Olivas, Manuel
Manuel Olivas (1941-2007) was a potter who lived most of his life in Nuevo Casas Grandes, the city nearest to the village of Mata Ortiz. As a teenager he was digging in various of the ancient sites around Paquimé and pulling out ancient pottery. There was a huge market in ancient pots back then, before the Mexican government enacted (and enforced) their Antiquities Preservation Laws. The market was so big it quickly got hard to find old pots.
When he was 10 years old, Manuel’s grandmother, Leonor Parra, showed him where to find clay, how to work with it, decorate it and fire it. His pots were rough at first but he got better quickly. He got so good it was next to impossible to determine if a pot was ancient or if Manuel had made it last month. By the time he was 15 he was selling Paquimé replicas to American traders and dealers. According to Jim Hills, Manuel was possibly the first (and best) of the known replicators of ancient Paquimé pottery.
There were also other young men scouring the area looking to find old pots, or to learn how to make new ones and then make them look old. The Antiquities Act ended all thoughts of making anything look old: if it looked like it might be old to a young Army officer who likely couldn’t tell the difference, you just might have everything you own seized and you might go to jail yourself. Several of the early potters in Mata Ortiz went to jail that way. So in the early 1960s, the digging for old pots stopped and all talk around the area turned to how to make new pots that were unquestionably new pots.
Sooner or later, all the earliest potters in Mata Ortiz visited with Manuel to get help with sticky points in their process. That included Emeterio Ortiz, Felix Ortiz, Salbador Ortiz, Macario Ortiz, Chevo Ortiz, Nicolás Ortiz, Osbaldo Ortiz, Rojelio Silveira and Juan Quezada Sr. When Juan Quezada Sr. finally worked out how to make a black paint that survived firing and remained black, he went straight to Manuel and gave him the first sample.
In those early days, as it was in the pueblos years ago, the making of pottery was a community thing with lots of discussion, sharing of ideas and joint experimentation. Manuel may have been one of the first Paquimé-Revival potters in the area but he also asked questions of the others and they shared what they knew with him.
One of the services Juan Quezada Sr. offered when he was touring around the United States with Spencer MacCallum was that he would examine anyone’s old Casas Grandes or Paquimé pottery and tell them if it was real or fake. He determined that a lot of the supposedly antique pottery was fake. In many cases, he said the pieces had been made by Manuel.
In the early years, Manuel worked all alone. After he married, his wife, Maria Cruz Orieto Olivas, helped him, but in his later years he worked with his daughter, Blanca. Blanca made, sanded and polished the pots while Manuel painted and ground-fired them.
Toward the end of his life, Manuel received official permission from Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History to make and sell authentic copies of Ramos Polychrome figures. Ramos Polychrome was a very distinctive style of pottery that essentially lived and died with the ancient city of Paquimé.