For more than 40 years, Edilma Herrera has made the typical skirt of the San Juan Huilense. She was a manual arts teacher and today, already retired, she continues to capture the tradition and culture of the opita land in her creations.
The family business of Edilma Herrera Zambrano, her husband, and their daughter, making typical skirts from San Juan Huilense, also generates 5 jobs, giving work to mothers who are heads of households in the city of Neiva. All of them have been linked to the long process that goes from cutting the fabric, painting the skirts, punching the fabric to make the flowers, and everything that goes into making the skirts that have been worn for decades. hundreds of women.
“More than 40 years ago we started this process of learning and then making the costumes, the whole process, which is the design, cutting, making, painting the skirts, assembling them, making the flowers, dyeing the fabric for the flowers. , then the gluing, the die-cutting, the cutting, the assembly of the flowers, and then the completion of the entire San Juan costume from Huilense”, explained Edilma, maker of the San Juan skirts.
It may interest you: National Virreina del Pasillo is opita
In addition to being a dressmaker, Edilma dedicated herself to teaching manual arts for more than four decades, and in her work she trained many women in the production of the San Juan Huilense skirt. Today she continues to leave that legacy to his children and relatives as the heritage of our entire culture and our festivals that are revived year after year thanks to the generational change.
This admirable artist and entrepreneur works with female heads of households who are involved in all the manufacturing processes, all of them working from their homes with the models and molds that Mrs. Edilma Herrera gives them.
