In Mexico, the Mata Ortiz potters keep tradition alive
Most versions of the Mata Ortiz pottery pilgrimage, including the original one, start with a small store in a Southwest town. Ours was no different.
In Sedona, Ariz., and later Santa Fe, we stumbled upon bright, intricate pots in oranges, browns and blacks adorned with cranes, doves and pheasants. Small worlds carved into and painted upon fired clay.
We were hooked. On what, we knew not. My wife, Mica, and I bought a few pieces and started reading. The more we read, the closer we were drawn to a small village bearing an obscure general’s name in Chihuahua, a dry, northern Mexican state with a bloody history dating back to Pancho Villa and the Mexican Revolution in the early 20th century.
This is a story about searchers: One man, Juan Quezada, a woodcutter who walked the hills with his eyes fixed on the ground looking for pottery shards, then perfected a method of making pots of his own.
And another man, Spencer MacCallum, who came across some of those early pots in a New Mexico junk shop and traced them to the source, setting in motion events that would transform hundreds of lives, including his own.
I guess in a small way it’s about searchers like us, bumbling into Quezada’s century-old shop/store/ home in Mata Ortiz in January 2020, when the pandemic was just a warning bell clanging faintly in the distance. We had come brimming with questions, which we unpacked before his wife, Guillermina.
She recalled the day, more than 40 years ago, when a local kid came knocking on her door with a White man – MacCallum – in tow. The man had brought some pottery with him.
“‘I want to find whoever made these,’ ” she remembers him telling her in Spanish.
“Mi esposo,” she replied. My husband.
Juan Quezada’s voice is deep and gravelly. His hands are gnarled, thick and sturdy. At 81, he’s hard of hearing, and the threads of conversation occasionally seem to slip from his grasp. But he is proud and patient and gracious, and when we asked him to spin his stories and show us the origins of his work, he readily agreed. We climbed into a four-wheel-drive vehicle for a harrowing trip on crude, rocky roads into the hills, where he finds his clay deposits.
On the way, I asked him to flesh out what I had read: how, as a young man, six decades before, he had come across old pottery sherds while gathering wood in the hills.
No one made such pots anymore, and he began to wonder how these longgone wanderers had done it. They had left behind no clues – only the ruins of a onetime thriving city in Casas Grandes, about 20 minutes from Mata Ortiz.
“I was always looking for stuff,” Quezada said in Spanish. “I loved the old things.”
In an abandoned cave, he found an old pot, miraculously intact.
“I took it in my hands,” he said, “and it came to my
mind to make its equal.”
From then came a years-long process of trial and error: finding clay, learning how to fire it, experimenting with various animal hairs and plant fibers for paintbrushes.
Pot after pot broke because of impurities in the clay or flaws in the firing process, but he said he never grew frustrated.
“I kept at it,” he said. “I was not going to give up.”
Finally, a few of those early pieces held their integrity and were exchanged for some used clothing at Bob’s Swap Shop in Deming, N.M. – where MacCallum, a social anthropologist, wandered in and couldn’t get the mystery of those pots’ origins out of his mind. So he went looking for their creator.
That was 1976. In the ensuing years, MacCallum and his wife, Emi, invested their lives in creating a pottery-based economy in Mata Ortiz and introducing the work of Quezada and, ultimately, hundreds of others to dealers, collectors and galleries around the world.
Quezada’s work now sells for thousands of dollars. Other Mata Ortiz potters sell their work from anywhere from $25 to $2,500 and up, depending on their fame and the pot’s intricacy.
The village’s transformation is often referred to in media accounts as a “miracle.” Harder to divine is whether that miracle is attributable to Quezada, whose talent and tenacity resulted in the art, or MacCallum, whose unflagging energy opened a marketplace for Quezada and the rest of the village.
I put the question to Quezada’s wife as we sat in their home on our first afternoon there.
“Juan has so much talent that, one way or another, it was bound to come out,” Guillermina said. “But thank God for Spencer.”
The MacCallums moved to Casas Grandes nearly two decades ago and became unofficial ambassadors for Mata Ortiz and its residents. They established a comprehensive website for visitors, with every detail imaginable, including their email address and phone number.
So I emailed and called