Philiberto brings home corn stalks to feed his cows.

San Agustin Etla Almost overwhelmed by his bundle of corn stalks Philliberto brings home corn stalks for feeding his highly prized milk cow. Everything is still done by hand here, and the natives take pride in working the land - Oaxaca Mexico - January 27, 2002.

Half an hour from Oaxaca lies San Agustín Etla, a picturesque, mountainous area where a relatively new Cultural Arts Center has been established in a creatively remodeled textile factory, as well as a small workshop where I watched, fascinated, as five young men hand produced beautiful thick paper for artists made from raw cotton mixed with ixtle, the fiber from the maguey cactus. Both facilities evidence the influence and contributions of Francisco Toledo, Mexico's most famous living painter. Christian Viveros-Faune, an art historian, writes: "Toledo fuses dream images from his childhood with pre-Colombian symbolism and myriad references to the work of Dubuffet, Miro, Tapies, Klee, Tamayo, Blake, Goya, Ensor and Dürer, among other artists, and also to the writing of figures like Kafka and Borges. Snakes and turtles abound, as do rabbits and coyotes, bats and toads, crickets and dogs, as well as human figures from Mexican history, cycling from one work to another in a dizzying bestiary that is part ancient codex. Toledo's work is based in part on the shamanistic notion of the nagual, the belief that each human's fate is intertwined with that of an Aztec spirit in animal form."

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