This afternoon we got a cab to San Martin Tilcajete, one of Oaxaca’s artisan villages, this one specialising in carving alejibres. These are fantastical brightly painted wooden animals – a relatively recent invention, less than a century old, but the village’s most famous and lucrative product. Tilcajete is about 40 minutes outside Oaxaca, set amidst low green hills that could be in Italy. We arrived at the workshop of Jacobo and Maria Angeles, the most famous of the local workshops, and were surprised to find what an operation it was. A vast car park outside and inside hundreds of people working on alejibres. We were greeted by a person with a walkie talkie who murmured into it, ‘Inglis’, and from all the walkie talkies around the words blared out, ‘Inglis’. We were ushered in and a teenaged boy came to show us around. The tour was conducted very efficiently, from the carving to the seasoning to the filling in of cracks to the gold leaf to the painting to the making of pigments and ending finally at the shop. Nothing really stood out though, and I think the Gentleman Friend, who was half thinking of buying one, was slightly put off by the professional feel of the tour. However it didn’t feel like a hustle, really, and the pieces are of very good quality.
We then went to another workshop, this time a small family-run one, picked by looking at photos on the Google Map entry, and it was interesting to see how very different the style was. This family didn’t really go in for the colourful alejibres, preferring instead gnarled bits of old wood, barely coloured and carved roughly into gnarled, somewhat cartoonish, images. There was some similarity to the scrap metal robots and dinosaurs one often finds in tourist towns, but there were some good pieces in there, albeit buried in a mountain of tat. We didn’t buy any as the good pieces tended to be very big. The brother who showed us around was particularly proud of his family’s key innovation, shoes for dinosaurs, which they made in every size from small to gigantic.
Tomorrow we are going on a two day hike in the Sierra Norte. I’m a bit nervous as I have not been feeling very strong, it being that time of the month, but it’s only two days.