Storytelling - meet a knitter

Their World on a Page 

by Tamara Stenn (excerpt from book manuscript for publication c. 2012)

Knitters

A rich and changing land of contrasts, Bolivia offered many challenges.  Solidarity in knitting helped women to realize similarities as they came together to enter into a wage economy, often for the first time.  From the vast, silence of the countryside to the bustling crowds of the city, women wove themselves and families through Bolivia’s starkly different landscapes.  Children were put first as families worked to support them in engaging in education and new opportunities hopeful for their realization of a better future.  Traditional gender restraints were challenged as economic needs brought more women into the labor force.  The following are the experiences of Bolivia’s knitters in this time of new opportunity and difficult change.  Knitters ranged in age from 18 to 55 and were largely indigenous women from the rural Bolivian altiplano (high plain).  Maria Mamani Condori, an imaginary (though typical) indigenous knitter based on the compilation of real data, experiences, and stories.

Maria Mamani Condori is 28 years old and has three children.  Carlos is nine, Margarita six, and little Amelia, four.  Carlos and Margarita attend the local elementary school in the mornings and return home in the afternoon to do homework, help around the house, and play in their new El Alto Neighborhood, Las Nieves. Amelia stays with her mom all day. 

Maria’s husband, Juan Jose, drives a truck for his uncle.  They grew up in the same rural altiplano community, were married there, and owned a small farm where they grew potatoes, wheat and quinoa and raised a few sheep and llamas.  Almost everything was for their own consumption though Maria did sometimes sell her potatoes in the local market and occasionally a sheep as well. 

Times grew hard.  The crops were not coming in well.  Hail had crushed the beans.  Worms ate the potatoes.  Rains came late and seedlings dried up.  Then there was too much rain and fields flooded.  The Mamanis could not depend on their farm to sustain themselves anymore.  They sold their animals, planted their fields, and moved four hours away to El Alto, the great urban sprawl outside the city of Pa Paz.  They wanted to earn more money and have access to better schools for the children.  On some weekends and school vacations, they returned to the farm to care for the meager crops. 

In El Alto, a new community was being built and had cheap lots “for sale.”  One just had to define a lot, build a house, and squat there.  Squatter’s rights ensured residents that in time, their neighborhood would be officially recognized, legal documents drawn up, and land titles issued.  This was a very organized process and squatter lots were neatly drawn up on a neighborhood grid, which included spaces for roads, utilities, parks, and plazas.  The Mamanis used the money from their livestock sales to build a small two-room brick home with a tin roof and a dirt floor.  It was built into the tall brick wall that surrounded their plot.  Everyone slept in one room and ate in the other.  In the dirt yard was a shallow well, vegetable garden, and chickens (Fig . 1).

(Fig. 1) Las Nieves knitters, El Alto, La Paz (Photo: Stenn, 2010)

A new group of knitters from Sr. de Mayo meeting in the garden of a newly constructed two room home in the Las Nieves community of El Alto.  At the time of the meeting, neighborhood men were installing a new connection to a sewer line the community had rallied to get put in.  The knitting money helped this household to be able to afford the construction costs to hook up to the line.  This group inspired some of the content in “profile of a knitter.”

Juan Jose learned to drive a tractor trailer and would leave weeks to drive cargo across Bolivia from the mountains of La Paz to the lowlands of Santa Cruz.  He returned home for a few days until the next trucking job started.  It was exciting for the children to be in Las Nieves.  There were lots of construction sites to dig around in, streets being dug up for sewer lines, and empty lots to explore.  There was a corner store a few blocks away and it was a great treat to be sent there to pick up laundry soap, eggs, or bread.  Sometimes they could cajole their mother into giving them a few extra centavitos (cents) for a piece of candy.  The school was new and they like their teachers.  They shared schoolbooks with their cousins in Las Nieves to save money.  Schoolbooks had to be purchased and not everyone could afford them.

A few months ago, Maria joined a knitting group.  Her cousin, Maribel, had been knitting with the group for over a year.  As a Christmas bonus, Maribel received a 20 pound sack of rice, 4 liters of cooking oil, and 10 pounds of sugar from the knitting group.  This was a great help for the family.  Maria was having a hard time making ends meet with the small salary that Juan Jose earned from driving and all of her new expenses in El Alto.  She earned a little extra money herself by washing clothes for other, more established, families in the neighborhood and also watching another neighbor’s little girl while that neighbor worked in the city of La Paz, but this was not enough.  When she saw Maribel’s bonus, she asked how she could become a knitter too.

Maria knew how to knit a little, but the leader of the knitting group, Dona Lydia, taught her to knit much better.  She learned how to count stitches, measure her work, change colors, finish edges and button holes, make pom poms, and other finishing details.  She also learned new stitches.  The products she made were interesting.  Gloves with fingers that lifted up and folded back, multicolored striped scarves with complicated macramé fringe work, colorful baby sweaters, and large cable knit sweaters with super long arms.  She liked knitting the products, thinking of the far away places where they were going – Europe, the United States, Japan.  She thought of who would wear them and what their lives must be like.  She was proud to be creating such important, high quality products.  Often when settling down to knit she would be worried about the events of the day, bills, the demands of the children, a problems with a neighbor, but as she knit, she forget these problems.  She felt as if she knitted her troubles into her work and they went away. 

She especially liked Tuesday afternoons when she would knit with the other women in her group.  They would meet at Dona Lydia’s home and share stories or sit in silence, knitting together (Fig. 2).  Dona Lydia would help her with her designs and knitting.  She would inspect and take the finished gloves, sweaters and scarves, and give her more work.  They would measure out the soft, alpaca yarn and review the new designs.

(Fig. 2) A knitter (left) and Dona Lily (right) from Sr. de Mayo’s “9th of January” Group (Photo: Stenn, 2010)

The inspiration for “Dona Lydia,” is Dona Lily (woman in black seated to the right).  Dona Lily has been knitting for over 30 years.  She is a Group Coordinator for several Sr. de Mayo knitting groups.  She works with the other Sr. de Mayo group coordinators to divide up new knitting orders amongst the association’s 13 groups.  Then she assigns orders to each of the knitting groups she specifically works with. Dona Lily trains and assists the 8-25 knitters in each group.  She attends their weekly meetings, hands out orders and yarn, checks samples for quality control, answers questions, welcomes new members, trouble shoots, collects finished work for shipping, and keeps track of payments. Dona Lily is 50 years old, lives alone, and is dressed in black for a year, because her sister was hit by a car and killed three months ago.  She says that working with the Fair Trade knitters has “changed my life.”  “The work,” she said, “gives me something to do, a community, and something to look forward to.”  Though she said it sometimes is stressful – orders need to be done on time and knitters are not always reliable.  She likes the work and the people she is with.

Maria had to learn how to better manage the household when she began knitting.  When there were orders, she would wake up at five in the morning to prepare the breakfast and lunch for the family.  Bread, tea, chicken soup, potatoes, rice, saice (a traditional dish of thin sliced beef stewed in a vegetable sauce).  She would wash the dishes from the night before and sweep the floor.  The children would wake up and Carlos would feed the chickens and collect eggs.  If there were any, the children would eat them for breakfast. 

The neighbor would bring over her daughter to be watched, and Carlos and Margarita walked to the neighborhood school.  Maria would sit down to knit.  On a good day she could get in about two to three hours of morning knitting before the little ones needed snack and the older children came home from school.

The afternoons were spent washing clothes, cooking dinner, caring for the children, and doing chores.  It was not until everyone was asleep that she would have time to knit again.  She would knit through the night, from 10pm until midnight or even two or three in the morning if she was on deadline with an order (Fig. 3).

The work was exhausting.  Often Maria’s shoulders, fingers, and eyes ached from sitting and knitting for so many hours.  She would cough from breathing in the alpaca fiber and it would get in her eyes too.   The evening hours were the hardest for knitting but it was the quietest time and when she could get the most done.  It was cold at night and the light was low.  Maria would often see little black dots in front of her eyes when she looked up from her knitting.  She worried about losing her vision.

(Fig. 3) The inspiration for Maria’s home life.  Gregoria Garcia (seated on left) with her daughter, Mariela. (Stenn, 2010)

Gregoria is a 35-year-old knitter with the La Imillia group in the valley of Arani.  She speaks Quechua and is illiterate.  She lives in a neat two-room home with a dirt floor, no electricity, or running water.  She has three children, Mariela 17, Norma 15, and Rodrigo, 11.  Garcia often knits at night by the light of the tall gas lamp on the right.  Her eyes hurt and she is tired but she is happier having work and earning an income.  She now wants to invite her other friends to knit too.

She worked about 20 hours a week, knitting one or two baby sweaters and earning about $23.  Maria used her earnings to buy better food for the children including meat and fruit, and also school books and shoes. It was good to have this extra money.  If her child was sick, she could pay for a doctor visit.  She could also help Juan Jose with costs for the house.  They were saving their money to pay for access to the town sewer line.  They already had the materials to build a bathroom, they just needed to pay for the line to be brought to their home.

When she went to her knitting meetings should would lock the children in her home, leaving Carlos in charge and asking that he help his sister with her homework.  Maria did not attend school long enough to learn to properly read or write and could not understand the homework herself.  It was safer to have the children secure at home than wondering in the streets while she was out.  The children did not mind staying home and would often watch cartoon shows on the television too.

            At first Juan Jose did not want Maria to knit.  He said that it took away from her time with children and the home.  Sometimes he would come home to find his children dirty, the dinner not cooked, and Maria out at a meeting.  He felt that this was not good.  One time he had invited his friend, a new neighbor, over for lunch and there was nothing prepared.  Maria was home knitting and said she had lost track of the time.  He had to hit her for that.  That was not a proper way for a wife to be. 

When Maria came to the knitting meeting the next day with a bruised cheek, Dona Lydia  wanted to know what had happened.  Crying, Maria told her and the other knitters about forgetting to prepare lunch and being hit by her husband.  A few laughed at her predicament, they too had faced the same situations.  The group helped Maria to better plan her day and shared the strategy of waking early and cooking lunch in the morning, thus freeing up more time for knitting.  Maria also learned that she could go to the Defensora del Pueblo (Village Defense) and get help if Juan Jose hit her again.  She learned that the next month a lawyer from the state agency was scheduled to come to the knitting meeting and give a talk about women’s rights and the Bolivian judicial system.  She wondered what would happen then. 

Maria took a moment to reflect.  She saw how the knitting was changing her life, it was not just helping her to earn money for her family, but it was also helping her to improve her life, be better organized, and know when and how to speak up.  She smiled, thinking back to how quiet and timid she had been when she first moved to El Alto, now she felt proud, confident and supported. It was a good feeling.