A shirtless man sits under a tree in a town in southern Mexico, stitching together a soccer ball. At the central square, several women congregate to make balls for the national pastime.
Others toil in workshops or inside their ramshackle homes: A grandmother sewing on a chair in her dirt-floor home, or a pregnant woman pulling threads in her kitchen while her six-year-old niece hands her panels of synthetic leather.
Hundreds work like this in Chichihualco, a town famous for hand-stitching colorful soccer balls for more than 50 years in the mountains of the impoverished state of Guerrero.
In its heyday, Chichihualco made the balls that were kicked around on the pitches of Mexico’s first-division clubs, and those used by the national team.
However, competition from Asia, emigration to the US and drug trafficking have relegated Chichihualco’s soccer balls to amateur recreational sales.
Mexico’s national squad is using Adidas balls during practice for this month’s Copa America Centenario tournament in the US.
Despite Chichihualco’s losing streak, entire families in the community of 25,000 people continue the tradition that they inherited from their parents and grandparents.
“All of us sew balls. Men, women, children. Even my husband. There’s no other work,” Virginia Ramirez, 72, said as she stitched together segments of vinyl in her small house with a dirt floor.
Ramirez has been making soccer balls since age 17. She has been doing this for so long that she does not need a thimble to protect her leathery hands from the needle.
She earns 10 pesos (US$0.50) per ball and can make up to five per day.
“We are very poor. We don’t have beans or salt. We have nothing,” she said under a roof made of wood planks.
The first workshop in Chichihualco appeared in the 1960s, when a man named Eulalio Alarcon brought ball segments from Mexico City to have them stitched together.
Others in the community were inspired and 70 workshops opened, churning out 60,000 balls per month, said Chichihualco Mayor Alfredo Alarcon, who owns a soccer ball-making facility and is not related to Eulalio. However, today there are only 15 workshops and production has dropped to 15,000 balls per month, he said.
Alberto Morales, who opened his factory in the 1960s, stared recently at the 1,200 balls that his facility produces every week.
They come in hot red, shiny black or lime green and each sell for between US$3 and US$5, leaving Morales with an US$0.08 profit per ball.
His company remains afloat, despite competition from cheaper balls made in China and Pakistan, but things used to be better.
“We are stuck. We can’t produce more because we can’t reinvest in material or machines,” Morales said as he held one of the 200 balls that first-division club Tigres of Monterrey ordered for its fans. “We could compete with balls from anywhere in the world. Our ball is really spherical, sewn by hand, while the Chinese ones go all over the place when you kick them.”
Fewer people are making soccer balls than before, as they can find more lucrative work than 10 pesos per ball. The drug trade has become an option in a region known as the country’s top producer of opium poppies. The labor force has also dwindled due to migration to the US.
“Ten pesos per ball isn’t much, right?” said Erasmo Flores, a 43-year-old-farmer and musician who has been sewing balls since the age of six. “It’s not enough to get lunch. One eats what God gives him.”
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