Inside a 100-year-old adobe in Medanales, N.M., 92-year-old Agueda Martinez stands before her sturdy, 120-year-old loom, her thin, gnarled fingers working the shuttle with a strength and deftness that defy her years. ”Come in here where the rats are,” she beckoned in Spanish with a soft chuckle.
She is a slender woman in a faded blue housedress, checked apron and snazzy black cat`s-eye glasses. The room is piled high with weaver`s clutter- skeins of yarn and box upon box of rags stripped and wound into tight wads the size of softballs.
”In the old days, everybody used to weave. It was our bread and butter,” Martinez said. She hesitated, then smiled and added, ”I can still weave eight hours a day, I believe.”
And when you see her at work, you believe, too. Ideas tumble out of the old woman`s mind and through her fingers and materialize in the loom as brilliant bursts of color. Martinez is, after all, the matriarch of the New Mexican weavers.
But there are others who weave magic on the traditional looms, in much the same way their ancestors did hundreds of years ago.
Some make affordable, utilitarian items, such as vests, purses and rugs. Others weave intricate tapestries priced in the thousands of dollars. Some weave to satisfy an artistic hunger. Others weave to feed their children.
A renaissance
Some, like Martinez, work at looms set up in their houses. Others have spacious studios. Some market their own work. Others work for established weaving shops.
Not so long ago, the traditional Hispanic style of weaving had become an endangered art in many rural villages of northern New Mexico. Today, the tradition is experiencing a renaissance. Some weavers have returned to the old designs. Others are reshaping those patterns into new forms. But at the heart of their work runs a thread that, while tenuous at times, has remained unbroken for 400 years.
A distinctive style of weaving emerged in New Mexico in the early 1600s, which later came to be known as the Rio Grande style. Weaving was a family enterprise-men sheared the sheep; children carded, spun and dyed wool; and men and women wove. Utilitarian items like pack covers and blankets were woven for use by the family, or were bartered locally or sent to Mexico and, later, to California.
By the 1860s, weaving was a thriving New Mexican industry, and thousands of Rio Grande blankets were being traded and exported.
But the arrival of the railroad in 1877 changed the nature of the art. For one thing, the trains brought quantities of machine-woven cloth, which led to the decline of household weaving.
The trains also brought tourists who wanted easy-to-carry souvenirs. As a result, around 1900 a handful of commercial weaving houses sprang up in Chimayo, north of Santa Fe. The owners supplied weavers with the raw materials, and they, in turn, wove items such as table runners, vests and small rugs, aimed at the tourist market.
The Rio Grande tradition faded, and the new Chimayo style, more dependent on commercial dyes and yarns, emerged. In one sense, these developments brought about a decline in the quality and quantity of Hispanic weaving. On the other hand, it kept the weaving industry from disappearing.
Better than nothing
”The idea of creating something from the soul and heart died,” said weaver Teresa Archuleta-Sagel. ”It became a commodity, a money venture. But I don`t see that as totally bad. They (the Chimayo weaving houses) kept the tradition alive and gave people a source of income.”
Some, like David Ortega, a sixth-generation weaver whose family settled in Chimayo in 1705, insist that the original Rio Grande tradition never really died.
He runs Ortega`s Weaving Shop, one of the early Chimayo weaving houses, which was founded in 1916 by his father, Nicacio. The family tradition continues. Ortega has been in the business for 55 years; his sons have joined him and he expects his grandchildren will too.
Ortega peers into the dusty recesses of an old chest tucked in a back room at his store and withdraws an indigo, brown and white striped Rio Grande blanket. It is one of the Ortega family jewels and proof, he insists, that the Rio Grande style was never lost. It only changed.
No doubt, in ways his weaver ancestors wouldn`t fathom. He flips open a scrapbook with glossy photographs of some of his own past creations. There are a cowboy boot, a tiger`s head, a Merrill Lynch bull.
”This guy from Beverly Hills wanted the best bedspread in New Mexico. And he got it,” he said, pointing to another photograph. ”Now that`s weaving, kid.”
Just as the early Chimayo traders did, Ortega supplies his weavers with raw materials and pays them for completed goods that sell in his high-volume store. Some are young men and women. Some are retired engineers, cattlemen and schoolteachers. Those who demonstrate superior skill get free rein in choosing their own colors and designs.
Family art
”The ability runs in families,” he said. ”This is second nature to us.”
Weaving is also a family affair at Centinela Ranch in Chimayo, where Lisa and Irvin Trujillo labor in the modern studio/gallery built by Irvin`s late father, Jacobo.
Jacobo Trujillo, or ”Jake,” was an accomplished weaver who passed on the skill to Irvin. Irvin rediscovered old family recipes for natural dyes and his wife, Lisa, incorporated old weaving methods into her creations.
While Irvin experiments with contemporary motifs, Lisa (who is not Hispanic) favors the complex patterns of the Mexican saltillo style, a highly intricate design produced by weavers in northern Mexico from the 17th through the 19th Centuries. Prices for these pieces run as high as $40,000.
Archuleta-Sagel also is a fine-arts weaver who excels at the traditional Rio Grande and saltillo designs. She works at four looms in a sky- lighted studio in her Espanola home, drawing ideas from poetry, history and the New Mexican landscape. She produces only several weavings a year.
”I`ve never wanted to be a production weaver,” she said. ”Each piece should push me a little more.”
A tourist business
In the tiny village of Coyote, 72-year-old Santana Salazar continues to ply a trade learned from her grandfather when she was 11. He was the village weaver, turning out finished goods from wool supplied by the community.
Salazar weaves in much the same fashion, though her weaving sells to tourists, not townsfolk. She works at a loom set up in her small living room and sells $20 place mats and $3,000 tapestries along with Windex and Doritos from a one-room store attached to the house.
”Every day people come and I have to weave. Sometimes the blanket is still in the loom and people wait for it to be taken out of the loom,” she said.
Cordelia Coronado`s earliest memory is of the thump of the beater on the loom as her parents wove by night. But Coronado didn`t learn the skill until she was in her 20s. Now 57, and retired from the Medanales post office, she raises a cash crop of chilies, teaches weaving classes and runs a weaving shop.
Unlike some accomplished weavers who speak of their craft in reverential terms, Coronado maintains an earthy pragmatism. Her shop hours hinge on when she finishes her gardening, for instance. And she swears weaving is a skill almost anyone can pick up.
”You would have to be very simpleminded, or very smart, not to be able to learn,” she said. ”I have a hard time teaching . . . upper-echelon people because they think they`re so darned smart, they won`t listen to the way I tell them to do it.”
But beneath the tough exterior dwells the soul of an artist. Ask Coronado the source of her inspiration and she responds, ”I dream at night. What would I like to see on that piece? And then I come in the morning, wind my bobbin and I`m ready to go.”
”Hootie, hootie, hootie. Hey, c`mon,” cajoled Johanna Terrazas, setting out across a straw-colored field to shoo her flock into a front pasture away from the clutches of stray dogs and coyotes.
These are not just any sheep. They are churro sheep, a breed that was introduced into this land by early Spanish settlers. They were prized for their glossy, coarse fleece, which is ideal for spinning. However, in the late 1800s other varieties of sheep were introduced that were meatier, but whose fleece was thin and oily and not nearly as good for weaving, and the churro breed died out.
Now they`re being reintroduced into the beautiful Chama Valley in north-central New Mexico by a group that also has restored weaving skills in an area where they`d lain dormant for two generations.
Ganados del Valle, a community-based cooperative in the tiny town of Los Ojos, consists of four wool-growing related businesses, including Tierra Wools, a weaving workshop and retail store established in 1984. It was co-founded by community organizer Maria Varela, who arrived on the scene in 1967 to run a health clinic, saw 50 percent unemployment and knew that sticking a bandage on a hemorrhaging community would not heal it. (She was awarded a 1990 MacArthur Foundation Fellowship for her efforts.)
Today, 23 women work out of the converted 130-year-old mercantile store that houses Tierra Wools. Some are employed washing, dyeing or spinning wool. Others have learned to weave in classes offered through the cooperative.
If they are initially attracted by the potential income, the weavers soon find that the economic benefits are supplemented by a sense of artistic accomplishment.
Weaver Angie Serrano looked up from her loom and explained, ”In this area, we work to survive. But as you learn to weave, you want to experiment, to grow creatively.”
A skill that had become what Varela characterizes as ”an endangered art form” is restoring economic promise to the Chama Valley, and in a broader sense, imbuing it with optimism for the future.
”Communities like this are afflicted with hopelessness,” Varela said.
”When you do something like this and it lasts more than five years, people re-evaluate their hopelessness. It empowers them to move forward with their art and decide where they want to go. And the culture moves on.”
