The story as told by the family
From a dream an impossible world was born
The Linares family tells that it all began when Don Pedro was seriously ill. An ulcer put him in bed and, as the family remembers it, even into a coma. Between dreams and delirium he saw extraordinary creatures, beings that seemed to combine parts of different animals, figures as unsettling as they were fascinating, shouting over and over an unknown word: alebrijes!
His son Felipe remembers the first figure he made on recovering: “a strange thing”, with a monkey’s face, painted in dark colors so it would look as ugly as he had seen it. With paper, cardboard, paste and his imagination, those creatures began to exist outside his dreams. Over time he settled what an alebrije is: a fantastic figure that combines parts of several different animals.
“A donkey with wings, well, there is no such thing, but you imagine that it could be an alebrije.”
Pedro Linares López, in the 1975 documentary (translated)
Here the only thing forbidden was to forbid
In the Linares workshop the craft did not begin with lessons or instructions. It began with play. The children watched their father and grandfather work; they took newspaper, prepared paste and tried to reproduce the figures they saw appearing between their hands. There was no written method: you learned by watching, trying, failing and starting again.
“Here the only thing forbidden was to forbid.”
Leonardo Linares Vargas, video testimony (family archive; translated)
That freedom was also a form of teaching. Each generation discovered, in its own time, how to turn everyday materials into creatures that existed nowhere else.
The son who learned by watching
Felipe Linares Mendoza, Don Pedro’s son, says he began working paper at about ten, watching his father, and that to him “it felt like a game”. When the alebrijes arrived in the workshop, he decided to add more to them: horns, scales, whatever came to mind. His first alebrije was a figure with an armadillo body, a rooster head and a skull mounted on top.
“I watched what my father did and always tried to do it better.”
Felipe Linares Mendoza, video testimony (family archive; translated)
Over the years, he recalls, he was invited to give a cartonería workshop in San Antonio, Texas, and later gave demonstrations in Los Angeles, Sacramento, San Jose and Finland. His greatest satisfaction, he says, is having made the family’s work known in places very far away.
The craft handed down through the hands
Felipe Linares Vargas remembers the afternoons after secondary school, when he would arrive at the workshop and sit beside his father. Between conversation, paper and paint, he was given small tasks: whitening a figure, decorating a piece, watching how a detail was resolved. Over the years those afternoons ended up defining his path. Although he studied programming, he found that his place was in the workshop.
“I was more drawn to being here with my father because here I expressed my creativity.”
Felipe Linares Vargas, video testimony (family archive; translated)
Knowledge was not passed on in words alone. It lived in the way the hand moved, in the patience to build a figure and in the care with which each brushstroke was applied. Leonardo says it of his father: from him he learned “fine work”, and he is still amazed by the skill with which he paints.
A tradition that keeps imagining
The essential materials remain: newspaper, manila paper, tissue paper, kraft paper, paste, wire or reed. In Leonardo’s workshop, nothing that is not paper: no polystyrene, no plastics, no fabrics, no glass eyes. But the possibilities keep growing. In the hands of Felipe Linares Mendoza and his sons, the alebrijes take on new forms, movements, heights, textures and details. Each piece keeps the knowledge of those who came before, but also expresses the imagination of its maker.
“To make an alebrije there is no mold, there is nothing. It is raised with paper, pure paper.”
Felipe Linares Mendoza, in the video “Soy creador mexicano” (family archive; translated)
It is not about repeating exactly the figures of the past. It is about keeping the craft alive, experimenting with its possibilities and finding new ways to bring the impossible to life. Because in the Linares family tradition is not a form that must stay still: it is an art that keeps transforming itself, generation after generation.
