Grounding this conversation within Teotitlan del Valle in Oaxaca, Mexico, guest Samuel Bautista Lazo, brings listeners into an insightful conversation on the value of craftwork that connects us to the past and plants seeds for the future. Here, Samuel outlines the weaving traditions of the Benzaa people, offering insight into a trade and lifeway shaped intimately by ancestry and the land. 

Together, Ayana and Samuel open up a compelling conversation surrounding topics of tourism, extraction, and the unique situation of rural communities amidst rapid globalization and commercialization. How can we pass on the values of slow and sustainable living? 

Through his family’s weaving business, Samuel emphasizes the importance of creating connection and meaning with the objects we need to sustain life. For Samuel, this means creating clothes that speak to the future we desire and the past we share and creating rugs that carry forth the symbols and stories of his ancestors. In an age of mass alienation and mass consumption, intimately knowing our relationship to the objects that sustain, to the skilled labor that creates, and to the land that provides is a radical act.  How might we cultivate such connections within our lives?

Dr. Samuel Bautista Lazo is a Benzaa (Zapotec) weaver from Teotitlan del Valle, Oaxaca, Mexico. In 2013 he obtained his PhD in Engineering from the University of Liverpool in the UK, doing research in the topic of Sustainable Manufacturing. Samuel's research focused on finding ways to help industry mimic nature (where there is no waste); he created tools that engineers can use to guide them in their approach to transform waste into profitable co-products that stay within industrial loops and help build a circular economy.

After obtaining his PhD in the UK, Samuel decided to go back home and connect back with his community and family weaving heritage. Being back home struck a chord in his life and made him realize that his community was already practicing an ancient form of Sustainable Manufacturing that is still alive in the many craft traditions of the Central Valleys of Oaxaca and the eight regions in his state. From this place, Samuel has rooted even more within his community and family weaving business and from there and through the language of the ancient textiles he spends a great deal of time teaching, educating and planting the seeds for creating a future that heals the relationship of humans with the web of life.

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♫ The music featured in this episode is "Snow Knows White" and "Coyote With the Flowering Heart" by Mariee Siou.

Episode References

Episode #40: Samuel Bautista Lazo on Coming Back to the Corn During Pandemic, Destructive Corporate Intrusion on Indigenous Communities in Mexico — Of Sedge & Salt 

Dixza Rugs and Organic Farm: Weaving Worlds Together — Tharawat Magazine

Dixza Rugs and Organic Farm

GUEST Recommendations

Start making your own clothes from scratch, as close as possible. Join a weaving guild, visit a grandmother who still has a loom, take a spinning, weaving or dyeing class. Visit or volunteer at an animal fiber farm. Start mending and sewing your own clothes... etc.

The Gospel of the Toltecs: The Life and Teachings of Quetzalcoatl by Frank Diaz.

Fifth Sun: A New History of the Aztecs by Camila Townsend

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