There were many community-based meetings in which debates as to what ideas would lend themselves best toward some form of economic self-sufficiency for their area before some people came up with a plan that eventually mobilized everyone into action. It would take YEARS of diligence and determination beyond this telling to meet their goals but Sofi’s vecinos finally embarked on an ambitious project, which was to start a sheep-grazing wool-weaving enterprise, “Los Ganados y Lana Cooperative,” modeled after the one started by the group up north that had also saved its community from destitution.

Every single step of launching off the cooperative took a lot of effort, a lot of time, and mostly a lot of not only changing everyone’s minds about why not to do it but also changing their whole way of thinking so that they could do it. At first, people were really nervous and for good reason. To begin with, the government had no money to lend them, so they were on their own. But finally it became a debate of either everyone doing it all together or nobody doing anything at all.

Neighbors who had inherited land from homesteading ancestors that was no longer farmed or used for nothing, mostly due to poverty, were persuaded to sell or barter it off for services in shares to those skilled neighbors who hadn’t. By bartering, people were able to get their run-down farm equipment, homes, home appliances, cars, and trucks fixed.

Skilled as ranchers or not, many began working in some way for the cooperative—by learning an aspect of the business of sheep grazing, wool scouring, weaving, administration, and selling the wool products. Unemployment had been at an all-time high in the first years of the enterprise so there was no shortage of volunteers.

The second year after the start of the sheep-grazing enterprise a core group of twelve women began the wool-weaving cooperative. Eventually, the business created and sustained the livelihoods of more than two dozen women. As cooperative owners of their wool-weaving business they had paying jobs they could count on and were proud of and the mothers among them didn’t worry so much about their babies and childcare because they could bring their ’jitos to work.

For some of the women, the greatest asset that came with the weaving cooperative was the arrangement they made with the local junior college. Due to the wide range of skills they learned from running their own business, those who were interested could work for college credit and potentially earn an associate’s degree in business or in fine arts. And no years of cleaning the houses of los ricos or serving tables in restaurants could ever get them that!

What the Ganados sheep-grazing part of the business also found out was that there was a growing demand for their hormone-free meat.