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With some 160 color photographs, this volume portrays the Mexican people, their cultures, and their folk arts, including textiles, ceramics, jewelry, lacquer, masks, and toys. It includes a guide to Mexico's indigenous peoples, a map, a glossary, and a bibliography. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
The piñata has become a birthday party staple in the United States, but it originated in the celebratory culture of Mexico. From Cinco de Mayo to the many religious festivals, the parties in Mexico often show deep cultural roots that include ties to the Spanish and Aztec people of the country’s past. Readers experience the vibrant Mexican culture and history through crafts in this book, including step-by-step instructions on how to make a piñata, skull mask, and maracas. These fun, easy-to-do crafts engage readers with social studies information about Mexican national holidays, traditional architecture, and even the popular sports of bullfighting and soccer!
This book examines how Mexican artisans and diverse actors participate in translations of aesthetics, politics, and history through the field of craft.
The piñata has become a birthday party staple in the United States, but it originated in the celebratory culture of Mexico. From Cinco de Mayo to the many religious festivals, the parties in Mexico often show deep cultural roots that include ties to the Spanish and Aztec people of the country’s past. Readers experience the vibrant Mexican culture and history through crafts in this book, including step-by-step instructions on how to make a piñata, skull mask, and maracas. These fun, easy-to-do crafts engage readers with social studies information about Mexican national holidays, traditional architecture, and even the popular sports of bullfighting and soccer!
Picture a throng of tiny devils and angels, or a marching band so small it can fit in the palm of your hand. In a Mixtec town in the Mexican state of Puebla, craftspeople have been weaving palm since before the Spanish Conquest, but over the past forty years that art has become more finely tuned and has won national acceptance in a market nostalgic for an authentic Indian past. In this book, Katrin Flechsig offers the first in-depth ethnographic and historical examination of the miniature palm craft industry, taking readers behind the scenes of craft production in order to explain how and why these folk arts have undergone miniaturization over the past several decades. In describing this "Lilliputization of Mexico," she discusses the appeal of miniaturization, revealing how such factors as tourism and the construction of national identity have contributed to an ongoing demand for the tiny creations. She also contrasts the playfulness of the crafts with the often harsh economic and political realities of life in the community. Flechsig places the crafts of Chigmecatitlán within the contexts of manufacturing, local history, religion, design and technique, and selling. She tells how innovation is introduced into the craft, such as through the modification of foreign designs in response to market demands. She also offers insights into capitalist penetration of folk traditions, the marketing of folk arts, and economic changes in modern Mexico. And despite the fact that the designations "folk" and "Indian" help create a romantic fiction surrounding the craft, Flechsig dispels common misperceptions of the simplicity of this folk art by revealing the complexities involved in its creation. More than thirty illustrations depict not only finished miniatures but also the artists and their milieu. Today miniatures serve not only the tourist market; middle-class Mexicans also collect miniatures to such an extent that it has been termed a national pastime. Flechsig’s work opens up this miniature world and shows us the extent to which it has become a lasting and important facet of contemporary Mexican culture.
When the early Spanish and Mexican colonists came to settle Texas, they brought with them a rich culture, the diversity of which is nowhere more evident than in the folk art and folk craft. This first book-length publication to focus on Texas-Mexican material culture shows the richness of Tejano folk arts and crafts traditions.
How is the Day of the Dead celebrated? What effect did politics have on twentieth-century painting? How do you weave with a backstrap loom? Arts and crafts offer a window into Mexican culture, reflecting its history, technology, beliefs, and every-day life. Every piece of Mexican art tells us something about the environment and the culture it was developed in, so that we can see how and why people make their art.
After Mexico’s revolution of 1910–1920, intellectuals sought to forge a unified cultural nation out of the country’s diverse populace. Their efforts resulted in an “ethnicized” interpretation of Mexicanness that intentionally incorporated elements of folk and indigenous culture. In this rich history, Rick A. López explains how thinkers and artists, including the anthropologist Manuel Gamio, the composer Carlos Chávez, the educator Moisés Sáenz, the painter Diego Rivera, and many less-known figures, formulated and promoted a notion of nationhood in which previously denigrated vernacular arts—dance, music, and handicrafts such as textiles, basketry, ceramics, wooden toys, and ritual masks—came to be seen as symbolic of Mexico’s modernity and national distinctiveness. López examines how the nationalist project intersected with transnational intellectual and artistic currents, as well as how it was adapted in rural communities. He provides an in-depth account of artisanal practices in the village of Olinalá, located in the mountainous southern state of Guerrero. Since the 1920s, Olinalá has been renowned for its lacquered boxes and gourds, which have been considered to be among the “most Mexican” of the nation’s arts. Crafting Mexico illuminates the role of cultural politics and visual production in Mexico’s transformation from a regionally and culturally fragmented country into a modern nation-state with an inclusive and compelling national identity.
Crafting Identity goes far beyond folklore in its ethnographic exploration of mask making in central Mexico. In addition to examining larger theoretical issues about indigenous and mestizo identity and cultural citizenship as represented through masks and festivals, the book also examines how dominant institutions of cultural production (art, media, and tourism) mediate Mexican “arte popular,” which makes Mexican indigeneity “digestible” from the standpoint of elite and popular Mexican nationalism and American and global markets for folklore. The first ethnographic study of its kind, the book examines how indigenous and mestizo mask makers, both popular and elite, view and contest relations of power and inequality through their craft. Using data from his interviews with mask makers, collectors, museum curators, editors, and others, Pavel Shlossberg places the artisans within the larger context of their relationships with the nation-state and Mexican elites, as well as with the production cultures that inform international arts and crafts markets. In exploring the connection of mask making to capitalism, the book examines the symbolic and material pressures brought to bear on Mexican artisans to embody and enact self-racializing stereotypes and the performance of stigmatized indigenous identities. Shlossberg’s weaving of ethnographic data and cultural theory demystifies the way mask makers ascribe meaning to their practices and illuminates how these practices are influenced by state and cultural institutions. Demonstrating how the practice of mask making negotiates ethnoracial identity with regard to the Mexican state and the United States, Shlossberg shows how it derives meaning, value, and economic worth in the eyes of the state and cultural institutions that mediate between the mask maker and the market.
"Arden Rothstein (New York U. Psychoanalytic Institute) and daughter Anya share their love of the contemporary folk art of Oaxaca, Mexico, in this guide for beginning collectors. Ten chapters cover ceramics, textiles, woodcarving, metal work, miniatures and toys, jewelry, candles, basketry, dried flower crafts, and images from the Day of the Dead. Sample pieces by 87 artists are featured, with information on current market values included. The guide is illustrated with some 500 color photographs. Oversize: 9.5x11"." -- Publisher.