NCBA CLUSA links cooperatives to markets worldwide, securing a wider customer base for their products and helping to ensure the success and sustainability of small cooperative enterprises. In this story recently published by Stories.coop, a cooperative weaver in Oaxaca, Mexico is looking for markets outside his mountain community:
“It’s my brothers and sister and cousins and then a few people from our town. We are all family. We all live in Teotitlan.” Surrounded by stacks of thick, vibrant, hand-woven rugs, Louis Martinez describes the members of Teotitlan Cooperative. “In my family we are the third generation of cooperative weavers,” he explains.
Martinez’s Zapateca family has been weaving since before Pedro de Alvarado invaded or Benito Juarez was born. “[Our ancestors] passed down the patterns and styles, though my sister sometimes makes very modern designs,” Martinez says, pointing to a woven rectangle of deep reds, a circle of yellow blazing in the center. The pattern is called, “Sunset in the mountains.” The majority of the work in the store, however, is a variation on beloved patterns.
Organizing into a cooperative structure allowed the people from Martinez’s community to open a store a few miles away in Oaxaca, Mexico, a large city visited by thousands of tourists every year. Following the idiom of “location, location, location,” the group opened up a few blocks from the center of Oaxaca’s historic district, the Zocolo. The space looks out at Templo de Santo Domingo de Guzmán, a church that dates back to 1570. Over the past decade the tourism industry has grown and, while the monastery is no longer active, boutiques, restaurants and quaint bars catering to a wealthy clientele now surround the Teotitlan Cooperative. The store maintains a home-grown feel, the walls lined in rungs and a loom in the back nearly hidden by piles of weaving that grow up around it.
“We are looking for venues to export our work,” Martinez says when asked about the future of the cooperative. The members are excited to share their history and their present with people outside of Oaxaca and the surrounding mountains. Martinez knows that each piece in the store, and each piece still being woven on the looms of cooperative members, represents hours and hours of labor. He also believes it is artisanal work that deserves to be seen and used and admired.