Party favor or art? Preserving the craft of the piñata.

Would you take a sledgehammer to the David? A flamethrower to the Mona Lisa? A shredder to the latest Banksy? (Actually, scratch that last one.)

Why then, some people are beginning to ask, would you want to pulverize a piñata?

Alfonso Hernandez, for one, wants you to lower the bat and take off the blindfold and appreciate the artistry of a form that dates back hundreds of years.

The Dallas-based artist has crafted life-size piñata sculptures of Mexican singer Vicente Fernández and Jack Skellington from “The Nightmare Before Christmas.” He wants the public to help turn an industry into art.

“Piñata makers never treated it like an art form,” he says. “They’re taught to make it fast. It doesn’t matter what it looks like, just hurry up because they’re going to break it.”

Unsatisfied with the generic mass production that has characterized their discipline for decades, piñata makers are pushing the artistic limits of the party pieces. These piñatas, bigger and more detailed, are made out of wood, foam, wire, and clay, and sculpted to look like beloved icons and life-size low-riders. Some move, some are political, and some even talk. Rihanna is a fan, as are, increasingly, art galleries.

For generations, the real cost of bargain piñatas has typically been borne by the piñata makers themselves working long, arduous hours for less than minimum wage. By proving that piñatas can be more than just clubbable party pieces, people like Mr. Hernandez hope they can both create art and bring a wider respect and dignity to a craft long viewed as cheap and disposable.

“It’s been an underappreciated art form,” says Emily Zaiden, director and lead curator of the Craft in America Center in Los Angeles.

“Piñatas are so accessible. They speak to everybody,” she adds. But there’s also a flip side. Piñatas “can be about appropriation, can be about, I think, the trivialization of a cultural tradition.”

A new generation of Hispanic artists, she continues, “see how much metaphorical potential piñatas have, and how deeply it reflects their identities.”

The piñata-making grind is familiar to Mr. Hernandez. He tried to sell the first piñatas he made for $100, only to end up accepting $40. He quickly learned the importance of speed and volume. He’s wiry and lean – the product of losing about 40 pounds during a sleepless four-year tear when he made piñatas seven days a week. And he speaks with a rattling impatience, like he needs to get his words out as quickly as he once did his piñatas.

Today, Mr. Hernandez works slower, with more care and craft, from his garage workshop in east Dallas. And across the country, other piñata makers are doing the same. 

Change in purpose

There are lots of questions around where piñatas come from. They may have emerged in Europe, or China, or the Aztec era – or in all three independently. There are few preserved, written historical records on the origins of piñatas – another sign of how underappreciated the craft has been, Ms. Zaiden believes.

“A lot of this work probably hasn’t been collected or preserved in ways that other types of art have been,” she says.

“It’s all speculation and oral history really,” she adds, “but that goes hand in hand with the idea that these are ephemeral objects.”

For centuries, piñatas were used for religious ceremonies in Mexico. Typically built to resemble a seven-pointed star, symbolizing the seven deadly sins, they would decorate homes – and be smashed – during the Christmas season.

Their religious significance faded over time, and they became the popular children’s birthday party feature. But as the piñata industry commercialized, quality and craftsmanship became secondary to quantity.

Yesenia Prieto grew up in that world. A third-generation piñata maker, she watched her mother and grandmother create in her grandmother’s house in south central Los Angeles, and when she was 19 she started helping herself. It was a constant struggle to survive, she says.

“I was tired of seeing how poor we were,” she adds. “My grandma was about to lose her house. And we just needed to make more money. We needed to survive.”

She describes a week in the life of a typical piñata maker. A four-person crew makes about 60 units out of paper, water, and glue a week. Selling wholesale, they make $600 and split it between the four of them. That’s about $150 for a full week of work.

“People don’t think of piñatas as something artistic most of the time,” she says. “One of the main reasons is because the workers themselves are making so little.”

“What you’re seeing is an art form having to be mass produced and rushed because they’re getting sweatshop wages,” she adds.

Sometimes that is literally the case.

In 2012, three women alleged in a lawsuit that they were forced to make piñatas in an illegal factory in the New York City borough of Queens. Locked in an unventilated basement below a party supply store, they claimed they were forced to work 11-hour shifts for $3 per hour making about 300 piñatas a week. A federal judge ordered their bosses to pay them over $200,000 in damages, attorney’s fees, and other costs.

What the market thinks piñatas are worth

In 2012, Ms. Prieto went independent from her family, and independent from the mainstream piñata industry. She founded Piñata Design Studio and set to making custom, complex pieces that reflect the artistic potential of the craft.

They’ve created pterodactyls and stormtroopers. They’ve made a giant Nike sneaker, and an 8-foot-tall donkey for the 2019 Coachella music festival. They made a piñata of singer Rihanna for her birthday. (She kept it a whole year before finally breaking it, Ms. Prieto says.)

But the need to hustle hasn’t abated, according to Ms. Prieto. They work longer on their piñatas than most makers do – up to 16 hours in some cases – but still struggle to sell them for more than $1 an hour.

They’ve been leveraging the internet and social media – posting pictures of pieces as they’re being made, to illustrate the labor that’s involved – and they’re slowly raising their price point.

“We’re still taking losses on certain things. But that’s the goal,” she adds. “To see our work for what it truly is. ... For this art form to survive, [and fulfill] its artistic potential.”

She’s also now reaching out to other piñata makers about forming a co-op. By working together, she hopes, piñata makers can get paid fairly, at least. Artistic quality could also improve. And as people see elaborate, custom piñatas more often, she believes, demand will grow, and pay will grow with it.

“What we’re doing is trying to show you what they’d look like if they were valued more,” says Ms. Prieto. “If [people] understand how it’s made, they know it’s not machines just cranking these things out.”

“There is a shift taking place,” she adds. She’s seeing piñatas in galleries more often. But “there’s [still] a need for us to push hard to survive. At least that’s how I’m experiencing things right now.”

Look, don’t touch

Artistic piñatas and functional (read: “smashable”) piñatas exist in very different worlds, says Ms. Zaiden. But they can affect one another.

She curated a piñata exhibit at the Craft in America Center last year – including some of Ms. Prieto’s pieces. None of the works were designed to be beaten to smithereens. A larger version of that exhibit will go on display at a museum in San Diego this fall. The piñatas conveyed messages on everything from pop culture and junk food to border policy and reproductive rights.

“People love them, and they become centers of this monumental occasion, this celebration,” she adds. “So maybe there’s a possibility that people appreciate them as something that isn’t just smashed.”

In Dallas, Mr. Hernandez has his own plans, and his own dreams. 

His business, No Limit Arts and Crafts, has been blowing up since Texas Monthly profiled him in January. He’s making a giant Day of the Dead-themed Big Tex piñata for the Texas State Fair, and he’s making a piñata of Selena, the slain Tejana singer – a job that he says “terrifies” him because she’s so beloved.

But he wants to focus less on big, custom sculptures. Now he wants to sell DIY kits so kids can make their own piñatas at home. He not only wants families to get higher quality pieces for their celebrations, but also hopes to help them scratch the same artistic itch he’s had since he was in elementary school. The way Lego has fueled children’s imaginations for decades, he wants piñatas to do the same.

“One of the most important feelings that you get from this ... is, ‘Wow, this thing is amazing. I can’t break it,’” he says.

“To sell [that] feeling is what I’m looking for.”