Chiapas is a state in southern Mexico, with the capital city of Tuxtla Gutierrez. It is home to a portion of the Mayan culture, with indigenous Mayan family languages still spoken. There is so much to say about our recent trip to Chiapas, but our personal interest in textiles will be priority in this blog post . And we are thrilled to announce that we will be back in 2023, co-leading a textile study tour with our partner Norma Schafer; if you would like to join us, please visit this link for more information and to register.
For 8 days, we learn about Chiapas culture in the beautiful San Cristobal de las Casas, which was designated as a UNESCO Creative City of Popular Art in 2015. The quickest way to get to Sancris is through the Tuxtla international airport, where you can take a shuttle for about 90 minutes into the highlands.
The main goal of this 8-day adventure is to visit master weavers, learn about textile traditions, and, of course, support artisans by purchasing directly from families and cooperatives.
We visited Tenejapa, Chamula, Zinacantan, Larrainzar, and Aldama, as well as markets and weavers’ studios, where we learned about the techniques, materials, dyes, and uses of traditional textiles. Plant and animal fibers are used to make morrales with the looping technique, cotton is used to weave rectangular panels of cloth on back-strap looms with a variety of techniques to make intricate designs on the huipiles, and treadle looms are used to weave cotton fabric. The majority of wool is hand spun and woven on backstrap looms. Oh, and there’s feather work!
Natural color is very important to us, and in the areas we visited, the use of natural dyes appears to be limited to dyeing wool, the color pallette is dictated by the variety of local plans and barks of trees, the one that caught my attention the most was this plant called cha’te’, in language Tsotsil, used in combination with mud to turn brown wool into a strong black color in the Chamula pueblo, trough a process of tree days.
The plant must be rich in tannic acid, and the mud had a strong iron odor; the combination of these two materials is the recipe for black color on fiber.
But not everything in San Cristobal is about textiles; we also had great food and pox, visited a hand made paper and print studio, and you can easily find leather work and pottery made locally.
Overall, this part of Chiapas awakens your senses and provides a better understanding of deep Mexico in the twenty-first century. Chiapas is well-known for its autonomous communities, the neo-Zapatista movement, the Lacandón jungle, and its connection to the pre-Hispanic Mayan world, which is still very much alive.
Here´s a short video of our 8 day adventure in Chiapas, enjoy!