The vitality of Sutatausa’s crafting tradition is guaranteed. This is so, in part, because of what Luz María Rodríguez, known by her fellow townspeople as “La profe,” has attained. Her list of life achievements is very long. Suffice it to say that, at the age of 15, she was already teaching 40 people in her village how to weave and that, due to her multiple vocations, she could only start high school when she was 21. Those facts, however, did not stop her from studying management and gastronomy. She explored different disciplines until she truly understood her calling and returned to what she knew best: weaving.

Her grandfather, who knitted women’s skirts, and her mother, who crocheted everything, were the ones who left this tradition as part of her inheritance. We do not know where she finds the time to chase after her three passions with such tenacity, but, somehow, she manages to do it. She even finds time to have a cup of coffee every single Thursday with her fellow craftspeople. She has her business, the Luz María productive unit; she runs the Tejilarte collective, a powerful strategy that seeks to preserve the legacy of the craft; and she is head of a training school that started out with 63 craftswomen and has now reached 180 students through online classes.

These activities are intertwined and seek to show the trade’s entire process. They unveil how the craft is carried out by real people, farmers who inherited their parents’ and grandparents’ skills and who know how to shear wool, spin it, dye it, and weave it masterfully. These handcrafted wares are showcased at festivals, fairs, and craft exhibitions. They are also displayed through entertaining audiovisual content posted and shared on Facebook and Instagram with the end goal of creating a community around the craft. They are truly great.

Together with Susana Rodríguez, she came up with the character of Patrocinia: a young, extremely curious farmer girl who goes from village to village celebrating the elders’ traditions and inviting the youth to dance carranga with her and feel proud of their rural heritage. All of this is an exercise in generational renewal, which is essential for the preservation of trades. It shows both how daily life is in these colder climates, and how the region’s cliffs inspire the earthy color palette of the ruanas and blankets they craft with the dyed yarns they hang out to dry over the town’s streets. They have shown how much they love their land and what they do.