The ABCs of Ernestos, part B

Ernesto Balladares was born in Piura, a city in northern Peru, in 1978. He learned ceramics at 7, and by 12, he had opened his own workshop in his family’s home. As a result, he was able to pay for his own studies from his workshop earnings. 

Ernesto is one of  five members in an artisan association. They maintain a beautifully arranged shop (above) to display and sell each of their products. Ernesto lives several doors away.

He decided to be an artisan because he loved working with pottery. “I loved experimenting with the clay and firing and learning how to obtain different colors. The results were surprising and exciting and I wanted to keep learning more.”

He adapts his styles, colors, and designs based on what the customer likes: bigger or smaller pieces, different colors. “I used to use black and white only for the Chulucanas pottery. But right now the ones that are selling the most have the green paint and floral or leaf motifs, perhaps because of the growing concern about the environment.”

The Chulucanas pottery is produced in a very specific manner. Traditionally, pieces are formed using a small wooden spatula and a small stone to form the piece. Then it is dried. “Not until it’s rock hard, but until it has the feel of leather. Then you paint it. After that dries, you use a small river rock to polish it, to give it a natural shine. Then you let it dry more, perhaps another day. Then you fire the piece at 900 degrees Celsius. It takes 8 hours to fire. Then you let it cool for 4 hours.”

At that point it is time to add the drawings. Ernesto essentially draws with the ash of mango leaves. “You put mango leaves on the parts of the piece that you want to turn light brown, dark brown, or black. What doesn’t get covered up stays the same color you’ve painted. Then you put it into the cylindrical smoker and smoke the piece. After a half hour, the parts that are covered with the mango leaf have turned light brown. After an hour and a half, the parts that are covered with the mango leaf are now dark brown. And after a third smoking, the parts that are covered with the mango leaf have turned black.” The piece is taken out of the smoker, cleaned, and polished with a small brush. It is finished.

The two barrels in the middle are used to smoke the mango leaves on the pottery pieces which produces  different colors.

Ernesto explaining the process of smoking the pieces in the mango smokers. Check out Simon, or rather his legs, on the left. He's just kicked back, learning the process too, paused from playing with his construction equipment.

As I'm making sure I understand what Ernesto's saying, Simon finally has to take a peek inside this vase which we've been examining for some time.

When he does not have many orders, he gives ceramics classes to adults and children to make ends meet.

Eventually, he would like to be able to handle exporting himself as well as sell directly to individuals. “I love everything that I do,” he says with a huge smile on his face. “I love the creation process, the production, teaching others. I am learning and teaching at the same time.”

The ABCs of Ernestos, part A

Ernesto Arango’s family is huge: he grew up with 14 brothers and sisters. When he was eight years old, his father died. His mother supported the family by weaving and dying wool. Ernesto learned her craft as a young child, starting at age nine when he could no longer attend school because of the terrorist violence in his hometown.

He makes tiny retablos inside eggshells and recently, granadilla skins. He was walking along the beach when he found an open granadilla on the ground and it occurred to him that he could develop a product made out of its dried skin. After three years of searching for the best way to dry and preserve the skin, he successfully began producing products from granadilla skins. 

Granadilla shell

While he admits that he doesn’t especially like to work in miniatures nor with eggshells, he sticks with it since they sell well.

Ernesto uses fingernail scissors to carefully cut holes in the eggshells.

Finished product, above and below

He organized a group of artisans in Lurín in 2008 so that they can work collectively to penetrate more markets and increase their capacity to handle bigger orders. He organizes and delivers capacity building trainings on things like designs, market trends, or accounting. He and others are creating new techniques to improve efficiencies in their workshops. So far they have had few orders as a group but hope to increase their orders as they make more contacts.

In addition to this artisan association, he has also established a small community fund to provide microcredit loans. Eventually, he would like to distance himself a bit from artesanía. He would like to spend more time running the microcredit fund and developing the artisan association.

In what little free time Ernesto has, he plays in a band with six other musicians.

Melquiades and his wife

Melquiades and his wife have their wedding picture hung on their wall, their only adornment. (I am so, so sorry to not have her name as part of this post, but somehow I never caught her name during our visit, and when I later asked everyone what her name was, no one knew it.) 

We visit Melquiades on an excursion with Yannina, Mario, and Dieuwe, and while the adults are busy discussing product samples and the kids are running around, I am transfixed by the photo. They are so young and beautiful in it. Their whole lives lie ahead of them. I wonder what their plans and hopes were, and how often they look at their photo and remember them. 

They work together, producing retablos, scenes inside of eggshells, plaster stars, dried fruit skins, shells, or cardboard boxes.

Melquiades left home when he was 13, worked in a lead and zinc mine for several years until he was fed up with how he was treated. Then he began working full time in artesanía. 

He learned artesanía from his parents, then taught his wife so they could work together. As their six children grew up in and among the workshop, they learned too. Two of them now operate their own workshops. All live in Lurín, one of the southernmost districts of Lima.

It is an adventure just to get to Lurín. First, we take a bus across Miraflores, then Surco, to get to the Panamerican Highway, about 45 minutes away, depending on traffic. We walk down the ramp to the highway itself, then wait in the noise and congestion under the bridge for the right bus to come. It’s far, so the buses aren’t as frequent as we have come to expect (meaning that instead of waiting 2-3 minutes for our bus to come, we might wait 10-15 minutes). 

There are many people waiting for buses or taxis or colectivos there. For others, this is their place of work, where they sell candies or sodas to commuters. And there are beggars. The noise of the rushing traffic, so close to where we stand to wait, is deafening. I can’t imagine spending hours there, let alone every day, and I wince when I think about the permanent damage that might be happening to the babies and young children who accompany their mothers while they sell or beg.

Once we’re on the bus, the trip takes another 45 minutes. We go from congested city center to the outskirts where occasionally a giant trash fire spreads a huge plume of black smoke for miles. Buildings thin out and there is a giant sand dune to the left and the ocean to the right. Small restaurants line the coast and pedestrian bridges allow transport to the shacks and small businesses along the sand dune, which, if you climb it, brings you to Villa El Salvador. The bus leaves the highway and take a back road past a cemetery and religious retreat center, then pass archaeological ruins. Finally we approach Lurín. It’s a drastic change; it’s sand, sand, sand... until boom, a line in the sand is drawn and Lurín starts. 

Melquiades and his wife live about 15 minutes past the beginning of Lurín, in a small rented shack without running water. While they would eventually like to purchase their own land and build their own home, they currently do not have the means necessary to do so.

Before we leave, I ask them if I can take their picture with their wedding photo. They readily agree and stand solemnly beneath their young selves. Unfortunately, the glare from the incoming light obliterates their young images. Yet the image remains, at least in my memory.

At the edge of the map, and beyond

Lima is a giant city. Official population estimates say that Lima is about 8 million people strong. However, there are millions of people who are not counted because they live in shantytowns on the outskirts of town or are part of what are called land invasions here: a planned takeover of a hill or mountainside or sand dune or otherwise undesirable piece of land, by a group of people who are desperate to call the government’s attention to them and demand that they include them in city planning by providing them with water, pipes, electricity. This doesn’t happen overnight, of course; being included in city plans might take decades. I include that here because many of the people who live in these areas are not necessarily included in these population numbers. We have heard more consistently that Lima’s population is closer to 13 or 14 million people.

Lima is also a desert, a dry, dusty desert which happens to be on the Pacific Ocean. I read somewhere that Cairo is the only other metropolis in the world that is drier than Lima. I’ve lived in the desert before, but I have never been in as dry of a place as Lima. When I lived in Tucson, there was a definite rainy spell with a predictable, fierce monsoon nearly every afternoon for several months. Here, it just doesn’t rain. Anyway, several weeks ago there was a very soft mist that fell overnight, and it wreaked havoc. It was big news, there were floods and damage and leaks. One of the artisans told us it hadn’t rained like that for 10 years. I hadn’t realized that was rain. But then again, in a location where nothing falls from the clouds, I suppose that was a hard rain.


And Lima is spread out. It covers 43 different districts, is about the size of Rhode Island, and takes lots and lots of time to cross, regardless of whether you are in a car or a bus.


I find a lot of solace in being able to find our location on my gigantic, extremely detailed Lima street map, even if it seems slightly useless at times. It includes most of the streets for 30 of the 43 districts, the ones that make up the metropolitan area. (The remaining 13 are rural, desert, or mountainous.) Street names change with each district, so being on 28 de Julio in Miraflores does not in any way guarantee that you will get to 28 de Julio in Lima centro. And then half the time the official name of a street (like Garcilaso de la Vega, a main street in Lima centro, listed on maps and street signs) is not the name that Limeños use (they call it Wilson, list it on the sides of buses as a destination point, and look at you with a blank stare if you call it otherwise). I like tracing the route our bus is taking as we wind through the city, and I have also taken comfort in knowing that a taxi driver is taking me in the correct direction when I have felt a little uneasy.


When we had first talked to Yannina about doing artisan visits by ourselves, I was worried about safety. I cannot tell you how many times we’ve heard awful stories and that people have told us to always have a local with us when going to these neighborhoods. I asked her about that and she said, “The artisans will always meet you at the bus stop and then walk you to the next artisan’s workshop after you are done. When you are finished with visits for the day, the final artisan will walk you back to the bus stop and wait with you until the bus comes.” Ok, that sounds fine. And it works that way, kind of, when the artisans are within walking distance of one another. But when they are miles from one another, escorting us is impossible and expensive. So we are on our own at times.


On Tuesday, we were on a city bus in San Juan de Lurigancho, one of Lima’s poorer districts. We often take this specific city bus south, to go to Barranco and eat Mexican food or play in the city pool, or north to go to a favorite heladería or the art museum in the city center. But on Tuesday, we were taking it north, all the way to the end of the line to visit three artisan workshops.

The end of the line, high in the hills of San Juan de Lurigancho

When I called each of the artisans to set up the visits, I asked them how to get there from Manos Amigas using public transportation. Each told me a specific stop number to get off at, then to call them and that they would come get us. I was surprised to hear them cite stop numbers. It was kind of like hearing that the buses have route numbers. “Take the 10E to the 15th block of Avenida Santa Rosa. Get off at the Mercado Number 2.” What did he mean, the 10E? “The 10E, the purple and white bus that goes from Villa el Salvador to Canto Grande.” Oh, okay. I know that bus. So then I started watching the buses, trying to see where it said 10E. I’ve now seen it occasionally marked on the side of the bus but as it is not consistent or frequently used, there is zero possibility I would have ever figured out which was the 10E just by knowing the number! I asked Christina about the stop numbers; she said that here in the city there aren’t numbers on the stops, but in these neighborhoods, often built into the side of the hills and rock, there are.


The addresses in these neighborhoods are different, too; instead of having a street name and a number denoting a house, homes or businesses are listed by which manzana and lote they belong to. I would haphazard that a manzana is a block, but not a block as we would describe it (as in, “go four more blocks and it’s on your left.”). Rather, a manzana would be a block as viewed from above, including all four sides of that block, not just the one side on the street we’d happen to be on. And then the manzana is divided up into however many lotes which people have started to build their homes. So, for instance, we visited Melquiades’ workshop in Lurín several months ago, and his address is Manzana B1, Lote 08, Nuevo Lurín. Here is where my map fails me; I can’t navigate by myself based on that information. While manzanas and lotes are drawn on the map, they are simply tiny squares, with perhaps the immediate neighborhood listed. No street names, no manzana numbers.


When we got into San Juan de Lurigancho, I went up to the cobrador and asked him to let us know when we were at stop 15. After I returned to my seat, a young woman sitting behind me asked me, in English, where I was from. When I told her, she asked, somewhat concerned, “How is it that you are in San Juan de Lurigancho?” I wondered if perhaps she thought we had accidentally missed our stop way back in Lima centro. I explained that we were volunteering with a fair trade exporter and were visiting several of the artisans they work with, to take pictures and write histories. “That sounds interesting,” she said. “Just be really careful here.”


Argh! A flood of fear washed over me. I generally am nervous about a number of things with these visits: whether I have understood enough in Spanish to know what bus to take, where to get off, what to do if we can’t find the artisan or vice versa, and, of course, about our safety. While we have had zero negative encounters in other parts of the city (in fact, the only sketchy thing that has happened to us was in Miraflores), here I got immediately scared when someone on the bus cautioned us.


After we finished our visit to our first workshop, I got out my map and asked Lastenia, the artisan, where we needed to get off to see Apolonio, our next visit. “Take the bus down to the intersection of Canto Grande and San Martin. Get off, cross the street, and do not move until Apolonio comes. Stay right there. Do. Not. Move.”


Yikes, another warning. Should I panic yet?


The day was full, we ended up needing to take mototaxis three separate times to end up at the right places to meet artisans or return to a bus stop, and we encountered no safety issues. We were certainly out of place and noticeable, but perhaps we were so obviously out of place that anyone that might have wished us ill steered clear.


Lastenia had pointed to where we were on the map, the very edge of the district of San Juan de Lurigancho where beyond the mountains begin. On the map, it looks like you would fall into the abyss if you went further. It was interesting to compare that to her neighborhood, built into the side of a small mountain, steep stairs going up the hill to access other homes that were carved out of the rock. As Lima keeps growing, people will keep building up this hill. I cannot imagine how hard of a life that would be, needing to haul your water up countless steps. I would think your life would be so focused on your basic needs that you could never get ahead.


I am hopeful that our safety and luck will last through the remaining 30-odd workshops we have yet to visit, most on the outskirts of town. Our next visits are to Lurin, which is so far away it isn’t even on my gigantic map. And so we go, off into the great unknown, without our map to guide us.