Coroneo!

After playing some chess with the Queretaro Sunday Morning Chess Club (sounds like the name of a mystery series, but it isn't) while C was at mass, we had some lunch and decided to try for Coroneo again. This time we were successful. After leaving the city, the countryside becomes rolling hills, with a good road and little traffic. It took about an hour to get there, and as we got over the last little range of hills and started into the Coroneo valley we noticed that the fields were all marked off with stone fences about 3-5 feet high. It really started to look like Europe, and not like the Mexico I was familiar with. We stopped by on our way back.

Tomás, front right just after he beat me. Maestro Javier and Vidal had left before I remembered to take a picture.

Coroneo is smaller than San Jose Iturbide, but more animated. The market closed off a number of streets, but unfortunately, we were either too late (after 2PM) or they just don’t sell much of their local basketry on the local market. We found a few pieces, and then walked around as the market started closing up. There were some ceramics from Michoacan and the state of Mexico which were interesting because of where they were made and where they are being marketed, but they are not particularly attractive. There was also a herbal remedy stand with a lot more stuff than I remember at markets in the DF and Puebla. Herbals are making a comeback. Must be the New Agers. It did not look like they had la Señora’s stomach-ache remedy though.

Colorful chiles at Coroneo

Herbal pharmacy

The church was dedicated to Santiago, the patron saint against the Moors during the reconquest, and the patron saint of the conquistadors in Mexico. Interesting, considering that the Spanish may be conducting the best diplomacy with the Muslim world, certainly better than the US.

Santiago and a Moor

The day was better than yesterday, but still not terribly exciting. Then we pulled off to visit a couple of little villages outside Coroneo on our way back. At the second, Cerro Colorado (red hill), where we had seen the stone fences, we stopped at the center of the village and visited the church. The village definitely had an air of relative prosperity. It reminded me of little villages in Portugal or Spain. The houses around the small plaza were new and well-built. The villagers have a view of their well-tended and laid out farms in the valley. What would be dirt roads in most villages were cobbled. It is really quit nice. As we were getting back in our car to leave, a woman, Maria, came down the road and started talking to us and invited us into her house across the road.

Spinning a little yarn

What's a shuttle?

A poncho for Christiane

Leftover from last season. The rebozo Maria is holding is very fine and my favorite.

It turns out she and her 97 year old mother weave and knit woolen (lana) articles from washing the wool in a nearby lake to making the yarn, to setting up the looms and weaving rebozos, ponchos, sweaters, etc. etc. There are only four natural colors, white, grey, black and coyote (brown). And she was eager to show us how it was all done. Nothing like a guided tour of a weaver’s workshop by the weaver herself. Of course, we bought C a poncho; but the quality of what she made was such that we will buy more things next fall when the season really begins. This is where I will get my poncho for next winter. Right now Maria only has left-overs from the season just ended.

She told us how everyone in the village is in the wool business, that Coroneo had a really big fiesta in October with lots of wool stuff and baskets, and that we should come back when they are making things and see how it is done, from the washing of the lanolin filled wool (C may be allergic) to the cleaning of the final product for market. This reminded me so much of the time in Puebla when I watched and recorded a potter for a week, from preparing the clay to firing the final product. It was a fantastic learning experience, and I am looking forward to doing it again in Cerro Colorado.

Maybe we will meet some of her seven kids who all live in the Dallas area now, and don’t get down too often to help out. Her pictures of her granddaughter’s 15th birthday showed an attractive family, but only one of them is interested in lana and weaving.

So it took us two days to get it right, but we finally had an adventure, and we look forward to the woolen market in June and the Coroneo fiesta (for Santiago, of course) in October.