Elena Poniatowska: Valeria Corona

-AND

Lena, I'm Valeria Corona. Guillermo Briseño adopted me. I'm not his biological daughter, but we've lived together for a lifetime. He and my mom became life partners, so I grew up by his side.

Valeria Corona is a slender, short woman who works with modern lighting materials. She recently created a modern version of Moctezuma's headdress with her assistants. In this craft, similar to jewelry making, Valeria managed to preserve the piece by creating a modern version of it.

“I have specialized in working with modern lighting materials and folk art techniques,” says Valeria. “I lived in San Cristóbal de las Casas for five years, where I learned weaving and jewelry techniques from art masters. I know how to prepare looms; I also work in wood and metal. I was fortunate to meet the master Gerardo Hermosillo, who made the gold pieces for the replica of the headdress. We established a dialogue between these lighting materials—LED light and fiber optics—and with these techniques, we were able to recover our pre-Hispanic art and also discovered many secrets of folk art that also come from pre-Hispanic art… The headdress has been exercise number five in my shared experimentation with masters who use different techniques and produce important pieces that recreate our past.”

–What was the first piece you made?

–It was a backstrap loom. We were helped with that by teacher Juliana Pérez, a pioneer in this tool. I suggested we put a copper filament with LED light nodes into her loom; the teacher was very happy; she has a lot of talent and, above all, a desire to face challenges. So, common threads, like cotton and linen, no longer posed a challenge until I introduced the teacher to this continuous filament of light. When Juliana Pérez began to weave it, she was very happy with the result.

–What is that filament made of?

–It's a copper thread with tiny flecks of light. The first experiment we did with folk art techniques was backstrap loom weaving with contemporary luminous materials. The second was with palm-knotted masks made in Tlamacazapa, Guerrero.

Tlamacazapa is an hour outside Taxco. There I met some wonderful women who weave palm leaves to make masks. They are three sisters guided by the oldest, a spectacular teacher named Alicia García. Her sisters are Teresita and Lourdes. Instead of working with palm leaves, as is traditionally done, we used fiber optics. The teachers were also very excited because they had never seen a material that reflects light like fiber optics. They really enjoyed playing at darkening their living room in Tlamacazapa and working with fiber optics, and we achieved unexpected results.

–How cool that they dared to innovate their weaving with threads of light!

–One thing I've noticed, Elena, is that the children of these teachers are no longer interested in what their family knows how to do, whether it's the backstrap loom, palm knotting, or the pedal loom. Folk art techniques seem like ancient processes that bore them…

-Because?

–Because society doesn't understand that teachers are great artists, and sees them as isolated phenomena, and previous governments systematically ignored popular cultures, thus disregarding the past.

–But under previous governments, with intellectuals interested in indigenous culture, archaeology, and pottery, sociologists like Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán in Xalapa, who researched Blackness and was rector of the University of Veracruz; Daniel and Sol Rubín de la Borbolla, Alfonso Caso, Iker Larrauri, Alberto Beltrán, and others, they exalted popular arts, studied them, and promoted them. In the Museum of Popular Art, founded by María Esther Echeverría, splendid creations were sold, and promoting them was a great success. I remember the joy with which we bought handicrafts to enthrone in our house, which we filled with equipales, candlesticks, pottery, and glass vases from the Carretones factory, which became wedding gifts…

"I'm referring to the people who don't want to buy their pieces from artisans, who haggle over the price or even ignore the piece that comes from artisan hands. Young people, boys and girls today, don't find a reason to learn these techniques, but with the excuse of LED lights and fiber optics, they've been hooked, and now they want to learn, because the pieces light up, and they like that. I had noticed that many people didn't care whether the plate was made of plastic or clay, but now they've become interested again. Sowing curiosity in current generations has been a slow but beautiful process, Elena. We carry folk art within us; it's our heritage. In the highlands of Chiapas, with Juliana Pérez; in Guerrero, in Tlamacazapa, I collaborate with the García teachers, who dedicate themselves to palm knotting."

–Where did the idea of raising Moctezuma's headdress come from, as if it were the elevation of the Host in the Catholic Mass?

"Look, we set out to make a copy of the headdress in Austria. Ours is a reinterpretation of the original, which I've never seen, except in photographs. One of my cousins traveled to Vienna and visited the Museo del Mundo, saw the original, and sent us images. So, I wanted to copy it and dedicate all my time to it, no matter how much effort it took. I thought: how can I return the headdress to Mexico if I don't have feathers or gold? That's why we thought about luminous materials and folk art techniques. In Chiapas, I met the master Gerardo Hermosillo, who has an important lineage and likes challenges, and when I proposed making a replica of the gold pieces from the original headdress, he accepted. We made them in black sheet metal. The headdress has circles, half-moons, and little turrets. You have the freedom to work at this scale, but you also have the freedom to make any drawing or perforation you want ," I told him. Today, in the museum, people identify with that piece: they take photos with the headdress. Conducting that study took us months, and converting it to a computer was also very complicated, but we have Moctezuma's headdress in the National Museum of Anthropology and History, directed by Dr. Antonio Saborit.