One of my first huipiles
When the San Antonio Smithsonian Museum in 2007 proposed featuring local collections of huipiles, indigenous tunics, I was invited to participate as well as write something for the catalog. It allowed me to think about a trip I took to Chiapas to finish my first collection of poetry. Any trip south to Mexico always brought me great surges of creativity. I thought I was going to rent a house and work alone while there, but instead my time in San Cristóbal was filled with anxiety and sadness.
Norma Alarcón and I were in a local tourist coffeehouse when we ran into a young Japanese tourist we’d recently met. She had a scratch on her face, but I didn’t think much of it until she told us her story. She said she had been visiting a church in the middle of the afternoon, and a man had raped her there. And just now in the crowded plaza, she had seen her attacker again, but by the time she found a policeman, he was long gone. This is what had happened, and this is what she told us under the shade of a lamp over a coffeehouse table.
Her testimony filled me with dread. I can’t remove that anguish from my memory of San Cristóbal. It flooded me with a thread of despair I felt while there and which I still feel almost thirty years later, as if it had just happened. As if she were still telling and telling her story.
I started wearing huipiles the summer before the big earthquake hit Mexico City. 1985. I was traveling with Norma Alarcón, first to the Mexican capital, then on a bus ride to Oaxaca, and finally to Chiapas on mountain roads so reckless and wicked, they made you instantly devout.
Before this trip, I don’t think I’d ever traveled to Mexico without my familia. Usually I was accompanied by my mother and my father, even as an adult. This isn’t as strange as it sounds. Mexicans are clannish and accustomed to traveling with family until the day they die.
To tell you the truth, I’ve always been terrified of traveling alone in Mexico the way only pochas (American mexicanas) can be terrified. Not because we know too little about this country we are visiting, but because as Mexicans from the U.S. side, we know too much. But that’s another story.
One of my first huipiles
Norma was researching the feminist writer Rosario Castellanos, who was from Chiapas, and that was why we traveled so far south, almost to the Guatemalan border. Me, I had a small grant from the Illinois Arts Council and a book to finish. There was money in my jeans pockets, purpose in my heart, and my buddy Norma to travel with.
I was homesick for a house of my own. I’d rented one in Greece a few years before, and that was where I’d finished my first book. Now I had to finish a book of poetry, and Norma’s press, Third Woman, was impatient to publish it. So it was with this idea of renting a house and borrowing a typewriter that I tagged along with her.
But Chiapas isn’t Greece. It’s mountain cold and damp, even in the summer, and one of the poorest regions of Mexico. We entered not only another country, but another time. Founded in 1528, well before Plymouth Rock, San Cristóbal de las Casas is a town of stout churches, cobbled streets, and markets filled with the most humble members of humanity—the barefooted, the cross-eyed, the harelipped: citizens from another century.
When we got there the summer of 1985, I didn’t know about the community lands stolen in the previous centuries, nor that the people would rise up soon to reclaim those lands under Subcomandante Marcos. Or about the villages flooded after dams were built to power Mexico City. Or the destruction of the rain forest.
I only knew darkness imposed a curfew. That everyone watched the latest episode of a telenovela from the few televisions available at cafés or shops. That the town was divided among the Ladinos (the non-Indian Mexicans, or Indians who had forgotten their traditional dress and language and spoke only Spanish), the tourists, and the Mayan people themselves, who were at the bottom of the social ladder (Chontales, Tzotziles, Tzeltales, Tojolabales, Mames, and Lacandones). And that, except for a small portion of midday, the weather was foggy and cold.
After a lot of asking, I did find a house for rent, a stone cottage with thick walls and windows shuttered with wood, instead of glass, that opened to a misty garden. It was charming to my eyes, but Norma asked, “How are you going to heat this place?” In Chiapas, homes are heated with wood, and their inhabitants smell of leña, fire and smoke. I lost courage and returned to my cell at the zócalo, a hotel with doors like a medieval prison and the austerity of a nunnery with none of the charm.
Back then I wore my hair short like a boy. I dressed in the same clothes I’d worn in Europe—a denim jacket and jeans, or a denim mini; a long Greek scarf wrapped twice around my neck and knotted at the throat; and, because of the cold, a beret. It was on this trip, deep in Mexico, deep in Mayan country, that I realized I was una gringa.
In the village of Chamula I visited a Mayan Catholic church smoky with copal, the earthen floor carpeted with pine needles. Women wrapped in dark shawls swayed on their knees, kids huddled quietly beside them. The devout offered eggs and bottles of Coca-Cola, and lit thin tapers, the air buzzing with their murmured prayers. Community guards watched over us to make sure we didn’t take pictures. This was a church that seemed more pagan than Christian, without pews or kneelers, with statues of saints dressed in miniature huipiles, the tunics native women have worn since before Columbus, layers and layers, one atop the other, and each wearing over all this a necklace of mirrors.
To make myself less conspicuous, less an intruder, and to be more respectful, I pulled my Greek scarf over my head and knelt too. Something holy was shimmering in the smoky air. Of this I was sure. It was one of the most sacred places I’ve ever visited, then or since.
I typed my poetry manuscript on the only typewriter-for-hire I could find—at the typing school, a storefront like any other local business with a corrugated metal curtain for a door and nothing separating the outdoors from the indoors but a high stone step. Dogs and flies wandered in freely. Lechers and enamorados lingered past and made ojitos. All the world was welcome to watch the jovencitas, girls practically, type-type-typing to earn a certificate, a ticket out of their miseria.
I typed, too. In my jean jacket and mini. I typed love poems, poems about being dumped, poems about sex and passion. If anyone knew what I was writing, I thought, they would drag me to the authorities, put me in stocks, and stone me to death. I sniffed, wiped away my tears with my Greek scarf, and typed my dirty poems among the chaste virgins, wondering under the bare lightbulbs how Destiny had brought me here to a town called San Cristóbal de las Casas, to a room noisy with typewriters, full of women, all of us young, dreaming our foolish escape.
This was when I first started buying huipiles, my first from the women’s collective of Mayan weavers, who created work of fine craftsmanship, not the cheesy stuff for sale on the U.S.-Mexico border.
I still own this first huipil, a simple cotton tunic with multicolored weavings on the neckline and red bands along the center, as beautiful as the day I bought it. Its price was the equivalent of forty U.S. dollars, and I waited a day before buying it. Forty dollars was a big bite from my arts council grant.
While in San Cristóbal, I met a Mayan woman whose name I never knew, but in my notes I called her Madame Butterfly. She sold butterflies in front of the one café where all the tourists hung out. She and her children caught the butterflies I sent home to my brother Lolo.
She was dressed in the traditional Tzotzil huipil, a heavy blouse embroidered with red, yellow, and black wool, over a wraparound skirt of indigo. And though I was wearing woolen socks and thick shoes, she was barefoot, her feet caked with mud.
Up on the mountain is where she said she lived. She pointed behind a gauzy cloud. “Up there,” she said, the fog already descending for the night. She said she had to walk and walk, tugging her little ones who were standing before me, and lugging on her back the sleeping baby.
She said they often left home in the dark and often got home in the dark. She told me all these things, and I felt sad I couldn’t invite her inside to have dinner. They wouldn’t have served her. So I bought all her butterflies, stiff and fragile as dried flowers, even the mangled ones with broken wings.
Then I found the used huipiles in shops all along the typing school street. As the daughter of an upholsterer, I know how to look at the seams and at the reverse to measure quality. By pulling the garments inside out, I could read their history.
Here was a little patch of polka-dot fabric; here a collar of embroidered flowers salvaged from some older garment; here the neckhole so narrow, I wondered how a woman ever managed to pull it over her head.
Some were finely woven with birds and flowers and animals in tight, perfect stitches. Some stitches did not look handmade, but, as the Mexicans like to say when a job is badly done, as if she had made it with her feet; no doubt a young girl in a hurry to be doing something else. Some still gave off a scent of leña. Who wore this, and why did she have to give it up? How much was she paid? And where was she now? Would a woman give up her most prized possessions unless she was desperate?
Did she have to work like Madame Butterfly because of a husband who left her with little ones? Did the civil wars of Central America force her to sell her clothes? Where did a woman like this pee when she had to relieve herself in the city? Who looked after her and her kids when she was sick? I thought all these things as I bought my first huipiles, guilty that I could afford a dozen, even with my small arts grant, and sad and sorry for the women who had to let them go.
When I got back to the hotel and showed Norma my splendors, she asked gruffly, “What are you going to do with all those?”
“I thought I could wear them,” I said without conviction. “Or maybe hang them on the walls.”
Once I got back I did hang some on walls. Then, poco a poco, little by little, I started to take them down and wear them. Only in the United States at first. Not in Mexico. Because I didn’t wish to appear disrespectful to the women who made them.
Since that trip, I’ve added to my textile collection over time, and included items from across Mexico. I’ve met other women who collect and wear these “poor women’s clothes,” because that’s what they are, clothes of the most humble segment of society.
I know it astonishes my Mexico City relatives that I dress like their servants, indígenas who come in from their villages and who wear their Indian clothes at first until they’re shamed into dressing like city folk. But on the U.S. side of the border, we take up these garments without the class and cultural restrictions of Mexico. I like to mix the Mexican garments in nontraditional ways, maybe a Tehuana huipil with a Tahitian sarong, or a Oaxacan skirt with a man’s Chiapaneco vest, to create something new, something no one in Mexico would do.*1
Nowadays, because I live in Texas, I prefer the huipiles from tierra caliente, the hot lands, especially from Oaxaca. They’re the ones I most often reach for to go to work—to write, that is. The fancy ones I save for being the Author.
For work, on the days I go barefoot, when I sometimes forget to comb my hair, when I’m anxious to forget my body and need to be comfortable, without any underclothes binding or biting me, I like my everyday huipiles de manta, of sackcloth. The ones I can stain with coffee or a taco and I won’t grieve. The ones I can throw in the wash. My Mexican muumuus, my prison clothes, my housedresses.
My spiritual mother and maestra is la Señora María Luísa Camacho de López, a walking Smithsonian of stories and information regarding Mexican folklore. I learned what I know about textiles thanks to this hija de rebocero, shawl-maker’s daughter. Several of my prize pieces once belonged to her.*2
I haven’t inherited any textiles from any of my real antepasados, ancestors, I’m sorry to say.*3 I didn’t know them. All I’ve got is a framed baby’s pillowcase my great-grandmother Victoria Rizo de Anguiano embroidered for the infant Elvira Cordero, my mother. A donkey in silk threads and the initials “E.C.”
La Señora María Luísa Camacho de López
In my antique Mexican trunks, I preserve my collection of huipiles. I like to think the huipiles I own were made by women like my grandmothers, and were, in a sense, their library.
Maybe the women of my family wove on a backstrap loom hooked to a tree in the courtyard, or maybe they embroidered in the shade, after their housework was done. And instead of writing books, which they could not do, they created a universe with designs as intricate and complex as any novel. These things I think because I can’t imagine my literary antecedents writing any other way than with needle and thread, weft and warp.
I consider the irony of being able to purchase huipiles made by women who go barefoot. Now only the most privileged North American ladies can afford to buy the museum-quality huipiles. Ladies like me.
In San Antonio there’s a group of women called “las Huipilistas,” a new class of Latinas. They’re professors, lawyers, artists, and activists who can afford to snatch up with the fervor of game hunters the very fine huipiles that cross our paths, because they’re getting harder and harder to find. In a time when 75 percent of the manufacturing industry is owned by American corporations operating in Mexico, when indigenous communities can no longer afford to stay in their villages and are forced to migrate north, the craft of these textiles may be lost altogether, and this clothing gone forever.
It’s been more than two decades since Norma and I made that trip south to San Cristóbal. Norma, the retired university professor, who favors T-shirts and sweats, hot-pink streaks in her hair, and high-top tennis shoes, recently asked me this favor: “Hey, Sandra, next time you go to Mexico, see if you can’t find me a huipil. I’d like to hang one on my wall.” That’s how it begins, I think.
Each time I wear a huipil, I’m saying, “Look, I know I can afford Neiman Marcus, but I’d rather wear an indigenous designer from Mexico, something no one else in the room will be wearing.”
I wear this textile as a way for me to resist the mexiphobia going on under the guise of Homeland Security. To acknowledge I’m not in agreement with the border vigilantes. To say I’m of las Americas, both North and South. This cloth is the flag of who I am.
*1 And here my comadre writer Liliana Valenzuela, who translates my books into Spanish, interrupts me for one moment: “Some women in Mexico City (and maybe other parts of the república) have been wearing indigenous clothing, perhaps since Frida Kahlo and other artists after the Mexican Revolution, and more recently during the ’60s, ’70s, ’80s, and probably even now, mostly in universities. I remember when wearing huipiles and blusas de manta and huaraches de cuero y suela de llanta was de rigueur when I was an anthro student in Mexico City in 1980. We were a bit unusual, but by no means the only ones doing so. We perhaps would not mix and match the items with modern or items from other countries like you do, but in all fairness, some anti-imperialist mexicanas y mexicanos have been wearing these clothes for some time, mostly with jeans. I guess it was a statement of going against the grain of current commercial fashion, solidarity with indigenous communities, coolness factor, and who knows what else.”
*2 They recently were donated to the National Museum of Mexican Art.
*3 Since writing this, I now have in my possession a shawl—rebozo de bolita—I found among my mother’s things when she died. My aunt Margaret recently gave me a Virgen de Guadalupe souvenir scarf from the 1940s that once belonged to Felipa Anguiano, my grandmother. I added these textiles to my installation “A Room of Her Own,” an altar for my mother exhibited at the National Museum of Mexican Art, Chicago; the National Hispanic Cultural Center, Albuquerque (a photo of this installation is on this page); the Smithsonian American History Museum, Washington, D.C.; and the Museum of Latin American Art, Long Beach, California.
