In the open-air taller, or workshop, of María and Jacobo Ángeles in San Martín Tilcajete in the Mexican state of Oaxaca, wooden figurines in various stages of carving, drying, and decorating line shelves and worktables. There’s a blue-and-purple deer with patterns swirling down its haunches. Atop it perches an armadillo in a turtle shell, and above that, a frog with the face of a monkey. Nearby, two embracing iguanas and a crouched monkey await paint. Since they were children, both María and Jacobo have created these carvings inspired by their Zapotec heritage, an ancient Indigenous culture whose Oaxacan roots stretch back to around 500 BCE.
The natural world guides the rhythms of life here. The Zapotec month has twenty days, each symbolized by a regional animal, starting with the iguana and ending with the hummingbird. For millennia, Zapotec artisans have carved these animals out of the region’s copal wood to express tonas and nahuales. “Tona comes from a word in Zapotec that means animal protector,” Jacobo explains. “And nahual is an animal assigned to you depending on your date of birth.”
The term alebrijes, as these carvings are often called, emerged in the 1930s, when Pedro Linares, a Oaxacan artist living in Mexico City, had a literal fever dream about otherworldly creatures chanting the word “alebrije.” Afterward, he devoted his waking hours to creating the colorful animals in cartonería, or papier-mâché. His figures became popular and fused with the ancient Zapotec wood-carving tradition, resulting in a new art form filled with creatures fantastic, strange, and pulsing with vibrant energy.
Despite the popularity of the term alebrijes, Jacobo and María prefer to call their creations tonas and nahuales, and each starts with a search for the right piece of wood. Copal trees, endemic to Oaxaca’s wet tropical forests, are soft, perfect for shaping. In an arch or turn of a branch, the husband-wife duo might see the antlers of a deer or the arm of a hanging monkey. “In the twisted pieces we find the expression of the figure,” Jacobo says. “You need to see the image in your mind, because we do not sacrifice a branch for nothing.”
Back at the taller, they begin the carving by removing the bark and cutting one end of the wood flat for the figure’s base. With a machete, they hack extraneous wood before reaching for a chisel to make more precise cuts, sometimes using a mallet for leverage. A small, sharp carving knife does the rest as slivers of copal curl away to reveal the fine details of the animal within. Often, the artists carve combinations of their own tonas and nahuales—for Jacobo, the coyote and serpent, for María, the armadillo and hummingbird.
After sanding and drying and a treatment for termites, the figure is ready for paint, which is sometimes acrylic and sometimes concocted by hand using natural, pre-Hispanic techniques. Copal bark, for instance, toasted and ground and then mixed with lime juice, creates yellow. Dried and ground cochineal insects make red. Pomegranate seeds react with limestone to produce green. Flowers and other fruits lend their own hues to the endless march of shades. “We have conserved these techniques over generations,” María says. “We take our time thinking about the colors of each piece.” The choices frequently nod to Zapotec mythology (red denotes adoration, for example, and black, the underworld).
After a base coat comes the precise art of decoration, in which the artists plan a coded dance of Zapotec symbols and patterns across the animal. A bell means power; a fish, respect; a butterfly, happiness. “When you look at the piece, it should not give you a shock,” María says. “It should cause you to look deeper into the detail.”
A single figure—which can take nearly a year to complete, retails for thousands of dollars, and involves the touch of multiple artisans working under the Ángeleses—rarely stands alone; the Ángeleses create collections that celebrate Zapotec culture. One called Ladrones de Ruinas, or Thieves of Ruins, for instance, captures five mischievous monkeys with stolen archaeological objects in hand: representations of pillaged Zapotec-Mixtec Native Oaxacan sites whose artifacts are displayed at far-flung museums. Another depicts animals playing the Mesoamerican game of Mixtec ball. Recently, the couple finished a collection of ten Xoloitzcuintle dogs that explores their role as spiritual guides on the Day of the Dead.
Their collections have appeared in galleries across Europe and in the United States, including the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C., and POST in Houston. In 2014, Pope Francis invited the couple to make a Nativity scene for the Vatican, honoring an Indigenous culture once stifled by Christianity. The makers of the 2017 Pixar film Coco visited the couple’s taller seeking inspiration for the movie’s alebrijes. In 2021, the Ángeleses carved two huge figures, a winged jaguar and an eagle, for display in front of New York’s Rockefeller Center as guardians for Latin American immigrants.
But if their mission is to disseminate Zapotec culture abroad, it is also to share their expertise at home. After years working alone, in 2001, they opened their taller to students. “We realized that teaching, learning, transmitting, sharing—these things do not impoverish you,” María says. In fact, the success of their workshop has helped transform the town’s economy. The Ángeleses also lead efforts to reforest the copal tree—a resource that the art form’s boom has helped deplete.
There, in the forests where the couple walk together in the morning, they are reminded of why they carve and teach, of why they plant copals and watch their branches grow into something that one day might represent the beautiful and strange creatures that weave through Zapotec culture. “We do not want this art form to die,” Jacobo says. “We want it to transcend.”
