Empowering Mayan women through ancient textiles

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

Links:

• NGOimpacto