Tales From Down a Dusty Road - in which we share with you a genuine anecdote of thrills and adventure in the Mexican backcactus.
The Road to Cocucho
Eric Mindling
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Cocucho Pots |
while back I went exploring in the state of Michoacan. I’d been hearing of this distant land for years but had been so busy getting lost in my Oaxacan homeland that there was no extra time for doing the same in Michoacan. But one day the right moment presented itself and off I went.
Michoacan is the land of the Purepecha Indians with towns with names like Erongaricuaro and Tzintzuntzan and a volcano named Paricutin that was born back in ’43 and then commenced to bury a nearby town named Parangaricutiro with lava. The old church steeples still rise above the ragged ground making for great photo ops.
But I wasn’t going there to hunt volcanoes or take Purepecha pronunciation classes. I was, as is my habit, on the trail of potters, of which there are as many or more than there are syllables in Purepechan town names. In fact, with the exception of Oaxaca, I’d venture to say that Michoacan is the Mexican state with the greatest density of pottery villages. I once sat across a table from a man named Victor Aguila who knew the back roads and potters of Michoacan very well. Almost as well as I knew the back roads and potters of Oaxaca. We engaged in a sort of verbal arm wrestling in which we tried to out do each other in the number of pottery villages we could name for each respective state.
“Patamaban!” He said.
“Atzompa!” I shot back.
“Ocumicho!”
“Tlapazola!”
“San Jose la Gracia!”
“Yojuela!”
And so on and so forth. There was some beer involved too I seem to recall. Anyway, he faded somewhere in the late teens and was completely done by the early twenties while yours truly kept spouting out Oaxacan village names until the lofty number of 31, and then qualified that low number by pointing out that there were still large tracts of the state I had yet to venture into. I walked away the victor of that duel with Victor, but also with my curiosity peeked about this other region of so many potters.
And so it was that I finally made my way to Michoacan. Once there I looked up Victor and his workmate Barbara Garrido. When one wants to meet potters in Michoacan, these are the folks to talk to. You see, while in my Oaxacan homeland the pottery is almost 100% prehispanic in its production methods and forms, 450 years ago in Michoacan Spanish missionaries considerably influenced the pottery making techniques, bringing them in line with what was going on in Europe at the time. One of the legacies of those old Spanish pottery masters are the lovely, lowfire glazes that are so pervasive and popular in Michoacan and Mexico. Unfortunately one of their chief ingredients is that heavy little metal called lead that doesn’t seem to want to leave your body once it gets in. The good news is that there is a project, now going on almost 15 years, to come up with substitute glazes and convince traditional potters to use them and convince the potters’ rural customers to buy the pots made with the new glazes (tradition sticks hard). The folks at the forefront of the project, who have been out in the fields working with potters for years are Victor and Barbara of Barro Sin Plomo.
So aside from being great folks, they also know just about every glaze potter in Michoacan. But one day I convinced Barbara to accompany me out to a pottery village that neither she nor Victor had been to. They had never been because this village was still making pottery using the pre-Hispanic methods and didn’t use glazes at all.
And so it was that Barbara and I found ourselves on the road to Cocucho. It was like no road I’ve ever met in Oaxaca, for it was newly paved and entirely free of pot holes. I’ve never seen such a road in Oaxaca. Why the difference, I do not know? But we made quick time.
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Two Purepechas |
Cocucho, a boldly traditional Purepecha village, sits high on a slope, snuggling into the hilltop pines. The village overlooks a vast, gentle slope that drops into a plain far below which is covered with tall grass and cornfields. The village is a mix of trojes, ornate indigenous log cabins and cement block houses. I paid more attention to the trojes because they are unique to upland Michoacan. They are small with steep, wood shake roofs, front porches and stout porch posts carved with flowers and designs. Under the shake eves are tied up bunches of dried corn; yellow, red and blue, with the husk attached but peeled back. Seed corn for next year’s crop. Peeking inside a house you see dark wood walls, cups hanging in rows from the ceiling (above which, in the attic, is stored the rest of the corn), plates artfully placed on narrow shelves against the wall, colorful cut paper decorations hanging like flags across the room, a table and a bed.
On the porch of the family we went to visit stood seven stout clay urns stained dark with atole, or liquid cornstarch, and three stout women, corn fed and stained dark by pure Purepecha blood and work in the sun. Mama Lorenza and her two grown daughters, Antonia and Angelina. They each wore velvet blouses, pleated skirts and waist aprons with multiple wraps of blue and red beaded necklaces tight around thick necks and large, heavy, silver earrings in the form of hanging crescents that pulled their earlobes down.
Unlike the other villages Barbara and I had visited, Cocucho’s pottery showed no Spanish influence. These enormous pots, some four feet tall, were coil built from the ground up and surface fired one at a time in bonfires. The potters here pulled the pots out of the fire smouldering hot and brushed them with cornstarch which burned into the porous surface of the pot and gave it a seriously freckled look, an ancient mottling. Old school potters at their finest. I tried to lift one of the bigger pots and could barely budge it. The walls were an inch thick top to bottom. The women carried them on their backs.
But in Cocucho I found myself to be more interested in the potters than the pots. Well, that is often the case if the truth must be known. I love all of this deeply rooted pottery, but the real reason I wander on the trail of Mexican pottery is because it gives me the excuse to sit on porches and swap tales with these very earthy, solid people.
Which is just what we did in Cocucho, chatting back and forth about their pottery and the weather and things tied to it, like corn, harvest, fiestas and about everything else that mattered in the village. I was interested to learn from them that the pottery wasn’t even sold locally anymore. It all went away in the hands of buyers to urban markets in Guadalajara, Mexico City and beyond. I could certainly vouch for this as a former pottery exporter. The Cocucho pottery was sold far and wide in the US by wholesalers and had become very popular. They said the pots used to be for storing water, corn, cooking tamales and so on, but no one was using them that way anymore (I guess no one didn’t include them because they had an enormous jug in the yard full of water).
Then they started speaking to each other, clarifying between them some point about the way the pots used to be used, and switched from Spanish to Purepecha. The tone of their voices changed entirely. Their voices went deep, coming from below those tight blue necklaces, from the depths of their chests in powerful bursts. Their voices vibrated in the ground below my feet and seemed to have a physical presence as they poured their words back and forth to each other like clouds of dense, warm smoke. I suddenly felt like I was seated in the court of the powerful leaders of an ancient matriarchal clan and sat in awe of the strength these women exuded. Was this just this family, or did all the women in this village speak so forcefully, so surely, in Purepecha? Then they switched back to Spanish to speak to us and their voices came up a couple of octaves and went soft. I wished I could speak Purepecha just to take part in the richness of their conversation, though at the same time I sensed I’d be squished like a cockroach by the density of their voices.
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Lorenzo y hiya |
As it was, no bugs were squished that day, rather I let myself go into a journey created on the small porch of a little wood cabin filled with huge pots, large women and enormous voices,
and we enjoyed ourselves talking about clay and corn.
Want to meet these Cocucho potters yourself? Join us this winter for The Potters of Michoacan or Michoacan Arts and Places and we’ll take you there.
Anecdotes From Our Travelers (Call for Articles)
Hundreds of travelers have survived our journeys and lived to tell about it. If you are one of those folks, this section is for you. We’d love to hear your anecdotes, tales and observations about your trip with Traditions Mexico or ways that your experiences have touched your life back home. Article shouldn’t be longer than 800 words and you may include a couple of pictures that show you or other trip participants interacting with backcactus Mexico. Send submissions to the editor at traditionsmexico@yahoo.com.
(PS, the editor doesn’t actually edit, as you may already know from reading this website, so be sure you check for typos).
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