By Isla Quinn
Here’s the detail that surprises most people who assume alebrijes are an ancient Oaxacan tradition: they aren’t from Oaxaca at all, and they aren’t especially old. The style began in Mexico City in 1936, when the papier-mâché artist Pedro Linares López fell seriously ill with a fever and, according to his own account, dreamed of a strange forest full of impossible hybrid animals. When he recovered, he started building those creatures out of cartonerÃa — cardboard, paper strips, and a flour-based paste — and called them alebrijes, a word he said he heard in the dream itself. Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo discovered his work and began commissioning pieces, and Linares eventually received Mexico’s National Arts and Sciences Award in 1990, two years before his death.
The move to Oaxaca happened decades later, and it changed the material entirely. In the 1980s, filmmaker Judith Bronowski organized a workshop that brought Linares together with Oaxacan artisans, and carvers there adapted the papier-mâché style into copal wood, a soft, easily worked local timber. Manuel Jiménez, working in the village of Arrazola, is generally credited as the first to make that leap successfully, and the technique spread from him to neighboring communities.
Three villages now do most of the work: Arrazola, known for elaborate single-piece carvings and host to an annual festival celebrating the craft’s local roots; San MartÃn Tilcajete, whose reputation owes a lot to carver Isidro Cruz, who both mastered the craft and mentored others into it; and La Unión Tejalapan, which leans toward more rustic pieces finished in traditional aniline paints. Contemporary carvers like Jacobo Angeles have taken the form as far as the Smithsonian.
The craft’s popularity has created a real strain on the resource it depends on. Copal trees near Tilcajete and Arrazola have been heavily depleted by demand that’s outpaced sustainable harvesting, and reforestation efforts so far have had limited success — Mexican federal estimates suggest a significant share of alebrijes on the market today are carved from illegally sourced wood. It’s a genuine tension for a craft that supports real household income in these villages, where an average carving family might earn a few thousand dollars a year from the trade and a master carver considerably more.
Sephari doesn’t yet have sourced, checked profiles of individual Oaxacan alebrije carvers — given the wood-sourcing concerns documented in this trade, that verification matters more here than in most crafts we cover, and it’s not something we’ll rush.
Oaxaca carvers can find out what’s involved at /sell-with-sephari/