“WE LIVE TOGETHER”
High in the Peruvian Andes, Josefina and her alpacas carry a centuries-old system of reciprocity that keeps culture and families alive
Photo by Alexandra Escobar
At 5 a.m., 4,800 meters above sea level, the air in Ausangate, a remote and sacred mountain range in the Peruvian Andes southeast of Cusco, bites at the skin. Josefina is already outside, walking among her alpacas before the sun touches the peaks. She wears a bright green montera, a traditional Andean hat shaped like a shallow bowl and embroidered by hand with hundreds of colorful fabric petals. In many Quechua highland communities, the colors and designs of a montera act as a visual marker, often reflecting a woman’s village, her identity, and the traditions she carries.
Josefina’s herd moves quietly behind her, pressing close to the stone walls her grandparents built. In the highlands, alpacas are the backbone of daily life. But more than that, they’re part of a system of mutual dependence that has shaped Andean survival for centuries. Alpaca wool provides warmth, income, and a tangible link to the same land that feeds them. And the exchange runs both ways: Josefina protects the animals from the cold, predators, and long winter nights, while they offer the fiber that sustains her weaving and her household.
“We live together,” she says. “They depend on me, and I depend on them.”
This give-and-take extends far beyond Josefina. The land sustains the herd, the herd sustains the family, and the family maintains a knowledge system that would disappear without this mutual dependence.
After the morning’s work, Josefina returns to her old fieldstone house, built with mud mortar generations ago to endure the harsh climate of the high Andes, where she crafts her textiles.
The space is filled with baskets of spun wool, natural dyes bubbling over a small fire, and a wooden loom resting against the wall. She begins by cleaning and spinning the alpaca wool, pulling the raw fibers through her fingers until they twist into long, even threads. The process takes patience as a single textile can take weeks, sometimes months, to finish depending on its size and complexity.
The craft is second nature to her. “In our weaving, we tell stories of our ancestors, and how we live with Pachamama (Mother Nature),” she says. “For us, weaving is memory.”
Josefina is one of more than 200 weavers supported by Mosqoy, a nonprofit working with Quechua communities across the Andes. Through fair-trade partnerships and cultural programs, Mosqoy helps artisans earn sustainable incomes while preserving their heritage.
“Before Mosqoy, we sold our weavings for whatever price people offered,” Josefina says. “Now, we know the value of our work.” She goes on to say: “We keep creating, and through our textiles, we recover our memory.”
Over a small fire, she works. cochineal insects transform into deep red. Leaves from the ch’illca shrub yield green, and q’olle flowers bring yellow hues. Each shade reflects the land outside: red for the clay-rich earth, green for the highland herbs, yellow for the dry grasses of the slopes.
“The mountains give us everything we need, even our colors.”
Photo by Alexandra Escobar
By this, Josefina is referring to the traditional dyeing process used in her community, in which wool is colored using natural dyes made from locally sourced plants, roots, insects, and minerals gathered in the surrounding mountains. The environment directly determines the range of colors used in their textiles.
Once the dyed wool yarns dry, she stretches them across her loom, and the pattern begins to take shape. As she works, her hands move in a fixed rhythm, tightening each thread and advancing the loom.
“When I weave,” she says, “I feel my mother here. And my grandmother too.” In Andean communities, weaving is learned at a young age by working alongside older women in the family. Mothers, grandmothers, and aunts teach children to spin, dye, and weave on backstrap looms, passing techniques and symbolic patterns from one generation to the next. Josefina first picked up a spindle as a child, watching her mother work with wool and learning to identify the designs traditionally woven by the women in her family. The patterns often depict sacred mountains, herd animals such as llamas and alpacas, and geometric forms that reference rivers and agricultural terraces in the surrounding landscape. Together, they function as a visual language through which cultural knowledge and family history are passed down.
Yet Josefina’s motivation goes beyond the art itself. “These weavings are what sustain us,” she explains. “With this income, we support our children. We buy food, pay for education — weaving is what keeps us going.”
As the late afternoon wind sweeps across the high-altitude pastures and puna grasslands, Josefina sets her loom aside. The weaving will pick up tomorrow, just as it did yesterday. What she carries didn’t begin with her, and it won’t end with her.t survives because generation after generation continues to weave.
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