The Potters Village in Mexico

 

The Potters Village

The two-lane paved road rises and falls, twists and turns like a dangling rope through the rugged Chihuahua hill country. “Amazing that one of Mexico’s most famous potters lives out here,” says my friend Dick Davis.
Shimmering in the stark desert light is the village of Mata Ortiz, the home of Mexico’s renowned potter Juan Quezada. In the mid-day heat, the pueblo is deserted except for a few stray dogs roaming the dirt-rutted streets. Old adobe walls and ramshackle wooden fences are laced with clotheslines of brightly colored garments drying against a brown desert backdrop.
Quezada’s modest gallery is on the corner of the main street across from an abandoned railroad tract. As we enter, he breezes in from the side room. Dressed in a faded tan cowboy hat, of medium height and bantam weight, he looks as fit as an Oklahoma rodeo wrangler, despite being in his early seventies. His rugged, suntanned face exudes a quiet dignity and purposeful curiosity.
The pale blue adobe walls in the front room are lined with ollas and vases, glazed in a rainbow of rust-red, brown, and eggshell white hues and painted with intricate, geometric designs. I am mesmerized by their spiral, thin-walled shapes and meticulously painted and etched patterns.
Outside, the heat glimmers over the parched, dust-colored land. Nothing seems to be
alive except patches of creosote and agave clinging to the desert’s emptiness. How could such incredible artistic beauty come to exist in such a remote, hardscrabble place?
The freedom and joy of discovery, I begin to realize, lies not in seeing new places, but in seeing things in new ways. The desert, I soon learn, is not empty but full of beauty.
Quezada grew up poor, leaving school at twelve to gathered firewood and herd sheep in the
hills above the village. While gathering firewood, he stumbled on some shards of pottery in a mountain cave, a burial site belonging to an ancient indigenous people called the Paquimé who had lived in this region from 1200 to 1450 A.D.
“The first time I saw those pieces,” Juan tells us in Spanish, “I said, ‘I have found a hidden treasure.’ I knew that the ancient ones must have found the materials here.” Over many years, he experimented with different clays, pigments, drawing and firing techniques to produce ollas or pots with the ancient culture’s iconography and design.
“Nobody taught me. There were no potters then. The village was poor,ˮ he continues.
The story could have ended here, lost in the buried memory of a poor village, but it didn’t because of Juan’s artistic genius, obsessive curiosity, and an unlikely friendship with the American art dealer and anthropologist Spencer MacCallum that would change the fortune of the little town and shape an artistic legacy whose reach is still unknown.
Like a tale out of the Wizard of Oz, it began in 1976 when MacCallum stopped off at a second-hand shop in a New Mexico border town where he bought three unsigned pots. Intrigued by their intricate beauty, he embarked on an adventure south that would take him to Mata Ortiz and the unknown potter. Over the next six years, MacCallum provided Juan with money to work at his craft full-time, while organizing exhibits in the United States to premiere it. “His arrival was a gift from God, a miracle,” says Juan.
Mata Ortiz today is the center of a bustling ceramic cottage industry. About one-fourth of its 2,600 inhabitants earn their livelihoods as potters—many of them trained by Quezada himself.
The homes, some humble brick adobes and others larger cinder-block buildings, radiate with an infectious warmth and vitality to the craft. Pots and vases line oilcloth-covered tables. I look over the shoulders of men and women as they shape, polish and paint at tiny sunlit work stations. They place a single coil of clay atop a plaster mold, and then by hand work the clay upwards to form their thin-walled bowls, jars, and pots.
A piece of hacksaw blade is used to smooth the surface. Hand-made kilns or just an inverted galvanized bucket buried in dried cow chips are used to fire the pots. Brushes to paint the long flowing geometric patterns are made from children’s hair.
Today, one of Quezada’s pots can sell for thousands of dollars. He now owns the land where he used to gather firewood. It has a rich vein of white clay, which he shares with other village potters. “Everywhere the sun shines is for everyone,” he says.
Walking outside the village, Juan points to a thin seam of chalky white clay; at another location to a pile of cottonwood bark once used to fire the clay. I begin to see beneath the bone-dry landscape, the desert’s possibilities discovered by Juan and other villagers. The Chihuahua Desert’s beauty is in its austerity: the searing heat, the stark desert light, and the rich caches of clay that Quezada recognized as the pueblo’s miracle.

About the Author:
Victor A. Walsh’s travel and feature stories and literary essays have appeared in the Christian Science Monitor, San Antonio Express-News, Austin American Statesman, San Jose Mercury News, Arizona Daily Star, Literary Traveler, Rosebud, Coast To Coast, Desert Leaf, Irish America, Sunset, and VIA. He spends his time when he’s productively unemployed prowling forgotten or unusual destinations looking for stories that connect a place and its people to their remembered past.

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