On Saturdays, you might find Monica Martinez selling her summer-themed creations at the James Baldwin Outdoor Learning Center in the Bronx: hand-crocheted watermelon earrings, flower hats, messenger bags, and coasters. But she’s best known for her supply of sweater vests for cats in the winter.
How a four-legged “sausage” sealed the biz
They were the origin of Martinez’s crocheting and embroidery business. Some winters ago, her family lacked heat in their apartment. She figured if the family was cold, her black cat, Chorizo (sausage in Spanish), was too. She crocheted Chorizo a pink sweater and a hat. Chorizo didn’t try to take them off.
It was the endorsement Martinez needed. “Every cat, you’re like, ‘hey, how you doing?’ [They’re like] ‘ay, don’t touch me.’ No human touch, but the sweater she kept on.”
Martinez kept crocheting sweaters for Chorizo, now 8 years old. Women who worked at the Bronx Museum of Art, where Martinez volunteered and attended transit advocacy meetings, complimented her creations and made requests for their nieces. They offered to sell her sweaters at the museum. In 2017, Martinez started Black Kat Krochet.
Her response to the cliched “cat lady” comments are eye rolls and a fact check: “I am a cat lady — I have six.”
Martinez, her husband, three children, and Chorizo live in a basement in Crotona Park with other adopted or gifted feline family members: Vicente, Felipe, Luna, Lemmy, and Georgia. All the cats sport her crocheted sweaters in the winter.
Starting young in Mexico, restarting in the Bronx
While growing up in the Mexican town of Chilpancingo, Martinez showed a precocious business acumen. She saw an opportunity outside her mother’s workplace, where civil engineers outside worked on construction all day until 9 p.m.
“These guys need candy,” she told her mother. With her help, Martinez began making and selling sweets. Soon she moved onto bracelets, selling them at her middle school.
Decades later — after marrying, joining her husband in New York in 2005, and having kids — Martinez adapted these entrepreneurial skills to follow in her mother’s and grandmother’s footsteps. In Mexico, they had both crocheted towels to keep tortillas warm. Martinez learned how to make them alongside her mother, but never paid them any mind until she got involved with the BXArts Factory about six years ago and attended a crocheting workshop at the nonprofit. Her fingers remembered doing this with her mom in Mexico long ago.
A thread back to home
Martinez sources threads from women in Mexico, through a friend she met at an embroidery class within Red de Pueblos Transnacionales, a network for and by immigrants from Mexican rural and indigenous communities.
She longed for a link back home, and Red de Pueblos Transnacionales was a way to connect with other Spanish-speaking people and to a craft that brought her back to her childhood.
“So I went there and everybody speaks Spanish, and I’m like, ‘oh, OK, this is gonna be a new thing.’ Because with the kids, you speak English, and you watch the TV, Netflix, everything in English,” she said. “So for a moment there, I was going back to my roots.”
She picked up new techniques, met new people, and diversified the kinds of products she was selling through Black Kat Krochet.
Compassion through crochet
Since she started the business, two of Martinez’ children have dabbled in crafts. During the pandemic, her youngest son was bored and open to her teaching him crocheting basics. He made a blanket. His new practice also helped him cope with being the new kid at school when the family moved from Grand Concourse to Crotona Park.
“I guess he didn’t want to make friends or he didn’t know how to,” Martinez said. “So his thing was taking his crochet to school. The kids were telling him, ‘hey, what are you doing?’ [He would say], ‘oh, I’m [making] myself a scarf.’”
Martinez hopes people will look at her and her crocheted and embroidered crafts and remember the maxim a client told her: to not judge a book by its cover.
“Because of my aesthetic, if you see me in the streets, sometimes I’m with pants, black shirt, short hair,” Martinez said, touching her side shave. “But when you see what I do, like ‘wow, I’ve never imagined that you do these beautiful embroidery flowers.’ That’s why you never assume that people are something until you know them.”
She says she hopes people start looking at different people free of judgment and strike up a conversation: “No matter what color you are, the important thing is that we are humans. We are made of the same thing.”
It’s not just with humans Martinez advocates this culture of care. A few Fridays ago, Martinez and her husband noticed a ginger cat left outside the building where they work. They asked around, but no one knew whose it was. Güero (“fair-haired” or “fair-skinned”) just joined their crochet-clad family.
“We might not have much to give, but we have a heart, and we love cats,” Martinez said. “We will … try to give all the love he deserves.”
Follow on Instagram at @black_kat_krochet.
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Visit in person at the James Baldwin Outdoor Learning Center Community Farmers Market at the corner of Goulden Avenue and Sedgwick Avenue and W Mosholu Parkway in the South Bronx.
