Amelia Gonzalez (Medford) is a traditional seamstress and is known for her beautiful quinceañera, wedding, and folklorico ballet dresses. She also crochets and embroiders, skills she learned as a girl from her grandmother in Jalisco, Mexico. Gonzalez makes the dance costumes for Medford’s Ballet Folklorico Ritmo Allegre, which she's been doing since the late 1990s.
Bio
Amelia Gonzalez (Medford) is a traditional seamstress and is known for her beautiful quinceañera, wedding, and folklorico ballet dresses. She also crochets and embroiders, skills she learned as a girl from her grandmother in Jalisco, Mexico. Not long after she moved with her family to southern Oregon in 1985, word about her abilities spread, and families would ask her to make quinceañera dresses for their daughters and their friends. Gonzalez also made her sister’s wedding dress, as well as wedding dresses for others. She does alterations for community members and makes clothes for her family, including her two sisters, her daughters, and her elderly mother. She is also teaching one of her granddaughters to sew.
Amelia Gonzalez grew up in the very small town of Las Pilas Municipio de Huejuquilla el Alto, in the state of Jalisco. Her grandmother taught her to embroider (bordar) and crochet, and, as a very young child, she would watch her mother, who was always sewing for her, her sisters, and neighbors. Gonzalez explains they’d bring her the fabric and an item of clothing for her to copy. Her mother would take apart the garment and figure out how to make it larger or smaller, depending on the age of the child. Gonzalez, whose mother measured by finger-width instead of standard measurements, taught her: “You know, she said a little bigger—another one finger more and one finger less to this for that size. . . . It's only the fingers, only the fingers.”
When Gonzalez was a teenager, her entire family moved to the city of Guadalajara. She went to a sewing school there for several months and learned the finer points of tailoring as well as how to make her own patterns, something that she found both fascinating and a huge time-saver once she started making quinceañera and then folklorico ballet dresses. She herself started sewing for neighbors and friends, something she very much enjoyed. Eventually she married and started a family, and then moved in the mid-1980s near Medford, Oregon, where her sister had settled. Gonzalez explained that she sewed for family as well as for others. “I fix some dresses; I make dresses for the community, for the quinceañeras” (girls celebrating their 15th birthdays). She looks at pictures the girls show her and then makes a pattern. "No problem for me. I like them. And then so happy . . . because it's exactly the way that she like it."
Not long after, Gonzalez recalls, Victoria Snow Mountain, who was the founding director of Medford’s Ballet Folklorico Ritmo Allegre, saw one of those dresses and asked "who made that dress, who made that dress?" Gonzalez remembers that Snow was “so happy” to find her and always acknowledged her work at the dance performances. But those dresses weren’t easy to make. Snow Mountain would show Gonzalez photos, then Gonzalez had to make the patterns—not just for one style of dress but outfits for several different regions, from “Sinaloa. Jalisco, Veracruz, Sinaloa, . . . I make a lot of these.” She also made shirts for the boys the same way—looking at online photos and then making the patterns. Having those templates made it much easier to make multiple dresses and shirts, which the dance group could then reuse for different dancers. For many years, her daughters and then her grandchildren danced with Medford’s Ballet Folklorico Ritmo Allegre.
Being creative is a big part of what Amelia Gonzales enjoys about her work. She sews the way musicians who play by ear make music; if she can see it, she can make it. As she says, "I love it. I love sewing.” And she loves making others happy with her creations.