Nick Spark (1990:1-2) provided a summary of the beginnings of Franco family folk art:
Cloth dolls
Molly Santos, Tohono O’odham, 1960
Hickiwan, Tohono O’odham Nation, AZ
Purchased at Tracey’s Trading Post, San Simon
Gift of Dr. Bernard Fontana, 1960
Height of man 17.5 cm, of woman 15.5 cm.
(E-4212 a and b)
Domingo Franco, like many Indians during the 1920s, had a difficult time providing for his family. Bartering grain and goods worked well enough for inter-tribal trade, but to obtain goods from the outside world Domingo needed cash. An easy way of obtaining money, he discovered, was to carve bows and arrows for the tourist trade and to sell cactus wood to various curio makers. It was while he was selling cactus wood that Domingo met Mr. Hall, a curio dealer who was building covered wagon lamps out of cholla and selling them to tourists. Domingo realized that there was very little involved in making the wagons, and when Mr. Hall rejected a pile of the wood for not being “knobby enough” Domingo tried his own hand at it.
From these beginnings a family craft legacy was born.
The elder Francos started making figures to add to Anglo cactus craft artisan Mr. Hall’s cactus lamps, with Domingo carving and Chepa sewing clothing and hair. Their collaborations on stand-alone figures began in the 1950s. Regarding the inspiration for these dolls, Nicholas Spark interviewed local Native arts dealer Mark Bahti, whom he quotes (1990:3):
I think you can make the argument that the O’odham were doing a lot of craftwork for the Catholic Church.” “We have reason to believe that some of the men made figures (of saints) that the women clothed, and I think it’s a branch of that.
The Tohono O’odham also have a tradition of making cloth dolls starting when commercial cloth was readily available. ASM has several examples of these dolls made by a rolled cloth construction technique.