These are the people who are the potters of Oaxaca...

ar in the south of Mexico where Middle America begins to crumple and twist into the long land bridge that ties it with South America, rising from the Pacific where the Southern Sierra Madre mixes with the clouds, where the centuries have seen empires rise and fall, where the corn has not ceased to grow in untold thousands of years, lies the state called Oaxaca. It is a place absent of subtlety, a land where no one piece of ground resembles another. Quiet coastal beaches disappear into hot thorny lowland scrub which is lost in pungent foothill jungles that cool into mountain cloud forests. The hard edged mountains tumble into canyons that spread beyond to a broken arid interior cut by jumbled mountain ranges and broad valleys of cactus, zapote, stone and dusty arroyos. The land burns under a persistent sun until the sudden roar of summer rains turns all a wet, brilliant green and sets the arroyos thundering with torrents of red, earth drenched water.