Papel Picado

Brightly colored strings of papel picado, the harbingers of all Mexican fiestas, are often seen fluttering over the streets and courtyards of San Miguel. In fact, San Miguel celebrates so many fiestas, some remain up all year.

Papel picado (perforated paper), is the art of fashioning decorative cut paper banners, a tradition that can be traced back to preHispanic times. Native Mexicans made (and still make today) a richly-textured paper called amate from the bark of fig or mulberry trees. This was cut with ritual designs and strung as banners to adorn temples, homes and fields during ceremonies or festivals—much as is done today.?

With the arrival of the Spanish came the Manila Galleons, sailing ships that plied the trade route from China and the Philippines to Acapulco with precious cargoes of spices, silks and delicate porcelains. The fine tissue paper used to wrap the goods, papel de China (Chinese paper) proved much easier to cut and dye than traditional amate and soon became the paper of choice for papel picado.

In its simplest form, papel picado is made from rectangles of tissue paper folded and cut with scissors to form different patterns (much like northern pre-school snowflakes) which are then glued side by side.
In the hands of a skilled craftsmen papel picado can become a work of art; for it takes talent to create the complex designs and an experienced eye to isolate the negative space surrounding that design, so that the completed piece will stay intact when hung. Then layers of tissue paper (up to 50) are topped with the master pattern and, using hammers and fine chisels, awls and small knives, cut to form the intricate lacy designs. Large or complex designs could often take over 20 hours to complete.

Flora and fauna, skeletons, saints, historic heroes, even personalized messages come to temporary life on the delicate paper. You can tell which fiesta is approaching not only by the designs but the color schemes involved; white for weddings, pink for baptisms, lurid purple and orange for the Day of the Dead, red, white and green to celebrate national holidays or venerate the Virgin of Guadalupe and royal purple and white for Easter.

Handcrafted papel picado sheets can take many hours to cut but, with sun, wind and rain, may only last a few weeks. As a result of this transience much of the papel picado now readily available is machine stamped or made of re-usable plastic and foil. It may not sound very traditional, but the cheerful inexpensive banners waving in the breeze, as they have for centuries, still announce a fiesta to one and all.