Tonalá

I went to Tonalá to buy one specific thing: a candleholder in blown glass that Lia had seen in a friend’s apartment in Polanco and had described to me with the specific detail that people use when they have already decided they want something. Blue-green glass, about forty centimeters tall, blown in a form that suggested it was made by someone who was improvising confidently rather than following a pattern. She described it at dinner and I said I was going to Guadalajara the following week and would look. The friend said she thought it came from Tonalá.

I found the candleholder within twenty minutes of arriving — the first blown-glass workshop I walked into had three versions of it in different sizes and colors. I then spent the next four hours in Tonalá because Tonalá is structured to make leaving impossible. Every door that is open is an invitation, and most doors are open, and behind each one is a workshop or a showroom or both, and the range of what is being made and sold is wide enough that even if you have no particular need for a large carved-wood dining table or a set of hand-painted majolica dinner plates or a rattan armchair or a blown-glass ceiling fixture, you find yourself considering all of these things seriously.

The Market

The Tonalá craft markets — held on Thursday and Sunday — are the largest of their kind in the Guadalajara metropolitan area and among the most significant in Mexico in terms of the range and quality of what is available. They operate along the main commercial street of Tonalá’s historic center and the surrounding blocks, an area of perhaps twenty or thirty square blocks that fills with vendors from the workshops of Tonalá and Tlaquepaque and increasingly from producers elsewhere in Jalisco and neighboring states.

The organization is not strict: furniture sellers mix with glassware sellers mix with textile sellers mix with street food vendors. The effect is organized disorder, which is the condition under which markets are most interesting to move through. I find markets with too much organization — items sorted by type, clear signage, regular booth spacing — aesthetically comfortable and commercially inefficient. Tonalá’s market does not have this problem. You need to walk the whole thing to understand what is there, which means you see things you were not looking for, which is how you find things you did not know you wanted.

The furniture is the most significant category in terms of volume and variety. Tonalá produces more artisanal furniture — hand-carved wood, hand-hammered wrought iron, combinations of both — than any other town in Mexico. Much of what appears in design-forward restaurants, boutique hotels, and apartments in Mexico City as “tapatío style” was made here or to here’s specifications. The aesthetic is distinctive without being rigid: heavy wood with carved detail, warm finishes (oil rather than lacquer), forms that draw on colonial models without slavishly reproducing them, occasional iron accents. It is furniture that belongs to a specific cultural tradition and looks like it.

The ceramics are the second significant category. Tonalá and the neighboring town of Tlaquepaque have different ceramic traditions that have influenced each other over generations: Tonalá tends toward the painterly and decorative, Tlaquepaque toward the more refined and controlled. The line between them has blurred. What is available in Tonalá ranges from mass-produced tourist ceramics to pieces by individual artists working in serious traditions.

The Blown-Glass Workshops

The blown-glass tradition of Tonalá is the thing I find most worth seeing in person, specifically because you can see it in person. Several of the workshops that produce the handmade glass — the vases, bowls, candleholders, ceiling fixtures, and sculpture that end up in galleries and design shops across Mexico and the United States — operate in buildings with open facades or internal courtyards that are accessible to anyone who walks in and expresses interest without being obnoxious about it.

The process of glass blowing at the scale these workshops operate — not small-studio artisanal production but also not industrial manufacturing — is one of the more mesmerizing things I have watched in Mexico. The gather of molten glass on the end of the iron pipe glows orange-yellow at working temperature, which is around 1,200 degrees Celsius. The blower works it through a combination of breath, rotation, and the use of various tools — a flat wooden block for shaping, iron jacks for constricting the neck, a wooden ladle for flattening the base — and the whole sequence from gather to finished piece takes a few minutes for a simple form. The glass changes color as it cools: from orange to amber to the yellow-green to the final blue-green or clear or amber, depending on the metallic oxide added to the batch.

I watched a workshop team make a series of large pendant lamps for what appeared to be a commercial order. The choreography of the team — a master blower, two assistants, the reheating station, the annealing oven for controlled cooling — was practiced enough to be nearly silent: each person knew their role in each piece, the movements minimal and efficient. The heat coming off the furnace was considerable. The master blower wore no particular protection beyond a thick cotton shirt. He had been doing this, I was told by the young man at the counter who was also the son of the master blower, since age fourteen. He was now somewhere in his late forties.

The glass that comes out of Tonalá’s workshops is in every design-conscious home in Mexico that I have visited and in many that I have not. The blown-glass ceiling fixtures — globe forms, elongated tear-drops, organic clusters — are as close to a signature aesthetic of contemporary Mexican interior design as any single object type. They are cheaper here than anywhere else you can buy them and more available. I sent Lia a photograph of a fixture I found at one workshop and she told me to buy two.

The Tapatío Aesthetic

Guadalajara — the tapatío city — has a design culture that is distinct from Mexico City’s: more directly regional in its references, more interested in craft than in conceptual art, more comfortable with ornament. Tonalá is the material expression of this aesthetic. The furniture, glass, ceramics, and textiles that come from here are not the design of people trying to appeal to a international market. They are the design of people making things for the way tapatíos live — houses with patios and high ceilings and the particular light of the Guadalajara climate, an aesthetic that has evolved over several centuries and is still evolving.

This is why the same candleholder that cost a thousand pesos in a Tonalá workshop shows up in a Condesa design shop in Mexico City for three thousand pesos with a small card explaining the artisanal process. The design shop is not wrong to stock it. But there is a pleasure in buying it where it was made, from the person who made it or the person who will sell it to a dozen local decorators before it finds its way to the capital.

Getting there: Tonalá is about 20 minutes by car or Uber from central Guadalajara (longer in traffic). The suburban bus system connects Tonalá to Tlaquepaque and to Guadalajara’s central bus station, but the connections are slow. For the market days especially, arriving by car or Uber allows you to manage purchases. The main streets close to vehicle traffic on market days (Thursday and Sunday), which makes walking easier and unloading more complicated — leave your car or Uber drop-off point a few blocks from the center.

When to go: Thursday and Sunday for the market, any day for the workshops (most workshops are open Tuesday through Sunday, closed Monday). December is the busiest period by far, when buyers from across Mexico and internationally come for Christmas inventory. January is the slowest month — fewer people, same products, easier to have time with the workshop owners. The blown-glass workshops work year-round; the light in the late afternoon when the furnaces are at full temperature and the orange glow of the glass is most dramatic is worth timing your visit to.