Ruth Conniff
Rebeca Martínez Santos and her artwork.
Marietta Bernstorff was pissed off. Leaning on her horn, she shouted at the cars in front of her as a group of protesters, wielding red hammer-and-sickle flags, approached a major intersection in Oaxaca. “Move it, you idiots!” she yelled to her fellow drivers. “You’re not going to make it before you get stuck!”
Protest blockades are a regular part of life in Oaxaca. But Marietta, a fifty-eight-year-old artist and curator who divides her time between Oaxaca and Los Angeles, was not about to let this one stop her.
“I’m used to driving in Los Angeles,” she said, as she made a series of sharp turns, evading the growing traffic snarl. With a trunk full of fabric scraps, she was on a mission to visit a group of women artists she has been mentoring for the last eight years in the little town of San Francisco Tanivet, about forty miles from Oaxaca. Along with the scraps, she was carrying a pile of stenciled templates of paintings made by Fred Escher, a well-known American painter, who is commissioning the women of Tanivet to make embroidered copies of his work.
The artists, who call themselves Las Hormigas Bordadoras de Tanivet—the “embroidering ants” of Tanivet—have gained international recognition for their fabric art, which expresses the pain of family separation and immigration to the United States. They have traveled to exhibits in London and Los Angeles and are featured in a documentary film. More fundamentally, they are now generating a steady income from their work.
Tanivet has lost more than half of its residents through migration to the United States. The town has a population of 250, but about 300 former residents live in the Los Angeles area. One of the themes of the hormigas’ work is their sense of loss as their own children have left to cross the border illegally.
Marietta, who was born in Chiapas and grew up in Mississippi, is fluent in both Spanish and English. She first met the women of Tanivet after she organized Mujeres Artistas y el Maiz, or MAMAZ, a nonprofit women’s art collective in Oaxaca. Its original focus was on corn, a staple in Mexico and a hot political topic after NAFTA flooded the Mexican market with American corn, driving up prices and threatening farmers’ livelihoods.
“I started with corn,” Marietta says. “But then I saw they had a bigger issue in life—migration. Everyone was gone. So they started with that and they flew.”
Marietta has many contacts in the art world, which she drew on to teach the women sewing skills and connect them with other artists, art-buyers, and galleries. In 2015, she organized a show of their work at the Social and Public Art Resource Center, or SPARC, in Venice, California.
When the women flew to Los Angeles for the show, it was the first time they’d been on an airplane—and the first chance they’d had to be reunited with their children in many years.
Tanivet is a mestizo community, Marietta explained as she drove into the town. It sprang up around a large hacienda, where residents came from all over Mexico to work the fields. Unlike the nearby Zapotec-speaking villages, famous for their rug-weaving and pottery, it has no indigenous artisan tradition.
The people here have few good options for earning money. That is what Marietta and the hormigas are trying to change. While the people of Tanivet are leaving in droves for the United States, nearby mezcalerias and rug and pottery galleries are bringing in dollars through the tourist trade. The inequality is glaring.
“That’s a petting zoo,” Marietta said, pointing out the window as her car bumped over the last stretch of road and into Tanivet. Next door was an enormous barbed-wire fence—Oaxaca’s largest jail.
She wheeled into the driveway of a bright green ranch house. A group of five women were sitting around an outdoor table in the breezeway, piecing together scraps and stitching with embroidery hoops.
The owner of the house, Juana Martínez Olivera, a strong-featured woman with a dazzling smile, came out to the car to greet us and help unload the fabric scraps from the trunk.
Marietta sat down at the table and began to talk about an upcoming panel discussion at the Graphic Arts Institute founded by the great Oaxacan artist Francisco Toledo.
“What inspires you?” she asked the women, practicing for the panel.
Rebeca Martínez Santos, whose brother, uncle, and cousin are all in the United States, was working on a panel depicting two figures in the desert, on opposite sides of a barbed-wire fence. “I want to support the Dreamers,” she said. “I know someone over there is organizing a march, so they don’t throw them out.”
Mexican artists are having a big impact on the world, Marietta said, citing the Mexican films that recently won Academy Awards.
“¡Arriba los Mexicanos!” shouted Juana. “¡Abajo los Guerros [white people]!” She laughed and shot me a glance. “Pardon me,” she said.
Later, Juana told me about her son’s harrowing crossing to the United States, when he was only fourteen years old.
“Here, what happens is that all of the kids grow up with this idea of going to Los Angeles to make money to build their house,” she said.
Some come back. Some get married and make a new life in the United States.
“Right now, my kids have not come back, and they haven’t been kicked out,” Juana said. She was working on an embroidery hoop, stitching a small boy holding hands with a bigger boy as they approached a huge wall.
Juana recalled how hard it was when her son left. “I was pregnant with my daughter at the time and I cried every day, worrying about how he might be suffering, and if he would get there.”
Her son finally called to tell the family he’d made it. “And he told me that he did suffer, because they left him alone in the mountains, and he was frightened. Everyone had to seek cover on their own so as not to be assaulted. When he crossed over, his clothes were dirty and wet, and he saw corpses of people who had tried to cross and were dead.”
For the next ten years, her only contact with her son was by telephone. Then came the California art exhibit.
“When Marietta told us she was going to help us and that we were going over there, for me it was a beautiful thing,” remembered Juana, “because I started thinking about nothing more than that moment—arriving and seeing him. Years go by without touching your children, hugging them, being able to be with them.”
When she arrived, she finally laid eyes on her son, then twenty-five.
“It was different, because he wasn’t a child anymore,” she said. “He was a big guy, and strong. He’s white—a guerro—and he looked enormous to me.”
Marietta explained how Juana flew on an airplane for the first time, by herself, to get to Los Angeles. So did another hormiga, Leonila Aragón Grijalva.
“Tell how it was when you saw your children, Leo,” Marietta prodded. “Because that was also a shock. Years had passed.”
Leonila looked sad. “When my daughter left she was fifteen,” she said. “It was ugly, because we spoke with a coyote, a man from Tlacolula, who was going to take her. And my daughter left with him. Three or four days went by and we didn’t know anything. When the man came back, he told us, very calmly, ‘You know what? I’m no longer responsible, because your daughter separated herself from the rest of the group.’ It was like he washed his hands of it. It hurts me a lot to remember it.”
Immigration police had caught Leonila’s daughter. She got a call from Tijuana, where they’d left her. Later, on another try, her daughter made it across the border.
“To meet up with your children again is beautiful,” Leonila said. “My daughter is happy. My son is with a girl—he has a baby.” She wiped tears from her eyes.
“In Mexico, you have freedom. But what’s missing is secure employment. Because of that, people migrate,” Juana explained.
“It’s from necessity,” added Rebeca.
“The worst aspect of poverty is the lack of education,” Marietta said to the group. “Your options are get married or work like a dog.”
The hormigas are trying to develop a third option.
Sales of their products—potholders, pillow cases, curtains, and wall panels featuring immigration themes and animals, corn, and other rural motifs—mostly in the shops around Oaxaca, are up and down. But they earn a good income for Oaxaca—usually more than 200 pesos (about $11) a week.
They meet a couple of times a week to share ideas, help each other, and have coffee together while they stitch.
Juana still keeps cows, turkeys, and sheep. She goes to the fields to work, cutting firewood and planting corn. “I used to carry firewood,” she told me, “but I hurt my back. Now that I’m doing this work, I’m in the fields less.”
Describing Juana, Marietta could be talking about herself: “She has really held this group together from the beginning, with her tenacity.”
After the initial stage, during which Marietta taught the women to stitch and brought in other artists to give one-day workshops, the project is run by the hormigas themselves,
“The final project here is that these women will give classes for everyone,” Marietta said. “In ten years, this town will be known for this.” She mentioned alibrijes—the colorful animal figures seen all over Oaxaca. These are a recent invention, Marietta pointed out, not an ancient art form.
“You are the founders,” she said.
Ruth Conniff is filing regular columns from Mexico this year as editor-at-large for The Progressive.