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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 79018 ***
+
+
+
+
+  Outline _of_ Mexican
+  Popular Arts and Crafts
+
+  _By_ KATHERINE ANNE PORTER
+
+  Upon the occasion of the
+  Traveling Mexican Popular
+  Arts Exposition in the United
+  States of North America, under
+  the auspices of the Ministry of
+  Industry, Commerce and Labor
+  of Mexico, Don Xavier Guerrero,
+  being the Art Director, has
+  caused this book to be published.
+  It contains a study by Miss
+  Katherine Anne Porter, of the
+  Popular Arts and Crafts of
+  Mexico.
+
+  Cover design by Xav. Gro.
+  Photographs from the collection of
+  Roberto A. Turnbull
+
+  Copyright, 1922, by S. I. C. y T.
+
+
+
+
+Acknowledgment
+
+
+My search for the sources and meanings of Mexican folk art has been a
+richly rewarded adventure among intelligences and devotions. Artists
+and scientists who have given many years to the work of recreating
+ancient Mexico from her historical remains, students who have brought
+enthusiasms as fresh and recent as my own, all have generously given
+me aid and counsel, have been swift to remove barriers of race and
+language and tradition that lay between me and the Mexican.
+
+To avoid an accumulation of footnotes in the text, let me here set
+down that I have read such widely divergent historians as Prescott,
+Alexander von Humboldt, Bandolier, Madame Calderon de la Barca,
+Bancroft, Rivas Palacio, Reville, Nicolas Leon; such entirely opposing
+contemporaneous writers as Dr. Atl, authority on modern popular arts in
+Mexico; Licenciado Ramon Mena, whose studies of recent archeological
+excavations have been of much value; and Don Manuel Gamio, whose
+theories of ethnology are sound and of deep interest.
+
+Thanks to the initiative and energy of Don Miguel Alessio Robles,
+Minister of Commerce and Industry, the actual work of preparing this
+exposition has been accomplished, with the personal collaboration of
+his department.
+
+For invaluable aid in gathering, classifying and interpreting the
+materials for this outline, I am happy to express my gratitude to
+Licenciado Jose Vasconcelos, Minister of Education and Fine Arts; to
+Licenciado Vincente Lombardo Toledano, director of the Preparatory
+School of the National University; to Señor Jorge Enciso, of the
+National Museum, collector and restorer of examples of early Colonial
+art, connoisseur of Mexican jade and Aztec design; to Licenciado Ramon
+Mena and his associate Mr. William Niven, the indefatigable digger who
+has brought out of the earth an extraordinary volume of relics from
+buried cities.
+
+The group of men immediately concerned in organizing this Exposition
+have been especially generous with their aid, Señor Alfonso Caso,
+private secretary to the Minister of Commerce and Industry; Dr. J. H.
+Retinger; and the Mexican painters, Diego Rivera, Adolfo Best-Maugard,
+and Xavier Guerrero, all have contributed the fruits of their studies
+to my understanding of Mexican art, have helped me to form my point of
+view and to place my sympathies.
+
+This simple outline of a profound subject is offered as an introduction
+to the arts of the Mexican people, on the occasion when they are
+sending for the first time an exhibition of their work to a foreign
+country. Virtually no special preparations were made for this exhibit
+in the way of manufacturing wares. The examples shown here were
+gathered from the little country villages, from the common shops and
+street markets, where the native brings his goods to sell them to his
+own people. They are personal, authentic creations, by the peasant
+craftsmen of a race that expresses itself simply and inevitably in
+terms of beauty.
+
+THE AUTHOR.
+
+_Mexico, D. F., May, Nineteen Hundred Twenty-two._
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: _Decorated Jar--Tonalá, Jalisco_]
+
+
+
+
+PART I: _Pre-Hispanic_
+
+
+It is a unique truth that to trace the origin of Mexican popular art as
+it exists today, it is necessary to consult first the archaeologists
+and scientists. In this country the past is interwoven visibly with
+the present, living and potent. The latter day life of the native is
+an anachronism. To account for him, archaeology and ethnology must
+combine in what appears to be an ill-rewarded search for beginnings. It
+is not possible to settle the question of the ancient races of Mexico,
+to close the book and pronounce clearly on a dead civilization, as in
+other countries where the earth is giving up her entombed cities.
+
+The descendants of the early Mexicans have survived the buried temples
+of their culture and are here, almost pure in strain, spiritually
+remote, stubbornly individual after centuries of alien domination.
+
+They have given way before foreign conquest with reservations. They
+outwardly conformed to a religion imposed upon them, and mingled
+ancient significances with its new rituals.
+
+They patiently wrought in the arts after the design of the strangers,
+and continued thereby an almost unbroken record of their own racial
+soul. Here is an art, almost unknown in the world today, a survival
+from internal wars, conquests, many fusions; an actual thing of full
+breathing vitality and meaning. Always the foreign influences have
+been assimilated and transformed slowly into something incorruptibly
+Mexican, personal to the race.
+
+The first concern of the scientist is to discover the origin, the first
+impulse of the artist is to apprehend the spirit. If the artist has
+more nearly achieved his aim, it is maybe because his task is simpler.
+He perceives and accepts the fundamental kinship of all human beings on
+the plane of natural emotion.
+
+They are agreed in this essential: the problem of the native is the
+problem of Mexico today. His future is invaluable, and must be secured.
+Modern sentiment of humanity and economic wisdom alike declare that the
+Indio has in the life of today his rights, his uses and his destiny.
+
+For this it is necessary to arrive at an understanding of him. The one
+approach to such an eventuality is by way of comprehending first his
+contribution to society ... and his contribution is beauty. A strange
+thing, sufficiently marvelous, of miraculous import. While we are
+attempting to explain him, he fulfills himself in his desert silences,
+unaware that he is enigma.
+
+Scientific theory regarding the origin of the Mexican is at once
+less sure and more dogmatic than the artistic. One may say with all
+high regard to the devoted and serious research of the students
+and historians of Mexico, that each man has an individual theory,
+compounded of many fallible ingredients. He is committed to faith in
+his works with an intensity once the property of religious fanaticism.
+This Sphynx of countries, which for every fragment of authentic
+history yields two riddles, is an enormous field of travail for the
+enthusiast who will die in defense of his facts. Each of them proves
+his contention by his own illumined faith, defended by his carefully
+gathered and rigidly arranged group of theories beginning where all
+theories of origins must begin: on hypothesis.
+
+This lends to their conclusions that quality of fantasy, of speculation
+and myth creativeness that has always marked the ideas of man pitiably
+eager to explain himself to himself, to open eternity with the key of
+his human imagination. But their work has this permanent value: they
+have brought out of the earth records in stone, unaccountable things in
+the main, but lasting documents for further study.
+
+A certain student will tell you there were five successive
+civilizations in Mexico; it is true he has collected five curiously
+unrelated types of masks and faces modelled in clay from several cities
+and from varying depths. The doubter may go to these cities and dig
+them out for himself.
+
+Another declares, and will show you charts to make it clear, that only
+two distinct types of culture existed here: the Maya and the Nahoa,
+so-called. Still others maintain that the races of ancient Mexico
+derived from the Chinese in the very dawn of time, and would raise the
+Atlantis to make a footpath for the migratory tribes across the sea.
+This last body of believers is almost large enough to found a school of
+archeology and ethnology of its own.
+
+They point to slant eyes, to anatomical character, to a gold colored
+skin surviving in the several tribes, in the Otomis, in the Mixtecas,
+in the early Maya. In effect, their contention is based on religious
+faith; it is not possible that in old time there were rival gods, each
+creating after his own fashion. The obscure monotheism in the soul of
+modern man declares the early man in the valley of Anahuac must be in
+some way blood brother to the human beings cradled in Mother Asia.
+
+They seek to account for this common Asiatic origin by comparison of
+hieroglyphics, motifs of design, by feature and customs and dress. They
+restore that vanished pathway of islands across the sea, which, if they
+did not form a complete bridge, created channels narrow enough for
+peoples to navigate them in small boats. This was, they admit, in the
+dawn; if they came so early as that, their kinship with the east is a
+remote thing, a mere sharing of common humanity.
+
+Analogies founded on comparisons so general have proved misleading.
+Those individuals who have studied origins in Egypt first find in the
+Mexican culture startling resemblances to the architecture and art
+motifs of the Early Egyptians. Scientists declare that virtually every
+culture of ancient Europe and Asia reveal some circuitous kinship with
+the inhabitants of Mexico.
+
+These resemblances appertain to the humanity of all races. The fixed
+dates of the Mexican culture vary from the Glacial epoch of the
+extremists to the five centuries B. C. of the conservatives. Science
+is hopelessly divided in point of time; but whatever the period of
+their emergence into civilization, they followed the natural process of
+growth. They may have been parallel with the same development in Europe
+and Asia, or they may have progressed in a slower rhythm, governed by
+different climatic conditions and their insurmountable isolation from
+the rest of the world.
+
+In important details they differ entirely. These differences give
+significance and depth to their culture. The resemblances are casual.
+
+A study of early design, for example, shows us that circles and wavy
+lines, labyrinths, swastikas and angles existed as basic motives among
+those peoples whom we are accustomed to call primitive. I submit that
+they existed as the simple universal expressions of emotions and
+perceptions that animated the awakening soul of man, the natural idiom
+of primary understanding. The individual use of these perceptions were
+developed differently by the growth of human personality limited and
+directed by its environment.
+
+A child of today, fragrant of civilization that he is, yet sees his
+world first with the eyes of innocence. He draws by instinct a straight
+line. A wavy line is water, a round circle serves variously to express
+his feelings for a flower, a head, a moon. He draws these things
+because they are the first planes and outlines the human eye apprehends.
+
+In his terrors the child is primitive man. He fears flood, fire,
+lightning, the mysterious and awful portents of nature. He creates
+superstitions about his birth, his emotions, his sex. I submit that
+these instinctive gropings make all men akin, and that they derive from
+within the individual. A race in China and a race in Mexico, emerging
+into the adolescence of civilization, would do similar things because
+those are the things all the men in the world did in the beginning.
+
+Since conclusions as to the history of the early races of Mexico
+must be based on choice of sources of information guided by personal
+faith and judgment, I have contrived the following mosaic of selected
+theories and data from many writers, offering it not as dogma, but
+merely as one possible combination on which to base further study.
+
+[Illustration: _Decorated Clay Jar--Tonalá, Jalisco_]
+
+Three distinct race-groups formed the early civilizations of Mexico:
+the Otomí, the Maya and the Nahoa. Of these the Otomí is believed to
+have been the oldest, the most migratory and warlike. Their exact rôle
+in the history of primitive Mexico is so ill defined it would not be
+profitable to attempt even the most nebulous outline here.
+
+Of the Mayas much is surmised. They came probably from North America in
+a migration that covered several centuries. The year of Our Lord 162 is
+the date assigned for the beginning of this pilgrimage of a race.
+
+At the close of the second century following, they were settled in
+Yucatan, with territories including parts of Chiapas and Tabasco,
+possessed of a splendid culture that dominated Honduras, Guatemala,
+Peru, parts of North and Central America.
+
+The Nahoa influence at about the same period embraced nearly all
+the valley of Anahuac, the central mesa of Mexico. At the time of
+the Conquest, the Mayas had long since vanished, while the Nahoa
+civilization had reached its final growth about the year 1400, and was
+in a gradual decline. The Aztecs, a migratory and aggressive tribe who
+came to the valley of Anahuac about the end of the thirteenth century,
+were responsible for the breaking down of the gentler Nahoa culture.
+The Aztecs assimilated the Nahoa arts as the Romans did those of the
+Greeks, adding the vigor and solidity of their military organization to
+the body of Nahoa culture, investing the arts of the decaying peoples
+with a harsher outline.
+
+The true foundation of Mexican art is, however, a combination of these
+two primary cultures, the Maya and the Nahoa. Throughout the states of
+Oaxaca and Jalisco today, this influence is still astonishingly pure
+and powerful.
+
+They were at first two totally different types of art. The practical
+difference was in method. All Maya stone carving was in bas-relief,
+marked by a finished nervous style and exquisite detail of design.
+The Nahoa sculpture was three dimensional, less fantastic, bolder in
+execution. The spiritual differences were expressed as freely: the Maya
+was devotional and religious, the Nahoa vividly objective and personal.
+
+If it is not possible to fix dates and descents with certainty, we have
+unlimited opportunity to study the remains of their architecture and
+kindred art forms, the infallible signs whereby we may discover the
+temper and intellectual level of a race.
+
+In this study, the important fact to consider is a psychological one.
+The early peoples of Mexico were dominated by the idea and practice of
+religion. In every tribe, at every stage of their racial progress and
+decay, faith in their gods was the compelling impulse of their lives.
+Priests were the guardians of the national spirit, the instructors of
+the young, the final authorities who governed the people in all matters
+of moral conduct even to the smallest personal details of daily living.
+
+Among the Aztecs even to the early part of the sixteenth century there
+were thirteen principal deities, and more than two hundred inferior
+gods. They ranked in importance from the War God Huitzilopotchli to
+the humble little household deity charged with the responsibility of
+bringing daily good fortune and happiness to the family under whose
+roof he was a guest.
+
+Five thousand priests waited on the will of these gods, serving at
+altars which reflected their holiest ideal of beauty, in temples set
+stone upon stone by the hands of unquestioning faith.
+
+The nature of any art is determined by the medium of expression. The
+medium of the early Mexican was stone. If they had song and poetry
+and musical instruments, there is little to record that they were
+considered as important forms. A few songs have survived, notably those
+of the last Emperor of Texcoco, but he was comparatively of modern
+times. The Nahoas made picture writing and carved panels to tell of
+their wars, their feasts, their games, their victories and religious
+ceremonies. They expressed themselves primarily in sculpture as the
+Celts did in great songs and legends. The old Irish people were like
+the Jews in this: they describe their gods and praise them in words.
+The Mexicans carved the images of their deities in stone, and left them
+for us to see and touch and wonder at, and to make our own legends
+about them.
+
+From this concern, this preoccupation with the will of the gods,
+there sprang a strange and terrible beauty, destined to remain as the
+sole record of a splendid race. The sculpture, the architecture, the
+decorations of the Nahoas and Mayas are symbols of the racial mind, and
+that mind was, above all, religious.
+
+In the simplicity of the attitudes of these images, we understand that
+the worship of the Mexican was a completely honest thing. Keeping their
+gods alive and appeased was the difficult work of men bent on surviving
+in a world filled with hostile forces. They shared this fear of the
+unknown with all races of men fated to experiment with the incalculable
+mysteries for the first time, with no guide except human curiosity, no
+weapon except human valor.
+
+The cruelties of their faith, so much discussed and theorised about,
+were then only the cruelties shared with a terror-stricken world of
+men. They would have discovered, finally, that the sun would rise
+even though no victim was sacrificed on their altars. Not hatred
+of humanity, but love of their gods prompted them to their ritual
+sacrifices. The intimate and precious possession of life was the ideal
+offering to their gods for the well-being of the race. The merely
+physical cruelties were incidental and necessary. Moral cruelty was
+unknown. It came later in other races, through different dogmas, with
+the decadence of the religious spirit.
+
+With this in mind, we will examine their sculptured images.
+
+The Maya civilization was the most advanced and important of all
+the old social structures of Mexico. They seem to have vanished
+mysteriously at the height of their beauty, for a sustained perfection
+of form marks their art from the first known example to the end.
+
+The early bas-relief panels in the temples at Palenque, of which the
+best known are the tablets of the Foliated Cross, are sophisticated
+and delicate in design. The later image of Chac-Mool (called first the
+Maya Bacchus, now identified as the Tiger King) is as restrained, as
+classic and cool in modelling as only a race old in culture, or young
+and supremely innocent, can produce. But always it is civilized--the
+exaggerations of savagery are unknown.
+
+The Nahoas followed a more natural process, upbuilding to a pinnacle of
+beauty and declining into over-ripeness.
+
+To a fantastic degree they possessed the grotesque sense at once the
+property of very primitive and very decadent minds. In art, we begin
+with distortions of beauty and we end with them. But the grotesqueries
+differ in precisely the degree of separation between innocence and
+decaying wisdom.
+
+In their sculpture we encounter these several phases of development.
+We find at first an innocent, artless animality, the crude efforts of
+a child to portray the human form, the shapes of beasts and birds and
+imaginary creatures, done with particularity and frankness.
+
+The gods are monsters, the modelled portraits of men are masks with
+holes gouged to represent eyes and mouths. The figures squat with
+enormous hands dangling between knees upraised in the primitive seated
+position.
+
+A period followed in which the Nahoas produced a caste of builders and
+artists so advanced their generic name has been mistakenly applied
+to the entire nation: the Toltecs. They created stylised, chaste and
+lovely images in crystal, in jade and in stone. The architecture of
+this period was massive, with an abundance of bas-relief carving in
+stone, more severe in design than that of the Mayas, and of great depth
+in cutting. The Toltecs had no iron nor steel tools for this work; they
+used only tempered copper and the flint-like volcanic glass called
+obsidian.
+
+In this epoch began the growth of a desire and necessity for beauty
+not wholly religious in meaning. Purely decorative objects sold in
+the public markets took the form of carved amulets meant more for
+adornments than to ward off evil; masks for festivals, beads of jade
+and jadeite skilfully cut and polished, jewels of gold and copper,
+girdles and headdresses, all came into use for the sake of their own
+beauty rather than because of religious symbolism.
+
+Human portraits in stone and clay, many of them gorgeously colored have
+been found in profusion in every buried city of ancient Mexico. In
+the middle period of the Nahoa culture an aristocratic and civilized
+beauty marks these faces modelled clearly and delicately under splendid
+headdresses. Balance and proportion, sanity and graciousness mark the
+work of this epoch. It was the high point of Nahoa culture. The century
+was that of Our Lord 1200, yet it all seems as far away as the Flood
+itself. The Nahoa heroes of that time, the later poet King of Texcoco,
+seem to be one with the spacious myths of antiquity, akin to Dana and
+Pan and the warriors Homer sung. Mexico was the final stronghold of
+the great pagan gods, and even to the very day of the beginning of the
+Conquest there still clings about them the atmosphere of legendary
+remoteness.
+
+A familiar flavor of the miraculous is in the religious accounts of the
+later times, as recorded by the first Spanish priests. Whether these
+are authentic myths, or a corruption of them due to the decline of the
+race at the time of the Spanish invasion, or imperfect translations by
+the historians new to the Mexican languages, we cannot be certain.
+
+The myth of the god Quetzalcoatl, who was once a man, and became the
+culture deity of the Nahoas, runs like this: Chimalma, a holy woman of
+the Nahoas, swallowed a small stone of jadeite, and later was delivered
+of a son, conceived thus immaculately, who was very wise and good and
+gentle from his childhood. When he grew up, he taught the people the
+wisdom and beauty of holy living, besides the crafts or weaving and
+metal work, and the sowing of the fields. He incurred the wrath of
+the wicked among his people, and went away by the sea in a skiff of
+magic serpent skins. For this reason he has become associated in a
+mysterious, half-spoken legend, with the waves of the sea, and with a
+feathered serpent: In what way it is impossible to discover from the
+endless versions I have read. He vowed to the people that he would
+return, and charged them to receive him as a god at his second coming.
+
+This legend so influenced the minds of the Nahoas, and later the
+Aztecs, it opened the way for that tragic and mistaken reception of
+Cortés and his soldiers, who came by way of the sea in the precise
+manner Quetzalcoatl had foretold.
+
+Another legend concerned with the immaculate mortal conception of
+Immortals is told of Huitzolopotchli, the god of war, who wears on his
+left foot the feathers of the humming bird. His mother saw rolling
+before her in the wind a bundle of brightly colored feathers. She
+placed them in her bosom, and a short while after discovered herself to
+be pregnant of a god. He was born full grown, with war dress and shield
+and helmet of green plumes.
+
+This may or may not be an authentic Mexican myth. But the legend of the
+creation of man is unique, original, austere as a Nahoa god in stone,
+unmarred by evidences of modern revision. A young god stood in the
+valley of Anahuac, near a place now called Acolman, and shot an arrow
+of obsidian toward the noonday sun. It soared and descended, and when
+it touched the earth, it sprang up again a living man. Though it may be
+told in two lines, it is the most innocent and splendid legend I have
+found in any mythology.
+
+It is above all a happy legend. There is no death nor sin in it. Man
+is created in a blaze of light, his being compounded of sun warmth
+and clean arrow point, touching earth and receiving there the divine
+essential energy of life. Not even among the Norse peoples have I found
+a legend more epically simple and great than this.
+
+This version of creation gives us a glimpse of another soul than the
+dark and ritualistic one discovered in the old codices representing
+sacrifices, and in the tales told by the Spaniards. We have become
+habited to think of these people as being always a stern and terrible
+race, fixed and immalleable of soul as their idols, with ponderous
+headdresses crushing their frowning brows.
+
+Those headdresses were contrived of paper and plumes and flowers, and
+the wearers of them loved color as the Israelites loved perfumes and
+spices. Their houses and robes, their votive cups, their temples and
+their gods were all splashed with the most vivid hues. Examine any
+insignificant clay figure today, recovered from the earth, not yet
+broken from its mold, and you find it brilliant with stains, sulphurous
+reds and yellows, burning blues and greens. This use of color is
+found alike in the remains of Atzcapotzalco, in Teotihuacán near the
+Pyramides, in Yucatán, and in the Tarascan figurines of terra cotta,
+found in Cheran. Strange designs of animals, flowers and birds give
+life and rhythm to color in vases and flowers and pots.
+
+In the arts of dyeing, the Nahoas surpassed the others. They had
+mineral and vegetable and animal color, and after the Conquest their
+dye secrets became very valuable to the world.
+
+Their special discovery was a small insect which yielded a fine quality
+of purple and red dye, now called cochineal. A thick lusterless white
+made from calcined stones was also originated by the Nahoas, and is
+still used by the Mexicans in decorating certain kinds of pottery. We
+shall see how their use of primary color has survived in other ways
+also.
+
+Engels and other scientists have been pleased to classify the early
+peoples of Mexico as semi-barbarous because of their lack of domestic
+animals, I believe they have overlooked the essential fact: they had
+no beasts of burden nor domesticated milk-giving animals because such
+beasts were not indigenous here. Their habit was to make pets of small
+creatures, chiefly monkeys, a species of diminutive leopard called
+_ocelotl_, and that strange breed of hairless dog, the _ixchuintli_,
+of which it is recorded they could not bark until taught the art by
+imported European dogs.
+
+It is true that here devolved on human beings that burden of physical
+labor shared between man and beasts in other lands. But the attitude of
+the Mexicans toward animals and slaves was that of a race abreast with
+the civilization of their epoch. Men were not more enslaved for this
+lack of beasts than they were in countries that possessed both species
+of burden-bearing animals.
+
+Their system of measuring time was original and distinctive. We have
+the symmetrical and beautiful Calendar stone of the Aztecs as enduring
+testimony to the perfection of their calculations. When the Spaniards
+arrived in Mexico, they discovered that the Aztec Calendar was only
+five hours late by the sun, while the Christian Calendar of Pope Leo
+the Great failed of precision by eleven days. Prescott gives an exact
+account of their measurement of time:
+
+“... The Aztecs adjusted their civil year by the solar. They divided
+it into eighteen months of twenty days each. Both months and days were
+expressed by peculiar hieroglyphics, those of the former intimating
+the season of the year, like the French months at the period of the
+Revolution, Five complementary days, as in Egypt, were added to make up
+the full number of three hundred sixty-five. They belonged to no month,
+and were regarded as peculiarly unlucky. A month was divided into four
+weeks, of five days each, on the last of which was the public fair or
+market day. This arrangement, different from that of the nations of the
+Old Continent, has the advantage of giving an equal number of days to
+each month, and of comprehending entire weeks, without a fraction, both
+in the months and in the year.
+
+“As the year is composed of nearly six hours more than three hundred
+and sixty-five days, there still remains an excess, which, like other
+nations who have framed a calendar, they provided for by intercalation;
+not indeed, every fourth year, as the Europeans, but at longer
+intervals, like some of the Asiatics. They waited until the expiration
+of fifty-two vague years, when they interposed twelve days, or rather,
+twelve and a half, this being the number that had fallen in arrear. Had
+they inserted thirteen, it would have been too much, since the annual
+excess over three hundred sixty-five is about eleven minutes less than
+six hours....” (Conquest of Mexico: Prescott: Vol. I, Page 73.) They
+had, in a word, calculated with such minute precision that more than
+five centuries must elapse before the loss of an entire day.
+
+Their system of numerals has been explained by Rivas Palacio in
+contrast to the Hindu and Aryan systems. Whereas, in the latter methods
+of computation, the essential numeral is five, and the perfect number
+100, in the Nahoa system (which served all Mexico) the essential
+numeral was four, and the perfect number was eighty, arrived at thus:
+four plus one equals five; five times four equals twenty; and twenty
+times four equals eighty.
+
+Their religious symbolism is equally distinct. Though the Nahoas
+employed characters similar to those of the Asiatics and Aryans,
+they differed in spirit. Their sign of the cross, for example, found
+designed on the walls of temples, or carved in stone, was their symbol
+of the four cardinal points of the compass; more simply still, of the
+four winds of heaven.
+
+Various explanations have been offered of this mystical sign.
+Religious writers have woven legends of primitive saints, who were
+even prophesied in Revelations, who came to Mexico in the early
+Christian era. Scientists have sought to identify it with its phallic
+significance in the secret rituals of primitive peoples.
+
+Their great feathered serpent was likewise free from the secret meaning
+of other ancients, and was a familiar symbol of godhead. The serpent
+and the sun are mysteriously related in Mexican mythology, probably
+with some distant association of ideas between the life-giving sun and
+fruitfulness, but there is no definite surviving legend explaining
+these things.
+
+Their social customs were marked by one tremendously important
+difference from the world of their time. The position of women was
+that of a completely civilized race. The legal or religious bondage of
+women was unknown. They served with honor as priestesses, and had a
+responsible share in the education of the children. Every evidence is
+that they enjoyed a cleanly human equality in society utterly foreign
+to the ideals that governed the relations between men and women of the
+European and Asiatic races.
+
+Their sense of rhythm in design was, and remains, unique. The basis
+of Greek design, for example, is the crossed line. There existed no
+crossed line in all Maya or Nahoa art. Even to this day it does not
+appear in the pure designs used by the Mexican craftsmen. When it is
+used at all, it is foreign, added since the sixteenth century.
+
+Their line of beauty is the bold flaring circle, the uninterrupted
+whirling of a leaf in the wind. This is why a design on a Guadalajara
+jug today gives the impression of one unbroken harmonious line from top
+to bottom.
+
+In architecture, they had no arch, that fundamental outline in all
+construction of Europe and the Orient. A square topped portal, or two
+beams contrived to form a shallow inverted angle, was their conception
+of a doorway. A pointed arch without a keystone was to them an ideal
+expression of beauty. In this method perfect examples exist in the
+ruins of Mitla and Chichen Itzá, of which the arch of Labnáh, in
+Yucatán, is the most beautiful.
+
+As we have seen, these peoples resembled their human brothers in all
+elemental ideals. Students and scientists pronounce on the vessels of
+aragonite, the cloudy Mexican onyx, found in the Isle of Sacrificios,
+near Vera Cruz. They say they are Greek in feeling and line. They say
+the Maya art is Babylonish; that the headdresses of the old Nahoas are
+Egyptian; that the character writing on the walls of the Pyramides in
+Teotihuacán are Chinese....
+
+All these things do veritably have a surface resemblance to the art
+creations of all races. But in their profound, racial significance they
+were spontaneous and original. In nothing more than their early arts
+do they resolve themselves into a people whose developed psychology
+followed patterns unknown to both Europe and Asia.
+
+[Illustration: _Jardinier Talavera--City of Puebla_]
+
+
+
+
+Colonial Art
+
+PART II.
+
+
+When the Spaniards came to Mexico in the year 1519, the Mayas had long
+since abandoned their splendid cities and were building no others of
+like beauty. The Pyramides at Teotihuacán were mounds of earth which
+the strangers regarded incuriously as natural hills. Nahoa civilization
+had reached its height two centuries before and declined with the
+death of the poet King Nezahualcoyotl of Texcoco. From thence it was
+gradually absorbed by the Aztec dynasty, and the city of Tenochtitlan
+became the center of wealth, power and culture of the race.
+
+The Zapotecas and Mixtecas, ancient allies, occupied the present state
+of Oaxaca; they were divided in language, the customs and arts that
+once were one had diverged slightly, the Zapotecas toward the Aztec,
+the Mixtecas toward the Maya. Though both nations possessed the richest
+languages and picture writing in Mexico at this time, the Mixtecas were
+superior in civilized arts. They were settled in the South and West of
+the state, a gentle and tranquil people given to cultural development.
+The Zapotecas were objective, warlike, militaristic; they helped the
+Mixtecas to conquer the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, and held their ground
+by force of arms. In spite of this, it is the Mixteca spirit in art
+that survives in the state of Oaxaca today.
+
+It was with the newer, intensely warlike Aztec in the city of
+Tenochtilán that the invaders were to deal. The Conqueror has always
+the first word. Centuries must elapse before the defeated peoples
+can find a hearing for themselves. According to the Spanish writers,
+they found here a race curiously civilized, but atrociously savage in
+war; lovers of beauty, worshippers of mystical gods, in spiritual and
+physical bondage to a religion founded on ritual sacrifice. Nearly all
+of the historians that followed accepted without question the Spanish
+point of view that the benefits of civilization had been righteously
+bestowed upon barbarians by the bitter charity of the sword. Having
+achieved a substitution by force of their ideals over those of the
+Mexican, they rested in arrogant certainty of their right to impose
+their own half-developed culture, derived from a mixture of Europe and
+the Orient, upon a people whose blood was pure, and whose culture was
+grown evenly in one soil.
+
+There ensued a collision of antipathies shocking to the imagination. It
+must have been as if two alien planets struck and fused. The story has
+been told many times, by makers of legends, by later historians groping
+among confused and conflicting legends. Yet they somehow achieve unity
+when considered as a whole. It seems that only a day elapses between
+that half-legendary ancient world of the Nahoa and the Maya, to the
+founding of New Spain that suddenly identifies Mexico with the modern
+world.
+
+One steps from the half light of the centuries before the Conquest into
+the year 1519, and thereafter we have a record of events insufficient,
+fragmentary, but comparatively clear. However obscured with personal
+and religious and political motives, distorted occasionally with belief
+in the miraculous, seen through the eyes of prejudices incomprehensible
+to us now, since we are bound by different prejudices, the story still
+has form and outline; it lends itself to the truth.
+
+After the shock of conquest there began the making of a new nation
+in Mexico, a slow series of rebirths, a gradual absorption of colors
+and fibres from many sources; Mexico became New Spain, a nation torn
+from its old gods and inborn visions, thereafter to take on the forms
+of faith of the conqueror, the laws of an alien world, the customs of
+strangers.
+
+Teocallis were razed, and churches set over the places where they had
+been. New arts were added to the old, and were amalgamated with them.
+These arts came by way of the Spanish crown, but they were borrowed
+from the greater and older nations of France and Italy....
+
+The Mexican arts amazed and delighted the strangers, who praised
+them in their chronicles--those extravagant documents that are such
+curious blendings of religious fervor, curiosity, appreciation and
+rapacity--and long descriptions of the native crafts remain as the
+pleasantest stories brought out of that dolorous period.
+
+They tell of the goldsmiths of Azcapotzalco, who wrought in gold and
+silver filigree, chains and necklaces and earrings and bracelets, in
+feathery and lace-like designs as minute and painstaking as those of
+the Chinese. It is as different from Chinese filigree as the Chinese is
+distinct from the Neapolitan silver work. The potters of Cholula were
+then renowned for making vases in a form resembling the classical Greek
+urn, but decorated with designs in that thick, vivid, unmixed paint
+they invented and used so perfectly.
+
+The painters of Texcoco, the mat makers of Quautitlán, the stone
+cutters from Tenajocan, all brought their wares to the markets of the
+throne city of the Aztecs. The florists of Xochimilco fashioned flowers
+into decorative shapes with a long patience of execution which is still
+the most remarkable thing about the flower arrangement of the Mexican.
+
+Plume work, a special craft developed by these people to the dignity
+of a fine art, was then in its fullest beauty. Entire mantles were
+contrived of feathers woven in color compositions and patterns
+intricate as tapestry. On their simple hand looms they wove exquisite
+cloth in cotton and a finely spun fibre made from the maguey or
+henequen plant. Garments and curtains were made of this material, as
+well as their breast-plates, tightly woven and quilted, a stout and
+durable armor against their own weapons, but not, as Prescott reminds
+us, proof against the musketry of the Spaniards.
+
+Temples and houses were ablaze with light and color, curtained with
+woven feathers and dyed cloth, their temples adorned with carved panels
+and the images of their gods. Even while they praised the beauty of the
+new country and its social structure, the fanaticism that accompanied
+the spirit of conquest conspired in the minds of the Spaniards, and
+prompted them to blot out invaluable records and monuments. They were
+not interested in the subtleties of research among peoples whom they
+considered merely as advanced savages, inhabiting a rich and desirable
+territory.
+
+[Illustration: _Serape (Woolen Blanket), San Miguel Allende, Hidalgo_]
+
+Their purpose was to exterminate the rebellious, establish the church
+and the power of Spain, and to amass wealth for the Spanish crown. Art
+was left to grow or perish of itself.
+
+Silently, ceaselessly, the Mexican spirit renewed and expressed itself
+in the making of beauty. It ran like a dark flood of dreams into all
+channels of Colonial life. It stained every idea, every physical
+manifestation of the slowly changing Mexican race.
+
+The churches were the first and most important imported expressions
+of art in New Spain. They were designed, in the main, by Italian and
+French architects, built and decorated by native artists. Whereupon
+strangely they are Mexican; because an Aztec ground the colors and
+executed the designs, and carved the wood and the stone, and made the
+tiles for the domed roofs. His inalienable beauty-wisdom had the final
+triumph.
+
+Writers of that period are accustomed to declare that civilization
+progressed in Mexico more rapidly within the first eighty years of the
+Spanish occupation than in any other country of North America or Europe
+during the same period.
+
+It is true that they brought their crafts, taught them to the natives,
+utilized and commercialized them with modern practical thoroughness. A
+book was printed for the first time in Mexico City in 1536. The printer
+was Juan Paoli from Brescia, Italy. He was brought here to publish
+ecclesiastical works, and his press flourished. The first University in
+America was founded by the Jesuits in Mexico City in the year 1533, a
+building now used as a Preparatory School to the National University.
+
+Weaving and ceramics were developed rapidly. In Puebla and Oaxaca
+splendid silks and wools were woven from raw materials got from the
+markets of Asia, and exported in great quantities. Wool was introduced
+in Mexico by the Spaniards, and took the place of the fine hair of
+rabbits, and plumage which the Aztecs had hitherto used for weaving
+warm garments.
+
+An immediate and perfect use was found by the native for the more
+substantial wool of the sheep. He wove serapes and rugs in orderly,
+geometric patterns after the old style, that gave to them a classical
+permanence of value. The first ones were sober and dark, but gradually
+they grew into brilliance, with designs of birds and flowers and
+stylised figures of animals.
+
+They developed a genius for leatherwork, especially in saddle making,
+a craft essentially Spanish, since the Mexicans had no horses previous
+to the Conquest. Under their hands, the saddle and all appurtenances
+of horsemanship became elaborated beyond anything known in Spain, and
+today the Mexican saddle is a marvel of costly workmanship in tooled
+leather and chased silver.
+
+The characteristic Mexican faculty to imitation of design and method,
+combined with an entirely alien feeling for color and execution brought
+about a subtle shifting of surface expression. His ability to adapt and
+use strange forms, under curious conditions, was the foundation for his
+new art, destined to become racial and genuinely expressive.
+
+[Illustration: _Candle Sticks and Plate--Talavera Ware--Puebla_]
+
+[Illustration: _Decorated Wooden Box--Olinalá, Guerrero_]
+
+The primary use of his imitative faculty was commercial. The native,
+out of his soul’s necessity, made his wares first things of beauty. But
+he must also use them, and sell them. They must be beautiful and useful
+objects, not costly, for the use of an impoverished people. In a very
+limited way, they worked in bronze, silver, gold and stone, but mostly
+they wrought in clay and wood. They transposed and recreated everything
+that came to their notice, from whatever source and in whatever
+material it might appear.
+
+Out of the influences that surrounded them they selected those things
+most in accord with their own ideals of beauty, those designs not too
+violently opposed to their own conception of form, in effect those
+patterns that resembled their own previously accepted motifs. For three
+centuries the Mexican was influenced by art expressions from Spain,
+through Spain from the Moors, from the Orient; from Japan, Persia, the
+Philippines, above all, China.
+
+The results are happily still apparent in designs wherein are
+commingled, in a strange harmony, pomegranates, lacy leaves from Spain,
+peacocks from Persia and mandarins from China, traced on jicaras, bowls
+and pots. In the Puebla pottery of that period, and on the painted and
+lacquered chests, knights on horseback, ladies in enormous skirts,
+birds as large as the trees they perch in, strange animals from the
+weird other-worlds of the Oriental imagination, foregather amiably with
+an effect of loveliness.
+
+That sense of the grotesque which we have noticed took hold of these
+foreign emblems. In the religious sculpture executed by the first
+Christianized Mexicans, distorted Aztec Christs bleed from wounds, not
+the legendary sacred five, but from as many as a human form can support
+and still be recognizable. In Manú, Yucatán, there exists an outdoor
+shrine, a cross roughly hewn from stone, and the hanging figure is
+wholly Aztec, resembling images found in the older ruins.
+
+The grotesqueries began changing in form, but they were still distinct,
+still quite other in feeling than the demons and gargoyles of Europe,
+far removed from the squat, sly humor of the Chinese figures.
+
+Those sixteenth century merchant crafts plying between China and Mexico
+brought not only merchandise, but ideas. Lacquer, black and red, and
+blue porcelain jars were left here by the sailors, and immediately
+the Mexican began making boxes lacquered in all colors, encrusted, or
+painted in flat designs over the smooth foundation.
+
+In Puebla, then a newly founded city, the making of a certain kind of
+pottery became the chief industry. The first Potter’s Guild in New
+Spain was chartered there: an organization of pure Indian and Spanish
+craftsmen, with a strict clause declaring that no negro or person of
+mixed blood could be a member. Puebla Talavera ware was during the
+sixteenth and seventeenth centuries a synonym for excellent pottery.
+
+The story of Puebla pottery has happily been written, and serves as
+an example of the methods used by the Spaniards in introducing their
+crafts and arts to the Mexican. Puebla de los Angeles was founded about
+the year 1532, and the first account of the new industry centered there
+was given by Fray Geronimo de Mendieta in his “Historia Ecclesiastica
+Indiana.” I quote from the translation given in “Maiolica of Mexico” by
+Edwin Atlee Barber:
+
+“After they (the Mexicans) became Christians and saw our images from
+Flanders and Italy, there is no altar ornaments or image, however
+beautiful it may be, that they will not reproduce and imitate. There
+were artisans in pottery and vessels for eating and drinking purposes,
+and these were very well made although the workmen did not know how
+to glaze them. But they soon learned from the first craftsman who
+came over from Spain in spite of all he could do to guard and hide
+the secret from them. And finally this may be understood as a general
+rule, that nearly all the curious and beautiful works of every class
+of trades and arts are now (1596) being carried forward in the Indies
+(at least in New Spain or Mexico) are being done and finished by the
+Indians.”
+
+Who this ungenerous craftsman was no one seems to remember. But
+sometime within the first half century of the new regime, it is certain
+that a small group of friars from a Dominican monastery in Talavera
+de los Reyes (Spain) came out to join their brethren in Puebla and
+instructed the natives in the making of the famous Talavera ware. This
+pottery had its first inspiration from Persia through the Moors, and
+later from China: transplanted to Mexico, it followed the same line of
+development until the end of the seventeenth century, when the Italian
+influence crept in, and changed small details of design and color.
+
+The Mexicans absorbed everything, and grew slowly away from their
+teachers. The transition in this particular instance was slow. Almost
+two hundred years elapsed before the Puebla ware became a completely
+Mexican thing. Gradually, the flowers and foliage became bolder,
+the designs were taken from native plants; the blue coloring became
+heavier, the patterns were raised in high relief, and the tattooed
+effect now so familiar came into popularity. The shapes reverted
+slightly to the primitive, and from simple blue and white the native
+potters used their own varied and exuberant schemes of color. A Puebla
+bowl now often rivals a batea (wooden painted tray) from Tehuantepec
+for gayety and vividness.
+
+The history of Puebla tile is not so well known, but they probably
+date from about 1550. They were called Azulejos, from a word meaning
+blue, and were at first literally blue tiles. They changed in character
+rapidly, and were for two hundred years a most characteristic form of
+decoration for houses and chapels, fountains and patio pavements. In
+many old houses there are large panels relating legends in the manner
+of European tapestry, picturing episodes in the lives of saints and
+warriors, or used simply as decorative motifs filled with birds and
+animals and figures imitating the Aztec designs.
+
+Until the beginning of the nineteenth century these tiles were used
+lavishly all over Mexico. The most famous examples of tile work are the
+Casa de los Azulejos in Mexico City, the Holy Well in the Chapel at
+Guadalupe, the Tepozotlan Convent in the State of Mexico, and several
+churches in Guanajuato, especially the exquisite small church called
+La Compaña, as well as the Church of San Francisco de Acatepec near
+Puebla.
+
+[Illustration: _Decorated Chairs--City of Aguascalientes_]
+
+[Illustration: _Equipales (Leather, Wood and Bamboo)--Jamay, Jalisco_]
+
+[Illustration: _Bead Work Child’s Dress--Puebla_]
+
+[Illustration: _Thread Lace--San Luis Potosi_]
+
+The imported forms of architecture became, in the hands of the
+Mexicans, a separate creation. The early churches of Mexico are
+full of this Aztec strength and heaviness. Even roses and Cupids
+and emasculated saints become virile and significant--they are not
+the roses and saints and Cupids of Spain. Later, the Mexican-born
+Spaniards who designed in all the arts, guided by some vague tradition
+of classical proportion, produced merely another Barrocco style,
+coincidental with a similar decadence in the old country. But whereas
+in Europe two white and civilized forms merged and decayed, in
+Mexico the fusion was Spanish and Indian: and Mexican Barrocco, “the
+Churrigueresco,” amazingly genuine and alive, is the curious result.
+
+The only vivid and quick artistic impulse of this country grew
+in the soul of the native. The Spanish artist who maintained the
+foreign traditions painted merely after the style of his own country,
+imitating without adapting, lacking inspiration of his own, growing
+each generation farther away from his sources, until at the close of
+the eighteenth century the so-called aristocratic art was a puerile
+childish copy of the European seventeenth century manner.
+
+Aside from this academic school, however, a national spirit was
+developing among the Mexican-born Spaniards, and a tremendously
+increasing class of Spanish-Indios who were genuinely Mexican in
+feeling. During the later Colonial times, they called themselves
+Mexicans and followed native customs as a patriotic duty. This period
+was fruitful in the production of the native crafts. Everybody made use
+of the rugs and bateas and serapes, the painted boxes and furniture,
+the saddles and potteries. They adopted a highly individualized native
+costume entirely Spanish in design, called the Charro. It was usually
+made of finely dressed leather, embroidered in silver and colors. The
+hats and saddles designed to complete this horseman’s equipment were
+splendid and very costly.
+
+The dresses for the women, especially the country costumes, were of
+gaily dyed silks weighted with bead embroideries and native lace. The
+most beautiful of these dresses originated in Puebla and was called
+the China Poblana. It has latterly passed into disuse, but is still
+seen during fiestas and in the Mexican theatre. As early as 1840 Madame
+Calderon de la Barca noticed that it was no longer used by ladies of
+the better society--a pity, for it is most graciously feminine and
+becoming.
+
+After the Independence of Mexico from Spain was established, the
+national psychology shifted, and it became once more the fashion to
+imitate Europe. All architecture and aristocratic art since 1825
+degenerated into the European manner, and that manner mostly second
+rate French. The epoch of Maximilian completed the havoc, with
+wholesale importations of French furnishings and styles at the lowest
+period of taste known since the decadence of Greece. Mexican art
+disappeared from popularity, a thing admired only by students and
+collectors, and used only by the Indio.
+
+During these changes, political and social, the native has remained
+racially and spiritually static. In common with all peasantry, he
+derived his ideas from the fine arts--not only the imported and foreign
+arts, but from his own magnificent traditions, filtered them through
+his own understanding, translated them into his common speech:
+the result is a thing of superb beauty and strength. He grew each
+generation a step further away from the object he had imitated--like
+the Mexican-born Spaniard who copied the methods of Spain--but with
+this difference, that the native added always more and more of his own
+feeling and psychic reaction, until at once the thing was his own, an
+interpretation of beauty, national, personal--even more, absolutely
+individual.
+
+For he works after his own fashion, and creates each smallest object
+as a unique thing, and does nothing twice alike. Each object has its
+own incorruptible character, even to the pattern on the jug in which he
+draws his water, the serape which serves him both as cloak and bed.
+
+[Illustration: _Baskets and Coin Purses, Palm Leaf and Hemp--Oaxaca_]
+
+[Illustration: _Lacquered Wooden Tray--Patzcuaro, Michoacan_]
+
+[Illustration: _Silver Necklace and Ear Rings--Michoacan_]
+
+
+
+
+PART III: _The Present_
+
+
+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.
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 79018 ***