One Hundred Percent Algodón Nativo

Another project I’m working on in Callanca involves algodón nativo or “native cotton” or “colored cotton.” Although it’s hard for us to imagine, it actually took quite a bit of dogged effort to breed a pure white cotton. Five thousand years ago cotton plants produced fibers of many colors—from beige and cream to rust red and dark brown and even gray-green and mauve. When dyes became prevalent these colors became superfluous and the words “cotton” and “white” became synonomous. The origins of some of the best strains of colored cotton—the cottons with the longest and finest fibers—have been traced to western South America. In other words to exactly where I am.

Up until 40 years ago they were still growing colored cotton here in Callanca. I met an artisan who still has in her house fat pillows of the stuff that her mother grew and used to weave blankets. It was a laborious process. First you had to pick the cotton, then clean the cotton of seeds and impurities, then spin the cotton by hand into hilo, a variety of thin yarn. Only then could you mount it on a loom and weave a paño or an alforja or a blanket. Today the artisans buy hilo in spools for 30 soles a kilogram. However this hilo “industrial” only comes in pure white and a range of gaudy reds, purples, greens, oranges and yellows. The colors of algodón nativo are much subtler and richer.

Marina with a blanket her mother wove from algodón nativo.

They still grow algodón nativo near Callanca in Mórrope, Túcume and Monsefú. So I’m hoping that I can work with these communities and with the district and regional governments to bring algodón nativo back to Callanca. There’s a meeting in the regional capital, Chiclayo, in early April at which many of the producers, consumers and supporters of algodón nativo in the region will be present. In June in Lima the State Department is sponsoring a forum on intellectual-property rights that will include a component on the protection of “indicaciones geográficas”—crops native to and specific to particular regions of Perú. I’ve spoken with a representative at the U.S. Embassy about algodón nativo and he wants one or two farmers or artisans from Lambayeque to attend the forum and to make a case for algodón nativo as a crop specific to our region and therefore deserving of international protections. In a sense Perú and Lambayeque could copyright algodón nativo.

Algodón nativo offers three advantages to Callanca. The farmers here have passed their land down through generations until its division through inheritances has reduced the amount of land owned by most farmers to an hectare (2.4 acres) or less. So the farmers really need a crop that pays better than the carrots, cucumbers, lettuce and sweet potatoes that most of them grow. Algodón nativo sells for a much higher price than any of these crops because of its rarity and also because it’s typically grown organically and for that reason commands a higher price in all markets, including especially the lucrative export market, a market that values the cotton for its utility in the manufacture of clothing that can claim to be produced from organically grown materials. A second advantage would be that if algodón nativo were available locally the artisans of Callanca could use it to weave the paños and alforjas that traditionally have been produced here. Again, the result would be a better price for their products because of the added value of the organic/natural label and the attractiveness of the colors. A third advantage is that the cotton is environmentally friendly and its cultivation would result in fewer toxic chemicals in Callanca’s soil and water.

An alforja woven from industrial cotton in Callanca.

This is a long-term project that involves convincing farmers to experiment with a new crop and artisans to choose a raw material that would mean more work for them if they decided to spin their own yarn or more expense if they decided to purchase industrial yarns produced in Lima from algodón nativo. But the potential for attracting more lucrative markets—exports for the farmers, tourist dollars for the artisans—makes algodón nativo an attractive option, at lease for the gringo Peace Corps volunteer if not for the members of his community as well.

The Bathroom is Occupied

The two little girls in the house where I live got tired of the gringo walking in on them when they were trying to take a piss. In my own defense I must say that the reason that the gringo walks in on them is that they don’t close the door to the bathroom while availing themselves of the facilities. Nor does their brother nor do their parents. I’m not sure how they themselves know that the bathroom is occupied but they seem to sense it. Because they’re all almost always downstairs while I’m sometimes upstairs in my room, perhaps they see that a person has entered the bathroom and know that it’s occupied. But Nicole and Pamela figured out a solution to the problem of the gringo. They made a sign with “baño ocupado” on one side and “baño desocupado” on the other side and attached string to the sign so that they could hang it up. But where? With the door open there was noplace convenient to hang the sign. It then occurred to them that if they closed the door they could hang the sign on the doorknob. So now the bathroom door is always closed, whether the bathroom is occupied or not, and the sign hangs on the doorknob, “baño ocupado” when someone is inside, “baño desocupado” when no one is inside. Unless someone forgets to change the sign when they leave the bathroom. Which is almost always the case.

Many problems in Callanca tend to get fixed in this manner. The main thoroughfare in Callanca remained unpaved until 2006. It was a tortuous and dusty (in the rainy season muddy) obstacle course of rocks and potholes. Six years ago they finally paved the main road. But in order to pave the road they had to bring in tons of fill and build a roadbed so that rains wouldn’t undermine the asphalt. So they heaped tons of dirt and gravel atop the old road through the center of town and laid the asphalt along this roadbed. And in the process they buried the entrances to half the houses in Callanca. Like New Englanders after a blizzard, the residents had to dig out their front doors and install rock or cement steps before they could again enter their own houses.

Which unfortunately brings me to the subject of artesanía in Perú.

As I’ve mentioned in previous entries, some of the artesanía in Callanca is of outstanding quality. The artesanía produced falls into several categories. Most common are bordados, embroidery. There’s bordado a mano (by hand) and a máquina (on a sewing machine). There’s also bordado en cinta (using ribbon instead of thread). Then there’s telar, weaving by means of a loom attached to the waist of the artisan. Also crochet, which is similar to the crochet that we’re used to in the U.S. except that it’s pronounced “kro-chet” instead of “kro-shay.” Have a look at some of the artesanía via the photos below.

Bordado a máquina.

Crochet.

Telar.

Bordado en cinta.

A few of the artesanas are capable of a type of embroidery called calado or richelieu (evidently named for the French Cardinal and arts patron of the 1600s, though nobody in Callanca admits to knowing where the name for this style of embroidery came from). This is beautiful stuff, see below. And remember this is done entirely on a manual Singer sewing machine, the old black machines with gold filigre and a wroght-iron foot treadle that some of us remember our parents or grandparents using in our youth. The artesanas employ this style of embroidery in the making of marinera dresses. I’ve spoken before of the marinera, the traditional dance, highly elaborate and melodramatic, of Northern Perú. The dresses more than match the bombastic quality of the dance itself.

They also weave sombreros from palm straw here in Callanca. This art is disappearing, I haven’t seen one person under the age of 40 or 50 doing this work. Maybe that’s because it takes a month to weave one hat. The hats equal in quality that of the famous “Panama” hats, which in fact come from Ecuador but who’s counting? Equal in quality means that you can pour water into the hat and it’s so tightly woven that it won’t leak. The male dancers of the marinera use the hats as part of their costume but that’s because they’ve been traditionally worn by many males in the campo of Northern Perú.

The artisans construct the hats around wooden hormas (cylinders made of the wood of the zapote tree) of three sizes, small, medium or large. The straw—or a variety of the straw called junco—used to be available in Callanca and Lambayeque. It grew along rivers, including the Río Reque here in Callanca. But junco has disappeared and now the artisans weave their hats with palm straw imported from Guayaquil in Ecuador.

All this sounds very romantic and charming. But for her month’s worth of work on that sombrero the artisan receives about 100 soles when she sells the hat to a wholesaler in Monsefú. That’s about $30. The local and national market for the other varieties of artesanía is equally bleak. An alforja (a variety of shoulder bag somewhat similar to a saddlebag, woven on a loom from cotton) also takes about a month to produce and sells for 100 soles or less. Even if you take into account that the artisans don’t work a full eight-hour day due to their other responsibilities—caring for children, cooking, cleaning, selling vegetables that their husbands raise in the market in Chiclayo—this works out to about thirty cents an hour according to my math. And this is for the creation of objects of art of indisputably high quality, as fine as any produced anywhere in South America or, arguably, the world.

This brings me back, if not literally to the bathroom, then at least to the subject of the bathroom. One of the reasons that the artisans don’t receive adequate compensation for their work is that they keep doing things the same way they’ve always done them and the way their mothers and grandmothers did them. They keep pissing with the door open in other words. And then when they try to remedy the unfortunate outcomes of their practices they do so in a way that often fails to take into account the real reasons for their dissatisfacions. Instead of closing the door they make a sign. Or they make a sign AND they close the door. Then they forget to change the sign, then they forget that there is a sign or they lose the sign, and then they decide that all this was ’way too much trouble and go back to leaving the door open.

I certainly don’t have all the answers, in fact I have very few of the answers, but as an outsider I can see the glaring mistakes in the artisans’ business practices a lot more clearly than they can because I arrived without (or with fewer) preconceived notions about the artesanía of Callanca. What you see below is called a paño. Paños traditionally have been offered as gifts at weddings in Callanca. The groom, the parents of the bride and groom and the godparents receive paños which they wear around their necks at the wedding celebration.

However, nowadays very few people are giving paños at their weddings. It’s a practice that’s seen as stodgy by younger people. They’d much rather receive a plasma TV set than a set of paños for the wedding party. So the local market for paños is not what it used to be. It’s much more likely that in the future paños will be sold as art objects rather than as wedding momentos. But the artisans continue to weave the paños in the same way they’ve always woven paños. The paños are extremely intricate and because they’re meant to be worn around the necks of their owners like scarves they always feature adorments at both ends. But since they’re unlikely to be worn around anyone’s neck since fewer and fewer people are buying them as wedding paraphernalia, it’s clear that the paños don’t need to be decorated at both ends. One could weave a much shorter paño with a single panel of decoration in the center and sell it at a much lower price or sell it for the same price and come much closer to realizing a reasonable return on one’s investment in time and materials.

Here’s a paño that I and the artisans are designing for Peace Corps’ 50^th Anniversary celebration. We’re hoping to produce it and sell it to Peace Corps as a memento to be presented to honored guests at the anniversary celebration in Washington this summer. If you bestow a gift that isn’t a paño upon someone who isn’t a Peruvian nor much less a Callancano at a celebration that isn’t a wedding then obviously you’ve lost quite a bit of the intent and the integrity of the original ritual. But who’s to say that if you help keep the practice of weaving alive the traditional exchange of paños or something like it might not someday return? It’s like keeping an endangered species alive in captivity. It’s not as good as the original but it’s a lot better than nothing.

See you later, I need to go take a piss.