Little T h r eads o f C hange
WAYÚU SHOULD CARE ABOUT COLOMBIA BY MIKE CRITELLI
PHOTOS BY JILL CRITELLI
C
an one person change the world?
One would hope. Despite the urge to feel helpless in the face of huge, modern challenges — a single person seemingly insignificant among eight billion—the Internet has collapsed the gap between places and people. Now, a poem written in Pakistan can make someone cry in Alaska. A dance routine performed in Zimbabwe can inspire a teenager in Sweden. And a product made anywhere can be sold and shipped, well, anywhere else. Although we access it wirelessly at short range, the vast Internet is transmitted long-distance through fibers. Multimode cable fiber optics, packets of plastic strands, each hundreds of times thinner than a human hair. So, really, what binds us together are millions upon millions of tiny, little threads.
Meet Jackie Gilbert
In mid-January, I attended a friend’s baby shower in the Funk Zone with my wife, Jill, Santa Barbara Independent Production Designer and photographer par excellence. That’s where we bumped into Jackie, the 30-year-old executive director of a Santa Barbara–based nonprofit that helps Indigenous women of Colombia sell masterfully woven handbags to a worldwide audience. It’s natural, at functions like these, to play the “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon” game. (“How do you know ____?”) Apparently, our mutual friend, the mama-to-be, used to live next to Jackie and her boyfriend, whose band played concerts in their driveway during COVID. That left us with even more questions. No, really, who is this person? Where did she come from? Jackie seemed unusually poised and ambitious to be sipping a beer in a bar with us in our carefree tourist town. We talked for two whole hours about how she wound up in La Guajira, the northernmost tip of Colombia, and therefore all of South America. How her interest in water equity led her to impoverished Indigenous communities waging war against energy conglomerates tearing up their landscape to mine some of the cleanest-burning coal on earth. She told us about the drug trade, the inequality, the exploitation, and, finally, the need for justice. “I’m heading down soon,” Jackie said. “My nonprofit, One Thread Collective, has a retreat planned later this spring to 22
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MAY 30, 2024
spend time with our weavers, the women of the Wayúu tribe. It’s only board members right now, but you two should consider joining us.”
How it beGan
Jackie first came to La Guajira five years ago, a Fulbright researcher and activist looking to support front-line defenders blocking a major mining company from exploiting the region’s resources and people. Unfortunately, she soon discovered that nearly everyone she met—including her first roommate—had ties to the mining company, employed by corrupt government agencies, or else “greenwashing” firms like the Cerrejón Foundation. The lone exception was Paula Restrepo, a former PR pro who operated an old-fashioned bed and breakfast meant as “a safe place for women,” whom Jackie met during her first week. Paula, just as intense and ambitious, became a mentor, and
Jackie Gilbert
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Angela, a Wayúu member of Tocoromana, crochets the base of a mochila
after Jackie stayed at Paula’s B&B, the two kept in touch with long lunch conversations about how best to make a difference. Jackie envisioned taking part in the ongoing lawsuit against the mining company. Sue the mines! Paula advocated for a different approach. Something truly radical…. Bags.
UntanGlinG History
Let’s go back even further. On Christopher Columbus’s third voyage, the Spaniards “discovered” South America. Landing on an island off the coast of Venezuela, they saw natives diving from canoes to fish while adorned with shimmering pearls, plentiful and easy to find. The colonial reaction to finding an exotic, exploitable resource was predictably horrific and depressing. The Spaniards enslaved the natives, forcing the males to dive for pearls every waking moment. They weren’t fit for it. Their bodies gave out, lungs bursting underwater. Most native divers only lasted two to three years. This was unsustainable, of course, until an equally horrific “solution” was found: import slaves from North Africa who could survive the workload and increase productivity. The operation was later moved to La Guajira and continued for decades until two things happened: First, the coast was picked clean of pearls and remains so to this day, and second, many of the African slaves escaped and went deep downriver, where they met and intermarried with the disproportionate number of female natives. Centuries after Columbus, it’s hard to say what “Indigenous” means. The modern-day Wayúu—a word, in their language, that means simply “the people”—are descendants of Native tribes of Latin America, Spaniards, and African peoples. Their spoken-word myths say they learned to weave from a magical spider, yet they were undeniably influenced as well by crochet techniques of evangelical French and Dutch nuns who came to the Americas in the 1800s. A true melting pot, the Wayúu people represent the best and worst of new-world colonialism: a culture rich with resilience that allowed them to adapt and survive into the modern era, and a people from whom nearly everything was stolen a very long time ago. Paula, it turns out, is part Wayúu. She learned this in her forties, as her father kept it a secret. There’s racism and classism