On our excursion to Pisac, a small town at the foot of the mountains just a few hours outside of Cuzco, we made a stop at the historic artisanal market where I met a vendor who sold art pieces handmade with Peruvian textiles. She asked me if I had any siblings, to which I responded that I had one younger brother. She then presents a painting of a family with a mother, father, older sister and younger brother, telling me that it was my family at Machu Picchu. I was immediately enamored, and was willing to overlook the steep 80 soles she was offering it to me for. She also gave me a pamphlet about her business and how each product was handmade, a stamp of authenticity for me that made me not even bother bargaining the price.
This woman had successfully pulled at my heart strings and I felt satisfied leaving with a one-of-a-kind souvenir while simultaneously supporting a hard working small business woman. About a week later, we visited the famous San Pedro market in Cuzco which is well known for its variety and reasonable price points. To my dismay, I find a stall filled with exact carbon copies of the painting the woman at Pisac had sold me. I knew for certain that she had not been outsourcing such a large quantity, the product designs were too cut and dry. Rather, I had been jipped. And while her products were not nearly as authentic as she made it seem, the Pisac vendor was certainly still a very clever business woman.
This was not a one off experience, as during our stay in Aguas Calientes, an artificial tourist town which serves primarily as a pit stop to Machu Picchu, I visited the local market and found that every stall was selling practically the exact same products. While one vendor told me the shirt I was looking at "could not be found anywhere else," although it was just a few stalls to the right, I found a vendor who was able to impart honest advice regarding my souvenir shopping. When I asked her about how everything seemed to be the same across stalls and if there was a common source they all obtained their products from, she told me that they all came from Cuzco in a shipment, and that I could get the same things there for likely a much better price.
Surprised and grateful for the brutal honesty from this woman, I decided to check out the scene in Cuzco to see how it differed. At the San Pedro market, I noticed the exact same trend of the same products being sold at different price points, although the trend was that everything was significantly more affordable than in the smaller towns in the outskirts of Cuzco.
I decided to ask one of the vendors at San Pedro about a common sourcing across vendors, and she said that they all indeed obtained their products from the same places. She mentioned that different sources had different specialties, ranging from textiles to jewelry, but that they were still all hand made despite being mass produced. She said they all come from "artesanos de pueblos alejados de Arequipa," which to my understanding are artisans from smaller, rural towns outside of Peru's legal capital Arequipa. She also mentioned that each vendor picks their own profit margin practically arbitrarily and that there is an exchange/ barter system that happens between vendors as well. She also did not divulge much about her own personal profit margins or which products were most lucrative to sell. From my own online research, a decent amount of souvenirs are also mass produced in Bolivian factories. It is very probable that this is where the "artesanos" are getting their material.
What qualifies a souvenir in Peru as"authentic" is not exactly clear, and it seems practically impossible to verify a product's authenticity with decent accuracy. Thus, I conclude that it is not worth it and that ignorance is bliss. I will attempt to forget what I saw at San Pedro market and tell anyone who asks that my painting is a unique piece handmade by a sweet old lady from Pisac.
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