Part 4 in a Series
Shaping Their Future: Women in Mexico Seek Empowerment Through Crafts
MEXICO CITY, MEXICO – Although it is Tuesday, the day the artisans of cooperative Sociedad Cooperativa de Producción Artesanal Flor de Mazahua gather to work, only sisters Agustina Mondragón and Lucía Mondragón are in the workshop.
The cooperative comprises women of the indigenous Mazahua community who moved to Mexico City, the nation’s capital, to earn a living by making and selling traditional crafts. For 25 years, they have employed traditional Mazahua embroidery to create items such as clothing, tablecloths, bags and folders.
But today, Agustina Mondragón, 58, cannot use the sewing machine in the workshop to sew a blouse that a client ordered because there is no electricity. The electric company shut it off because the cooperative has not been able to pay its bills.
The cooperative owes 5,500 pesos ($425) for electricity services, Lucía Mondragón, 42, says. It is also in debt for its water bill and property taxes.
When the women cannot use the three old sewing machines in the workshop, they sew their crafts by hand. The traditional Mazahua embroidery style is cross-stitching, Agustina Mondragón says.
But customers do not value the work and always try to bargain for lower prices, she says. The increasing operating costs and an inability to pay them because of low sales make her think that perhaps the best thing to do is to end the cooperative.
Mazahua women who migrated to Mexico City launched the independent cooperative to earn a living and to preserve their culture. But a drop in sales and a rise in operating costs are threatening their ability to work. The waning profitability is prompting their daughters to opt for alternative careers in more modern industries, threatening the future of the cooperative and Mazahua crafts.
The Mazahuas are an indigenous group who primarily inhabit central Mexico in the northwestern part of the state of Mexico as well as a small portion of the eastern part of Michoacán state.
The majority of Mazahua communities suffer from marginalization, according to the Mexican state government’s website. A lack of jobs and poor agricultural production, their main economic activity, have forced many to migrate to nearby cities such as Mexico City and Toluca de Lerdo.
Some 40 Mazahua women launched the cooperative in 1988. But only 12 of these women remain members today. And Lucía Mondragón says that only five actually participate, which includes her and her two sisters, Agustina Mondragón and Antonia Mondragón.
The members of this cooperative are Mazahua women who had to leave their native villages in order to find work, Agustina Mondragón says. Most migrate from the same village, San Antonio Pueblo Nuevo, located in the center of Mexico state, which borders the federal district of Mexico City.
Before, Agustina Mondragón had worked at a government-run center in Mexico City that employed 800 Mazahua women to make embroidery and rag dolls by hand, she says. But after the 1985 earthquake destroyed a large portion of the city, almost all of the Mazahua left for fear that the workshop would collapse.
The government then ended the project. The Mazahua women who remained decided to create an independent cooperative to sell their handicrafts directly to customers without intermediaries.
But now, Agustina Mondragón speaks discouragedly about the future of the cooperative. Since 2007, the cooperative’s sales have declined. She attributes it in part to the country’s economy, which diminishes the purchasing power of people of working age. Those too young to work also cannot buy the women’s goods.
“The youth do not have jobs,” she says, “and the little old women like us who do have work, to whom do we sell?”
Moreover, Mondragón says that people do not value craftsmanship. Customers at craft fairs and exhibitions always haggle for lower prices, which forces the women to sell their goods for cheaper prices in order to make sales.
The increasingly high cost of utilities has also eroded the finances for the cooperative, Lucía Mondragón says. She has been in charge of making the utilities payments for the past 19 years.
The waning profitability of the industry has discouraged the women’s daughters from working as artisans, further threatening the cooperative’s future.
“When we started,” Agustina Mondragón says, “our way of thinking was that when we were old women, we would dedicate ourselves to giving classes to the young women so that this work always continued.”
But that plan has not materialized. Even in her own family, her two daughters were not interested in taking over the family artisanal business. They prefer to seek employment elsewhere.
“They do not want to carry a suitcase as I do,” Agustina Mondragón says. “They prefer to carry nothing more than their handbag. They want to work for other people.”
Her niece, Ana Cecilia Aguirre, the 32-year-old daughter of Antonia Mondragón, says she is not interested in working as an artisan because it does not pay well, there are no opportunities for advancement, it requires a lot of time, and consumers do not value the crafts.
“The youth now are not interested in doing craftsmanship,” Aguirre says, “and they seek other more modernized things, like learning information technology or some other profession.”
She studied biochemical engineering and today works as a supervisor in a chemistry lab. When she was a university student, she made crafts with her mother and aunts. But she used her earnings to pay for her school expenses and pursue a different career rather than continue in the trade.
Although she is not interested in continuing to work as an artisan, she says that if the cooperative made more sales, she would help them with administrative work.
Despite an uncertain future, Agustina Mondragón holds onto the positive reasons for continuing the cooperative: It the women’s source of income. It is more flexible than other jobs. It enables the Mazahuas to be together, to dress in their traditional clothing without suffering discrimination, and to talk in their native tongue, Mazahua.
Interviews were translated from Spanish.
