“I am a woman of the earth.”

Rufina Ruiz López spoke with unassuming strength, her gleaming black braids threaded with pink ribbon. The clay calavera skull she had sculpted bounced gently on her knee, her fingers wandering the hollows of its black eyes.

It was the third day of the 2024 Smithsonian Folklife Festival, spotlighting Indigenous Voices of the Americas. López (Zapotec/Mixtec) sat in the center of the Narrative Stage, joined by fellow Oaxacan artisans Macrina Mateo Martinez and Carina Citlalli Ramírez Juárez. To open the conversation, each presented a sample of their work to the audience. López offered her calavera, along with a glimpse into the piece’s layered significance.

“Making calaveras was a way to honor the women of my community who fell,” López explained, referencing gender-based violence. “I go about the world always speaking of women.”

*****

Two days later, we pulled two stools onto the dirt and sat beside each other under the heavy heat, surrounded by the swirling chatter of festivalgoers. The morning had just begun, but visitors were already pooling under the Zapotec Ceramics tent to admire her handmade wares and the Día de los Muertos (Day of the Dead) style altar set up behind them.

“It’s a biodiversity of knowledge,” López said in Spanish, gesturing to the Festival hum around us. The last few days had introduced her to many inspiring techniques and clay traditions, but, above all, she reflected, they had been a welcome window of insight into new cultures.

This love for continued learning has been the driving force of her artistic career. López comes from Santa María Atzompa, a small town cradled between the rolling hills of the Oaxaca Valley of southern Mexico with a rich clay tradition dating back over 3,000 years. She has supplemented her ancestral knowledge of ceramics with twelve years of study at the Centro de las Artes de San Agustín, an ecological arts center in Oaxaca committed to artistic training and environmental protection. Today, her distinct style reflects a soulful dialogue between these traditional and contemporary influences. Aside from decorative items like calaveras, her workshop creates functional pieces like plates, bowls, and vases for clientele across Oaxaca and beyond.

Much of daily life in Santa María Atzompa is upheld by the hands of women, López said. Yet despite all they provide, many live restricted lives. Only a generation ago, women were not allowed to sell or display their ceramics in public spaces. In López’s case, things were different.

“My mother showed me a different path,” she explained. “She taught me what courage looks like. Because of her, I live in a different vision—a different way of relating to femininity.” She recalled how traditional gender roles were more flexible in her home, with household responsibilities like cooking and cleaning shared among the men and women in her family.

“The most important challenge we face is ourselves,” she continued. “You have to let go of your fears in order to break through obstacles. It’s always difficult but never impossible.”

Throughout her forty-five-year career, López has connected with artists from diverse cultural backgrounds. She soon realized the limitations felt by women in her own community were universal.

“It’s like my mother used to say,” she remembered. “A woman is the humblest being who exists in the land.”

Some might mistake this for passivity, but I sensed the duality in her words. Sitting beside each other, I couldn’t help but be moved by the power of this same humility. She is strong, sure, and kind.

*****

For López, reverence for the feminine and for the earth are one and the same. The two speak the same language: one of fertility, sustenance, and devotion.

“Una mujer siempre es tierra,” she emphasized—a woman is always earth.

While clay has brought her close to this truth, it isn’t the only way of getting there. “For me, the most wonderful thing is to see a woman working the land,” she said. “It doesn’t matter if it isn’t clay. When you go into the fields and see the women there, it’s sacred. They are one with the fertility of the soil.”

López is the fifth generation in a matriarchal lineage of potters. Her deep knowledge of traditional ceramics is a gift which has passed through the hands of her tatarabuela (great-great-grandmother), bisabuela (great-grandmother), abuela (grandmother), and madre (mother) before reaching her own. Even as we spoke on the National Mall, I sensed their presence beside her.

Yet just as important as the techniques López inherited were the values that accompanied them. “My siblings and I were taught to respect women, because we were brought into this world by one,” she said.

Indigenous cosmologies often characterize nature’s life-giving power as essentially feminine: Pachamama, Madre Tierra, Unci Maka. It follows, then, that a culture’s treatment of women and the land are inextricably linked. López’s words were a powerful reminder that social and environmental justice are two sides of the same coin: the treatment of the natural world and the people who live in it (women, in this case) are explicit symptoms of the same culturally rooted value systems.

*****

An understanding of this interconnectedness was integral to her upbringing. López is the ninth of eleven children, six of whom went on to become potters. Her eyes twinkled as she recalled the joy of growing up alongside each other with their hands in the earth. As a young child, she and her siblings learned to commune with clay by playing with it. She was raised by these rhythms of retrieving, refining, and sculpting the material, and they have guided her life ever since.

Though parts of the process have changed since her childhood, much remains the same. I listened as she recounted each step in tender detail: waking before dawn, the freshness of the wind on her skin, the dew on the leaves.

“It’s a feeling of coexistence,” she shared.

Traditionally, women guard the knowledge of where to find the best clay. The harvest is something of a pilgrimage, beginning with a steady trek up the rugged hillside. Upon arrival, potters descend upon the hard earth with nails, picks, and their bare hands, collecting the raw clay in buckets. With the midday heat bearing down against their backs, they carry the material back down the hillside on their shoulders. They pause only to eat lunch between the cacti and wildflowers to make it home before nightfall.

The next day, the routine begins again. “Next, you clean the material,” López described. “You must remove all the roots, thorns, and stones. The clay must be clean so it can give.”

This metaphor mirrors the internal process of the artist; she shared that through the meditative act of physically purifying the material, the emotional body is clarified, too.

The artists in López’s workshop use five clays with distinct colors and characteristics: three local and two foreign. Once the locally sourced clays have been freed of debris, the next step is to grind them down. This was done with sticks in the past, but today they use mechanical clay grinding mills. “It’s still exhausting,” López assured.

The five clays are consolidated and mixed with water to form una sola masa: a single mixture which is ready to be shaped. Then, with the familiar weight of the clay between her hands, López is guided by inner instinct as she expresses the soul of each piece through form. Every final product is imprinted with a memory of its own—of the land, local tradition, and the distinct touch of the artist.

“That’s when my mother would say: appreciate what you have in your hands, Rufi.”

“Do you know how much the earth has suffered?” she echoed in her mother’s voice. “We chop her, we crush her, we grind her, we put her in the fire. Do you know how much it hurts?”

“So don’t mistreat clay. Don’t throw her away, because she feeds you. If you don’t treat her right, you won’t eat.” 

*****

In all her years of creative exploration and professional success, López has kept her two feet firmly rooted. “Rufina without the land is nobody,” she insisted as we came to the end of our interview. “It’s the land that has brought me here today to share with you all.”

“I work with all four elements,” she continued. “Clay is nothing without water, without air, without fire. That’s the importance of connecting with nature: understanding that ‘you’ are not just you.”

Instilling these values in younger generations can be a challenge, but López seemed confident that a shift is well underway. “For every person who listens and understands, a seed is planted,” she said. “And sooner or later, those seeds will be fertile. People are searching for ways to heal, and connecting to culture is a part of that.”

*****

As the conversation at the Narrative Stage drew to a close, López smiled appreciatively as she looked out across the audience to the Festival crowds beyond. She gathered her parting message with care.

“We are all children of this earth,” she said, her words carrying all the weight and simplicity of gravity.

Tia Merotto is a former intern at the Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage. Her writing explores intersections of ecology, culture, and spirituality.