Cooperative effort
Former Gallupian helps Palomas residents deal with economic woes

Joesfina Morales and her daughter, Carolina, displaying their handcrafts outside the Palomas co-op. Courtesy Photo

Copyright © 2009
Gallup Independent
By Marjorie Lilly
For the Independent

PALOMAS, Mexico — Twenty or so women walked into the gray cement-block house in Palomas carrying plastic bags with bits of crocheted or embroidered things hanging out of them, things they’d made during the week. Several of their children followed them or were carried in their arms.

They were members of La Cooperativa de la Frontera de Palomas y Columbus. Janet Shepard, formerly of Gallup, was leading the meeting that day, a Tuesday in mid-April.

Shepard threw out ideas on new ways of making things and get feedback. The group had been struggling with how to make crocheted shoes that fit well.

“Using a buckle solves the problem of how it fits,” she said, demonstrating with an actual shoe with lavender uppers.

She was a lively facilitator, overflowing with appreciation for the women’s work. She has a part-time job working with the deaf in the Silver City schools, which is the work she did in Gallup.

The co-op started last fall in Palomas. The workplace was the house of Socorro Palacios, the sister of a woman named Estela that Shepard knew in Gallup. Within a few months it changed setting and developed new leadership.

While the idea of the co-op was conceived a few years ago, it has helped meet extreme economic needs caused by the tightening of the border by the U.S. in 2006, the devastating drug wars, and the U.S. recession. Palomas has never known such widespread hunger, and the town’s population has been halved.

Everyone gets paid depending on how many of their handcraft items sell. Five percent of their earnings, plus $1, goes toward rent for the room they use for meetings.

The range of things they make is enormous, from traditional embroidered tablecloths and place mats to barrettes and scrunchies for hair, to shoes, dresses and shawls, and jewelry and fake flowers made of seeds. Production is somewhat chaotic and sprawling, and the organizers hope that market forces will eventually standardize the items somewhat.

But for now the organizers marvel at the prodigious creativity and capacity for innovation of these people — inventing a new stitched design to put on the side of a purse or a new way to put binding on a dress. They believe the sheer variety of things they make is what draws buyers.

Shepard and her husband Clint lived in Gallup from 2003 to 2007, and Janet Shepard taught deaf kids in the public schools.

“We planned to be there one year, but we fell in love with the kids,” Janet Shepard said. “I had all these adorable little boys.”

They sit in lawn chairs under a mulberry tree in their back yard in Mimbres, near Silver City, with Clint’s elderly mother Joyce. Both she and Janet wear flower barrettes in their hair made by co-op women.

“We have so many pictures of the kids,” she said. “Clint photographed them and photographed them and photographed them. Navajo are really nice people to be around. They’re polite, and their manners were incredible.”

The Shepards brought her students bowling once a month.

Janet Shepard worked in Tijuana from 1963 to 1972 and established a school for the deaf there. After she and Clint married, they moved to Washington state, where they raised two adopted daughters. After almost two decades there, they lived in Alaska for another decade.

But they were always intending to return to their first love.

“We were always heading toward the border,” she said.

Her time in Tijuana left a deep impression on her. With the backing of a few organizations, including the diocese of Tijuana, she located 60 deaf children and adults. An association of families contributed a total of $45 a month to pay for instruction. “This was very precarious,” she said. “I depended on the families to feed me.”

“I had no money at all,” Shepard said. “I’ve always had the concept that if you want to do something, you just do it.”

Teachers’ salaries were funded by the city six months after the school started up.  

Eight of the co-op members got together in late May to work on a special project making 15 book backpacks for Don Heacox, pastor of St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in Deming, who gave them to Diocesan seminarians in Albuquerque.

Co-op members talked and giggled while they worked on sewing machines. Ludi, struggling with her machine, says, “The poor machine! It’s almost talking to me. It’s saying, ‘Yaa-aa.’” The others laughed.

This group, they say, is a break-off group of the Co-op, while still maintaining membership. They’re hoping for a crochet group, and one to make ponchos. Luis, the only male member, has been enthusiastically putting some of the items they make to sell on MySpace, and is talking about designing a logo.

For these women, the co-op is an economic lifeline. Nena Quintana lost her job at the bakery eight months ago. Her husband lost his papers to cross the border to work, and he now works a day here and there in construction in Palomas.

Nena says softly that, yes, they have gone hungry.

Juana Lozoya used to sell homemade bread in the streets for about $30 a week. With this co-op she makes a little more money than before, and “I don’t have to walk in the rain and wind any more,” she said.

Ludivina Loya, or Ludi, has a 1-year-old baby, and “he needs a lot of stuff, like Pampers and milk,” she says. Her husband has a taqueria in town, but she says, “He’s not making any money. It’s not working right now.” Almost no visitors go to Palomas these days due to the fear of drug violence, while to most residents the town has mostly settled down after the wave of killings last year.

Some of these women got their sewing machines from a micro-loan project partly sponsored by a non-denominational organization on the Columbus side of the border called Our Lady of Las Palomas Hermitage and Retreat Center.

Craig Yandell, a disabled Vietnam Marine in Albuquerque, jump-started the program by donating $700 earmarked for sewing machines, and other donations followed. Janet has bought sewing machines for well below retail price, and the women pay off the loan in installments.

“It’s really appealing to people to help with micro-loans,” she says, referring to donors. “It’s really concrete.”

Janet is trying to wean the group from her leadership role at the meetings. But she will continue to be “project coordinator,” she says. She’s expecting the current elected leaders, such as Ludi, the secretary, and Paula, the president (who’s recovering from a serious accident in April), to take on more responsibility.

“I don’t think they now need Americans down there to tell them how to run their co-op,” Clint Shepard said. “They’re doing a really good job. I think they don’t know it, but they are.”

One part of the co-op that’s already broken off successfully is called Aprons and More. It was formed by Peter and Polly Edmunds of Deming, under the aegis of their organization they call Border Partners.

Polly said the idea to make aprons sprang from a conversation she had with Ivonne Romero of the Pink Store in Palomas, which now sells their products. In November last year there were two members, but now there are seven, and they’re maintaining it at that number until they grow.

“We’re taking it step by step,” Polly explained.

Besides adult aprons and charming kids’ aprons made of oilcloth, they make handbags in many styles out of the same fruit-and-flower design material, for which they’re still creating new ways to put pockets inside and out. They also make place mats, tablecloths, and zipper bags.

Polly’s plan is for the business to become worker-owned, whenever the members are ready. You can feel their eagerness to take on the responsibility.

“There is something special going on in Palomas. I can feel it in my bones, said Peter Edmunds in April. “The pieces of the puzzle are coming together in such special ways.”

In Columbus, the town government is going to back the co-op with a work site at the old elementary school. The Columbus Co-op is currently on hold because all the women are picking chile in the fields.

On June 9 the mayor of Palomas, Estanislao Sanchez, announced to the co-op that the town would donate an empty building for their use. Co-op members are excited.

Things are definitely looking up for some residents of the border.

Information: Shepard, janetsh@homernet.net