Tierra Wools

Rugs under the eaves

Handwoven rugs hang from the eaves of a farmhouse porch just south of Chama on US Highway 64/84, behind a wooden sign and a stand of trees. Inside are five rooms. Yarns dyed with native New Mexico plants line the walls under names such as Lamb’s Nose, Green Chile, and Sangre de Cristo. Tables hold rugs, tapestries, scarves, mittens, and fiber and folk art by local makers. Other colors in the house Churro line, worked out by Molly Manzanares and Sophia DeYapp, carry Spanish names: maiz, a yellow; pollo, a lighter one; anochecer, a purplish shade that Lara Manzanares compares to the sunset there.

Molly Manzanares owns the place and runs it with her sister, the master dyer Toni Boyd Broaddus. “It’s a community project,” Molly told New Mexico Magazine in 2024. She and her husband, Antonio, raise about 700 Navajo-Churro and rambouillet sheep whose wool comes to the store, and Antonio sells their meat under the name Shepherd’s Lamb at the Santa Fe Farmers’ Market. The core weavers are Molly; the store manager, Nathaniel Chavez; his mother, Sophia DeYapp; and his sister, Savannah. Nathaniel gets on a loom every day, “at least for half an hour,” and Antonio has said his pieces are the first to sell. Asked what he likes best about the work, Nathaniel said: “Being creative, especially with the weaving. You get to make something, like, whatever you can come up with out of your head.” His grandmother, Francisquita “Kika” Chavez, worked closely with Molly while Molly was learning to weave. His grandfather, Leandro Chavez, was the first shepherd to show Antonio how to live on the summer range with the flock. Lara Manzanares, a musician and songwriter named with Molly as an owner in a Bard Graduate Center interview, began learning to weave from her mother at about eight and grew up in the workshop.

The shop keeps a rancher’s calendar. Shearing comes in April and lambing in May. By June classes and tours are under way while the flock summers in the high country. In October the sheep come down to their winter feeding grounds. Each spring a festival brings the community in to see what the weavers made over the winter. The 2013 Spring Harvest Festival fell on the last Saturday in April. Classes run four days for four to five students at a time, in beginning weaving and in tapestry. There is also a one-day workshop on warping a Rio Grande loom, and Toni teaches a two-day natural dyeing class once a month from June through September.

Piñon fires and five hardwood looms

Both acid dyes and natural plant dyes are used. The pots sit over piñon wood fires. Undyed yarn soaks in cold water overnight. Early the next morning the fires are built, the pots are brought to a boil, and the color goes in. The yarn boils until it has taken up all the dye and the water runs clear. By the end of a dye day the skeins hang in row after row to dry in the sun. The acid dyes need a small amount of sulfuric acid to strike the wool, and Nathaniel and Sophia do all of that work.

Toni handles the plants. She has dyed long skeins of grey Churro with black walnut husks to get a deep brown. Madder root gives salmons, corals, and vermilions. Dock root gives red brown if the root is red and coffee brown if it is not. Chamisa and cota give soft yellows, and indigo laid over red turns it purple and over yellow turns it green. A natural dye bath weakens with each batch of wool run through it. Most of the plants near Chama, Molly says, give gray, green, and yellow, so the shop buys indigo, cochineal, and madder for a wider range.

The weaving room is a former garage, and its looms are Rio Grande walking looms. This is a counter-balance floor loom whose ancestors came from Spain in the 1500s. The weaver stands at it and works the warp with her feet. Five of the looms were built by Hans Leitner, a craftsman from Austria who was married to a weaver named María from Chimayó. Leitner came to the workshop and stayed a while. He watched the weavers, mostly women at the time, asked questions, and took measurements. Then he built five large hardwood looms with thick beams and rounded corners. Each has a huge square back beam that holds dozens of yards of warp and heavy “x” braces that keep it rigid under a high-tension warp. They arrived more than 30 years ago and are still in use.

Before them came a set of pine looms made by a local craftsman, Cruz Aguilar. The soft wood did not hold up in a production shop where weavers worked five days a week, six to eight hours a day. A few looms were then bought from Weaving Southwest, the Taos company of the weaver Rachel Brown. One of hers remains, and the shop invites visitors to pick it and the Leitner looms out from the rest. Other looms in the room were made by Dave Baber, Lawrence Dilka, Lawrence Carrillo, an unknown maker from Canjilón, and a loom-building class at a community college.

Warps are wound 30 yards at a time. One weaver holds the tension while two others turn the drum. Lara grew up weaving a series of pieces on each warp so no thread went to waste. Later, as a teaching assistant in graduate school, she watched a class wind a whole warp for a single weaving: “I was just kind of like, whoa.” Every piece comes off a walking loom with fringe. “These will always have fringe,” Molly said, and the fringe is what sets a Rio Grande weaving apart from a Navajo one.

A kitchen table in Los Ojos

The enterprise began in 1981 at a kitchen table in Los Ojos, about fifteen miles south. María Varela, a veteran of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, had come to northern New Mexico in 1969 to work with the land grant leader Reies López Tijerina. She married a villager and lived with him in a trailer at the edge of Los Ojos. The school teacher and part-time sheep rancher Gumercindo Salazar called the meeting. According to María Ochoa’s study of the venture, the sheep rancher Antonio Manzanares still thought of Varela as an “outside agitator.” The three kept meeting informally. Between 1981 and 1983 they brought back communal shepherding in the area, and out of that work came Ganados del Valle. Molly translates the name as “Flocks of the Valley”; Ochoa gives it as “Livestock Growers of the Valley.” Antonio and Gumercindo ran the sheep, and Varela headed the wool side, a committee that became Tierra Wools. “We didn’t actually talk about the meat right away,” Molly recalled. A separate account, from Renewing the Countryside, dates Ganados to 1989 and names Antonio and Molly, with Varela and Rachel Brown, as its founders.

Brown met Varela through a member of the Mountain and Valley Wool Association. “We met for lunch one time and we just got along great immediately,” she said. When she reached Los Ojos in 1983, she found the region’s wool “lustrous, long-stapled” and well suited to hand spinning. Local spinners had worked on a hand spindle called a malacate, and more than fifteen people came to her first spinning-wheel workshop. At an exhibition of local weavings at the community health center, she asked to meet the makers. She was taken to a former convent, where several elder women were working on looms crammed together in a tiny room.

Varela raised money for Brown’s consulting fee from progressive funds, among them the Shalan Foundation. The two accounts of Brown’s commute differ. Ochoa says she drove a 160-mile round trip every Tuesday for the first year and added 100 miles each way when snow closed the pass. Tierra Wools’ own history says she crossed 70 miles of mountains once a week for about three years. Her curriculum ran to fifty lessons, and those who finished it earned the title Maestra and went on to teach the next class. Kika Chavez was among the first graduates. Joanna Terrazas joined the first class with seven others after Antonio mentioned the venture to her husband. Molly remembers an early sales trip to New York, where a buyer told Brown, “Oh, no, you need to tell people what designs they need to do.” Brown’s answer, as Molly tells it: “No, that’s not going to happen.”

The Burns store years

Tierra Wools opened in July 1983 in the T.D. Burns Mercantile building in Los Ojos. The store dates from about 1880 and is built of adobe under stucco, mud plaster, and brick veneer. Inside are a hardwood floor, the original shelves, a pressed metal ceiling, and wool sorting rooms. It had been the area’s leading mercantile from the 1870s to the 1930s, and later Wheeler’s Hardware and General Store. Over the years it also housed a post office and an automobile garage and held dances. The weavers started there with two spinning wheels, four looms, and an $18,000 loan from Ganados. A 2013 visitor described a bell at the door and women sitting around the woodstove telling stories.

By 1992, Ochoa counted thirty workers, twenty-nine women and one man, aged eighteen to sixty. She called it a quarter-million-dollar operation and said its annual budget had grown from zero to $225,000. Another account puts gross sales at $250,000 a year by the end of the first decade, with original pieces selling for up to $3,000 and eight of 23 women weavers holding a share of ownership. The best-paid weaver earned no more than $17,000. Winter snow closed the mountain roads and kept tourists away. The 1992 annual meeting was the first held by the member-owners alone, without Varela, Brown, or the San Francisco consultant Robin Collier. That spring the member-owners stopped allowing preschool children in the weaving room. They also turned down outside wholesalers and asked any vendor who carried the work to tell the Tierra Wools story.

In the early 1990s Tierra Wools broke from Ganados and became a for-profit, worker-owned business. It stopped paying weavers upfront and moved to consignment. Some weavers, Molly said, “were not excited about that idea of weaving and then waiting for the product to sell before they could get paid.” In 1995 High Country News reported that the Ganados enterprises supported 100 families, directly or indirectly. Through the 1980s and 1990s, members of Ganados and Dr. Lyle McNeal of Utah State University bred Navajo-Churro sheep and built a sizable local flock. Teri García of Tierra Amarilla was hired as a finisher in 1992, entered the apprenticeship two years later, and was recognized as a Master Weaver in 1998. The member-owners later set up a separate nonprofit, the School of Río Grande Weaving Traditions, under Sophia DeYapp. A writer who stopped by in late September 2014 found the loom room empty. Since the recession, staff told her, weavers had mostly come in only when they had an order to fill.

Up the road to Chama

Molly and Antonio took over ownership in 2012, ending the collectively governed employee ownership. Rachel Brown died the same year. The rented building in Los Ojos was, in the shop’s words, “literally falling down around their ears.” It also sat down a small winding road that many travelers on the highway never took. Molly puts the stay in Los Ojos at 34 years, and the shop’s page on its looms gives 36. Nathaniel packed the old store and Molly set up the new one. The move meant downsizing, and two storage lockers now stand beside the dye shops. “It’s made it all possible,” Molly said. With the shop visible from the highway, “we’re actually getting a lot of people, and we’re making sales, and it’s, it’s kind of frightening.” At 62 she had begun pricing weavings as art.

Antonio has his own way of describing the work. “La borrega es muy agradecida; the sheep is a grateful animal. She’ll give you her wool, she’ll give you her lamb for meat, and then when she’s old she’ll sacrifice herself too.”