My great aunt Zoilita, the last of 12 siblings, is a brown-skinned and curly-haired Wayuu woman of the Sijono clan. She arrived in Maracaibo, Venezuela, in the midst of the oil boom in the 1970s. A beautiful woman who, along with several cousins, organized cultural performances of Yonna (Wayuu traditional dance) for different events across the emerging city.
In spite of her beauty and elegance, Zoilita never managed to start her own family and dedicated her youth and life to the care of her great nieces with whom she lives to this day. She supported the education of six children with patience, love and dedication.
While established in Maracaibo, she constantly visited the Upper Guajira, her native land, her cemetery and her old house. This made life in Maracaibo feel like a second Guajira for everyone.
The situation in Venezuela has meant that Zoilita now lives in Maicao, Colombia, where she shares stories with her great nieces. Though she may repeat the same stories, she maintains the feeling of the words, transmitted with important teachings each time she tells them. She transports you to a fantastic world, an unknown Guajira that remains alive through her stories, in her characters, in her memories and in the connections she draws, which flow between myth and lived reality.
Now Zoilita is bounded by the white walls of her second-floor apartment as part of the mandatory lockdown. This places her in a similar position to the ritual confinement that she undertook when she became a woman with her first menstruation. However, the current situation forces her to stay indoors, far from her native land, far from the rest of her relatives, turning her daily practice of weaving into an art and act of resistance and survival that anchors her to the memory of every confinement she has had to experience.
Zoilita is under medication and constant control for being diabetic and has high blood pressure. Her biggest fear during this period of confinement is to catch COVID-19, die and be cremated, preventing her remains from joining the rest of her relatives in the family graveyard.