Mexicans are an obsessively creative people. Wherever you go in their country, you’ll be impressed by the marvelous artistic expression on display. Colorful painting, stunning architecture and beautiful crafts are everywhere; Aztec dancers vibrate in the very heart of Mexico City and musicians strike up on the streets and in bars and buses. This is a country that has given the world some of its finest painting, music, movies and writing.
Mexico’s priceless architectural heritage from pre-Hispanic and colonial times is one of its greatest treasures.
At places like Teotihuacán, Monte Albán, Chichén Itzá, Uxmal and Palenque you can still see fairly intact, spectacular pre-Hispanic cities. Their grand ceremonial centers were designed to impress, with great stone pyramids (topped by shrines), palaces and ritual ball courts – all built without metal tools, pack animals or wheels. While the architecture of Teotihuacán, Monte Albán and the Aztecs was intended to awe with its grand scale, the Maya of Chichén Itzá, Uxmal, Palenque and countless other sites paid more attention to aesthetics, with intricately patterned facades, delicate stone ‘combs’ on temple roofs, and sinuous carvings, producing some of the most beautiful human creations in the Americas.
The technical hallmark of Maya buildings is the corbeled vault, a version of the arch: two stone walls leaning toward one another, nearly meeting at the top and surmounted by a capstone. Teotihuacán architecture is characterized by the talud-tablero style of stepped buildings, in which height is achieved by alternating upright (tablero) sections with sloping (talud) ones.
The Spaniards destroyed indigenous temples and built churches and monasteries in their place, and laid out new towns with handsome plazas and grids of streets lined by fine stone edifices – contributing much to Mexico’s beauty today. Building was in Spanish styles, with some unique local variations. Renaissance style, based on ancient Greek and Roman ideals of harmony and proportion, with shapes such as the square and the circle, dominated in the 16th and early 17th centuries. Mérida’s cathedral and Casa de Montejo are outstanding Renaissance buildings, while Mexico City and Puebla cathedrals mingle Renaissance and baroque styles.
Baroque, which reached Mexico in the early 17th century, layered new dramatic effects – curves, color and increasingly elaborate decoration – onto a Renaissance base. Painting and sculpture were integrated with architecture, notably in ornate, enormous retablos (altarpieces) in churches. Mexico’s finest baroque buildings include Zacatecas cathedral and the churches of Santo Domingo in Mexico City and Oaxaca. Between 1730 and 1780 Mexican baroque reached its final, spectacularly out-of-control form known as Churrigueresque, with riotous ornamentation.
Indigenous artisans added profuse sculpture in stone and colored stucco to many baroque buildings, such as the Rosary Chapels in the Templos de Santo Domingo at Puebla and Oaxaca. Spanish Islamic influence showed in the popularity of azulejos (colored tiles) on the outside of buildings, notably on Mexico City’s Casa de Azulejos and many buildings in Puebla.
Neoclassical style, another return to sober Greek and Roman ideals, dominated from about 1780 to 1830. Outstanding buildings include the Palacio de Minería in Mexico City, designed by Mexico’s leading architect of the time, Manuel Tolsá.
Independent Mexico in the 19th and early 20th centuries saw revivals of colonial styles and imitations of contemporary French or Italian styles. Mexico City’s semi–art nouveau Palacio de Bellas Artes is one of the most spectacular buildings from this era.
After the 1910–20 Revolution came ‘Toltecism,’ an effort to return to pre-Hispanic roots in the search for a national identity. This culminated in the 1950s with the Ciudad Universitaria campus in Mexico City, where many buildings are covered with colorful murals.
The great icon of more recent architecture is Luis Barragán (1902–88), who exhibited a strong Mexican strain in bringing vivid colors and plays of space and light to the typical geometric concrete shapes of the International Modern Movement. His strong influence on Mexican architecture and design is ongoing today. His oeuvre includes a set of wacky colored skyscraper sculptures in Ciudad Satélite, a Mexico City suburb, and his own house in Mexico City, which is on the Unesco World Heritage list. Another modernist, Pedro Ramírez Vázquez (1919–2013), designed three vast public buildings in Mexico City: the Estadio Azteca and Museo Nacional de Antropología in the 1960s and the Basílica de Guadalupe in the ‘70s. The capital has seen its share of eye-catching, prestigious structures popping up in the last decade or so: undoubtedly the top conversation piece is the Museo Soumaya Plaza Carso which opened in 2011 to house part of the art collection of multi-multi-billionaire Carlos Slim. Designed by Slim’s son-in-law Fernando Romero, it’s a love-it-or-hate-it six-story construction that resembles a giant, twisted blacksmith’s anvil covered in 16,000 honeycomb-shaped aluminium plates.
Since the earliest times Mexicans have exhibited a love of color and form, and an exciting talent for painting and sculpture. The wealth of art in mural form and in Mexico’s many galleries is a highlight of the country.
Mexico’s first civilization, the Olmecs of the Gulf coast, produced remarkable stone sculptures depicting deities, animals and wonderfully lifelike human forms. Most awesome are the huge Olmec heads, which combine the features of human babies and jaguars.
The Classic Maya of southeast Mexico between about AD 250 and 800 were perhaps ancient Mexico’s most artistically gifted people. They left countless beautiful stone sculptures, complicated in design but possessing great delicacy of touch.
Mexican art during Spanish rule was heavily Spanish-influenced and chiefly religious in subject, though portraiture advanced under wealthy patrons. Miguel Cabrera (1695–1768), from Oaxaca, is widely considered the most talented painter of the era.
The years before the 1910 Revolution finally saw a break from European traditions. Mexican slums, brothels and indigenous poverty began to appear on canvases. José Guadalupe Posada (1852–1913), with his characteristic calavera (skull) motif, satirized the injustices of the Porfiriato period, launching a tradition of political and social subversion in Mexican art.
In the 1920s, immediately following the Mexican Revolution, education minister José Vasconcelos commissioned young artists to paint a series of public murals to spread a sense of Mexican history and culture and of the need for social and technological change. The trio of great muralists – all great painters in smaller scales, too – were Diego Rivera (1886–1957), José Clemente Orozco (1883–1949) and David Alfaro Siqueiros (1896–1974).
Rivera’s work carried a left-wing message, emphasizing past oppression of indigenous people and peasants. His art, found in many locations in and around Mexico City, pulled Mexico’s indigenous and Spanish roots together in colorful, crowded tableaux depicting historical people and events, with a simple moral message.
Siqueiros, who fought in the Revolution on the Constitutionalist (liberal) side, remained a political activist afterward and his murals convey a clear Marxist message through dramatic, symbolic depictions of the oppressed and grotesque caricatures of the oppressors. Some of his best works are at the Palacio de Bellas Artes, Castillo de Chapultepec and Ciudad Universitaria, all in Mexico City.
Orozco, from Jalisco, focused more on the universal human condition than on historical specifics. He conveyed emotion, character and atmosphere. His work was at its peak in Guadalajara between 1936 and 1939, particularly in the 50-odd frescoes in the Instituto Cultural de Cabañas.
The contemporary art having the most public impact in Mexico – and which you are most likely to set eyes on – is street art, whose direct popular appeal provides a powerful channel for Mexicans to express themselves and reach an audience. Mexico City, Oaxaca and Guadalajara lead the way in truly accomplished street art, often with a powerful political-protest message. Check out Street Art Chilango (www.streetartchilango.com), the psychedelic images with pre-Hispanic motifs created by the Axolotl Collective (www.facebook.com/axolotlcollective); the striking, often monochrome works by internationally renowned Paola Delfin (www.urban-nation.com/artist/paola-delfin); and the kaleidoscopic portrayals of animal by Farid Rueda (www.widewalls.ch/artist/farid-rueda) in Mexico City. Find works by Lapiztola (www.facebook.com/lapiztola.stencil) and Guerilla-art.mx (www.guerilla-art.mx) in Oaxaca.
Today’s street artists follow in the footsteps of the 20th-century muralists, with the difference that they tend to be independent and rebellious and do not serve governments. Some do, however, use their art for specific positive social projects – none more so than the Mexico City-based Germen Crew (www.facebook.com/muralismogermen), who in 2015 turned the entire Las Palmitas neighborhood in the city of Pachuca into one big rainbow-colored mural. It’s a remarkable work, sponsored by the local city hall, which by all accounts has restored pride and smiles to a formerly sketchy area.
Frida Kahlo (1907–54), physically crippled by a road accident and mentally tormented in her tempestuous marriage to Diego Rivera, painted anguished self-portraits and grotesque, surreal images that expressed her left-wing views and externalized her inner tumult. Kahlo’s work suddenly seemed to strike an international chord in the 1980s and ‘90s. She’s now better known worldwide than any other Mexican artist, and her Mexico City home, the Museo Frida Kahlo, is a don’t-miss for any art lover.
Rufino Tamayo (1899–1991) from Oaxaca is sometimes thought of as the fourth major muralist, but he was a great artist at other scales too, absorbed by abstract and mythological images and effects of color. After WWII, the young artists of La Ruptura (the Rupture), led by José Luis Cuevas (b 1934), reacted against the muralist movement, which they saw as too obsessed with mexicanidad (Mexicanness). They opened Mexico up to world trends such as abstract expressionism and pop art. Sculptor Sebastián (b 1947), from Chihuahua, is famed for his large, mathematics-inspired sculptures that adorn cities around the world.
Today, thanks to dynamic artists, galleries and patrons and the globalization of the world art scene, contemporary Mexican art is reaching galleries the world over. Mexico City has become an international art hot spot, while other cities such as Monterrey, Oaxaca, Mazatlán and Guadalajara also have thriving art scenes. Mexican artists attempt to interpret the uncertainties of the 21st century in diverse ways. The pendulum has swung away from abstraction to hyper-representation, photorealism, installations, video and street art. Rocío Maldonado (b 1951), Rafael Cauduro (b 1950) and Roberto Cortázar (b 1962) all paint classically depicted figures against amorphous, bleak backgrounds. Check out Cauduro’s murals on state-sponsored crime in Mexico City’s Suprema Corte de Justicia. Leading contemporary lights such as Minerva Cuevas (b 1975), Miguel Calderón (b 1971), Betsabeé Romero (b 1963) and Gabriel Orozco (b 1962) spread their talents across many media, always challenging the spectator’s preconceptions.
Music is everywhere in Mexico. Live performers range from marimba (wooden xylophone) teams and mariachi bands (trumpeters, violinists, guitarists and a singer, all dressed in smart Wild West–style costumes) to ragged lone buskers with out-of-tune guitars. Mariachi music, perhaps the most ‘typical’ Mexican music, originated in the Guadalajara area but is played nationwide. Marimbas are particularly popular in the southeast and on the Gulf coast.
Mexico can claim to be the most important hub of rock en español. Talented Mexico City bands such as Café Tacuba and Maldita Vecindad emerged in the 1990s and took the genre to new heights and new audiences, mixing influences from rock, hip-hop and ska to traditional Mexican folk music. They’re still popular and active today, as is the Monterrey rap-metal band Molotov, who upsets just about everyone with their expletive-laced lyrics, and El Tri, a legendary rock band active since the 1960s. Mexico’s 21st-century indie rock wave threw up successful bands such as Zoé from Mexico City, which is popular throughout the Spanish-speaking world, and Monterrey’s Kinky. The Mexico City five-piece Little Jesus has been winning fans with its catchy, dancey brand of pop-rock; the band’s most recent album was Río Salvaje (2016).
Mexican rap is the true sound of the streets, and top homegrown talents include Eptos One (or Eptos Uno), from Ciudad Obregón (Sonora), Bocafloja (Mexico City), C Kan from Guadalajara, and Monterrey’s Cartel de Santa.
Powerful, colorful Alejandra Guzmán is known as La Reina del Rock (Queen of Rock) and has sold 10 million albums during a two-decade career. The Mexican rock band most famous outside Mexico is undoubtedly Guadalajara’s unashamedly commercial Maná.
Although their origins lie in the Caribbean and South America, several brands of percussion-heavy, infectiously rhythmic música tropical are highly popular throughout the country. Mexico City, in particular, has clubs and large dance halls devoted to this scene, often hosting international bands.
Two kinds of dance music – danzón, originally from Cuba, and cumbia, from Colombia – both took deeper root in Mexico than in their original homelands. The elegant, old-fashioned danzón is strongly associated with the port city of Veracruz but is currently enjoying quite a revival in Mexico City and elsewhere too. The livelier, more flirtatious cumbia has its adopted home in Mexico City. It rests on thumping bass lines with brass, guitars, mandolins and sometimes marimbas. Cumbia has spawned its own subvarieties: cumbia sonidera is basically electronic cumbia played by DJs, while ‘psychedelic cumbia’ harks back to Peruvian cumbia of the 1970s.
Almost every town in Mexico has some place where you can dance (and often learn) salsa, which originated in New York when jazz met son (folk music), cha-cha and rumba from Cuba and Puerto Rico. Musically, salsa boils down to brass (with trumpet solos), piano, percussion, singer and chorus – the dance is a hot one with a lot of exciting turns. Merengue, mainly from the Dominican Republic, is a blend of cumbia and salsa.
Paulina Rubio is Mexico’s answer to Shakira, who has also starred in several Mexican films and TV series. Hot on her heels is ‘Queen of Latin Pop’, Thalía from Mexico City, who has sold 25 million records worldwide. Natalia Lafourcade, a talented singer-songwriter who mixes pop and bossa nova rhythms, won Record of the Year and several other 2015 Latin Grammies with her album Hasta La Raíz. Another versatile singer-songwriter and diva of the pop world is Julieta Venegas from Tijuana, best known for her 2007 album, Limón y Sal.
Balladeer Luis Miguel is Mexico’s Julio Iglesias and incredibly popular, as was Juan Gabriel, who had sold millions of his own albums and written dozens of hit songs for others before his death in 2016.
Ranchera is Mexico’s urban ‘country music’ – mostly melodramatic stuff with a nostalgia for rural roots, sometimes with a mariachi backing. The hugely popular Vicente Fernández, Juan Gabriel and Alejandro Fernández (Vicente’s son) are leading artists.
Norteño or norteña is country ballad and dance music, originating in northern Mexico over a century ago and now nationwide in popularity. Its roots are in corridos, heroic ballads with the rhythms of European dances such as waltz or polka. Originally the songs were tales of Latino-Anglo strife in the borderlands or themes from the Mexican Revolution. Modern narcocorridos tell of the adventures and exploits of people involved in the drugs trade. Some gangs even commission narcocorridos about themselves.
Norteño groups (conjuntos) go for 10-gallon hats, with instruments centered on the accordion and the bajo sexto (a 12-string guitar), along with bass and drums. Norteño’s superstars are Los Tigres del Norte, originally from Sinaloa but now based in California. They play to huge audiences on both sides of the frontier, with some narcocorridos in their repertoire. Other top stars include Los Huracanes del Norte, Los Tucanes de Tijuana and accordionist/vocalist Ramón Ayala.
Also very popular, especially in the northwest and along the Pacific coast, is banda – Mexican big-band music, with large brass sections replacing norteño guitars and accordion, and playing a range of styles from ranchera and corridos to tropical cumbia and Mexican pop. Sinaloa’s Banda El Recodo have been at the top of the banda tree for decades.
Son (literally ‘sound’) is a broad term covering Mexican country styles that grew out of the fusion of Spanish, indigenous and African music. Guitars or similar instruments (such as the small jarana) lay down a strong rhythm, with harp or violin providing the melody. Son is often played for a foot-stomping dance audience, with witty, sometimes improvised, lyrics. There are several regional variants. The exciting son jarocho, from the Veracruz area, is particularly African-influenced: Grupo Mono Blanco have led a revival of the genre with contemporary lyrics. The famous ‘La Bamba’ is a son jarocho. Son huasteco (or huapango), from the Huasteca area in northeastern Mexico, features falsetto vocals between soaring violin passages. Listen out for top group Los Camperos de Valles.
This popular genre of troubadour-type folk music, typically performed by solo singer-songwriters (cantautores) with a guitar, has roots in 1960s and ‘70s folk and protest songs. Many trova singers are strongly inspired by Cuban political musician Silvio Rodríguez.
The historical golden age of Mexican movie-making was the 1940s, when the country was creating up to 200 – typically epic, melodramatic – films a year. Then Hollywood reasserted itself, and Mexican cinema struggled for decades, though it has made quite a comeback in the 21st century. Fine, gritty movies by young Mexican directors have won commercial success as well as critical acclaim, and Morelia, Guadalajara, Oaxaca, Monterrey, Los Cabos and the Riviera Maya now stage successful annual film festivals.
Nuevo Cine Mexicano (New Mexican Cinema) confronts the ugly, tragic and absurd in Mexican life, as well as the beautiful and the comical. The first to really catch the world’s eye was Amores perros (Love’s a Bitch; 2000), directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu and starring Gael García Bernal, who have since both become international celebrities. Set in contemporary Mexico City, with three plots connected by one traffic accident, it’s a raw, honest movie with its quota of blood, violence and sex as well as ironic humor.
Y tu mamá también (And Your Mother Too), Alfonso Cuarón’s 2001 coming-of-age road trip movie about two privileged Mexico City teenagers (Gael García Bernal and Diego Luna), was at the time the biggest grossing Mexican film ever, netting more than US$25 million. Carlos Carrera’s El crimen del Padre Amaro (The Crime of Father Amaro; 2003), again starring Gael García Bernal, painted an ugly picture of church corruption in a small town.
Success has spirited some of these talents away from Mexico. González Iñárritu moved to Hollywood to direct two more great movies with interconnected multiple plots and a theme of death – 21 Grams (2003) and Babel (2006). He followed up with Biutiful (2010), a stunning Mexican-Spanish production starring Javier Bardem in a harrowing ‘down and out in Barcelona’ tale. He then scooped four Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Director, with Birdman (2014), the brilliantly crafted story of an aging Hollywood superhero (Michael Keaton) trying to revive his career on Broadway. Alfonso Cuarón moved on to Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004) and the multi-Oscar-winning (including Best Director) science-fiction epic Gravity (2013), while Guillermo del Toro has scored success with the triple-Oscar Pan’s Labyrinth (2006).
Meanwhile, homegrown Mexican films have been raking in awards at Cannes and other festivals. Pedro González-Rubio’s Alamar (To the Sea) in 2010 is a gentle, thoughtful exploration of father-son bonding between a Mexican with Mayan roots and his half-Italian son, while Michel Franco’s Después de Lucía (After Lucia) is a grim, uncomfortable look at the high school bullying at its worst. Carlos Reygadas took Cannes’ 2012 Best Director award for Post tenebras lux, a confusing mix of fantasy and reality about a middle-class family living in the countryside. Amat Escalante was Cannes’ 2013 best director with Heli, the story of a young couple caught in Mexico’s violent drug wars. Another acclaimed 2013 movie was Diego Quemada-Diez’s La jaula de oro (The Golden Cage), about young Central American migrants trying to get to the USA through Mexico. Migrants, this time Mexican, also take center stage in the 2015 thriller Desierto, starring Gael García Bernal and directed by Alfonso Cuarón’s son Jonás Cuarón.
Also in the 2015 crop, Gabriel Ripstein’s arms-smuggling thriller 600 Miles, starring Tim Roth as a kidnapped US law-enforcement agent, was garlanded at the Berlin and Guadalajara festivals, and became Mexico’s candidate for the 2016 Best Foreign Language Film Oscar. Tim Roth featured again, this time as a male nurse for terminally ill patients, in the moving Chronic, directed and written by Mexican Michel Franco and named best screenplay at Cannes in 2015. Another 2015 release, Los jefes, digs into the brutal reality of the narco world in Monterrey, an added curiosity being that its lead roles are played by rap musicians Cartel de Santa. In 2017, Ernesto Contreras’ Sueño en otro idioma (I Dream in Another Language) is a meditation on the demise of indigenous languages.
On a more commercial note, Gary Alazraki’s comical 2013 film addressing Mexican class divisions, Nosotros los nobles (We the Nobles), became the all-time biggest-grossing Mexican film in Mexican cinemas, with 3.3 million viewers. The first Mexican 3D horror movie, Más negro que la noche (Darker than the Night; 2014) directed by Henry Bedwell, also did well, both at the box office and with critics.
Mexicans such as Carlos Fuentes, Juan Rulfo and Octavio Paz have written some of the great Spanish-language literature.
Fuentes (1928–2012), a prolific novelist and commentator, is probably Mexico’s best-known writer internationally. His most famous novel, The Death of Artemio Cruz (1962), takes a critical look at Mexico’s postrevolutionary era through the eyes of a dying, corrupted press baron and landowner. Less known is the magical-realist Aura (1962), with a truly stunning ending.
In Mexico, Juan Rulfo (1918–86) is widely regarded as the supreme novelist, even though he only ever published one full-length novel: Pedro Páramo (1955), about a young man’s search for his lost father among ghostlike villages in western Mexico. It’s a scary, desolate work with confusing shifts of time – a kind of Mexican Wuthering Heights with a spooky, magical-realist twist.
Octavio Paz (1914–98), poet, essayist and winner of the 1990 Nobel Prize for Literature, wrote a probing, intellectually acrobatic analysis of Mexico’s myths and the national character in The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950).
The 1960s-born novelists of the movimiento crack take their name from the sound of a limb falling off a tree, representing their desire to break with the past and move on from magical realism. Their work tends to adopt global themes and international settings. Best known is Jorge Volpi, whose In Search of Klingsor (1999) and Season of Ash (2009) weave complicated but exciting plots involving science, love, murder, mysteries and more, with a strong relevance to the state of the world today.
The crack seemed to open the way for a new generation of novelists who are right now putting Mexico back in the vanguard of world literature. These are typically superimaginative, impossible-to-classify writers whose multilayered works leap around between different times, places, voices and perspectives. Valeria Luiselli’s Faces in the Crowd (2012) and The Story of My Teeth (2015) are, on the surface, respectively about a woman writing a novel and a man who replaces his own teeth with (supposedly) Marilyn Monroe’s. Then there’s Álvaro Enrigue with Sudden Death (2013), a novel of vast scope set among the many world-changing events of the 16th century in Europe and the Americas, and Yuri Herrera, whose Signs Preceding the End of the World (2009) illluminates small-town and big-city Mexico, the Mexico–US border and the US itself through a young woman sent to retrieve her brother from across the border. Carmen Boullosa’s 17 novels range from They’re Cows, We’re Pigs (1991), examining the world of 17th-century Caribbean pirates, to Texas, the Great Theft (2014), a reimagining of the Tex-Mex borderlands in the 19th century. In Quesadillas (2014), Juan Pablo Villalobos takes a satirical look at poverty and corruption in Mexico.
Mexicans’ skill with their hands and their love of color, fun and tradition find expression everywhere in their wonderful artesanías (handicrafts). Crafts such as weaving, pottery, leatherwork, copperwork, hat-making and basketry still fulfill key functions in daily life as well as yielding souvenirs and collectibles. Many craft techniques and designs in use today have pre-Hispanic origins, and it’s Mexico’s indigenous peoples, the direct inheritors of pre-Hispanic culture, who lead the way in artesanías production.
In some of Mexico’s indigenous villages you’ll be stunned by the variety of colorful, intricately decorated attire, differing from area to area and often from village to village. Traditional costume – more widely worn by women than men – serves as a mark of the community to which a person belongs. The woven or embroidered patterns of some garments can take months to complete.
Three main types of women’s garments have been in use since long before the Spanish conquest:
Huipil A long, sleeveless tunic, found mainly in the southern half of the country.
Quechquémitl A shoulder cape with an opening for the head, found mainly in central and northern Mexico.
Enredo A wraparound skirt.
Spanish missionaries introduced blouses, which are now often also embroidered with great care and detail.
The primary materials of indigenous weaving are cotton and wool, though synthetic fibers are also common. Natural dyes have been revived – deep blues from the indigo plant, reds and browns from various woods, and reds and purples from the cochineal insect.
The basic indigenous weavers’ tool, used only by women, is the backstrap loom (telar de cintura) on which the warp (long) threads are stretched between two horizontal bars, one of which is fixed to a post or tree, while the other is attached to a strap around the weaver’s lower back; the weft (cross) threads are then intricately woven in, producing some amazing patterns. Backstrap-loom huipiles from the southern states of Oaxaca and Chiapas are among Mexico’s most eye-catching garments.
Treadle looms, operated by foot pedals (usually by men) can weave wider cloth than the backstrap loom and tend to be used for rugs, rebozos (shawls), sarapes (blankets with an opening for the head) and skirt material. Mexico’s most famous rug-weaving village is Teotitlán del Valle, Oaxaca.
Many small-scale potters’ workshops turn out everything from plain cooking pots to elaborate works of art. One highly attractive pottery variety is Talavera, made chiefly in Puebla and Dolores Hidalgo and characterized by bright colors (blue and yellow are prominent) and floral designs. The Guadalajara suburbs of Tonalá and Tlaquepaque produce a wide variety of ceramics. In northern Mexico, the villagers of Mata Ortiz make a range of beautiful earthenware, drawing on the techniques and designs of pre-Hispanic Paquimé, similar to some native American pottery in the US southwest. Another distinctive Mexican ceramic form is the árbol de la vida (tree of life). These elaborate, candelabra-like objects are molded by hand and decorated with numerous tiny figures of people, animals, plants and so on. Some of the best are made in Metepec in the state of México, which is also the source of colorful clay suns.
For millennia Mexicans have worn masks in dances, ceremonies and shamanistic rites: the wearer temporarily becomes the creature, person or deity represented by the mask. You can admire mask artistry at museums in cities such as San Luis Potosí, Zacatecas and Colima, and at shops and markets around the country. The southern state of Guerrero makes probably the broadest range of fine masks.
Wood is the basic material of most masks, but papier-mâché, clay, wax and leather are also used. Mask-makers often paint or embellish their masks with real teeth, hair, feathers or other adornments. Common masks include animals, birds, Christ, devils, and Europeans with comically pale, wide-eyed features.
The Huichol people of Jalisco, Durango, Zacatecas and Nayarit use centuries-old symbols and designs when covering masks and wooden sculptures with psychedelic patterns consisting of colourful beads, attached with wax and resin.
Gourds, the hard shells of certain squash-type fruits, have been used in Mexico since antiquity as bowls, cups and small storage vessels. The most eye-catching decoration technique is lacquering, in which the gourd is coated with paste or paint and then varnished, producing a nonporous and, to some extent, heat-resistant vessel. Lacquering is also used to decorate wooden boxes, trays and furniture, with a lot of the most appealing ware coming from remote Olinalá in Guerrero, where artisans create patterns using the rayado method of scraping off part of the top coat of paint to expose a different-colored layer below.
The Seri people of Sonora work hard ironwood into dramatic human, animal and sea-creature shapes. Villagers around Oaxaca city produce brightly painted imaginary beasts carved from copal wood, known as alebrijes.