Working hand by hand with women artisans in Altos de Chiapas.
Human Development is an area whose main objective is to strengthen the self-esteem and leadership of indigenous women artisans in the Highlands of Chiapas. Our commitment is to focus on the implementation of human development curricula, incorporating elements of ethical community leadership facilitation and conflict resolution. Our strategy is that these tools become one of the pillars that support the collective organization from a relationship of respect and active listening.
The Human Development activities have represented an opportunity to create support networks among women, within a safe environment for them, generating spaces for the exchange of experiences and active listening outside their daily work, allowing them to connect with each other based on empathy and recognition of their emotions.
The women found in the facilitations a space for conflict resolution and assertive communication, being the exchange of experiences an opportunity that will allow us to continue promoting positive changes in the personal and collective life of the partners.
The women's circle is a powerful resource for building trust and continuing to develop intercultural communication and intersectionality, while at the same time demonstrating that it is a powerful tool for conflict resolution.
The strengthening of the partners' participatory leadership allowed us to see their capacity to transcend the limitations imposed by social inequalities and to develop communication and decision-making skills.
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To interlace:
To join or tie one thing to another by crossing them with each other to form a homogeneous whole.
There are several factors that encourage cooperation, which NGOimpacto applies intuitively and intentionally. We continually change our ways of interacting, practice exchanges in all directions, and share management strategies, organizational programming, fundraising, and communication skills that are useful in the game of collaborative community-based development.
Our physical and emotional body is intertwined with the territory we inhabit and with the practices we inherit. As women, we are a complex unit of searches and feelings that sometimes, due to the needs of livelihood, are driven by an accelerated productive rhythm that ignores the body-soul nexus.
From the urgency of connecting the Technical Productive and the Human Development area, at the end of 2022 the area of Intertwined Textile Impact was born, whose methodology is based on the life cycles that all beings have, but that we see particularly present in indigenous communities, these are: seeding, germination, growth and harvest. Thus, with this organic understanding, we devise facilitations in each phase, with the purpose of strengthening women artisans in a deeper and more transcendent way.
We focus on reinforcing the autonomy of their voice through breathing exercises and the exploration of their inner wind with the use of ancient musical instruments and storytelling. Likewise, we exalt their ancestral wisdom both from its historical-cultural, intuitive and feminine dimension, as well as from their being as entrepreneurs in training, using drawing, design, conceptualization and elaboration of textile jewelry pieces from their traditional techniques, with a contemporary approach.
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The preservation and reproduction of the textiles of the traditional clothing of Santiago el Pinar.
Weaving is a living expression that persists and survives in the indigenous peoples that inhabit part of the Mexican territory, despite the industrial influences of the world. This resistance is due to the fact that grandmothers and mothers have inherited their knowledge from generation to generation.
El telar de cintura, forma parte del patrimonio cultural de los pueblos originarios de México, cuando este desaparece de la vida de un pueblo desaparece una forma de vida, una tradición, un conocimiento ancestral que lleva consigo, otras técnicas, como el uso de fibras, tintes, iconografías, preservadas fundamentalmente por mujeres.
Artisans of the cooperative “Choyo Spolavil” from Santiago el Pinar conducted a research process of the traditional clothing of Santiago el Pinar in the Textile Center of the Mayan World, a place that preserves a collection of more than 2,500 pieces in which you can appreciate the diversity and complexity of the designs, symbols and meanings of textiles from tojolabales, Choles, Tzeltales and Tzotziles Mayan communities from Chiapas.
This allowed them to elaborate and reproduce the traditional clothing of their community, a crucial activity that allows the women to recognize, value and preserve the backstrap loom techniques of their ancestors, thus reinforcing their knowledge and motivation as artisans, turning them into future facilitators who transmit knowledge to new generations.
To appreciate backstrap loom weaving is to appreciate a way of life that shows us great knowledge, treasured for centuries by indigenous women artisans who are an invaluable part of the cultural fabric of our nation.
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Every day, the indigenous peoples and communities of Chiapas struggle to maintain their work processes, autonomy and dignity by safeguarding their traditions and customs. This is possible largely due to the constant collective exchange of their knowledge, wisdom and experiences that maintain the strength of their autonomy.
The women artisans from Los Altos de Chiapas with whom we collaborate are guardians of this tradition and strive to preserve their knowledge by sharing it with other women and groups in the region in order to improve the processes, techniques and designs of their handicrafts and thus strengthen their own autonomy and self-management.
Thanks to the support of the donations we have received from people who bet and believe in the processes of exchange of knowledge and empowerment of women through collective work and shared experience, thanks to the GlobalGiving platform, NGOimpacto can continue to support indigenous women artisans in their own processes of collective strengthening.
A meeting and learning space
The workshops for the exchange of artisan techniques and experiences are a space for meeting, dialogue and learning among women artisans from different regions. These workshops show us the interest of the artisans in improving their practice and raising the quality of their creations.
In order to carry out these workshops for the exchange of experiences, women artisans who easily handle a specific textile technique are invited to share their expertise and methods with other groups of artisans from a different region than their own. In general, the meetings are held in the common spaces of the home of one of the artisans, where all the women of the group meet to learn the technique visually and orally, and right there, they all reproduce the technique with sample material, supporting each other and generating spaces of mutual trust and empowerment.
We are very happy to know that thanks to the support we received from people committed to our cause through our campaign “Empowering Mayan women through ancient textiles”, we have been able to design, develop and implement these workshops for the exchange of experiences to continue strengthening the processes of empowerment, autonomy and self-management of women artisans from Los Altos de Chiapas.
Testimony
"I see that the Tasalu'kum colleagues do their embroidery very well and learn very quickly. I taught them my stitch and they caught on quickly. It's nice to share and learn together.” - Artisan from Aguacatenango
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The empowerment of women transforms their role in the community. The objective is that in the future they will play an essential role, being the decision makers and leaders of their own productive projects.
Supporting and encouraging women's goals through workshops focused on business development, leadership and human development will enable them to set specific and attainable goals that will help them achieve stability and success.
The empowerment of indigenous women as powerful agents of change could only strengthen their communities and nations in the face of the challenges they face.
I am a craftswoman because it was a knowledge that my mother passed on to me, she was taught by her mother and so it has been from generation to generation. For me it is important because it is a way to generate money. My journey with NGOimpacto has been amazing and a great learning experience. Thanks to improving our skills, we now make better products that we sell at a fairer and more ethical price. Thanks to the sales, we are able to feed our families. It has been a great help to me as an indigenous woman artisan and I am very grateful.
Gabriela Aguilar V.
Artisan from Aguacatenango, Venustiano Carranza, Chiapas.
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