The Artifact: The Piñata

pinata before you know how this works. A brightly colored paper mache, pottery, paper, cardboard, or cloth container is stuffed full of candy or other treats and raised and lowered by a rope as a blindfolded contestant takes wax at it. After a few hysterical misses and punishing hits, the container bursts and spills these treats on the ground to be

snatched up by eager hands. It's an activity and craft strongly linked with Mexican customs, and is all so so widely spread that it's easy to just take for granted. I know, I did till I visited the Pinatas exhibit at the Mengae International Museum in San Diego, California, running through April thirty, twenty twenty three. The exhibit celebrates pinatas as both a traditional craft and a form of contemporary art.

Sometimes aimed at social and political commentary. It was really an eye opening exhibit from me into both the material culture and the cutting humor of pinadas, and artists are continuing to do a lot with this medium today. Another area I'd never personally explored is the origin of the pinata,

a topic that the exhibit acknowledges is somewhat understudied. It cites a twenty eighteen paper by Young Chin published in the Fudan Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences titled From the Dachinu to the Pinata, Tracing the alleged Chinese origin of a Mexican tradition. In the paper, Chin explores the possible connection between the Chinese traditions surrounding the docunu, or beating or lashing of the spring cattle, and the Mexican

pinata tradition. The Dacinu is an old springtime ritual in which a large clay statue of an ox is filled with seeds and then shattered by the emperor or an imperial representative, scattering its contents on the ground. The ritual performance is still practiced in China today. The hypothesis then, is that this practice may have spread from China to Italy via the Silk Road and or the travels of

Marco Polo during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The name pinata may be derived from pigna, a clay pot in the shape of a pine cone in Italian traditions. Around this time, Italian Linton customs sometimes entailed the shattering of small, simple clay vessels filled with fruits or sweets. So it is then proposed that this practice spread to the Americas in the sixteenth century via Catholic Spanish missionaries who use the practice as both a Catholic religious celebration and an

indoctrination tool for indigenous peoples. Now, obviously this is the sort of practice that would just be inherently fun, as this sort of ritual transcends language and beliefs, at least in just the basic practice of shattering something, breaking something, and finding a reward within. But it may also have found a foothold in indigenous practices due to precontact rituals of shattering clay pots in devotion to the Aztec solar

deity Withsulopotli. Now that's a long journey across multiple continents and cultures, so the question remains, Is it possibly true? Well Chin contends that we might tentatively attribute the origins of the pinyada to Chinese customs, but that there's insignificant evidence to make any definitive conclusions. So whatever the pinyada's origins Chinese, Italian, Spanish, Aztec, or some mixture of them, the pinata has become cemented as a distinctly Mexican and

Latin American tradition with broad international appeal. Tune in for additional episodes of The Artifact or The Monster Fact each week. As always, you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.