Copperware, beaten to shape by hand, has fascinated me since, as a sixth-grader in shop class, I pounded a sheet of copper into an ash tray (!) for my father's birthday. Making copper vessels is a major craft in Mexico, the finest works finding their way to museums or commanding breathtaking prices in galleries.

Shown below are three more modest pieces Jean and I have accumulated over the years: On the right, a soup-bowl sized vessel of thin copper, on the left, an antique cauldron, hard-used over the years, holes in its bottom patched with crudely-shaped pieces of copper held in place with copper rivets.

In the center sits a large kettle with a heavy brass handle to permit hanging over a fire, that Jean found in Santa Clara del Cobre (copper), near Pátzcuaro.

Santa Clara, like all good Mexican towns, has a central plaza featuring a small bandstand. Theirs is covered, appropriately, with a copper roof. The cast-iron lamp standards have been painted with cheap-looking metallic copper paint. The treatment of the cast-iron benches is slightly more successful, painted green to look like verdigris. It doesn't, but the green looks nice anyway.

Scores of workshops in Santa Clara del Cobre make and sell copper objects. Most are inexpensive decorative items or souvenirs for tourists, sold in stores or galleries lining the main street. Along the side streets is where you find the true artists in their workshops, where you can shop for significant pieces that cost an arm and a leg in San Miguel de Allende, but cost only half an arm and a leg here.

Most of the fine pieces are "raised from a single ingot." That is to say, the craftsmen start with an ugly lump of copper like the squarish black one shown on the left, below, and by repeated heating and hammering, turn it into an object like the pot on the right.

You can see how thick are the walls of the pot above. It's about 18" in diameter and it's very heavy.

In my imagination, the workers of Santa Clara went down into copper mines, refined the ore, and tapping patiently for weeks, created these masterpieces. Of course, that's not what they do.

I saw a pickup truck on the street, in the bed of which were coils of thick copper wire; material perhaps purchased from a scrap metal dealer. Just as likely, some small community recently experienced an interruption in its electricity supply. There have been reports of such theft, along with the disappearance of manhole covers, taken for scrap iron. A worldwide rise in commodities prices due to soaring demand fueled by the rapid growth of manufacturing in countries like China has made stealing copper and steel remunerative—and made acquiring raw material difficult for the coppersmiths of Santa Clara.

Whatever the source, scrap copper is melted down and poured into ingots. The ingots are reheated and the hammering begins. Here, one worker holds a red-hot plate of copper while three men beat on it with sledgehammers.

The four work in an elegantly coordinated fashion. The hammer-wielders beat out a waltz—BAM-Bam-bam—while the man with the tongs rotates the piece once each measure. BAM-Bam-bam(turn) BAM-Bam-bam(turn) BAM-Bam-bam(turn).

Somehow, I'd expected more finesse, more delicacy in the process. But, after all, we're shaping thick metal here. These guys hit that copper plate hard, and after a couple of minutes of vigorous hammering, I couldn't see any appreciable thinning or widening.

The plate cools and work-hardens, so it needs reheating. Back into the open-hearth charcoal fire it goes. Hechizos (bellows) provide air to obtain the intense heat needed. The young man on the left is pushing on the handles of the hechizos. The little boy helping him is training to become a zorrilo (little fox), a bellows operator. It's the entry-level position for coppersmiths.

The guy on the right has his hand on the switch controlling an electric blower that augments the airflow from the hechizos. The system is ugly, but it works.

At some point, the plate becomes wide enough, and a senior craftsman takes over to begin raising the walls of the vessel. He uses no forms to shape the work; he works entirely by eye.

Eventually he has to bring the walls of the pot inward. He hammers against an anvil that reaches through the neck of the vessel.

Looking at the beat-up pot above, it's hard to visualize that in the end, he will produce a beautiful piece, perhaps one like this prize-winning fluted pot

Works of this size (24") and caliber sell for many hundreds of dollars at the workshop. But a significant portion of the cost is in the value of the copper it contains. It took several workers months to produce it, so none of them receive a lot of money for all their work and skill.

Mexico has a serious unemployment problem: witness the hundreds of thousands who brave the deserts and the Minutemen and the Border Patrol for the opportunity to go north and clean chickens on an assembly line. Some, though, develop skills and are lucky enough to find a niche as craftsmen and artists. Then, as sometimes happens, out of poverty comes beauty.