Tag Archives: cultural anthropology

Into the Villages on the Oaxaca Coast: Women Who Weave

For me, the most emotional part of our visits to the remote Oaxaca villages along the coast of Oaxaca is to meet the women who weave and hear their stories.

Our Oaxaca Coast Textile Study Tour takes us north out of Puerto Escondido along Mexico Highway 200. This region is called the Costa Chica and extends from Puerto to Acapulco, Guerrero. Small roads, often winding, are like fingers carrying people to/from the main towns of Jamiltepec, Pinotepa Nacional and Ometepec.

We travel deep into the foothills into these weaving villages where isolation has preserved a traditional way of life.

Three generations in San Juan Colorado, Oaxaca

We meet the women who are the backbone of their families. For the most part they work in cotton. Their work is intense. They grow and pick native cotton. They clean and card it. They preserve the seeds of natural cream-colored, green and coyuchi brown cotton. They use the malacate drop-spindle to make thread. And, they weave wefts of cloth using the back-strap loom, creating designs formed by a technique called brocade or supplementary weft.

Grandson works the Internet to use credit cards

There is a growing market for natural, hand-made cloth dyed with natural plants and cochineal and the caracol purpura snail. But the market is still not big enough to create widespread prosperity. It takes years to be recognized and sometimes, not at all.

Nanache tree bark and indigo dye, hand-woven cotton

Women and families struggle. Mostly it is the women’s work that brings the income that buys medicine for aging parents or a sick relative. Mostly it is the women’s work that pays the school tuition, buys books and uniforms for children and grandchildren. Mostly it is the women’s work that brings food to the table — the tortillas, the hot chocolate, the occasional chicken for a fiesta.

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Weaving natural, native cotton dyed with indigo on a back-strap loom

Men work the fields. They raise corn, beans and squash. They tend the animals. This work is not income producing because every family grows its own corn, beans and squash to feed themselves. There is no commercial market for the basics that go on the table. This work for men is subsistence farming. In the socio-economic life of a village, weaving cloth can mean a path out of poverty.

Native, pre-Hispanic wild green a coyuchi cotton on the looms

Another path out of poverty is the long road north, to El Norte, where uneducated village men can migrate with a coyote across the desert at night, cross a border without papers, and become undocumented workers. They are the farm laborers, restaurant dishwashers and cooks, gardeners, poultry slaughterers and handymen, doing the work that few others want. They stand in line on Friday afternoon, wiring remittances home, sometimes never returning.

The women continue on.

A few women go on to university in Pinotepa Nacional or Acapulco and become accountants or lawyers or teachers, but not many. Some women choose not to marry, a bond that requires them to go live with a husband’s family, taking on their livelihood and craft, contributing to the household of the in-laws. Some women see that the men are in despair, turn to alcohol for consolation when they have little earning capacity and lose their self-esteem. For this reason, many choose a life of independence.

Kristy holds a huipil made with coyuchi and caracol purpura dyed cotton

We come not to judge but to understand. We do what we can. We support their work by visiting and buying direct. We are the appreciators who admire, wear and collect what they make. We are cultural appreciators rather than cultural appropriators.

Sebastiana who left a technology job for full-time weaving, her passion

The women who make cloth learned from their mothers and grandmothers. They have been around thread all their lives. Most started weaving at age twelve. They might sit tethered to the back-strap loom for six or eight hours a day or longer. It can take three months or longer to make a fine huipil.

Maximina shows us algodon verde, wild green cotton, Xochistlahuaca, Guerrero

Do you love what you do? One of us asks a weaving cooperative member.

I weave to help feed my children and family, and cover costs for school, one woman answers.

I do love to weave, and I’m proud to continue the work of my grandmother, answers another. It provides for us, but we need places to sell.

We must support each other economically, says a cooperative spokeswoman. It’s in our solidarity that we will help each other and raise us up. It’s more than a social get-together. It is our livelihood.

Handmade dolls, Muñecas, wear handmade huipiles, Xochistlahuaca, Guerrero

Children, boys and girls, age eight to twelve, are learning to weave. This is our future. Our boys are also learning to make loom parts and grow cotton. Men can always help and we encourage their participation, she continues.

In the outdoor kitchen, at the comal, a group of women pat masa into tortillas. They turn the corn dough with thumb and forefinger, careful not to burn themselves. Their fingers are worn with years of cleaning cotton, turning tortillas, washing clothes, spinning, caring for others. Some have lost their fingerprints to hard work.

They salt the hot tortilla, picking up the salt between thumb and forefinger, drizzling the tortilla, rolling it and handing it to us as a gift of welcome. It is fresh, slightly chewy and crunchy, the taste of real food. A simple life can also be a harsh one, and I caution our visitors not to romanticize the experience of being here.

Making the randa is time-consuming and adds beauty

In our home countries, we are absorbed with technology, family isolation and the intensity of politics. Indigenous women in Mexico are absorbed with finding access to markets for their work, good health care and education for their children. What unites us is our humanity and our mutual respect.

Eye glasses are a luxury. Mike brings them to give as gifts.

For many of us who go off-the-beaten-path to visit makers, we can first be surprised, even shocked at how humbly they live. Some of the most famous artisans I know live in adobe houses or those made with concrete blocks. They may not be able to afford a finished floor or it is not a life-style value.

Homemade green corn pozole, pickled cabbage and carrots, potato flautas

We go into homes with packed dirt floors, swept clean. We go into outdoor kitchens where amazing food is prepared over a simple wood-fired stove; sometimes this is a grill over a cut off garbage can. Occasionally, the sanitary facilities are not plumbed and we must put a bucket of water into the toilet to flush it. We note these differences and appreciate the abundance in our lives.

Jesus Gomez and his weaver mother, Zacoalpan, reviving lost traditions

We also appreciate the abundance in the lives of Mexican families who live close to the land: they live among their mothers, fathers and grandparents. They are supported by a deep network of community, of friends and tradition. They eat homegrown food. They yearn for the same things we do: health, education, contentment and prosperity. They create works of art.

The children are our future

Folk Art Makers in Oaxaca Artisan Villages: Kinship, Work and Compensation

I subscribe to a website named academia.edu that recently published a paper by Alanna Cant, an academic from Kent University, United Kingdom. Dr. Cant spent almost a decade studying and writing about the relationship between the owners of a large, successful wood carving and painting workshop in San Martin Tilcajete and the people who are employed there making alebrijes.

The article is important because it expands understanding about how folk art gets made and marketed, who gets recognition for the work, and a different form of compensation. It emphasizes how the importance of family relationships and kinship take priority over economic independence and personal recognition for artisan work.

Read it here: ‘Making’ Labour in Mexican Artisanal Workshops

We learn from this that making a name for oneself and making money is not the primary driver for most people who live in community.

It’s very important for us not to judge by our own standards, but to observe and understand the differences and similarities between cultures.

In many small villages throughout Oaxaca, in fact throughout Mexico, safety, security and economic well-being depends on mutual support. These practices are ancient and deep, embedded in tribal relationships rooted in loyalty and commitment. It is far more important for many talented crafts-people to support strong family relationships than it is for them to break away and start their own enterprise.

I’m not a cultural anthropologist, yet I extrapolate that this may be the norm in many villages of weavers, potters and embroiderers. Cooperatives are usually extensions of family units of parents, children, aunts, uncles and cousins — a social organization that differs in practice from co-ops in the USA. Producing quantities of artisan-made work depends on more than a few pairs of hands.

If you are a collector or appreciator of Mexican craft, this article may interest you. It will give you insight into the making of Mexican folk art and how indigenous communities are able to survive and support each other over 8,000 years of existence.

Their experience is very different from ours. Entrepreneurship and commercial success, too, comes at a cost as television and the internet make the world of things more important than the world of people.

 

Among the Zapotecs of Mexico, National Geographic 1927

We bought National Geographic DVDs from the 1920’s to the 1960’s at a garage sale a couple of years ago and just got around to looking at the table of contents, to discover there was an article written by Herbert Covey in 1927 with photos of Teotitlan del Valle, our village.  I was eager to read it.

Herbert Covey’s view of Mexico was not unlike many of his adventurous contemporaries who were exploring indigenous Africa, Asia, and Central and South America at the same time.  In April 1927, National Geographic magazine published a rather lengthy first person account of his train trip from Puebla to Oaxaca and his travels around the villages, accompanied by black and white photos.

The travelogue, viewed through today’s lens, is appalling.  Covey reflects that era of colonial arrogance that we have associated more with Great Britain, France and other paternalistic colonizers who are determined to either remake the indigenous culture in its own image or to stereotype it into the “noble savage” ideation that sells exotic armchair travel.  It is a foretelling of the neocolonial relationship that the U.S. has had with Mexico since WWII, and is a retrospective of U.S-Mexican political relationship of dominance and weakness.  Moreover, it emphasizes the social, cultural and political superiority held by “more advanced” societies who look down upon the poor “other.”

The first paragraphs reveal the tone of the article.  Covey writes that there were only two eras in Mexican history that were civilized, the three hundred year period of Spanish colonization and the seventy year presidency of Porfirio Diaz (“affectionately” known as the Porfiriata)!  The Spanish conquest is only spoken about in the most glowing terms, and the populist Benito Juarez is referred to as the little brown Zapotec.  Other stereotypes abound and the language includes racist innuendos that made my stomach turn.

I read the entire article because these images are ingrained in our world view as a nation, and it is important to know how we are acculturated to accept (or reject) our Mexican neighbors.  These writings of almost one hundred years ago influence how we treat the immigration issue today and our economic relationship with Mexico around oil and other natural resources.

Wikipedia:  Paternalistic neocolonialism

The term paternalistic neocolonialism involves the belief held by a neo-colonial power that their colonial subjects benefit from their occupation. Critics of neocolonialism, arguing that this is both exploitive and racist, contend this is merely a justification for continued political hegemony and economic exploitation of past colonies, and that such justifications are the modern reformulation of the Civilizing mission concepts of the 19th century.