Note - This is the first in a series of my stories about the stone Carvers of Escolasticas in Central Mexico. I'm honored to say that on March 21, 2022, an edited consolidation of these stories was published in the New York Times in their section titled The World Through A Lens. I want to thank the New York Times for the opportunity to tell a worldwide audience about these wonderful people and their art. What follows is the wider view of Esolasticas and the people who live there.
The town of Escolaticas carves a dusty trail along the slope of a desert hillside, following a valley of ancient volcanic stone. It's part of what geologists call the ten-million-year-old Trans Mexican Volcanic Belt, flowing right through the center of the country. About three hours northwest of Mexico City, the town of around 2500 people is surrounded by razor harsh nopal and organ pipe cactus, and sun-scorched, short, stout desert trees like the mesquite, palo dulce, and encino. It's what Cormac McCarthy calls "No Country for Old Men".
From one end to the other, it’s about a 2.5 km (1.5 mile) drive through and around potholes, stray dogs, stray trucks, and ragged businesses hanging on to the hillside and their futures. Incredibly, almost three hundred of the men in Escolasticas are artisan stone carvers (maybe one in every family?). They are all somehow connected through a long-lost joint of historical bone and cartilage to those carvers from ancient Mexican civilizations. But astoundingly, for the most part, the rest of the world (including Mexico) doesn’t even know this place exists. I can’t even find people local to my home, San Miguel de Allende who know about it. It’s the classic conundrum wrapped in an enigma. I’ve questioned it myself. Does Escolasticas really exist, or do I just think it does? Maybe it's an illusion. Illusion is a big part of Mexico. I don't know the answer. It's that kind of space.
Mexican’s have been carving volcanic stone for thousands of years. In what would eventually become Mexico, the Olmecs became the mother culture - the first organized civilization in Mesoamerica, sometime around 3400 years ago, and they were the first from Mesoamerica to carve volcanic stone into detailed-three-dimensional human figures and animals. They also carved colossal 10-to-40-ton replicas of the heads of their leaders. The carved heads were about 11 feet tall. The Olmec civilization lasted about 1500 years, leaving no significant written record of what they did or how they did it. I have a couple of friends who would try to continue this thought by claiming the Olmecs had knowledge given to them by aliens from deep space, but that’s another story.
The Maya, Zapotec, and Teotihuacan civilizations followed the Olmec, and they certainly carved stone, but nothing close to the Olmec. 2,000 years after the Olmec, and with no knowledge of what the Olmec had accomplished, the Aztecs somehow used the same basic sculptural forms and concepts to further evolve stone carving into masterpieces that still exist in and near the ancient capital - the ruins of Tenochtitlan, on the edge of Mexico City. I don’t know, maybe it was aliens. Fine, it was aliens.
Give or take a couple of days, it’s now 500+ years or so since Cortez arrived and, with the help of the church, reinvented what would become known as the history of Mexico. I can’t find many Mexicans now who feel they owe anything to or know much about the Olmec or Aztec. For the most part, everyday Mexicans around here believe their history began with the arrival of Spain, and it flowered with the Mexican Revolution of 1910. Today, they don’t much care about the Olmec. Generally, traditional Mexicans would say they are children of The Virgen of Guadalupe first, members of a family second, Mexican’s third, and fourth, for few of them, they call themselves stone carvers. They create Cantera (the Spanish word for quarry).
I stumbled into the Escolasticas in January of 2020. Some friends needed a new carved stone column for their patio. They had heard about this town from a Mexican friend, and I went along on one of their trips. I had no idea what I was riding into. I’ve never seen an industrial landscape so consumed with small workshops, chunks of volcanic stone, Cantera sculptures, clouds of dust, and a high desert sun that screams more than it shines. It was astounding.
Over the past few decades, Escolasicas has evolved into one of Mexico’s major centers for Cantera. In the old days (75 years ago or so), there were historical haciendas and churches in the area, and they all needed stone cut and carved for architectural or security-based issues - simple stuff like walls, steps, tile, fountains, columns, etc. There was no work locally, so the men, who knew nothing about stone carving, said they knew everything about stone carving, and then they figured out how to do it, and then they figured out how to get paid to do it - a typical admirable Mexican tactic. Over the years, the quality of the carving increased as well as the art form. Today, you can buy carvings directly from the artists at their workshops, and carvings from Escolasticas are sold by distributors (buyers) all over Mexico and exported around the world. But nobody really knows who actually does the work. I want to take a closer look at this issue. Who are these people? These stone carvers from Mexico.
I started going to Escolasticas to take photographs in 2020. As a photographer and writer, I’ve never seen anything like this location. Three hundred carvers and each a story to tell. I thought I would just wander in and maybe do a story in a few days, but it’s now over a year, and I haven’t even started. With the help of an interpreter/fixer (Margo Luna), I’m gradually getting to know these folks, and they are starting to know there’s a friendly gringo in town shooting photos and handing out prints. Everywhere I go, the people are genuine and welcoming to me - it's the ultimate seduction and the baseline nature of Mexico. If you want to see the real Mexico, take a moment to look out your window as drive to the next tourist destination. Smile, wave, and say Beunos Dias. Stop and take a look. Unlike some other countries we know too well, you will be welcomed as brothers, sisters, and family.
I’m not at all certain there’s an actual desktop computer anywhere in Escolasticas. I’ve not seen any CAD drawings, no laser cutters, and no laptops. A few loose sketches here and there, a child's toy used as a model. They use different qualities of volcanic stone from different local quarries. They just pencil scratch out a basic shape on the stone, and then they go to work with electric grinding tools, hammers and chisels of different sizes, and finally, sandpaper. So...... they eyeball a 3-ton chunk of a volcano, get rid of the stone they don’t need, and in its place are "lions and tigers and bears, oh my!", a horse, a statue, an archangel, a detailed fountain, a fireplace facade, or whatever you want. I asked one carver what exactly he can make with the stone. His reply was, “I can make anything señor. What would you like today?" And you can be certain he can make it.
There isn’t a lot of other predictable “work” to do in Escolasticas. There’s a school in the area, but for many Mexican students, nobody teaches them to aspire, and locally, there is nothing to aspire to, so for too many of the students, school doesn’t really lead anywhere. The only other work is in the factories or the fields at the end of a long ride in an old torn-up bus or with other people jammed into the open bed of some beat-up pickup truck. So, a child picks up a small chisel and strikes it to a stone, older mentors teach younger students to carve, fathers teach sons, and so it goes and has gone through multiple years, and lost civilizations. These men will die young from breathing volcanic stone dust every day of their lives, and nobody will ever know their names because they never sign their art - as Mexicans, they feel they don’t deserve to. In the evening, the wind calms, and the volcanic dust created from 300 carvers drapes yet another layer over Escolasticas, and all the stories go quiet, but they don’t ever leave town.
Our world is in chaos, but here in the middle of Mexico, there’s a small town in the high desert where ten-million-year-old volcanic stone awakens, takes a deep breath, and like a Mexican monarch butterfly, emerges reborn as Cantera. But as always, the future for the artisan carvers of Escolasticas remains hidden in the stone.
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