Daring Uruguay Co-op : Rural Craft: A Revolution of Latin Poor

The big sign across the highway advising of an abrupt drop in the speed limit is not so much an admonition as an appeal for attention. For there is nothing grand about Solis Grande. Mayor Joaquin Colman, a retired policeman, thinks the population is around 2,000.

On a recent afternoon, there was a game in the pool hall, and outside the traffic was light. One or two shops were open, but no one seemed to notice. There were bundle-laden people at the bus stop, though, because buses are important to Solis. They go up the road to Pando, where there is a movie house, and down the road a few hours to Montevideo, the Uruguayan capital, a world apart.

Solis Grande is a cow town, a diffident intruder in a sprawling countryside that dwarfs its municipal pretensions. It has 100,000 cousins in rural Latin America. They share backwardness and timelessness. Today is the same as yesterday; tomorrow will be no different. There are too many kids, too little work, never enough money.

Stuff of Daily Life

Solis Grande is an unlikely place to find a revolution, but a revolution is going on here. On an appropriately unpaved side street, in an old house turned workshop, skilled and ambitious country women spin, dye, knit and gab--about lethargic husbands, fractious children, neighborhood romances, prices and currency exchange rates.

Solis’ 55 cooperative women artisans are at peace with a foreign world of unaccountable tastes. They have never seen it, and they don’t pretend to understand it. But experience has given them a canny eye.

“When there’s a design we all like, nobody buys it,” seamstress Gladys Cabana said the other day. “Then we get one that’s so awful we say, ‘Ay, que mamarracho! (What a mess!) Who could wear such a thing?’ And that one sells like crazy.”

So they turn out burgundy peacocks, green lions, purple butterflies flirting with orange tulips, a high-backed black cat stalking eerily across the roof of a skyscraper.

Back Country Industry

Last year, Gladys Cabana and 1,200 sister artisans of a backland cooperative called Manos del Uruguay (Hands of Uruguay) created 150,000 sweaters and other garments from the thick, rustic wool that is Uruguay’s pride. Working in 18 outback settlements like Solis Grande, Fraile Muerto and Rincon de la Urbana, they put $3 million worth of hand-spun, hand-dyed, hand-knitted wool on fashionable backs in New York, Rome, Tokyo and Buenos Aires.

It is too early for parades, but the artisans of Solis are the spearhead of changing times in the countryside. Throughout Latin America today, rural women who are the hemisphere’s largest downtrodden minority are at last winning isolated skirmishes with macho societies and the 20th Century.

In one country after another, pathfinder women are banding together to challenge the hardships of traditional rural isolation. Their initial goals are invariably economic, but success in escaping from behind wood-fired stoves brings with it far-reaching social consequences.

Before dawn, for instance, newlywed Gladys Rodriguez, a Uruguayan weaver, drives to work over deserted country tracks on her motorcycle. She and her truck driver husband are not planning a family just yet.

Rufina Roman de Viera, who represents a Manos co-op in the village of Egana, population 1,200, told a reporter: “The men scoffed at first. They called us the ‘crazy old wool women.’ Now everyone is very respectful. They call us ‘the money women.’ ”

Enterprises of rural women in Uruguay and the Dominican Republic, and cooperatives of coffee growers’ wives in Colombia and Guatemala are supported by the Inter-American Development Bank. In Panama, a cooperative of nearly 1,400 seamstresses forms a key economic underpinning of the Kuna Indian tribe. In Chile, church and state encourage rural artisans. In the plain of Bogota, young Colombian women form the backbone of an export-oriented cut-flower industry.

None of the victories of nascent rural women’s activism is more extraordinary than that of Manos del Uruguay, whose success has triggered international praise and domestic imitation.

‘Quality Goods’

“Of all the projects, Manos has had the greatest success in penetrating world markets with quality goods,” said Kenneth Cole, the Inter-American Development Bank’s director of small-project loans. “Creating income sources for women in rural areas contributes to their economic well-being, but also helps put rural women on an equal footing they have never enjoyed before.”

The bank’s first small loan, $500,000, went to the co-op in 1978, a decade after the cooperative idea was conceived by a handful of Uruguayan ranchers’ wives.

Olga Artaguarytia, one of the founders, said: “There had to be something to fill the emptiness for country women. Knitting was a tradition so we started with a saddle blanket, changed its color, gave it a face lift, and we had a throw rug.”

The founders came from the economic and social elite of Uruguay, the artisans from the rural poor. It was not a problem.

“This is a country of common values and egalitarian tradition,” Artaguarytia said. “There is great dignity in the countryside. The gaucho was never dominated, and he never learned to lie to please his colonizers. Ranchers and their workers treat one another as equals.”

Contemporary Form

From the outset the idea was to train the rural women not only in craftsmanship but also in more complicated modern skills.

Anne Ternes, senior representative of the U.S. government’s Inter-American Foundation in Washington, which has supported the cooperative with about $750,000 in training funds over the past decade, said:

“Starting with an attitude of service, the leaders of Manos have been very successful in working themselves out of a job. All along, Manos has sought to raise the educational and skills level of the rural women in management and production, so they can assume control of what has become a sophisticated export business.”

By next year, four of the cooperative’s seven directors will be rural women of modest formal education.

“We’ve come a long way, all of it uphill,” said Isabel Gallinal de Terra, who began with the Uruguayan cooperative as a social worker and is the cooperative’s newly elected president. “At first, we had sweaters that were so heavy they guaranteed instant curvature of the spine. Buyers would go pale when we tried to explain a shipment was delayed because the horses couldn’t get across streams swollen by rain.”

Grass-Roots Background

Rufina Roman de Viera, a country woman in her late 40s, is one of Manos’ up-and-coming managers, an example of the success of an organizational concept since borrowed by other cooperatives in Latin America.

“I live on a farm, and I had three years of schooling,” she said. “At 16, I got married, and soon I had seven children. I never had a chance to do anything, except once I took a correspondence course in dressmaking. Ten years ago, I joined the cooperative as a chance to grow that life didn’t give me, but first I had to educate my husband.

“There were great debates the first few years about my leaving the house. Things would happen, like running out of bread, or one of the kids with a cold--the little things that always happen, but they were worse to him because I wasn’t home. When I would come home late from a meeting, he would say, ‘I want to know what’s going on in there. Why are you gone so long?’ ”

The oldest of Roman de Viera’s children got only as far as the sixth grade, she said. By contrast, those who have matured with a mother earning money and gaining confidence outside the home talk of going to college.

“An important spinoff is that in the small towns the cooperatives are important sources of dynamism and information,” Ternes said.

In Egana, the Manos cooperative was instrumental in getting the government to build 67 rural housing units. Here in Solis Grande, officials invariably seek early cooperative support for municipal enterprises.

The Money Is Good

The backbone of the cooperative, though, is the craftsmanship. Fashioning a sweater takes 10 to 40 hours, depending on the complexity of the design. The artisan gets 65% of the wholesale price, according to Manos’ general manager, Julio Garcia, and may make almost $100 a month-- princely pay in the Uruguayan countryside.

Roman de Viera’s husband, Jacinto, a 62-year-old itinerant farm mechanic, seldom earns that much. Neither do the ranch hands, policemen, soldiers, truck drivers and minor government officials who are the typical husbands of other rural artisans.

A team of social workers links the artisans with a central administration in Montevideo. It is these social workers who must smooth the ruffled machismo of unlettered but proud men unexpectedly outdistanced by their women. “Daddy works, Mommy bakes,” says a first-grade Uruguayan textbook.

Manos’ steady growth is particularly notable because it runs against a strong current of economic decline in Uruguay, where living standards have slumped to levels of 20 years ago.

The most complicated sweater the co-op produces costs around $40 retail in Montevideo, about $100 in U.S. specialty shops. The export market is strong, and there is a reason.

“A Manos sweater in a display window pulls people from across the street,” Cinny Streich, merchandising director for 40 women’s specialty stores on the U.S. East Coast, said by telephone from her office in Portland, Me. “They are unique in their lofty yarn, their bold colors and designs that seem to come out of a clear blue sky--turtles and rainbows, things that relate to their own land.”

Ginny Bunn, a buyer for another U.S. chain, based in Raleigh, N.C., said: “Manos makes a quality garment that is different. We really like the product.”

Distinctive Designs

Less apparent to foreign buyers than to Uruguayans is the audacity of design that has become a trademark of the co-op. Uruguayan country women, most of them descended from Spanish and Italian settlers, have always knitted, but unlike their Andean, Mexican and Guatemalan sisters, they have never knitted or woven anything distinctive.

“We have no indigenous tradition here, nothing that could be rescued,” said Beatriz Gulla, who heads the group’s design staff. “We had to create our own tradition.”

In societies along the Rio de la Plata that are mired in memories of better yesterdays and wed more to emulation than innovation, that is a revolutionary statement.

This year, what Gulla calls Manos’ “lightly sophisticated” designs include peacocks of impossible colors, stylized horse heads, a copy of an abstract painting by a Uruguayan artist, a lions-in-the-bush fragment borrowed from a painting by Henri Rousseau.

Now Gulla finds herself drifting into arabesques, and it is only a question of time until the Uruguayan countryside flowers with swirls and curves and curlicues.

Among the conservative artisans of Solis Grande, who give life to Gulla’s inspirations but wouldn’t wear one on the coldest winter morning, reaction to the new designs is not hard to anticipate:

“Ay, que mamarracho!”