Dude, They Don’t Have Bracelets

5-21-07

The water cooler empties everyday. Every morning, it refills.

I wake during my last morning at La Casa de los Amigos. I grab an empty two-liter bottle, and I go to drain water.

I shuffle past two Mexican women. They sit on a couch. Embroidered clothes, cards and blankets spread across the coffee table in front of them. The first woman wears traditional dress layered in bright fabrics. She straightens the merchandise as I pass.

The second woman wears contemporary clothes: a black t-shirt and jeans. She leans back in the couch.

I fill the water bottle with free water – one of the perks for staying at La Casa - and go downstairs for breakfast.

Bowls of scrambled eggs and black beans pass around the table. A noise rumbles overhead. An Abercrombie-clad avalanche pours into the room. American college students crowd the table. This is their last day of a summer course titled “Understanding Mexico.”

They laugh about a tour-bus driver who had blared Queen during the previous day’s drive from Oaxaca. “He played his Mariachi music after we started to fall asleep,” giggles a skinny girl sitting to my right.

Group conversation turns to You-Tube videos and shopping plans for the day. The voice of the chaperoning professor rises above the goofiness. To those not in his group, he explains that each student must give a presentation on Mexico during the trip.

One plump young man stands in the corner. He mumbles through an inaudible speech.

“Very good,” the chaperone says as he sits down.

Everyone claps. Next. The girl to my right stands.

“I’m going to talk about time,” her voice trembles as she speaks.

She reads from a computer printout. Sentences appear highlighted in neon yellow. She explains that Mexicans understand time differently than “we do.”

She lists some reasons:

“Time is more flexible in Mexico.”

“We see this by Mexicans' use of “manana” (a word that literally translates to “tomorrow” or “morning,” but means “later” in some contexts).”

“Punctuality is less important in business settings.”

“…Um, uh… People, um, like don’t wear watches as often.” The chaperone’s brow furrows. The student’s speech peters out.

Everyone claps.

Nick, one of La Casa’s full-time volunteers, addresses the students. He explains that women from the Mazahua Women’s Cooperative are upstairs selling things.

The Mazahua are one of the state’s indigenous communities (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mazahua). The cooperative has worked in Mexico City since 1970. The college students had already met the Mazahua women at the beginning of their trip, when they stayed in La Casa.

Two or three students disappear upstairs. They return after a few minutes.

I finish breakfast and listen to talk about pirated DVDs and cheap souvenirs.

“Don’t forget to check out the Mazahua upstairs,” Nick reminds the group as it rises to leave.

An awkward silence. A girl whispers to a friend who went upstairs.

“I know, I wanted to get some bracelets, too,” her friend responds with a shrug, “I checked, but they didn’t bring any of 'em this time.”

The avalanche pours outside. The students leave for other markets.

I ask Nick if he might help me speak with the Mazahua women. He says okay.

The two women stop packing their bags when we enter the room. I rest my water bottle on the ground, and I try to introduce myself: “Me llamo Doug.” She looks at me skeptically.

I reiterate: “Douglas. Doo-glass.”

“Ah! Doo-GLAHZ.”

“Como se llama?”

Her eyes smile sympathetically, “Me llamo Antonia.”

“Is it difficult to preserve Mazahua culture in contemporary Mexico?”

“Si, es poco dificil, porque la cultura…” and my vocabulary comprehension fails. I wait for Nick’s translation: “Yes it’s difficult. One of the things we’ve lost is the traditional dress. It can be hard to survive in such a big city where a group of women makes embroidery by hand.”

The Mazahua homeland is located near Toluca 39 miles southwest of Mexico City. The tribe is traditionally agrarian, but textile work has become part of the local economy (http://www.mexicantextiles.com/grouppages/mazahua.html).

Antonia Moudragon Pauline, 48, was a teenager when she left for Mexico City with her two sisters. They were among the cooperative’s original 80 members. Antonia’s younger sister Lucia, now 36, wears t-shirt and jeans beside Antonia.

Antonia said the Mazahua women’s Cooperative grew to 800 women in recent years. Two divisions of 400 women work in the Merced Market, she says. Some of the money goes back to family members living in the traditional Mazahua villages. They don’t make much profit.

If they could, Antonia says they would like to help fund the tribe’s legal battle over water supply (http://www.americas.org/item_17861). I look down at the half-empty water bottle sitting at my feet. Aside from the cooler, I can only guess where the water originated.

The Mazahua still live in the pueblo, and they still speak the Mazahua language, Antonia says. The cooperative members still return to their rural home, and they still celebrate all their traditional holidays and festivals. If anything, she said they are now rescuing traditional Mazahua culture.

“It used to be prohibited to speak Mazahua when we went to school,” Antonia says as Nick translates. “Our teachers would say, ‘you’re not allowed to speak that (Mazahua), why would you want it. Let’s end it. Learn to speak Spanish.’ So we learned it by force. They taught us by force.”

In 2003, the “Ley General de Derechos Lingüísticos de los Pueblos Indígenas” recognized the language as one of the official state languages in Mexico (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mazahua_language). Although, Antonia says her daughters don’t speak the language.

Antonia said the Mazahua Women’s Cooperative has a catalog, and they want to create a web page, but they don’t have the computer resources.

Communicating with potential buyers is a problem. For example, if the women knew that the students wanted cheap bracelets only, then they could have left their heavy bags at home.

“Our biggest concern is finding a market to sell our embroidery,” she says. They sell clothes, blankets and dolls at fairs, museums and tourist spots, but they don’t have a fixed market.

Some groups, like La Casa de los Amigos, help the Mazahua with sales. In the breakfast room of La Casa, a glass case exhibits their hand-made dolls. And an American woman buys large quantities of the dolls and sells them in the States.

I ask prices on the products spread out in front of the two women. I point to an elaborate blanket. She quotes 1,000 pesos. Compared to the merchants in Oaxaca and San Cristobal, this price is outrageous…Then again, compared to U.S. prices for similar products, $100 might be a fair price. Either way, it’s not in my budget.

Joyce inspects the embroidered cards. She buys two for 40 pesos, $4 US, which still seems too expensive.

“Muchas Gracias,” I say,

“Th-Thank you,” she says, unsure of the word choice. Her pitch rises at the end of “you,” so it sounds like a question.

We go back to our room. We pack our backpacks. Again I fill the water bottle. We go downstairs and reserve a room for our last night in Mexico five weeks later.

On the way out, we pass a display case of food products and a poster for Economia Solidaria. Economia Solidaria is one of La Casa de los Amigos’ economic assistance projects.

“Economia Solidaria is fair trade and more,” says the Director of La Casa de los Amigos, Bridget Mois, a Quaker from the U.S.

Fair trade emphasizes that consumers consider the environmental and social consequence of their purchases. “Economia Solidaria also emphasizes reconstructing relationships between consumer and producer,” she says.

La Casa de los Amigos works with Centro de Estudios Economicos (http://www.cce.org.mx/CEESP/) to connect a network of cooperatives, promoters and vendors.

The participating cooperatives produce artisan crafts or food products; promoters advertise and package the products; vendors sell them. Together they negotiate a fair price based on labor hours, and CEE helps to determine a profit margin for vendors.

Mois considered inviting the Mazahua into the network, but she says the Mazahua Women’s Cooperative is well established in Mexico City. This Economia Solidaria project focuses on smaller operations.

“The agreement is that any profit we use, we invest at least small portion of that back into social justice and peace work,” Mois said. “Here at the casa, we use all of it for that. We just buy more products and sell more products.”

Economia Solidaria is part of La Casa de los Amigos’ renewed social work, which was tied to La Casa’s 50th anniversary as a civil association in 2006.

“Our focus in non-violence and conflict transformation as a peace center,” she says. “But we understand very clearly being here in Mexico that you can’t separate issues of conflict and peace from issues of economic injustice or issues of migration.”

Roughly eight producers and five promoters met at La Casa de los Amigos last October during Economia Solidaria’s first meeting. La Casa will host the network’s second meeting in August. They will discuss their competitive strategy in the Mexican free market.

In the United States, the disconnection between consumer and producer is obvious. One may now live his or her entire life eating from pre-packaged containers. Corporations like Wal-Marts and McDonald’s provide fast and cheap sustenance to anonymous masses. This pattern of consumption, Mois says, disrupts social bonds.

And Mexico is the same (in some ways).

“There is a culture of wanting brands in Mexico, wanting foreign brands in particular,” Mois says. “So there’s even more of a disconnect (between producer and consumer). But there still exists if you get outside of the city, the small local economy. People still buy things from the local market, and you meet the person is selling the food that they grew, so there still is that existing here in some ways.”

We exit the House of the Friends into world’s largest city. Surrounded by cement and traffic, we walk between street vendors and storefront businesses. We pass countless taquerias, travel on the metro, and then we see Starbuck’s.
Inside, shiny brochures advertise the corporation’s rendition of fair trade. The fair trade concept has become a marketing tool at Starbuck's.

If you specifically request fair trade coffee at a Starbuck’s, the store is obligated to serve you fair trade coffee. But you have to ask.

Mois has doubted Starbuck’s commitment to fair trade ever since petitioners forced the issue on the corporation in the late ‘90s.

Fair trade coffee represents a miniscule percentage of the company’s overall sales. Even so, Starbucks is the largest fair trade vendor in the world according a 2006 press release.

(Two perspectives on Starbuck’s fair trade coffee:
Corporate perspective----------------------------------------------------- http://64.233.167.104/search?q=cache:iGeOwZgrX9MJ:www.starbucks.com/aboutus/StarbucksAndFairTrade.pdf+starbuck%27s+fair+trade&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1&gl=us&client=safari
Activist perspective-------------------------------------------------------- http://www.globalexchange.org/campaigns/fairtrade/coffee/starbucks.html)

While the rest of Mexico drinks café, we could drink from cups plastered with “Starbucks Coffee." But we continue walking past the entrance. For the time being, water remains in the bottle.