Weavers Of History

In the Guatemalan city of Antigua, a women’s cooperative is keeping their Mayan heritage alive by weaving, wearing and selling colourful traditional designs.

This morning, the courtyard of one of the hundreds of colonial houses in the center of Antigua, Guatemala, seems like a canvas splashed with vivid colors. Surrounding Vey Smithers is a group of women, dressed in their own creations, who are wearing as their ancestors did for centuries. Shelves hold a rainbow of threads, yellow, green, gold, orange, colors these Mayan women patiently intertwine on their looms, crafting place mats and rugs they’ll later sell at their shop. The shop, Colibri, is one of the many businesses that dot the center of this pretty colonial city – deemed a World Heritage Site in 1979 – tempting visitors with its vibrantly colored clothes, a sharp contrast to the Spanish Baroque facades lining the cobbled streets.

Vey opened Colibrí as a women’s cooperative in 1984. Enthralled by Mayan weaving, she was one of the first people to wager that it could be adapted to contemporary tastes and shapes, thus ensuring that the story of this ancient people would continue to be told.
The idea, she says, came after five Mayan women visited her at the estate she had bought in the village of Chuinimachicaj, Patzun, asking for her help. “In Kaqchikel Maya, chui means “close”, nima “big” and chicaj “sky”, explains the US native, who fell in love with country when she came here on holiday in 1973. Those were years of conflict, and women had fled their village to escape the Army. They tried to sell her their embroidered blouses, called huipiles. “They were wearing rags” – she recalls. “But the women had their looms and their hands and they knew how to weave. It was all they had.” That’s when she first had the idea to create a business that would showcase this local tradition, giving work to the women, combining the characteristic geometric style of the huipiles from the wome’s village with less elaborate designs. Through word of mouth, the group grew over the years, and today the cooperative comprises 25 women’s groups from various indigenous villages in Guatemala. Here, clothing is considered a valuable treasure, and the huipil – a tunic-like garment made of folded fabric with an opening for the head, worn by indigenous women is one of the most important items. Worn before the arrival of Spaniards – as Barbara Knoke de Arathoon, an anthropologist and expert on textile, explains – their design evolved as a result of weaving and embroidery techniques imported from Europe.

Each municipality has its particular style of huipil, each serving as an emblem of pre-Hespanic culture. Some represent snakes and jaguars – important animals in the Mayan worldview; others show volcanoes, hills and rivers, which are sacred in nature, and others still depict even entire legends, like the huipil from Nebaj in Quiche, which tells the Ixil legend of a princess who fell in love with a young man from the wrong side of the tracks.

“My grandmother taught my mother to embroider, my mother taught me, and I teach my daughters,” says Irma Bajan, one of the Colibrí embroiderers. She’s 45 and originally from Patzun. The neck of her garnet-colored huipil is embroidered with dozens of colors. “There are nine rings – one for every month of pregnancy – and the oval shape means the planet,” she explains. Inside the rings are embroidered leaves, flowers, dogs, butterflies and coil-shaped symbols.

At her side, Sabina Cojon Hernandez, 69, weaves coasters with a design typical of her own community in San Martin Jilotepeque. She met Vey 30 years ago she went to ask her for work for herself and 30 other women in her village. Sabina wears her loom attached to her lower back; the so-called back-strap loom. The threads of the base color are stretched tightly for about two meters and then tied to a column. Laid out in a row, they are intersected by various pieces of wood of different thickness and sizes that guide the other threads that will eventually become coasters. Her San Martin Jilotepeque huipil has different geometric elements divided by four orange serrated stripes. As the anthropologist Barbara Knoke de Arathoon explains in an essay “these horizontal stripes are used to separate images of cosmological significance. They are equivalent to the full stop in a prayer, and signal a different idea or concept.

While visitors may not understand the full significance of the designs on these women’s huipiles, they can still enjoy their eye-catching beauty. More than four centuries after the Spanish arrived in Guatemala it’s still impossible to escape the seductive artistry of one of the most advanced peoples of Mesoamerica, and of the Mayan women of Antigua who are keeping their heritage alive in glorious color. 

SOURCE: Ronda Iberia (April 2016)
TEXT: Carolina Gamazo
FOTOS: Daniel López Pérez