The Teachers, the Loom, and the City That Changed Everything

photo credit: Fernando Serrano

I didn’t go to San Miguel de Allende to learn how to weave. I went to learn silversmithing.

It was 2021, just after the pandemic. The world was learning how to be alive again. I was there with that energy - going out, finding the local scene, soaking up everything after two years of isolation. Instituto Allende, one of Mexico’s most storied art schools, was where I landed. I was working in metal. I had no plans to touch a loom.

But then I met Vivian.

photo credit: Fernando Serrano

THE LAST DAY OF CLASS AND THE RUG THAT STARTED EVERYTHING

Vivian is a Chinese-American artist from Brooklyn - we met in the jewelry course. She was also taking the weaving class down the hall, and I kept noticing her talking about it with a particular kind of energy. I got curious. On the very last day of the program, I asked her to introduce me to the master weaver so I could buy a rug from him.

That weaver was Agapito.

Agapito had been the master weaver at Instituto Allende for around fifty years. He started weaving when he was seven years old. He was the kind of person who carries an entire tradition in his hands - not as archive, not as demonstration, but as living practice. He was Yumiko Murai’s teacher. The lineage ran through him.

I bought a rug from him that last day. But it wasn’t really about the rug. It was a promise to myself - a reason to come back. I’m going to return to weave.

What I didn’t know then was that I had just met the man whose loom I would one day weave my very first tapete on.

Agapito passed away not long after. I tried to interview his daughter, who works at Instituto Allende, to document his legacy - but it was too soon after his passing and she personally declined. I understood. Some grief needs time before it becomes story. His lineage continues through Yumiko, who took over the weaving program after his death.

photo credit: Fernando Serrano

WHEN ONE DOOR CLOSED, THE COMMUNITY OPENED ANOTHER

Back home, the pull toward weaving didn’t go away. I put myself forward for an opportunity to pursue it formally. That door didn’t open.

So I built my own.

photo credit: Fernando Serrano

I launched a GoFundMe - and the community showed up. Friends, neighbors, strangers who believed in the work before it had a name. That campaign funded my residency back at Instituto Allende. It funded the month that would become the foundation of Border Loomers. I’ve lived in Bisbee long enough to know how strong community is here. I’ve experienced it firsthand, over and over. If it weren’t for community, I wouldn’t be where I am. This was just the most direct proof yet.

Around that same time, Deb Maroney stepped in. Deb is a master weaver here in the borderlands, and when I told her what happened, she said something I needed to hear: you don’t need money that to start weaving. She took me under her wing and taught me the things you can’t learn by just sitting at a loom - the mechanics, the warping, how the structure actually works. The difference between knowing how to weave and knowing how a loom thinks.

That foundation mattered. When you learn weaving in an immersive program, you’re handed a warped loom and you weave. You’re not shown how to set it up, how to thread the heddles, how to calculate sett and warp length. Deb gave me that - the technical architecture underneath the practice.

2 years before all this, a friend who was moving reached out. They had a large Leclerc 8-pedal floor loom and they  knew I would put it to good use. They gifted it to me. Just like that. I moved her into my 200 square foot studio at Central School Project in Bisbee. It filled the room. I loved it. It is this loom and studio I worked on to weave the piece that now lives in President Claudia Sheinbaum's collection.

If you had asked me as a younger person what medium I would end up working in, I would have told you painting. Every time. I was never introduced to my own traditional craft as fine art - it wasn’t presented to me as something that could be serious, institutional, mine. And yet here was this loom, sitting in my studio, pulling me toward it in a way nothing else ever had. Serendipity is too small a word for it. It felt more like being guided by my ancestors.

photo credit: Fernando Serrano

THE SECOND TRIP: THIRTY DAYS, ONE PURPOSE

In June 2025, I returned to San Miguel de Allende. This time everything was different.

The first trip had been about feeling alive after the pandemic - the city, the people, the late nights. The second trip was work.

I spent the entire month thinking about weaving, talking about weaving, designing weaves. I sought out local weavers, conducted oral history interviews, photographed their practice, built relationships. I went with my friend Alex Chronowski, and we were there with a shared sense of purpose that made everything more concentrated, more meaningful.

We enrolled in a thirty-day weaving intensive under Yumiko Murai at Instituto Allende. And because of what Deb had already taught me - the loom mechanics, the warping, the structural logic - I arrived prepared.

I could focus entirely on what Yumiko was teaching: the weaving itself, the tradition, the knowledge.

And I wove my very first tapete on Agapito’s loom.

I don’t take that lightly.

And then - at the airport, bags packed, about to board my flight home - I found out I had been awarded the Artist Opportunity Grant from the Arizona Commission on the Arts.

Standing in that terminal in Mexico, phone in hand, I just laughed. The universe has a sense of timing. The door I had knocked on didn’t open - but while I was busy building something anyway, another door did. That grant went directly toward launching Border Loomers.

photo credit: Fernando Serrano

YUMIKO MURAI AND WHAT TAPETE WEAVING ACTUALLY IS

Yumiko Murai is a master weaver who studied under Agapito and carries his lineage forward. What she teaches is the traditional Mexican tapete - a flat-woven textile tradition rooted in the Zapotec communities of Oaxaca, particularly Teotitlan del Valle and Santa Ana del Valle, where hand-woven wool rugs have been made for centuries.

Tapetes are woven on a fixed-frame loom. The warp - the vertical foundation threads - stays taut while the weaver passes the weft horizontally through, beat by beat, building the textile from the bottom up. Traditional tapetes are woven face-down, meaning you work on the back of the piece and hold the design in your mind as you go. The finished surface is revealed only when you turn it over.

There is something profound about that. You are building something you cannot see. You are trusting the structure, the pattern, the accumulated knowledge of generations. It is an act of faith in a lineage.

Traditional tapetes use natural wool - often hand-spun - and dyes made from plants and minerals: cochineal for deep reds and pinks, indigo for blues, marigold for yellow. The patterns carry meaning specific to each weaving community - stepped frets, diamond lattices, animal and plant motifs that are records of cultural knowledge, not just decoration.

What Yumiko transmits is this living practice - technique, structure, material knowledge - so that it can continue to grow in new hands. That month changed me.

I also came home knowing that I wouldn’t be working only in traditional materials. That realization happened gradually, almost nervously - stepping outside the traditional patterns felt almost sacrilegious at first. You don’t do that. The form is the form. But I knew myself as an artist. I’m drawn to unconventional materials. I knew that the techniques I was learning would become a vehicle for something distinctly mine - rooted in the tradition, but pushing into new territory.

photo credit: Daniela Dawson

BACK IN BISBEE, BACK AT THE LOOM

I returned to my 200 sq ft studio at Central School Project and to that Leclerc loom and started weaving. The pieces I made there pulled from everything I had absorbed - the tradition, the technique, and the borderlands life I carry everywhere I go.

One of those pieces became Autopista Monarca. It is woven not from wool but from Mylar and repurposed camouflage clothing - found garments left behind in the desert by people crossing the border. The piece holds the story of migration, duality, and what it means to be from here and from there and somehow not fully from anywhere. It now lives in a private presidential collection. That story deserves its own post - and it’s coming.

The larger question that all of this brought me to was simple: what would it look like to bring this knowledge back to the communities it belongs to?

Not as exhibition. Not as archive. As something living and free - open to whoever walks through the door.

My grandmother Martha Peraza de Serrano, Presidenta of Manos Amigas in Naco, Sonora, had spent her life in community service in the region where I grew up. The weaving tradition I studied in San Miguel belongs to communities like hers - to the borderlands, to the families who have lived here for generations on both sides of a line drawn through the desert.

That’s what Border Loomers is trying to give back.

photo credit: Fernando Serrano

COME SIT AT A LOOM

If you’ve never woven before - the loom is not intimidating. Every time someone sits down with us for the first time and passes the shuttle through and beats the weft into place, there’s a moment of recognition. Like something in the hands remembers.

Border Loomers offers free, bilingual weaving workshops on both sides of the border - Bisbee and Douglas, Arizona, and Naco and Agua Prieta, Sonora. No experience needed. No cost. Just show up.

Follow us to stay updated on upcoming workshops. And if you want to support this work, every contribution through our GoFundMe goes directly toward materials, looms, and keeping everything free.

- Emmanuel Fernando Serrano

photo credit: Fernando Serrano