Release Date:- 2026-08-04
Availability:- In Stock
Kind:- ebook
This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design. Katherine Anne Porter's introduction to Mexican popular arts and crafts is both cultural study and passionate tribute, revealing a civilization whose beauty has always been inseparable from survival. She presents Mexican folk art not as a relic of the past but as a living expression of indigenous memory, resilience, and identity, shaped by centuries of adaptation under foreign pressure. To understand Mexico, Porter argues, one must first understand its native peoples and the artistic spirit they gave the nation. Moving from ancient origins to colonial transformation, she surveys Mexico's early civilizations—the Otomí, Maya, Nahoa, Toltec, Mixtec, Zapotec, and Aztec—linking their sculpture, architecture, symbols, and rituals to religion, myth, and a profound sense of mystery. She celebrates their originality in color, ornament, calendars, numerals, and design, while tracing the rise of Tenochtitlan and the violent Spanish conquest that destroyed temples yet could not erase native ingenuity. From featherwork and textiles to ceramics, metalwork, and Talavera ware, Porter shows how Spanish, Moorish, Oriental, Chinese, Persian, and Japanese influences were absorbed into something unmistakably Mexican: bold, inventive, and enduring.
