Performing Craft in Mexico: Artisans, Aesthetics, and the Power of Translation

by Michele Avis Feder-Nadoff (Editor), Ronda Brulotte University of New Mexico (Afterword), Natasha Bonilla Eckholm (Contribution by), Iris Calderón Téllez (Contribution by), Janet B. Esser (Contribution by)

Overview

Performing Craft in Mexico examines how Mexican artisans and diverse actors perform as translators of aesthetics, politics, and history through the field of craft. The contributors build from historical and ethnographic archives and direct engagement with makers to reassemble an expanded vision of artisanal production and the complicated classifications that surround Mexican popular art-making—from the Anglo term “craft” to the Spanish term “artesanía.” This book also homages Dr. Janet Brody Esser’s research on the Blackmen masquerades of Michoacán, exploring African history and presence in Mexico. The contributors provide wide-ranging insight into the agency, history, and contemporary world of Mexican makers and other entangled actors in the field of craft.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781793639974
Publisher:	Lexington Books
Publication date:	08/12/2022
Pages:	330
Product dimensions:	6.18(w) x 9.36(h) x 0.97(d)

About the Author

Michele Avis Feder-Nadoff is an independent scholar, founder of Cuentos Foundation, and assistant editor of the Journal of Embodied Research.

Table of Contents

Acknowledging: The Widening Circles

Prolonging: Following Folds beyond Boundaries

Michele Avis Feder-Nadoff

An Appreciation of Dr. Janet B. Esser: From Brooklyn to Michoacán

Natasha Bonilla Eckholm

Prefacing Things: A Pondering

Michele AvisFeder-Nadoff

Chapter 1: Introducing Things: Between the Lines

Michele AvisFeder-Nadoff

PART ONE: TRANSLATING INSIDES AND OUTSIDES, MATERIALS AND GESTURES, NOMADIC AESTHETICS AND COMMUNITY

Pondering Two

Eugenio Mercado López

Chapter 2: Artisans and Crafts in Postrevolutionary Mexico

Eugenio Mercado López

Pondering Three

Amalia Ramírez Garayzar

Chapter 3: The Rebozo: The Stereotype of the Popular Mexican Woman in Nineteenth-Century Art and Onward

Amalia Ramírez Garayzar

Pondering Four

Anne W.Johnson

Chapter 4: Performative Materiality, Masks, and Masking in Teloloapan, Guerrero

Anne W.Johnson

Pondering Five

Eva Maria Garrido Izaguirre

Chapter 5: Indigenous Aesthetics and Glocalization: Recursive Agencies and Reflexivity

Eva María Garrido Izaguirre

Pondering Six

Lorena Ojeda Dávila and Iris Calderón Téllez

Chapter 6: Identity, Female Empowerment, and Resistance through Textile Crafts in the P’urhépecha Region of Mexico

Lorena Ojeda Dávila and Iris Calderón Téllez

Pondering Seven

Claudia Rocha Valverde

Chapter 7: The Triqui Huipil as a Representation of Territory: Women Immigrants between Oaxaca and San Luis Potosí

Claudia RochaValverde

PART TWO: FORTLEBEN: CALLING FORTH, LIVING FORTH

Chapter 8: Pondering Fortleben: An Interview with Janet B. Esser

Michele Avis Feder-Nadoff

Chapter 9: Selected Excerpts: Winter Ceremonial Masks of the Tarascan

Sierra, Michoacán, México

Dr. Janet B. Esser

Introduction

Michele Avis Feder-Nadoff

Chapter 10: Afterword

Ronda L. Brulotte

Chapter 11: Masks in Performance: Selected Fieldwork Photographs

Dr. Janet B. Esser

Biographical Synthesis

Dr. Janet B. Esser

Janet B. Esser Selected Bibliography

Editorial Reviews

This wonderful and powerful collection of essays celebrates the contributions of the Mexican art historian, Janet Brody Esser, and reframes Mexican artisans, craftspersons, makers—those who make the things that collectors, tourists, and everyday people use, appreciate, and even take for granted—in terms of translations and performances. The volume challenges us to rethink who the makers are and the ways things take on new meanings as they travel from their makers into faraway hands and homes and collections. Moreover, the authors, here, are critically self-conscious and self-reflective of how they study and translate these makers and their things and performances in ways that shed new light on maker creativity and agency in important political and cultural contexts.

Walter E. Little

Performing Craft in Mexico pays homage to the groundbreaking scholarship of Janet Brody Esser (1930–2019), an art historian who taught at San Diego State University and a pioneer in the study of what is loosely termed “craft," “folk art,” “ethnic art," and, in Spanish, artesanía. Attesting to Esser's scholarly legacy, the selections from Esser’s dissertation and the essays offer a comprehensible introduction to key developments in the art-historical and anthropological engagement with an art that is other in terms of production, producer, social resonance, and performative, embodied experience. Recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty and professionals/practitioners.

Choice Reviews

Performing Craft is a daring new vision of artisanal production, and its possibilities for translating meaning through time and across communities. The authors orient their investigations with the groundbreaking work of art historian Janet Esser and a mode of inquiry that links performance and crafted object. Writing both against the term ‘artesania’ and translating it creatively, the authors restore the distinctiveness of diverse Mexican makers and performers and the life projects they realize through their craft, words, and artistic commitments. Collectively these contributions offer a new vocabulary for studying the cultural force, collective purpose, and individual vision Mexican artisans make possible through their work.

Rudi Colloredo-Mansfeld

This timely volume is an important contribution to the growing literature on craft, and specifically craft in Mexico, where craft has long been enmeshed with the problems, pressures, and possibilities of nationalism, ethnicity, migration, gender, and global capitalism. Of special importance is the recognition and documentation of the African presence in Mexico. As becomes clear, craft makes worlds, and the people who make, use, imagine, and remember things crafted are the bearers of infinite repositories of knowing.

Elizabeth Chin

Michele Feder-Nadoff’s book is a remarkably diverse collection of articles, essays, and interviews about indigenous Mexican artisanry and performance. Many of the contributors are Mexican scholars whose important research has rarely been available in English. The book includes provocative discussions of complexities associated with the terms ‘artesanía’ and ‘crafts’ and an extensive examination of the life and work of Janet Brody Esser, an influential art historian who specialized in mask making and dances in Michoacán.

Michael Chibnik