Lords Of Atitlan

The Guatemalan tradition of weaving by back-strap loom has reached a level of sophistication in technique and design rarely rivaled. Here people wear art works, at times museum pieces. The Mayan ability to combine color and form within an individual article of clothing, and between articles of clothing, is absolute artistry. To me, the activity of weaving is as lovely as the finished product. Any day in any town or rural household, you will see women, or groups of women, standing, kneeling, or seated on the ground weaving or embroidering while chatting, joking, and breast-feeding their babies, surrounded by chickens, ducks, or turkeys and an occasional pig or cow.

Traditionally, one`s native dress (traje) identified a person´s pueblo. Even within the prescribed fashion of a particular town, however, always appeared varied patterns and styles, containing shared elements, figures, and symbols. The use of traje is far from dead around the lake, although it is diminishing, and evolving, as in the rest of indigenous Guatemala and probably all of Mesoamerica. The ladies of Santa Catarina Palopó and San Antonio Palopó have, within a generation, switched from red to blue huipiles (blouses)retaining the same general style as the originals. In most lake towns only a few quite old men still wear traje.

Women in many towns mix and match a lot. They wear huipiles from Patzún, San Martín, and Comolapa in Chimaltenango with corte (long wrap-around skirts) from Salcajá (Xela) and San Juan Sacatepéquez. They frequently combine huipiles from Huehuetenango with corte from Nebáj (Quiché), and huipiles from San Lucas Tolimán with blue tinted corte from Totonicapán. Coveted are huipiles from San Antonio Aguascalientes and Chichicastenango and wide pleated corte from Xela, but the prohibitive cost of these ítems makes them largely unattainable. Some Mayan women mix and match their clothing cross-culturally, donning traje one day and pantalón or business suits the next. Paradoxically, some who switch completely to pantalón do so to increase job opportunities and hasten social elevation, while others abandon traje simply because they can`t afford to buy it. In los Palopós, Atitlán, Concepción, and all of the many aldeas, caserios, cantons, and colonias (suburbs) which comprise the municipality of Sololá, the women, and many men too, cling steadfastly to the traje specific to that town.

Good hand-made `tipica` clothing must be washed by hand. But, whatever the style of clothing, washing is almost always done by hand, by women, in a variety of venues: private and public pilas (wash basins), rivers, the lake front, mountain streams, and plastic pipes fed from mountain streams to the plains below. Wherever I walk, I meet washerwomen, either washing or carrying tubs of wet laundry to their homes, along narrow mountain pathways or up steep village streets, often at great distance.

Nowhere is the activity of washing more festive than in the two bays of San Lucas Tolimán: las Conchitas and el Relleno. Sadly, nowhere is the ecological damage done to the lake by phosphates and plastic detergent and shampoo containers so evident. Hopefully, the answer lies in better soaps. But, today, if I were asked to take a side in the debate between the environmentalists and the washerwomen, I`d have to opt for the communal activity of washing in the lake front. The market is the center of San Lucas Tolimán on Tuesday and Sunday. But every other day the center of town, with all of its gossip and daily news, descends to the lake and to the string of tiny washing stones rimming the two bays. Note the happiness on the faces of the washerwomen in my photos, and perhaps you will agree that the practice of public washing in the lake front shouldn`t end. It must be modified.