History

On a crisp September morning in 1985, two anthropologists in their mind-fifties, Spanish-born Gabriel Martinez and his Chilean wife Veronica Cereceda, set out in their Jeep from Bolivia’s colonial capital of Sucre on a quest to resolve a mystery that had long puzzled them. Joined by Bolivian ethnologist Ramiro Molina, they were being passed off as antiques in tourist shops in La Paz and other Bolivian cities.  Although the weavings were esteemed by collectors for their uniqueness, and their fabulist designs were reproduced on postcards, magazine covers, and posters and had inspired university –trained painters in La Paz, surprisingly little was known about their creators. Collectors and merchants referred to the weavings as “Potolo pieces,” after the largest town (comprising some 600 families) in the area of their origin, 50 kilometers northeast of Sucre. No ethnographic studies of the culture or people responsible for the weavings could be found.

For several months, Martinez, Cereceda, and Molina combed the steep valleys of Chuquisaca, visiting dozens of scattered communities by Jeep and on foot. Much of what they found was disturbing but unsurprising.

The area was inhabited by a group of nearly 25,000 people who called themselves Jalq’a. They were severely impoverished; whit an infant mortality rate on a par with Africa’s and average family incomes of $ 100 per year.

Their parched potato fields and small flocks of scrawny sheep and goats showed the effects of a longstanding drought. Villages lacked clean water, electric power, and often health clinics; and no tin roofs or bikes-common signs of minimal affluence among Andean campesinos- were to be found. People seemed generally dispirited and disorganized.

The three visitors were pleased to see that most villages still wore traditional ethnic dress. But the aqsus worn by the woman were pale reflections of the garments that had inspired the team’s quest. The subtle color combinations were gone, the large decorative panels called Pallas has shrunken in size, and the motif of exotic animals in free fall had been replaced by repetitive rows of stock figures. The adoption of geometric designs and colors used by a neighboring ethnic group was gradually erasing the tenuous connections to the past that remained. The young women, perhaps influenced by urban values penetrating the countryside, had turned away from the exacting standards maintained by their mothers and grandmothers.

Indeed, as Martinez and Cereceda talked with villagers, they began to see that the decline in textiles was symptomatic of a deeper problem.

The community’s cultural structure was unraveling from changes in the regional economy. The drought had crippled subsistence production, and rising demand among the jalq’a for noodles, candles, cooking oil, medicines, and other consumer staples had increased the need for cash.

Beginning in the 1960s and accelerating through the mid-1970s, a ready source for that cash became available. A growing market for Andean textiles among tourists and overseas dealers had spawned a horde of itinerant traders who scoured the countryside for ponchos, shawls, aqsus, belts, bags, and even grain sacks. Items whit Jalq’a motifs were in heavy demand, and traders, some of them expatriates, frequented local fairs and festivals to persuade campesinos, often through badgering or trickery, to relinquish their finest textiles. The Jalq’a never learned the true market value of these items, which steadily appreciated as they grew rarer.

One day the boom was over, and the Jalq’a awoke to find the core of their weaving inheritance – their ritual costumes, wedding garments, and family heirlooms – gone. Without models to inspire a new generation of weavers, and the connection between weaving and ceremonial life frayed, the Jalq’a tradition seemed virtually extinct, victim of the same forces that had undermined indigenous textile arts throughout the Andean during the second half of the twentieth century.