Feature Article

Wounaan Master Weaver, Alina Itucama, Guest of Honor at the First Annual Santa Fe International Folk Art Market 2004—Part I of III

© 2004 By Charlotte Meares

Photography © 2004 Lorran Meares, All Rights Reserved

Alina Itucama threads a needle with a long, silk-fine strand of chunga. Like a gem-colored nest in the center of her large basket, the hand-dyed skeins of palm fiber are the beginnings of something new and wonderful. One of 75 master artists selected from around the world to participate July 17-18 in the Santa Fe International Folk Art Festival 2004, Itucama represents the indigenous people of Panamá’s Darién Rainforest.

Wearing the traditional crayon-colored paruma, a pareo specific to her Wounaan people, Itucama, 35, demonstrated Hösig Di basket-weaving techniques that have defined this contemporary art form.
Hösig Di, a Wounaan word, are fine, tightly constructed baskets historically made from fibers of the black palm, called “chunga” in Spanish. Chunga also refers to the palm from which only the young “spear leaves” are harvested. Inspired by her Darién homeland, Itucama’s basket is a profusion of jewel-toned butterflies and orchids, which have taken her three years to stitch into being.

Sponsored by Lorran and Charlotte Meares of Santa Fe, Itucama was also the honored guest at an exhibition featuring the Hösig Di collection at the William Siegal Galleries, 135 West Palace Ave., Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Born in the Darién Province village of Capeti, Itucama began weaving at age 8, learning from her mother how to keep her stitches small and straight, pushing them close together to totally encase the underlying coil of naguala palm fibers.

Though she and her Emberá husband, Obdulio Isarama Aji, have no children of their own, those they’ve reared in their home have born children themselves. The couple converses in their native tongues, but mostly in Spanish, Panamá’s official language. Education is mandatory, even for children in remote villages, through high school, and illiteracy among its ethnically diverse population is amazing low.

Long ago, the ancestors of the Wounaan and Emberá were a united people who migrated in the 1700s from the Chocó region of Columbia into Panamá and what is now known as Darién Province.

The Wounaan and Emberá are adamant that they are clearly distinct peoples with now-distinct languages—Wounmeu and Emberá pedee. Like Itucama and Aji, couples inter-marry, yet work at maintaining their individual cultural traditions. Each group cringes at being lumped collectively as Chocó and will go to great lengths to explain that the term now has derogatory connotations, which many Wounaan and Emberá find offensive.

(Click here for Part II of this article.)