Marco Antonio Castillo and the Danzante Jaguar

At carnival, the men of Izúcar de Matamoros perform dances wearing masks. The town sits in the Mixteca region of Puebla, and the dancers appear as the jaguar, the devil, old men and cowherds. At Day of the Dead the masks change. The town fills with Catrinas and Catrines, skeletons dressed as wealthy society figures, a satire that goes back to the prints of José Guadalupe Posada around 1910. Their faces are painted white and patterned with birds and leaves.

One of the traditional types of carnival dances is the Danza de los Tecuanes, and it reenacts a hunt. Dancers in yellow and black masks and spotted suits act out the pursuit of a jaguar that threatens the village and its livestock. Each carries a whip and cracks it to imitate thunder and the roar of the animal. Tecuani means the one who eats people. The jaguar is also read as a sign of strength, of rain, and of the fertility of the earth, so the jaguar carries multiple meanings as the thing the village fears and the thing that makes its fields grow.

With the Danzante Jaguar, Marco Antonio Castillo sculpted a figure that mixes and unites complex symbolism from different traditions. The figure wears the mask of the jaguar, known from the carnival dance, and carries the whip. But when you look at the figure beneath it, you find a skeleton, which belongs to Day of the Dead. In this figure, Death has come to the festival, and Death, strangely or understandably, has put on a mask.

The mix of adverse symbols is a central part of the piece and makes it comic, absurd and macabre. Everyone at the festival is hiding, and now so is Death. But it goes further than that, because of the specific mask Death chose to hide behind. It is the mask of the very animal the dancers spend the whole dance hunting, which is also the animal that brings rain and fertility.

The Castillo family and their work

Marco Antonio Castillo is the fifth generation of a workshop in a town that has made ceramics for a very long time. The traditional objects of Izúcar de Matamoros were candlesticks, incense burners and religious pieces. In the early twentieth century, potters in the region began adding small separate elements to them, such as flowers, birds and little figures, which they attached to the main object with wire.

The Castillo family built on these habits and developed their own style. Marco's father, Alfonso Castillo Orta (1944 to 2009), and his mother, Soledad Martha Hernández Báez, moved the family's work away from an anonymous communal craft and toward a distinctive, more decorative style that was recognizably theirs, by including many more of those small attached pieces than anyone had used before.

Up to that point, the pottery in the town had been made by artisans that nobody outside it could name. The Castillos made work that could be identified on sight. Alfonso Castillo Orta received the Premio Nacional de Ciencias y Artes in 1996, and is generally credited with making the polychrome ceramics of Izúcar known well beyond Mexico. He taught his wife and their five children. Marco's sister, Verónica Castillo, is a National Heritage Fellow of the United States.

The meaning of Barro Policromado

Barro Policromado describes objects made from the local red clay and then decorated in many colors. The term is often taken to mean a type of clay, but it does not. The clay is ordinary to the region. What is particular is the way it is processed. The color is only applied at the very end, after five or six separate operations.

The body of the piece is modeled by hand. The small additions like flowers, figures and animals are formed in molds and attached, often with wire. The finished object is left to dry for a long time, fired, and given a white ground coat. Only then is it painted by hand, today mostly in acrylic.

Therefore a Castillo piece is an assembly of various objects made in various ways, unified by a coat of white and then distinguished apart again by color.

The range

Marco Antonio Castillo works with familiar subjects and has added his own. Árboles de Vida (Trees of Life), traditional and ritual dancers, Day of the Dead figures, multi-chromatic vessels, vases and pots, candle holders, masks, incense burners, and figures of Frida Kahlo.

We are beginning by presenting his Danzantes figures. They are the pieces where his own development inside the family tradition is clearest, and they are the ones that operate with that conceptual reversal: a dancer who is a skeleton, a skeleton in a jaguar's mask.

Puebla, not Oaxaca

Izúcar de Matamoros is in Puebla, not Oaxaca. While Oaxacaoriginal began in Oaxaca and remains rooted there, our interests go beyond the region. Oaxacaoriginal is about original pieces of traditional craftsmanship, from named artists living and working in the regions these crafts originate in, such as the Castillos in Puebla.

Explore the ceramics of Marco Antonio Castillo


Trees of Life and other works are available on enquiry. Write to us and we will send photographs and a quote.