Village Witchery

From the proud parents at the baptismal font to the sorrowing mourners at a young man's wake, the joys and griefs of a Latin American village are rousingly depicted at San Antonio's HemisFair. The weddings, the cockfights, and the bustle of the marketplace are all there, recorded with droll candor and naive precision. The wonder is that this bewitching pageant, the hit of the fair, is contained in a single building in Las Plazas del Mundo. In fact, "The Magic of a People" is a human comedy on the scale of Tinker Bell. Its 41 tableaux were composed by U.S. Architect-Designer Alexander Girard, who used 8,000 Latin American dolls and folk figurines from his huge collection (see color pages).

Candy Skulls. Most of the carefully wrought effigies were intended originally as toys, or as decoration. They are important, says Girard because "toys are a natural, generic expression of a people. They reflect the whole of its life in miniature." Even trivial trinkets, Girard feels, reflect a potent folk tradition derived from Latin America's unique amalgam of cultures.

Spanish colonists, American Indians and African-descended slaves used effigy and icon as a part of their religious rituals. In San Antonio, Girard displays pre-Inca dolls found inside burial shrouds, Christian saints and angels, Haitian voodoo fertility symbols. Among the tableaux that most colorfully mix the half-Christian, half-pagan customs are those depicting All Souls' Day (Nov. 2), a festival celebrated in Latin America as a cheerful holiday for the dead.

In Mexico, graves are still decorated with candy skulls and toy skeletons. These are afterward given to the children to play with or to eat. For a tableau of hell (opposite). Girard combined bread-and-sugar diablos from Ecuador, plaster devils from Bolivia, pottery Satans from Venezuela, and unpainted wood grotesques from the Mexican town of Erongaricuaro.

Old Passion. For centuries, village priests have used instructional dolls to teach children Bible stories, and Girard's collector's eye spotted one particularly vivid scene: a depiction of bearded Noah and Mrs. Noah presiding over an ark of candy-colored animals. Villagers labor for months to produce a panoramic Nativity scene for display during the Christmas season. Girard has assembled 200 Mexican figures which would originally have served as background in Nativity scenes, into one tableau. It portrays the busy market that thrives in any village on a fiesta day. To add a contemporary note, he even introduced camera-toting Yanquis into one Peruvian market-scene miniature.

For Italian-raised, English-educated Alexander Girard, 61, doll collecting is a passion that began in the 1920s, when he bought some Russian dolls in a London shop. The complete Girard Foundation collection today consists of some 100,000 items, including doll houses, and other memorabilia from the Americas, Europe, Africa and Asia. To install "The Magic of a People," Girard worked 14 hours a day, seven days a week, for three months. Artist Georgia O'Keeffe, a New Mexico friend, helped by selecting and installing the rocks used in landscaping.

The feat is not likely to be repeated. Most of the dolls and toys seen at HemisFair cost less than $10 when Girard picked them up over the past few decades in Latin American workshops and bazaars. But the majority are now irreplaceable: old craftsmen die, young folk move to the city, and the market has been flooded with tasteless imitations.

"I believe we should preserve this evidence of the past," Girard argues, "not as a pattern for sentimental imitation, but as nourishment for the creative spirit of the present."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.