PERU: Old Crafts in New Hands

All U.S. good-neighborly schemes are not tainted with boondoggling. One such scheme clicked smartly last week: the Peruvian Government was so pleased with the Inter-American Development Commission’s job in creating a local crafts industry that it took over the project, lock, stock & barrel. What’s more, it would undertake to repay development costs.

A lank, soft-spoken Californian named Truman Bailey could take the commission’s bows.Back in 1942 he had found that the only decent Peruvian artifacts were buried in museums. Most stores sold shoddy, cast silverware and tritely patterned blankets. Bailey, who had acquired a ripe background digging the best teakwood and tapa cloth out of Java and Oceania, knew exactly what to do: hit out for the sources of pre-Columbian handicrafts and discover the lost techniques.

By poking through musty, 1,000-year-old shrouds dug up from coastal desert tombs, Bailey rediscovered lost weaving techniques (spinning had once been so ‘ fine—they sometimes used mouse’s hair—that the shrouds ran thread counts of 250 to the inch). On burro trips in the 12,000-ft. sierra, Bailey uncovered the finesse of the ancient backstrap loom. In Andean fields, he rubbed wild-flower petals into his palm, watched the sweat precipitate streaks of true dye colors; he tested and proved 420 hues. In the Amazon highlands he found long-forgotten “workable” hardwoods.

With the know-how under his hat and the dyes and designs in his work bag, Bailey set up a laboratory-workshop in suburban Lima. Using workmen whom he and his blonde Peruvian artist-colleague Grace Escardo trained themselves, Bailey was soon producing a great variety of cleanly designed, finely wrought textiles, lacquer-work, silver, wooden utensils, even furniture.

Almost from the start, sales paid the workshop’s way. Soon Peruvian Government officials began to take an interest. Men like Haya de la Torre, chief of the dominant APRA party, dropped in for a look and stayed to listen. Pipe-puffing Truman Bailey’s program for Peru’s back-country Indians,,they agreed, made sense. Now big U.S. companies (Westinghouse for one) are bidding for exclusive foreign sales rights. Bailey, who will stay with the, project, is not rushing into the export field. But both he and the Peruvian Government, which needs dollar credits, are looking to the day when handicraft sales abroad may do for Peru what like industries have done for Switzerland and Czechoslovakia.