In my grandfather's study, there was a framed painting of a tree of life bursting with birds and flowers, painted directly onto what looked like rough, textured bark instead of canvas. I must have been eight when I finally asked what it was made of, and he told me it was amate — bark paper — and that the family who painted it had been making it the same way for generations in a village in Guerrero. He talked about it like it was older than the country itself, which, as it turns out, it basically is.
What is amate paper, and why has it been made in Mexico for over a thousand years?
Amate is a bark paper handmade by boiling and beating the inner bark of fig and mulberry trees, a process that traces directly back to pre-Columbian Mesoamerica, where it was used to create the codices and ritual objects of the Aztec and other Nahua peoples long before European contact.
From sacred codices to a nearly lost tradition
Amate — from the Nahuatl "amatl" — was one of the primary writing surfaces of pre-Hispanic Mexico, used to create the folding-screen codices that recorded history, astronomy, tribute records, and religious ritual. It also held spiritual weight of its own: paper was cut into figures and burned or offered in ceremonies dedicated to gods and ancestors. After the Spanish conquest, colonial authorities banned bark paper production, associating it with Indigenous religious practice, and the craft nearly disappeared entirely. It survived in only a handful of isolated communities, most notably among Otomí artisans in the mountains of Puebla, who kept the technique alive largely for ceremonial paper-cutting rather than commercial use, well into the twentieth century.[1]
How bark becomes paper: a process that hasn't changed much in centuries
Making amate starts with stripping bark from jonote, mulberry, or fig trees, then boiling it for hours in water mixed with wood ash or lime to soften the fibers. The softened strips are laid out in a crosshatch pattern on a wooden board and pounded with a flat volcanic stone until the fibers fuse into a single continuous sheet. The texture stays visibly organic — uneven, fibrous, sometimes with small holes or bark fragments still embedded — which is part of what makes it unmistakable and, to many collectors, part of its appeal rather than a flaw. Otomí artisans in San Pablito, Puebla remain the primary producers of raw amate paper today, supplying much of the material used across the folk art world.
From ritual paper to painted canvas: the Nahua artists of Guerrero
Starting in the mid-twentieth century, amate found a second life as a painting surface, largely through Nahua artists in villages like Xalitla and Ameyaltepec in Guerrero. These painters adapted imagery from ceramics and older decorative traditions onto the bark paper itself, creating the vivid scenes of village life, animals, and trees of life that amate art is best known for internationally today. It's worth noting these are two distinct but connected traditions: Otomí artisans in Puebla largely make the raw paper, while Nahua artists in Guerrero are best known for painting on it, and both crafts require years to master.
Why amate still matters as a living folk art
Amate remains one of the clearest threads connecting contemporary Mexican folk art directly back to pre-Columbian practice — not a revival or a reconstruction, but a continuous, if fragile, tradition. It supports entire artisan economies in Puebla and Guerrero, and its imagery has influenced everything from textile prints to home decor well beyond Mexico's borders. Every sheet still carries the fingerprints, literally, of the person who beat it into shape.
If you're drawn to art with this kind of history behind it, we source pieces that celebrate exactly this kind of enduring craftsmanship — explore the Cultural Pride collection.
That painting still hangs in what used to be my grandfather's study. I look at it differently now, knowing the bark it's painted on carries a story that goes back a thousand years before the paint ever touched it — proof that some traditions don't need to be reinvented, only kept alive.
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[1] Fuente: Wikipedia, "Amate".