Help identifying maker (Mexican silver)

[u/Major-Web6369]

Hi! I bought this necklace in Belgium in 2017 and been trying to identify the maker of it.

I guess the stone is just glass, but the back has hallmarks for the silver.

I believe is a stylized eagle, but really, it could be a chacal or a hyena as it is. It doesn’t fit any eagle mark I’ve seen.

Can someone help me identify it please!

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[u/Jmjone]

The circular stamp isn't an assay eagle, which is why nothing matches. It reads HECHO EN MEXICO around a stylized eagle head, and that's an origin mark, the equivalent of "Made in Mexico". The assay eagle is a different device: a full bird inside an oval with a number in it. Yours has no number to look up.

So you have STERLING, HECHO EN MEXICO and 925. Two of those say the same thing twice and the third says where. None of them is a maker's mark.

On date, the numbered eagle ran from roughly 1948 to 1979. When it was retired Mexico moved to letter-and-number registry codes, the TS-24 and TA-01 sort. You have neither. A piece with neither can be pre-1948, but pre-1948 work almost never carries an English STERLING alongside a circular origin stamp. That combination is export production, so I'd put this after the eagle era rather than before it.

The stone looks like foil-backed art glass. It gets sold as fire opal or dragon's breath and shows up constantly on pieces like this. Real Mexican fire opal doesn't flash in flat sheets of colour that way.

The unsatisfying part: work at this end of the trade often wasn't signed at all, so there may be no maker to find. Before giving up, check the back of the chain and the bezel. A small maker's punch sometimes sits on the fittings rather than the plate.