Susana Harp, Xquenda Alma

Yesterday at the radio-reality show, while my students were talking about their experiences in the community we're working at, one of the women working at the show, now friend, was telling me about the lives of the indigenous artisans that were interviewed.

It seems Tolimán, which is the municipality of El Saucito and where some of the materials get bought by these women, has deep racial issues against indigenous people. People from this town treat them like dirt, they call them names, make fun of their dialect and are perceived as ignorant.

As she was telling me this, I felt terrible for these women. They already have a hard life carrying water, walking up the hill under the scorching sun, miscarriages, alcoholic and abusive husbands. To understand they, against all these facts, walk down to the municipality to get some cloth and needles to garnet, to buy some pesos of thread to make some beautiful patterns of embroidery is a miraculous event of will.

I started crying. A few tears fell down and gazed to the floor to try to look pensive. When I looked up, my friend was also crying and we both started laughing. What a pair of "corazones de pollo" or chicken hearts, words which are used to describe people who easily become emotional.

Yes. I am a chicken heart. I can't conceive these women have to go through so much. Understanding life in a constant abusive environment. But if... These moments of knitting, embroidering and garnetting are the ones where they take a break from crying kids, or irreverent young sons that later mistreat them, then we must really try harder to make some more minor changes before we leave Querétaro's Sierra Gorda.