Clay and History

I met a woman today, Amparo, whose 107-year old grandmother was lying in a bed next to her pottery wheel. This grandmother is the last of the indigenous people who used to live in the area (what Amparo meant by this, I don´t know, since she´s a descendant standing right there, ostensibly an indigenous person.) Maybe she meant that her grandmother was one of few left who remember how it was before the area was built up, when people still lived traditionally. Now, Amparo´s grandmother uses a wheelchair. Toothless and skinny, she laid in bed in a pink cotton nightgown. Amparo, her grandchild, is a solidly built woman. Her dark eyes are set deep in a face that shines like polished wood, and her frequent smile reveals a gap in her lower front teeth.

"Yeah, journalists come to interview her, on Women´s Day and stuff," Amparo told us. "She was born in 1902, has seen all the wars, everything." The town used to be called "San Juan de los Platos" when Amparo´s grandmother was young, because of all the plates that were made here. "From this clay," Amparo told us, gesturing to the bag of clumped, brown clay in her yard.


She sat at her pottery wheel, rocking back and forth as her foot pushed it. Her hands caressed the spinning lump of clay, drawing it up into a bowl. Suddenly I imagined that this is how God made the earth, by taking a glob of clay and spinning it on a pottery wheel into a perfect sphere. Indeed, some Native American creation myths tell that God made humans out of clay. Mother earth. The perfect roundness of the pots on Amparo´s workshelf belies the rustic equipment she uses.

According to Amparo´s grandmother, the indigenous story goes that people discovered clay when they used it to seal the holes in their baskets, preventing the grain from falling through the cracks. Amparo stood by the brick oven in her yard, explaining this. "Then, one day, there was a fire, and they noticed that the material got hard, like this," she picks up a shard of red tile from the inside of the oven, "so they started to make things with it. They used pots instead of baskets."

Amparo learned from her grandmother to make simple things for cooking when she was a girl. At 12 or 13 years old, she could make any utensil for the kitchen. But then she went to an artisan´s workshop in the 1970´s, where they showed her how to work with a wheel and new designs. They showed her pre-columbian patterns, graphics, new paints, techniques. "Like this one," she pointed to a squat vase with leaves and flowers designed in relief, painted a glossy black and green, "is magnesium oxide." She told us that the pre-columbian designs take more time, and so the more commercialized pots are now the ones that use the natural paints but which don´t feature the complicated designs. "Like the Jaguar," she said, "and the serpent heads and all that. Those take a lot of time. So the art is being lost..."