BECA Students Travel in Guatemala

Nine students from BECA's Media in Community Service class are spending the month of June in Guatemala. The purpose of their trip is to make a video to serve the needs of a women's weaving collective in Quetzaltenango, Guatemala. Four hundred women in seventeen communities belong to the collective called "Trama Textiles." Each woman weaves cloth particular to the design of her native village. The cloth is then taken to the collective in Quetzaltenango, where it is sold, and the proceeds of the sale are returned to the women. Care is taken to make sure that the thread and the weaving itself are of the highest quality. The weavings from the Trama women may cost more than products made by others, but the higher cost enables the women to spend enough time on their weaving to make a quality product, thus preserving the Mayan art of weaving and supporting themselves and their families. The weavings are fair trade products.
This week, the BECA students became familiar with the collective and its products, and began designing the video. They also shot footage of the process of dying thread with chemical dyes, and of the finishing of the products. Next week, they will travel to three different villages to talk with the women about their weaving and their experiences with the Guatemalan civil war, which gave birth to the cooperative. They will spend the weekend at Lago Atitlán, biking and kayaking - a break from their dawn-to-dusk production schedule.
The class is the second half of BECA 580 - Media and Community Service, co-taught by Professor Betsy Blosser and former graduate student Sonia De La Cruz.