Southwestern Easter Eggs

egg art

colorful, confetti-filled cones

honor an Easter tradition

A MOTHER JUGGLING TACOS AND SOFT DRINKS buys a cascarón and hands it to her 2-year-old daughter. "This is to break over Daddy's head," she says. But as the words float down from mom, the toddler winds up and smashes the cascarón on the food booth, producing a flurry of confetti. Oh, well. She got the smashing part right.

Cascarón means "eggshell" in Spanish, but the definition casts a pale shadow of the gorgeous party-going favors crafted in southern Arizona. These decorated eggshells filled with multicolored bits of paper show up in scattered areas of Mexico and in U.S. border states. But Tucson's Yaqui community has made cascarónes a unique art form.

The southern Arizona-style refilled eggshell rests atop a cone of newspaper that has been covered with colorful paper. The foot-long cone becomes a flower stem, handle or skirt.

The coneless cascarónes made in El Paso or Santa Barbara are called "poppers" in Tucson. Small children who don't appreciate the finer art form of the fancier cascarónes prefer these. They'd rather "pop" somebody.

The original fate of a cascarón was to be smashed on the head of an unsuspecting friend, showering the lucky person with confetti in an exuberance of good wishes. Today many cascarónes escape to become "fluorescent folk art," in the words of folklorist James Griffith.

Cultural historians have complex theories about cascarónes. One story says that Marco Polo found them in China, brought the tradition back to Italy, and it spread to Spain and then to Mexico. Griffith, in his book A Shared Space: Folklife in the Arizona-Sonora Borderlands, related stories by an Army lieutenant in Tucson in 1870 who saw eggshells being sold at dances. When broken, they showered paper, perfume or candy.

While some people living in the Southwest grew up with a tradition of confetti-filled eggs, mainstream Easter bunnies edged out cascarónes in many families. Richey Elementary School in Tucson has reintroduced the eggshell fantasies to people who never learned about them as children.

Maria Hinojos saw her first cascarón at Richey School. She grew up in Nogales, and recently enrolled in the Richey School's Englishas-a-second-language class for adults. She told the group in Spanish that she had never seen cascarónes as a child in Nogales. After learning how to make them, she created 15 cascarónes, one to give each family member when she and her husband went to visit on New Year's Eve. "It was a labor of love."

Because the family always throws confetti on New Year's Eve,