Generally speaking, there are masks that are made to order for a specific dancer, and there are masks that are made for sale. The made for sale category covers a variety of situations. A carver will frequently make masks in advance of any fiesta, with the plan that these would be available for purchase by dancers in his community. He may decide to sell such masks in a local market. Traveling dealers from Mexico City or the United States may buy these new masks, to be sold to merchants in distant communities for their folk art stores.

Then there is an additional category of masks that are made for sale specifically to tourists or collectors, they are carved in traditional designs, however they may be simplified or less carefully carved to meet a particular price point. Ironically, these distinctions are blurring in recent years, as the carvers are competing with inexpensive plastic or rubber masks, and any mask carved ahead of time may be carved to the simplest level, to keep the price low. As the reader will discover, the work of an individual carver will frequently defy categorization into these neat distinctions.

Collectors use the term made for sale in apposition to another, more pejorative term- decorative. In contrast to made for sale masks, decorative masks are of an invented, fantastic form and usually attributed to an invented dance. These masks are often stained and abused in order to create the impression of use and age. There are also masks which started out as made for sale, but then they have been subjected to such false aging practices. I simply call these fakes.

Bryan Stevens