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291 Poco a Poco: Weaving Transnational Solidarity with Jolom Mayaetik, Mayan Women’s Weaving Cooperative, Chiapas, Mexico Katherine O’Donnell If you want to have a “global partnership” with an artisan co-op you should in the first place have respect for their lives and their work. —International advisor The above quote, from a compañera with whom I worked during the last fourteen years in Chiapas, Mexico, captured the bottom-line realities involved in an emerging, dynamic, and complex transnational and intercultural partnership. Organizing with Jolom Mayaetik, an autonomous, Mayan women’s weaving cooperative composed of 200 members from the highlands of Chiapas, within the context of the academy, I moved from tourist to academic observer and finally to a solidarity relationship through what is referred to in Latin America as the “accompaniment” of compañeras–fellow political allies in Chiapas. Accompaniment is a horizontal relationship of mutual learning, building collective commitment and trust along the way. As our relationship has deepened and we have grown to trust each other and know each other, my role has emerged as a bridge person between academic, business, fair trade, health, and human rights individuals, organizations, and networks in the global North and South. Consequently, in brokering relationships for grants, speaking tours, or the marketing of textiles, I have been in the middle of many conversations and have had to translate actions and decisions back and forth. A principal job that the members of Jolom Mayaetik have asked me to take on is finding new U.S. markets for their textiles, and each time that I visit the women co-op members in their villages or at the center for training and development, I am reminded of that duty and thanked for my work with them. This work involves large-scale, direct retail marketing and, more often, networking and correspondence with solidarity members around the world, K A T H E R I N E O ’ D O N N E L L 292 grant writing for health initiatives, and formal and popular education on indigenous rights, economic justice, and globalization. Within the first year of working with the cooperative in the United States, I realized that using the conventional course that I had developed for students would meet neither the hopes nor the needs of the cooperative. I learned that my academic course succeeded at raising consciousness, but the short duration of the course and lack of follow-up affiliation and organizational structure intensified the “chameleon complex” (Kiely, 2004), the struggle to reconcile shifts in worldview, and precluded alignment with the solidarity relationship and commitment to the long haul by all but the most highly motivated students who had completed intensive intercultural and social justice work in high school long before their Chiapas college experience. I also realized that without an institutional level approach to social-justice-centered engagement, which Ward and Moore (2010) describe as working as equal partners within communities to collectively build community, solve problems, and increase social capital, it would be difficult to create genuine solidarity relations within the context of the college and recruit people to become part of an international network. If I went only the conventional course route to satisfy the college and students, I would violate the expectations and bottom line needs of my global partners and fail to accomplish our shared social justice goals. On the other hand, if I worked to satisfy the commitments and demands of economic solidarity, I could bring students in occasionally through courses and small-scale events, but the economic and social justice bottom lines would have to be met largely outside of the academic context and there would be looser buy-in on the part of students. The persistent economic and political inequalities in Chiapas, my deepening commitments, the relationships and insights (accompaniment) of my compañeras in Chiapas, and the academic context’s constraints led me to choose the pursuit of solidarity in the more public realm. In the following sections, I develop my conceptualization of the solidarity process and consider long-standing transnational models that utilize a solidarity-based praxis and structural approach. Next, I turn to the work with Jolom Mayaetik and discuss how our alignment with our partners’ struggle for economic and political justice shapes the solidarity relationship. Introduction to Solidarity-Based Practice Long-term activist, Freire- and feminist-inspired grassroots community-organizing work is my foundation for community-based pedagogy and partnerships informed by a human rights framework. Such a position...

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