The Loom and the Long War
A Guatemalan huipil identifies the town its wearer comes from, in motifs that predate the Spanish. During a thirty-six-year war in which the state was found responsible for acts of genocide, that made the cloth dangerous — and later made it the means by which the dead in clandestine graves were identified.
In a courtyard above Lake Atitlán, a woman kneels with one end of a backstrap loom tied to a post and the other end strapped around her hips. She leans back and the warp threads come taut; she leans forward and they slacken. The tension of the entire cloth is her body weight, adjusted continuously, for the several weeks it will take to complete the huipil she is weaving. The technique is older than any European presence in the Americas and has not been meaningfully improved on.
What she is making is not a garment in the sense a foreign visitor understands. The pattern identifies her town. The motifs carry meaning that predates the Spanish. And the fact that she is weaving it at all is the outcome of a survival — of a people, a language and a practice, through a war that came very close to ending all three.
Reading a huipil
Guatemala has twenty-two recognised Maya languages plus Xinka and Garífuna, and the highlands are a patchwork in which the language, the town and the textile design align almost exactly. Traditionally a woman’s huipil identified her municipality on sight — the ground colour, the arrangement of the brocade bands, the specific motifs at the shoulders and neck.
The motifs are not decorative in origin. Diamonds representing the world with the sun tracking across it; zig-zags for the plumed serpent; birds, maize plants, and figures that appear in the Popol Vuh, the K’iche’ creation text written down in the sixteenth century using Latin script to preserve what the friars were burning. Some designs are documented in Classic Maya sculpture more than a thousand years old, worn by figures carved in stone at sites now covered by forest.
The technique is brocade: supplementary weft threads worked into the cloth as it is woven, so the figure is structural rather than embroidered on afterwards. Done well, on a backstrap loom, it produces a fabric that is identical on both faces. It takes months to learn badly and years to learn properly, and it is transmitted from mother to daughter without written instruction of any kind.
Thirty-six years
The Guatemalan civil war ran from 1960 to 1996 and is the fact that stands between the highlands as they were and the highlands as they are.
Its origins are usually traced to 1954, when a CIA-backed coup removed the elected government of Jacobo Árbenz, whose land reform had proposed redistributing uncultivated holdings — including those of the United Fruit Company — to landless peasants. What followed was a succession of military governments, a small leftist insurgency, and a counter-insurgency doctrine that identified the Indigenous rural population as the insurgency’s base and acted accordingly.
The worst years were 1981 to 1983. The army’s scorched-earth campaign destroyed hundreds of villages in the Ixil region, Huehuetenango, Quiché and the Verapaces. The UN-backed Commission for Historical Clarification, reporting in 1999, documented over six hundred massacres, estimated the dead and disappeared at around two hundred thousand, found that the state was responsible for the overwhelming majority of the violations, and concluded that acts of genocide had been committed against specific Maya groups.
A million people were displaced. Tens of thousands crossed into Mexico. Whole communities were forced into model villages under military control, and men were conscripted into civil patrols that made neighbours complicit in the killing of neighbours — a wound that remains open in specific towns to this day.
The war did not only take people. It went after the things that made a people identifiable — and the cloth was one of them.
Traditional dress became dangerous, because it identified the wearer’s town, and in the counter-insurgency logic a town could be an enemy. Men across much of the highlands stopped wearing traje entirely and have not resumed; the male costume survives in only a handful of municipalities. Women largely kept it, which is why the textile tradition that survived is a female one — a fact of the war rather than of the culture.
What accountability has looked like
The 1996 peace accords included an Agreement on Identity and Rights of Indigenous Peoples that recognised Guatemala as multi-ethnic and multilingual and committed the state to protecting Indigenous languages, dress and spiritual practice. Implementation has been partial at best.
The legal reckoning has been extraordinary and unstable. In 2013 the former head of state Efraín Ríos Montt was convicted of genocide and crimes against humanity by a Guatemalan court — the first time a former head of state had been convicted of genocide in a national court anywhere. The constitutional court annulled the verdict on procedural grounds ten days later. A retrial was under way when he died in 2018.
Forensic anthropologists have exhumed clandestine graves for three decades, and the identification of remains — often by the cloth wrapped around them, since the huipil tells you which town the person came from — has returned thousands of people to their families for burial. The textile as evidence is one of the more devastating details of the whole story.
The economics of a piece of cloth
A backstrap-woven huipil represents somewhere between two and six months of intermittent work. Sold in a market to a visitor, it may fetch a price that, divided by the hours, falls well below any minimum wage.
The pressures on the tradition are ordinary and severe. Machine-made cloth printed with traditional-looking patterns is a fraction of the price and is sold widely, including to tourists who cannot tell the difference. Synthetic thread has replaced hand-spun cotton in much production. Young women migrate, or work in the maquila garment factories, or simply calculate that the return on six months of weaving does not compare with anything else available.
There has also been a long-running argument about appropriation, as international fashion brands have used Maya designs in commercial collections without permission or payment. Guatemalan weavers’ organisations have pursued legislative protection for collective intellectual property over community designs, on the grounds that a town’s pattern belongs to the town. The legal question is genuinely difficult and the moral one is not.
The functioning counterweight is the weaving cooperative. Associations in Santiago Atitlán, San Juan La Laguna, Quetzaltenango and elsewhere sell directly, pay by the piece at rates set by the weavers, and run workshops where a visitor can spend a day failing to control a loom and thereby learn what the price is actually for.
The calendar that never stopped
Alongside the loom, the other thing that survived is the count. The Maya calendrical system — the 260-day ritual cycle of thirteen numbers and twenty day-names — has been kept without interruption in parts of the Guatemalan highlands for something on the order of two and a half thousand years.
It is maintained by ajq’ijab’, daykeepers, who are trained over years and who are consulted about naming, marriage, illness, planting and dispute. Each of the twenty day-names carries a character; a person born on a given day is understood to carry it. The system runs in parallel with the Gregorian calendar in the same households, without either displacing the other.
The syncretism that resulted from four centuries of Catholic presence is unusually visible here. At Santo Tomás in Chichicastenango, ajq’ijab’ burn copal and candles on the church steps while mass is said inside, and the eighteen steps are commonly explained as corresponding to the months of the solar year. The cofradías — lay religious brotherhoods established by the Spanish to organise saint’s-day observance — became the institutions through which Maya communities preserved their own ritual leadership under a Catholic name.
Maximón, encountered by most visitors at Santiago Atitlán, is the sharpest example: a figure in a hat and tie who accepts cigarettes and aguardiente, is identified variously with a pre-Columbian deity, with Judas and with Saint Simon, and is housed by a different cofradía member each year. The Church has objected to him for four hundred years without effect.
The 1996 peace accords formally recognised Maya spirituality, and ceremonial sites have since been given legal protection. That recognition arrived after the war in which practising it openly could be lethal — which is the reason the practice went into the churches in the first place.
Where to see it honestly
Chichicastenango’s Thursday and Sunday market is the famous one, enormous and genuinely a working regional market underneath the tourist layer. Go early, before the buses.
San Juan La Laguna on Atitlán is the natural-dye town: cooperatives working with indigo, cochineal, and plant dyes, with the process shown from raw cotton onward. Santiago Atitlán has the strongest surviving traje and the shrine of Maximón, a syncretic figure who receives cigarettes and alcohol and is moved to a different household each year.
Quetzaltenango is the base for the western highlands and the K’iche’ heartland. Nebaj and the Ixil towns, harder to reach, hold both some of the most complex weaving in the country and the villages that were hit hardest in the early eighties.
The single best thing a visitor can do is buy from the person who wove it, ask how long it took, and pay without negotiating. The answer to the first question generally ends the second.
Isabella covers Latin America from the Caribbean coast of Colombia, where she was born. Ten years of reporting on post-conflict tourism have taken her from the Darién to Patagonia; her Caño Cristales feature was translated into six languages.