Introducing Taller Leñateros

We are the woodlanders who walk in the hills gathering dry branches and deadwood from fallen trees, collecting firewood without chopping down the forest. We come down from the mountains, carrying bundles of wood, of pitchpine and split encino for the hearths of the Royal City of San Cristóbal de Las Casas. We walk through the mist, leading our burros, selling firewood from house to house. We knock on people's doors, offering pine needles to spread on the floor, moss, flowers of bromeliads and orchids for manger scenes. Twenty-five years ago we rented an old adobe house in San Cristóbal and we planted a little avocado tree in the patio. The sprout took root and grew and now it is as tall as the tree where the Moon showed the first Motherfathers how to weave. The house shrank under the shadow of the leaves and filled up with dreams and we called it a "Workshop...," first "...of Dreams," and then "...Woodlanders," something between theater and witchcraft. Over wood fires in the patio, big kettles are boiling full of corn husks, gladiola stems, heart of maguey, palm leaves, recycled womens' cotton huipil blouses, banana trunks, and who knows what other raw material to make paper. There are baskets full of papyrus, liana vines, lichen and moss. We beat the fibers in a mill which spins by bicycle power. We spread the paper in the Sun, and while it dries, we print poems on oak leaves and pansy petals. Our silkscreen alchemists work from Sun to Sun, from Moon to Moon, transforming natural light into bougainvillea-color images. We cut, fold, sew, glue, bind and wrap. We publish a literary magazine, a rustic codex known as "La jícara" (The Gourd), which includes translations from Native languages, testimonies, foreigners' journals, xylography, petroglyphs and odd things. And a book of spells, including one "To Live Many Years" from the book, "Calling the Fire, Maya Womens' Songs and Spells." Conjure-women sing at the foot of the avocado tree. Loxa Jiménes Lópes, Xunka' Utz' Utz' Ni and María Tzu paint amid the scent of the honeysuckle. The Woodlanders come to the door of the Workshop. They bring a load of madrone- wood to feed the fire. They bring withered flowers from the churches, and pine needles trampled in yesterday's festival. They carry rattan, lichen, banana leaves, corn husks, bridal veil, mahagua, bean pods, maguey tongues, reeds, coconut shells, gladiola stems, palm fronds, grass, papyrus, cattails, pampas grass and bamboo, along with recycled paper and old clothes; the raw material of dreams is nearly always something "useless." Ideas and images come to us in dreams. That is how it is with the Woodlanders: the Moon and the daughters of the Lightning give us dreams to light our way. We recycle our visions to turn them into art; we also reproduce the dreams of others: images from the ancient codices, from pre-Hispanic clay seals, motifs from Mayan embroidery and ceramics. The Earth also inspires us: we photocopy the fossil of the tropical leaf, the texture of a seashell. We relearn hand-printing techniques: xylography, basketography, petalography. We reinvent the unicorn so that its horn will perforate a cardboard pinhole camera, as found in 12th-century Arab documents discovered by the Chiapas alchemist Carlos Jurado, ritual master-counselor of the Woodlanders. Taller Leñateros is a cultural society, an alliance of Mayan and mestizo women and men, founded in 1975 by the Mexican poet Ambar Past. Among its objectives, we will mention the preservation and dissemination of Amerindian and popular cultural forms: song, literature and plastic arts; the rescue of old and endangered techniques such as the extraction of dyes from wild plants; and the generation of worthwhile and decently paid employment for women and men who might otherwise have no studies, no career, no future. Taller Leñateros has created a multi-ethnic space for artists and becoming-artists. We foment artistic creation among the most marginalized communities. The Woodlanders invent, teach and exercise the art of handmade paper, bookbinding, solar silkscreen, woodcuts and natural dyes. We benefit the ecosystem by recycling agricultural and industrial wastes to create crafts and objects of art and rely on the sale of artist books, postcards, posters and printed shirts for our continuing success. We cultivate a group environment in which all members of the Workshop participate in decisions, contributing ideas, solutions and work proposals to benefit the individual and the group. Although we are from different cultures and speak different languages, we are putting together a common project. We were once servants, washer women, wandering vendors and unemployed. Now we own our own business. Little by little, without subsidies or capitalist partners, pulling ourselves up by the bootstraps, we have been able to buy and constuct the minimal equipment with which we work. We have managed to construct our Workshop with our own hands. The only resource we have had, and the most valuable, has been ourselves and the ideas of the collective, our rural- indigenous folk wisdom. There are places in the highlands where every passerby adds one stone to the cairn, a testimony to her or his presence and journey. The Woodlanders say this how the mountains grow through time. Our work is our stone for the pile, our scale to weigh the years, an offering for the new millenium.