This striking cardboard sphere, decorated with colored papers, is as protagonist of the December festivities in Mexico as the Christmas tree
Colored papers cut to decorate piñatas, a Christmas craft, hanging in a family business in Acolman, north of Mexico City, on Wednesday, December 13, 2023. There are endless designs, from Disney characters to political figures, but the traditional shape of the piñata is a sphere with seven spikes, like a star. Colored papers cut to decorate piñatas, a Christmas craft, hanging in a family business in Acolman, north of Mexico City, on Wednesday, December 13, 2023. There are endless designs, from Disney characters to political figures, but the traditional shape of the piñata is a sphere with seven spikes, like a star. To the rhythm of a contagious Mexican northern song, a woman cuts hundreds of colored papers that she piles on a table.
“My fingers already have the measure,” she says with a laugh, María de Lourdes Ortiz Zacarías, 49, about 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 of the Christmas festivities: the piñatas.
This striking cardboard sphere, decorated with colored papers, is as protagonist of the December festivities in Mexico as the Christmas tree or the nativity scenes.
It has the shape of 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.
María de Lourdes Ortiz Zacarías sells piñatas in her small family business in Acolman, north of Mexico City, on Wednesday, December 13, 2023. The family started with their local in Acolman, where Ortiz Zacarías’s mother was known as María de Lourdes Ortiz Zacarías sells piñatas in her small family business in Acolman, north of Mexico City, on Wednesday, December 13, 2023. The family started with their local in Acolman, where Ortiz Zacarías’s mother was known as “the queen of the piñatas” before her death.
The most common ones now have a cardboard heart, covered with newspaper and glue (flour with water), and are usually filled with fruits, candies and local sweets, although some can still be found made as they were always, with a clay pot to which the seven spikes were placed.
It is loaded with symbolism. The bright colors represent the superfluous pleasures, while the seven spikes symbolize the seven deadly sins that are destroyed with the help of a stick.
To the rhythm of “Dale, dale, dale, don’t lose your aim, because if you lose it, you lose your way. You already gave him one, you already gave him two, you already gave him three and your time is up”, the Mexicans assault the piñata in popular celebrations known as the “posadas”, which are celebrated during the nine days prior to Christmas Eve and recreate the search for shelter that Joseph and Mary did before giving birth to the Baby Jesus on December 25.
A piñata craftsman works one with the traditional shape, a sphere with seven spikes, in a small family business in Acolman, north of Mexico City, on Wednesday, December 13, 2023. This traditional craft has a religious origin and is loaded with symbolism: each cone represents one of the seven deadly sins, that is why the piñata is hit until it is destroyed as a way of getting away from those sins.
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 Zacaría
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 Chinese New Year. But in Mexico they appear even in research on pre-Hispanic peoples.
In a publication of the Autonomous University of the State of Mexico – “The piñata as an evangelizing instrument of our ancestors, from May 2019 – it is told 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 vessels for piñatas similar to those implemented by Marco Polo in central Europe, after his travels through China.
“This was the encounter 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.
Papel picado announces the piñata fair in Acolman, north of Mexico City, on Wednesday, December 13, 2023. Mexican grandparents still remember times when piñatas were made with clay pots covered with paper and filled with sugar, fruits and peanuts. But the tradition has advanced over the years and now there are piñatas of many figures.
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 in the 16th century when the religious of a convent in the town of Acolman, on the outskirts of the Mexican capital, received a permission from Pope Sixtus V to make the “Christmas masses”.
In Acolman lives María de Lourdes Ortiz Zacarías and, although the history of her family with the piñatas does not go back so far, the more than four decades that they have dedicated to creating them in an artisanal way earned the grandmother of the clan the nickname of the “queen of the piñatas”. And today it is a trade that four families live on and for which they work twelve months a year.
Romana Zacarías Camacho, the family matriarch who died today, found in this artisan work a livelihood to support four children and fill the death of her father. The tradition passed 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,” says Jairo Alberto Hernández Ortiz. It is the “legacy that my parents and grandparents left me”.
Source: Diario las Americas
