Morales himself. One of the more engrossing pieces is a ten-foot column on which Morales has symbolized the preservation of Oaxacan culture in paint. Towering in the background is a group of women, whose height reaches the lengths of the column. The foreground features a small-scale Oaxaca pueblo, which the women guard, cradling the buildings with arms extended toward the viewer.

One cannot return to Oaxaca City without first visiting Ocotlan’s market, which presents its own blend of cultural tradition and modernization, with vendors selling live chickens and fried grasshoppers-a local favorite-under the same tent as blue jeans and compact disks.
Although it may be impossible to see all the cultural artifacts of Oaxaca’s countryside in one day’s trip, it is a virtual guarantee that anything overlooked will remain for a future visit. For in San Martin, Santo Tomas, and Ocotlan, it is tradition to both conserve and uphold tradition.