Higuera, Petra

<p>"Ethnographer Ralph Michelsen visited Santa Catarina several times between 1959 and 1966, and interviewed many of the same craftspeople that Norton Allen had previously visited (see below). Michelsen photographed Petra (Albanez) Higuera, a Kuatl woman, in 1959 as she was making an agave-cordage net bag (Michelsen 1974) and again in 1966 while she was making and firing pottery (Michelsen 1971; Smith 1972)." (p. 396)</p>
<p>Petra Albañez (later Higuera) When Norton visited Santa Catarina in 1952, Petra was married to Eugenio Albañez, a seventy-year-old Tipai man (Henderson 1952a:5; 1952b:ll). The Allen Collection contains two bowls made by Petra (figure 5), one of which, a bean-cooking pot, can be seen in Norton's photograph of Petra's pots at her home in Santa Catarina (figure 6). Her pots were made with micaceous clays and have very visible burnishing marks and bits of clay left behind. Both bowls have cracks from firing: the bowl in figure 5, left, has a crack near its maximum diameter, and the bowl on the right has a crack at the juncture of the flat base and wall.</p>
<p>A decade later, when Petra was in her seventies, Michelsen knew her as Petra Higuera, and identified her as a "Kwatl Kwepai" (i.e., Kuatl) Indian (Michelsen 1970a, 1971, 1974; Smith 1972:2). In 1966, he photographed her collecting and processing clay and making and firing pottery. His notes and photographs were published by Smith (1972), and Petra's pottery-making process is summarized here. She collected clays from favorite sources ranging from three to twenty miles from Santa Catarina. She ground the clay on a milling stone, then winnowed it to remove coarse particles. It took up to six hours to grind the clay into a fine powder. Petra also pulverized horse manure as organic temper, along with a handful of ashes that she worked with water into the clay. She used an old, ash-covered olla bottom as a form on which to mold a large disc</p>

<p>Box 4, Folder 26: "Petra Higuera preparing mescal fibers for making cordage" 1966</p>
<p>Box 4, Folder 27: "First scraping of leaf. Child is granddaughter, Amalia" 1966</p>
<p>Box 4, Folder 43: "Corn field the maker, Petra Higuera" and "House of son of Petra about 150 yards to the east of Petras house" 1966</p>