Mexican modernist jewellery is the body of designed silverwork produced from the early 1930s into the 1970s, principally in Taxco, Guerrero, by a group of artists and workshops that fused indigenous Mexican motifs with the formal language of European and American modernism. It is one of the few twentieth-century jewellery movements to combine a strong national identity with a coherent international design vocabulary, and its leading makers are now studied alongside Scandinavian modernists and Italian sculptural jewellers in the auction and museum literature.

The movement begins with William Spratling, an American architect who settled in Taxco in 1929 and opened the Las Delicias workshop in 1931. Spratling's contribution was twofold. He revived the silversmithing tradition of Taxco, which had survived the colonial period as a craft activity but had no industrial workshop infrastructure, and he established a pictorial vocabulary drawn from pre-Columbian sources, particularly the codices and the stone sculpture of Tenochtitlan, Monte Alban and El Tajin. His designs sit on the boundary between folk reference and modern sculpture and remain in steady production from the workshop's successor enterprises.

The Spratling generation trained the second wave. Antonio Pineda, Hector Aguilar, Sigi Pineda, the Castillo brothers (Antonio, Justo, Miguel and Jorge) and Margot van Voorhies all opened independent workshops in Taxco between the late 1930s and the 1950s, each developing a personal idiom. Antonio Pineda is associated with bold sculptural forms in heavy-gauge silver, often combined with cabochon amethyst or moonstone. Hector Aguilar produced architectural and biomorphic shapes with a flat-planed vocabulary close to Mexican muralism. The Castillos worked at scale on flatware as well as jewellery and developed the inlay of malachite, amethyst, turquoise and obsidian into silver matrices, a technique often called orfebreria de incrustacion in the Mexican literature. Margot Carr, working under the name Margot de Taxco, introduced enamelled work that brought a Pre-Columbian colour palette into modernist forms.

The technical foundation of the movement is the .925 sterling silver standard, with the eagle mark applied from 1948 and the alphanumeric maker code from 1979. Most workshops produced limited series of each design rather than industrial volumes, and pieces are stamped with the maker's mark, the workshop logo or initials, and the appropriate federal hallmark. The high-water marks for production are the years from 1945 to 1965, after which the death of Spratling in 1967 and the closure of several leading workshops shifted the field toward later imitation and reproduction.

The materials repertoire extends beyond silver. Mexican modernists incorporated obsidian, amethyst, turquoise, abalone shell, malachite, jade, agate and freshwater pearls, generally cut as cabochons or flat inlays rather than facets. Gold appears in some Pineda and Spratling pieces, but silver remained the dominant metal because of cost, availability and the cultural identification of Mexico with silver production. The aesthetic vocabulary borrows from pre-Columbian source material, especially feathered serpents, jaguar masks, double-headed birds and step-fret patterns, and from the formal language of mid-century international modernism, including Calder-influenced biomorphic curves and Bauhaus-derived geometric severity.

The market for Mexican modernist jewellery is a defined collector field. Major auction houses now hold dedicated sales of mid-twentieth-century Mexican silver, with Spratling, Pineda and Aguilar pieces commanding strong prices when fully marked, in good condition and with documented provenance. Reproduction is a real concern, particularly with Spratling designs, which have been re-issued by the Spratling family workshop after the artist's death and are also widely copied in unlicensed Taxco production. Authentication relies on the maker's mark, the period-appropriate federal hallmark, the gauge and feel of the silver, and matching the design to documented original output through reference works such as Penny Morrill's monographs.

For the wider history of jewellery, the Mexican modernist movement matters because it produced a coherent national style at a moment when most other national jewellery industries were either consolidating into a few large maisons or reverting to historicist pastiche. The Taxco workshops demonstrated that a regional silver tradition with deep colonial and indigenous roots could speak in the language of international modern design without losing its local accent, and the influence of that synthesis extends through the Latin American jewellery scene and into contemporary independent silversmithing in North America.