By Laura Fraser
Photographs by Andrew Sullivan
In the 1500s, a Spanish bishop turned a collection of pueblos around the Mexican town of Pátzcuaro into a center for craftsmanship. The people here are still making and marketing their wares in much the same way as they did hundreds of years ago. Now they have to overcome tourists’ fears about drug traffickers, real or not.
On Friday mornings in the colonial town of Pátzcuaro, Mexico, there is a flea market where indigenous people barter their wares the way they’ve done since before the Spaniards set foot in this region. Squat, weathered women in long braids and woven rebozos carry baskets of dried fish, avocados, or wood scraps, which they trade for the used clothing, pots, or medicinal herbs that other natives have spread out on blankets.
The local crafts traded or sold around Pátzcuaro date back much earlier; coppersmithing, for one, has been traced to 600 AD. The native Tarascans—or Purépecha in their native name—whose vast empire was seated in Pátzcuaro and nearby Tzintzuntzan, had the resources to develop a variety of sophisticated crafts, and the emperor surrounded himself with artisans who created textiles, arms, feather adornments, and copper and clay vessels. Clay was abundant in the hills around Pátzcuaro, which led to many different approaches to the ceramic arts. One reason the Tarascans were never conquered by their fierce Aztec enemies was their superior metallurgy. They were no match for the Spanish conquistadors, however, who arrived in 1522, plundered those treasures, and killed any Tarascans who stood in their way.
Sixteen years later, in 1538, a more benevolent Spaniard, Bishop Vasco de Quiroga, traveled to the area, determined to stop the slaughter of the Purépecha and to focus on converting them instead. Inspired by the writings of Sir Thomas More, Quiroga, whose statue stands in the middle of the main plaza of Pátzcuaro, set out to create a spiritual and economic utopia. Surveying the richness of the local crafts, and the informal barter system already in place, he decided to use these traditions as the basis of a networked trading economy in what is now the state of Michoacán in southwestern Mexico. (See map in sidebar.)
An artisanal tour of Michoacan — with 18 towns devoted to ancient crafts
Quiroga gathered the scattered indigenous people into pueblos (the better to convert them), and noticed each village’s craft specialty: fishing nets to the island of Janitzio, leather to Ocumicho, musical instruments to Paracho, lacquer to Pátzcuaro, wool to Aranza, pottery to Capula, wooden chests to Quiroga, and so on. (See our sidebar, “An artisanal tour of Michoacán.”). To strengthen the region’s craftsmanship, the bishop imported experts, tools, and techniques from Spain, and built workshops in many pueblos. Pátzcuaro, with its spread of white houses, red tile roofs, and expansive main plaza, became the trading hub for these crafts, which strengthened the economies of all the villages in Michoacán.
Five hundred years later, artisans still flock to Pátzcuaro with their wares, especially at fairs during the Semana Santa (Holy week) and Night of the Dead (November 1-2). The olive trees that Quiroga planted in the town of Tzintzuntzan, about ten miles from Pátzcuaro, still grow. And most of the pueblos still maintain their artesania (craft) traditions. Some of these crafts have changed over the years, becoming more decorative than utilitarian — copper vases rather than weapons, for instance, or fantastic pineapple-shaped pots instead of cooking vessels. These transformations have accelerated since the 1970s, when more tourists discovered the area, and more craftspeople were educated and exposed to the art of the outside world.
During the past 15 years, however, the craft economy has been struggling to survive. Drug-related violence in Michoacán has made tourists afraid to visit, even though most of the skirmishes have been hours away from Pátzcuaro. In some pueblos, finely skilled craftspeople have had to turn to construction work instead, or head north to the U.S. to find jobs. In other villages, the crafts have been so undervalued that younger people leave to find easier, more lucrative ways of making money, and may only create crafts for fairs or competitions. Tourists have become used to paying rock-bottom prices for crafts—which, when bought directly from the artisans, cost about a third of the price you’d pay in a commercial gallery. That price difference, and the willingness of many artisans to bargain, can skew a buyer’s sense of the work that goes into these crafts — and disguise the hidden reality: Usually, the artisans are simply desperate for cash. If you do buy in galleries, ask if they are committed to giving a precio justo. The term means nothing more than a “just price,” but galleries who subscribe to it seem to honor it. (One such gallery is Casa Michoacána in San Miguel de Allende).
For the Michoacán traveler, consider Casa de la Real Adana, the ultimate craft hotel
Despite these economic pressures, an astonishing array of artesanias still exists for visitors to explore in the region — relatively safely. “It’s a big state,” as the town’s new mayor, Victor Baez, told me, “and it’s peaceful here.” As people are realizing that Pátzcuaro is a safe town, they are also discovering the many dimensions of its culture.
Santa Fe de la Laguna: Black Clay
Santa Fe de la Laguna was the first utopian pueblo that Bishop Quiroga set up. Much of the town is still communal, including the central “hospital,” which is a place of hospitality, not medicine. On the day I visited Nicolas Fabian Fermin, he wasn’t in his studio; my guide had to track him down on narrow dirt side streets, where he and his wife, Maria del Rosario Lucas Buatista, were doing their monthly duty of delivering food to the elderly and infirm in the town. Collective efforts like these are part of the legacy of Quiroga’s communal pueblos.
Behind the simple wooden doors to Nicolas and Maria’s home is an entryway with shelves of award-winning pots. The courtyard is strewn with laundry lines hung with T-shirts, jeans, and indigo blue rebozos. The kitchen has open shelves with handmade crockery, and the smell of dried chilis and wet clay hangs in the air. In the back room of the house is the workshop and kiln, with a newer, bigger kiln outside. Nicolas’s great-grandfather made pottery in the pueblo, and his grandfather was well-known for his chocolate pitchers. The traditional pottery in the pueblo is black — created with molds, not on a wheel — often with intricate designs. Nicolas, who began playing with clay as a child, noticed that the black-glazed pottery chipped easily, and the designs wore off. Over time, he developed his own style of embedding designs into the clay itself. He covers the dark clay that’s traditional to the region with a red clay called engobe, then sketches fish, hummingbirds, blossoms, and other designs from nature, creating designs that have won competitions in both Mexico and the U.S.
While Nicolas has passed down his pottery-making skills to his daughter (“Apart from her father’s good looks, she has inherited a craft,” he joked), this tradition is fast becoming unusual. “In general, kids don’t want to work so hard to make 50 pesos,” Nicolas says. “They’re thinking of their cell phones and the Internet, like everywhere else.” Nicolas and his wife, also an artist, sell their work to galleries that promote precio justo. They also plan to organize a workshop, school, and competitions to teach pottery-making in Santa Fe de la Laguna, one of the region’s villages where Purépecha traditions — dress, language, crafts, and ceremonies — remain strongest.
*Laura Fraser, NYT-bestselling author and journalist who lives in SMA and San Francisco. Andrew Sullivan, e recent SMA resident who now lives in Barcelona
*The Craftsmanship Initiative is dedicated to reclaiming craftsmanship’s principles of excellence, beauty, and durability as a pathway to a more sustainable world. The flagship venture of the initiative, which operates as a non-profit, is Craftsmanship Quarterly, a multimedia publication that focuses on master artisans and innovators whose work informs our quest.
This excerpt was published with authorization. To keep reading please search for the link to The Craftsmanship: https://craftsmanship.net/can-patzcuaro-and-surrounding-colonial-crafts-towns-survive-modern-mexico/
