Our Story

 

I was born and raised in Santiago, Chile, but I spent my teenage years at the foot of the Andes mountains, close to nature and far from the chaos of the city. I’ve always had a strong awareness of our history as Chileans, proud of our indigenous peoples. I’ve been living in Los Angeles, California, since 2012. I moved with my American wife, Nicole, after we were married in Chile back in 2010. Two years after moving to LA, we had our son Quintún (his name is from the Mapudungun: “Searching for condors.”) Giving him that name was the first time I was able to take pride in my indigenous roots outside of Chile. After 2020, the roughest year in modern history, I found myself with no job, drowned in debt, and with a family at my side, without enough to provide for them.

My family in Chile, as everywhere else in the world, was in quarantine for months. Overwhelmed by the chaos of the city, my mother decided to take on her old dream of moving far to the south, to a small island in the archipelago of Chiloé, right in the north coast of Patagonia. It was in this moment of crisis when the idea of going back to my roots and sharing them with the US and the world was born. Through my mother, now settled in the Cailín Island in Chiloe, I connected with a local artisan, Alejandra. Since then we’ve been working together to bring to life my dream of Folil.    

--Matias Muñoz-Rodríguez

Folil for me means to look back to my own roots in Chile. Folil comes from Mapudungun, the language of the Mapuche People, and its literal translation is “roots.”

 

The making of clothing with wool has been part, not just of the Mapuche culture, but of all the communities along the southern part of my country, Chile. Folil, specifically, looks to restore the tradition of wool making, mixing the symbology of the Mapuche and the techniques of female artisans from the extreme south of Chile. Folil looks to elevate and recognize worldwide the tradition of handmade clothing made with sheep’s wool from small family farmers. Our pieces are not just exclusive, but also, as it has been for centuries, friendly to our planet Earth, to nature and its resources. Made by local female artisans and dyed naturally with local products, each Folil piece is unique in its nature, using both techniques of knitting and looming.

 

The Mapuche people are maybe not as well-known as the Mayans, Incas or Aztecs, perhaps because the Mapuche didn’t build big cities or ancestral temples. Instead the Mapuche people were focused on nature and the development of a new human being with a special wisdom as the center of the universe, not temples or material things, and with respect toward each other; men and women, and toward nature. The Mapuche always have been first conserving the land and preserving nature, the paradise. As the Chilean intellectual Gaston Sublette says “The Mapuche fighting to defend the paradise is something that is much more valuable than pyramids and temples.”

 

As our aborigines the Mapuche are many times a forgotten community, they have fought the longest against the Spanish conquistadors, for over hundreds of years. As with many indigenous languages around the world the language of the Mapuche people, Mapudungun, was once intended to be buried; schools didn’t allow students to speak their own language, only Spanish, and later on in modern times kids and young people were ashamed of speaking it because they were bullied by their classmates with a lighter skin tone. Fortunately, that has, in part, changed. Today the younger generations of Chile are feeling proud of our indigenous roots; for the first time in our history a Mapuche woman is presiding over the process of writing what will be our new Constitution. But that doesn’t mean the discrimination and usurpation of the Mapuche people, culture, and land has stopped; not yet. Today, the Mapuche community is the poorest in our country, and the battle against the taking of their land continues. They are fighting not just against big private enterprises but also against the current government. But, as centuries ago, our Mapuche people continue in the fight for their rights and recognition, and until that’s a right for them, the battle will continue.