Tesuque Pueblo Pottery

Before the early 1800s, Tesuque pottery mostly resembled the pottery produced at San Ildefonso at the time. Around 1830 that began to change as Tesuque potters experimented with newly found clays and slips that shortly made Tesuque Polychrome a style of its own. That style was quite popular until two sisters, Anastasia Romero Vigil and Francisgita Romero Trujillo, are said to have started making muna figures in the mid 1880s. Their decorations evolved much more than their shapes over the years.

Anastasia and Francisgita created a sitting figure holding a pot in his lap, his mouth open and his eyes generally turned to the sky looking for rain. The women started selling them under the portal at the Palace of the Governors in Santa Fe and they turned out to be very popular. Eventually, almost everyone in the pueblo was making them.

Originally, the muna were “funnymakers” who came around to the village three times a year: Christmas Day, New Years Day and Kings Day. They wore masks and painted their faces. Sometimes the men dressed as women. They went door-to-door in the pueblo, making people laugh as they went.

The earliest muna were made of either a micaceous clay paste or a plain buff clay. Then they added a few designs in red paint. Between 1895 and 1915 most decorations were in red and blue. From 1910 to 1930 black designs were added. Pastels were popular from 1930 to 1940, then poster paint was popular from 1940 to about 1970. Then the making of muna figures almost completely stopped.

Around 1905 trader J.S. Candelario named the muna figures “Rain Gods.” Then came curio trader Jake Gold. Gold bought so many Rain Gods that nearly everyone in the village was making them. He also convinced them to paint those figurines with commercial paints. Gold did an outstanding marketing job and orders poured in. Soon Tesuque potters were turning out Rain Gods by the thousands. They were distributed nationwide and many manufacturers bought them by the barrel to use as promotional items. That mass production ended up virtually destroying pottery making at Tesuque. In the 1920s the demand for Rain Gods started to diminish and the potters turned to making other low quality goods painted with commercial pastels and “Day-Glo” poster paints.

In the 1930s and early 1940s only a handful of Tesuque potters were producing traditional Tesuque polychrome pottery. Catherine Vigil was one of them.

In 1948, Manuel Vigil was in a car accident and lost a leg. He learned to make pottery while he was recuperating and he and his wife made figurative pottery the rest of their lives. Manuel is credited with making the very first nacimiento.

In the 1960s a few other young potters took up where Catherine left off and a small revival of traditional pottery making began at Tesuque. However, employment in the tribe’s commercial ventures these days has pretty much ended most pottery making.