By Isla Quinn
I want to get the origin story right, because most people I talked to before this trip had it wrong, myself included until recently. Alebrijes are not an ancient Oaxacan tradition. They’re not from Oaxaca at all, originally, and they’re barely a century old. Pedro Linares López, a papier-mâché artist working in Mexico City, fell seriously ill in 1936 and, according to his own telling, dreamed of a bizarre forest full of impossible hybrid creatures while unconscious with fever. When he recovered, he began building those creatures in cartonerÃa — cardboard, paper strips, a wheat-flour paste — and gave them the name he said he’d heard in the dream itself: alebrijes. Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo found his work and started commissioning pieces, and by the time Linares received Mexico’s National Arts and Sciences Award in 1990, the form had real cultural standing, entirely apart from Oaxaca.
The move to Oaxaca happened decades later and changed almost everything about the craft except the fantastical animal subjects. In the 1980s, a workshop organized by filmmaker Judith Bronowski brought Linares together with Oaxacan artisans, and carvers there translated his papier-mâché forms into copal wood, a soft native timber suited to detailed carving. Manuel Jiménez, working in the village of Arrazola, is credited as the artisan who made that translation work, and the technique spread outward from him into neighboring villages over the following years.
I spent time in two of the three villages that now dominate the trade. Arrazola, where Jiménez started, still produces some of the most elaborate single-piece carvings I saw anywhere, and hosts an annual festival celebrating the craft’s local roots. San MartÃn Tilcajete has built its reputation substantially around one carver, Isidro Cruz, who by most accounts both mastered the technique and actively mentored other carvers into it, turning a personal skill into a village-wide trade. A third village, La Unión Tejalapan, works in a more rustic register, with traditional aniline paints rather than the intricate patterned work the other two villages are known for.
What I wasn’t prepared for was how serious the material problem has become. Copal trees near Tilcajete and Arrazola have been significantly depleted by demand that’s simply outpaced how fast the trees can be sustainably harvested, and reforestation programs I asked about have had, by most honest accounts, limited success so far. Mexican federal estimates suggest a meaningful share of alebrijes sold today come from illegally sourced wood — a genuinely uncomfortable fact for a craft that also provides real, documented household income in these villages, from a few thousand dollars a year for an average carving family up to considerably more for an established master.
I left without a confirmed list of individually verified carvers to recommend, not because the talent isn’t real — it clearly is, everywhere I looked — but because getting the wood-sourcing question right for any specific workshop is exactly the kind of verification that takes more time than a short reporting trip allows, and it’s not something Sephari will guess at.
Oaxaca carvers interested in a future profile can start at /sell-with-sephari/