In and around Uruapan, Michoacán, in central Mexico, where folk artist Marta Morales Naranjo lives, the markets abound with tasty bread loaves, fresh fish, and tamales, colorful arrays of flowers spilling from baskets, distinctive regional pottery glistening with green and brown glazes and an assortment of decorative crafts.

This is daily living in Marta Morales Naranjo’s hometown and in many of the surrounding cities and towns in the state of Michoacán.  It is a place where the Tarascan people, who call themselves the Purépecha, built their empire long ago and held steadfast against repeated attempts by the Aztecs to conquer them. A place where men still don masks and perform dances to honor saints as negritos, the mythic Tarascan Blackmen, or participate in exaggerated and acrobatic jigs as viejitos,

little old men.  A place where women still wear traditional indigenous garments, painstakingly woven on backstrap looms.  And where elaborate wooden framework ofrendas (altars) are bedecked with colorful orange marigolds to commemorate ancestors during Día de los Muertos, Day of the Dead.

Surrounded by an endless source of inspiration, Marta has become the “keeper of culture” by meticulously crafting dolls that reflect everyday life in her milieu, each telling its own story. Her dolls recreate in diminutive form masked dancers in colorful costumes, a queen and her attendants riding in an old-style wagon float pulled by oxen at a local barrio festival, a man weaving intricate palm frond crafts to sell for Palm Sunday celebrations, and a campesino wearing a raincape of palm leaves. 

Many of her dolls represent ordinary daily tasks of men and women: fishermen with their accompanying nets, men carving masks and selling pottery, and women taking live chickens to the market to sell or making tasty foods and flowers available to buyers. Marta has invented more than 100 different figures and the variety of subjects is endless.