WEAVING

GOLD IN OAXACA Oaxaca's ancient history is as interesting and as complex as any nation’s: involving religious cultures transforming into warring nation states, exhibiting distinct artistic sensibilities, making good culinary and medicinal use of local fauna and flora, trading with, conquering and being conquered by others. In Oaxaca, we can meet the living descendants of those who both suffered and flourished so many hundreds and even thousands of years ago. And, yet, there is another, more recent history that equally fascinates. It is a history of families that goes back not more than a hundred years or so. It involves the rich stories of grandparents and great-grandparents of people that are a moving force in Oaxacan society today.

One of the more interesting of these ‘recent histories’ concerns a woman by the name of Florencia Manzano who, at the turn of the century, made her way in the world by selling chiles in the city market near the church of Nuestra Señora de La Merced. She and her young daughter Rosita would rise early each day to head to the market (much as village women today still do) and set up their stall to offer housewives the abundance of Oaxaca’s chiles: guajillo, mulato negro, pasilla, chiles de árbol and so many more. Sometimes bored, sometimes curious, young Rosita would wander among the stalls that sold such things as maize and beans, tomatoes and onions, maguey, melons and pitayas, all grown in Oaxaca.

	Rosita grew up (now known as Rosita Quevedo), ever more curious and filled with an entrepreneurial spirit, she set out for México City to buy woven cotton cloth to bring back to sell to the ladies in the market. She did well and between her mother’s chiles and her woven fabric, the family prospered.
	On one of these journeys to the capital in the 1920s, Rosita was introduced, by a friend, to a jeweler who thought she had what it takes to sell jewelry. She was smart, she was pretty and not at all afraid to talk with people. She returned to Oaxaca by train. This time she brought back not only cloth, but gold jewelry. And the jewelry was a hit. It didn’t take long for Rosita to weave her cotton into gold.

After a few years of going back and forth between Oaxaca and México City, she decided to open a shop devoted exclusively to jewelry– the first in Oaxaca! This she opened across from the Sagrario of the Cathedral. She baptized it ‘Joyeria Rosita’ (Rosita’s jewelry shop). After a number of years she opened her own workshop and created her own jewelry. Eventually, when construction was completed, she moved her store to the hotel on the main square – the only one with a telephone. There she continued to sell her wares for fifty years.

Her daughter Tere also opened a jewelry shop in Oaxaca called ‘Joyeria Tere’ which is still open, and in 1977 her grandson Alberto (who worked in his grandmother’s workshop and his mother’s store) opened his own goldsmith workshop – Oaxaca’s most celebrated retail jewelers called ‘Oro de Monte Albán’, located across from the Santo Domingo church with its gold encrusted altar. This shop, opened 21 years ago, actually sells art created in gold. The finest craftsmanship reproduces the magnificent ancient pieces found at the archeological site of Monte Albán. The workshop is open to the public and is quite a thing to behold. Utilizing the lost wax method and working the intricate detail by hand, Oro de Monte Albán creates stunning pieces that will be found nowhere else. These goldsmiths, many who worked for Rosita ‘in the old days’, carry on a proud tradition handed down through the generations.

From chiles sold across from Nuestra Señora de La Merced to jewelry sold across from Santo Domingo, Oaxaca’s history is woven in gold.

VISIT THE VILLAGE ARTISANS No trip to Oaxaca is complete without some time spent exploring a few of the region’s fascinating villages, and wandering through several of the area’s exotic native markets. Within a 50-kilometer (30 miles) radius of Oaxaca City are dozens of small towns, many of which specialize in a particular art tradition. Often combining ancient and modern techniques, most of the region’s voluminous output comes from families that have spent generations becoming known for a particular item.

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