Aura narrates her story from the origins of her two great-grandparents: the wayuu chieftains and the white man who fought alongside Bolívar, both of who stepped into the land of La Guajira and fell in love with its women. Both, high-ranking military officers in their own universes, ended up sharing land and sowing seeds. She is one of their descendants. The heiress recounts that she is also the granddaughter of a Spanish grandmother and herself married an arijuna, another white man. Whites, however, who learned to live in this foreign territory, and made it their own out of pure conviction, to the point that grandmother and mother died wearing their Wayuu guayucos.

She has precious memories of her childhood and speaks of La Guajira from abundance, of the fruits of mamón, olives, and guáimaros, an almost sacred tree for the Wayuu, whose highly nutritious seeds were eaten, and it was said that where one of them grew there would be prosperity, and even if an iguana or a snake hung from its branches, a great harvest and multiplied goat life was foretold in the yards. She also remembers making clay dolls when she was a girl, the wayunqueras, for whom she made little blankets and wove hammocks. She also talks about the lushness of the cotton bushes, mentioning their two colors, as well as bathing in the streams under the moonlight, from where the elders had to pull them out with scolds because there was a belief that the stream waters had their goddess and she claimed lives from time to time.

But perhaps what marked the beginning of her adolescence the most was that day: February 5, 1985, at 5 in the afternoon. That afternoon the train roared for the first time and left the indigenous people dumbfounded. It was the railroad built for the Cerrejón mining company. And so the virgin soil full of coal, which had been inhabited and protected by the Wayuu people, became useful to the nation, and the destinies of a community became divided. Customs, then, were suddenly transformed. They had to say goodbye to bathing in the streams. How could you be there under the gaze of the soldiers or policemen guarding the cargo? Goats and cows also died, run over by the machine.

Many things were broken, including their ability to dream. It is precisely through dreams that the Wayuu people receive all their spiritual guidance. There, as a divine gift, the dreamers – usually there is one dreamer in the house, in her case, her mother, who was an outsü or traditional healer – receive the necessary guidance to maintain good family relationships, to have good health, to expel bad energies from the house and those that could afflict any member of the clan, to understand which medicinal plant should be used in the cure of any illness, and of course, to weave the bags. The noise stole their peace while sleeping and the entire universe fabricated there.

Nevertheless, those who resist do so with all their will. In this way, Wayuu weaving was completely preserved and is now a living heritage of La Guajira. The old women spun the cotton at three in the morning so that younger hands would have the material with which to weave the kaanás, and thus perpetuate what they saw as they walked along dirt roads: those slow turtles, the parrots and macaws that threw seeds at them as they passed among the guáimaros, the hardworking donkeys, and the peccaries and little deer they came across. Those traditions were taught to her by Aunt Cenaida, chosen to impart the essence of being Wayuu. She did so for being the neatest and most obedient of the women, so who better to teach her everything. Thus, among fabrics, Aura becomes the master of the spun tale.