PENINSULA WOMAN: Behind the Mujeres de Maiz and its work in Mexico

CARLSBORG — She started with an idea, plus six women.

And then Judith Pasco, then a Spanish teacher at Sequim High School, gathered up her passion and her fellow teachers, and flew with it back to Chiapas, the place that had lodged in her heart.

And Pasco has a big heart. Upon registering the Mujeres de Maiz Opportunity Foundation as a nonprofit organization in January 2006, she had hopes of funding a scholarship for Yolanda Hernandez Gomez, then a 16-year-old resident of Zinacantan, Chiapas.

An indigenous Maya, Yoli wanted to go to college, study English and become a teacher. Her family, who live in a rural corner of Mexico’s southernmost state, couldn’t afford to send her to the university in nearby San Cristobal de las Casas, or to any college, for that matter.

Yoli and others in Zinacantan are part of a women’s sewing cooperative, the Mujeres de Maiz en Resistencia — women of corn, Mexico’s staple food, in resistance to oppression — that joins residents of several villages outside San Cristobal.

Pasco, along with Mujeres de Maiz’s five other board members, had become well-acquainted with the cooperative. Like the other members, Yoli is an expert weaver who makes azure-blue shawls and other clothing — thus helping to support her family and community.

With a fundraising letter sent to friends, and then a festive Mexican dinner featuring clothing from the cooperative in October 2006, Pasco and Mujeres raised enough money to present Yoli with a scholarship.

With a budget of $3,000 that first year, the Mujeres de Maiz foundation also planned to provide at least one laptop computer for the sewing cooperative, so the women could bring their bookkeeping and marketing work into to the 21st century.

Today, Mujeres de Maiz’ $24,000 annual budget is funding college scholarships for 19 young women, plus Saturday morning enrichment programs for children in rural Chiapas, literacy training for adults and eye exams and glasses for women in Zinacantan and nearby villages.

This summer, Pasco and Mujeres board member Linda Finch delivered 85 backpacks full of school supplies to youngsters in the villages, and in December, Pasco and her 37-year-old son Eric Rust will bring more backpacks, plus three laptop computers, to the women.

This week, though, Pasco is focused on dinner.

The fifth annual Dia de los Muertos celebration, a Mexican feast and auction of clothing and other art from Chiapas, is set for 5:30 p.m. this Saturday at the Sequim Prairie Grange, 290 Macleay Road.

Pasco’s son Eric will serve as auctioneer, and she will present a short, illustrated program on Chiapas and the Dia de los Muertos — Day of the Dead — holiday, which honors loved ones who have passed on.

Dinner begins with traditional tortilla soup made by Molly Rivard, a founding Mujeres board member, and finishes with Mexican wedding cakes, home-baked cookies that Pasco said past dinner guests have gone nuts over.

Admission is a suggested donation of $15.

As for the art, “we have such gorgeous stuff this year,” said Pasco. She chose the weavings, clothing, handicrafts, jewelry and ornaments while traveling through Chiapas and Oaxaca, places that have been pulling her south since her first trip to the region two decades back.

In 1990, soon after meeting Bob Pasco, who’s now her husband, she went with him to Guatemala. The place had fascinated him, and it changed both of their lives.

“We went for a month — and I came back and realized I didn’t understand what I was seeing,” Pasco recalled.

“I went into a year of reading: I read 40 books, about the history, politics and economics of the whole Central American region,” and learned that U.S. intervention had played a major role in the bloody conflicts there.

“That caused an upheaval in my life,” Pasco said.

She went with Bob with a Peace Brigade delegation to Chiapas, and got involved with a Canadian social justice organization called Rights Action.

Through that group, Pasco learned of the women’s cooperative in Chiapas, and met Maria del Carmen Cano Alvarez, the San Cristobal de las Casas woman who would become her liaison with the villages outside the city.

Pasco is fluent in Spanish — she started studying it in seventh grade and taught it at Sequim High for decades — but that didn’t mean she was immediately brought inside the village women’s circle.

“It takes a long time to build up trust,” Pasco said. “When we went out to meet the mothers of the scholarship girls, they said, ‘How do we know you’re going to be here next year?’ We said, ‘We give you our word.'”

Then Pasco listened. She listened to Yoli talk about her dream of becoming a teacher instead of getting married young, like so many of her countrywomen.

And Pasco watched, and saw how the Mayan women worked together, weaving, sewing, cooking and caring for their children as a community.

Yoli is now 21, and in her fifth year at the university. She doesn’t take a full load of courses; like many other women in Zinacantan, she works as a weaver and seamstress in addition to growing food and teaching the younger girls life skills.

“When we met Yoli, she was very shy. She would hardly speak,” Pasco remembered.

Today, in addition to being among a handful of indigenous women at the university, Gomez is one of the leaders in the cooperative, helping to run the children’s program begun with funding from Mujeres de Maiz.

The local women developed a proposal for the Saturday programs, and impressed Pasco with their comprehensiveness.

Now some 35 boys and girls come each week for classes that range from self-esteem to help with schoolwork to lessons on caring for the environment.

The young women who are in college give workshops to share their computer and language skills with the whole village, Pasco said.

And instead of downloading an agenda onto the community, Mujeres de Maiz solicits proposals for programs, and has Alvarez coordinate the workshops and the administration of the 19 scholarships.

“She is really good,” said Pasco. “She doesn’t respond on my schedule, because it’s Mexico.

“But she always responds,” and makes sure the funds reach the students and their university.

“We made the commitment to stay with each girl, as long as they stay in school,” Pasco added. “We don’t have an agenda for them,” only Mujeres’ mission, which is to provide access to education.

In the five years since Mujeres began, Pasco has answered more than a few questions about what drives her.

She’s of German and English descent and grew up in the Chicago suburbs. But ever since that trip to Latin America in 1990, she has felt a heart-to-heart connection with the women there.

“It’s like a magnet is pulling me. I had to go,” she said, adding that Mayan spirituality, “the way people worked together and cared about each other,” resonated.

Earlier this year Pasco received the Ruby Award, an honor presented by Soroptimist International of Sequim.

She accepted it in the name of Mujeres’ members and supporters, and in honor of the women of Chiapas.

One of those board members is treasurer Linda Finch, who like Pasco is now retired from Sequim High School, where she taught math for 37 years.

She helped deliver the seven dozen backpacks to children in Chiapas last summer; Finch and Pasco filled three construction-size trash bags with them and carried them on an overnight bus trip from Oaxaca.

“It was worth it,” Finch said. The backpacks “are something all of the kids can use.”

She added that Pasco, who’s a volunteer like the rest of her board, is a consummate professional when it comes to running the foundation.

“She’s organized. She’s persistent. And this is 100 percent her passion,” Finch said.

“She really connects with the women. She had a stint raising a child as a single parent . . . and when you go through those experiences, you have more compassion. She is absolutely devoted to the women.

“And she says: ‘I would never do this if it weren’t for them.'”

Other Mujeres board members have also traveled to Chiapas with Finch and Pasco.

One is Martha Rudersdorf, a Sequim High School teacher and artist who has taught children’s art workshops all over Mexico.

Board historian Mary Norton and secretary Patsy Simpson, who took Pasco’s Spanish classes at Peninsula College in 2008, joined this year, succeeding founding board members Carol Bell and Patricia Lang, who stepped down due to health problems.

Together, the women send out Mujeres’ newsletter and invitation to the Dia de los Muertos dinner. And together, they give thanks to supporters for helping to grow the foundation.

“Our partnership with the women in the cooperative has accomplished more than we had ever dreamed,” Pasco writes.

“We are so proud of these amazing young women.”

In addition to the recipients in Zinacantan, three women from the village of Crucero are now on scholarship, and are providing a year-round enrichment program for children age 5 to 12. Finch is impressed by Juana, one of the leaders.

“She seems like she’s maybe in her mid- to late 20s; she has three kids. Every workshop I’ve seen her do, she was top notch,” and when Mujeres embarked on a DVD project about the program, “she organized the whole thing in her village.

“These are women who have a lot to offer their communities and the world,” Finch said.

On last summer’s journey, Finch added, “there was a distinct difference in comfort level,” in Zinacantan.

“We’re not just these gringas bringing stuff. . . . There’s a true connection. The quality of the hugs is deeper,” she said. “We weren’t just going through the motions.”

Pasco “pushes the envelope,” when dreaming up new projects, Finch added. The foundation, after all, started with one scholarship.

“But she has such good judgment. … I’m in much gratitude to her for making this part of my life.”

December will bring another trip to Chiapas, and an expanded opportunity to support Mujeres de Maiz. Pasco has won inclusion in the Alternative Gifts International catalog (www.AlternativeGifts.org), a catalog that enables shoppers to purchase and designate for loved ones gifts of support for humanitarian and environmental causes.

Mujeres de Maiz is one of 41 projects described in the catalog.

As for Mujeres’ next major endeavor, Pasco, the board and the Chiapas women are looking for a piece of property on which to build their own place for the sewing cooperative, community workshops and other programs.

“It would be a legacy,” Pasco said, “to show what’s in the realm of possibility when women work together.”

To learn more about the Mujeres de Maiz Opportunity Foundation, visit www.MujeresdeMaizOF.org, or phone 360-683-8979.

To make a contribution by mail, write to Mujeres, P.O. Box 1954, Sequim, WA 98382.

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