CNS STORY: Indigenous Peruvian artisans strive for recognition of their work

A young musician made of red clay takes shape under artist Fredy Huasacca's skillful fingers in Lima, Peru. Huasacca learned the art from his father in his home town of Quinua, in Peru's southern highlands, which is known for its ceramics. (CNS/Walter Hupiu)

By Barbara J. Fraser
Catholic News Service

LIMA, Peru (CNS) -- Fredy Huasacca rolls a ball of red clay between the palms of his hands, pressing and pinching it. As if by magic, a face with smooth cheeks and delicate features takes shape between his fingers.

Small strands of clay become hair and another piece, patted skillfully like a tortilla, creases into the folds of a skirt. Minutes later, the lump of earth on Huasacca's workbench has become a peasant girl playing a charango, a sort of Peruvian ukulele.

Usually, Huasacca makes arks. Vessels of all sizes, crammed with animals, line the shelves of one room in his simple reed-and-plywood house on the southern edge of Lima, Peru's sprawling capital. Most are for wholesale to middlemen who peddle them to dealers in Lima's tourist markets. The buyer haggling for a bargain might never know that every detail was molded and painted by hand.

One ark towers above the rest. Noah, on the prow, is surrounded by Peruvian parrots, toucans, tortoises and llamas, as well as exotic elephants, giraffes and hippos. A monkey's tail wraps around a mooring rope on the side of the vessel, and a condor with outspread wings perches at the top. That ark took two years of work. Huasacca's pride in each piece is evident.

This year, Lent brought a new challenge. Huasacca and other ceramic artists are fashioning 15 pieces -- representing the Stations of the Cross and Jesus' resurrection -- in the style of their native Ayacucho, a city in Peru's southern highlands.

"My figures represent rural people," says Huasacca, who places Andean figures in traditional Christian scenes. "The faces are craggy and weathered. They are the faces of my people. In the countryside, people are very Catholic and have a deep belief in God."

Spanish missionaries used art to spread the faith among indigenous people in the Andes, and their influence still is seen in paintings, ceramics and wooden shadow boxes, "retablos," which often portray religious scenes.

"Art in Peru is rooted in faith," says Aldo Diaz of the Institute of Theater and Social Culture, which was founded by members of the Christian Life Movement in Lima. The institute sponsors competitions and exhibits of the artists' work as well as retreats for them. Diaz visits the families, counseling them and praying with them.

"We encourage them to work with colors made from natural slips, which were being lost," he says. "We talk about the tradition, so it is not lost. We encourage them to go back to their roots."

Huasacca began molding clay when he was just a few years old, forming his own toy cars and animals at the workbench where his father made ceramic churches, for which his native town of Quinua is famous. Originally placed on the roofs of newlyweds' houses to ask God to protect the couple, the elaborate churches are now sought by collectors.

Feriberto Aylas, who lives two blocks from the institute, down a dirt path marked by a hand-painted sign pointing to "Artists Alley," also began working with clay as a child. His father made earthenware cooking pots, but Aylas was drawn to human figures. When he was about 8 years old, he began studying at a crafts center in Quinua.

Like many of his neighbors, he moved to Lima in the mid-1980s, during the political violence that struck the Ayacucho region especially hard, resulting in tens of thousands of deaths, mainly of indigenous, Quechua-speaking farmers.

In Lima, the families started over again in shacks on the sandy outskirts of town. A middle-class neighborhood has grown up nearby, but their dusty neighborhood of rustic homes still lacks water and sewer service.

In his workshop, Aylas and five employees mass-produce pieces for tourists, but when he has time, he creates freehand figures -- Christ's entry into Jerusalem, the Last Supper, a ceramic shadow box framing Our Lady of Cocharcas, the patroness of his home town.

Andean motifs permeate the artists' work. In Huasacca's 13th station, Jesus' body is lowered from the cross over a pile of rocks like the ones farmers remove when they clear fields for planting. Andean cactus and flowers sprout from cracks between the stones.

Ayla's work also melds Andean figures and religious themes.

"We are always thinking of God and adoring God. I want people to appreciate that" when they look at the figures, he says.

It is a difficult life. Lima is so saturated with handcrafts for tourists that the artists earn only a small amount for the long hours they spend crafting, painting and firing the pieces. They struggle to be recognized as artists, rather than makers of handcrafts.

Diaz hopes the contests and shows of religious art will help, although a Christmas exhibit of Nativity scenes, displayed at a municipal gallery in a Lima district, sparked a debate among the curators over whether the pieces qualified as art, which the gallery would display, or crafts, which it would not.

"I'd like to make a piece that would be displayed in a museum, so people would see my name and recognize the type of art I do," Huasacca says.

At his workbench, Huasacca adds a cloak to the girl playing the charango. Beside him, his 3-year-old son, Miguel, rolls marble-size balls of clay between his hands in imitation.

Miguel was the inspiration for the small angel watching over the Christ child in the Nativity scene that won Huasacca second place in the December show. Huasacca watches Miguel's tiny hands with a mixture of amusement and pride.

"I hope he will follow in my footsteps," he says, "as I am following in the footsteps of my father, who taught me."

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