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Rosa Maria Fuentes Islas
Rosa Maria Fuentes Islas
Trajes Bordados & Pintados Tradicionales de Danza Azteca
Rosa Maria is a mother, grandmother, traditional artist, seamstress, and culture bearer from Jalisco, Mexico, currently living in Huntington Park, CA. She is a Indigenous ceremonial dance teacher and maker. She has been making traditional regalia for more than 36 years and began sewing even earlier, as a small child. She credits her first ceremonial teachers in Mexico with passing on the knowledge that goes into regalia making and sharing with her about the use of materials and color theory. She prides herself in upkeeping cultural traditions and emphasizes that creating regalia for herself and others creates a deeper connection to our lineages and Spirit. Ultimately, Rosa believes in using this artistic tradition of regalia creation as a form of prayer, with prayers being interwoven into each stitch or brush stroke.
Apprenticeship Program
2024
In this apprenticeship, the goal is that Adela learns to make her own patterns, hand embroidery, and specific hand embroidered techniques, and develop a more refined understanding of the traje-making process and learn from Rosa the ceremonial aspect of making trajes. Patterns for danza trajes are unique in that they cannot be learned in a traditional pattern-making course nor can they be bought as industrial patterns. The project would be for Adela to learn to make trajes bordados and for her to create an embroidered traje to present at her group’s ceremony in May.