Well, it's a devil riding on the back of a turtle. The turtle is covered in skulls. (part 2)

So I was doing some random reading today and came across a section all about the prevalence of turtles in mesoamerican funerary ceramics. I don't mean to say that this corresponds completely with the diabolito I bought, but I think there's some connection (see previous post about Ocumicho).

Apparently turtles were considered dimensional travelers who could move between earth, heaven, and the underworld. The shape of the turtle's shell was thought to resemble a cloud, and so it was associated with the heavens. Tombs in Oaxaca depict flying turtle-men, and likewise the sea turtle (which moves through the water as though flying) was capable of getting to the underworld via the sea. A post-conquest codex from Michoacán, the Lienzo de Jucutacato, depicts turtles helping people who emerge from a primordial cave to cross the ocean (and presumably settle Mexico). During periods of drought or cold turtles hibernate, as a corpse hibernates in a tomb awaiting another life. Likewise the tomb, as the home of the dead, was equivalent to a turtle's protective shell.

La vida pirata

Whatever exists in Mexico, it seems there is also a pirated version of it. Movies, CD's, video games, shoes, clothing brands, designer handbags, and more are sold openly on the streets. I even saw a newspaper headline about the continuing problem with "pirata" buses in Guadalajara. I didn't read the article carefully, but I would imagine that anyone who can get their hands on a bus-like vehicle could simply hand paint some numbers on the front and then drive around picking up passengers and collecting money (no insurance or license needed!)

While the police could care less, a series of highly ineffective anti-pirata advertisements are screened before most films. In the latest, a young job seeker has just purchased a pirated DVD before going to an interview, and when his prospective employer sees it poking out from under his resumé, the manager decides not to hire him. A dour narrator then warns the audience that "buying pirated DVD's says a lot about who you are." Well, I suppose it says you're someone who is in Mexico at any rate.

We resisted buying pirated DVD's for some time, but eventually we were pushed into it. By swarthy, mustachioed banditos? Dishonest street scum? No, by the very giant companies that are so worried that unauthorized viewing activity will eat into their profits. Firstly, if you live abroad, many videos & movies that Americans can watch online (such as through Amazon or Netflix) are blocked. Sadly, some time last year, we were also cut-off from The Daily Show and the Colbert Report on Comedy Central's website. Bloke-boost-air (aka Blockbuster) sucks as much as it does in the U.S., so we got an account with a local competitor. They have a slightly better selection but...most of the movies for rent are encoded for region 4, while the laptop we watch them on is region 1, so our options were cut by about 60%. Over a number of months we quickly depleted the number of watchable movies, and soon found ourselves at a booth selling piratas.

Our pirata man has no eyepatch. He does have a larger selection of cheaper, better movies, all multi-region. They all come with a money back guarantee, and if he doesn't have something you're looking for he can often get it for you within a week. He's also about twice as friendly as the video store clerks. Genuinely friendly, not Bloke-boost-air fake friendly.

How to advertise a boxing match in Guadalajara

Hearing the theme song from Rocky, I turned around to see a billboard truck plastered with oversized photos of gloved fighters barreling down the street. Attached to the truck was a trailer, on which was mounted a giant plexiglass terrarium housing a faux boxing ring. Inside there were two skinny adolescents costumed as boxers, along with a young lady wearing a "sexy referee" outfit. Both boxers were definitely on the ropes; the truck was swerving madly in and out of traffic and none of the three could keep their footing.

Ocumicho

Jenny and I stopped in the village of Ocumicho with some friends on our second trip to Michoacán. This state roughly corresponds to the pre-hispanic Tarascan empire. The Tarasco's descendants are still around and tend to go by the more accurate word Purépecha (the original term being the result of a weird mistranslation of I think their word for "brother-in-law").

Many of the Purépecha towns are dedicated to one or another craft. Ocumicho is known for making little clay figures of devils and also wooden devil masks. Apparently this has sometimes collided with conservative religious views, and at times artisans have had to go underground to avoid angry zealots smashing up their work.

We bought a mask about a year ago elsewhere in Michoacán, and on a whim I'd asked the maker for his info. Normally this is the kind of behavior that results in my having mountains of scraps of paper that I can neither throw away nor use for anything, but here it actually paid off. I kept the piece of paper tucked behind the mask, and thus remembered the name of the village.

When we showed up with our car owning friends, the address turned out not to be very helpful (small Mexican towns tend to not have many street signs or numbered buildings). There were no craft stalls or stores, and certainly no tourist kiosk. Luckily, all we had to do was stand slack-jawed in the town center. Outside the main church a friendly woman approached us ("psst- ¿Buscas figuras de barro?") Interestingly she made no mention of little devils.

First she took us to the town's other attractions which were few, but interesting. We went to another older church that was very simple--the kind of thing the first Franciscan missionaries might have built in the 1500's. All of the pews had been cleared out of the middle, and there were a number of shrines to virgins and saints bedecked with large quantities of real and fake flowers. Some of the more prominent icons had dollar bills affixed to them. Next she took us to the shrine of the town's patron saint (I think San Pedro). It was just in some random building. You could look through a window onto an ostentatious shrine dominated by red flowers. It's a pretty safe bet that this saint corresponds to a far older deity.

The first woman turned out to be the sister-in-law of the artist whose info I had, so after we visited her place she took us to his place on a rocky outcropping on the outskirts of town. He had just sold almost all of his work, so we didn't end up getting anything, but by this time there was another lady who was insisting that we come to her workshop (which happened to be in the home of yet another artisan family). Needless to say, by the time we left we were carrying boxes and bags of diabolitos, and more and more Purépecha ladies were coming out of the woodwork to invite us to check out their families' workshops.

I wish I knew a bit more about the iconography of this stuff...I made a few attempts to ask, but the answer was always like "Well, it's a devil riding on the back of a turtle. The turtle is covered in skulls." They would explain it as though maybe I was a bit slow not to have figured that out. It could well be that there are things that they don't like to share with outsiders--they would have every reason to be guarded about making all those devils in uber-Catholic Mexico. Or maybe from their perspective they just make stuff and there's not much to tell--maybe they just don't carry around the baggage of artist statements, gallery talks, panel discussions and all the other talking that is supposed to surround serious art. Whatever the case it was cool to visit there.