Editor’s note: The following essay was written in 2009 in The Bloomington Alternative as part of a series called “Forty Years in Bloomington: A Memoir.”
We had learned in Cartegena that artisans wove the wall hangings I was importing through Steven C Imports in a crafts village about a hundred miles south of Barranquilla. Almost a month to the day after I flew to Colombia the first time, Victor and I were on a bus to San Jacinto to pursue my evolving vision of an international cottage industry with a social conscience.
That ride was straight out of Romancing the Stone – ancient, loud, brightly painted buses with Jesus statuettes on the dashboards; stony-eyed locals with bags, boxes, crates, babies, birds, and pigs jamming every cubic inch of the seats and aisles; and drivers who stopped for anyone and anything on the roadside, no matter how packed their vehicles.
We disembarked at a shop called the Almacen La Feria de las Hamacas. With Victor translating, I negotiated with one of the proprietors, while sipping a warm Coca Cola, my beverage of choice in 1974 Colombia. No water was potable for non-natives, not even in the mountains, I would later painfully learn.
We returned a few days later to collect 100 wall hangings, along with 10 scarves and a dozen purses we bought at another store called Almacen el Paraiso.
Set in Colombia’s Caribbean Coastal Region, San Jacinto remains an arts and crafts village about an hour south and east of Cartegena, with a population approaching 24,000 and reputation for its world-famous signature product, according to a ColombiaOne article titled San Jacinto, Colombia: Land of the Big Hammock.
“Meanwhile, its artisans are celebrated for their handwoven ‘mochilas’ (bags), which, like their hammocks, are crafted using ancestral techniques passed down from generation to generation,” the piece says. “The region’s woven Vueltiao hats are similarly well renowned.”
The village is also known as the birthplace of notable musicians and folkloric groups that have contributed to the nation’s rich musical culture, the article says, among them Los Gaiteros de San Jacinto.
Whether it is true I don’t know, but I was told that the artisans learned to weave the wall hangings from the Peace Corp, or the Cuerpo de Paz. But the Colombian government says nearly 5,000 Peace Corp volunteers served in Colombia between 1961 and 1981. I always assumed it was so.
While we waited in Barranquilla, Victor took me to his parents’ house in the Barrio Simon Bolivar, where I met their next-door neighbors, Hilario Martinez, his wife, Teresa, and their six children. I instantly connected with them and had my first immersive experience in the Colombian culture that, in fact, would lead me to the Amazon River a half century later.
Hilario was a bus driver — as I would be a few years later in graduate school — and his family immediately became mi familia Colombiana. They were also the subjects of my first photo shoot in Colombia.
By July, I had moved to a little shack on a ridge top overlooking Indiana’s largest lake, was seriously exploring photography, and had set up my first permanent B&W darkroom. After we returned from San Jacinto, I hung out in the Martinez home with Hilario, Teresa, Estela, Marcos, Luz, Reinaldo, Patricia, and Ricardo, all of whom happily served as my photo subjects.
Like John, I had no money in the summer of 74. But I didn’t need much to finance this adventure. Two nights in Barranquilla’s Hotel Hispano-Americano cost 220 pesos, roughly $6. Wall hangings that would retail for as high as $30 in the States cost a couple bucks.
My financial ability to pull it off got a boost when a friend said I could spend the summer in her duplex apartment in Bloomington. She had a spat with the landlord over maintenance and refused to pay rent. She moved home to Elkhart in June and said I could crash as long as the landlord let me. I never saw or heard from him.
From that three-room apartment, I spent the summer building an infrastructure in the United States to complement the one I envisioned in Colombia. I added several new retail clients, like the Fields of Aiku, a gift shop in Bloomington; Karma Records and Heads Up in Indianapolis; and a boutique called Truckers Union in Eau Claire, Wis.
I also established a network of friends and acquaintances who bought wall hangings from us wholesale and sold directly to their friends, a la Amway or Avon. I was once introduced at a party as “Mr. Wall Hanging.”
By August ‘74, I was back on a plane to Barranquilla for my third trip to Colombia in as many months. The mission was to create an system through which we could import wall hangings without my having to fly there every time. The trip, however, marked the end of my partnership with Victor.
He took his new girlfriend with us to San Jacinto, which upped my expenses by a third, since I paid for everything. And while we were in a Barranquilla taxicab, a couple olive-clad cops saw me hand some cash to Victor, who gave it to a kid to pay for his fedora that had been cleaned. After the officers climbed in the car and discovered the contraband at the bottom of my bag, they instructed the cabbie to drive.
I had been assured by everyone who knew anything about Colombia that every cop there had a price, a system that I came to call “taxicab justice.”
The going rate for a predicament like mine was 100 pesos, about three bucks. As Victor argued with the older cop in the front seat, I said to the young one seated next to me, “No es muy serio, si?” He replied, “Es muy serio.” With visions of rat-infested South American prisons, I accepted his word that it was very serious. Fifty years later, I remember word-for-word the conversation that followed:
Me: “Victor, what’s he saying?”
Victor: “I have to talk to him. He wants too much money.”
Me: “I will pay.”
Victor: “How much?”
The going rate notwithstanding, all I had in my wallet was an American 20, and I assumed I wouldn’t get change. I opened my wallet, the older guy snatched the bill, prattled something in Spanish while wagging his finger at me, instructed the driver to stop, and exited the cab.
Victor swore they were the happiest cops in Colombia that day. They never got $20 for a little bag of pot.
All that, however, was prelude to serious disaster. When we took the 250 wall hangings we had purchased in San Jacinto to the Barranquilla airport, the customs agents asked for my paperwork. When we told him we had none, Victor haggled. The agents took my money and just tossed my investmentts into the plane’s cargo hold, sans documentation.
I would eventually have to send that shipment back to Colombia, bribe the customs agents a second time to let it back into the country, and then obtain the necessary documentation.
I needed a new partner.
