San Martín Tilcajete

I came on a Thursday because someone at a market in Oaxaca told me the workshops were quieter mid-week, the artisans less interrupted, more likely to let you watch. The colectivo dropped me at the crossroads with a handful of other passengers, and within thirty seconds of walking into the village I had already stopped dead on the pavement. Through an open doorway, a man was painting the scales of a serpent onto a wooden figure no larger than my forearm, each scale a different color, each edged with a line so fine it seemed impossible that the brush had more than three hairs in it.

The Workshops

This is a village of carvers. Not some carvers — nearly every household. The raw material is copal, a resinous wood that splits and cracks unpredictably as it dries, which means the artisan has to work with the defects, incorporating knots and grain into the body of whatever creature is emerging. Watching the apprentices at the Jacobo y María Ángeles workshop on the road toward San Antonio, you understand that this is not craft in the souvenir sense. The geometric patterns — dots, chevrons, spirals — painted in natural pigments mixed with mezcal require three weeks of work on a single mid-sized figure. The piece dries, gets another layer, dries again. Time is part of the material. I watched a woman painting the iris of an owl’s eye for fifteen minutes without stopping, without checking her phone, without looking up. There is no shortcut that produces what they produce, and no factory that has figured out how to replicate it, which is one of the few things about the tourist economy here worth being grateful for.

The Village Between the Workshops

San Martín Tilcajete is small enough that you will walk the whole of it in an hour, and quiet enough that the sound of a chisel on copal carries across the street. There is a central plaza with the usual church and the usual plastic chairs, and a small weekend market where you can find tlayudas and tamales de rajas from a woman who has no sign and no name I ever caught. The village runs on mezcal — not as a selling point but as daily fact — and in the late afternoon the smell of copal resin drifts out of open doors and mixes with wood smoke from somebody’s kitchen fire. It is one of those places where the economy and the culture are so completely the same thing that it becomes strange to think of them as separate. The alebrijes are not a product the village happens to make. They are the organizing principle.

How to Actually Spend the Time

Go to workshops, not shops. The distinction matters: shops sell what is made for tourists; workshops sell what is made, full stop, for whoever walks in. Ask to watch if the door is open — the answer is almost always yes. If you are going to buy something, buy the piece you cannot afford rather than the piece that fits the budget, because you will think about it for years otherwise. The Jacobo y María Ángeles atelier is the most famous and worth a visit for the scale alone, but the smaller family operations on the side streets are where you are more likely to find someone mid-process, a half-finished jaguar sitting on a workbench next to someone’s lunch. Take cash. There are no card readers.

Getting There

Colectivos leave for San Martín Tilcajete from the junction near the Mercado de Abastos in Oaxaca city, or from the second-class bus terminal. The ride takes about twenty minutes and costs almost nothing. If you are combining the visit with nearby Ocotlán or Arrazola, a rental car or taxi makes more sense. There is no reason to stay overnight — the village empties out after five.