Culture comes home

Published in 2009

Cristina Bubba Zamora’s campaign to recover Bolivia’s sacred textiles has transformed her into an international champion for the protection of cultural heritage, helping Bolivian officials track down plundered items and lobbying foreign governments to strengthen their protection of cultural property rights.

The residents of Coroma, a small village in the Andean highlands of Bolivia, believe the well-being of their community is intricately linked to indigenous textiles, some dating from pre-Columbian times. They are convinced that through these fabrics they receive the guidance of ancestors who reside in and are the ultimate owners of the weavings.

When scores of the ceremonial weavings were stolen over recent decades, the community fell on hard times, reinforcing villagers’ belief in the power of the fabrics. And then several community members journeyed to the United States and brought many of the weavings home.

“Our history is written in those fabrics, and to lose them is to lose our past and our memory,” says Cristina Bubba Zamora, a social psychologist who is helping the community recover their heritage from unscrupulous traffickers of cultural property.

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Cristina Bubba Zamora (above, centre) has helped the people of Coroma retrieve many of the fabrics that are vital to their village ceremonies.
©Rolex Awards/Piotr Jaxa

Bubba Zamora received a Rolex Award for Enterprise in 1998 for her work on behalf of the villagers in the war over the weavings. With her help, Coroma has retrieved 56 of the stolen textiles, most recovered by U.S. customs agents in a raid on the California home of an art collector. When collectors in the U.S. tried hiding their illicit textiles in Canada, her allies tracked them down. In 2002, they succeeded in repatriating 428 of 6,000 weavings that had been smuggled to Canada – 40 of them from Coroma.

“Cristina was a pioneer, working both with grassroots organizations and to change the attitude of the government, in recovering objects that had disappeared because of theft or corruption,” says Xavier Albó, a Jesuit priest and anthropologist in the Bolivian capital, La Paz. “Her work is fundamental in helping the communities better appreciate their own values and goods.”

As director of the Illa Foundation, which is dedicated to protecting and conserving the cultural heritage of Bolivian villages, Bubba Zamora has served as an advisor to the Ministry of Culture, trying to help protect the country’s cultural wealth. At times she works with Bolivia’s embassies in countries where stolen cultural objects have been identified.

She is also writing a book that will describe the weavings that have been recovered, as well as those that remain missing. Her descriptions include details about history, thread counts, colours and minute errors – a key element in identifying individual weavings.

Bubba Zamora has also travelled abroad to lobby governments for tougher laws against trafficking in cultural property. Some progress has been made: Canada has adopted what she calls an “exemplary” position. France and Switzerland — where Bubba addressed a series of public meetings — have approved laws banning the import of looted cultural property. Trafficking to those countries is down, she reports.

Yet she says the United States, the biggest market for stolen goods despite a 2002 bilateral accord forbidding the importation of Bolivian cultural goods, demands that evidence of fraud be present before the courts will take action. In the Coroma case, that was easy to prove because the weavings belonged to the entire community, and the community never gave its approval. It is not as easy in many other cases.

However the attention focused on trafficking has already made stealing the fabrics more difficult. “The collectors named in the cases made public don’t come back to Bolivia,” the Laureate explains. “They still sell Bolivian work in the U.S, but they obtain it through intermediaries. They are not more conscientious, but they are more afraid.”

Modern-day looters try hard to shift attention away from their own actions. “They think they have good taste, and they justify their actions by saying they’re doing a great favour to Bolivia, that the items are better preserved outside the country or that we’re racists and don’t really care for the patrimony of the indigenous. They’ll say anything to justify their actions,” she says.

Bubba Zamora’s work to strengthen Bolivian laws protecting the cultural rights of indigenous peoples has borne fruit in the country’s new constitution. Yet she also says it is important to “raise awareness in both the local community and the country so that nothing is removed in the first place”. That means changing how people feel about themselves and their community. “In Coroma, since we started fighting this battle, not one weaving has been sold. We’ve achieved a new level of consciousness in the community and in the country about the importance of patrimony. We’ve recovered some of the items that were stolen, but, more importantly, we’ve recovered some of the self-esteem of the people.”

The Coroma weavings that were repatriated from Canada are now on display in the Museo Nacional de Etnografia y Folklore in the capital, La Paz. Encouraged by her Rolex Award for Enterprise, Bubba Zamora helped build a museum in Coroma to house other weavings, but it has yet to open. Local authorities postponed the museum’s opening because of security concerns.

As an alternative, Bubba Zamora has photographed the most important weavings and wants to display them in the museum. “If they steal the photos, we can replace them,” she says. In 2008, she exhibited the photos in a gallery in Oruro, western Bolivia, and a municipal museum in Tambo Quirquincho, La Paz. The photos were highly popular, demonstrating what she says is a deep desire of Bolivians to know – and preserve – their own history and culture.

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