Doña Ludi carding wool. Photo: Ibis Alonso

Faustino Ruiz'due south family has been weaving wool rugs in Teotitlan del Valle, Oaxaca, for sixteen generations.

His grandfather loaded the rugs onto his burro and sold them in the coldest parts of the mountains, where they kept floors warm. Today, Faustino and his wife, Ludivina, sell their rugs to tourists, who hang them on walls.

But it's been ane thing subsequently another for anyone involved in the tourist trade in Oaxaca in the last few years. Don Faustino counts on his fingers: the teachers' strikes in Oaxaca in 2006 and 2008, the economic downturn in the U.South., the contempo overblown media coverage of edge drug violence that's scared tourists abroad from all of Mexico, and now, swine influenza panic.

Teotitlan del Valle is never a wildly busy place, but this week it'southward been utterly silent.

Don Faustino giving a sit-in, when business was meliorate. Photograph: Ibis Alonso

The baskets of marigolds, indigo, moss, pomegranates, and cochineal that Don Faustino and Doña Ludi use for their natural dye demonstrations are shoved haphazardly under the spinning wheel, instead of artistically arrayed in front of it in anticipation of visitors.

The wooden table where smaller rugs are normally displayed has been sitting naked in the middle of the display room all calendar week. We cleared information technology off for our starting time English class on Monday, and it hasn't been needed for its usual duties since so.

Doña Ludi takes a slightly different view of the waning supply of customers than her husband. She tells me that people simply don't buy things for dazzler anymore, and if they need something to keep the floor warm, they purchase a cheap, mass-produced rug at Sam's Club or Home Depot.

Her sons, at xiii and 17, know how shear the sheep and dye the wool and weave the rugs, but she suspects they'll take to discover a dissimilar mode to make a living once they finish school.

Don Faustino and Doña Ludi have managed for years to make a living, carry on a generations-old family tradition, create from scratch something cute and—at least potentially—useful, and not hurt anyone or annihilation in the process.

Is that becoming an impossible combination to promise for?

Photo: Ibis Alonso

Doña Ludi tells me that she and her husband will probably never go to the U.Southward., though some of their relatives have. "I think we'd get lost there," she says—non self-deprecatingly, but thing-of-factly. But she's not certain how they'll manage to proceed like this, weaving beautiful rugs that no one buys.

I planned our English classes around their work—they've learned to say "sheep," "rug," "marigold," all the relevant vocabulary. Already they're giving me trivial tours in English language: "This is a sheep!" they tell me, afterward we hike up the dorsum hill to the pen. "These are bugs!" while holding upwards the handbasket of cochineal.

Afterward form, I wave from the dusty border of the quiet road and promise they'll exist able to employ their make new English with someone other than me earlier also long. That they'll notice a way to get on.

And anyway, I tell myself, at least nosotros're having fun—and that should do usa all adept, in these days when it's too easy to be lamentable about all that'south existence lost.

Community Connectedness

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