2023-12-23 05:22:02
ACOLMAN, Mexico (AP) — To the rhythm of an infectious northern Mexican song, a woman cuts hundreds of colored papers that she stacks on a table.
“My fingers already have the measure,” laughs María de Lourdes Ortiz Zacarías, 49, regarding the skill she developed since she was a child, following in the footsteps of her grandfather and mother, to make one of the most popular crafts in Christmas festivities: piñatas.
This striking cardboard sphere, decorated with colored paper, is as much a protagonist of the December holidays in Mexico as the Christmas tree or births.
It is shaped like a seven-pointed star in its traditional version, but it has varied over the years in an overflow of creativity and can be found with the figure of cartoon characters and even politicians.
The most common ones now have a cardboard heart, covered with newspaper and paste (flour with water), and are usually filled with fruits, candies and local sweets, although you can still find some made as they always were, with a clay pot. to which the seven peaks were placed.
It is loaded with symbolism. The bright colors represent superfluous pleasures, while the seven peaks symbolize the seven deadly sins that are destroyed with the help of a stick.
To the rhythm of “Go, go, go, don’t lose your sense, because if you lose it, you lose your way. I already gave it one, I already gave it two, I already gave it three and your time is up”, Mexicans attack the piñata in popular celebrations known as the “posadas”, which are celebrated during the nine days prior to Christmas Eve and recreate the Joseph and Mary’s search for shelter before giving birth to the Baby Jesus on December 25.
It survives its four centuries of tradition through the hundreds of artisans who still make them and the passion that Mexicans feel for their customs, according to the director of the Museum of Popular Art, Walther Boelsterly.
Also thanks to families who have passed the legacy from generation to generation like that of Ortiz Zacarías.
In other Latin American countries such as Argentina, Colombia, Chile, Peru, Puerto Rico or Venezuela they are associated with children’s parties or with the celebration of the New Year in China. But in Mexico they even appear in research on pre-Hispanic peoples.
In a publication from the Autonomous University of the State of Mexico – “The piñata as an evangelizing instrument of our ancestors”, from May 2019 -, it is said that the indigenous people had a ceremonial game in which they broke a clay pot full of cocoa seeds The game was copied by Catholic religious who changed the pots for piñatas similar to those implemented by Marco Polo in central Europe, following his travels through China.
“This was the meeting of two worlds,” confirms the director of the Museum of Popular Art. “The piñata and the festivity were used as part of the catechesis tool to be able to convert the natives of Mesoamerica to the Catholic religion,” explains Boelsterly.
In the chronicles of the friar Juan de Grijalva, compiled in the historical archives of the Augustinians, it is mentioned that the origin of this Christmas festivity falls on the 16th century when the religious of a convent in the town of Acolman, on the outskirts of the Mexican capital , received permission from Pope Sixtus V to do the “aguinaldo masses.”
María de Lourdes Ortiz Zacarías lives in Acolman and, although her family’s history with piñatas does not go back that far, the more than four decades that they have been dedicated to creating them by hand earned the clan’s grandmother the nickname “the queen of the piñatas.” And today it is a job from which four families live and for which they work twelve months of the year.
Romana Zacarías Camacho, the family matriarch who has died today, found in that artisan work a livelihood to support four children and compensate for the death of her father. The tradition was passed on to her daughter and, now, her grandson is convinced to maintain the legacy.
“It is a family tradition that has a lot of sentimental value for me,” boasts Jairo Alberto Hernández Ortiz. It is the “legacy that my parents and grandparents left me.”
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