Abstract

Images and descriptions of textile craft production in Mexico, largely created for commercial purposes or to document projects with social impact, often emphasize the ancestral character of the craft or its usefulness in cultivating the empowerment of women artisans on their way to a better future. However, both approaches ignore the concrete ways in which women work in their daily lives. This short film, which portrays a day in the life of Antonia, a Tseltal embroiderer from the municipality of Tenejapa, in the highlands of Chiapas, seeks to paint a more accurate portrait of the place of craft production in the daily lives of women artisans.

Keywords: Chiapas, audiovisual representation, artisan work

artisanship as just another job: an ethnographic study on different work paces of a tseltal embroiderer

Videos, photographs, and descriptions of crafted textile production in Mexico, often made to promote the products or to document social impact projects, tend to emphasize the craft as an age-old practice or one that empowers women artisans on a path to a better future. Both of these focuses, however, overlook the actual form this work takes in these women's day-to-day lives. This short film depicts a day in the life of Antonia, a Tseltal embroiderer from the town of Tenejapa in the Chiapas highlands. It seeks to provide a more faithful depiction of the place that craftsmanship occupies in the daily lives of women artisans.

Keywords: artisanal work, Chiapas, audiovisual depiction.

I met Antonia, the embroiderer who stars in this short film, when I went to her home in Tzajalchen, Tenejapa, to photograph her group and the garments they were selling at Jolob Jlumaltik, a cooperative they had formed along with five other groups of craftswomen in association with the Colectivo Feminista Mercedes Olivera y Bustamante, A.C. (cofemo). As part of my doctoral research on new commercial relationships and ways of organizing artisan work in the region of Los Altos de Chiapas, I was curious about the founding of a cooperative between different groups and villages. In exchange for being able to attend the cooperative's meetings, I took photos of the artisans dressed in the textile garments they made, to promote their products in networks. We visited the artisans in their homes and went to nearby picturesque places - coffee plantations, rivers, forests and ranches - to take the photos.

In these photos, the purpose was to present the textile garments and the artisans in the best light; that the colors and designs of the garments would be appreciated, that the artisans would look beautiful or somehow attractive as models, and that the landscape would contribute to an aesthetic effect that would make the people who see the photos stop and be interested in what is being portrayed. It was interesting to take these photos because while there are many brands and commercial projects of handcrafted garments and documentation of their production process, the photographic genres for the presentation of the clothing and the representations of the craftswomen are often very different. In advertising photography, tall, thin women model the garments, giving off an inaccessible, self-absorbed air. The craftswomen, in contrast, are often shown as approachable and happy, smiling as they show off the products or concentrating on the work of weaving or embroidering.1 Rarely, however, do the craftswomen model the garments they made themselves.

The photos that resulted from these visits were a hybridization of many things: I took photos as a non-professional photographer, thinking about some of the tropes of fashion photography (i.e. certain relaxation of the models, the gaze into the distance) and the craftswomen posed according to their comfort with the camera, ranging from the naturalness of Instagram followers to stoic big women who have never smiled for a photo. The girls who are part of the team of cofemo also participated in making up the artisans and modeling the garments. I felt that the photos captured a wider range of attitudes, postures and spaces than the more conventional repertoire of artisan garment and artisan photography, but remained within a format that had the primary purpose of presenting the clothes and the artisan-models in an aesthetically appealing way.

Unlike this type of images, the short films I started to make about artisan work had very different purposes. With these videos I do not intend to sell the products made by the craftswomen or show the success of a social program that benefits them. My interest is to capture their work processes, highlighting aspects that seem to me to be frequently ignored in the existing documentation on artisan production. The visual as well as the discursive emphasis on the fineness of the craft techniques, the simplicity of the craftswomen, the beauty of the natural environment where they live, the cultural particularity of aspects of their work and their life in community are perfectly adequate strategies to sell craft products. However, these recurrent images make up a generic lexicon that hinders another type of approach and understanding of handicraft work.

The commercial interest of the stores and the purpose of demonstrating the success of the social and economic development programs of the ngo lead to visual representations of craft work that either focus on the sterile beauty of the technique, with a halo of ancestral and exotic significance, or highlight the positive and transformative effect on women's lives as a means of empowerment. They are visual representations that, like all images, embody a way of seeing (Berger, 2016). In many ways, these ways of seeing craft work are not too different from what Néstor García Canclini (1989: 153) stated in reference to the changes that befall crafts when they are outside their original context: "Almost everything that is done today with crafts is summed up between the boutique and the museum, it oscillates between commercialization and conservation". Breaking with these ways of seeing handicraft production is not a simple task, because they constitute the accepted representations of handicrafts to the outside. They are the images that, consciously or unconsciously, people who know about handicrafts -by buying them in stores or seeing them in museums- expect to see of handicraft work.

Another image of the craftsmanship

In the course of my doctoral research I have made several short films that reflect the transformation of my own relationship with certain conventions in the representation of craftswomen and, at the same time, my way of looking at craft work. In the first videos I made, for example, I relied more on interviews with the craftswomen to give structure and coherence to the videos. While I never resorted to a folklorizing or overly aesthetic representation of the artisans' work, this narrative makes the images of the artisans and their work more digestible for viewers. However, as my observation and interviews with more than 80 weavers and embroiderers in 15 municipalities in the highlands of Chiapas have progressed, my interest in capturing the complexity that frames this type of work has grown. The video of Antonia shown here portrays a woman embroiderer from the Tseltal community of Tenejapa; it is not a general profile that synthesizes the experiences of all the women artisans I met, but an attempt to evoke the complexity that characterizes artisan work in the Highlands of Chiapas through the particularity of the daily and concrete rhythms of this singular case.

More than a presentation of results, this video is part of the methodological process of my research. Along with my participant observation in the cooperatives and collectives to which the craftswomen belong, in their homes and in the communities where they work, I have resorted to audiovisual recording as another technique to observe the craftswomen's work practices. Recording what happens in the daily lives of the craftswomen, following them in their various activities and interactions throughout the day, implies another kind of attention that differs from that which one has during participant observation. As David MacDougall (1998: 34) has noted, both looking through the viewfinder and reviewing what one has recorded constitute acts of intense and intimate inspection. By picking up the camera, you separate yourself from the social dynamics, where one as an anthropologist has an ambiguous and strange position as an observer that is nonetheless participatory. In filming, on the other hand, one is engaged exclusively in observing.

In addition to giving oneself more completely to observation, being behind a camera also transforms the act of seeing. There is an awareness of recording what you are seeing for others to see as well. When recording and editing, rather than just watching, there is the constant question of what to show. This is a question that serves to examine the labor practices of the craftswomen, because it has made me think more consciously about what is expected to be shown of them. I am aware that certain shots of Antonia, the Tseltal embroiderer protagonist of the video, will coincide more with the generalized images of indigenous craftswomen in Mexico: when she lights the fire, when she cuts vegetables from her patio, when she sweeps, when she cooks the broth and, of course, when she embroiders. These traditional and domestic activities fit with an image of nostalgic simplicity of indigenous women artisans. Other images, however, may differ from this common vision: when Antonia buys her tortillas at the store, her constant use of the cell phone, or when she embroiders while watching television at her daughter's house. These images of practices that we tend to consider as more "modern" are not usually associated with life in indigenous communities.

The act of observing is multiplied when making a video. Recording, reviewing and editing the footage of Antonia's different daily activities allowed me to appreciate the diverse traditions and social worlds that are integrated into her everyday life. Antonia's daily life, like that of many other indigenous women of Los Altos, is not frozen in time, nor does she participate in the same capitalist modernity of urban Mexicans. She cooks mainly with firewood but also has her gas oven; she checks her cell phone next to her daughter, who burned the corn she was roasting on the fire while playing with her Barbie dolls; she buys potatoes and tomatoes at the market in downtown Tenejapa, cuts the tops off the chayote that grows in the backyard and, in the morning, her son-in-law passes by in the truck he drives and gives her the meat. These diverse ties and influences are part of the life Antonia forges, similar to the life that many other Tsotsil and Tseltal women I met build, participating in different social and economic worlds.

Showing this diversity of influences and practices within the lives of the craftswomen of Los Altos was part of what I felt was pertinent to record and expose. However, there was another facet of the representation of Antonia's life, more closely linked to artisan work, that presented an enigma. The question of what to show in this short film about craft work became a somewhat problematic question, because Antonia devotes relatively little time to this activity. By filming Antonia as she made the fire, swept, bought vegetables and tortillas, talked with her daughters, prepared food, cut vegetables, washed dishes, visited her married daughter and granddaughter's house, and, finally, when her hands and mind were not occupied with other things, embroidered, it became clear that embroidery was not her main occupation. This observation is also supported by taking into consideration Antonia's work history. At the age of 13 she went to Mexico City and worked in different businesses: a tortilla shop, a lunch counter and cleaning in a store. She returned to Tenejapa, joined her husband at the age of 15, and for a few years embroidered naguas, the tangled skirts used in her Tseltal community. "They just handed me the naguas and I embroidered them," she explained. "Nothing more than labor, let's say." Now she combines her sales at the cooperative, which are still low, with orders from people who live in her community. In the context of this repertoire of work experiences, artisan work is seen as a job opportunity rather than a vocation; Antonia refers to "being in the craft," not being an artisan.

In order to convey the place that handicraft work has in Antonia's life, I considered necessary a representation of handicraft work that would contextualize it in the time and space of her daily life. Therefore, embroidery is presented in the background for most of the short film; a paradoxical decision for a video that is supposedly about embroidery work. However, it serves as a more authoritative way of representing the rhythms of the craft as it is performed. It is important to emphasize that this was a very conscious decision on my part, based on a recognition of certain qualities inherent in the medium of film. The theorist Siegfried Kracauer (1997) noted the power of documentaries for propaganda in that they are supposed to be faithful to reality. However, the selection of shots, the light, the camera angle and the inclusion of music are some of the decisions made in the making of a documentary that transform the representation of this reality. André Bazin (2005), another film theorist, points out that the particularity of the cinematographic image is the objectivity of time. Although this "objective" time bears little resemblance to the time that the same events, actions and scenarios that we see represented in a film usually last, we experience the temporal reality that it imposes on us as a real fact. If I wanted to, it would be easy to make another video of Antonia composed of more shots of her embroidering, to give the impression that this work is what she does most of the day.

One of the biases in filmic representations of women artisans in Mexico is to do just that: to give artisan work the leading role in the lives of women artisans, which is quite at odds with the reality of Antonia and many of the women artisans I interviewed. While artisan work represents an important income for women in Los Altos de Chiapas (where there are few job opportunities and poverty rates are among the highest in Mexico), it is also an important source of income for women in Mexico.2), their situation should not be understood purely in the economic terms of a crushing poverty that reduces women's agency to a logic of survival and forces them to accept whatever work they can find. Something that was emphasized by most of the craftswomen I interviewed and also noted by other researchers of craft production (López-López and Isunza-Bizuet, 2019; Martínez, 2014) is that craft work is one of many activities that women perform and does not usually have a priority status in relation to their work of taking care of the house, preparing food, raising their children, or participating in their communities' festivals and religious events. Just as many women said they sell handicrafts "out of necessity," they also describe their work as something they do in their "spare time," when they have finished these other tasks. This apparent contradiction - a necessity that is done during free time - reflects another way of organizing and valuing artisan work.

Unlike formal, salaried work, in which the rhythms of daily life are dictated by the workday, the artisanal work of these women is often the reverse. The rhythm of artisan work in Los Altos resembles that of the English peasant societies Thompson describes, where "the orientation to chore seems to show less demarcation between 'work' and 'life.' Social relations and work are intermingled-the workday lengthens or contracts according to the labors required-and there is no greater sense of conflict between work and 'passing the time'" (Thompson, 2019: 476).

According to this organization of work, the blouse we see Antonia starting to embroider in this video will take her two months to finish. But that's because, as she explains, "I don't do daily, all day long. I make my food... sometimes I take two, three hours a day". Being an artisan, in this sense, contrary to what I had first imagined, according to my own cultural vision of work, is not a singular identity and, I would argue, not even a primary one.

The times and spaces of Antonia's artisan work, as seen in this short video - her embroidery that she does in her free time in the dining room or watching the news at her daughter's house - resemble those of most of the women weavers and embroiderers I met in Los Altos. Craft work, which is performed in domestic spaces, in times dictated by other tasks that are usually relegated to a secondary role in Western societies because it is the reproductive work of caring for children and preparing food for the family, is usually subjected to another hierarchy of values in the indigenous communities of Los Altos. The continuity that we see portrayed in the short film between housework, paid work and social coexistence contrasts with the organization of these activities in capitalism, whose peculiarity "is that it treats the social relations that define and structure it as if they were 'economic' and belonged to an independent subsystem of society, to an 'economy'" (Fraser and Jaeggi, 2019: 56). This division between the economic sphere and the social (and, above all, the domestic) sphere that is installed in capitalism exists only in appearance, as Fraser proceeds to explain, given that the relations of production supposedly proper to the economic sphere depend on background relations of reproduction. However, this appearance is reinforced by the temporal and spatial division that is erected through an organization of productive labor that is divorced from the social world of people.

Although the Tsotsil and Tseltal women of Los Altos de Chiapas do not live beyond the reach of capitalism, they do not fully assimilate its ethos. Although Antonia, as part of the new cooperative Jolob Jlumaltik, is entering a new market for her embroidery that involves new processes and practices - such as the rigorous quality control to which her pieces are subjected, which she mentions at the end of the video - her work times and spaces have not been profoundly transformed. And although the vast majority of embroiderers and weavers in Los Altos live in poverty, the work they do to earn money is not necessarily considered work of primary importance. Feeding their families, caring for the children and housekeeping often take precedence. Many families in Los Altos have diverse sources of income and forms of subsistence that allow women to not depend exclusively on their sales: they still have their cornfield, some vegetables and animals such as chickens, guajalotes or sheep, on the one hand; they receive government scholarships when they have children in school and money from the labor migration of men.

This different structuring of work, which is no longer one job but several, where paid work does not take priority, is also reflected in other aspects of handicraft production. Although it could go unnoticed, in the short film we see Antonia embroidering two different garments: one is commissioned by a woman from her village in Tenejapa and the other is for sale in the cooperative. While Antonia uses the same technique of embroidery in quadrillé and draws on the typical iconography of Tenejapa, the blouses have different colors and materials according to different tastes within the community and for these new external markets. Many artisans in Los Altos resort to this strategy of selling their products in different markets. They sell the traditional costume that they still wear in the villages to women in their community and to merchants who sell in the local markets of the indigenous villages; they make garments of poorer quality and simpler elaboration to intermediaries who sell to tourist markets in San Cristóbal; and they make garments with better materials and different cuts, colors and designs to stores in the capital and in the capital. ngo in a national and international market. However, this diversity of local markets is disguised in the discourses issued by development agents such as the United Nations Development Program, Mexican government agencies and various international organizations. ngo that promote the international commercialization of Chiapas handicrafts. Instead, the global capitalist market is presented as the panacea of economic independence. As J. K. Gibson-Graham (2006: 41) notes, this development narrative reflects a "capitalocentrism" that equates development with the "dynamic, modern, growth-oriented" capitalist economy, while devaluing and marginalizing non-capitalist forms of the economy. The diversity of economies, social worlds and alternative ways of organizing work time that are woven into the everyday lives of Antonia and other indigenous women in Los Altos challenge the homogeneity of experiences and futures imposed by these development narratives and superficial images of women artisans.

Conclusion: an attempt not to assimilate what is not ours

I endeavored in this video to observe and show the artisanal work as it is done in the Tsotsil and Tseltal communities of Los Altos de Chiapas, seeking to move away from the clichés that plague many of the visual representations of them. But this video of artisan work is still my observation of the craftswomen. "No ethnographic film is merely the record of another society; it is always the record of the encounter between the filmmaker and that society" (MacDougall, 1998: 134). In the process of making this video I was acutely aware of the limits of my own understanding of the work and the social world I was seeing. For one thing, I do not speak Tseltal, which is the language Antonia uses in almost all of her conversations and interactions during the course of her day. For another, although I have lived with Antonia quite a bit by visiting her and staying in her home in Tenejapa, in addition to knowing something of her earlier life from my interviews with her, there are many aspects of her social life and the context of her community that I am unfamiliar with.

With the appearance of objectivity that is typical of the documentary format, there is always the risk that what is presented in the film gives the impression of completeness. Through a few images, in close-up and in high definition, a sense of proximity to the subjects portrayed is achieved, which can lead us to think that we have come to understand them as well. Sometimes it is important to resist this impulse. In an interview, Trinh T. Minh-ha elaborated on his intention to "talk close to" rather than "talk about" the subjects of his films. He mentioned that in order to achieve this repositioning, and not speak from a position of omniscience, "you speak with a lot of gaps and holes and question marks" (Balsom, 2018).

To point out the limits of our access to and understanding of Antonia's life, I included several scenes and conversations that indicate the existence of other people, relationships and places that we do not know about. I recognize that the effect of this inclusion is sometimes disorienting: who does she talk about at the beginning of the video with her daughter? Who does she talk to on the phone and what is her relationship to the clinic? I hesitated at various moments about what balance I should strike between the assimilable and the strange in this portrait of the social and cultural world that frames Antonia's craft. In the end, I chose to point out the complexity. We get closer to the truth by recognizing the gaps between one culture and another, between one person and another, and not just by trying to iron them out or assimilate them.

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Rachel Barber is a Ph.D. student in Social Sciences at the ciesas-West. Her doctoral thesis research focuses on the new labor relations and practices of Tsotsil and Tseltal embroiderers and weavers in Los Altos de Chiapas. She has made several short documentaries about the artisans of Los Altos that have been shown in international film festivals. She is interested in the topics of material culture, social change and anthropology of work, and incorporates documentary and audiovisual methods in ethnographic study.