Genoveva Castellanoz: Part II

Genoveva Castellanoz was born in Central Mexico and moved at an early age to Texas. She became versed in many traditional Mexican crafts including making paper flowers, crocheting, knitting, and embroidery. Eva moved from Texas to Nyassa, Oregon, her present home. She has received a National Heritage Fellowship and is a frequent visitor to Washington where she teaches and demonstrates her master craft skills at festivals and in classrooms.
Castellanoz is especially renown for making paper and wax flowers for baptisms, weddings and quinceañeras. In this celebration of a girls fifteenth birthday, relatives contribute one of the necessary items for the girl's outfit: the white dress and other articles of clothing, a pillow for kneeling, and the corona, a crown of flowers, also white, symbolizing purity. The corona is important to the aesthetics of the quinceañera event. Eva is the only corona maker in the Pacific Northwest and is sought by families for hundreds of miles.

Her work may be seen at the Washington State History Musuem's Exhibit "With Our Hands"
http://www.washingtonhistory.org/wshm/featuredexhibits/withourhands.aspx

Video by Anders and Jens Lund

Category:

Education

Tags:

• Genoveva Castellanoz
• Wax Flowers
• Paper Flowers
• Folk Arts
• Mexican American Crafts