The Craft Map

Two villages in two states, two crafts separated by roughly two thousand years, and one shared problem: neither is protected, and both are widely reproduced by people who name neither village.

San Pablito, Puebla: Amate

High in the Otomí sierra of northern Puebla, San Pablito has made bark paper for close to two thousand years and is the centre of the craft. Inner bark is boiled with lime and ash, rinsed, laid in a grid and beaten with a flat stone until the fibres fuse. Until the 1960s only shamans made it and the process was secret; the paper is sacred only once a shaman has cut it in a rite. Most sheets sold today become supports for Nahua painting from Guerrero, so a full record names two places, not one.

Tenango de Doria, Hidalgo: The Embroidery

In the neighbouring state of Hidalgo, Tenango de Doria and its surrounding villages produce the embroidery that carries the town's name. It dates from 1960 and is credited to Josefina José Tavera of San Nicolás, who began it during a drought. Designs are drawn freehand and filled in flat blocks of colour with the outline left bare. It has never been trademarked, is classified as folk art under Mexican law, and has been used without credit by international fashion houses. The maker's name is the only provenance that exists.

Guerrero

Several hundred kilometres south, and on this map because most San Pablito paper does not stay in Puebla. Nahua painters in the Alto Balsas villages of Guerrero buy the sheets and paint them, and the result is what the market calls amate: a painting on Otomí paper by a Nahua hand. Two states, two peoples, two crafts in one object, and a label that usually names neither.

Pahuatlán

The larger town below San Pablito, on the road in, and the place the first tenangos were sold before the embroidery had a market of its own. It is the commercial hinge for both crafts, the point where paper and cloth leave the sierra, and the reason a piece can carry a town name that is not the village it was actually made in.

Also on the Map

The jonote and fig trees the paper is stripped from, whose bark is the limiting material and whose harvesting is now a live question in the villages. Which village, and then whose hands: on this map the second question has an answer and is almost never printed on the label.

A Paper That Survived Being Banned

Bark paper was made across Mesoamerica before the conquest and was suppressed afterwards, because it was the material of ritual and of records the church wanted gone. It survived in the Otomí sierra, in the mountain village of San Pablito in northern Puebla, where it has been made for something close to two thousand years. The method is simple and physically hard: inner bark is stripped, boiled with lime and ash until the fibre softens, rinsed, laid out on a board in a grid, and beaten with a flat stone until the strips fuse into a single sheet.

Secret Until 1960

The reason it survived is that it went underground. Until the 1960s the paper was made only by shamans, who kept the process to themselves, and it existed to be cut into figures of deities for ritual use: for harvest, for rain, for banishing harm, for curing. The crucial distinction, and one a buyer should hold onto, is that the paper itself is not sacred. It becomes sacred only when a shaman cuts it as part of a rite. A sheet of amate is a material. A cut figure from a ritual is something else entirely, and the two should never be conflated in a sale.

Two Peoples, One Object

From the 1960s the paper was commercialised, and what happened next is the single most misunderstood thing about it. Nahua painters from the state of Guerrero, several hundred kilometres away, began acquiring Otomí paper and painting on it, and those paintings are what the international market calls amate. So the typical piece hanging in a gallery involves two distinct indigenous peoples: Otomí papermakers in Puebla and Nahua painters in Guerrero. The painter is usually named and the papermaker almost never is. That is a provenance failure with an obvious remedy.

Sixty Years Old, and Attributed to a Person

The embroidery has a shorter and remarkably specific history. A severe drought in the 1960s pushed Otomí households in Tenango de Doria, in Hidalgo, to look for income beyond farming. The invention is credited to Josefina José Tavera of San Nicolás, who in 1960, a single mother needing money, drew the animals and plants around her, embroidered them, and sold the results in Pahuatlán. From that the whole tenango industry follows. It is one of the very few crafts anywhere whose founder is named, dated and still discussed by the community that practises it.

What Was Actually Suppressed

It is worth being precise about the prohibition, because it explains the secrecy. Bark paper carried the codices and the ritual apparatus of pre-conquest Mesoamerica, and the colonial church treated both as idolatry to be destroyed rather than as a craft to be regulated. Papermaking did not survive because anyone tolerated it. It survived in mountains that were difficult to reach, among people who stopped telling outsiders about it, for four centuries. That is why a process that is technically simple was nonetheless a closed secret until living memory, and it is why the village's claim to it is not a marketing position.

The Patron Institution

There is no patron here at all, and that is the crux of the card. Amate answered to ritual need within the community, and the embroidery answered to a household's need for cash. Neither was ever commissioned by a court, a church or a state, which means neither acquired the protections that institutional patronage tends to bring: no guild, no registration, no legal identity. The crafts have exactly the standing their makers have been able to claim for them, which as things stand is very little.

Folk Art, Which Is a Legal Category

Because tenango embroidery was never registered with trademark authorities, it is classified as folk art under Mexican law, and folk art is not owned by anyone. That is the mechanism by which the designs have been used by international fashion houses without payment or credit. In 2019 a Carolina Herrera resort collection carried patterns that the embroiderers of Tenango de Doria recognised as their own, and the Mexican government objected publicly; the label described the use as a tribute. Hermès has been named in similar disputes. The legal position and the moral one are not the same, and this card takes the community's side of it.

Arts, Crafts and Living Ateliers

Papermaking at San Pablito is loud and rhythmic: the beating of fibre with stone against board is audible through the village, and sheets dry outdoors in the sun in ranks. The embroidery is the opposite, done seated and quietly in houses across Tenango de Doria and the surrounding settlements, usually by women, often in company, over weeks or months for a large cloth. Neither craft has a workshop in the industrial sense; both are done in the places people live.

What a Tenango Actually Is

The design is drawn first, freehand, and then filled with a flat satin-type stitch laid in solid blocks of colour with the outline left as unworked cloth, which is what gives the characteristic hard-edged, poster-like look. Figures come from the immediate world and from local imagery: deer, birds, rabbits, flowering plants, sometimes figures and scenes. A large piece is several hundred hours. The quickest quality test is the reverse, where hand embroidery shows a coherent structure of carried threads and machine work shows a backing and locked stitching. Printed imitation, which is now abundant, has no reverse structure at all and is usually given away by the perfect regularity of its outlines.

Reading Amate Before You Own It

Establish first what you are looking at, because three quite different objects share the name. A plain sheet of Otomí bark paper is a material, and a beautiful one. A painted amate is a Nahua painting on that material, and a full record should name both the painter and, if it can be discovered, the papermaking village. A cut figure is potentially ritual material, and the ethical position on acquiring those is different again; anything presented as a used ritual object deserves direct questions about how it left the community.

The Question of Who Is Credited

This card takes a position rather than describing a controversy from a distance. The papermakers of San Pablito and the embroiderers of Tenango de Doria are identifiable people in identifiable villages, and the barrier to crediting them is effort rather than possibility. A record that names the painter of an amate and not its maker, or that describes a tenango pattern as generically Mexican, is reproducing exactly the erasure that made the fashion disputes possible. Naming costs nothing, and it is the one intervention a buyer can make that changes anything at all for the people involved.

How the Paper Is Judged

Amate varies enormously and the differences are visible once pointed out. Sheet thickness and evenness show how carefully the fibre grid was laid and how thoroughly it was beaten; a well-made sheet has a consistent surface with the fibre structure legible but no thin patches. Colour depends on the bark used, and the pale and dark papers are different species rather than different treatments. Edges should be deckled and irregular, because the sheet was formed on a board rather than cut. A perfectly rectangular sheet with clean edges has been trimmed, which is not a fault but is worth knowing.

Ateliers, Villages and Artisan Encounters

San Pablito is in the mountains and is a genuine journey, and papermaking there is a working trade rather than a demonstration. Tenango de Doria and the villages around it are similarly rural, and the embroidery is done at home, which means access is by introduction rather than by arrival. Both are close enough to Mexico City to be reached in a long day and far enough that most of the market for their work has never been.

Tourwit Editions and Provenance

Tourwit works directly with papermaking families in San Pablito and embroidering households in and around Tenango de Doria rather than through intermediaries. Artisans are paid before the work begins and retain the major share of what a piece realizes. Editions are limited by what a hand can beat, draw and stitch, and each work is documented at source with its village and its maker by name, and for a painted amate with both the papermaker and the painter, so that the record travels with the object. No ritual cut figures are offered.

Why These Works Matter

These two crafts frame the central question of the whole collection more sharply than any others in it. Who owns a pattern? The law says nobody owns a tenango, which is why it can be put on a dress in New York. The community that invented it in 1960, and can name the woman who did, plainly disagrees. Owning one of these pieces means participating in that question, and the least a collector can do is know the name of the person who made it.

The Sacred Year

One of these crafts sits inside a ritual calendar and the other has none at all. It is the older one that is still tied to observance, and the tie is specific: the paper exists so that figures can be cut from it on particular occasions.

Entering Festival Time

Otomí ritual in this sierra addresses the practical business of living in mountains: rain, harvest, sickness, harm. Ceremonies are conducted by specialists, and cut paper figures representing deities and spirits are made for them, used, and disposed of according to the rite. The important point for anyone approaching this material is that these are not calendar spectacles open to visitors. They are private religious practice within a community that spent centuries concealing it for good reason.

Public Rituals and Private Worlds

Alongside that runs the Catholic year, kept in the same villages by the same people, with patronal feasts, Holy Week and the days of the dead. The two systems have coexisted for centuries without resolving into one another, and the paper belongs to the older layer while the embroidery belongs to neither. A tenango is not ceremonial dress. It was invented to be sold, and it says so honestly.

Two Systems in One Village

What makes this sierra unusual is that neither religious system has absorbed the other. A household may keep the patronal feast, observe the days of the dead, and also call on a ritual specialist when someone is ill, without experiencing any contradiction. For the crafts this matters because it explains why the paper never became a purely commercial product: the older use continued alongside the new one, in the same village, in the same families, and it continues now.

Culture in Motion

The region is known for the volador ceremony, in which men climb a tall pole and descend head-down on ropes wound around it, turning in wide circles as the rope unwinds. It is practised by several peoples in this part of Mexico and is inscribed on UNESCO's intangible heritage list. It is worth naming here because it is the same cultural world the paper belongs to: a practice that survived by being too deeply held to suppress, now performed publicly and photographed constantly.

The Year the Embroidery Actually Keeps

The tenango has no ritual calendar, and its real year is a market one: the pieces are made continuously and sold when buyers appear, through cooperatives, through intermediaries in Mexico City, and increasingly online direct from the villages. That last channel matters more than it sounds, because the whole history of this craft is a history of value accruing to whoever stands between the maker and the buyer. Every link removed from that chain is money that stays in Hidalgo.

Etiquette and Presence

Ritual is not a subject for casual enquiry in these villages, and the appropriate default is not to ask. Do not photograph cut figures in use, do not attempt to acquire ritual material, and accept that a shaman's practice is not a craft demonstration. In embroidering households the work is domestic and largely done by women; introductions matter, and a photograph of a woman at work should be asked for rather than taken.

Festivals as Lived Heritage

The relationship between calendar and object here is the sharpest in the collection and the easiest to get wrong. The paper is made for a use a buyer will never see and should not acquire; what a buyer can legitimately hold is the material, or a painting on it, or an embroidery that was made for exactly the purpose of being sold. Knowing which of those is in front of you is not connoisseurship. It is the minimum, and the distinction is not difficult once someone has said it out loud.