Husband and Wife Team Keep Native Traditions Alive

PATZCUARO — The crucified Christ figure, smooth as marble over its fragile frame of corn stalks, looked tragically through distant eyes.

Beatriz Ortega Ruiz, 57, created the image from corn stalks using a pre-Hispanic technique called pasta de caña de maiz. She shares a workshop with her husband, Mario Augustin Gaspar Rodriguez, who makes maque, an indigenous form of lacquer ware that already had a long tradition when the Spaniards arrived 500 years ago.

He was currently working on a wooden plate with blue and pink flowers surrounded a group of Viejitos — local traditional dancers, waiting for the next song.

"Each one (maque artisan) has his particular style of work," said the 58-year-old Mario. "When we learn, we learn what the teacher tells, but when the time passes, you get your own style."

This husband and wife team has labored for years to keep a part of Michoacan’s artistic heritage alive, and visitors can see their work firsthand in their shop in historic Patzcuaro west of Morelia in the Mexican state of Michoacan. Their shop, located in Casa de Once Patios where numerous artisans have their stores and workshops, reveals the diversity of their work. They both know how to do maque and pasta de cana, but each have found their own niche in one of the techniques.

Both crafts are long and involved processes, and Beatriz and Mario can’t make and sell enough of them to support themselves. Therefore, Beatriz engages in still another craft, laca perfilada del oro, which roughly translates into lacquer ware trimmed in gold. Such painfully detailed work can take its toll, and pasta de caña provides a welcome diversion.

"With laca, my eyes get tired."

Her passion for pasta de caña de maiz, a lost art for many years until rediscovered in the early 1990s, showed throughout her shop. A blank face forged in the ancient technique stared up from a glass counter next to a box full of hands and a woman’s body with the flutes of corn stalks flowing down like the folds of an elegant dress. Two other polished faces lay nearby with the individual stalks cut off at the neck like ruptured jugulars and tendons.

"First we cut it, peel it, make a selection, put it in the order by size," Beatriz said. "When we peel it, we select the pieces and stick them together with the juice of the nopal for glue, and put the string around it."

This initial step merely binds the number of corn stalks necessary for the sculpture. The collective piece is then allowed to dry, and the length of time necessary varies according to the climate. After the grouping of stalks has dried, Beatriz carves the piece into the desired form.

After carving the image, she makes the pasta de caña, a paste of ground corn stalk, fig leaves, ground orchid bulbs and other natural ingredients. Historically, some elements differed according to the plants in various Indian communities, Beatriz said. She covers the images with the mixture, which also includes plants that act as natural repellents against animals and insects.

The husband and wife help each other with one another’s techniques. Mario assists her by preparing many of her materials. Beatriz, who won first place for her pasta de caña at Patzcuaro’s Concurso de Noche de Muerto (Day of the Dead Crafts Competition) in 2000 and second place in 2008, helps him by collecting and formulating the natural dyes for the maque.

Mario, his thick salt and pepper hair falling toward the blue denim enshrouding his robust frame, worked on the wine-colored underside of a 3-foot-wide batea nearing completion after almost two years of scrupulous, patient labor.

Mario also spends long tedious hours on his maque projects, which filled their workshop and store. Flowers showered over the side of a blue pot; a bright green batea was bedecked with yellow flourishes suggesting a flurry of untamed leaves and flowers diving in all directions.

Mario, 58, has had a love affair with maque most of his life and has also won numerous awards. "When I was a little boy, I learned to do maque. My primary teacher knew how to do it. I began to go to his house to work with him, help him, whatever he asked me to do. So little by little, I began to learn."

The artisan works slowly through each step, abiding time’s deliberate pace as his art slowly awakens on the large bateas, some of which can take years to complete. He had worked on another 3-foot batea with red scalloped edges for three years, during which time he’d adorned the piece with dashes of brown and yellow that now fired in all directions — dark purple and cherry red flourishes appeared and dissipated across the piece. He still needed to carve images from the outlines of Lake Patzcuaro and Isla Janitzio residing in three circles across the middle of the batea.

His maque work would never have had a chance to reveal itself if not for the laborious attention from Beatriz who helps obtain the colors, all of which are natural. The individual hues of the blue batea come from añil, a plant found in many areas of the world, including Michoacan’s Tierra Caliente region.

Creating the colors is a curious and varied process. The añil plant, which yields indigo blue, is fermented in a tank of water in which people spit chewed up cheese. An alterrnate method of obtaining the natural dye from añil entails fermenting the plant with chicken feet and banana peelings.

Beatriz acquires green by adding orange zempasuchitl flowers to the blue indigo. That flower also yields yellow soil from Tocuaro, a town distinguished for its wooden mask makers, turns a brilliant orange when it comes into contact with oil of the chia.

Ground cochineal, an insect found on the nopal cactus, yields a rainbow of tones ranging from bright red to lavender and ponderous purple, depending on the addition of other colors. She pointed to a gourd with a milky wine color.

"To get this color," Beatriz said, "you add cow urine to the cochineal."

Cochineal and cow urine are just two of the many curious pairings that comprise the Michoacan experience. The state’s diversity has bestowed a notable legacy on the lives of its many inhabitants, and people like Mario and Beatriz have absorbed that legacy and developed it into a powerful inheritance which they bequeath to their many admirers.