Single and Abandoned Country Women Supporting their Families The countryside of Guerrero State in southern Mexico has been gravely affected by the global economic crisis. In the past 10 years a large number of men have migrated to the United States in order to seek work. Many families have been separated and frequently are destroyed when the young men disappear forever or establish relationships with new women in the promised Gringolandia. Frequently, Mexican country girls are married and have babies when they are still only in their teens: the ranchos and villages of rural Mexico have many women with families who are living with their parents or are entirely on their own. More than 150 men from Tecalpulco alone are wetbacks in the United States according to the Comisario. Sometimes the husbands are sending remittances, the woman must still shoulder the primary responsibility for the family and work to provide income necessary to adequately feed clothe and educate the children. Handcrafts production is not a very attractive career path in this era of globalized economic duress, yet it is something that the women of Tecalpulco know how to do and have used their skills to develop a business. The Handcrafts Tradition of the Village of Tecalpulco The village of Tecalpulco has a long tradition of handcrafts, going back to when the local artisans made elaborate tin masks and fancy mirrors out of sheet and wire and bits of bone and glass. In the 1970s and 1980s they developed a successful shell mosaic jewelry product that was sold everywhere in the world. The Alpaca Abalone jewelry of Tecalpulco with its floral motif designs has never been equaled anywhere. But that fashion trend only lasted until the end of the 1980s when a combination of changes in fashion, the new devastating "free trade" competition from cheap Oriental suppliers destroyed the local industry. In order to perpetuate and bring forward into the present the craft tradition of the village of Tecalpulco, a way has been found to survive long enough to form a distinctive jewelry product and get it out there. The Women form an Artisans Cooperative When a small foreign-owned factory went bankrupt the women who worked there determined to try and continue to employ themselves and to continue the handcrafts tradition of their village, by joining together forming the embryo of the artisans cooperative that was eventually constituted legally as Artcamp SC de RL. The idea was to work together and to not give up. Other people were giving up because the factory had closed. The cooperative was morally born in the determination of those Mexican women to persevere. The guiding star the real inspiration of the Artcamp cooperative is that of a triumph for Mexican woman; the women have always been the first to suffer the most on account of the faults and weaknesses of others. Looking around this perverse and damaged world of ours today, one can safely say, I think, that the Mexican women had nothing to do with the propagation of evil and violence the world sees everywhere. Whatever the embedded error that is causing all the evils of this difficult time in which we are living, it were impossible to make any thesis, that the Mexican women had any part at all in the doing of it! On the contrary, if anyone is doing anything right it is probably these, the weakest and innocuous of all!!! The Artcamp project partakes of a large part of necessity, and an equally large part of vision and faith; this is an initiative born out of the womens' strength drawn from a centuries-long cultural experience. The Artcamp mission is the creation of the condition of rebirth of the once-flourishing local handcraft industry by generating new timely designs and commercial prototypes that are mass-produceable in the village workshops. The Women Teach Tthemselves English, Html Code, and Construct a Website Unknown to the world and marginalized by the trend of globalization, lost in the mountains of Guerrero, the women determined to stop being the unknowns they had always been by teaching themselves English and by tasking their daughters to learn html code in order to make an Internet website, because they had been advised by someone that they had to >get on the Internet< to have a chance to succeed in the world. The Women Create Original Models, Make Molds, and Administrate Cottage Craft Production The women of Artcamp undertake the entire process of jewelry manufacture, beginning with the creation of fashion designs, the construction of original models, mold-making, color-matching, soldering, assembly, casting, sanding, inlay, polishing, and finishing. They also organize and administrate the cottage craft industry production among the craftspeople of Tecalpulco and other near-by villages. The women sell to commercial distributors of fashion jewelry and giftware in the United States, Canada, and in Europe. The women use a series of Excel spreadsheets to track the production process and cost/price analysis; different village girls who had never even seen a computer were trained by the cooperative. The native people have the strong minds of rock wall builders, learning to work with computers without complexes. The Women Sponsor Donation of Medical Equipment to the Local Public Hospital In 2001, the Artcamp Co-op was introduced to an Ohio manufacturer of ofthamological equipment. Burton Company generously offered to donate a complete modern eye-examination and surgical station with the refractometers and tools required by the doctor right down to the eye charts Artcamp asked DHL to donate a flight and DHL, to their great moral credit, did fly it in for free. The women worked with the Legal Staff of the Guerrero State Secretary of Health Doctora Veronica Muņos Parra to secure the necessary import permits. The eye-care clinic is serving the patients at Adolfo Prieto Hospital The Women Sponsor a Water Project for the Village of Tecalpulco In 2002, Artcamp is presenting project plans for water infrastructure in Tecalpulco working with the village water commission and with the Comisario of the town. The women are intervening by organizing in descriptive and concrete language the various projects that will, together, fulfill the community's need for water. By organizing the projects, without concerning oneself with the fact that one has no money, the projects and the desired goals of the project take great giant steps into becoming reality. The Women Research and Publish Material about the Aztec Calendar As part of their self-education project, the women produced a website for teachers in Mexico and other countries to present the Aztec Calendar, which is the single most recognized symbol of Mexico culture and intellectual history on the Indian side. The Artcamp Aztec Calendar website has twelve important descriptive articles about the stone, its designers, the world of the Aztecs in twin English and Spanish translations. This makes it very useful because the student can read along in either language, comparing back and forth between the texts, it is interesting and demonstrates bi-linguality. The Women Have Not Been the Beneficiaries of Grants or Charity By any standard the women of Artcamp are poor people; the median image of the members of the cooperative in 2001 was little more than enough to meet the bare necessities of survival. Artcamp has not yet been a profitable business inasmuch as it has had no profits to distribute. The purpose of the cooperative has been to secure orders so that people could get some work. Every cent that Artcamp has had has come from making and selling and getting paid for handcraft, it is NOT an easy way to get money, making handcraft jewelry in the Third World and they have done it. _________________________________________________________ |
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