Mexican artisans preserve Day of the Dead decorations

XOCHIMILCO, Mexico — Mexican artisans are struggling to preserve the traditional manufacture of paper cut-out decorations long used in altars for the Day of the Dead. Defying increasingly popular mass-production techniques, second-generation paper cutter Yuridia Torres Alfaro, 49, still makes her own stencils at her family’s workshop in Xochimilco, on the rural southern edge of Mexico City. As she has since she was a child, Torres Alfaro punched stunningly sharp chisels into thick piles of tissue paper at her business, ‘Papel Picado Xochimilco.’ While others use longer-lasting plastic sheets, laser cutters or pre-made stencils, Torres Alfaro does each step by hand, as Mexican specialists have been doing for 200 years. Begun in the 1800s, experts say ‘papel picado’ using tissue paper is probably a continuation of a far older pre-Hispanic tradition of painting ceremonial figures on paper made of fig-bark sheets.