Vallero

The Vallero is the first design within our tradition that actually develops here in Northern New Mexico. It’s named after the beautiful mountain town of El Valle, where there were a number of weavers who had the respected skill of being able to weave these distinctive textiles.  The oldest of these use commercial plied yarns, and tend to be more detailed than later Valleros.  The majority of Valleros were dyed with the early synthetic dyes, but are handspun wool.  Those woven before about the 1920’s are woven in two pieces with a seam down the center.

This is a simple Trampas Vallero. It has five serrated Vallero stars, one in each corner and one in the center. The corner stars are in large boxes. It has a simple vertical border and it uses chained hourglasses to delineate color areas in the radiating diamond . It also shows striping in the radiating diamonds. You can see how similar these are to the Rio Grande Saltillos that preceded them. Valleros pretty much look like Rio Grande Saltillos but with eight-pointed stars added to them.  Not all Valleros have the same five-stars distribution.

The weavers who wove Valleros were said to have had distinctive border designs that identified who wove the piece.  A majority of the Valleros we have seen have either a “tulipan” border like the piece above, or a “culebra” border like the Vallero below, or some combination of the two borders.