What Are Alebrijes? The Story Behind Mexico's Spirit Animals
Alebrijes are brightly painted Mexican folk-art sculptures of fantastical creatures, each one blending the features of several animals into a single dreamlike being. They were born in Mexico City in the 1930s, from one artist’s fever dream, and later made famous by the woodcarvers of Oaxaca. Today many people see them as spirit guides, guardian animals that walk beside us.
I love them enough that I commissioned a collection of my own from a family of carvers in Oaxaca, so let me tell you where they come from.
One of my favorites was waiting for me in Puebla, in a courtyard of the Barrio del Artista, the city’s old artists’ quarter, red walls all around it and marigolds planted at its back, a bright blue creature far taller than I am, with a rabbit’s ears, striped horns, a jaguar’s spotted muzzle, and a mane of purple spines. Painted right in the middle of its chest was a heart. A few steps away, a man was painting at his easel in the open square, as if a giant blue creature were the most ordinary neighbor in the world.
Where do alebrijes come from?
Alebrijes come from a dream. In 1936, a Mexico City papier-mâché artist named Pedro Linares fell gravely ill, and in his fever, as he told it for the rest of his life, he dreamed of a strange forest where the rocks and clouds turned into creatures, a donkey with butterfly wings, a rooster with the horns of a bull, a lion with the head of an eagle. All of them were shouting a single nonsense word. Alebrijes.
When he recovered, he began building what he had seen out of paper and paste, and a new folk art was born. Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, who already bought his papier-mâché figures, were among the first to notice. In 1990, Mexico gave him its highest honor for a folk artist, the National Prize for Arts and Sciences.
A donkey with butterfly wings. The wings were there from the very first dream.
That paper tradition is still alive in the city where it began. At an artisan market in Mexico City, I came face to face with one the size of a person, with blue horns, ears like a bat’s, an insect’s wings, a bird’s clawed feet, and a wide red mouth full of teeth, every inch of it painted in dots and scales. That is what Linares meant. Not one animal. All of them at once.
How did alebrijes get to Oaxaca?
The wooden alebrijes most people picture today come from Oaxaca, where carving animals from wood was already a Zapotec tradition. A carver named Manuel Jiménez, from the village of San Antonio Arrazola, took the fantastical creatures Linares had imagined and began carving them from copal, a soft local wood, instead of building them from paper.
Other villages followed, San Martín Tilcajete most famously, and whole families took up the work, carving and painting side by side. The tiny dots, the fine lines, the patterns that cover every inch of the animal, that is the Oaxacan signature, and it is why no two are ever the same.
Are alebrijes spirit animals?
Not originally, but the two ideas have grown together over time. The creatures Linares dreamed were pure imagination. In Oaxaca, though, the carvers brought something older to the work, the Zapotec ideas of the tona and the nahual, animal counterparts believed to accompany a person through life. Slowly the fantastical creature and the animal protector became one in the popular imagination, and in 2017 the film Coco, which cast alebrijes as spirit guides, carried that idea around the world.
Each alebrije carries the traits of the creatures it is made from, so it becomes a kind of mirror, reflecting something true about the person it belongs to.
That is the idea that captured me.
Are alebrijes part of Día de Muertos?
Not traditionally, though you will see them everywhere during Día de Muertos, or Day of the Dead, today. Alebrijes are less than a century old, and the holiday is far older. But the two have found each other.
Every October, Mexico City fills with giant alebrijes for La Noche de los Alebrijes, a parade of monumental creatures that the Museo de Arte Popular has organized since 2007. Soon after, they march again in the city’s Día de Muertos parade. I have not seen La Noche de los Alebrijes yet, but it is at the top of my list.
The Spirit Guides I imagined
When I first imagined the Spirit Guides, I wanted every single one to carry three things, monarch butterfly wings, a heart, and a cempasúchil, the marigold of Día de Muertos. Those three threads tie each Spirit Guide back to the symbolism at the center of Monarch of the Heart, transformation, love, and remembrance.
In the novel, these creatures come from the hands of María, the artist whose work carries so much of the story’s soul. She gives her animals monarch wings, and the collection I commissioned is my way of bringing her art off the page and into the world.
I did not carve them. I imagined them, and then I commissioned them from a taller, a family workshop, in Oaxaca. Each one is a real alebrije, carved from copal wood and painted by hand by the artisans of BLAS Taller Zapoteco, a Zapotec family workshop in San Pedro Cajonos, high in the Sierra Norte of Oaxaca. There are twenty-four in the first collection, coyotes and jaguars, owls and cats, snakes and turtles, and no two are alike.
I kept one of the six original prototypes for myself, the one that feels most like me, a coyote with wings. The coyote is a survivor, adaptable to nearly any environment it finds itself in, which is a truth I have lived more than once. Mine wears marigold-gold across its back, a small heart at its chest, and monarch wings wide enough to carry it anywhere it needs to go. If you have ever had to remake yourself to survive, you might recognize yourself in a coyote too.
How do you find the alebrije that is yours?
There is no wrong way to be drawn to an alebrije. Some people choose the animal they have always loved. Others choose the one they wish they were braver like, or gentler like, or freer like. Whichever calls to you, that is the one. It was probably calling for a reason.
If one is calling to you now, come and meet the hand-carved Spirit Guides in the collection and see who is still waiting. And if you have not met Rylee yet, you can read the first chapter free.
With much love for the journey,
Carrie
