Emma & Mike · 11.18.26 · Cancún, México
papel picado: “perforated paper”
Papel picado means “perforated paper”. It is one of Mexico's best-known folk arts: sheets of coloured tissue paper cut into lace-like designs and strung in rows above streets, plazas, churches and homes.
The craft grew from two materials. Before the Spanish arrived, peoples of central Mexico made paper from tree bark, called amate, and used it in ceremonies. Tissue paper, still called papel de China in Mexico, came later. The town of San Salvador Huixcolotla, in the state of Puebla, is considered the birthplace of papel picado, and in 1998 Puebla declared its style part of the state's cultural heritage.
Traditional papel picado is not cut one sheet at a time. An artisan stacks up to 50 sheets of tissue paper under a drawn pattern and cuts through the whole stack with a small hammer and a set of chisels with differently shaped tips. Every sheet in the stack comes out identical. Many banners today are cut by machine or laser.
Banners mark almost every celebration: weddings, where they are usually white and cut to look like lace, baptisms, saints' days, Christmas and Independence Day. On Día de Muertos altars, papel picado represents wind, one of the four elements on the altar along with water, fire and earth, and it is hung to help guide the spirits home.
Your lantern applies the same idea to wood. Each one carries four of these thirteen designs, drawn from Mexico and the Maya world. Below is each design with its name in Yucatec Maya, the Maya language still spoken across the Yucatán Peninsula, and what it means.
In Maya tradition, the plumeria is the flower of love and beauty. The Songs of Dzitbalché, a collection of old Yucatec Maya songs, include one called Kay Nikte', “the song of the flower”.
In Mexico, flowers fill every celebration, from wedding arches to the marigolds on Día de Muertos altars.
The little ground dove of the Yucatán is called mukuy. Doves are not a major figure in ancient Maya art.
In Mexican tradition they stand for love, peace and fidelity, and they are one of the most common designs on wedding papel picado.
One Maya word means sun, day and time, because the Maya counted time by the sun's daily journey.
The sun god, K'inich Ajaw, was tied to kingship. Rulers took his name as a title, as in K'inich Janaab' Pakal, the great king of Palenque.
In Maya tradition, the moon is linked to Ixchel, goddess of fertility, childbirth and weaving.
Her most important shrine stood on Cozumel, just south of Cancún. Maya women crossed to the island by canoe to ask for her blessing.
The word for serpent, kaan, sounds almost the same as ka'an, sky, so the snake also stands for the heavens.
In Maya carvings, rulers summon great “vision serpents” whose open jaws bring ancestors and gods into the human world.
In Maya belief, the jaguar rules the night and the underworld. Ancient kings wore its pelt and sat on jaguar thrones as a sign of power.
The word lives on in the Books of Chilam Balam, “the jaguar prophet”, written in Yucatec Maya after the Spanish conquest.
Maya pyramids were built as sacred mountains, linking the earth to the heavens. The tallest at Cobá, near Cancún, is still called Nohoch Mul, “big mound”.
El Castillo at Chichén Itzá has 91 steps on each side. With the top platform, that makes 365, one for each day of the year.
Hanal Pixán is the Yucatán's Día de Muertos, held October 31 to November 2. Families set altars with candles, flowers and food to welcome the spirits of relatives home.
The decorated skull, or calavera, is not a symbol of fear or mourning. It honours loved ones who have died and celebrates their lives. Posada's elegant skeleton, La Catrina, is one of Mexico's best-known images.
At a wedding, it remembers those no longer here.
In Maya belief, the ceiba holds up the sky at the centre of the world, with its roots in the underworld and its branches in the heavens.
Farmers often leave a ceiba standing when they clear a field.
In the Popol Vuh, the Maya book of creation, the gods tried to make people from mud, then from wood, and failed. They finally made the first humans from maize dough.
Corn is still the centre of the table across Mexico, from tortillas to tamales.
In the Popol Vuh, the Hero Twins are killed by the lords of the underworld, and their bones are ground and thrown into a river. They come back to life as fish, then return to defeat the lords.
The fish stands for rebirth.
Chaak brings rain by striking the clouds with his lightning axe. In the Yucatán, which has no rivers above ground, rain decides whether crops live or fail.
His masks cover the temples of Uxmal and Kabah, and farmers still hold the Ch'a Chaak ceremony to ask him for rain.
K'uk'ulkan joins the feathers of the quetzal bird with the body of the serpent, uniting sky and earth. The Aztecs knew him as Quetzalcoatl.
At the spring and autumn equinoxes, the late sun casts a serpent of light and shadow down the steps of El Castillo at Chichén Itzá.
Maya words follow modern Yucatec spelling. An apostrophe marks a glottal stop, a short catch in the voice, as in the middle of “uh-oh”.