Raíces y Razón — Orígenes | Education

María José Fábrega, the designer behind the brand. María is the jewelry designer and metalsmith born in Quito, Ecuador.Her creative designs fuse the artisanal practice of metalsmith with a modern approach to produce unique and elevated jewelry designs. No piece is the same since it is all handmade and produce in small batches. This creates a minimal impact on the environment and the people involved with making it.Fábrega believes in making jewelry that is made to last and encourages quality over quantity of consumption. One of Fábrega's top priorities is to give value to the process of making pieces by hand, caring about the artisans and the time...

Meet Angela Lizbeth Yescas Garcia, founder of Bee Staz, a brand dedicated to uplifting San Melchor Betaza, Oaxaca, through their stories and textiles.Bee Staz means sleeping air, another homage to their community of Betaza, which is known as the place where the wind blows in Zapotec. Betaza is in the northern Sierra of Oaxaca and has a population of about 800 people.Lizbeth started Bee Staz in 2018 after seeing the unethical practices among artisanal clothing within her community. She would frequently hear about the low costs at which the traditional clothing pieces from Betaza were being purchased, only to find...

Black Friday is here, and with it comes a plethora of shoppers seeking out the best deals for their holiday shopping. While we all love landing a good discount on goods, we’re here to set the record straight on the most popular shopping day of the year and explain its negative effect  on small business owners. While some might attribute Black Friday to merchants going from negative sales (or operating in the red) to making profits (operating in black, or having their accounting books balance out), this is not the actual origin of the day but rather the modern explanation...

Like many others, you may have stumbled across Cadena Collective's page and asked yourself: "how do I wear any of these products if I don't identify as Mexican or Latine?" As a Puerto Rican who also wondered if I could purchase an item from Cadena's marketplace, I realized there are ways to pay homage to skilled artists without appropriating their culture. First things first, what is cultural appropriation? Cultural appropriation is defined as the act of taking ownership of all or some parts of a group's identity or culture. These are then manipulated, disrespected, or exploited without acknowledgment of the...