It took a U.S. senator, thousands of dollars, and 42 hours of flying for Tia Flores to return home from Peru in 2020—not to mention weeks of uncertainty and dwindling food and water along the remote Yanayacu tributary of the Amazon River.
Flores is a Reno artist and program director at Sierra Arts Foundation. In 2020, she was in Peru for her third visit to the Ayacucho village, where she teaches local women crafting skills so they can establish their own microbusinesses.
However, COVID-19 shutdowns halted all travel in Peru. The military blocked any movement via river, road or air. Travel to the U.S. could commence only with advocacy for a repatriation flight from the State Department, necessitating a conversation between Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto and the Peruvian government. It took three weeks to get Flores home.
This is one of the reasons her family was apprehensive about her returning in 2024––and all future visits, which she promised would only happen every other year from here on out. But after her return from a 2024 trip, as she talked on the red leather couch in the Sierra Arts office, a smile crept along her face.
“I come back, and I think, ‘I don’t know if I can just do every other year—I might have to do every year,’” she said.
Barbara Land, founder of the Nevada Building Hope Foundation, invited Flores to join her trips to the Amazon in 2018. The group’s mission is to “provide educational support, dance and choreography workshops/projects, and humanitarian aid” to three remote villages in the Peruvian Amazon: Ayacucho, San Juan de Yanayacu, and Junín.
Land enlisted Flores, leveraging her expertise in sourcing native plants and basket-weaving learned from the Great Basin Basketmakers. Flores—who’s skilled in foraging materials like willow, sage and sweetgrass from the high desert—helped the women in these villages source materials from their own environment to craft sellable goods like jewelry, baskets and artworks, which provide them with an income and a creative outlet.
“They live in the jungle, and they live off the resources in the jungle, but they’re not aware of all the gifts in the jungle,” Flores said.
The people in these villages can only trace their ties to the land back a few generations. Their families fled to this region in the late 1800s to escape the breakout of enslavement and torture brought on by the rubber boom. The Peruvian Amazon Company was the largest of the rubber companies, and its mistreatment of natives is referred to as the Putumayo genocide.
Flores described the women in the San Juan de Yanayacu village she worked with during her 2024 visit as “gifted basket-makers.” However, instead of sourcing palm—the baskets’ primary material—in the surrounding jungle, they were traveling into the faraway town of San Joaquín to buy supplies.
“Palm that you can make cordage from … they’ve never been a gatherer of that,” Flores said. “They don’t even know what that particular palm looks like in the environment.” Purchasing materials in the town not only requires the use of limited funds to shop, but paying for gas to power boats—the only mode of transportation between their village and town.
During the 2024 visit, Flores, her travel mates and her guides went into the jungle to investigate materials such as the local palms, as well as seeds that could be used as beads. “Our whole team was doing this … we were gathering seeds, and we were gathering all kinds of stuff,” she said. “I can’t tell you how much fun that was to just really take a deep dive into that environment.”
Environmental and economic strain
At the Sierra Arts office, Flores showed off a stunning red and black seed, with the colors split down the middle. Hard as a rock and a tad smaller than a blueberry, it looked like an artisan ceramic bead, not a product of the jungle. Flores brought kits with earrings clasps, jewelry files and X-acto knives to help the women transform these natural materials into sellable goods.
She said that art is a necessary outlet for the women in these villages, especially now as they are facing incredible hardships due to accelerated climate change and the economic strain still felt from the COVID pandemic.
“They live in the jungle, and they live off the resources in the jungle, but they’re not aware of all the gifts in the jungle.”
Tia Flores, on the women she met in San Juan de Yanayacu
In the four years since her last visit, Flores can see a dramatic change in the environment and the hardships it has put on the villagers, especially the women.
“One of the things that I realized is, like, four years is a long time to be away from the jungle,” she said. “It’s like shifting landscapes. The environment looks different just because the rivers are narrower; the pathways are not as accessible. You see all this change that’s happening, and then you look at the people who live in that environment. It accelerated their aging. This hasn’t been an easy four years for them. You see it.”
According to the United States Agency for International Development, “Peru is highly susceptible to climate-related natural disasters. … The strong effects of the El Niño Southern Oscillation on the frequency and severity of extreme events and their impacts are increasingly amplified by climate change.”
“When I came back, there was more of a sadness, because their life depends on the river,” Flores said. “They eat what they catch that day. They don’t catch anything—they don’t eat anything.”
During her 2024 visit, she noticed the receding water due to a record drought. “While the region has faced at least three other intense droughts in the past 20 years, this drought’s scope was unprecedented,” according to a Reuters article from January.
Said Flores: “I mean, their life is so dependent on the river, but they have no control over the environment. (In the United States), it’s like, ‘Wow, I get in my car today and go to the grocery store.’ It’s very easy, because we’re removed from it here.” In these remote villages, “You can’t be removed. It’s in your face.”
People use the river to fish, clean, commute and drink. It’s what connects them to tourists who buy their goods. It’s their lifeblood, and when it shrinks, a major resource is cut from them.
Regional tourism has also diminished. There are several lodges along the Yanayacu tributary that serve tourists exploring the Amazon, but COVID disrupted this travel. Even now, “the tourism hasn’t regained momentum,” said Victor Coelho, manager of the Yaku Amazon Lodge, via email. “We are having a hard time to be as we were before pandemic time.”
Said Flores: “If you do have somebody passing through, they’re more interested in looking at the environment than visiting the people in the villages where they can purchase the goods.”
A lack of money means that Elsa, a woman with whom Flores bonded during previous visits, was struggling to eat. As Flores rehashed the story, she paused. “I’m going to cry,” she said, taking a deep breath. Elsa’s husband developed cancer, which caused him to lose his vision and his ability to complete necessary chores for the couple, like fishing.
“I see her husband,” Flores said. “He’s holding the edge (of their hut’s walls), and he’s just pacing.” Flores doesn’t speak the language, so Land interpreted. “Barbara’s asking her questions, and then you see Elsa get really sad.” Flores took a deep breath. “And then Barbara looks at me, and she said, ‘They have no food. They have no food. They’re hungry.’ I start crying, and then I lose it. I can’t control. I’m, like, freaking sobbing. Barbara comes over and gives me a hug, and she goes, ‘This is why we come here.’”
Flores gave the couple money for food and set up an agreement with a guide/friend to check in on Elsa and deliver money which Flores will regularly wire from America.
Helping Elsa and her husband with food is one example of how Flores tries to bring this community more than art. This year, she brought along another supply to help make life easier: period panties.
“I know it doesn’t have anything to do with the arts,” she said, but menstruation adds more stress to women in the village. They don’t have sanitary products; they rely instead on “rags,” Flores said. “We didn’t know how it was going to be received,” she said, but “they were more than appreciative. You could see it on their face—like, they knew this was going to change their life for them.”
Flores added that bringing art to the villages isn’t just for the potential economic boost. “It’s a necessary outlet for them from their day-to-day hard life just to be in that creative state and to do that in the company of other women who are in the same boat you are,” she said. “When I worked with the women in San Juan, they were excited.”
Flores added with a wide smile: “So, then the question comes back: Do I wait two years?”