Deana McGuffin · History

History

Deana McGuffin is a third-generation New Mexico custom bootmaker and teacher. She began an apprenticeship with her father, L.W. McGuffin, in 1981, and opened her first shop in Clovis, New Mexico, in 1985 before later moving to Albuquerque. By 2019 she had spent 18 years at McGuffin Custom Boots in Albuquerque, and she and her father had once shown work at the Smithsonian; a late-1980s New Mexico Master Artist and Apprenticeship placement led to their appearance at the 1992 Festival of American Folklife.

Sources differ on her grandfather's shop: her own site says C.C. McGuffin opened a boot shop in Carrizozo, New Mexico, in 1917 — buying premade tops from shops including Blucher and Olsen-Stelzer before the family moved to Roswell — while a 2019 profile says he left Texas and opened directly in Roswell in 1915.

Lisa Sorrell has said that a magazine article about McGuffin was what first showed her that women could be bootmakers.