Weaving in Huancayo

Huancayo, Peru

I arrived in Huancayo early Monday morning by bus from Lima. My teacher is Margarita, a little old indigenous lady from one of the local villages here in the Montaro Valley of the Central Andes. She and Mercedes come at 9am to teach me and Leslie, my fellow student who comes from Australia by way of living in Japan for the last three years.

Margarita

Margarita and Mercedes are native speakers of Quechua, the indigenous language, but they also speak Spanish with a thick accent, which is hard to make out. We manage to communicate in Spanish, but the learning process is largely visual and tactile. As a teacher, I always find it important to periodically put myself in the student´s shoes again - to remind myself of what my students face when they are struggling to understand or learn something new. Knowing absolutely nothing about this process, and having limited communication abilities, I am definitely finding myself in those shoes!

We are learning a method using what is called a Backstrap loom. What we are producing is a little thin belt or wristband that is woven tightly with thin yarn or thread in geometric designs. The backstrap loom is so called because it is stretched between a post on one end, and the weaver´s waste on the other. The loom is tightened by leaning back, and loosened by leaning forward. The mechanics of how the colored threads are manipulated on the loom is quite complicated. Our first lesson started yesterday with Margarita and Mercedes rather quickly stringing the colored thread on the loom for us. It was all happening very quickly, and I was panicking to keep up with what was going on. I was sure I would never be able to follow along, and that this was all one big mistake.

Once the loom was set up, and the weaving process begun, Margarita handed the reins over to me. There are several steps to the actual weaving process, which repeat over and over. There is a step where one has to reconfigure the order and layers of the colored threads, which gets very complicated. She began by showing me each step at a time, and having me do it. I was entirely lost in the process, but followed what she showed me to do. After an hour or so, the rhythm began to take hold of my fingers, and little by little, the process began to reveal itself. After our second class this morning, I am nearly finished with my first piece, and tomorrow we will go over the setup process, so I can learn how to begin a new weaving on my own.

The ladies are quite fun, and I joke around with Margarita a bit - mostly about what a blockhead she has to teach. Yesterday as we were working, Leslie was making good progress, and she remarked to Mercedes that "That one is learning" (meaning Leslie), but that "This one can´t do anything!" We all had a good laugh, and I think that was the point when they realized that Leslie and I could understand what they said in Spanish. Now they speak mostly in Quechua.