Imuris, Sonora, some forty miles south of Nogales, is home to a folk art tradition that is unique in Mexico.  A few families still make glass crosses, boxes, and frames for holy pictures.  Floral and geometric designs are painted on the back of the glass in both opaque and translucent colors.  The glass is then mounted in tin strips and backed with crumpled tinfoil, giving a wonderful shimmering quality to the translucent paint.  While this art form used to be made in other parts of Mexico and the American Southwest, and while tin picture frames and niches are enjoying a revival of sorts in northern New Mexico, it is only in northern Sonora that folk artists are still making reverse-painted glass in any quantity.

Up until a few years ago, this work was only available at Magdalena, Sonora in early October, at the annual Fiesta de San Francisco.  The customers were mostly Tohono O'odham from Arizona, who would take the framed holy pictures to their desert chapels.  In the 1990s, the market has expanded to include collectors and others from the United States.  This has been the result of exhibitions in Arizona, as well as trips on the part of some of the artists to festivals in the United States.

Anastacio León grew up in a family dedicated to this art form. His father, Jesús León, was a talented and prolific tinworker and glass painter.  Anastacio started helping to paint the glass as a young boy, and then graduated to tinwork.  In 1993, after Don Jesús had died, Anastacio was invited to participate in the annual Smithsonian Festival of American Folklife on the Mall in Washington, D.C. There he learned that outsiders were interested in his tradition.  Later he was exposed to older New Mexico tin and glass work, while demonstrating at the Tucson Museum of Art.  This broadened his horizons and led him to incorporate more decorative use of tin in his frames.

Anastacio has participated in the annual Fiesta de Tumacácori since 1995.  It is with great pleasure that we now include him as a member of our rotating staff of demonstrators.  He and his family are true folk artists, serving specific communities by creating traditional kinds of beauty.

Coulter, Lane, and Maurice Dixon, Jr. New Mexico Tinwork, 1840-1940.  Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1990.

Griffith, James S. A Shared Space: Folklife of the Arizona-Sonora Borderlands.  Logan: Utah State University Press, 1995.