MEXICAN INDIAN COSTUMES DONALD & DOROTHY CORDRY 1973 LARGE DJ VG

Description: Bright colors, elaborate weaving techniques, beautiful embroidery — all these qualities characterize the Indian costumes of Mexico. Skillfully made and often adaptable to many uses, the men's and women's garments, the belts, headdresses, tortilla cloths, and bags were once found in infinite variety throughout Mexico.Modern civilization, however, is bringing to an end such individualistic styles and customs. Some have already vanished; the rest will probably do so within a few decades.The inexorable disintegration of many aspects of Mexican Indian culture makes this volume on Indian costume particularly important. Donald B. and DorothyM. Cordry, in over thirty years of intermittent study, have compiled an invaluable record of many of the Indians of northwestern, central, and southern Mexico.Mr. Cordry's field work began under the auspices of the Museum of the American Indian (Heye Foundation), New York, and later the Southwest Museum of Los Angeles. The Cordrys have visited numerous villages, recorded details concerning the making of textiles and the making and wearing of costumes, and purchased and preserved representative garments. Mr. Cordry has taken hundreds of pictures; and some of the costumes photographed twenty or thirty years ago when the Cordrys began their study can no longer be found at all today.Mexican Indian Costumes approaches the study of Indian costumes in two ways. First, it examines the general history of the costume, the tools and techniques used in making it, and the nature and variation of the particular garments and accessories and how they are worn. Second, it analyzes in detail the costume of some twenty-seven villages and linguistic groups. There have been countless books on Mexico, and almost as many albums of pictures reflecting-with greater or lesser fidelity-different aspects of Mexico's enormously varied life. Some of these productions are banal travel reports with their chief emphasis on the picturesque and the "quaint," others are serious scientific studies which have little interest for the lay public. Still others are artistic tours de force by masters of photography who take casual pictures with an eye to purely photographic values-the character of a fine head, the play of light on a gnarled tree root, the texture of a pair of earthy Indian hands, the enigma behind a child's eyes.Often published in limited expensive editions, these latter are, for the most part, outside the reach of the general public.Donald Cordry's photographs do not belong to any of these categories; rather they partake of the best qualities of all of them. In a strictly photographic sense they rank with the best work of the modern photographers who have turned their cameras on the Mexican scene, for they are striking, dramatic, and always beautiful pictures. They possess, in addition, a direct human appeal that derives from the uncomplicated honesty of Cordry's approach. To a surprising degree they succeed in capturing the serenity, mystery, and monumental plasticity of his subjects. But more than this, they constitute an invaluable portrait of remote and little-known peoples who prefer their ancient modes and manners to a modern world about which they know little and care less, and against which their only defense is a stubborn refusal to abandon their antique ways of life.Anyone who has traveled, if only briefly, in the Mexican interior will realize the importance of Cordry's achievement. He has visited the farthest corners of the country, the inaccessible mountain villages and the primitive communities of tropical jungles, finding Mexicans who have ancient and traditional cultures of their own-who wear, with dignity and style long lost to those who live under the standardizing influence of the hybrid cities, costumes they themselves have made. The warlike Mayos and Coras, the retiring Huichols, the unpredictable Indians of the Sierra de Puebla, the exuberant Totonacos, the elegant women of the Tehuan-tepec plains, the Zapotecs and Mixes of the Oaxaca mountains, the richly dressed Chinantecs, the rude Hua-ves of the Pacific coast, the Zoques and Chamulas of the Chiapas highlands, and many others pass in fascinating procession through the pages of this collection.This book is thus no grab bag of animated "Mexican curios." It sets the Mexican people in true perspective against their Indian land and background. It constitutes an invaluable record of a Mexico that was, that is al-ready-in spite of tenacious resistance-beginning to disappear, and that tomorrow may exist only as a memory and in such brilliantly realized images as Donald Cordry's photographs.MIGUEL COVARRUBIAS The development of a study such as that presented in this book is made up of many thousands of individual situations-experienced and recorded on film and in notes and sketches, and remembered with affectionate pleasure. It also consists of many problems met and overcome (usually), many decisions made, and considerable discomfort endured.To obtain photographs in the field we traveled by car and jeep, on foot and horseback, by oxcart, horse and wagon, and boat or dugout, and sometimes in a small airplane-which usually landed a considerable distance from the village to be visited and left us to cover the remaining miles by whatever means was available. Since we did most of our work during the dry season the weather seldom created difficulties to hamper us. Due to the cooperation of village officials we were often able to find accommodations in schools or municipal buildings, or sometimes in private homes.At other times, however, we found it necessary to sleep on the ground or-in the Huichol country-more comfortably on the sand of river beds.For this study two Rolleiflex cameras were used (one for color and the other for black and white) and a Hasselblad 500 C equipped with a wide-angle and a telephoto lens. All film was developed commercially in Mexico, and the resulting pictures show some of the variation in quality which will be found in any commercially processed prints.Taking the pictures produced a variety of problems-amusing and otherwise. Almost always the permission of the subject was secured before the picture was taken. Whenever possible the subject was posed: a costume photographed in motion often fails to give a correct idea of the formation of the garments or the placement or detail of design elements. Considerable time was often required to gain the subject's confidence, and sometimes we found it necessary, for diplomatic rea-sons, to take our pictures in locations and under conditions which were photographically far from ideal. Then too, the subject's idea of the proper pose for a photograph was usually regrettable-formal and stiff, eyes fixed with a serious expression upon the camera. The subject often desired a copy of the picture, and we made it an invariable rule that this copy should be sent to him or her. Where there was no regular postal service this often entailed considerable effort on our part-sometimes even a return trip to the village.The recording of the facts which give the pictures meaning also presented a number of problems, largely orthographic in nature. For one thing, maps, official reports, and census records of Mexico exhibit wide variations in the spelling of place names. Where records and maps conflicted we chose the spelling which seemed to be in most common use or which was used by the reference work which we regarded as most authoritative (for Oaxaca this was Toponimia de Oax-aca, by José María Brandomín). In some cases our first recording of a village or rancho name was a phonetic spelling based on the pronunciation of a local infor-mant. This spelling was later revised to conform to that used in official records. A few of the places we visited, however, we have never found on any map.Another orthographic question which we had to decide involved the use and spelling of Indian words.When a commonly used Hispanized version of the Indian word exists we have followed the Spanish spelling conventions (huipil and huipiles for the Nahuatl huip-illi). When the word commonly used is still basically Indian we have used the uninflected Indian form (for instance, quechquemitl in both the singular and the plural). ORDER BEFORE 2 PM CENTRAL - SAME DAY SHIPPINGPRML243

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