Petate Earrings

A woven basket pattern, the petate, is worked into the rectangular face of these earrings, translating the plaited reed mat of Mexican daily life into hand-wrought silver: the over-and-under weave of an everyday object becomes a metal texture. The petate motif ties the piece to vernacular Mexican craft rather than to ancient iconography.

The design was made across scales, the existing record noting the same basket-weave pattern was used, much enlarged, for a pin and a bracelet, a single texture modulated from earring to statement piece. Per the catalog evidence the design seems to have been in production from about 1940 through 1945, though the earrings themselves appear only in the 1942 catalog, placing them in the First Design Period.

The earrings are recorded in Penny C. Morrill and Carole A. Berk's Mexican Silver. Petate-pattern jewelry is among the more distinctive of the workshop's references to Mexican folk material and is collected as such.