Ever been to Guatemala? Beautiful volcanic landscape subject to eruptions and earthquakes, indigenous people who survived a terrible civil war and now live in a territory infested by drug runners, and, oh, the backstrap looms. The Land of Eternal Spring, Guatemala has warm weather in the lower elevations and cooler weather in the highlands. Villages abound, surrounded by hillside coffee plantations and vegetable and fruit gardens. Although Zone 10 of Guatemala City is a banking and business center that hosted an international economic conference, poverty dominates the rest of the city and the rest of the country. Many villagers have no electricity. Some no indoor running water. Some no true walls to their homes, rather, some sticks for walls and a sheet of tin for a roof.
And, did I mention the looms? Almost everywhere in the country you can find women kneeling and weaving, using a seemingly crude loom that appears to be some sticks. The loom, connected by a strap to a wall or post, hangs on a diagonal in front of the kneeling women. They sit on their ankles, a thin carpet separating them from the hard floor, often outside on a covered porch.
What the women weave are works of art, sometimes just color combinations, but often a cloth with a story or with characters. The colors are mesmerizing. On a simple loom these craftswomen create a unified work, somehow, as they weave, keeping track of a pattern they complete.
Most of the women have very little education. In Guatemala the schools don’t educate everyone. Poverty and dearth of public funding limit opportunities. For the weavers, the loom is a path to earning money: Tourists have the money to buy the products made on backstrap looms.
And then, there’s the mechanical competition. What takes days to weave on a backstrap loom can be completed in short time by a computerized, electrically driven loom. What’s the difference? The machine-made blankets can imitate the beauty of color, pattern, and story of the handmade ones.
We do like to romanticize, don’t we? We prize the painstaking toil of an individual more highly than the machine’s product. Both might appear to be the same, but we place value on “handmade.” There are car commercials that stress the “handmade” care in the company’s production. Yet, we know that a robot, a numerical control machine, can produce a flawless copy, and another, and another, and…
Still, we look at the kneeling Guatemalan woman, see her manipulate the threads on her loom, and judge her work to be of value. It has small imperfections that the machine product rarely includes, and those, rather than detracting from the value of the work, seem to give the work more value. It is a work that transcends a single product. It is a work that represents a tradition. It ties us to a place. Pick up a cloth made on a backstrap loom, and you pick up Guatemala.
And, did I mention the looms? Almost everywhere in the country you can find women kneeling and weaving, using a seemingly crude loom that appears to be some sticks. The loom, connected by a strap to a wall or post, hangs on a diagonal in front of the kneeling women. They sit on their ankles, a thin carpet separating them from the hard floor, often outside on a covered porch.
What the women weave are works of art, sometimes just color combinations, but often a cloth with a story or with characters. The colors are mesmerizing. On a simple loom these craftswomen create a unified work, somehow, as they weave, keeping track of a pattern they complete.
Most of the women have very little education. In Guatemala the schools don’t educate everyone. Poverty and dearth of public funding limit opportunities. For the weavers, the loom is a path to earning money: Tourists have the money to buy the products made on backstrap looms.
And then, there’s the mechanical competition. What takes days to weave on a backstrap loom can be completed in short time by a computerized, electrically driven loom. What’s the difference? The machine-made blankets can imitate the beauty of color, pattern, and story of the handmade ones.
We do like to romanticize, don’t we? We prize the painstaking toil of an individual more highly than the machine’s product. Both might appear to be the same, but we place value on “handmade.” There are car commercials that stress the “handmade” care in the company’s production. Yet, we know that a robot, a numerical control machine, can produce a flawless copy, and another, and another, and…
Still, we look at the kneeling Guatemalan woman, see her manipulate the threads on her loom, and judge her work to be of value. It has small imperfections that the machine product rarely includes, and those, rather than detracting from the value of the work, seem to give the work more value. It is a work that transcends a single product. It is a work that represents a tradition. It ties us to a place. Pick up a cloth made on a backstrap loom, and you pick up Guatemala.
RSS Feed