William Spratling: The Man Who Made Taxco the Silver Capital of Mexico

There's a small colonial city perched in the mountains of Guerrero, Mexico, where the streets are cobblestone, the buildings are white-washed, and nearly every doorway opens onto a silversmith's workshop. Today, Taxco de Alarcón is synonymous with silver. But that wasn't always the case — and the story of how it got there begins with an unlikely figure: an American architect from Alabama named William Spratling.

From Alabama to Mexico City

William Spratling was born in 1900 in Sonyea, New York, and raised in Auburn, Alabama, where he eventually joined the faculty of Tulane University's School of Architecture. He was brilliant, restless, and deeply curious about the world beyond the American South.

In the late 1920s, Spratling began making trips to Mexico, drawn by its art, its culture, and its people. He wrote about his experiences in Little Mexico, a vivid portrait of Mexican life that caught the attention of readers and artists alike. By 1929, he had made a decision that would change his life — and the history of Mexican craft: he left his teaching post and moved to Mexico permanently.

He settled first in Mexico City, where he taught architecture at UNAM and fell into a remarkable social circle. Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo were friends. Ambassador Dwight Morrow — who was then working to strengthen U.S.-Mexico relations — was an early patron and supporter. These weren't casual acquaintances. They were collaborators in a shared project of cultural renewal, and Spratling was at the center of it.

The Move to Taxco

In 1931, Spratling left Mexico City for Taxco, a small town that had once been a center of silver mining during the colonial era but had long since faded from prominence. The mines were largely exhausted. The silversmithing tradition had nearly disappeared. What remained was a beautiful, quiet town with a population of skilled hands and deep craft memory.

Spratling saw something others had missed. He rented a house, set up a small workshop he called Taller de las Delicias (Workshop of Delights), and began designing jewelry and objects in silver. Crucially, he didn't arrive as an outsider imposing a foreign aesthetic. He arrived as a student of Mexican culture — someone who had spent years studying Pre-Columbian art, who had written seriously about it, and who believed that the design vocabulary of ancient Mesoamerica was one of the great untapped resources in the world of decorative arts.

He hired local artisans, many of whom had no formal silversmithing training, and taught them the techniques they needed. In return, they taught him about the materials, the rhythms of the work, and the local traditions that still lived in the community's hands and memory. It was a genuine exchange — and it produced something neither could have made alone.

A New Design Language

What made Spratling's work immediately distinctive was its visual vocabulary. At a time when most Mexican silver was either copying European styles or producing tourist trinkets, Spratling looked to the ancient civilizations of Mesoamerica: the Aztec, the Maya, the Mixtec. He studied their codices, their sculpture, their ceramics. He wrote seriously about Pre-Columbian art in his book More Human than Divine, one of the first major English-language studies of the subject.

The motifs he developed — stylized fish, interlocking geometric forms, spirals, rhombuses, serpents, and nature-derived abstractions — were rooted in this deep research. But they weren't archaeological reproductions. Spratling filtered these ancient forms through a modernist sensibility, creating pieces that felt both timeless and contemporary. The result was a design language that was unmistakably Mexican and unmistakably modern at the same time.

His work attracted international attention quickly. Collectors, galleries, and museums took notice. The Franz Mayer Museum in Mexico City holds pieces from his workshop. Christie's has auctioned vintage Spratling silver. His jewelry was worn by artists, diplomats, and tastemakers across two continents.

The Transformation of Taxco

As Spratling's workshop grew, so did Taxco. Artisans who trained under him went on to open their own workshops. Their apprentices did the same. Within a generation, the town had transformed from a quiet colonial backwater into a thriving center of silver craft, with hundreds of workshops and a reputation that drew buyers from around the world.

In 1953, the Mexican government officially designated Taxco as a "National Monument" — a recognition of its architectural and cultural significance. The silver industry Spratling had helped revive was central to that designation. He had, almost single-handedly, created an economic and cultural ecosystem that sustained an entire community.

For this, he earned a title that has stuck ever since: El Padre de la Platería Mexicana — the Father of Mexican Silver.

His Legacy Today

William Spratling died in 1967 in a car accident near Taxco, but the workshop he founded did not die with him. The artisans he trained, and the artisans they trained, carried the tradition forward. The design principles he established — respect for Pre-Columbian forms, commitment to handcraft, use of high-purity .950 silver — remain the foundation of Spratling Silver's work today.

Every piece that leaves our Taxco workshop is made by master silversmiths who are the direct inheritors of this tradition. The techniques are the same. The materials are the same. The design vocabulary — those fish, those spirals, those geometric forms drawn from ancient Mesoamerica — is the same. What has changed is simply the hands doing the work, each generation passing the knowledge to the next.

When you wear a piece of Spratling Silver, you're not just wearing jewelry. You're wearing nearly a century of craft history, a story that begins with a curious architect from Alabama who fell in love with Mexico and decided to stay.

Explore our Classic Spratling Collection — pieces that carry Spratling's original design language into the present day.

Or browse our full collection to find the piece that speaks to you.