The Goods in the Market

Throughout my time In Latin America I've run into various products that have been mass produced and yet  sold as if they were handmade. I'm thinking mostly of the textiles, but wood carvings, jewelry and and clay statues surely fit the bill. Markets and tourist stores are full of them, women and children will approach you with arms full. Some are very clearly the same products you can get in the US. Silk or pashmina blend scarves sold all around the world... Others have designs as if they were local, perhaps finalized locally with a pattern that makes it seem a little more special. 

But where do these products come from? Are they made in giant factories along the banks of polluted chinese rivers? Are they made in small villages in mountain towns in India or in Guatemala?  Are they made on blackstrap looms by women sitting and chatting or by large industrial machines that keep the people awake all night with the noise?

Are the colors made locally or shipped from Indonesia? Is the material from the sheep in the countryside or from the cotton fields of Central Asia, or the oil fields in the Middle East?

Are these products shipped in vast cargos ships, to ports along the coast where they are loaded up into trucks and further distributed from warehouses... or brought down by trucks from the highlands, one guy making the rounds to each of the houses. Collecting that week's harvest, to be sold in the markets of the region. 

If they are hand made in little towns, then where are these towns?  And how does the product of one place end up in so many? How is it that I can but the same blanket in Cancun, Oaxaca, Antigua and Copan? If it's the same pattern distributed to many locations than how do they get the materials? 

But perhaps the question that sets it all in motion,  what is the price?

The price should tell us the distance, the quality, who made it and where... But because the price varies depending on who is buying, we get nothing.

The Baja hoodie (drug rag) sells for between $3-30 depending not on the distance but upon the buyer. The person selling it couldn't possibly have made it- they are the vendor... So we are already talking about a product that 2 people are involved with that can somehow be sold for $3... If mass produced locally that might make sense, but if made locally by hand, there is no way that is worth the time, effort, materials. Someone needs to live off that $3 potentially more than 1 or 2 people.  

So most likely it is made in a factory, local or international... But if international how can it be made, shipped and sold for $3?? Even the gasoline used to take it from the coast, or a large city all the way to these mountain towns seems to beg for more than $3. 

If it's made locally how do they afford the machinery?   Sometimes I look at the teenagers selling a handful of scarves and think "even if it costs them a dollar a piece, that still means they spent 25 dollars (usually more) on those items to sell... How did they earn 25 dollars to build up their stockpile? Did they do it 3 at a time? Sell a scarf for $9 buy a handful more and starve for the night?

But they are not starving. The majority, even the street kids have clothes and food. Which begs the question are they family units? Cooperatives? Are NGOs or churches or micro-financiers  supplementing them for a time? 

How does this process work.

I asked the tour guide today. He assumed the products weren't made in china, but his guess was Guatemala. But everyone in Mexico assumes Guatemala is just a little worse off than anywhere in Mexico, I wonder if I asked a Guatemalan tour guide If he would tell me Honduras.

I also asked him if he thought the venders would know... He assumed not. 

But ask the vendors directly and they will say it was handmade, sometimes they will even say they made it.