Carving a Place
Remigio Pizena brings the woodcarving traditions of Michoacan, Mexico, to southwest New Mexico.
Story and photos by Marjorie Lilly
Remigio Pizena sits using a paper cutter to make some fine details around the eyes of the wooden crucifix he's working on. His little dogs Pinky and Barbas roll around and play by his feet.
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Remigio Pizena with one of his carvings. |
"It's something from tradition, from la raza," Pizena says. He's originally from the state of Michoacan and largely learned his woodcutting technique there. Besides the cutter, he uses an axe for rough work, and a chisel that he taps with a light wooden mallet to dig out a space around the spear that jabs into the Christ figure's chest.
"Everything is done by hand," he says with satisfaction. He works in this large outbuilding for hours, often in the evening after irrigating pecan trees belonging to the owner of St. Clair Winery. In the winter he has more time to carve.
He sells his carvings mostly at the pulga, or fleamarket, on Saturday mornings in Deming. With the figures he sells, he often hands a free pot with a pecan sapling or a grapevine to the buyer, with his campesino generosity and warmth.
Although the woodcarving is a tradition from Michoacan, most of his pieces are original figures he has created out of his own imagination.
Pizena has carved a broad Indian woman who carries something like a big tub on her back. He pours water into the tub and it comes out her mouth. There are typical San Franciscos, San Antonios and Guadalupes, who have 10 charming toes ranged at the bottom of the figure. The Guadalupe has a cherub beneath her with orange glass eyes from a doll.
He has made a yoke of oxen with a cart behind them, like the ones he drove in his youth. He makes a fairly large pig that can be used as a planter.
Then there are his borrachos, the drunken men. He has made one that is almost tilting off his horse in a nighttime ramble. Another carries a human-size devil on his back. In one hand the man has a bottle held up to his mouth. Pizena unembarrassedly demonstrates how you pour water into the bottle and it comes streaming out of the borracho's wooden penis.
He's carved another man leaning up against his horse to take a leak, and when you pour water into his mouth, it again comes out his private parts. The horse's neck is bent around and its mouth is twisted. The vendor at the booth next to Pizena's at the pulga says with wry humor, "The horse is neighing."
Pizena has made a straw roof on poles about three feet high that he hopes to sell as part of a nacimiento, or creche, for Christmas. He also makes lots of planters of various shapes. And then there are the countless small burro-and-carts that are easier to sell in this nickel-and-dime border town than the larger figures that go for $60 or $70.
Some pieces are cruder than others, and some of the figures he invents are a bit awkward still, but most are loaded with the natural charm of the man who makes them. They confirm one's faith in the universality of the creative spirit.
Pizena was born in a tiny rancho with five little houses called Tamacuas, Michoacan, in the 1940s. He never went to school. "The closest school was like from here to Albuquerque–about eight hours by horse," he says, smiling. His parents spoke Tarasco, although he never did.
He and his family worked "sowing, plowing with oxen and weeding" for a middle-class rancher. They usually ate just one meal a day. "We suffered a lot of hunger. There's so much hunger in Mexico," he says sympathetically.
When he was 18 he went to work as a gardener in Mexico City. He was 20 when he learned to read–"on the streets," he says. They later went to Morelia, the capital of Michoacan. There woodcarvers sell their works on the sidewalks or in the plazas. He says rich people used to pay him just $5 a week when he had a regular job, but, oddly, he'd earn $7 a day when he worked as a day laborer. When they moved to Mazatlan he earned $10 a day from "los gringos."
Hunger wasn't so much of an issue after coming to Deming years ago to pick walnuts. It wasn't until eight years ago that Pizena and his sons got a job in irrigation. He was tickled to learn that the famous Juan Quezada of Mata Ortiz also did irrigation before becoming a full-time potter.
It was 10 years ago that Pizena started doing some serious woodcarving. "I was suffering from depression, and that took it away," he explains.
His wooden figures have helped supplement his income, along with the adobes he makes and the cucumbers and squash he grows in his garden and sells at la pulga.
For a lot of his pieces Pizena uses mesquite wood from Hatch, which he says grows to about five inches thick there. "A man from there brings it to me," he says. He usually uses screws to attach legs to a saddle or a human. But if he uses cottonwood he can make his horse and rider figures all of one wood, although it's inferior wood. "It has to be green," he says.
Lots of people put his carvings in their gardens. When he puts oil on them, he says, they last forever. Some churches in Deming have bought his cristos.
The house he rents now is really quite idyllic. It's small but there are two long outbuildings connected to it in the shape of an L. There is a long drive approaching it with cedars on one side and pecan trees on the other. "There are no neighbors all around," he says.
When I first visited him I got a talk on his carvings and a tour of the zinnias, sunflowers, cosmos and cucumbers growing around his house. I went away with a big bucket with two pecan saplings and a couple of huge cucumbers.
His wife Amalia and two of his children still live there with him, and another son Ismael is the manager of a nearby farm. All of his seven children graduated from Deming schools. Pizena is still a campesino and doesn't use the telephone, they tell me.
Pizena says people from Tucson or Phoenix come to the flea market with their families and purchase his pieces sometimes. A doctor from North Dakota has bought a lot of them, too. Some of them were sold last summer in the parking lot of the old Food Basket by a man selling vegetables there.
He remarks ironically that in Morelia it was mostly Americans who bought carvings, and here it is Mexicans who buy them. He says he has never heard of any other Michoacano making similar pieces in the US. "I've seen things made of clay, gesso, or ceramic, but they break," he says.
But he's not selling as many of the big carvings now. "It's hard in the fleamarket," he says. "Everybody's leaving." He says that, as in other businesses, there are fewer buyers now that the National Guard has almost sealed the border in the area. Some say that even Mexicans with a visa aren't coming as often. He was hardly making any large pieces in early November.
But one of his sons is bringing some of his works to a store in Las Cruces, and they are thinking of marketing some of them in Arizona, too.
As I get ready to leave the outbuilding where Pizena works, I notice something in the darkness on the floor. It is a small wooden cristo whose arms had broken off when Pizena stepped on it. He tells me it was the first piece he had ever made, carved out of the wood of a Mexican elder tree.
He was planning to throw it out, he says. I am rather alarmed that such a momentous piece could get destroyed and ask if I might have it. But he decides he will keep it himself. Maybe it will be worth something.
Marjorie Lilly writes the Borderlines column. She lives in Deming.