This article is part of our Design special section about buildings, objects and techniques that are fighting to stay alive.
María Mateo first started working with clay 64 years ago, at age 7, helping her grandmother mold domed water jugs, called cántaros, and watching her burnish their surfaces with dark, smooth stones.
The work was painstaking but meditative. “Whatever problems you have, when you sit down in the workshop, all of that falls away,” Ms. Mateo said on a rain-drenched January afternoon, seated in the clapboard kitchen of her home in Patamban, a highland village in the western Mexican state of Michoacán.
Pottery making also allowed her to support her three young daughters after her husband’s untimely death in 1993 — a lifeline in a place that, at the time, still relied on a communal well for water and a rough dirt road to reach the nearest town.
Two years ago, when Ms. Mateo’s middle child fell on hard times, her mother encouraged her to turn to their village’s ancestral trade. But by then things had changed.
Large-scale monocultures — of avocados, which proliferated around Patamban in the early 2010s; then, since 2019, strawberries — had radically transformed the village’s landscape, economy and culture. Young people, like Ms. Mateo’s daughter, sought weekly salaries, luring them away from family workshops and into the fields. As the 77-year-old potter Audelia Molina put it: “In earthenware, there’s always risk; something might break or come out badly. But in the fields, the money comes out clean.”
At the same time, the valuable crops that now offer steady incomes for many of Patamban’s households have attracted violence, perpetrated by criminal groups that, in Michoacán and across Mexico, go wherever there are businesses to extort and hills to hide in. Though national statistics have shown a significant drop in violent crime over the last two years, people in Patamban, as in much of the country, say they feel less safe than ever.
These pressures, many of Patamban’s artisans fear, are bringing an ancient vocation, treated for many decades as a dying discipline, to the brink of disappearance.
Built over fertile, clay-rich soil and fringed by the truncated cones of extinct volcanoes, Patamban, within the territory of the pre-Hispanic Purépecha empire, has produced earthenware for at least a millennium. From the 16th century onward, Indigenous potters combined local practices with European decorative motifs and technologies like lead-based glazes to create the curvaceous pots and casseroles, snub-nosed cántaros and luminous, emerald-green tableware that they’ve sold for generations.
Early 20th-century cultural elites exulted crafts as emblems of the mestizaje, the ethnic and cultural blend between Europe and Mesoamerica that undergirded the nationalist project of Mexico’s Revolution (1910-1920). Yet artisans themselves, many Indigenous, subsisted at society’s margins. Then, as now, “mud was dirty, it was poor,” said Frida Calderón Bony, an anthropologist at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, who grew up in Patamban. Some migrants to the United States, Dr. Calderón said, “will say they’re proud that, thanks to them, their mothers don’t have to cover themselves in mud anymore.”
State support for crafts expanded in the 1950s, with workshops, fairs and competitions that were ultimately consolidated two decades later under the National Fund for the Development of Arts and Crafts. Dr. Calderón’s father, Ricardo Calderón Aguilera, moved to Patamban in 1974 with a government grant to introduce new forms through plaster molds. (The cooperative school and workshop for high-temperature ceramics that he helped start in the 1980s still operates out of the family home near Patamban’s central plaza.) Such institutions and programs emerged from a longstanding conviction that craft was going to disappear, he said, “but no — and the proof is that it’s still here.”
Nevertheless, global forces took their toll. In the 1980s, large-scale migration fractured family workshops while the passage of NAFTA in 1993 flooded the market with imported plastic and aluminum, sinking demand for household ceramics.
Starting in 2006, the United States and Mexican governments collaborated to depose criminal kingpins, a policy, launched in Michoacán, that generated brutal turf wars and splinter groups. (That approach continues, most recently with the Mexican army’s Feb. 22 assassination of one of the country’s most powerful cartel leaders based in nearby Jalisco, which has triggered violence against government forces.) The ensuing security crisis hit Michoacán especially hard, stanching the slow trickle of tourist dollars that flowed into craft villages, though statewide fairs still attract crowds.
But none of those challenges compared to those created by the recent agricultural boom, many of Patamban’s artisans insisted. Avocado growers have fenced off their land, limiting, though not entirely eliminating, access to firewood that ceramists use for kilns. Criminal groups have set up encampments in the hills, leading in the last few years to kidnappings, executions and, in 2024, a bloody confrontation with the National Guard in Patamban’s main square.
These dangers are largely undetectable to casual visitors — Patamban remains charming, its artisans’ homes open to travelers — even as they have reshaped the rhythms of daily life. “Until four years ago I would be up every morning at six to take my father’s animals out into the country,” said Francisca Agustín Cristóbal, 60, a potter. Criminals, Ms. Agustin said, “used to steal animals. Now they steal people.”
In Tarecuato, 14 miles west of Patamban along a pockmarked road fringed with elliptical polyethylene vaults that protect strawberry crops from rain, hail, heat and frost, avocado farmers have fenced off the best quarry for charanda, the iron-rich clay used as a slip on Patamban’s cántaros. “They’ve taken it over as private property and there’s nothing you can do,” said María de Jesús Govea Mateo, a vendor in Tarecuato’s busy Sunday market. Going into the hills to find new sources is simply too dangerous.
The shape of regional commerce has changed, as well. Today, only one merchant from Tarecuato still manages to bring charanda to Patamban’s Thursday market, usually leaving by noon to avoid trouble on the road home. Production of cántaros, already fading, has become increasingly rare.
In the ceramic-making town of Huáncito, “people used to come from Patamban and other villages to sell things,” during festival days, said Agripina Espicio Felipe, 37, an artisan from the village’s most prominent craft family. But now, she said, criminal gangs “steal their money, or charge a percentage, so fewer people come.”
Three years ago, those same groups abducted one of Ms. Espicio’s nine siblings, a talented young artisan in his own right, she said. She has not seen him since.
Cash crops, though, have brought more than just fear and violence. Rosario Castillo, who manages a pair of seven-and-a-half-acre strawberry parcels, started picking berries in Tangancícuaro, a city 11 miles northeast of Patamban, after her husband abandoned her with three young children about 16 years ago. Now, 26 people work under her during the harvest, half of them women. Others have opened food stalls for field workers, a previously unheard-of form of female-led entrepreneurship. “To go into the fields is to go into the world,” Ms. Castillo said. “This work is freedom.”
For some artisans, the choice between the fields and earthenware is a false binary. Belén Ayungua Aguilar, 23, a granddaughter of Neftalí Ayungua Suárez, Patamban’s best-known artisan, started working on the parcels managed by Ms. Castillo during the pandemic to keep the family workshop afloat. She still spends mornings in the fields but returns home most afternoons to apply delicate white-clay cross hatching to the pale red bulbs of vases and pitchers — the technique, called petatillo, for which her grandfather, who died in 2021, became famous among aficionados of Mexican craft.
In time, she hopes “for the studio to be what it was when my grandfather was alive,” she said, “to teach more people and set a fair price for our work.”
Rosa Imelda Méndez Álvarez, 41, grew up as an apprentice in Mr. Ayungua’s studio. In the last 12 years, since striking out on her own, Ms. Méndez and her husband, Daniel Molina Ventura, 44, have built an atelier that employs eight family members. Ms. Méndez credits the decorative petatillo ceramics that she learned to make as a child with lifting her family out of poverty; Mr. Molina, who spends mornings at an avocado orchard, said he overcame a decade of alcoholism by learning how to paint. Their daughter Lupita, 13, plans to continue the family trade.
Despite her success, Ms. Méndez echoed the narrative of decline passed down over a century. Ceramics in Patamban, she said, are “going to end because people don’t work like they used to.”
Her husband is more sanguine. “If earthenware is ending, that’s because people want to keep making pots and casseroles when enamelware and plastics have taken over the market,” he said. “The trick is adaptation, evolution.” His own family is proof. Decline has never been inevitable, but transformation is.
Like strawberries and avocados, earthenware is, at least in part, a hedge against hardship. “In the end, people use the land to survive,” Ms. Castillo said. “That’s how it’s always been.”
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