Tucked away in the Chicago Lawn neighborhood near Midway Airport, a Mexican folk art tradition lives on in the papier-mache, tissue-papered heads of Spider-Man and Shrek. This is where Jesus Dimas makes pinatas, those festive vessels of goodies built to be smashed.
With little more than scissors, wire, newspaper and a simple flour-and-water paste, Dimas, 34, has been creating pinatas for 10 years. Multicolored ladybugs, donkeys, purple dinosaurs, superheroes and snakes inhabit his garage and kitchen.
“Monsters are the hardest to do,” says Dimas. “The face is kind of hard; you have more details . . . “
But details are part of the job of capturing this cross-cultural staple of North American celebrations. They have also become a barometer of sorts for societal preoccupations.
Bring him a photo of just about anything and he’ll turn the image into a three-dimensional conversation piece. For a price, of course. Foot-tall burros run about $5. Bigger pinatas can run up to $150 — that was the price tag on a recent commissioned pinata of the Rocky Mountains. He also does, ahem, adult-theme pinatas.
In a paste-hardened scrapbook, Dimas keeps magazine clippings for reference. Cartoon-character pinatas reign supreme at children’s birthday parties, so he catalogs a range of icons, from SpongeBob SquarePants to Barney. One page holds designs for a Superman costume and on another, “Nightmare on Elm Street” villain Freddy Krueger grins ominously next to a newspaper photo of Osama bin Laden.
In 2001, Dimas made more than 10 special-order bin Laden pinatas for various customers. You can still see one in Dimas’ photo album. A few page flips away, there are 3-foot tall Corona cans and “Star Wars” characters.
“Artisans of all kinds are heavily, heavily influenced by people who commission them and the pop culture,” says Cesareo Moreno, visual arts director at the Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum in Pilsen.
“Culturally speaking, pinatas have definitely evolved in the 20th Century,” he adds. Not only have the designs changed, but the materials have as well. In traditional Mexican pinatas, a clay pot housed in the middle — where the candies and nuts are eventually placed — made the pinata more fragile. Today, newspaper pinatas, like the kind Dimas makes, or the corrugated cardboard pinatas mass-produced in China, are the norm.
This is interesting considering China has historically been identified as the birthplace of the pinata. It’s thought that Marco Polo’s 13th Century expeditions introduced them to the West.
From there, pinata-making most likely went to the Italians, then the Spaniards, eventually blossoming in Mexican culture.
The brightly colored tissue paper used to decorate pinatas, says Moreno, is still called, “papel de China” in Spanish or “paper from China.”
In her cookbook “Feasts of Life,” Mexican restaurateur Patricia Quintana wrote about the popularity of pinatas at posadas, the pre-Christmas reenactment of Mary and Joseph’s search for lodging.
In a telephone interview from Mexico City, Quintana says pinatas remain popular south of the border at posadas and birthday parties. “We are rescuing all our traditions,” she said, recalling her own 15th birthday and its requisite pinata. “It’s a wonderful way of understanding happiness and giving and sharing.”
So accepted are pinatas in the United States and Mexico, with both Latinos and Anglos, that Wal-Mart, the world’s largest retailer, has been selling pinatas in the U.S. since 1997.
“They have been popular with customers across the country,” responded Wal-Mart spokeswoman Karen Burk in an e-mail.
“We offer them in most of our store locations, and we offer basic selections in addition to licensed pinatas such as Spider-Man and SpongeBob that are in great demand.”
Right now, Dimas says most of his business comes from Latinos, and largely through word of mouth. But he has big plans. He’s just had business cards and refrigerator magnets made and purchased the Internet domain name www.pinatas.net. Next year, Dimas hopes to open up his own storefront sometime next year, which is a good thing considering boxes of colored tissue paper have taken over large areas of his kitchen. Currently, he sells his creations through Abarrotera Mercantil, a store on West 26th Street.
In addition to his customers, Dimas has 10 cousins and nieces to make pinatas for in between his day job of delivering milk. On average, that’s more than 520 pinatas a year — though he’s never made one for his own birthday.
Watching other people bust open his work is bad enough, Dimas says, although he enjoys watching children’s faces when the pinata explodes. “I don’t like to break my own work,” he says.
