Ensenada’s treasures

THE border crossed, the tangle of Tijuana behind you, you sweep south along a pretty coastal road, passing signs in Spanish, others in English, still feeling in that twilit realm where cultures collide on uneasy terms. Then from a height, a broad bay appears, rimmed by this palm-fringed city. You descend to a boulevard in traffic, past a tall green Dos Equis beer sign, to a rutted parking lot a few steps from the harbor. Turning off the engine, you step out into soft Pacific air and enter a small, one-story art center, painted orange with blue trim. Moments later you are standing in the Galeria Perez Meillon, surrounded by hand-crafted pottery, baskets, jewelry and masks of exceptional beauty, the scent of willow bark filling your nostrils.

Mention the Baja California town of Ensenada and it’s a good bet that the first word that leaps to mind won’t be art. This semi-languid Mexican coastal city of about 250,000 people, an hour and change south of Tijuana, is about sport fishing, cruise ships, RVs, off-road motor racing and tequila sunrises. A walk down the low-slung main drag of Avenida Lopez Mateos at happy hour among the vendors of cheap huaraches, sombreros, blankets, naughty T-shirts and Viagra at 30% off suggests preoccupations that fall somewhat shy of culture. If, in fact, Ensenada is a town with a true history predating all this -- the Manila galleons used to take shelter here, and indigenous tribes have long populated the area -- these days the conversation pouring from the cantinas and restaurants tends to be between Corona and Bud Light.

Yet over the years Ensenada has quietly become a key contact point for the work of the region’s artisans and mainland Mexico’s bottomless fount of folk crafts. Considering that Mexico is generally regarded, along with the Indian subcontinent, as the world’s richest source of hand-crafted arts, this is saying quite a lot. But paradox is not uncommon in a less orderly culture, and in this sporty town of budget sybaritism (“Full Swedish Body Massage for $40,” reads one flier), where the Baja 500 kicks up dust every year and the blaring horns of massive cruise ships drown out the mariachis’ keening laments, artistic revelation awaits the visitor willing to look beneath the surface.

Beautiful ceramics, basketry, lacquerware, woodwork, silver jewelry, textiles and other crafts from Baja, nearby Chihuahua and the great classic regions of central and southern Mexico -- Michoacan, Guanajuato, Oaxaca, Chiapas -- can be found in select Ensenada galleries and shops. These handmade goods, many of them quite inexpensive, lend uncommon beauty, depth and sensuality to the lives of those fortunate enough to have them.

THE Galeria Perez Meillon, low and narrow, with just enough room to move about, at first glance seems a modest enterprise, but as so often in Mexico, humble appearances may deceive. The exquisite objects filling the shelves are gathered mainly from villages in the Baja region and northern Chihuahua. They seem to erase the line between store and exhibition space.

With the arrival of owner Adalberto Perez Meillon, things quickly become clearer. An affable, informed man somewhere in early middle age, Perez Meillon tells how his gallery came about. Like so many dealers in fine art and crafts, the work surrounding him mirrors a personal obsession.

After completing his education, he received a government grant to go to the poor Casas Grandes region in the mountains of northern Chihuahua to promote change -- economic, social and ecological. “What I found there was so rich culturally, it changed me instead,” Perez Meillon says. “I visited archeological sites, met indigenous artists in the villages. They inspired me to do something with this art.”

After working as a teacher, Perez Meillon opened his gallery in 1988. Since then he has exhibited the work at American galleries and institutions such as the Southwest Museum in Los Angeles and the San Diego Museum of Man, and he sells to customers and collectors, mostly from the United States.

At the heart of Perez Meillon’s collection is pottery from the northern Chihuahua village of Mata Ortiz, home to one of Mexico’s most remarkable craft artists, ceramist Juan Quezada. Inspired by prehistoric shards he’d come upon in the region, Quezada began making pottery in the 1970s. These hand-painted, stone-burnished pots and vases, with their powerful geometric designs and lizard motifs, immediately seduce the eyes and senses.

Now scores of potters in Mata Ortiz -- indeed, entire extended families -- create these superb pieces, the best of them ending up in museum collections. Prices have soared, with some Quezada works selling for $2,500, but less intricate pottery goes for as little as $25.

The gallery sells baskets from the Baja interior, where Kumiai (also spelled Kumeyaay) women in the village of San Jose de la Zorra weave large, lidded pieces from willow branches and leaves, and smaller ones of dried, soaked juncos grass. Once made to hold pinon nuts and acorns, these shapely containers, with their cool, grayish fibers and rust tones, emit a delicious aroma when the lid is opened.

You’ll also see the work of the Paipai, who are, according to Perez Meillon, the original people of Baja. They make pit-fired pottery, covering the clay with wood and dung, the black marks visible where the pots touch each other. The near-extinct Kiliwa people’s seed jewelry is sold here, as are the coyote-dance masks of wood and human hair from the Mayo Indians of southern Sonora and northern Sinaloa.

“These people are artists,” Perez Meillon says. “The entire village -- men and women and children -- participate.”

Do they choose the designs or does he?

“We collaborate,” he says. “Many of the designs are theirs. Some we come up with together. In olden times villagers made them for themselves, of course. Nowadays they make things mostly for the market.”

KEEN aficionados of Mexican folk art and crafts with six months on their hands could easily fill that time visiting different regions in Mexico. How rich it would be to sit with the rug weavers of Teotlitlan del Valle, outside of the city of Oaxaca, or the barefoot Mayan women who weave their incomparable shawls, blouses and skirts on back-strap looms in the misty mountains of Chiapas. Days could be spent visiting, one by one, the villages surrounding Lake Janitzio in the high mountains of Michoacan, each community devoted to a distinct craft.

A trip to the yearly crafts fair in nearby Uruapan, where artisans bring their harvest of wares, provides total immersion in all that the human hand and eye and imagination in combination can summon. What a pleasure it would be, not to mention an education, to spend days among the master ceramists of Puebla where the classic Talavera pottery is still produced; in the silver workshops in the mountain village of Taxco; in the village of Olinala in remote Guerrero state, where stunning lacquered wood boxes and chests are made.

But how many among us has six months to spare? In a stroke of good fortune, not far from Galeria Perez Meillon are several other stores, all within walking distance of one another on Avenida Lopez Mateos, which serve as portal and introduction to the artistry from the rest of the country -- classical crafts and work by the best new artisans, for whom the definition of traditional is always mutating.

A good place to begin might be either of two Arriaga de Taxco stores, eight doors apart from each other. Here you’ll find excellent examples of striking Olinala wood boxes, charming ceramic dolls from Michoacan and the classic, soulful black-on-black Oaxacan pottery. The Arriaga stores are especially strong on Taxco silver, including some silver-mounted abalone jewelry unique to the Baja region and colorful Huichol yarn art: masks, animals and huge, tour de force paintings made by these peyote people of the central deserts. There are fine Talavera bowls, plates and vases and glasswork from Jalisco.

A few blocks down Avenida Lopez Mateos, a cornucopia of high-quality folk arts and crafts awaits at Bazar Casa Ramirez. Oaxacan tinwork, Day of the Dead skulls and skeletons from Michoacan (including some marvelous ceramic ones) and silver, glass and wood pieces from throughout Mexico cascade from the walls, tables and shelves of this festive, crammed store.

Owners Aurora and Guillermo Ramirez exude knowledge and passion, as do their extended family and employees. Upstairs, the collection widens and deepens: Here you’ll find a room full of tin-framed mirrors from Guanajuato, another with handsome tin lamps made by generations of a San Miguel de Allende family. Beautiful Puebla Talavera pieces share shelf space with lively ceramics from the central Mexican pottery center of Dolores Hidalgo. Larger Olinala wood pieces can be found here as can clay Tree of Life extravaganzas made in Metepec, outside Mexico City. Casa Ramirez’s bilingual staff will be happy tell you the provenance of each piece, including the names of artisans.

A 15-minute walk east along Avenida Lopez Mateos will bring you to a soaring, two-story adobe building. Vast Fausto Polanco features mesquite beds and tables, couches, giant pottery jars from Dolores Hidalgo, ceramic lamps, ironwork patio furniture, woven rugs from southern Mexico, petates (straw mats), even rattan shoulder bags from Chiapas.

Crossing one of Fausto Polanco’s patios, you will come upon an entire reconstructed village store, an antique hand-carved archangel from Tlaxcala. You could furnish and decorate a sizable number of homes, indoors and out, exclusively with Mexican furniture and objects from among what is found here. Some of the old wood and metal furniture imported from the mainland is sold as-is; others receive their linseed, lacquer or chapopote (tar) finishes before coming to market.

“A glass pitcher, a straw basket, a shawl woven of rich wool.... Their beauty is inseparable from their function. Hand-crafted objects belong to a world that existed before the separation of the useful and the beautiful.”

These words by Mexico’s great poet and essayist Octavio Paz suggest that to those of us embroiled in contemporary lives -- lives in which information often stands in for experience, where history and memory are deleted daily, and what our fingers touch are as often as not a keypad, a credit card or a steering wheel -- we mourn, in ways we can’t always describe, the loss of art and sensuousness in a utilitarian world.

The more technology invades our lives, with its flood of impersonal, colorless and branded objects, the more value we find in a hand-woven Mexican cloth dyed from indigo, sea snails, cochineal, mosses or tree bark. A hand-shaped vessel discovered in a Mexican shop brings aesthetics back into our life: color, pattern, texture. Time slows down, if only for a moment, releasing us from harried, hurried lives, for it takes time to make a pot, to weave, to work a piece from silver, and the result is something that only time can deliver.

Crossing over into a land where the touch of the hand still has currency not only offers us a chance to pick up parts of our lost selves; it also sustains and advances a living culture for both maker and user.

It knits the useful and the beautiful back together.

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Tony Cohan’s newest book, “Mexican Days: Journeys Into the Heart of Mexico,” was published by Random House this spring.

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Seeking art and crafts in Ensenada? Here’s where to start

The stores listed here have bilingual staff and can arrange for shipping. It should be added that the avid hunters who have sharpened their eye at the better emporia and galleries can occasionally find a lovely piece of Dolores Hidalgo pottery, a Oaxacan throw rug or a carved woodwork item from Michoacan at a bargain price among the cheap merchandise thronging the little tiendas (shops) along Avenida Lopez Mateos.

For a little advanced study, try the book “The Miracle of Mata Ortiz: Juan Quezada and the Potters of Northern Chihuahua” by Walter P. Parks.

-- Tony Cohan

Shopping

1. Bazar Casa Ramirez: Edificio Ramirez, 496-3 Ave. Lopez Mateos; 011-52-646-178-8209; e-mail: bramirez717@hotmail.com. Brims with wonderful work. Staff can explain what you’re seeing. After a visit, refuel with a latte at the art-filled Cafe Cafe next door.

2. Origenes: 55-4 Ave. Gastelum, just off Avenida Lopez Mateos; 011-52-646-178-1080. Contemporary tables, chairs and sculptures in metal, wood and stone.

3. Arriaga de Taxco (two stores): 821 and 865 Ave. Lopez Mateos; 011-52-646-174-0704; email: sterling@telnor.net. Excellent selection from all over Mexico.

4. Fausto Polanco: Avenida Lopez Mateos and 1107 Ave. Castillo; 011-52-646-174-0336; e-mail: jmendez@faustopolanco.com.mx. Larger furnishings.

5. Galeria Perez Meillon: Centro Artesanal, 1094-40 Blvd. Costero; 011-52-646-175-7848; e-mail: adalbertopm@hotmail.com. Mata Ortiz ceramics, Paipai pottery, Kumiai willow baskets and other work from the region.

Traveling

Getting there: A tourist card is required only if you plan to stay longer than 72 hours or travel south of Ensenada. Buy Mexican car insurance at one of many spots near the border.

Coming back: Travelers can return with $400 worth of merchandise, duty free, according to the State Department. The next $1,000 in goods is subject to a duty of 10%. For restrictions, go to travel.state.gov/travel/tips/regional/regional_1174.html.