At the entrance to Hermes Arroyo’s workshop stood a collection of giant paper-and-paste figures, taller than the doorway and dolled up in finery — ready at any moment for one of the many parades and festivals held throughout the year on the cobblestone streets of this city in central Mexico.
Here, a grinning, bejeweled Day of the Dead skeleton; there, a buxom Spanish flamenco dancer wearing a polka dot dress, black lace mantilla and come-hither look. In the courtyard a few steps away, oversized brides and grooms waited for their big days.
These giant puppets, animated by the dancers who wear them, are called mojigangas (moh-he-GAHN-gahs). In other parts of Mexico, they are sometimes known by names that are variations of giant or doll.
An offshoot of Spanish traditions — the word mojiganga derives from the name for a style of farcical, burlesque theater — they have been around in the New World in one form or another for at least 250 years. Eventually, they became incorporated into many community celebrations here and elsewhere in Latin America, much like their large-scale counterparts around the globe, from the giants of Douai in France or the towering puppets at the Dussehra festivals in India.
Mr. Arroyo, 54, has been taken with mojigangas since he was a boy in San Miguel, helping out from age 7 at a workshop owned by an uncle who made statues of saints, masks and mojigangas. He uses his formal artistic training to make them pleasing and well-proportioned — what he described as “humanoid.”
“I want to fill the world with mojigangas,” Mr. Arroyo said with a big smile. The way he sees it, his creations are like the cake at a party. “A party without cake isn’t a party,” he said, “so that’s the little piece we want to add.”
His are not the only mojigangas produced in San Miguel, but they are the best known and have a signature aesthetic, according to Eduardo Berrocal López, the operations director at the Museo La Esquina, or the Corner Museum, which is devoted to Mexican folk-art toys.
“He’s a marvelous sculptor,” Mr. Berrocal said, adding that Mr. Arroyo’s mojigangas tend to be less rustic in appearance, better dressed (down to their long paper eyelashes) and more amusing than most. “Not everyone has those nice finishing touches like he has.”
A Lively Mix
To create his cast of characters, Mr. Arroyo tapped into classic Mexican archetypes as well as his own life. Frida Kahlo is in his collection, but so are representations of a bricklayer who used to work on his house and Doña Fausta, who made tortillas for the family.
In a nod to San Miguel’s large expat population, he has included gringa-looking mojigangas, some with impossibly blonde hair, bright blue eyes and, like most of his female characters, exuberantly large breasts. (He remembers getting into trouble during his Catholic school years for drawing them.)
Mr. Arroyo, his four assistants and occasional hourly helpers work out of an atelier in the city center, in a house he calls La Casa de las Mojigangas. It is where his paternal grandmother was born (the ground floor dates to the 18th century) and where he grew up as the seventh of 12 children. He and his husband, Alfredo Aguilera, live there today, and a few members of his extended family occupy apartments that have been added over the years.
A small shop to the left of the main entrance sells local crafts, many of them made in-house. Inside the main work space, the walls and benches are crammed with half-finished masks, figures of muscled lucha libre wrestlers still awaiting arms, small statues of saints, and mojiganga heads and torsos in different stages of production.
The figures are made of paper and an adhesive solution, a version of papier-mâché called cartonería that was brought to Mexico by the Spanish and still is popular in many traditional arts and crafts. The workshop buys heavy craft paper in large rolls; one can weigh as much as 180 kilograms (nearly 400 pounds).
Though he occasionally makes larger mojigangas, Mr. Arroyo’s creations typically are about 2.4 meters tall, or almost eight feet, on their own; their final heights depend on the people wearing them. And fully clothed, each one weighs 12 to 15 kilograms.
A figure starts with a rough mold, made of wadded-up paper or plastic bags, to establish the general shape of the upper body. Then comes the painstaking process of dipping scraps of paper into the adhesive and applying them, one by one, to the mold to create a sturdy outer shell. Once the shell dries for a few days, the mold is removed, the figure mounted onto a basic structure of wooden sticks and work on its features begins. From start to finish it takes about three weeks to create a mojiganga.
Mr. Arroyo mixes his own paint colors for skin, eyes and makeup, and two of his sisters sew the costumes, covering the structure’s length with long drapes of fabric. When it is ready to be worn, the mojiganga is lifted over a person’s head like a large dress, and the weight of the structure rests on the shoulders, supported by a harness made from plant fibers. Only the wearer’s lower legs and feet peek out below.
Unlike many puppets, mojigangas have no rods or strings. The dancer holds onto the frame and uses body movements to jauntily toss the character’s hair back or to swing the stuffed-cloth arms around.
Colorful History
Puppetry is an ancient art form, probably as old as theater and even storytelling, according to Kristin Haverty of UNIMA International, an acronym for Union Internationale de la Marionnette. “The desire to animate inanimate objects, I think, is a very innately human thing to do,” said Ms. Haverty, who heads the communication and public relations commission at the organization, which promotes puppetry around the world.
Part of the beauty of giant puppets, she added, is that they can draw a crowd and create a communal experience: “Whether it’s for something that’s celebratory or sad or a protest, it’s bringing people together.”
John Bell, an associate professor at the University of Connecticut and the director of the school’s Ballard Institute and Museum of Puppetry, said the size of giant puppets made everything feel topsy-turvy.
“It’s very exciting, and it changes the scale of the public environment,” he said. “All of a sudden, we’re very small. The buildings look smaller. You’re in the presence of these huge forces.”
Mexico’s history with mojigangas is not well documented. “It is clear that our tradition of the giants, of these figures, comes from Spain,” said Graciela Cruz López, a local historian and longtime friend of Mr. Arroyo’s who has researched the subject.
Migrants from Spain’s northern Basque region likely would have introduced this aspect of their culture, she added, and, as far as she knows, the earliest documented appearance of these giant figures in Mexico was in the 1700s.
In San Miguel itself, Ms. Cruz said, trade in cartonería was part of the city’s economy by the 1880 census. And by the early 20th century, several local workshops were making mojigangas and other figures out of cartonería — including, she said, representations of Judas (the disciple said to have betrayed Jesus) that would be burned. To this day, Judas figures are destroyed with firecrackers during public ceremonies at Easter.
Mr. Berrocal of Museo La Esquina said that San Miguel had some talented young mojigangueros, as the makers of mojigangas are called — including a nephew of Mr. Arroyo’s. So Mr. Arroyo “should look out because they’re going to catch up to him,” he said with a big laugh.
Abuzz with Business
For more than 30 years Mr. Arroyo has had a day job teaching art — not mojiganga making, but a regular curriculum — at a special-education public vocational school for teens and young adults in a nearby town.
Part of his work with the mojigangas is focused on supporting local culture. If a local nonprofit organization, school, church or community organization needs mojigangas for an event, he loans them free of charge (or perhaps in exchange for a plate of tamales), as a way to help keep the tradition going, he said.
On the business side, a pair of figures can be rented for about $150 per hour, which includes the services of the dancers who will wear them. They sell for about $500 each.
The workshop can disassemble, package and ship a figure to buyers from other countries — although in some cases the shipping can cost more than the mojiganga itself, noted Mr. Aguilera, Mr. Arroyo’s husband, who handles many of the business’s logistics and organizes events.
Weddings are a big source of income. San Miguel is a destination for couples from all over Mexico and abroad, so Mr. Arroyo works with more than a dozen wedding planners to incorporate an appearance by bride-and-groom mojigangas at the reception or a party.
The workshop can even craft the figures’ features to resemble the real-life couple. On a recent afternoon, Mr. Aguilera was tweaking the ears of a mojiganga bridegroom, looking down occasionally at a photo of the real groom-to-be that was displayed on his phone.
Wedding mojigangas are usually rentals, but sometimes the couple will like them so much that they buy them, Mr. Arroyo said. “Once they separate, they burn them,” he added with a wickedly gleeful laugh.
Mr. Arroyo also gives individual or group classes in which visitors can spend a couple of hours in the courtyard painting and accessorizing their own mojiganga dolls, cartonería figures small enough to fit in a backpack.
One Saturday in February, Keira McCarthy was visiting San Miguel from her home in Woodbury, Long Island, N.Y., and was working on a “mini-me,” as she described it. The figure had been shaped ahead of time, based on a photograph she had sent of herself in an elegant black dress.
After she had painted the main surfaces, Mr. Arroyo stepped in to do the detail work, including the eyes and highlighted hair. She had him put flowers in the doll’s hair, and he added some tiny sequins to the dress.
“I just love that I got this experience with a maestro,” said Ms. McCarthy, who had paid about $120 for the lesson. She said she was thinking of giving the finished piece to her mother.
And Mr. Arroyo pronounced himself pleased with the result. “Muy sexy,” he said.
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