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.