Between alpacas, threads and looms, Aymara artisans preserve the wisdom of their ancestors

There where the sun burns and the altitude presses on the chest, Teófila Challapa learned to weave. Not to weave, to loom. To look at the white wool of a alpaca and close your eyes to listen to Mother Earth. What—among all that Pachamama offers—could you outline in a textile?

Camelid legs. A hill. The communion of grass and sand that patches the Atacama Desert. Life at 3,500 meters above sea level.

There where Chile ends and Bolivia begins, Teófila Challapa—59, the round face of an Aymara, hair black as a raven’s wing—received her first ancestral lesson.

“Hello, girl,” was heard in his grandmother’s voice.

That is, using your fingertips to turn the wool into fine strands that are then braided—or ““twist”says Teófila Challapa—to generate skeins and with them textiles.

“We had to learn to spin out of obligation, because there were no clothes or money in those times. “We had to dress ourselves with our own hands.”

Next to her, three llamas chew dry grass in their little house in Cariquima, an arid town in northern Chile where it seems the only thing that makes noise is the wind.

If you talk to her more than once, the age varies. Sometimes she says that she spun at seven, sometimes at eight, and sometimes at ten. “I learned when I was very young, when I was herding animals and I grew up with the same habits as my grandparents.”

Teófila Challapa’s artisanal legacy began with two knitting needles that she calls palillos. Her first clothes were gloves, socks and ponchos. Once the sticks were tamed, she mastered the loom.

Strictly speaking, the making of each garment takes more than two years, due to the time it takes for the animal to cover itself with wool. Since it looks like a huggable stuffed animal, the llama or alpaca is sheared.

Teófila Challapa skins her camelids in October—when the weather is kind—and leaves a layer the thickness of a thumb on their skin so that her animals don’t feel cold.

“You have to put a rope on their legs and a blindfold on their eyes so they can stay calm.”

Then separate. The ideal wool for the loom comes from the back and sides. That of the neck and abdomen is discarded. Then clean it —“to take away the earthy”—and now gathered in a white mountain, her thick fingers stretch it little by little and threads sprout from her hands.

Teófila Challapa is an alchemist: she transforms her camelids into gold.

“My animals are my mother”, says. Without giving more details, she says that one day she lost her husband and to support her children, she supported her. “we call”. From them came the meat, the company and the raw material for the textiles that emerge from their loom to sell.

“That’s why I say: ‘oh, my animals,’” sighs Teófila Challapa. “The day I leave, they will leave with me. “They have given me everything.”

More than three million Aymaras are scattered between Chile, Peru and Bolivia. Of these, less than 160,000 inhabit Chilean lands, according to the latest census cited by the National Subdirectorate of Native Peoples.

The Aymara has its own language, social organization and worldview. A part was lost with the Spanish conquest (1532) and evangelization.

In the case of this country, furthermore, the National Library recognizes what it calls “Chileanization”that is, using education and military service to instill national sentiment and erase autonomous cultural traits.

Thanks to their ancestral knowledge, artisans like Teófila Challapa paid for their children’s school and their migration to big cities. They all smile with satisfaction when a job far from home promises them the life they lacked.

The truth is that this progress is also bittersweet. With the distancing of their lands, several artisans agree, the legacy is in danger. Although they passed on their knowledge to their daughters, there are now only a handful of young Aymara people who know how to weave.

It is four in the afternoon on a Saturday and a line of artisans—straw hats, red lips, the body in its traditional costume “aksu”—get your phones ready.

Soon their daughters will parade along a catwalk installed in the commercial center of the Free Trade Zone of Iquique, in northern Chile.

Organized by the Tarapacá Peasant Market, of the Agricultural Development Institute (INDAP), the event brought together the groups Aymar Warmi, Aymar Sawuri, Monte Huanapa and Artesanas de Camiña.

Luis Pizarro, head of the INDAP Development Unit, explains that the institution stimulates rural development in communes linked to the Aymara culture.

Part of the work is to support camelid farming—taking into account its cultural relevance in the towns—so that it is maintained through commercialization. They also support events such as the national parade to enhance the benefit to the artisans.

This involves planning ideal dates for sales, promoting fairs, connecting them with cultural managers and opening the way for them on social networks. And although marketing is a priority, something else is also sought.

“In rural areas there is a significant migration of young people. “The population is aging, the grandparents are the ones who are in the territories and this link of cultural roots is being cut,” says Pizarro. “So we try to get the daughters or granddaughters of the artisans to start getting involved in the work of inheritance.”

Nayareth Challapa, 25, says that the textiles of her mother – the artisan María Araníbar – can be read as texts. When she depicts a bird, the flowers of a mountain or a rhea, she reveals her state of mind and her proximity to her territory. “For us the land is sacred,” he assures.

“When migrating to the city, many forget their ethnicity and leave their roots behind,” says Nayareth. “My family tries not to do that. We continue with the llamas and planting to preserve what my grandfather taught us because, if that dies, it is as if he died.”

An Aymara woman who knows how to weave has one or more sisters whose mothers and grandmothers also taught her to move between threads. She saw her brothers studying while her father told her: “Not you, because you are a woman.” Cloth gloves in one day; scarves, in two.

He uses little dye and, when he does, it comes from the herbs that his fist lifts from the earth. He spins, above all, the colors that his eyes look at: green, raw, red. It has herds of llamas, alpacas or goats. He knows how to herd and, while he walks, he plants quinoa and potatoes. As he walks, he knits. He says to his daughters: “Hila, because one day money could be scarce, but you will have how to clothe your children.”

There where the desert speaks and the Aymara listens, Pepe and his whiteness move like a wave in slow motion. High collar, pointed ears, “called” He is a provider, family and ancestral accomplice.

“To be an artisan, one must have the raw materials,” says Efraín Amaru. “You have to communicate with your animals because they are part of you.”

Sixty years old, with a raspy voice and a circular face like an ocher moon, Efraín Amaru is a craftsman and an encyclopedia of camelids. Like his parents and his parents’ parents, he learned to raise them, feed them to obtain fine fiber and avoid crosses that would spoil his genes. “That is inherited from our ancestors; It is repeated from generation to generation.”

His wife is another daughter of spinning. María Choque —48, caramel skin, ebony hair— says that as a child she did not have toys, but rather a mother who she watched knit all day. With chopsticks she knitted vests, hats and socks.

At 14 he stood out in ponchos, aguayos and the jewel in the crown, his “aksu”as traditional Aymara clothing is known.

“My suit is part of me”he says as if he wanted to throw away his jeans and jacket to run and put on his chocolate-colored wool suit. “It is part of our life, of the body, of our experience.”

In her small house in Colchane, where the hills and roads seem painted in chalk, María Choque keeps a treasure chest.

“I have pieces of my grandmother that she wove,” He says as he opens a small plastic box and his brown hands take fabrics that keep the wisdom of the centuries. “She told me: ‘Look, it’s the claw of the puma, the path of the snake.’”

Now, says María Choque with the words muffled, there are those who make tremendous drawings with tremendous colors, but nothing has history or identity. They are empty threads.

“What do they say?”he asks. “No one can read them.”

Source: AP