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 Crafting Identity:
Alebrijes and the Modern Self
Jessica Voigt

It is commonplace to hear expressions like whittling away a problem, carving out an

idea, cutting against the grain, and carving a place for oneself, but what does it mean to use

the language of carving to understand other aspects of human endeavor and thought? In

what ways does carving provide analogies for the ways in which individuals come to

understand and negotiate the world in which they live? Can artistic play transform

everyday reality (Bronner 1986, 95)?

One morning in 1950, Pedro Linares Lopez awoke from a fever-induced dream with

a revelation that would alter his destiny. During his long illness, Linares dreamt of a

faraway place filled with trees, animals, and rocks. The animals were unidentifiable,

strange creatures: a donkey with wings, a rooster with bull horns, and a lion with a dog s

head. All of these creatures yelled: ¡Alebrijes! ¡Alebrijes! ¡Alebrijes! Meanwhile, in the

waking world, Pedro s family began preparing for his funeral. The traditional medicines

and herbs used to treat high fevers proved no match for Pedro s illness. Still navigating the

dream-world filled with strange, shouting creatures, Linares encountered a man who

pointed to an escape: a small window through which Pedro climbed. Reemerging in the

waking world, Pedro opened his eyes to witness his own funeral in progress. Much to the

surprise of his family and community, Pedro fully recovered from his illness, though he

never escaped his nightmare visions. Upon recovery, Linares began to craft the creatures
from his dream-vision thereby inventing an art form that would change the lives of

thousands of Mexicans (Bercovitch, 2000).

)n the 9 s, the newly constructed Pan-American highway connected the

previously remote southern state of Oaxaca, Mexico to more populous areas in the north

and created, for the first time, an influx of tourists from the United States. With tourism

came money and the rise of new potentials for individuals living in Oaxaca. Money has

been the great accelerator of change in the Oaxaca valley: money from the state, money

from the tourist industry and money from the mojado, the illegal worker in the United

States Barbash 99 , . By the 99 s, the Mexican government had given local

municipalities the freedom to manage their own financial affairs along with the funds for

local development. The craft economy boomed and Oaxacans were left to negotiate new

identities within this ever-changing and unpredictable world. )n just ten years time one

such individual, Epifanio Fuentes, went from not knowing how to use a bathtub to

designing a tiled bathtub of his own; from getting jailed as an illegal at the border to getting

frequent-flyer miles for visiting his granddaughters in Miami; from helping his dad grow

corn in the rain-fed Oaxacan countryside to watching his son teach teachers in the well-

watered U.S. classroom Barbash 99 , 17).

To have grown up in Oaxaca s artisan villages near the end of the millennium is to

have had one s expectations destroyed and replaced with new ones. This perhaps is true of

growing up anywhere. Expectations are like the horizon, inescapable and unreachable,

changing with every moment (Barbash 1993, 10). Today, almost every resident of San

Martin Tilcajete, a small village forty-five minutes outside Ciudad de Oaxaca and 500km

south of Linares home in Mexico City, carves and sells alebrijes. A large building near the
center of town reads: Feria del Alebrije advertising the craft that has transformed the

town from a small farming community to a boutique-filled tourist destination. For tourists

and carvers alike, alebrijes have a magical quality that connects this world to the faraway

world of dreams while revealing secrets about our inner selves. Susana Buyo, a female

carver in San Martin Tilcajete says people everywhere identify with the alebrije. They are

symbols in the so-called collective unconscious and are apparent in our dreams. We all

keep them hidden deep within us (Bercovitch 2000).

The sudden and widespread popularity of alebrijes suggests a profound shift in the

consciousness of many individuals during a time of great transition. To understand the

draw of the alebrije as a manifestation of the spiritual self, it is necessary, as Mary Douglas

says, to compare people s views about man s destiny and place in the universe Douglas

2000, 40). My friend Jacobo Angeles, a successful carver in San Martin Tilcajete, explains:

"My ancestors used a twenty-day calendar and each day was represented by a different

creature. So every Zapotec person had an animal with whom he had a connection, and each

animal had certain characteristics that carried over to the individual as personality traits.

For example, the jaguar represents power and ultimate strength, the frog is characterized

by honesty and openness, the coyote watchful observation, the turtle always a

troublemaker prone to breaking the rules, the eagle technical and strategic power, and so

on. My people used to carve figures of just these twenty animals. They started out as small

whittlings for good luck that people would keep in a revered place in the home, or wear

around the neck as amulets. They also carved larger figures for their children to use as

toys" (Starkman 2008). Jacobo wears one such amulet around his neck, a coyote, to remind

him of his naghual, or animal spirit.

titled Astrologia Zapoteca y Tolteca filled with charts and tables. After converting my

birthdate from the 365-day Julian calendar to the 260-day Zapotec calendar, Jacobo

revealed my naghual: the jaguar. Sitting at a workbench, Jacobo began to peel limes and

mix pigments with his fingers. In a matter of minutes, Jacobo had created a full palette of

colors using only natural substances, which he used to create a painting of my naghual. The

finished artwork shows a fierce jaguar bearing her teeth. The animal has defined eyelashes,

sharp features, and pale blonde fur: she embodies my own physical characteristics while

simultaneously revealing the raw, hidden aspects of my inner nature. The alebrijes crafted

in Jacobo s studio are similar to the naghuales from his ancestral past, but instead of

depicting a neatly defined singular interpretation of self, they embrace a fragmented and

confused modern identity. Jacobo explained that while my own naghual is the Jaguar, my

spirit is divided: I embody attributes of the frog and rabbit, as well.

The Alebrijes of Linare s dream vision resonated with Mexicans living in rural,

Zapotec villages in southern Mexico because they simultaneously nodded to the regions

spiritual past while confronting a strange and confusing future. The naghuales that once

served as a means of understanding the differing character traits between individuals no

longer provided a means of understanding the self in a contemporary context. Unlike

naghuales, whose importance stemmed from a symbolic reading of form, the power of the

alebrije lies not in what they mean, but in what they do (Seligman et al. 2008, 4). The

alebrije, with its fragmented identity, was introduced to take the place of the too-stable

naghual, thereby providing a means to conceptualize an ambiguous self within an uncertain

world. Jacobo Angeles adds: "Look at what we now carve…while in my family we still use
natural paints, and still carve our twenty totems, we've transformed a simple yet important

and symbolic tradition into something very different Starkman 2008). In Ritual and Its

Consequences, Seligman, Weller, Puett, and Simon suggest that to adequately deal with

ambiguity, ambivalences, and the gentle play of boundaries requires both their existence

and their transcendence . In effect, alebrijes seek to function as a resource to deal with

ambiguity, not by dismissal or removal, but through acceptance and glorification of the

fractured, ambiguous self.

Alebrijes play with and blur boundaries. They celebrate the divided nature of the

individual and offer up multiple, subjunctive realities from which to carve out a place in the

world. In Oaxaca, a person born to a poor farming family has the ability to attend college

and become a businessman; children born in the rural countryside might one day own

contemporary homes on bustling city streets in Cuidad de Oaxaca; indigenous Zapotec

might learn to speak Spanish and English; and most individuals will abandon traditional

dress for the popular Western clothing seen on television and sold in the city. As

individuals carve new social realities, alebrijes stand as reminders of the great inner

transformations that have taken place: the past has not disappeared, but merged with the

present to create new and complex realities.

For Oaxacans, carving alebrijes was not a means of escaping a reality in which they

could no longer make meaning, but a means of accepting and negotiating ambiguity in a

way that would allow them to act in and on the world. Simon J. Bronner, in observing

carvers, explains that a carving can stand for conflict and harmony, pleasure and pain and

that when a carving is made in the present, the carver is reenacting a conflict, ritually

overcoming it in wood (1996, 70). In a sense, working out a problem in wood allows
carvers in Oaxaca to work out the larger problems of how to live life. Rather than trying to

eliminate boundaries or make them unbreachable walls…ritual continually renegotiates

boundaries, living with their instability (Seligman et al. 2008, 11). In this way, the creation

of alebrijes not only opens up the possibility of multiple, subjunctive realities, but

simultaneously allows individuals to regard as real differing and contradictory versions of

reality. Put another way, an individual need not choose a single identity from the myriad

possibilities, but can embody and embrace multiple and incongruous notions of self.

In an increasingly globalized world, it is not surprising to see similar phenomena

apparent among many communities. Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Mariana Leal Ferreira

explain the ways the introduction of transplant technologies in indigenous Suyá Indian

communities troubles the cultural and religious conceptions of reality, including the

ontological status of the real/unreal, seen/unseen, and matter/spirit . Dombá, a Suyá

Indian receiving an organ transplant in a Westernized hospital, negotiated the ambiguities

and challenges of his medical situation not by fully rejecting or accepting either his

indigenous beliefs or western attitudes, but by blending the two worlds into an untidy, but

singular identity. The subjunctive realities that opened up through the collision of these

two realities afforded Dombá the ability to undergo a Western medical procedure without

compromising his Suyá identity. Scheper-(ughes and Ferreira explain: in Suyá cosmology

all beings are classified as either predators or prey. Whites, like jaguars, are among the top

predators . Because he survived his transplant with a white man s kidney, Dombá is

especially empowered . Dombá, like the Oaxacan carvers, emerges from a place of

conflict not with a reduced or conflicted sense of self, but with a strengthened, if altered,

contemporary identity.
 The time spent, slowly and carefully, on the wood was time spent on reshaping herself,
(68) says Bronner. To act on objects is to act on the world and to shape one s very identity.
In this way, the ritual processes of wood carving can be seen as having greater implications
for understanding the ways in which people make sense of and draw meaning from the
world. The objects themselves stand as constant reminders of conflicts overcome and give
hope for carving out a future in an uncertain world.
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