Weaving in Guatemala:

Threads of an indigenous Way of Life

by Kennerly Clay, Art Workshops in Guatemala

Lidia's Mother

I follow the steep, dusty path to Lidia’s house situated in a shaded cluster of homes built with wooden poles and tin roofs. The dwellings are simple, but, surprisingly, there is running water here and even the luxury of a flush toilet.

A woolly sheep blinks at me from her comfortable sprawl in the dirt beneath a shade tree where pollitos wander freely, pecking the ground in search of corn meal and other food remnants.

“Buenos dias!” Lidia greets with a smile that reveals beautiful white teeth. She wears her long, black hair tied neatly at the nape of her neck and looks to be in her 30s, though her Mayan features – strong cheekbones, brown skin and sturdy body – transcend our notion of age.

She adjusts her colorful huipil, a traditional, Mayan blouse-like garment, and corte (long skirt) and invites me to join her on a square thatch mat just big enough for two. With both of us kneeling, she introduces me to the colorful threads we’ll be using to create the small wall hanging I’m aspiring to make.

I am here in Santa Catarina Barahona, a village outside of Antigua, to study backstrap weaving, an ancient Mayan method of weaving defined by a woven strap used to leverage the weaver’s own body weight against the work. (The weaver leans in to slacken or leans back to create tension.) It is a practice generally reserved for Mayan women, the primary producers of the gorgeously colored and patterned huipiles and myriad textiles that challenge the starkness of impoverished Guatemala.

When the Spanish colonialists arrived in this part of Central America, they introduced the treadle loom, which was taken up by Mayan men and now produces many of the country’s fabrics. To the undiscerning tourist, the treadle loom products may yet seem a mano (handmade), but the finest quality goods require days and even months of labor on the backstrap loom used by Mayan women.

Weaving for Lidia and her family is a way of life, an inextricable aspect of their culture and daily work. Lidia learned it from her mother, who learned it from hers before her, and now Lidia is passing the skill down to her own daughters.

And to me.

Simply winding the black thread, which I have chosen as the background color, around and around to form a thick ball, seems never-ending. Sore, cramped and clumsy, my fingers todavia no saben –  they don’t yet know – but Lidia is patient. We laugh together when I make the profound discovery that I wind better with my right hand than with my left.

We move to the urdidor, a long, wooden bench with large pegs protruding upwards. By running the thread in and out in a triangular motion between three of the pegs, I begin forming the warp.

When we have the warp to work with, Lidia rigs it up with a number of palos, small sticks inserted in various sections to separate the threads. She ties the entire thing to a tree trunk and extends it down to me, seated cross-legged on the mat. I pull it towards me and get “strapped” in with the backstrap, which also serves to support the back while weaving.

We then begin with the weft by lifting warp threads with the aguja, a small wooden pick that Lidia stashes in my hair while I'm running the weft threads in and out to create the outer border — slowly, laboriously. Admittedly, the work (and the language) exhausts me, and I wonder how I'll possibly be able to weave four hours a day for the duration.

Though I have barely begun my project, I am already aware of the incredible amount of time, skill and mental effort that goes into creating the brightly colored and patterned textiles that tourists bargain and haggle for. Most cannot appreciate the intensity of the work involved.

Yet on day two, I find rhythm in the repetitive motions and delight when the patterns I’ve selected begin to emerge. There’s pene, a horizontal V-shaped pattern representing “comb” of the hair, and jarrito, which represents the small clay vessels used for toting water, and many others, each with some symbolism and often varying according to geographic region.

Historically, the designs of one village were easily recognizable and distinguishable from another, a phenomenon encouraged by the Spaniards as a means of control. Nowadays patterns and color schemes have been borrowed heavily and are less definitive of geography. Yet in remote areas it is still common to wear a locally produced huipil that proudly represents the wearer’s village, particularly when traveling to another region.

For the next few days I head out to Lidia’s village each morning on the chicken bus, an open-air school bus decorated with “Christ has risen” in glitzy letters in Spanish that hauls people and livestock from Antigua to outlying areas. Lidia’s 10- year-old daughter, Sindy, waits eagerly for my arrival, greets me with a kiss on the cheek, and holds my hand all the way to her mother’s house.

The family giggles at the cold, hard tortillas I’ve stashed in my bag for an afternoon snack and the next thing I hear is the gentle slapping sound of fresh, homemade ones being tossed back-and-forth between busy hands. The women rally around an open fire in the kitchen and lay the tortillas out on an earthen griddle.

I try my hand at tortillar, but the corn dough sticks to my fingers and my tortillas tear or end up in amoeba-like shapes. I realize again how much work it all takes. Making tortillas in Guatemala starts with gathering the corn from the fields and beating the kernels down into a crumbly meal. There are no special machines, or ready-made mixes or prepared tortillas in plastic packages. The tortillas, like the weaving, require dedicated hands.

By the end of the week my own hands have created several rows of designs, interspersed with colors like magenta, melon, sea green and gold. Lidia and her family beam with pride and praise me for my good taste in color combinations.

It has taken me roughly 16 hours to produce this small piece of work, hours in Guatemalan time and life that would have been divided between weaving, cooking, cleaning and caring for children.

The salmon-colored huipil with bunches of flowers (right) and intricate designs worn by Odelia, Lidia’s sister, took six months to make. Its heartfelt beauty and the plethora of rich colors and patterns reflect an insistent spirit and leave me without adjectives or exclamations.

On my last day in the village, Odelia happily sold it to me at a price that would probably help the entire family for some time. It hangs on my wall with my own weaving project – palos, backstrap and all – as a reminder of the patient hands that created it and those that taught my own.

Kennerly Clay is a globetrotter whose adventures include mingling with Zapotec Indians in Oaxaca, drinking bilos of kava under the full moon in Fiji, skydiving in New Zealand, koala snuggling in Australia, riding elephants in Thailand, trekking Nepal's Himalayas, shooting an AK47 in Cambodia, and dancing in the streets of Chau Doc to Santana tunes with a toothless Vietnamese grandmother.
Article originally published in Traveldish.com