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Jewelry
design Mexico
Artesanas
Campesinas (ARTCAMP)
Artesanas
Campesinas (ARTCAMP) is a rural womens' artisans cooperative founded in
1991 - 1992 in the wake of the collapse of the local handcraft jewelry
industry occasioned by broad changes in fashion in the United States
and by the inexorable price pressures forced upon the humble handcraft
producers of Mexico by the crushing market "globalization"of the 1990's.
In the nineteen-seventies and eighties there was more of an
appreciation of "handcraft" in the U.S. and Canadian markets. Then, the
village artisans labored to ingeniously carve the shell mosaics on the
edge of carborundum wheel. Cottage industry jewelry production was
thriving in the Municipality of Taxco. When the wheel of fortune turned
by angry wrenches, and when the fierce competition from the East
Indians and the Chinese, the Thais, and the Javanese came into the
traditional markets of the Mexican artisans, in the 1990's, the local
handcraft jewelry producer community was devastated.
The villagers of Tecalpulco, of Taxco El Viejo, of Dolores, and
Paintla, of Santiago Temixto, Tlamacazapa, Cerro Gordo, Itzala,
Mezcaltepec and the others were stranded on the desert of
post-industrialism; the value of handcraft simply plummeted in the new
globalized market.
The countryside of Mexico has undergone a profound economic recession
during all of the 1990's The country people of Mexico have been
grievously affected.
Today, the largest employer in the villages is the United States.
According to the comisario of Tecalpulco about a third of the adults
are in the USA. The second largest employer are the silver mines. Most
all the young and active men of the villages have left long ago for "El
Norte" - across the Rio Bravo. It is THE one way for the strong and
industrious to get ahead. The migrants travel to the Sonora border by
bus and cross at a place they call Piedra Negra near Sonorita Sonora
and Douglas Arizona The coyotes charge $700 to $1500 usdollars to
deliver you inside the Immigration Checkpoint Wetbacks live twelve or
fifteen to a two bedroom apartment. Laying low for the most part when
not working. Their paychecks are garnished for U.S. Income Tax and
Social Security salary deductions they never receive the benefit of.
Illegal aliens are usually paid under the table in cash. The wetbacks
have no rights, supposedly, under the US Constitution. And when they
transfer their hard earned money down South to the family, Western
Union and Electra Take 20% of it as financial service fee! Tecalpulcans
and Taxco El Viejans are all over the USA In Arizona and North
Carolina; in Chicago, in Oklahoma living in a stateless limbo ' riding
out the crisis at home.
The women in the villages and the children are the victims of the
NorthAmerican labor migrations of the nineteen-nineties. The boys and
girls of Tecalpulco are often married in their teens and young children
are at home when the men leave.
When the men are gone a long time and since it is not very easy for
them to go back and forth, they have frequently established liaisons
with women encountered at their U.S. work and living places. In
northern Guerrero, single women supporting the family is
extraordinarily common.
In response to the desperate dislocated economics that mark these our
times for the Mexican campesino, women from Tecalpulco joined together
to form Artesanas campesinas in a bid to re-create a renaissance in the
local handcraft industry.
The women have developed:
original model making capability, Centrifugal Rubber Mold Casting
technology
mastered color matching and crystal resin making; tasked their
daughters to learn HTML programming, Manage Excel spreadsheets and
Quiken; Nurturing and educating her children, Participating in civic
and familial obligations in village life, in processions, and working
at handcraft jewelry production when work is available.
Eating corn, and beans, and chile.
See her in the dry season; carrying laundry on her head, tots in tow,
kilometers down to a dusty water hole beating the clothing articles
clean on the rocks carry them home clean, with the children. It is
rough now in Guerrero, really hard. Modern country people have cash
expenses: Food, clothing, school, transportation, electricity, gas,
medicine.... Girls from Tecalpulco work in the silver shops in Taxco
polishing silver
Six days, ten hours a day * Weekly pay : 30 usdollars!
Malnutrition is common across modern rural Mexico that explains why
people will work for so little money A few years ago, colera and dengue
fever were unknown Now there are frequent hepatitis and typhoid fever
cases
Campesino Mexicans have walked the plank for the ends of "globalization"
and it is in a virtual life and death resistance to the
"Africanization" of rural Mexico
that the abandoned women of Tecalpulco joined together in a faithful
expression of agapic native life energy, conditioned by the
transcendental motives of traditional religion, and the strong physical
and psychological quality of their indigenous blood.
They have survived and have established themselves as a unique
design-development original-modelmaking resource And they are managers
of village cottage industry production for the fashion markets of the
Twenty-first Century!
Fine
Pewter Jewelry
(no nickel, no lead)
Stone
and Shell Inlays
Jeweltone
Enamels
Private
Label Manufacturing
Native
American Symbols
Celtic
Symbols
Aztec
and Mayan Calendars
Directly
from rural womens artisans of Tecalpulco, Guerrero, Mexico.
artcamp.com.mx
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Artesanas
Campesinas (ARTCAMP) jewelry design
Directly
from rural womens artisans of Tecalpulco, Guerrero, Mexico.
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