The Guiding Thread: Women Weave Legacies in the Peruvian Andes
Photos courtesy of the Center for Traditional Textiles in Cusco, Peru.
Long before they set up their first looms, Quechua weavers Yessica Sallo Auccacusi and Rosa Pumayalli Quispe grew familiar with the quiet rhythms of warp and weft. The sounds have followed them throughout their whole lives.
“All through my childhood, I was surrounded by weavers,” Yessica explained to me, speaking in Spanish. She recalled her earliest memories of weaving: soaking in the swift movements of her mother’s hands as she worked, figures and designs coming to life beneath her fingertips.
Yessica and Rosa met me over Zoom, wearing the traditional dress of their community, Chinchero, Peru, their hands neatly clasped together on the worktable before them. Rainy season has just begun. Still, the sky was bright enough to cast gentle shadows across the patio from which they had called me. Their surrounding space was a shrine to thread. Intricately woven blankets (mantas) draped the wall behind them, adorned with delicately strung garlands of pom-poms (pompones) and tassels (bolsas). The table boasted a colorful cornucopia of wicker baskets, crafting tools, and loosely bundled lengths of yarn.
They have just finished an afternoon of rehearsals for the virtual workshop they led for the Smithsonian Folklife Festival on December 5. Live from the Andes Mountains, Yessica and Rosa instructed online audiences in the United States in the traditional art of Quechua pom-pom and tassel making, part of a rich textile tradition that has come to emblematize the collective spirit of high Andean communities in the Cusco region of Peru.
Terms like “lived tradition” and “living art” are common in conversations surrounding culture and heritage, but we sometimes fail to consider what it actually means for a tradition to hold a life of its own. The relationship that exists between Andean weavers and their ancestral arts is reciprocal: tejedores breathe life and feeling into their work, and the resulting textiles offer life in return, providing a powerful source of identity and communal belonging in addition to the financial profits they yield.
For artisans like Yessica and Rosa, textiles are nothing short of the lifeblood of Andean community and culture. The process of creation that they described to me, and that I witnessed firsthand in their rehearsal, is also one of self-expression. Whether pom-poms, tassels, or mantas, no two designs are exactly the same, and so creative output is profoundly connected with the energy and spirit of the weaver. Each interlacing thread is a recording of movement, tension, and emotion in the body. Each tells a story.
“Sometimes, if I’m singing to myself as I work, the designs might come out faster,” Yessica said. “The part I love most is deciding which colors to choose for my design. I don’t like to repeat a design more than once, and I want the combination of colors to be unique.”
Every weaving community has a voice of its own. In Chinchero, textiles are often finished with a tubular edging called ñawi awapa, meaning “eye border” in Quechua. The cord is patterned with woven eyes (as its name suggests) which are said to watch over the fabric, protecting it spiritually, as well as from physical wear. A closer look at the geometric detail of a manta might reveal any number of symbols from everyday Andean life: winding lines mimic the snaking incisions of terrace farms and rivers, while radiating motifs depict stars, or even the reflection of sunlight on water. Stylized renderings of local flora and fauna—like rose blossoms (rosas tika), hummingbirds (q’enti), and puma claws (pumac maqui)—imbue the designs of each community with a distinct sense of place. Still today, this notion of individuality is important when it comes to judging craftsmanship.
“If it’s unique, it’s of a finer quality,” Rosa explained. “When I’m making a design, I want it to be unique, not a copy.”
“I first began weaving with my abuela, when I was six years old,” she continued. “I started with simple designs. It became difficult when I moved up to three colors, but I had to keep trying if I wanted to learn. Back then, you had to spin your own thread from your own wool. There are machines that can produce thread for you now, but it’s not the same. If I create a piece myself, if I spin and dye the thread, it’s going to have more of a unique value.”
Read the full story, published December 20 2021, on Smithsonian Folklife.
