The miracle and misery of Mexican artisans
Mexico’s creative energy explodes in colourful and inventive handicrafts. The quality is high and the prices low. Far too low.
Every tourist town in Mexico has a market where artisans sell their work in tianguis (market stalls). In our area, along the Pacific coast, the tianguis and farmers’ markets set up in different towns on a weekly basis: Puerto Vallarta on Saturdays, Bucerias on Mondays, La Peñita on Thursday, etc.
I know the market at La Peñita best, because it is closest to Chacala, where I spend a few months every winter. The tianguis remain in the same place and sell the same goods, year after year.
In La Peñita, the vendors set up in the town square in front of the church and the tianguis spread out from the centre. I usually enter the market along a passage lined on one side with stalls selling fresh strawberries, baked goods, tin mirrors, ceramic skulls and churros (delicious donut-like pastries deep fried in large vats and rolled in sugar). The vendors on the other side of the passage sell Oaxacan tablecloths in subtle-hues, logo-covered T-shirts, leather bracelets and hand-embroidered shirts and dresses.
After a few visits, I began to recognize the vendors and to know whether they were local artisans selling their own handicrafts or whether they carried goods made by family members of villagers from other parts of Mexico — tablecloths and from the state of Oaxaca, textiles from Chiapas or talavera pottery from the state of Mexico.
A Huichol artisan and his wife who live in the mountains beyond Chacala sold animals and cuadros (pictures) made of yarn or beads pressed into wax on wood in the La Peñita market. The artisan’s work was finely detailed with unexpected colours. Last year, I learned he lost a leg to diabetes and he no longer sells his beautiful work.
Mexico’s creative genius lies in its handicrafts. A visit to the Museum of Popular Arts in Mexico City will convince you of the extraordinary variety, talent and craftsmanship of Mexico’s indigenous artisans. Local techniques and designs have been preserved over centuries by village cooperatives, many of which date back to the 1500s, after the Spanish conquest. Ironically, the Mexican artisanal tradition grew out of the utopian ideas of the British philosopher Sir Thomas More.
Between 1525 and 1534, the murderous Spanish deputy Nuño de Guzmán decimated Mexico’s indigenous people in the name of New Spain. His cruelty horrified the bishop of Michoacán, Vasco de Quiroga, who convinced the Spanish king to sack Guzman. Quiroga then set about rebuilding indigenous communities by using the principles outlined in Sir Thomas More’s ‘Utopia’.
Quiroga assembled the native people in cooperatives, teaching them religion, a trade and the fundamentals of self-government. The villages surrounding Michoacán’s colonial capital of Morelia each specialized in a particular craft — copper in San Jose del Cobre, woodworking in Quiroga, straw baskets and decorations in Tzintzuntzan. Every member of the cooperative was to work six hours a day and to contribute on an equal basis to the common welfare. Vasco de Quiroga is revered to this day, and the village cooperatives still exist, though the results are far from utopian.
Artisan villages also surround the beautiful city of Oaxaca, but they have not brought prosperity. In 2014, the state of Oaxaca had a poverty rate of 66.8% making it the 2nd poorest state in Mexico after Chiapas. Even more shockingly, poverty rates in Mexico are rising.
As in Michoacán, each village surrounding Oaxaca specializes in a different type of handicraft — black pottery, green pottery, alebrijes (fantastical wooden figures), textiles and rugs. The handicrafts produced are distributed across the country and sold by family members or other villagers, who pack and unpack their wares in different tianguis in different locations every day.
I recognize the system, or the vague outlines of it, but I have no idea of its intricacies. I suspect it’s a skinny game, with little money left on the table at any step. If money is made, it isn’t made by the village artisans or by the vendors in the tianguis.
The vendors of Mexico’s quality handicrafts expect bartering, and they enjoy it. Their opening gambit is always high, and they smile, ready to play the game. They know their business, and their price, and they usually won’t sell below it. Buyers walk away; the vendors call them back; a deal is occasionally reached.
During peak tourist season, when business is brisk, the vendors do well. But tourists taper off after Christmas and again after Easter, and the vendors and their families have to eat all year long. There are times when a sale, at whatever price, makes the difference between a meal or not. At these times, the vendors accept low prices because they need to, not because they can afford to.
When I watch affluent tourists, in their sun hats and Ray-Bans, grinding a vendor down to the lowest possible price, I want to tell them that these artifacts are handmade, crafted with skill learned over centuries of tradition, and that the prices do not reflect the labour or the costs involved.
For you, I want to say, this is merely a vacation memento; it’s a livelihood for the people you’re standing in front of and for the communities they represent.
If it would be a fair price at home, I want to ask, why won’t you pay it here?
This is the 7th story in the weekly publication A Remarkable Education: Lessons Learned in a Mexican Rural School. The next story describes my adventures teaching science in a language I barely know.
The previous story introduces two of Chacala’s beach vendors and how they changed my mind about bartering.
Starting in the winter of 2009, Diane Douglas volunteered three years in the two-room school in the fishing village of Chacala, north of Puerto Vallarta. Since 2012, she’s been working to improve online learning at el Colegio Patria, a remarkable rural school in the poor, agricultural town of Las Varas.
