By Ines Keane
The forge is wood-fired, and the forests have noticed. That is one of the more sobering lines in the sources for Santa Clara del Cobre, a Michoacán town where copper is the main trade.
Wikipedia places the town in central Michoacán, 18 kilometers from Pátzcuaro and 79 kilometers from Morelia, at 2,200 meters above sea level. The municipality covers 487.98 square kilometers. In 2005 it had 38,502 residents, of whom 13,069 lived in the town itself, and the article says 82 percent were employed in copper work. The official municipality name is Salvador Escalante, in use since 1932, and the town’s name reverted to Santa Clara del Cobre in 1981. It was named a Pueblo Mágico in 2010.
Before the Spanish
The Purépecha people have dominated the area since the twelfth century, according to Wikipedia, and the article says they were the most advanced in metallurgy among the Mesoamerican cultures, making bells, jewelry and tools. A separate article on traditional copper work in Mexico lists pre-Hispanic copper objects including axes, boxes, fish hooks, knives, small bells, necklaces, bracelets and earrings, centered on what is now Michoacán and Jalisco.
Who founded it
Here the sources disagree. The town article says it was founded as Santa Clara de Acuero in 1521 by Friar Martín de Jesús, and that Vasco de Quiroga granted exclusive rights to produce cazos, large cooking vessels, and introduced new methods of smelting. It says a large forge was built in 1540 and the town was officially established in 1553. The copper-work article says the town was founded by the friar Francisco de Villafuerte, and that the attribution to Vasco de Quiroga is likely because of his own work with copper smithing. It adds that the earliest surviving records of the town’s copper work date to 1748, showing it was already well developed. We cannot settle who founded it. If the founder matters to you, ask the town’s museum.
How the work is done
The copper-work article describes the basic process as hammering, thinning, shaping, trimming, bleaching, polishing and decoration. After the Mexican Revolution, it says, smiths work with scrap copper from industrial sources. It says modern techniques could reduce the metal thinning by 70 percent but most workshops use traditional methods, and that wood-fired forges have diminished the surrounding forests by up to 70 percent. Those figures come from one article, and we have not seen the underlying study.
How many workshops?
The sources give different counts. The town article says 250 registered workshops process about 450 tons of copper a year, and that a training center, the Adolfo Best Maugard center, was established in 1976 for technical training. The copper-work article says the town is home to at least 2,000 coppersmiths working in over 300 workshops. The two may describe different years or definitions, and neither gives a date, so we are not choosing.
The museum and the fair
The Museo del Cobre houses pieces from pre-Hispanic times to the present, Wikipedia says. The National Copper Fair, the article says, is held in late August or early September, around Saint Clare’s feast day, with competitions of more than eighty prizes. The copper-work article says the fair was first held in August 1946, has been held annually since 1965, features about 250 artisans and drew over 6,000 people in 2010, with a national hammered copper contest in four categories and over 84 prizes. Wikipedia’s prize pool of about 400,000 pesos is a figure from the article and we have not checked it. Fair dates change, so look for the current announcement.
What to look for
Pick up a hammered piece and look at the surface. The hammering is part of the process the sources describe. We found no source that tells you how to tell hand-hammered from machine-made, so ask the maker to show you where the hammer marks are and how the piece was finished.
Ask what the copper was, and whether it was scrap or new. Ask what the piece was meant for. Cazos were cooking vessels, and a decorative piece and a cooking pot are not the same object. The sources do not tell us how to care for either, so ask for care instructions before you buy.
Where this fits
We follow places before products. Santa Clara del Cobre is a town where the same craft has been central for centuries, and the sources are generous with numbers and cautious with certainty. We have tried to be the same.
We are not naming a workshop, because we have not sourced one for this piece.
Roam first. Shop later.