Lenca pottery is built without a wheel. Ropes of clay are coiled up by hand, smoothed with a stone and a stripped corn cob, coated twice or more in red engobe, burnished until the surface holds a low sheen, then open-fired under stones, roof tiles and potsherds with ocote pine. The loceras — the women who own the craft — judge the firing by eye and call it done when the pot is chelado, a live red like an ember.

Onto that red skin they draw in white barbotina, the clay-dust paste they also call mantequilla de barro, using feathers, splinters and fingertips. White is always the figure and red always the ground. This system keeps that relation, keeps the wobble in the line, and keeps the matte, unglazed surface of a working household vessel.