Taller Leñateros ~ Mexico

About Taller Leñateros, (The Woodlanders’ Workshop), is an artisan society of Mayan women and men who produce handmade paper, artists' books, silkscreen and wood block prints, pansey graphs, natural dyes, and magic spells.

Taller Leñateros is a cultural society, an alliance of Mayan and mestizo women and men, founded in 1975 by the Mexican poet Ambar Past. Among its multiple objectives are the documentation, praise and dissemination of Amerindian and popular cultural values: song, literature and plastic arts; the rescue of old and endangered techniques such as the extraction of dyes from wild plants; and generating worthwhile and decently-paid employment for women and men who have no studies, no career, no future.

Bolom Chon
ranslation and texts in English by Ambar Past with Sara Miranda and Tom Slingsby
Translation texts in Tzotzil [a dialect of Mayan still spoken] by Maria Tzu,
Rominka Vet, and Maruch Méndes Péres
Chiapas, Mexico: Taller Leñateros, 2008. Edition of 100.

8.75 x 11 x 1"; 50 pages. Woodblock prints and silk-screens. Pop-up center fold of a jaguar. Book design, typesetting, and page numbers by Ambar Past and Sara Miranda. Includes a CD audio of several versions of the song. CD tucked into a pocket at the back of the book. Edition of 100 numbered and signed, in Tzotzil-English; 50 in Tzotzil-Spanish; and 20 copies in Tzotzil-Japanese (a world’s first).

Taller Leñateros: "Bolom Chon has seventy pages of surprising graphics inspired in ancient myth, Mexican carnival masks and original block prints created by contemporary Mayan artists. The hands and warm hearts of artisans have brought this story to life.

"A mythical Bolom Chon danced across the handmade paper cover: his foot prints remain as a testimony of the eternal presence of the jaguar in Mayan culture. The endpapers of the book are made from agave fiber and decorate like the tiger costumes of Tzotzil ritual dancers. Inside the book we discover jaguars among the stars, masks that roar, tissue paper butterflies, yellow woolly sheep and all kinds of images that evoke the colors, the form, and the legend of our magical protagonist. Mayan music transports the reader to the Highlands of Chiapas where the Bolom Chon dances in the Fiesta; perhaps you will find that the beating of your heart matches the step of the children who dance on the face of the Earth to the sound of harps, flutes and drums. ...

"This book and CD were created during a book arts workshop for Mayan men and women generously funded by the Danele Agostino Foundation and Libros Prehipanicos A.C. This book was inspired in the canto Tzotzil Maya, the stomp of dancing feet, the masks and bright colors of the fiesta of the Jaguar, the warm hands and hearts of the book artisans who brought it to life during the first days of 2008, in the shadow of the green avocado tree that covers Taller Leñateros.

"Bolom Chon is the title of an ancient song of the Tzotzil Maya who live in the Highlands of Chiapas in Southern Mexico, but… what is the Bolom Chon? We asked this question of a number of Mayan friends and got a lot of different answers…'The Bolom Chon is a velvet ant' said a little boy named Lol. Petul responded that it’s a jaguar like those that still live in the Lacandon jungle, and its spotted skin looks like a starry night. For Loxa the Bolom Chon is a Tiger Snake; Xpetra thinks the Bolom Chon represents all the Animal Kingdom: tigers, deer, coyotes and possums. A man who plays the harp told us the Bolom Chon is a Dancing Tiger. But grandmother Maria Tzu insists that the Bolom Chon doesn’t mean anything at all, it is just the name of a song the Fathermothers made up when the world was created so people could have fun at the Fiesta, stomping their feet on the surface of the Earth. After listening to our friends and having heard the song over and over again we concluded that the Bolom Chon is a magical being that lives in the imagination of people in all the corners of the Universe. Wherever there are tracks, spots, paws, and tails there is the Bolom Chon."

$250 Limited Edition of 100 (with woodblock and silkscreen prints)
$50 Offset edition

Portable Mayan Altar:
Pocket Books of Mayan Spells
Translated from Tzotzil to English by Ambar Past
San Cristóbal de Las Casas, México: Taller Leñateros, 2007. Edition of 100.

4.25 x 3 x 9" house-shaped box contains three books, package of candles, two candleholders, and an incense burner. Books: 2.5 x 4" with black paper covered boards. Gilt edges. Ribbon page markers. Handmade paper pastedowns.

Designed in the form of a traditional Mayan house, the paper case holds the altar and its accessories: candles, candleholders, incense and burner — plus instructions for casting the spell.

The three books - Hex to Kill the Unfaithful Man, Mayan Love Charms, and Magic for a Long Life - are excerpted from Incantations (Taller Leñateros, 2005).
$50

Incantations
By Mayan Women
Chiapas, Mexico: Taller Leñateros, 2005.

10.5 x 10.75 x 2.5"; 29 pages. Recycled and handmade paper with silk-screened illustrations. Front cover is a three-dimensional rendering of the face of Kaxail, Mayan goddess of the wilderness, in recycled cardboard mixed with corn silk and coffee. The bas-relief mask has incised open eyes. Housed in a protective case lined with handmade paper.

Taller Leñateros: "Anthology of Mayan women’s magic spells accompanied by 70 pages of original silkscreen art by Mayan painters.150 Mayan women worked for over 30 years to create this treasure."

Incantations contains spells and hymns tape-recorded by the women and by Ms. Past, who transcribed and translated them from Tzotzil into Spanish and English.

Dinita Smith, The Poetic Hearts of Mayan Women Writ Large [New York Times Review]: "The Mayan women of the Chiapas highlands in southern Mexico are extremely poor, and many, especially the older women, are illiterate. The poorest own only a few blankets, articles of clothing and utensils. But what they do have is poetry, much to the surprise of Ambar Past, an American-born Mexican poet who first encountered the Mayan women 30 years ago.

"Ms. Past, 55, came to Chiapas in 1973 as a self-described hippie and renegade housewife, escaping an unhappy marriage. She stayed with some Mayan women and taught herself Tzotzil, one of the local Mayan languages.

"As she listened to the women, Ms. Past said she realized that they sometimes spoke in poetry, in couplets and in gleaming metaphors. 'I was so deeply moved hearing in these mud huts these breathtakingly beautiful verses, sometimes echoing verses and phrases spoken or written 500 years ago,' she said…. 'They live with no comfort,' Ms. Past said during a visit to New York in April. 'Yet poetry is an essential part of their daily life.'

"Now after 30 years' work, 150 Mayan women from Taller Leñateros (Woodlanders' Workshop), a paper- and book-making collective founded by Ms. Past in 1975 in the Chiapas city San Crist?bal de las Casas, have produced what may be the first book of Mayan women's poetry created almost entirely by them, and translated into English. ...

"Robert M. Laughlin, a curator of Mesoamerican and Caribbean ethnology at the Smithsonian Institution who has published two Tzotzil dictionaries, said of Incantations: 'There is very little publication about Mayan women's lives in their own language, and this gives a whole view of the culture that's been unknown before.' (Mayan men in Chiapas also incorporate poetry into some of their formal and religious discourse, but that group has been well studied, Mr. Laughlin said.)

"The Olmec and the Maya were among the first literate societies in the Western Hemisphere. Evidence of Mayan writing goes back to the first century A.D. Murals and ceramics from the height of Mayan civilization, A.D. 600 to 900, depict male scribes holding pens and brushes, making Incantations even more significant....

"One reason Incantations took so long to create, said Ms. Past … is that some incantations last for days. She transcribed hundreds of hours of tape, from which she culled essential verses. In fabricating Incantations, the women soaked recycled paper with palm fronds, making a pulp in a blender, dyeing it black with soot and campeachy wood. Mayan men helped with the offset printing."
$130