Page:Face to Face With the Mexicans.djvu/407

Rh life are these imitations, even the tiniest wax figures not more than an inch in length, representing venders of vegetables, fruits, or other commodity. But to me the most wonderful are the productions of the Guadalajara Indians in clay and glazed pottery. Of the latter, their pitchers, vases, water-jugs, animals and toys of all sorts are beautiful, while in the former an extraordinary artistic conception is evinced. In an incredibly short space of time they will model for you a life-like bust, either from the life or from a photograph. The strength of expression and fidelity to the subject are remarkable.

Their plumaje (feather-work) is delicate and artistic. Cortez and his men were much interested in the cloth woven of feathers, so intricate, multicolored and beautiful. They no longer manufacture feather cloth, but expend their skill in this line in the representation on cards of all kinds of animals, birds and landscapes.

On feast-days these ingenious people have their stalls on the Zocalo, with their street agents, and business is animated. Each one of these days finds still another variety of toys, and some of them are indeed laughable. For the 1st of November they have cross-bones and skulls, funeral processions (calaveras in wood), and death's-heads in imitation bronze, with glaring eyeballs and grinning teeth. All these are arranged on a miniature table, with a small bottle for pulque, and on one corner a cake or piece of bread of the kind the dead may be supposed to like.

Their rag figures and dolls are a comical invention. They make baskets with taste and ingenuity, from the size of a thimble to one or more yards in height. They excel in frescoing. They manipulate tissue-paper into decorative forms, and in numberless ways display aptness and imitative skill.

In brief, these productions of their natural ingenuity would require, in other countries, years of patient toil and study, if they could even then be reproduced. But I have been told that any attempt to educate them in their peculiar branches of art would be the means of losing their entire knowledge. This wonderful skill is purely the result of an artistic tendency—a faculty handed down from his ancestors.