There is virtually no bibliography of Mexican modern art. The student
will have difficulty in finding definite essays, either on the history
or the meaning of this vivid and natural expression of a race. From
time to time individual writers have included a casual chapter on
general culture in their political and psychological studies of Mexico;
and the special departments of ceramics and architecture have been
dealt with attentively by authorities in these subjects, in a limited
number of handbooks that never reach general circulation.
Unfortunately, those few artists who have attempted either definition
or criticism of the wide field of Mexican art have remained within the
enclosure of an academic tradition. This is in a special manner true of
the Mexican writers and painters of the past century, whose ideals and
technique were formed by the Spanish or Italian, or worst of all, the
French schools.
This is the rigid attitude of those who have written in English, at all
events: They maintain, almost to a man, that Mexican art began well
under the foreign influences, but that it is now degenerated into a
mere meaningless peasant art.
They seem inexplicably to have missed the point. A peasant art: this
is precisely what it is, what it should be. The alien, aristocratic
influence was a catastrophe that threatened the vitals of the Mexican
race, and diverted its natural expression to strange, superficial
methods over a long period. Yet, once released, and only a little
maimed, it settled back to its calm level, and persisted after its own
way.
It is not possible successfully to comprehend Mexican art from any
other angle. Seen thus, harmoniously adjusted to its native background
and its history, we discover it to be an invaluable, eloquent thing.
There is in it the earthy aroma of a frankly peasant effluvium. It is
filled with a rude and healthful vigor, renewing itself from its own
sources. Above all, there is no self-consciousness, no sophisticated
striving after simplicity. The artists are one with a people simple
as nature is simple: that is to say, direct and savage, beautiful and
terrible, full of harshness and love, divinely gentle, appallingly
honest.
No folk art is ever wholly satisfactory to those who love smooth
surfaces and artificial symmetry. They cannot approach a living thing
that grows as a tree grows, thrusting up from its roots and saps, knots
and fruits and tormented branches, without an uneasy feeling that it
should be refined a little for art’s sake.
Yet the fineness is there, not only in feeling, but in countless small
delicate objects: in woven baskets fit to nest an ant, in lacquered
gourds smooth as enamel, in necklaces of filigree gold. Countess Evelyn
Martinengo Cesaresco, in her essays in “The Study of Folk Songs,”
understood this perfectly when she wrote: “... no touch is so light
and sure as that of the artificer untaught in our own sense--the man
or woman who produces the intricate filigree, the highly wrought
silver, the wood carving, the embroidery, the lace, the knitted wool
rivaling the spider’s web, the shawl with whose weft and woof a
human life is interwoven.”
[Illustration: _Decorated Clay Pieces--Tonalá, Jalisco_]
[Illustration: _Decorated Clay Plate--Tonalá, Jalisco_]
[Illustration: _Grey Clay--Asompa, Oaxaca_]
[Illustration: _Jars and Cups--Texcoco_]
From this viewpoint, then, we must consider the Mexican arts and crafts
as they are, having outworn or assimilated their foreign influences. If
they seem a trifle endangered by modern contacts, however remote these
may be, let us keep in mind that they have always been, not only a
record of the racial unfoldment, but a personal diary, if you will, of
the craftsman himself.
This accounts for the objective precision of that pictured account the
Mexican left to us, of the first Spaniards: there they are, seen by
implacably honest eyes, those helmeted conquerors on horseback, those
wide skirted, stiff waisted ladies with monstrous coiffures, those
imported dogs and incredible household furnishings. Painted chests and
wooden trays of that period silently point to the ugliness of our kind
of civilization as beheld by the civilized of another race and ethical
code.
Today it is the same. I saw a classically formed pot from Tonalá, fresh
from the potter’s kiln, a masterpiece of design and glaze. One side was
covered with figures done in the old style--ancient Mexican hunters
drawing their bows against fantastic animals, all leaping through
forests such as one is accustomed to see only in dreams.
The reverse side was even more interesting, for it bore the detailed
drawing of an automobile, of outmoded fashion, brimming with men
wearing foreign hats, hastening down the streets of an Oaxaca
village--the potter’s own village, no doubt, and this a first
impression of the only automobile he had ever seen. Viewed through
his amazed eyes, it is more mad and strange than all his warriors and
animals and forests.
No doubt that most of us would think it in lamentable taste. It
warns us, too, that if the artist were removed from his fructifying
contact with his mother earth, condemned daily to touch instead the
mechanics and artifices of modern progress, he might succumb, as do
the aristocratic arts, each in turn, to the overwhelming forces of a
world turned dizzyingly by a machine. But where the civilized arts,
so-called, may root themselves in another imported and cultivated soil,
where the individual artist may triumph by the strength of his unique
genius, the peasant workman may have none of these resources. In his
own earth--his native tradition, are his strength and his happiness.
The Mexican has a name for his home place. He calls it his “earth.”
(Mi Tierra.) He means literally the very spot where he was born, and
where his mother nursed him, is his own. There he belongs, and there he
will return inevitably, no matter how far he goes away, nor how long he
must stay in foreign places. His life is bound to this beloved earth:
gray-brown, fertile, spread unevenly as a tired man asleep, obscure and
humble and filled with richness, compounded of all the stains and tints
of fruits and flowers and irridescent stones.
In this village where he was born, the Mexican sits with his family and
his neighbors, making household wares for himself, and for the near-by
markets. Today, they make pottery and serapes in Guadalajara, in Oaxaca
and in Texcoco; lacquered gourds and painted trays in Olinalá and
Uruapan, chairs and tables in several parts of the states of Jalisco
and Michoacań, saddles and charros and rebosos in Puebla and Guanajuato
and Zacatecas.
Each community has its own particular craft, and not even the smallest
painted box or clay figure but bears plainly the stamp of the place
where it was made, by some unmistakable character of decoration or
form, in color or material.
We have seen that the early Mexican art was formed and ruled by the
idea of religion. Later it overflowed into profane life as well, and
became a personal, intensely human thing. But the forms had solidified,
and during the later years of the Aztec dynasty, design assumed almost
the rigidity of hieroglyphic writing, dogmatic and inelastic as the
final stage of Egyptian art.
The inflood of foreign elements during four centuries, disastrous as it
was in many ways, possessed one merit: it diffused and softened this
dogmatic quality, and restored Mexican design to its early freedom and
pliancy. Today, those ancient sacred and mystic shapes survive, but as
decoration merely. They have lost their symbolism, and have become pure
design. But they have not the haphazard, meaningless air of patterns
invented merely for the sake of their cleverness; the dignity of their
great origin saves them from superficial smartness. For example, the
ritual cornflower is woven again and again into the reed fibre baskets
and mats, in the traditional colors, blue and green; but the weaver
cannot tell you why he does it in that certain way, or why, indeed, he
uses the design at all.
[Illustration.]
Weaving and ceramics, wood carving and embroidery, these natural crafts
of the peasant, are now the most perfectly developed and eloquent
of the Mexican arts. There are many variations of method and style,
depending on the climate, the characteristic woods or clays of the
regions, the conditions of life of the workers; while the ultimate
decisive factors are the special social customs and needs of each tribe.
Changing levels of merit divide the work of the individual artists,
certainly, but it is not an overstatement to say that every village in
the states of Jalisco, Oaxaca, and Puebla has its guild of craftsmen
devoted to some special art, and within this circle there will be
smaller guilds composed of entire families who have the secret of
extraordinary skill in some chosen craft.
But all of them share ideas, intuitions and human habits; they
understand each other. There is no groping for motives, no divided
faith: they love their past with that uncritical, unquestioning
devotion which is beyond logic and above reason.
Order and precision they know by heart. Instinctive obedience to the
changeless laws of nature, strait fidelity to their own inner sense of
fitness mark all they do. Without analysis they can perceive and design
all the infinite harmony that is in a flower, a flying bird. Looms and
wheels and edged tools are the same, their uses unchanged. By these
means they have achieved innocently, without premeditation, the perfect
speech of their hearts.
Of late, the Mexican students, writers, painters, the vivid group
which makes up the National University life, has discovered anew the
principles of design in this neglected native art. They have realized
that in those undeciphered characters on temple walls is buried the
history of the lost races of Mexico. With admirable humility they
have set themselves, unreservedly, to the task of re-discovery, free
of pre-conceived theories, not committed to faith in the obvious. The
submerged period which preceded this revival, when no one remembered
the native artist, did not bring about a decadence, or failure of
creative energy as would occur to any art or industry depending for its
life on a changeable public taste. The Indio labored as before, with
the inspirations and materials that were his, rejecting and disposing
and adding where he chose, completing his destined task in quiet
certainty that it was good, whether the world remembered him, or forgot.
[Illustration.]
The state of Oaxaca is the very source of traditional folk art in
Mexico. It is true that the pottery of Jalisco is more complex and
mobile. But with this single exception, all things made by the Zapotec
and Mixtec peoples have a deeper, more personal value. It may be
because they, themselves, have retained their languages and laws: more
perfectly than the others.
The atmosphere of the tiny villages in this state is not old world
in the ordinary sense. It blows mysteriously from the very ancient
world, a time immeasurably removed from us. It is caught and held,
however precariously, in the spirits of a race which preserves its past
realities, surging with warm life, a quiver of living nerves, flowing
and changing of itself within its own limitations.
This will all pass in time: even now is passing, maybe. But there
is no sign of it yet, and it will disappear utterly only with the
race itself. The tiny pueblos have a look of relaxed and unresisting
permanence. The inhabitants have invested their surroundings with their
own deep and slow moving rhythm of life. The rows of flat-topped houses
lean together securely, the silent streets, cobbled or floored with
earth, are clean and wide. Their open markets are centers not only of
commerce, but of social exchange. Their manner would be good manner
anywhere, they walk splendidly: they are those who rest on a sense of
friendly and eternal kinship with each other, with their native earth,
and with their destiny.
The serape they wear is the classic garment of the Mexican Indio,
once used in many ways, woven of cotton, of rabbit fur, draped as a
mantle, cloak alike of the nobility and of the poor. Now it is a simple
square of woven wool, depending for beauty on design and color rather
than material. Each Oaxaca village has a guild of weavers, under the
authority of a master weaver. The best workman is their most important
citizen, and his disciples, after learning their craft, unless they can
surpass him, usually remain as simple weavers in the group. They work
slowly, and every serape is individual in design, woven from wool they
card and spin and dye themselves.
[Illustration: _Glazed Clay Ware--Tonalá, Jalisco_]
These garments are woven music: songs and legendary figures and the
dreams of the weaver go into them. A sombre brown or black serape will
be suddenly joyous with tight little nosegays of green and red and
yellow flowers, precisely the shape and tints of the bouquets sold in
the flower markets. A serape of scarlet and black will bear an angular,
stylised horse’s head, in hues unknown to that animal. Figures of Aztec
warriors taken from the ancient codices, bringing to mind the later
figures of Egypt, and the mythical cepactli, after all merely a tiger
with bared teeth, are among the favorite designs used by the Oaxaca
weaver with endless variations.
One man, master weaver of a certain small Zapotec pueblo, makes a
smaller, simpler serape, woven lightly of fine spun wool, almost as
pliable as velvet, and very delicate in design. On a foundation of
white or gray or brown he weaves narrow bands of color in the ends,
scatters small geometrical designs loosely over the surface, with a
double line of the same pattern in the center. The wearer slips his
head through the straight opening where the seam is left unjoined, and
this delicate wreath encircles his shoulders.
It is not fantastic. It is simple and touching, it belongs to the
wearer as he belongs to the land about him. He seems not merely in
sympathy with the trees and hedges of cactus and the gray road, he
literally is one with these.
The women make their chemises of cotton, embroidered in colored beads,
or smocked at neck and sleeve ends in heavy blue or scarlet threads.
The beaded chemises, meant to be worn on days of fiesta, swing loosely,
weighted with the strips of glittering tinted glass grains, a classical
rounded band at the shoulder releasing the soft brown arms and necks in
a line of tender beauty.
Second to the pottery of Guadalajara, the earthenware most prized by
the Mexican is the thick yellow pottery made in the Tonalá village.
It is of common baked clay (loza vidriada), very gay in coloring and
varied in shapes. On a foundation of deep cream the stains are splashed
on with an effect of casualness, in orange, in vivid blue, and green
with occasional touches of brown. At first glance it appears to have
been blurred, or “blotted” on, as their phrase has it, but immediately
the eye perceives the outlines of birds and butterflies and flowers,
very fantastic and charming.
The glaze of this ware is thick and clear, but brittle. It flakes
off easily, carrying the pattern with it. But for all its evanescent
character, it is most appealing: the pots and bowls and platters spread
in small booths in the sunshine resemble a Mexican garden in full bloom.
There are other kinds of ware in the northern part of the state.
Simple vessels of white clay are molded without the wheel, and left
unadorned. The shapes are primitive, the jugs with tiny ears, the flat,
round water jug with a thin spout and a round handle at the top, and
the cups tall as vases, with straight edges. Black clay, engraved and
glazed in the natural color, is also made here, and is very attractive.
One village specializes in small toys of black clay, money banks for
children, and whistles in the shapes of animals. The grotesque sense is
perfect in these, the distorted little figures possessing a sardonic
quality of humor. But it is a grotesquerie still uninfluenced by the
Oriental or the Western idea of comedy.
[Illustration: _Clay Incense Burners--City of Puebla_]
This portion of Oaxaca is peopled largely by the Zapotecas, and their
objective temper is expressed by the things they make: knives and
swords of a special kind of finely tempered steel come from here. The
handles are of wood or bone sharply carved, and engraved inscriptions,
usually of a sinister or slightly Rabelaisian humor, run thinly along
the nervous, pliable blades. “Do not unsheathe me without reason, nor
fail to draw me through fear,” says one. “I am the Peace,” announces
another. And still another identifies itself thus: “I am not the friend
of cowards, nor the servant of the timid.”
Here also we find a certain type of charro, the national riding costume
of the ranchero, in which the Spanish love of magnificence is projected
in terms of silver and gold embroidery, and hand tooled leather. The
wide brimmed hats of heavy felt are weighted with borders of flowers
and leaves, and great cords of metal thread knotted and hung with
tassels depend from the inside of the crown. But the charro has its own
place in the Mexican arts, Our present interest is with the pottery and
weaving.
[Illustration.]
Guadalajara pottery has an older and more truly national history than
the better known Puebla ware. But it has come into esteem only of late
years, being rather overshadowed by the more obvious qualities of the
imported Talavera style of ceramics. The Talavera has its own place,
and a definite value, but it is considered even today as a modern
importation by the makers of the older kinds of ware.
All the ancient city of Guadalajara is, in effect, a huge pottery.
The state of Jalisco (of which Guadalajara is the capital) is indeed
second only to Oaxaca in its devotion to the folk arts. Many smaller
villages near the capital are given to this work, Tonalá being the
leader. The most perfect pottery in Mexico is made by the guild in this
tiny community. The inhabitants have been potters from the beginning of
their history. When the Spaniards found them, Tonolá was the capital of
a kingdom of the same name, and its potteries were famous. There are
now only about five hundred people in the town, whose sole industry is
the making of earthenware.
In idyllic peace and simplicity the villagers sit before their door
steps or under the trees, or in their tiny clean houses with their open
doors, decorating jars and jugs. They make, even more beautifully than
the potters of Guadalajara, who invented the style, those splendid
water jars and pots covered with fine tracery of design in white and
delicate shades on a pearl gray ground.
They have created a type of ware even more interesting, though
less subtle: a hard baked clay covered over with designs in white
and brown. They superimpose a fine pattern of thick white paint on
the dark copper red surface, and glaze it as hard as glass. It is
extraordinary in effect, and they say, very difficult to make. Though
it is the custom for the artist to sign his work, this type of pot
is a veritable scroll of records. Infallibly it is not only signed,
but dated, with the name of the village, and it is further dedicated
to some individual, or christened with a name. It has, more than any
other pottery of the Mexican, the faults, the imperfections, the
unevenness of the handiwork of a human being who is “untaught in our
own sense”--but it has this priceless value of the human sentiment, a
loved thing created for its own sake. One comes to love better than any
other thing in the native arts these brown humble bits of clay, done so
exquisitely, so gently, so irregularly.
The potters of the city of Guadalajara have many ways of making
beautiful things, but two types of their ware are of superior quality.
They are fortunate in the quality of their clay: it is smooth,
resilient and easy to stain. The old-fashioned potter puts a thin clear
glaze over the design, which was very fragile. They cover the entire
surface with nets of brush work too intricate to accept at a glance.
The eye must follow patiently, unravelling that precise, unhurried
mesh that never breaks nor interrupts itself. There are in them the
full bodied gold of pumpkins, the glossy green of foliage, the tints
of mangoes, of poppies, of bougainvillaea blooms, woven together with
slender markings of gray.
The newer style is more brusque, not so precious, the big flaring
leaves are applied with broad stroke in one color, usually, on a
ground of clay-red, ochre, sage green, or dull black with gray all
unglazed, slightly rough to the touch. Yet this very slight, almost
imperceptible, relief offers a fine depth of perspective.
The painter manages to convey, in this method, without shading or
foreshortening, a foreground, a middle distance, a far distance. There
are strange rhythms of loveliness in them: the darkness of forests,
the curve of boughs laden with uncanny fruits, the sophistication of
pointed fern fronds minutely accented as filagree; or brilliant with
dyes and stains in color associations strange to us, full of gayety,
balanced with shadow. They offer the paradox of gorgeousness balanced
by restraint, an exuberant yet disciplined spirit, in which elements
apparently unrelated are reduced to a simple and profound harmony.
After the Oaxaca and Guadalajara ware, the Puebla Talavera seems always
a trifle naïve, rather lacking in imagination. But it has its perrenial
charm of blue-and-white, the Chinese inspiration--filtered through from
Spain, absorbing the sturdiness and solidity of Holland blue-and-white
on the way. We have seen that the Puebla Mexican did not long confine
himself to the original colors. Today, all colors go into the tea
pots and plate and flower vases of the thick, hard glazed ware. It is
the most utilitarian of all the Mexican pottery, being near akin to a
coarse and porous porcelain, or stone china.
Mexican artists have recently discovered that the Puebla ware lends
itself to the use of their designs, and many of them have plates and
jars for their collections made in the Puebla potteries, done in the
old manner, and often in precise reproduction of the early examples.
The tile work is very popular, and the individual with a taste for
design may draw his own patterns for the tiles to be used in his house,
in mantels, for fountains, or wall panels.
Many of the older tiled churches have fallen into decay, and are being
restored with tiles that are such exact copies of the original, it
is difficult to distinguish the old from the new. When the famous
Casa de los Azulejos (House of Tiles, in Avenue Francisco I. Madero,
Mexico City) was restored a few years since, it was necessary to add
an entire new wall where the new street of Cinco de Mayo was cut
through; the tiles were made in Puebla, in the same pottery and by the
same methods as the original ones made in the seventeenth century,
and the reproductions are so perfect only the connoisseur can detect
the difference. Close examination shows that the old glaze was more
clear and even, the blue is deeper, the clay is softer. The ware has
deteriorated in quality by these shades of decline.
The two large tibores, great jars standing six feet or more in height,
brought from Puebla for this present exhibition, are unusually splendid
examples of the Talavera ware at its present best. One is developed
in the blue and white, an ordered confusion of fleet winged birds and
swift footed animals. The glaze is exceptionally fine. The other is in
colors, a happy blending of yellow and green, of fruits and leaves.
They are masterpieces of the Puebla method, prophetic of a renewed
interest in making this ware the thing of beauty it once was.
[Illustration.]
There are many other kinds of earthenware in Mexico. Every region
produces its special type of clay household vessels, made of the clay
about the village doorways, and each has the merits of honesty and
simplicity. It is not always artistic, judged even by the most liberal
standard, but it has the profound appeal of ardent human expression.
In Cuernavaca, one of the most beautiful of the smaller cities, they
make good use of their light red clay, almost a pale coral color, in
molding bottles and jars without painted surfaces, but inlaid nicely
with bits of half precious stones.
From Metepec near Mexico and Quiroga, a village of Michoacan, comes a
very distinctive and curious sort of pottery. It is glazed in glossy
black, decorated with vivid flowers, streaked with silver or gilt
paint. It is gay and frivolous in effect, of no special importance
except for its nonchalant prettiness. Set among a group of sedate
Guadalajara bottles, or the sober plain gray and black pots from
Teotihuacán or Texcoco, a Quiroga pitcher will decidedly convey the
effect of a bright-skirted dancer in a company of Quaker ladies.
The “loza” from Texcoco is quite primitive, the very rudiments of
earthenware, unpainted, often of a noble beauty of form. The specialty
of the Texcocan is weaving, and he makes a serape that appeals to a
discreet taste. Blue is his color, and on this ground he weaves his
simple designs in black, white, or gray. The rugs are usually large and
very heavy. The wool is more coarsely spun, which makes the Texcoco
serape valuable for use as floor rugs. They are not so original or full
of splendid associations as the serapes of Oaxaca, nor are they proof
against rain and made for horsemen to wear in bitter weather, as are
many of those woven in Guadalajara. But they have their soft enduring
charm, a civilized restraint in tone, that makes them exceedingly
livable.
[Illustration.]
After all, it is useless to attempt a rigid classification of the arts
of Mexico, or to draw definitive boundaries beyond those here set down.
For bits of loveliness spring up here and there, unexpectedly, like the
sudden clumps of sweet blooming small flowers along a Mexican lane.
For example, take those adorable little wax figures, dressed in the
national costumes, made of real fabric stiffened with wax, that you see
in the shops, or in the small booths called the “puestos” set along
the borders of city parks at Easter and Christmas and other feast days
... they are made in the suburbs of Mexico City, and so far as I was
able to discover, they are not made anywhere else. Their variety is
endless: patient little mothers carrying their babies on their backs,
cradled in their rebosos: men bending under panniers of fruit: children
dancing, men strumming guitars, girls and men mounted on splendid
rearing horses, wearing the China Poblana, and the Charro. They are so
delicately tinted, so fresh and lifelike, they seem veritable living
people, seen through the reverse lens of a field glass.
The skirts of la China Poblana fly discreetly, as she curbs her
mettlesome horse, glimpsing lace petticoats whose ruffles are fixed in
billowing flight, real thread lace, waxed to maintain those spontaneous
looking folds. Her knee curves easily over the horn of the saddle, her
smiling face is always turned toward the caballero who rides beside
her, gorgeous in his riding dress of tooled and embroidered buckskin.
From a village called Santa Cruz de los Monos (literally, Holy Cross
of the Monkeys) in the state of Jalisco, comes another kind of small
image, but made of clay and painted, of these types beloved in the
popular imagination. There are mounted ladies and gentlemen, young
country lads and girls dancing the Jarabe, a favorite folk dance seen
at its best and most joyous in this part of the country. They also make
fruits of painted clay, while the waxen fruits, perfect even to the
bruised spots, the broken twig, are made only in Mexico City. Madame
Calderon de la Barca, wife of the Spanish minister to Mexico in 1840,
exclaimed with delight over the artfulness of these fruits, declaring
herself completely deceived by their realism. They are deceptively
luscious indeed.
This aspiration after a perfect realism, a complete statement of the
thing they see, is the essence of their arts, the key to the racial
temperament. I am reminded of a certain man, in the tiny puebla of San
Esteban Titzatlań, who carves walking sticks.
This man sits every day before his house, on the hard naked earth,
behind his enclosure of organa cactus, and makes every sort of walking
stick from the heavy cudgel of defense to the airy wand a man might add
to his costume as pure decoration.
He works with a small sharpened knife on saplings of various native
woods, dried and polished to the color of ivory. He carves designs
in high relief on these wands, sometimes almost the entire length of
them, after the fashion of the things he knows: lizards and beetles and
cacti, eagles and dogs and leaves and men wearing charros. Each stick
is a chapter in his life’s experience, a record of what he has seen and
felt. Sometimes he is more than a month in carving a single stick. When
he finishes it, he sets it aside and begins another. Carving sticks,
beautifully, painstakingly, endlessly, is his vocation and his pastime.
He sells them occasionally, at prices which elevate them to the dignity
of gifts. He works with a preoccupation entirely untainted by any
knowledge of popular taste, and utterly refuses to teach any one else
the technique of his carving. This is characteristic of the Mexican
peasant artist. He guards jealously his working formulas.
Master potters have been known to create certain designs, to perfect an
excellent glaze, and to teach them only to a carefully selected group
of disciples, or more often, not to teach them at all. Several years
ago a painter of boxes in Michoacań who had discovered a superb method
of fixing his colors, died without revealing his secret, and left only
a few examples of his work.
In Oaxaca there is a woman who makes a curious little incense burner,
not particularly beautiful but intensely individual, rare in shape
and violent in coloring. She instructs her daughters as they grow up
in the method of making these burners, but the art remains strictly
in her family, and no one else would even presume to inquire into her
technique, nor to imitate her work.
The city of Aguascalientes contributes a wide assortment of crafts, the
natives there being more versatile, if less classical in spirit, than
in any other region.
Rather sophisticated tastes demand, in Aguascalientes, chairs made by
hand, all painted in green and yellow and blue, or else lacquered in
black and decorated with gilded flowers. The seats are made of woven
rushes, or of maguey cords, woven stoutly in red, green, blue or white.
Tiny chairs for children will be charmingly adorned with birds and
animals, small flower wreaths, naive and old fashioned as fairy book
pictures.
Wall cupboards with shelves for books and pottery are also made in this
style, quite often being painted in a sulphur yellow, the back panel
carved at the top not infrequently with birds amiably touching beaks, a
favorite device in wood carving with the Guanajuato cabinet maker.
A wool garment called the tilma is much worn here. It is a smaller
and lighter weight serape, of wool of fine spun henequen fibre. They
are cheerful in hue, fit for the bright soft weather of this region.
On such a tilma was imprinted the miraculous image of the Virgin of
Guadalupe, now the patroness of Mexico, which may be seen at her shrine
at Villa de Guadalupe near Mexico City.
[Illustration: _Embroidered Waist Band--Tehuantepec_]
There is, in all, a progressive modern air about the arts of
Aguascalientes, mingled with a native quaintness; their most dignified
art is lace making. Needle lace, as it is called, and the drawn
linen lace, were derived from Italy in the seventeenth century. The
women work marvels with their fine needles and linen thread on their
smoothly woven linen, making table cloths and napkins, curtains and
old-fashioned counterpanes, handkerchiefs, and lingerie for brides. The
work has that remote and unworldly beauty of convent needle craft, and
serves much the same uses. No Mexican bride, at least in the country,
would forego a chest of this linen and lace for her new household.
Italy contributed also the small square shawl of embroidered silk in
white or pale colors, adorned in the corners with thread lace. They are
called chalinas, and are much worn by the young girls on haciendas.
A few years ago they were worn also by the beautiful ladies of the
cities, chiefly in Guadalajara, where the women are noted for their
splendid hair. They wore these filmy mantles instead of hats, allowing
them to slip lightly about the shoulders, thereby revealing the most
carefully dressed heads in the Republic.
Aguascalientes has a rival guild of needle workers in the small town
of Silao, near by. Here also they make those painted chairs and wall
cupboards; and here they excel in the ancient art of mat and basket
weaving from reeds and palms. The petate, the pliable mat used as a
bed, or as curtains before doorways, even as wall partitions in the
houses constructed of woven palm withes, is here at its glorified best.
There are pure white ones, bleached like flax, with maybe only the
national escutcheon, the eagle and cactus and serpent, in the center;
or more thickly woven ones with diagonal stripes in many shades. Some
of them rival a Quiroga pot in brilliancy, though this is more often
found in the basketry. Whatever the shape, whether flat, made into
halves that slip one over the other like a pocketbook, or round and
handled like a flower jar, there is always in these baskets a shocking
juxtaposition of color, yaw and unrelieved. Often one sees in a single
basket, red and rose and orange, with sulphur yellow and cobalt blue,
without even the relief of a white line dividing them.
We have noted how this use of violent, unshaded pigment gives an
effect of depth, of actual penetration, to the surfaces of pottery.
In the painted boxes and chests from Michoacań, the lacquered gourds
and bateas from Tehuantepec, whether encrusted or painted, this use
is carried to the ultimate possibility. The result of this flat
opaque unmixed color is to give an amazing clarity and sweetness of
tone, where it is used with artistic discretion. On these chests and
jicaras, also, the schemes of color are very ardent, but more ruled
by the associations we are accustomed to accept: blue and clear red,
orange and green, gray and black and rose, with bands of silver. They
take on a delightful tone of mellowness with age. When new they are as
irresponsibly brilliant as Russian embroideries.
In the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, these fragile seeming gourds are used
daily for carrying fruit and vegetables, or water. The smaller ones
serve as water dippers, and for chocolate. The chocolate will be beaten
to a froth with a beautifully carved whip called a molinillo (little
mill), sometimes inlaid with bits of jade or bone. The Tehuantepec
woman wears, more often than not, a strange, flaring headdress of
starched and pleated white lace, which rays out from her face like the
coif of a sister of charity. But there is nothing nun-like about this
enchanting dress of la Tehuana. She is given to all the vanities,
from her perfectly arranged head to her embroidered short blouse with
its short sleeves and low cut neck, to the rustling lace-trimmed and
embroidered skirt, to her very feet, lightly bound in thin sandals or
satin slippers with ribbon bow knots, embroidered on the straps.
Her jewelry is the airy gold and silver filagree, akin to that of China
and Naples, but distinct from either, since it was an old art before
either the Chinese or the Italians came to Mexico. The huge ear rings
of the women, their necklaces, the splendid rosaries and crosses, the
very auras of the saints are contrived of this delicate web-like gold.
Their pins and combs, rings and bracelets are also of spun and filagree
silver, set with jade and turquoise, or more rarely, with opals.
In Yucatan, the Mayas defeat their tropical heat with lightly spun
fabrics, thin silks, pale colored, fine embroideries. Here, they import
their cloths, and their embroidery is a comparatively recent imitation
of the Chinese, which lessens the value of their contribution to
Mexican arts. However, there is a certain charm to the curious satin
shoes and thonged sandals of the women, with their sharply upcurved
pointed toes and high heels. Their most unique and interesting work is
done with henequen fibre weaving. They make hammocks, used instead of
beds, of henequen (sisal) thread, in which they sleep suspended in air,
cool as a spider in his web.
In the more temperate states, Jalisco, for example, we find serapes of
moderate weight, furniture designed for comfortable living in a fairly
equable climate, such as those cowhide easy-chairs, bound together
with thongs of undressed cowhide or buckskin, known as “equipales.”
Stretched on stout wooden frames, the hide left in its natural color,
they are much used in the country, and are meant to withstand hard
usage.
The ceñidores, long narrow bands used as belts, woven in rigid
figures in bright colors, are made in many districts, though they
are used almost exclusively among the rural Indios. The reboso, that
indispensable article of attire among Mexican women, is also made in
every part of Mexico, though the finer ones come from two places only:
Santa Maria, in the state of San Luis Potosi, and Tenancingo, state of
Mexico.
The reboso is a long scarf, woven commonly in two colors, one the warp,
the other the woof, so that it appears to be one shade except in the
fringe, where the different colored threads will be woven alternately
and knotted into an effect of square blocks of contrasting shade. For
the poor, blue cotton is the favorite. The handsomest ones, made in
Santa Maria, are of raw silk, in delicate tones of jade green, pale
yellow, ashy violet, gray, and rose. The flat spun thread weaves into
a very supple, sinuous length of silk, with a silvery shimmer, or
over-gleam, like the shine of a snake skin. Dr. Atl has touchingly
described its use among the poor, in his monograph on “The Popular
Arts of Mexico:” “... With the reboso the women of the village cover
themselves. It does not only serve as a head covering, or when crossed
over the breast, as a simple adornment, but it is also the provisional
cradle of the poor children, the handkerchief with which the women
dry their tears, the improvised basket in which the Indios carry
their vegetables to the market, the cover of the infant who sleeps
tranquilly beside the working mother. When it is twisted and placed
on the feminine head it serves as a seat for the filled fruit basket
which, skilfully balanced, is thus carried through the streets; or when
extended, makes a shelter for the kettle of tamales in the angle of a
street....”
[Illustration: _Wax Figures--City of Mexico_]
In its more luxurious aspect, it is used among the ladies of the
haciendas, and is an important part of the riding costume, being folded
about the hips, over the knees, adding its weight to the flying skirts
of the rider. It was originally a Spanish garment, but its shape and
uses have vastly changed. It is the familiar garment of many classes of
women, even among the bourgeoisie, where it takes the form of softly
fringed black silk or thin woolen nun’s veiling.
[Illustration.]
El charro! He is the beau ideal of the romantic imagination in Mexico.
He is the symbol of her old society, her truly Mexican old society,
not the eternally foreign-souled Spanish grandee, but of the Spanish
who were Mexican-born in their love of the country, who were genuinely
native to the soil, to the struggles, to the dreams and aspirations
of their country. Some of these had Indian blood, and in them the new
patriotism burned with the ardor that quickens new nations, and is the
clean animating force that welds a race indissolubly from the beginning.
The development of the charro, the national dress of Mexico today, is
a little history of Spain in Mexico. The Spaniards brought horses, and
with them prodigious saddles, high pommelled, of leather and metal,
with ponderous stirrups, leg guards of leather, and high chair-backs.
This is the present shape of the Mexican saddle--La Silla, the chair of
the horseman--often for the ranchero the only chair he knows day upon
day, as he goes about his affairs on the cattle pastures and enormous
cultivated areas of the haciendas.
From the Spaniard also he developed the dress itself, the short jacket,
the tight trousers strapped under the boots, the wide sash fringed and
knotted at the side. The great wide brimmed hats were designed for
protection from the sun: it was the caballero’s own manner of wearing
them that made of them the most dashing and devil-may-care fashion of
headgear ever devised by man.
Because of the necessity for country life in Mexico, the horse became
the most important of all their domestic animals. Man must spend his
life in the saddle in pursuit of either business or pleasure. The
horse, the saddle, the accouterments of horsemanship became objects of
care, of costly and expert attention. In this way it became a symbol
of the national life and customs after the conquest. It is today
worn with pride as the distinctive dress of the country, the mark of
a special patriotic devotion. Members of old country families, and
certain distinguished persons make a point of appearing in the charro
on all occasions of holiday and festal costume, notably in the paseo
in the park of Chapultepec on Sunday morning, when the President, the
members of the Cabinet, and Mexican society and officialdom in general
drive slowly back and fourth on the Grand Avenue, under the shadow of
Chapultepec Castle.
In the country the charro is not a ceremonial dress, but the ordinary
habit of the man on horseback. Here it appears in all its variations,
from the humble suit of tough blue drill ornamented with black bone
buttons, to the splendor of hand-dressed buckskin in chamois color
embroidered in spun silver and scarlet.
The charro indeed is subject to all the caprices of taste of the
individual in respect of material and color combinations: it is in
the cut and the design and placing of decoration that do not change.
They are made by Mexican leather workers and embroiderers in small
towns, each one catering to the local taste. In Salamanca, state of
Guanajuato, they band cream-colored buckskin with tooled leather
flowers of golden brown; they make for this jacket a waistcoat of
golden brown buckskin, with gold embroidery, and trousers to match the
waistcoat. A hat of brown beaver or felt, very peaked in the crown,
will be weighted with gold flowers and a long cord with gold thread
tassels ... gloves and boots, a whip of light tan leather, with gold
or tooled leather head, a wide smooth leather belt with gold buckles,
and a flowing gold-colored tie, will add the small final touches to a
theatrically beautiful and impressive dress. In Salamanca also they
have the habit of cutting strips of thin leather into complicated
designs and stitching them on flat, to resemble braiding.
The town of Jerez, in the state of Zacatecas, has a famous guild of
leather workers who make the finest possible quality of softly dressed
buckskin; exquisite metal embroideries come from this place also. The
finest hats come from Puebla or Guadalajara, being distinguished by
their slightly tilted crown and deeply rolling brim. Aguascalientes
contributes charros embroidered in thick brightly dyed thread, mingled
with silver. In this region there is a taste for trousers and jacket of
contrasting shades and materials. Charros of black cloth or leather,
embroidered in silver or colors, are very much worn. Gauntlets have
flaring wrists, fringed and stitched.
Like the manufacture of saddles and stirrups, this craft is somewhat
modernized, since the demand is so wide and the buyers are drawn from
every class and section of Mexico. But still the charro “shop” is apt
to consist of one master workman and his apprentice, usually his son,
and one or two employees.
Stirrups and saddles are made in several towns, but Amozoc, Puebla,
Andeleon in Guanajuato is easily in the lead. Here they make great
saddles of soft firm leather, delicately tooled as a lady’s pocketbook.
They embroider saddle flaps in shining threads of spun silver, and make
saddle horns of carved wood or bone mounted in silver. There is no way
of generalizing them in descriptive terms since every saddle is unique,
with small details of decoration, the treatment of the leather, the
pattern and method of tooling, the use of colors. They are finished
with rings and stirrups of dark polished blue steel, encrusted with
gold or silver flowers, gleaming like great jewels--a horseman’s dream
of stirrups!
The saddle flaps, the bridles, even splendid blankets of chamois
colored buckskin or fine wool are bordered with banded designs of
flowers in leather, are weighted with this lovely metal work and gay
silk thread flowers.
[Illustration: _Clay Water Jar--Michoacan_]
Bridles of woven horse hair, hard as iron and pliable as wool, drip
with prodigious tassels in red and blue and green. Less magnificent
ones of maguey fibre are quite as durable and colorful. The designs are
woven the full length of the reins, the head pieces are joined with
buttons of bone, representing bull’s heads, or rosettes of metal or
leather. To the final touch, it ts all splendidly and perfectly made.
Saddle cinches, lassoing gloves (strange mitten-like affairs, with
fingers joined loosely to the body of the glove with light leather
thongs for the sake of ease at the knuckles), lassoing ropes of maguey
fibre, with tasselled noose ends: in everything there is a brilliant
taste, a sense of beauty, a handsome abandon to their ideal of gallant
living, that is deeply characteristic of the Mexican people.
[Illustration.]
One is loath to leave a subject on which there is so much left unsaid
... but it was not my intention, indeed, it was not within my province,
to write a complete analysis and history of so complex a subject as the
Mexican Popular Arts.
My aim is to present to you, in its human aspects, this profound and
touching expression of a very old race, surviving and persisting in
its devotion to ancient laws with a steadfastness that is anachronism
in this fluctuating age. These pages will perhaps help to explain many
things to those who will see, for the first time, examples of this art
extending over a period of at least fifteen centuries. In doing this,
the aim of this short study will have been fulfilled.
_FINIS_
_This book was published in Los Angeles, Calif.,
U. S. A., by Young & McCallister, Inc.
being completed November 10, 1922._
Transcriber's Notes:
Italics are shown thus: _sloping_.
Variations in spelling and hyphenation are retained.
Perceived typographical errors have been changed.