Zapotec Post-Earthquake Reconstruction | Oaxaca MX

“My name is Montserrat, I am 16 years old and I want to be a traditional Istmeño embroidery guardian. I decided to practice this handicraft because I want the others to know my culture and traditions, that when they meet me, they value me as a designer but also to embrace my embroidery, my traditional clothes, my entire zapotec culture. In the future I want to share this knowledge to people from inside my community and outside it. I like to participate in the embroidery workshop because it is a relaxing therapy, it is cero stress. Everyday I am learning new tricks and creating creative concepts. I want to have my own traditional clothing brand, with customized embroidery designs, in which people identify their own feelings in the pieces they select.”

In Una mano para Oaxaca  we are working with our educational post disaster model intervention, with which we share ancestral knowledge as traditional handicrafts to the women of our communities so they can start new business. We like to self-appoint as traditional crafts guardians.  Since we started this project, in 2017 we are focused on promoting social networks between women to launch new productive activities that embrace our zapotec culture, we are improving on how to provide emotional health and developing more ways for learning handicrafts. We notice that there was a fortuite interest of the younger generations for learning about traditions too so we decided to evolve our pedagogic model to a creative and dynamic one. 

“My name is Sinai, I am 31 years old and I love to use traditional clothes. I decided to start a local business with my sister in which we want to use traditional embroidery in t-shirts we believe is a good way to innovate and that new generations will like them.”

 For the next three months new groups will be learning embroidery, carpentry and handmade woven bags.  Monste and Sinai represent hope and change, they show the resilience of zapotec people in adapting to crisis, no matter the nature of it, our traditions are safeguardings of our emotional health and a possibility of economical reactivation. 

Once again thank you so much for your solidarity and valuable support.

Regards, 

UMPO team