At 31, Daniel Iturralde has been making papier-mâché for most of his life. Born along the equator — in Quito, Ecuador, to be exact — he arrived here three months ago and has spent the last month making head-pieces out of cardboard for dozens of children and adults who will be in Sunday’s Carnaval parade.
So far, he has made 37 jaguar heads and 15 helmets with golden and red corn husks. They will be worn by parade-goers and volunteers at Carnaval, which started in 1979 and, every year, features hundreds of dancers, musicians and performers parading through the Mission.
The jaguar heads start out looking a bit like large, yellow baseball caps after their initial coat of paint. But, as Iturralde adds black dots that serve as eyes and noses, the pieces turn into a more familiar character. “It kind of looks like Pikachu right now,” said Iturralde, on a recent Wednesday afternoon inside his studio, smiling and painting.
After painting a series of black stripes and applying the finishing touches, the headpieces slowly start to gain the final desired look: A jaguar hat with fangs on the side, near the wearer’s eyes, and the animal’s eyes and ears on the back of the person’s head.
The process of making the pieces has been a long and fun one, said Iturralde. He first makes a base with a combination of cardboard and old newspaper, and then combines them with regular white glue — which is not as ideal as flour and water, he said, but good enough. He then inflates a balloon and coats it with the paste, letting it sit until it dries. Once it does, he pops the balloon to get the perfect shape for the pieces.
Iturralde has not been alone in this process. Many volunteers have come by to offer a hand.
“I know exactly what to start them off with,” said Iturralde “I have all these things to do, so I give them a small demo of what we should do, and it takes off from there.”
One of the volunteers on Wednesday evening was his mother, Gina Moreno. As a fellow artist — a jeweler, silversmith and multimedia artist — she had to come help her son out, she said.
“This is a super-special space that he and I share. It’s talking about art forms, methods. We feed off one another and we support one another,” said Moreno while she polished one of a couple dozen clay teeth made for the jaguar heads.
The clay teeth, which Moreno has been working on to help her son, had just come out of the oven at 1:30 a.m.
“What we’re doing is rectifying these. Just trying to get it as realistic as possible in a fun way, in a caricature way,” she said. Each square clay piece, about the size of a stamp, was waiting to be filed down to the shape of a tooth.
Iturralde is also making 15 red and gold hats. Moreno said they will be adorned with different fixtures, including feathers made out of corn husks.
Carnaval’s motto this year is “Honor Indigenous Roots,” and organizers have made 1992’s Nobel Prize winner and Indigenous rights activist Rigoberta Menchú Tum the event’s Grand Marshal. Longtime carnaval organizer and District 9 supervisorial candidate Roberto Hernandez said that having Menchú in the Mission is a “dream come true.”
As for Iturralde, he said this opportunity has been unexpected but positive. As soon as he arrived in San Francisco, he started distributing some of his drawings, small sculptures and art around the city.
The Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts told him they were looking for someone to make jaguar heads for Carnaval. After showing them his paper mache works and a couple of different designs, he got the job. The jaguar is not only MCCLA’s mascot, but also a special symbol to Mesoamerican Indians who see the animal as sacred.
“I’m beyond excited to see what they’re going to look like when being paraded down the street,” said Iturralde. “See all the people, not only me, being excited for the outcome saying, ‘Oh, yeah, I was part of making that.’”
“I’ve seen the costumes that go with those helmets, and they’re going to be beautiful,” added Moreno.
Even though Iturralde has been working hard on these pieces, don’t look for him wearing one. Instead, he will be sitting next to a mojiganga — a giant puppet-like piece — mounted in a car.
Iturralde made the piece for an earlier event, but is using it on Sunday and has been asked “to guard the mojiganga on the float, make sure it doesn’t fall off,” he said.
“Maybe at some point we can get off and hoist it around,” he added. “But for the time being??? I’ll be supervising it.”
Thank you Oscar! So sweet to read this!