San Pablito Otomí Amate Bark Paper Making

Papel amate

A nearly 2,000-year-old bark-paper making technique in which inner tree bark is boiled with lime and ash, then hand-pounded on a wooden board with a flat stone into a single continuous sheet, preserved after the Spanish colonial administration banned its ritual use as "witchcraft" almost exclusively by the isolated Otomí mountain village of San Pablito, Puebla, which today remains the sole significant producer of a paper still cut by local shamans into spirit-figure cutouts (muñecos) used in healing, rainmaking, and harvest rituals.

Risk level: Endangered · Not currently inscribed on a UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage list; Mexico is a State Party to the UNESCO 2003 Convention (ratified 14 December 2005) and could nominate this technique in the future.

Alternate Names: Amate paper; bark paper
Geographic Center: San Pablito, Pahuatlán municipality, Sierra Norte de Puebla
Community / Ethnic Group: Otomí (Hñähñu)
Estimated Origin: Bark paper production in Mexico dates back nearly 2,000 years and was used across many Mesoamerican civilizations including the Toltec, Aztec, and Mixtec; the practice was banned and largely disappeared after the Spanish conquest, when it was associated with magic and witchcraft, but survived in the isolated Otomí villages of the Sierra Norte de Puebla, with San Pablito emerging as essentially the sole continuous producer
Cultural Function: Otomí shamans (curanderos, brujos) traditionally cut finished amate paper into muñecos — spirit-figure dolls — used across a wide range of ritual purposes including rainmaking, ensuring good harvests, banishing evil spirits, and curing illness; figures cut from white paper represent benevolent spirits, while figures cut from dark paper represent malevolent ones, and to this day San Pablito residents, who speak an Otomí dialect and learn Spanish as a second language, maintain that amate paper itself carries genuine mystical power
Primary Materials: Inner bark of the jonote tree (historically several Ficus and related species, particularly the wild fig varieties from which the paper's name amate derives); Trema micrantha bark, imported from Veracruz, is now the majority material used in San Pablito due to documented overharvesting-driven scarcity of the traditionally preferred amate (wild fig) species
Primary Tools: A flat stone used for pounding pulp strips into a merged sheet, a wooden board as the pounding surface
Process Overview: Harvesting and cutting inner tree bark into strips, boiling the strips with lime and ash to soften the fibers, laying the softened pulp out on a wooden board in a grid, hand-pounding the strips with a flat stone until they merge into a single continuous sheet, sun-drying the finished sheet, and patching any holes with cut orchid pseudobulb adhesive
Traditional Applications: Ritual muñeco spirit-figure cutouts for healing, rainmaking, harvest, and protection ceremonies; historically also codices and ceremonial garments across Mesoamerica
Contemporary Applications: Base material for amate bark painting (a related craft practiced in Xalitla, Guerrero, and elsewhere), fine-art and collector paper, continued ritual cutout production
Notable Practitioners: Alfonso García Tellez, a San Pablito papermaker and shaman who learned from his father Santos García, described as the self-identified "brujo mayor de San Pablito" (head shaman of San Pablito), and who created the influential late-1970s amate manuscript books documented by the Metropolitan Museum of Art; Efrain Daza and his family, contemporary San Pablito papermakers documented producing amate using methods passed down from precolonial times; Esperanza Trejo González, a papermaker with more than a decade of experience in the craft; Carol Tyroler, papermaker and anthropologist who founded the Amatl Papers cooperative in 1990 to support San Pablito papermaking families
Key References: Timothy S. Y. Lam Museum of Anthropology, 'Otomí Bark Paper'; Hand Papermaking, 'Amate Papermaking in San Pablito'; Metropolitan Museum of Art, 'Power Paper: the Amate Manuscripts of Alfonso García Tellez'; Ethnobotanical research on Cyrtopodium macrobulbon adhesive use (ResearchGate, 'Otomi bark paper in Mexico: Commercialization of a pre-hispanic technology')
Verification Status: Desk-Researched

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