Economies of Objects
A regadera, or watering can, from Fabien Cappello’s Objetos de Hojalata para el Hogar collection (image: Rodrigo Alvarez).
It’s a bright February afternoon in the Mexican city of Guadalajara and the sun-blitzed streets of Analco, a working-class district just east of the city centre, have gone quiet, not so much abandoned as asleep, like the central thoroughfare of a rural town settling into the slow rhythms of a fading day. The industrial designer Fabien Cappello, based in Guadalajara since early 2020, taps on a whitewashed metal grate. A few seconds later, it opens onto a steep, narrow stairwell that rises through claustral darkness to a bustling home-studio where the family of María Guadalupe Gil Orihuela and Arturo Vega Vargas fashion utilitarian objects from sheets of galvanised steel and tinplate, or hojalata. Sunlight filters through a west-facing window, illuminating the time-dimmed stencils hanging on the apartment’s back wall and exacerbating the heat thrown by an open brazier where three of the couple’s four adolescent children solder seams on a new order of cylindrical milk jugs. Slipped onto a plastic cord, the finished pieces clang together like wind chimes and pile up like loot. If they didn’t glint so brightly under the exposed overhead lights, the jugs could have been made a century ago.
Vega, 42, has worked with hojalata since his childhood in Toluca, an industrial city in central Mexico some 420km southeast of Guadalajara. Moving between workshops run by uncles, cousins and family friends, Vega would mark out geometric shapes on metal sheets and cut them loose with massive shears. All but indistinguishable from the sprawl of the Mexican capital to the east, Toluca and other peripheral districts of Mexico City were replete with hojalata workshops turning out colanders, baking trays, gelatine moulds, cheese graters, rat traps and cookie cutters to be sold in the hundreds of permanent and itinerant markets that dot the metro area, home today to more than 22 million people. The workshop where Vega frequently worked as a teenager also sold to vendors in Guadalajara, which was until recently Mexico’s second-largest city and has a population of more than 5 million. When the workshop’s maestro (literally “master” or “teacher”) decided to move his business there, seeking out a market with less competition, he brought Vega with him. A year later, Gil followed.
Fabien Cappello.
In the last two decades, Gil and Vega have come to specialise in customisation. Rather than dedicate their workshop to serialised production of a single object – like Vega’s brother, for instance, also based in Guadalajara, who uses moulds to produce wiremesh colanders by the hundred – Vega and Gil craft their products almost entirely by hand and sell the vast majority of them within a 10-block radius of their home and studio. Working from two-dimensional designs, they cut the pieces from flat sheets, like a tailor cutting yokes and lapels from a length of fabric. Using little more than a small, hand-cranked roller press clamped to a work table, they clip, fold and seal the joints that make their objects functional. (Quietly iconoclastic, with long black hair pulled into a pony tail and fingernails painted black, Vega also has a smaller side business fashioning spiked chokers and wire crosses for metal bands, and tinplate armour for medieval reenactors.) It’s slower work, Vega says, but allows a degree of flexibility that other workshops don’t have. “Before, everyone wanted cake moulds with the same capacity, but now they want them a little smaller, a little shorter, a little narrower – you know, like candy bars, which just keep getting smaller,” he told me on the day I visited, Guns N’ Roses and Iron Maiden murmuring over the speakers of a flatscreen TV. “I’ll still take the risk of making a design that someone brings me.”
Which is how, beginning in August 2021, Vega and Gil started working with Cappello. Born in the suburbs of Paris in 1984 and based in Mexico since 2016, Cappello first became interested in hojalata while living a few blocks from a sprawling market district in Mexico City. “Hojalata is the exact scale of industry I like to work with,” says Cappello, who ran his practice in London for more than five years before moving to Latin America. “It’s principally urban, it’s not an ancestral form and it produces utilitarian objects that aren’t luxurious at all.” In the capital, workshops were scattered at the city’s edges, but in Guadalajara, Cappello soon noticed workshops within walking distance of his studio and home in the historic centre. Initially, he developed designs with a mid-size studio named, mysteriously, Taller Acrilico, or Acrylic Workshop. “It was very, very, very difficult to make prototypes,” Cappello recalls. The maestro, who worked with a handful of machines to produce a narrow repertoire of objects (pails and pans and watering cans), “couldn’t grasp why you would use so much time and material to test something without selling it.” Before too long, the maestro had politely suggested that Cappello take his business elsewhere, specifically to Vega and Gil, who, for years, had worked for Taller Acrilico filling specialised orders in exchange for raw materials.
A frutero, or fruit bowl.
In no time, Vega and Gil had proposed a model to charge for product development. Cappello would come to the workshop with carefully plotted twodimensional plans for his designs – totem-like candle holders; crimped, conoid lamp shades; flower pots that resemble disaggregated machinery; and watering cans stretched tall like El Grecos or ballooned out like Boteros – which were pieces that tweaked and distorted, rather than replaced, hojalata’s classic forms and functions. Vega and Gil would translate those designs into three dimensions, making millimetric adjustments to accommodate pleats and folds, and suggesting the best joints and unions to make the objects work. In those initial stages, they would charge by the hour, switching to a per-piece arrangement once they had a clear sense of how much time and material each design would take to produce. “Arturo and María think like industrial designers,” says Cappello. His own task, he adds, is always “first to understand the technique and understand the place, only then do you start making objects”.
These images of Hojalata were taken in the Guadalajara home of photographer Rodrigo Alvarez’s abuelo, Guadalupe.
From the beginning of his career, Cappello has been as interested in the economies of objects – the ones that shape them and the ones they shape – as he is in objects themselves. Hojalata caught his attention, in part, he says, because of its specificity – “those precise limitations on what you can do are the best frame to work within,” he says. At least as important, though, was the neighbourhood-based infrastructure that the objects preserved. In its most quotidian expression, hojalata resists the romantic associations of earthenware, textiles, wood-carving and masonry – Mexican crafts of extraordinary beauty and refinement that have, over the last century, become fetish objects for foreigners and local elites alike. Hojalata is, instead, an essential part of Mexico’s palimpsestic urban landscapes, situated at the boundary of artisanship and industry, a modest oficio – the term for a skilled trade or vocation – slipped uncomfortably into the ever-narrowing gap between a globalised economic order and local systems of production built on circularity and family ties. Where much of the global north has long since either eradicated artisanal processes or relegated them to the realm of luxury – as in the case of British tailors or Florentine leatherworkers – here, cottage industries continue to support neighbourhoods as singular and specific as the handmade objects that circulate within them. “In Mexico, the process of homogenisation through globalisation has certainly begun,” Cappello says, “but it isn’t finished yet.”
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It is, on some level, ironic to think of hojalata in terms of the local economy it supports when its origins in Mexico are fundamentally global. Prior to the 16th-century Spanish invasion, the great civilisations of Mesoamerica used lost-wax casting to fashion gold, silver and copper into ornamental and ritual objects like chest plates, earrings and ankle rattles. Tin, the essential element for the production of hojalata, was also known by pre-Hispanic metallurgists and was used for bronze alloys shaped into axes, chisels, needles and fishhooks. But tinplate, which consists of covering iron or steel in a thin layer of tin, was a colonial product, imported from England, France and Germany, sometimes crossing the Atlantic as ballast on ships. Even as late as the 18th century, as historian and conservator Gloria Fraser Giffords notes in her 1999 essay ‘A Noble Metal’, published in Artes de México, “tinplate objects were either of such scarcity or such aesthetic insignificance that they escaped notice by authors concentrating in the ‘high arts.’” Well into the 19th century, hojalata was probably used principally for religious paraphernalia in poorer Catholic missions, as is still the case in some parts of Mexico. Then, beginning around 1870, as tinplate factories in the United States supplanted English fabricators, easing access to the material in Mexico, hojalata started to creep into households throughout the country in the form of candlesticks and picture frames, as well as plates, cups, spoons and sieves. From its earliest use in Mexico, Giffords writes, “tinplate was regarded as a poor man’s silver.”
A maceta, or flowerpot.
Throughout the colonial period, powerful guilds controlled the production of precious metals in Mexico, restricting their use to Spanish-born artisans. Hojalata, as far as the best scholarship has shown, had no such infrastructure. Still, as an imported material, hojalata was largely associated with mestizo populations in urban centres. In the initial centuries of Spanish domination, says Octavio Murillo, director of archives at Mexico’s National Institute of Indigenous Peoples, “forms dominated by women, like pottery and backstrap-loom textiles, were left in the hands of indigenous people, but guilds were associated with ‘masculine’ work.’” Such trades “were the industries of their time,” says Murillo, “and they might have been important as antecedents to oficios.”
Even today, cities like Guanajuato, Mexico City and Oaxaca (throughout its history the most important centre for the mestizo population in an otherwise indigenous-majority state) tend to dominate production of hojalata, though, as Vega points out, “each place has its speciality.” Many of Oaxaca’s hojalateros work in an ornamental language of repoussage picture frames that they sell to tourists; they also make Sacred Hearts and crosses for indigenous communities who have no hojalateros of their own. (Vega and Gil, for their part, sell to vendors in the industrial boomtown of Monterrey, which produces galvanised steel in its mammoth factories, but is also, Vega says, home to relatively few hojalateros.) The city of Guanajuato’s hojalateros tend to specialise in the manufacture of toys, many of them die-cut and pressed with moulds. In San Miguel de Allende, a popular destination for American retirees in the state of Guanajuato, craftspeople use hojalata to make perforated, Moroccan-style lanterns, a technique introduced by movie idol José Mojica in the 1920s, as Martha Egan writes in her essay ‘Tenacity of a Trade’, also from Artes de México. The craftsman that Mojica worked with, Egan writes, had “until then limited himself to producing milk cans and other utilitarian goods”. Here, hojalata became part of a larger economic development model that began in the 1920s, following Mexico’s decade-long revolution, “designed to turn communities from production for internal use into producers of merchandise for external consumption,” explains Murillo. “‘Folk art’ became a way to ‘take home a piece of Mexico.’”
An assortment of candelabros, or candle holders.
As practised by Vega and Gil, the oficio of hojalatería is neither an aspirational “modern” industry like steel or cement, nor a “craft”, valued as an expression of tradition (even when, at times, those crafts are recent inventions sponsored by the state). Hojalata, despite its origins in industry, became a peculiar kind of relic, a relatively new material reproduced via systems that the 20th-century economic paradigm of growth and globalisation would not, or could not, include.
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The central feature of that structure – one carried over from the time of colonial guilds – is the organisation of modern-day oficios around family and neighbourhood units. Vega and Gil maintain personal ties with at least half a dozen families who work with hojalata, all of them either their own relatives or kin to the producer who brought them to Guadalajara in the late 1990s. Galvanised steel, purchased by the kilo, comes from local intermediaries who buy from factories, while tinplate often comes as cast-offs from large corporations such as Nestlé, which reject sheets that show even minor imperfections, such as scratches or slightly uneven surfaces that their massive machinery can’t process. (Sometimes, Gil says, the material comes already stamped with Nestlé’s branding.) The small local shops that purchase the bulk of Vega and Gil’s products often double as workshops, trading the goods that they produce for those made by other workshop/stores nearby to round out their inventory. “It’s a network of networks where everyone knows each other,” says Luis Manuel Ochoa, founder of the interdisciplinary design studio Barrio Arquitectura Ciudad (Neighborhood Architecture City) based between Guadalajara and Bilbao, Spain. “There’s also been a process of disappearance, which has to do with the transformation the city has experienced in the 20th century” – that of a small, semi-industrialised trading hub growing into a large regional centre for commerce and industry.
María Guadalupe Gil Orihuela and Arturo Vega Vargas.
As Guadalajara has expanded, many networks of trade and exchange have died off. The tanning industry, for instance, once concentrated in the neighbourhood of El Retiro, a short distance north of Analco, has moved away from Guadalajara entirely. Shoe-making is mostly gone, too, though a small handful of factories remain. (According to one vendor, workshops that make tin dustpans, common around the city, use empty cans of shoe glue; Cappello, for his part, has seen at least a couple of such workshops in the district dedicated to shoe repairs and cobblers.) So far, hojalata maintains a comparatively robust presence, but like all cottage industries in the 21st century, it faces its share of threats.
In the kitchen and houseware shops that line the market streets a few blocks from Gil and Vega’s studio, bouquets of locally made colanders dangle alongside clusters of Chinese imports, which often sell for less than half the price. In San Andrés, a district in the city’s far east, a maestro hojalatero named Alejandro Pérez told me that apprentices cut patterns imprecisely, solder shoddily, and slice up their fingers, making them a greater liability than benefit. Clients, meanwhile, primed to view hojalata as cheap and easy to produce, gripe over marginal price hikes, even when the costs of materials skyrocket. At the height of the pandemic, Gil recalls, the price of a sheet of hojalata measuring 3m by 90cm nearly doubled, rising in increments of 30 or 40 pesos ($1.60-2.15) per week. “When this happened, it’s not like we suddenly raised the price by 30 pesos. We raised it by maybe 50 cents, and even that – no no, they got mad about it.”
A lampara, or lamp.
“Artisanal production has always been seen as a precarious kind of labour,” says Ochoa. This makes it difficult for people like Gil and Vega to demand fair compensation and renders such work unattractive to young people. Many who remain in the field have, in the last few decades, migrated their skills to other oficios. Some now do car repairs. Others make stainlesssteel stoves and flattops for restaurant kitchens and taco stalls. Of course, such transformations are nothing new. Pérez, the maestro in San Andrés, recalls that his own father made tinplate plumbing and even coffins. Pérez does neither of these things, a fact he seems neither to regret nor view as a loss. Hojalata is, after all, an essentially urban practice and cities are engines fuelled by constant change. If hojalata resists romanticisation, it resists nostalgia, too.
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On the afternoon I visited Gil and Vega’s studio, I’d gone with Cappello to check on the first prototypes for a new series of side tables and stools, his most significant departure thus far from hojalata’s quotidian uses (save for an early experiment with a toilet paper holder that he has yet to put into production). Formally elemental, with their round tops and bases shaped like cylinders or frusta, the pieces were still a few rounds of tests away from functioning as Cappello, Gil and Vega hoped. Galvanised steel sheets are not typically used to bear weight, but all three had ideas for how to make the pieces work. Maybe a cross could traverse the hollow interior of the stool or maybe the base could extend upward through the top to keep the weight-bearing surface of the stool from warping. Meanwhile, the tabletops, Cappello suggested, could be simplified into trays, with the top circle of steel removed to make the object lighter and easier to produce. Vega and especially Gil both seemed excited to continue the experiment, eager to apply their expertise to new and unexpected uses.
Pendant lamps.
The next morning, Cappello and I sat down to talk in his studio, a vibrant collage of primary colours nearly as crowded with objects as the market shops in Analco. Some of those objects had been designed by Cappello, but at least as many were collected from shops and stalls in Guadalajara and Mexico City. Hojalata is, after all, just part of Mexico’s vast material culture and only one component of Cappello’s own design practice. Through the years, he has worked with fibreglass and wool, made plates from off-cuts of coloured glass and sconces that resemble TV antennae fashioned from wooden broomsticks. But hojalata, Cappello says, “is really specific and really lovely in its utility.” Wood and blown glass offer similarly exciting possibilities, “but those materials are always going to be more expensive, more fragile. They require us to create moulds or they involve heavier machinery. Hojalata is such a ‘light’ technique. The distance from the notebook to a three-dimensional object is so much shorter.”
The nature of the material has allowed Cappello to create what are by far the most accessible objects in his wider collection: pieces that he sells from his studio for prices that range from 350 to 500 pesos ($19-27), a markup over production cost comparable to that used by vendors in Guadalajara’s markets. Sold abroad, in places as far afield as Taiwan, New Zealand, Denmark and Spain, the pieces retail for far more, due to the exorbitant cost of shipping. This problem, says Cappello, demands creative logistical solutions – perhaps transporting pieces in much larger orders to single distribution points. Production processes could also be altered to help reduce costs – for example, by designing a simplified piece to make at a larger scale that could be sold through a single retailer abroad.
Another regadera, or watering can.
In the coming years, Cappello hopes to develop proprietary dies for Vega and Gil’s roller press, an adaptation not only of forms but of the machinery used to produce them. He’s imagined recasting some of the hojalata objects in more luxurious materials like turned wood or stainless steel, and returning to typologies first developed with his previous collaborators to see where he, Vega and Gil might take those objects together. In the longer term, he would like to build a compendium of hojalata designs in the form of a book: a two-dimensional taxonomy of possible forms that translate, in their own small ways, to possible futures. “I’m really interested in doing as little as possible to adjust what’s already there,” he says. “It’s important to remember that, in these designs, there were a lot of adaptations, there was a lot of innovation. Today, in 2023, we look for innovation in totally different spaces. We don’t consider that, in Guadalajara, we could all have a colander made locally from hojalata because we prefer to go to Costco and get one made from plastic.”
For Cappello, the goal is neither to replace nor transform a system that already exists and still, to a large extent, functions. As Gil told me on the day we met, “with this oficio you always sell, whether its cake trays around Christmas or watering cans in the spring – maybe not in huge quantities, but you sell all year long.” Cappello is more interested in understanding and reinforcing the neighbourhood dynamics that have sustained this practice. The designer, in this schema, is just another participant in an urban micro-economy as it reshapes itself to meet new needs. “These are things that we’re about to lose but that still have value for a city, for a society,” says Cappello. “We all have our role to play.”
Words Michael Snyder
Photographs Rodrigo Alvarez
This article was originally published in Disegno #35. To buy the issue, or subscribe to the journal, please visit the online shop.