Frontera NorteSur July 2003

Located a few miles south of Las Cruces, New Mexico in the small town of San Miguel, the Tres Manos studio is where area women can go to learn the skills of weaving, sewing, and spinning and get instruction in small business development and life skills. After finishing months of training, women can elect to open their own businesses or can choose to work with Tres Manos to produce high-end garments like shawls, scarf, bags and other sorts of clothing. Tres Manos sells some of its products directly to stores or to people visiting the center, other products are handmade—often from exotic materials--for small businesses around the US. The organization not only provides training to its 24 participants but also daycare assistance and transportation for these residents of Southern Doña Ana County.

Tres Manos’ San Miguel facility began operations in November 2002 under the direction of Angel Gomez. Gomez believes the program is essential for a poor corner of a poor county and notes that the women participating in the program come from low-income communities with limited resources.

About the program’s financial goal, Gomez states, “The textile arts program is an avenue that we are using to develop skills, so that they [participants] can go back into their homes, either as individual home businesses or through a cooperative effort. They can increase their incomes, their family incomes, and in this way help themselves to improve their quality of life.”

Tres Manos is a project of Doña Ana County’s Community Action Agency and has its roots in the Mujeres Mariposas program that began in 2000 (see a previous FNS story about Mujeres Mariposas at http://www.nmsu.edu/~frontera/feb02/feat2.html). The program encompasses the three areas of weaving, sewing, and spinning, each of which requires coordination, precision and patience. Weaving for example requires attention, rhythm and practice. According to Tres Manos spinning instructor and long-time weaver Rosie Jones, “the art of weaving presents three main challenges, which are dressing the loom (preparing it for operation by stringing through threads), throwing the shuttle and beating the thread in rhythm in order to have good angles and to avoid loose or uneven edges.”

No experience needed

To join the Tres Manos sewing project, no experience is required and sewing instructor Silvia Gomez-Holguin actually prefers working with people that have not practiced in the past.  According to Gomez, “it is easier to teach beginners the basic rudiments of sewing techniques, and the sewing instructor does not have to fight with the old habits of the experienced seamstress.”

Josefina Quezada is one of nine seamstresses who have been at Tres Manos for three months and she had no previous experience with sewing. Quezada, of Anthony, New Mexico, says “this is the first time that I am sewing, I think the sewing program helps a lot because I did not know how to sew pants and dresses. I like it because I think I am going to open my own business. What I like here is that when we finish our program they will give us a sewing machine . . . Our instructor Sylvia is helping us to open our own business.”

Like Quezada, the other women studying at Tres Manos express both excitement and pride in the project and their new skills. Business classes also have the women anticipating starting their own commercial ventures or joining in with Tres Manos’ current production. Of course the women are confident they can begin working productively in the near future because they know that they will receive the necessary equipment at the end of their course of study.

According to Lucia Bond, the assistant program director, everyone that finishes the sewing program gets to keep her machine. A similar program is being developed for the weavers. However, due to the cost of the looms, which can cost thousands of dollars, the women in the weaving program may be responsible for paying or financing part of the cost of their equipment. 

A sense of place and friendship

Maria Navarra Pino, the Tres Manos weaving instructor, comments on the emerging talents among the women and the therapeutic effects that the program is having on the participants, “this has been a lifelong dream to do this kind of work with women and its been an incredible experience not only to see the talent that is emerging but for me is to see the women and the camaraderie. They have come out of isolation…they get to come here, they socialize, they share meals. And the fellowship, the camaraderie has been a joy to experience and then the weaving is incredible. Some of them are doing work, and you would think they were weaving for ten years.” 

Johnna Hartsog, a program participant weaver who has been at Tres Manos for six months, talks openly about how she has benefited from the strong bonds formed between  the women. “I had to move here from Rhode Island in November, and I was not having any kind of contact with anyone for weeks and a young lady at Community Action in Anthony suggested that I come here. It has opened up my life, it has given me people to love and be with and it is very important. Sick or not, I am here unless I’m so bad that I have to go to the hospital,” she says.

Johnna, a disabled veteran fighting cancer, says that when she is very ill from her cancer treatments, women from the program come by to be with her and bring her food. Hartsog sums up her experience at Tres Manos by stating, “This has been a dream of mine since I was very young, and when I was given the opportunity it was like the answer to a prayer.”

The skills and experience that Hartsog has acquired inspired her to write a poem, “The Loom Tale.”

I feel the shuttle as it leaves my hands
but it’s weaving more than cloth.
It tells the tale of days gone by and passions yet unfelt.
My body feels the rhythm of the shuttle as it flies,
and my doubts begin to fade away as my spirit tries to fly.
I feel myself become as one with the loom and all its parts,
and I am finally in a place that’s safe, that I long for with all my heart.

Tres Manos can be contacted through Lucia Bond at: 

505-527-8799 ext. 133 

320 E. Wyatt Drive, Las Cruces, NM 88001

BondL@caasnm.org