Not all residents of Mata Ortiz deal in pottery.
Subsistence living with horses and buggy is prominent.
Third in a five-part series exploring northern Chihuahua and the Sierra Madre. The remote village of Mata Ortiz may have hit it big as the center of a pottery renaissance, yet it looks no different than the days its impoverished citizens survived as small farmers or railroad workers on just 25 to 50 pesos a day. The village still consists of three dusty streets of crumbling adobe buildings. It still lies seemingly timeless and abandoned between the sustaining waters of the Palangansas River and the abandoned Chihuahua Al Pacifico Railroad. The town's central ramada is ramshackle.