Secret of ‘the magical needle’
Tradition unites Purépecha women in S. California to get together, speak out
La aguja maravillosa, “the magical needle,” dips in and out of the maroon velvet cloth, leaving behind a delicate loop of colorful cotton thread with each venture that will soon form the shape of a flower iconic to indigenous Purépecha tejido embroidery.
“The needle has to learn,” says Maria Conchita Pozar González, speaking in Spanish as her hands continuing their deft work even as she instructs. “If the needle doesn’t learn, then the person won’t know what to do.”
Pozar, 28, is a resident of North Shore, southeast of Palm Springs, Calif., in the Eastern Coachella Valley, where an estimated 2,000 Purépecha people live.
The art of la aguja maravillosa is Pozar’s birthright. Her great-grandmother was one of the first to pioneer this kind of embroidery back in the Michoacán, Mexico village of Ocumicho during the 1960s. Her mother, Natividad González Morales, is an internationally-known Purépecha artisan.
Pozar, for her part, is using the craft as a grassroots form of activism, teaching workshops full of women not just the secrets of the magical needle, but the importance of coming together and speaking out.
Floral and vibrant, Purépecha embroidery is the same now as it was generations ago. But this art form is more than a meeting of needle and thread. It’s tradition, it’s blood and it’s community.
Situated in the pine-forested mountains of Michoacán, Ocumicho is home to many of the 200,000 indigenous Purépecha people believed to be left in the world. In Mexico alone, it is believed that more than 25 million people belong to dozens of indigenous groups, of which the Purépecha is one of the largest.
Ocumicho is known not only as one of the only places in Mexico to never be colonized, but as the birthplace of the enigmatic art of Marcelino Vicente, whose magical realism style of sculpting devilish figures made him a renegade of Mexico’s art world in the 1960s, according to Eli Bartra’s book “Women in Mexican Folk Art: Of Promises, Betrayals, Monsters and Celebrities.”
Before his death in 1968, Vicente taught his unique style of sculpting, along with the tejido embroidery, to a number of female artisans in Ocumicho—one of whom was González Morales’ grandmother, who learned when she was a young woman.
The embroidery and sculpting became a mainstay in Ocumicho, giving women a way to make a living and support their families by selling their work to appreciative tourists. It also became a point of pride and tradition for the Purépecha people and a way to remember their heritage.
González Morales remembers learn-
ing patience with the needle from her mother starting when she was around 11 years old.
“It looked really easy to me when I looked at my mom, so I told her I wanted to learn too,” she said in Spanish. “It was too difficult and I told my mom, ‘No, I can’t do this.’ And I would just stop after a little while and go out and play.”
Years later, when she was getting married, a friend pressed her to get back into the craft.
“I learned and I did this for a long time,” she said. “With these two different arts is how I supported my children.”
González Morales has gone on to have art shows internationally and is considered a “master artist and cultural treasure” by the Alliance for the California Traditional Arts, which first sponsored the workshops she and Pozar teach.
Now, after coming to the U.S. about a decade ago when her late husband got their family green cards, she is employed as a farmworker.
“I work in the lemon fields and I work in the grape fields, and when I come home I grab my embroidery,” she said.
González Morales passed on her artistic side to both of her daughters, of which Pozar is the youngest.
“It’s like they say, you inherit this,” González Morales said. “Tradition is that when I’m no longer here, this continues. That once my granddaughters are grown, that they continue this tradition.”
Pozar remembers watching her older sister learn when they were living in Ocumicho, but had to wait until she was 16 before taking a needle in her hands for a lesson. She plans on teaching her 7year-old daughter in a few years, but said she’ll wait until she has a bit more patience to begin.
“My grandmother taught my mom, my mom taught me and I will teach my daughter once her hands are ready to learn,” Pozar said. “When I learn more, I know what my great-grandmother had done . ... I feel connected to her because what I’m doing right now I know she was doing as well.”
Many of the Purépecha people living in the Eastern Coachella Valley made their home in the Thermal mobile home park known as Duroville that was infamous for its poor living conditions and rampant poverty for almost two decades before it was shuttered in 2013.
Pozar and her family, however, are the only ones who have carried on the embroidery tradition, the North Shore resident said. So when the Alliance for California Traditional Arts approached her family in 2015, asking if they would be interested in teaching an embroidery class out of their homes as part of the California Endowment’s Building Healthy Communities initiative, they were thrilled.
“It was very joyful, because we wouldn’t lose our traditions,” González Morales said.
Although the alliance’s funding for the workshops comes sporadically, Pozar continues to host them almost every week, drawing people from across the valley and even as far away as Los Angeles.
As the sun dips below the mountains on Friday evenings, Pozar sets up long tables and dozens of folding chairs in the side yard of her North Shore home. Soon, as many as 40 people fill the space, bringing with them half-finished embroidery pieces and questions for their teacher.
“The first thing I tell them is they have to be patient,” Pozar said. “Patient with the needle and patient with the embroidery, because it’s very difficult . ... Sometimes people will come the first Friday and the second Friday they stop coming.”
On another cool February evening, almost 20 people attend the workshop, with some students from Desert Hot Springs, Indio and Cathedral City.
As women — and two men — of all ages sit side by side at these meetings, some fill their plates with food and others work diligently on their embroidery while trading stories and jokes. One woman borrows her neighbor’s glasses after nearly conceding defeat while threading her needle. Pozar flits from side to side, helping those who are stuck, or whose needle has become unthreaded.
“The difference is that the people who are not family members, they get very excited to learn this art form,” Pozar jokes. “The people who get most excited about it are not from my town.”
It's not just fabric and thread being joined at Pozar's workshops — the outspoken North Shore resident is trying to stitch together a community.
Celia Acosta, 64, has been a regular at the workshops for two full seasons after hearing about them at the North Shore Yacht Club.
She saw the special kind of embroidery needle used in Purépecha art more than three decades ago on the streets of Mexicali, she said, but didn’t know what to do with it. Now she spends her Friday nights cheerfully embroidering fruit into a lush velvet—a fabric reserved for those who know what they’re doing—and embracing a community with which she doesn’t often get to spend time.
“When you work a lot, you don’t really meet people if they’re not your neighbor,” Acosta said in Spanish. “You don’t even know them.”
“We speak about everything,” added 46-year-old North Shore resident Telia Santeno in Spanish. “We give each other advice ... it helps me to learn. It relaxes me and I like spending time among friends.”
Jocelyn Vargas, 32, started working with Pozar and González Morales through her position as director of community programs with the Indio nonprofit Raices Cultura. Raices has periodically partnered with Pozar to bring in educational resources such as “Know Your Rights” legal presentations.
Vargas describes the workshops as a kind of chatty, homey space where you can both ask for and give advice about almost anything.
“It’s been a good place to learn,” she said, “not just their art, but to connect on other community issues that they have. I feel like because we’re engaging in this
activity, people are able to build a community where people can discuss these things.”
It’s this kind of community-building that Pozar hopes she can channel into grassroots political action in the underserved and unincorporated community of North Shore.
This area is home to about 3,500 people, according to the U.S. Census, almost 40 percent of whom live under the poverty level. But the community can feel forgotten, Pozar said, with almost no sidewalks or street lighting, only one bus stop and no school. In 2015, loose dogs killed a 65-year-old man and severely injured a 57-year-old woman just feet from their North Shore homes. As they lay bleeding, the ambulance took 45 minutes to arrive.
Residents want a park, a school for their children to go to and basic infrastructure improvements, but Pozar fears that they’ve become disenfranchised after years of waiting and getting the brush-off by the county.
“They don’t listen to us,” she said. “I’ve been here for five years, trying to get a park going for five years, and they always say, ‘This year. No, this year,' and they still haven’t built it. I don’t know why (they don’t listen) but what I see is people are not organizing. If people got together in a multitude, that’s the only way they would listen to us. Because right now if there’s a meeting, there’s three people who show up, and they just ignore three people.”
Before the workshops, if she called her neighbors to try and rally them for something such as a school board meeting, most would say, “What’s the point?” But once they’re engaged in their embroidery, it becomes a lot easier for people to share their complaints and open up.
“Once the women are here, they can get involved more and I can teach them to speak up,” Pozar said. “If they’re here, they’re more invested.”
Long after the food is gone and sweaters have been donned to fight the evening chill, the women of Pozar's workshop continue to carry on. Sitting silently apart from the group and clad in a bright purple blanket, González Morales cuts away at the long threads that will be the front of her embroidery piece. Pozar gets some stitches done on her own floral piece while fielding questions both from her students and her 7-year-old daughter, who darts out of the house from time to time to press her face into her mother's side. This is how the days have gone in indigenous Purépecha embroidery groups for generations-hours talking about nothing in particular and yet everything.
Anna Rumer is a reporter covering the Eastern Coachella Valley for The Desert Sun in Palm Springs. Omar Ornelas translated for this report.