Artisan Santusa Cutipa Cutipa
Santusa spinning alpaca fur to make yarn in her home during our interview.
Santusa’s mother with a young alpaca. Photo courtesy of Santusa.
Santusa Cutipa Cutipa was born in the high Andes region of Peru to a line of artisan weavers from her mother’s side. Her father abandoned them, so Santusa was raised by her mother and grandmother. This left her feeling like an “hija abandonada”, an abandoned child as she and her mother were left to fend for themselves against the world with little money and resources to succeed. While the high Andes region is breathtaking, it’s is a harsh and unforgiving environment to live in, so the family had to rely on each other. Santusa helped out with chores in the terreno, or land/fields where she learned about how to tend and care for the land, and she helped her family tend for others’ alpacas, without having any of their own. Speaking Quechua and developing a love for the land and all that it produced, Santusa grew up proud of her culture. At a young age, her mother and grandmother began teaching her the artisanal craft of weaving in aguayo style as an occupation, which her mother and her mother before her and beyond mastered. Santusa fell in love with the craft, and before she was ten tears old, she was already weaving articles of clothing on her own.
Santusa attended and loved her teachings at school, but endured severe bullying because of her background and clothing. While other students wore more modern clothing at the time, Santusa was teased for having homemade clothing since her mother could not afford anything more for her. Already having negative feelings towards men, the bullying boys at school did not help Santusa feel differently about them. Despite these adversities, Santusa was often one of the best students in her classes. Santusa was the first in her family to attend school.
To Santusa’s biggest surprise, at 18 years old after finishing secondary school, she found herself with a partner and expecting a baby. Growing up with the experience of being alone and not liking men because of her father’s abandonment, Santusa did not expect to have a male partner in life, let alone a family. Santusa’s pregnancy was an odd experience because of this. The family struggled financially in those early years, and Santusa began to lean more and more into her craftsman ship to be able to provide for her children.
Aguayo weaving as Cultural Preservation & Love
Aguayo weaving is a traditional Andean hand-weaving technique that utilizes colors of the natural landscape and unique methods that includes dying, yarn weaving, and design. For Santusa, her work in aguayo weaving became more than a livelihood - it is her cultural identity. As she saw the world change around her with less youth speaking the Indigenous Quechua language and with fewer individuals knowing how to do traditional weaving, Santusa’s work went beyond weaving and selling to make a living. Santusa has made it her mission in life to share her work to teach and inspire other youth to not let go of their Indigenous cultural roots. Santusa’s artisan work was a true labor and act of love, not only for her family, but for all those she taught and shared her work with near and far. Santusa’s artisan skills began to be recognized in Puno and beyond, and she was able to make enough money to put her two children through school. Her children are the first in her family to attend college.
Santusa weaving. Photo courtesy of Santusa.
Today, Santusa has traveled throughout Peru and beyond to various continents and countries to share her work. In 2022, Santusa won that year’s Peru “National Award to the Artisan Woman” honor. In 2023, she had the incredible opportunity to travel to Mexico for an artisan runway show where she and other artisans from around Latin America were able to exhibit their work. From there, she was cast as an artisan woman in the movie Transformers: Rise of the Beasts (2023), which was an amazing feat for her and for her community in Puno, to see an Indigenous woman from their own lands in a blockbuster franchise movie. Through her continued dedication to sharing her message of love towards heaving and in turn, her culture, Santusa hopes to keep traveling far and wide to share this love with the rest of the world.
Santusa in the runway in Mexico in 2023. Photo by Iberartesanías.
Santusa weaving in her role in Transformers: Rise of the Beasts (2023). Photo from the movie, credit to Paramount Pictures.
Changing Landscapes - Iconography in weaving
Santusa’s art features intricate patterns and colors that reflect the landscapes she lives in. However, with a changing climate, a lot of the landscapes that Santusa has preserved in her art are changing, and affecting the health of the environment and her livestock. Santusa is cautious about the future, already witnessing some of the devastating effects of changing seasons that were once so predictable and familiar to her.
