“Picb’il”: digital repatriation and textile production as 
cultural revival in the Alta Verapaz of Guatemala. 
  
 
 
Callie Vandewiele 
Newnham College 
University of Cambridge 
31 August 2018 
  
  
  
  
 
 
 
 
 
  
 
 
 
 
 
  
 
  
This thesis is submitted  
for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Latin American Studies 
  
i 
 
To Grandma Haws,  
for believing in me always 
And to Reid,  
for lifelong friendship  
 
 
  
ii 
 
Declaration  
 
This thesis is the result of my own work and includes nothing which is the outcome of work 
done in collaboration except as declared in the Preface and specified in the text. 
It is not substantially the same as any that I have submitted, or, is being concurrently submitted 
for a degree or diploma or other qualification at the University of Cambridge or any other 
University or similar institution except as declared in the Preface and specified in the text. I 
further state that no substantial part of my thesis has already been submitted, or, is being 
concurrently submitted for any such degree, diploma or other qualification at the University of 
Cambridge or any other University or similar institution except as declared in the Preface and 
specified in the text 
Statement of Length  
I certify that this thesis does not exceed the word limit of 80,000 words, excluding footnotes 
and bibliography, prescribed by the Degree Committee of the Department of Politics and 
International Studies.  
  
 
 
Callie Vandewiele 
31 August 2018 
Cambridge 
 
 
 
  
iii 
 
Abstract 
 
“Picb’il”: digital repatriation and textile production as cultural revival in the 
Alta Verapaz of Guatemala. 
Callie Vandewiele 
 
Textile production on back strap looms in the Maya region of Central America has continued 
uninterrupted for over three thousand years. Forming the backbone of a rich cultural tradition, 
the craftwork of Maya women remains an indigenous tradition in the Maya region to survive 
the Spanish conquest and subsequent waves of violence. For Q’eqchi’ women of the Alta 
Verapaz of Guatemala, textile production not only plays an important role in continuing 
indigenous culture, but also contributes to family and community economic life. 
 
As artefacts of cultural production, Maya textiles are integral to collections across the world, 
and museums and academic institutions have sought after them since at least the mid-nineteenth 
century. In many cases, these collected textile objects have been divorced from their context. 
The names of the artists, and even the communities in which they were produced, have been 
forgotten or unrecorded. Contemporary groups and communities of Maya weavers often 
remain unaware that historic textile objects from their culture and communities are being held 
in museums in the United States, Europe and elsewhere. 
 
This PhD research hinges on encounters between contemporary indigenous weavers in the 
Q’eqchi’ communities around Cobán in the Alta Verapaz of Guatemala and historic museum 
textiles by means of the visual repatriation of picb’il textiles; specifically, high-quality 
photographs of textiles in the collections of the University of Cambridge, the University of 
Oxford, and the University of California, Berkeley. This has resulted in weavers not only 
experiencing what they described during interviews as connections to their communities’ past 
and ancestors, but also reproducing lost textile patterns by copying the patterns present in 
museum textiles, which they did not recognise as being woven by modern weavers.  
 
Relying on extensive interviews with weavers and local community members, I juxtapose the 
history of picb’il weaving in the region with the role that master weavers, or weaving teachers, 
play in the continuation of picb’il affecting weaving in local communities. The thesis elucidates 
how national or international markets and vendors affects the ability of communities to 
continue relying on textiles as part of the women’s income, as well as engaging with the role 
that textile collectors and museum buyers played in regional textile production in the past.  
 
The first chapter is a short history of the region in which I worked. The Q’eqchi’ weavers I 
interviewed live in a complex and difficult political environment, one whose history is violent. 
This chapter seeks to situate the history of picb’il within the history of the Alta Verapaz as 
experienced and perceived by my informants. It includes a specific history of two of the 
communities in which I worked most closely with informants.  
 
The second chapter covers the methodology used during the course of the PhD, including the 
research design process that led to the adoption of the methodology and the challenges that 
arose in the field. This necessitated a reconfiguration of the research model to ensure that it 
suited the circumstances. It is in this chapter that I address the concept of visual repatriation as 
part of a field research model. The third chapter addresses the role of gender in Q’eqchi’ 
iv 
 
communities and the role of weavers as gendered actors. This chapter draws from 
anthropological research and focuses on the way in which picb’il textile production is a 
gendered act of cultural preservation. The fourth chapter is an ethnographic overview of the 
picb’il textile and its cultural and ethnographic value. In this chapter, I address the construction 
of the textile as well as its spiritual and ontological significance to the communities where it is 
produced.  
 
In the fifth chapter, I address the impact of international and tourist markets on picb’il 
production in the Alta Verapaz while considering the future of the textile as these markets 
continue to grow or potentially collapse. This chapter examines past “booms” and “busts” of 
picb’il production, and what may have driven those changes. The sixth chapter is on intangible 
cultural heritage and the reactions of the weavers and other informants I worked with to the 
museum textiles I visually repatriated. In this chapter, I address the value of visual repatriation 
and the role that visual repatriation can have in the preservation and recovery of disappearing 
or lost cultural heritage.  
 
The final chapter encompasses the museum aspect of my work, including the value of engaging 
with museum objects in anthropological fieldwork and the impact that museums have had on 
the preservation of objects such as picb’il textiles. In this chapter, I address the role that 
previous researchers and collectors may have played in picb’il production.  
 
As a whole, this thesis further examines the ways in which museums by means of their 
collections can engage with and be perceived by source communities and ethnographers 
working both within and outside the museum world. Through this research, it became apparent 
that weavers and local communities have a distinctive interest in museum textiles as being 
physical connections to a shared Maya heritage in the region. Community members and 
weavers view these textiles as tools that can be used to recover lost heritage, and repair cultural 
damage from colonisation and the ensuing centuries of violence and genocide. 
  
  
  
  
v 
 
Acknowledgements  
 
It is a pleasure and an honour to recognise the community who have surrounded me during my 
time in Cambridge and in Guatemala. They have made this doctoral thesis possible. A PhD is 
more difficult a process than even the most aware students can know, and I could not have 
accomplished this without the support of more people than I can name here. Visibly present or 
not, their voices are echoed in this work. 
 
First and foremost, I cannot offer enough gratitude to my supervisor, Dr Francoise Barbira-
Freedman. She took me on as a student in 2014 after unforeseen circumstances left me at the 
beginning of my PhD without my planned supervisor. Despite my multidisciplinary 
background and winding path to academia, Francoise saw potential in my work. Her patience 
and support as I have learned (sometimes despite my own stubbornness) have been invaluable. 
Her open-minded approach to her own work and commitment to academic excellence are 
values I hope to emulate throughout my career. She has truly been a caring and committed 
guide and mentor. 
 
Without my advisor, Dr Susanna Rostas, I would have lost my way more than once over the 
course of the last four years. Susanna’s insight and feedback have shaped this thesis from the 
first day, and her willingness to share her expertise from her fieldwork in Central America were 
key to my successful fieldwork in 2016. Susanna’s support, and copious amounts of Yorkshire 
workingman’s tea, have kept me afloat through the various ups and downs and held me to 
account during weeks when I was not sure I was able to finish a PhD. I cannot thank her enough 
for the time, energy, patience and grace that she has given me. 
 
To Joanna, Julie and Chriselia: Your support through the Centre for Latin American Studies 
was incalculable. Thank you for fostering such a welcoming space without letting us lose sight 
of our academic aspirations and standards. Truly, a gargantuan task could not be done better. 
The greatest regret of my PhD will always be that I did not work more hours in the centre. To 
say that CLAS is the warmest research group in Cambridge is an understatement.  
 
This thesis would not have been possible without the financial support from the Gates 
Cambridge Scholarship and the administrative support of the Gates Cambridge Trust. Thank 
you to the small but dedicated team at the Trust, the devoted members of the Board of Trustees, 
and the generous Gates family.  
 
The research done was also supported by funding generously supplied by POLIS and Newnham 
College and the collection of a museum textile for the MAA at Cambridge was made possible 
by the Crowther-Beynon fund. I thank them for providing me with the resources necessary to 
complete this work. 
 
At a very young age I learned that as you leave every place, a part of your heart stays there, 
and you learn, as you grow, that none of us can live or work in isolation; what we accomplish 
is truly the sum of the support that our communities provide us. Thank you to my Cambridge 
‘places’: The Gates Cambridge Scholars: you have made me believe in myself; to the 
Newnham College MCR, college staff and college fellows--especially Emma Mawdsley, Jenny 
Manders and Kate Fleet. I never imagined I would have a home so far from my own, and 
Newnham has proven to be not only a safe place to grow, but one that adopted me in every 
sense of the word: a special thanks to Penny and the Development Staff. Rachel, and the 
vi 
 
curatorial staff at the MAA for opening the museums to volunteers and students—you have 
given me a community I have cherished and something to look forward to each week.  
 
Gracias a la familia Fernández-Tello en San Juan Chamelco. Sandra, en 2008 cuando me dijiste 
que había ganado una segunda madre, nunca lo dudé. Con cada año pasado en Guatemala, eso 
se vuelve más cierto. Gracias a Fredy, para alguin con quien puede tomar un cafecito en Cobán, 
y ultimamente, Margarita Beb: amiga, traductora, segunda hermana, gracias para invitarme a 
su vida. 
 
Moving across a continent and an ocean was made worthwhile by the friends who have made 
Cambridge home, and given me a meaningful community filled with exemplary models to 
follow: Jenna, Owen, Ally, Farhana, Laura, Angie, Annalise, Joanna, Danny, Xander, Vince, 
Jake, Annika, Arif, Collin, Zoe, Eva, Yung In, Charlotte, Alex and Margaret.  
 
Thank you to all the friends and PhD student colleagues who have swapped chapters and 
articles and drafts over the years, but especially Yung In (who read the whole thing, start to 
finish), Farhana and Laura who provided my viva prep, Annalise who skimmed more drafts of 
things than I can count, Victoria, Marc, Kevin, Joanna, Sam, Magali and Jenna who all read 
various chapters, paragraphs and endless re-writes.  
 
Martha Rampton and Jules Boykoff: you taught me that the academy does not need to be 
isolated from the world. Chris Wilkes, you believed a small-town girl and transfer student from 
a community college could find a place in that academy. Without you, as teachers and role 
models who believed in me, I could not be here. Thank you to my friends back in Portland 
Oregon (Kelley & Gigi especially) and the improv community who taught me I could take 
risks.  
 
To my mother, Sherie, who raised me to think without bounds, and my siblings, Reid, Terra, 
Dane, Hailey and Whitney for being my first community of inquiring minds. 
 
Nelis, during the course of finishing my PhD, I’ve learned that you are not my rock. You are 
my whole god-damned mountain. I genuinely cannot thank you enough for your ongoing 
support and partnership.  
 
Choq’reheb’ laj kemonel re Alta Verapaz, li xe’ xk’uluk we chi anchal xch’ooleb’: b’antyox. 
Wi ink’a’ raj xextz’aqon, li k’anjel a’in moko xruhan taraj, choq’re qana’ Rosario Coy ut li 
xjunkab’lal: laa k’anjel re xk’eeb’al xyu’am li naka b’aanu naxk’e xkawub’ inch’ool. Jwal nim 
xwankil laak’anjel. (Translation: to the women of the Alta Verapaz, who opened their homes 
to me: thank you. Without your hospitality and kindness this research would not be possible, 
but especially to Rosario Coy and her family: your commitment to maintaining your history is 
an inspiration. One that deserves recognition.)  
 
And of course, to my translators, Esperanza, Margarita and Maria Elena, without your guidance 
I would have been lost in more ways than one. Bantiox, xik a we, hulaj chiq. 
 
Finally, as a Newnhamite especially, I know that a generation ago my place here would have 
been all but impossible. It is only now possible because of the hard work and activism of others 
that I am able to do more than imagine this kind of work. Thank you to all the scholars and 
activists who widened the door to the academy to let me in. I would not be here without you, 
and I will do all that I can to help wedge it open a little wider for those who come after me.   
vii 
 
Table of Contents 
Declaration .......................................................................................................................................... ii 
Abstract .............................................................................................................................................. iii 
Acknowledgements ............................................................................................................................. v 
Table of Contents .............................................................................................................................. vii 
Figures & Tables ............................................................................................................................... iix 
Glossary .............................................................................................................................................. x 
Abbreviations .................................................................................................................................... xii 
Introduction ............................................................................................................................................. 1 
Chapter One: Land of True Peace: A Brief History of the Alta Verapaz ............................................... 8 
BUILT GEOGRAPHY ............................................................................................................................. 8 
SAMAC & THE Q’EQCHI’ COOPERATIVES .......................................................................................... 13 
GENERAL HISTORY ............................................................................................................................ 14 
HE OF THE FIVE THREADS: SAN JUAN CHAMELCO IN THE LATE SIXTEENTH AND EARLY 
SEVENTEENTH CENTURY ............................................................................................................... 15 
THE LIBERAL REVOLUTION & GERMAN SETTLERS OF COBÁN ...................................................... 16 
US ECONOMIC INTEREST ................................................................................................................ 18 
LOCAL EXPERIENCES ..................................................................................................................... 27 
POST-2000 ..................................................................................................................................... 30 
RISE OF THE PAN-MAYA MOVEMENT ............................................................................................... 31 
THE COOPERATIVES TODAY .......................................................................................................... 32 
Chapter Two: Engaging with the weavers: Methods & Field Research. .............................................. 35 
MUSEUMS AND THEIR RELATIONSHIPS TO SOURCE COMMUNITIES ................................................... 37 
VISUAL REPATRIATION ..................................................................................................................... 40 
SURVEY DESIGN ................................................................................................................................ 42 
INTERVIEW DESIGNS & MATERIALITY ......................................................................................... 45 
FIELDWORK ................................................................................................................................... 49 
ORGANISATION ................................................................................................................................. 53 
WORKING WITH TRANSLATORS..................................................................................................... 55 
FIELDWORK CHANGES TO DATA CHALLENGES ............................................................................. 55 
CONCLUSIONS & DISCUSSION ........................................................................................................... 56 
Chapter Three: ‘li ixq ut li winq’: Gender in the Aldeas ...................................................................... 58 
CONTEMPORARY Q’EQCHI’ ............................................................................................................... 61 
CORN PLANTING ............................................................................................................................ 66 
GENDER AND THE LIFE CYCLE ...................................................................................................... 67 
GENDER, FAMILY, LANGUAGE AND IDENTITY ............................................................................... 72 
THROUGHOUT LIFE ........................................................................................................................ 72 
viii 
 
GENDERED IDENTITY AND POLITICAL EXPRESSION ...................................................................... 74 
RABIN AJAW ..................................................................................................................................... 78 
Chapter Four: “Nuestro Traje:” Picb’il textiles of the Q’eqchi’ ........................................................... 85 
PICB’IL, THE COBANERA AND THE PROCESS OF WEAVING ................................................................ 90 
LEARNING TO WEAVE ........................................................................................................................ 95 
TEXTILE PATTERNS ........................................................................................................................... 99 
ONTOLOGICAL SIGNIFICANCE ......................................................................................................... 100 
TEXTILE PATTERNS WOVEN IN CONJUNCTION: ............................................................................... 110 
Chapter Five: Expansions and Contractions: International Textile Markets and the Cooperatives of the 
Alta Verapaz. ...................................................................................................................................... 115 
HOME PRODUCTION AND IMPORTED TEXTILES 1930-1950 ............................................................. 116 
THE COLLECTORS’ MARKET, GENOCIDE AND RESISTANCE 1950-1980: DOÑA LESLIE HEMPSTEAD & 
QANA ROSARIO COY ....................................................................................................................... 118 
THE COLLECTORS’ MARKET ........................................................................................................ 123 
1990 - 2015...................................................................................................................................... 125 
INDIGENOUS ARTS IN SANTA FE: THE INTERNATIONAL FOLK ARTS MARKET (IFAM) ............... 128 
COMMUNITY DIVISIONS .............................................................................................................. 132 
NETWORKS .................................................................................................................................. 135 
TEXTILE MARKET TODAY ............................................................................................................ 136 
IMPACT OF INCOME ......................................................................................................................... 137 
Chapter Six: Our Grandmothers’ Huipils: Museums as Time Capsules. ............................................ 140 
WEAVERS ENCOUNTERING MUSEUM TEXTILES .............................................................................. 143 
MUSEUM OBJECTS AND THEIR HOMES: TRACING CHANGE.............................................................. 152 
EARLY COLLECTORS OF PICB’IL TEXTILES ...................................................................................... 148 
MUSEUM OBJECTS ACROSS TEMPORAL DISTANCE .......................................................................... 154 
MUSEUMS AS BORDER SPACES WITHIN TIME .............................................................................. 155 
Q’EQCHI’ CONCEPTIONS OF TIME ................................................................................................ 158 
MUSEUMS & REPATRIATION MOVING FORWARD ............................................................................ 161 
DIGITAL REPATRIATION IN THE ALTA VERAPAZ ............................................................................ 163 
CONCLUSIONS & DISCUSSION ......................................................................................................... 164 
Conclusion .......................................................................................................................................... 167 
HERITAGE AND MUSEUMS: BRIDGING THE PAST AND PRESENT ...................................................... 170 
Bibliography ....................................................................................................................................... 183 
Appendix A ......................................................................................................................................... 193 
Appendix B ......................................................................................................................................... 197 
Appendix C ......................................................................................................................................... 198 
 
ix 
 
Figures & Tables  
 
CHAPTER 1 
FIGURE 1.1: MAP OF GUATEMALA WITH THE ALTA VERAPAZ OUTLINED ................................................................ 9 
FIGURE 1.2: MAP OF THE MUNICIPALITIES WITHIN THE ALTA VERAPAZ .................................................................. 9 
 
Chapter 2 
FIGURE 2.1 MUSEUM OBJECT ACCESSION NUMBER 1962.151, MAA, UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE. ...................... 43 
FIGURE 2.2 PITT RIVERS MUSEUM OBJECT ACCESSION NUMBER 1946.6.54 PICB’IL MAYA TEXTILE. .................... 43 
FIGURE 2.3 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY, HEARST MUSEUM, MUSEUM NUMBER 3-29591.. ............... 44 
FIGURE 2.4: ROUGH MAP OF COMMUNITIES IN WHICH FIELDWORK WAS CONDUCTED ........................................... 50 
 
CHAPTER 3 
FIGURE 3.1 LADY SIX SKY OF NARANJO DEPICTED ON STELA 24 .......................................................................... 60 
FIGURE 3.2 BREAKDOWN OF WEAVER AGE OVERALL ............................................................................................ 70 
FIGURE 3.3 BREAKDOWN OF WEAVER AGE IN SANTA MARÍA ................................................................................ 70 
FIGURE 3.4 BREAKDOWN OF WEAVER AGE IN SAMAC ........................................................................................... 71 
 
CHAPTER 4 
FIGURE 4.1 IXIL HUIPIL FROM THE COTZAL REGION NEAR THE BAJA VERAPAZ. ................................................... 86 
FIGURE 4.2 POQOMCHI HUIPIL FROM THE TACTIC MUNICIPALITY. NEIGHBOURING MUNICIPALITY TO COBAN..... 86 
FIGURE 4.3 MANUFACTURED LACE HUIPIL IN THE STYLE OF THE ALTA VERAPAZ CIRCA 2016. ............................ 87 
FIGURE 4.4 HANDWOVEN CALADA HUIPIL IN THE STYLE OF THE ALTA VERAPAZ. ............................................... 87 
FIGURE 4.5 HANDWOVEN PICB’IL HUIPIL PRODUCED BY MARGARITA POOU IN 2016. .......................................... 87 
FIGURE 4.6 : CRISTINA MACZ, A Q’EQCHI’ WOMAN, WEARING HER TRADITIONAL PICB’IL HUIPIL ......................... 90 
FIGURE 4.7 PICB’IL LOOM IN PROCESS. .................................................................................................................. 92 
FIGURE 4.8 MAYA VASE ILLUSTRATING SHEER TEXTILE. ...................................................................................... 93 
FIGURE 4.9 KAQCHIKEL WOMAN WEAVING IN SAN ANTONIOS AGUAS CALIENTES AUGUST 2016 ........................ 94 
FIGURE 4.10 BAR GRAPH INDICATING RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN WEAVERS AND THEIR TEACHERS. ...................... 96 
TABLE 4.1 PICB’IL PATTERNS .............................................................................................................................. .102 
TABLE 4.2 PICB’IL PATTERNS WOVEN IN CONJUNCTION ....................................................................................... 110 
FIGURE 4.11 TEXTILE ILLUSTRATION OF PATTERNS AS INTERPRETED BY DON CA’AL. ........................................ 112 
 
CHAPTER 5 
FIGURE 5.1 CHART OF WEAVING HERITAGE. ........................................................................................................ 121 
FIGURE 5.2 SCATTER PLOT OF WEAVING KNOWLEDGE ACQUISITION FROM 1950-PRESENT DAY .......................... 122 
 
CHAPTER 6 
FIGURE 6.1: HISTORIC PICB’IL PATTERN MUSEUM OBJECT NUMBER 3-28120 HEARST MUSEUM CONTRASTED WITH 
CONTEMPORARY TEXTILE ........................................................................................................................... 146 
FIGURE 6.2: HISTORIC PICB’IL PATTERN MUSEUM OBJECT NUMBER 3-28126 AT THE HEARST MUSEUM 
CONTRASTED WITH CONTEMPORARY TEXTILE ............................................................................................ 146 
FIGURE 6.3: MUSEUM CATALOGUE CARD FOR MUSEUM OBJECT 3-28126 AT THE HEARST MUSEUM AT THE 
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA BERKELEY. ................................................................................................... 150 
FIGURE 6.4: MUSEUM OBJECT NUMBER 3-28126 AT THE HEARST MUSEUM AT THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA 
BERKELEY. ................................................................................................................................................. 151 
 
x 
 
Glossary 
 
Note: Q’eqchi’ terms, Spanish words used by my informants as Q’eqchi’ terms, or other words 
from Maya languages, will be italicised unless they are part of a book or article title or inside 
of a quote. 
 
Ajaw: Leader/king 
 
Barrio: Local neighbourhood 
 
Calada: A style of weaving common to the Alta Verapaz 
 
Cofradía: Catholic ‘brotherhood’ of community leaders. 
 
Corte: Maya woman's skirt. Traditionally woven on a floor loom  
 
Eb’: Pluralisation of Q’eqchi’ words 
 
Huipil: Maya woman's blouse  
 
Hunabku: Unified god spirit 
 
Ixq: Woman 
 
Ixb’alam: The moon goddess 
 
Junkab’al: Q'eqchi’ kinship group, usually bound by blood or shared work ties 
 
Junta de directive: Group of directors; cooperative leadership unit 
 
Kayajil: Community market 
 
Kej: Deer 
 
Kemok: Verb: to weave 
 
Milpa: Corn and bean patch, owned and tended to by family groups and essential both to 
sustenance and the cultural life of the junkab’al 
 
Nixtamal: Ground corn mixed with water for preparing tortillas 
 
Picb’il: White sheer weave with inlaid designs  
 
P’ot: Q’eqchi’ translation of huipil 
 
Pueblo: Community or village 
 
xi 
 
Qana: A respectful term for an older woman, best translated as ‘grandmother.’ Often used as 
a title 
 
Rabin: Daughter 
 
Rabin Ajaw: Daughter of the King. Title of Guatemala’s indigenous beauty pageant, and title 
of the annual winner  
 
Tenamit: Community or town 
 
Traje: Indigenous Maya clothing or costume specific to geographic regions and linguistic 
groups 
 
Tzot: A white sheer textile similar in construction to picb’il but lacking inlaid designs  
 
Tzuultaq’a: Mountain spirits 
 
Winq: Man 
 
Xorok: Verb: to make tortillas (an important daily activity for women)  
 
Xul: Animal, usually wild and associated with the uninhabited land around villages  
 
 
  
xii 
 
 
Abbreviations 
 
CEDEPCA: The Protestant Center for Pastoral Studies in Central America (El Centro Evangélico 
de Estudios Pastorales en Centroamérica) 
 
CFICH: Convention for Intangible Cultural Heritage (UNESCO) 
 
CIA: United States Central Intelligence Agency 
 
CREOMPAZ: Regional Training Command for Peacekeeping Operations (Comando Regional de  
Entrenamiento de Operaciones de Mantenimiento de Paz)  
 
EGP: The Guerrilla Army of the Poor (Ejército Guerrillero de los Pobres) 
 
FEDECOVERA: Federation of Cooperatives of the Verapaces (Federación de Cooperativas de las 
Verapaces) 
  
FGEI: Edgar Ibarra Guerrilla Front, Guatemala (Frente Guerrillero Edgar Ibarro) 
 
IFAA: International Folk Art Alliance 
 
IFAM: International Folk Arts Market 
 
MAA: Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of Cambridge 
 
NAGPRA: North American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (1990) 
 
NGO: Non-Governmental Organisation 
 
ORPA: Revolutionary Organisation of the People in Arms. (Organización Revolucionario del 
Pueblo en Armas) 
 
PGT: The Guatemalan Party of Labour (Partido Guatemalteco del Trabajo) 
 
REMHI: Recovery of Historical Memory Project (Recuperación de la Memoria Histórica)  
UNESCO: The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization 
 
USAID: United States Agency for International Development  
 
WWII: World War II. 
 
1 
 
Introduction 
 
About the Moon. Ixb’alam. She is our grandmother. Because she was a weaver. But 
once she was a young woman. Ixb’ej in her father’s house. She wove every day, sitting 
on the porch under the roof. She would weave in the morning and in the evening. Using 
a candle as the light faded. It is bad luck to weave when the sun has set. But she did 
anyway. Perhaps she did not know. Or maybe it was not bad luck in that time. One day 
a young man, the Sun, passed by the house at dusk and saw Ixb’alam weaving in the 
candlelight at the corner of her house. He whistled, but Ixb’alam did not turn to see, 
because she was bent over her weaving, watching the thread grow. The Sun shouted, 
“Look here.” But Ixb’alam did not look, it was dark and she needed to concentrate to 
see her weaving in the light of the candle.1  
 
It is the end of August, 2016. I am sitting outside a long wooden board house with a packed 
earth floor. We are shelling corn with our thumbs for the tortillas which will make up most of 
our dinner. Anna Magdalena, matriarch to the family of seven children and four grandchildren, 
holds her youngest grandson in her lap while she tells the story of Ixb’alam, the first weaver, 
and her lover, the Sun. Anna Magdalena does not weave. However, each of her daughters does, 
as do most of the younger women in her isolated community of Santa María, just outside Cobán 
in the Alta Verapaz region of Guatemala. The story of Ixb’alam, as a myth centred on the 
experience of a young woman, is a defining part of how Anna Magdalena, and the half dozen 
other women who shared this legend with me situate the work of women weavers as culturally 
central to the life of Q’eqchi’ communities and Q’eqchi’ people. 
Huipils (or blouses), woven in the picb’il style set the Q’eqchi’ women who wear them 
apart, not only from Ladino2 women, but also from other Maya women. Throughout the 
Guatemalan highlands, textiles play an important role in the production of cultural identity. 
Women weave these blouses, or huipils, on back strap looms and each huipil ties its weaver 
and wearer to a specific language, region and even village. In the Alta Verapaz, the traditional 
huipils are made up of three panels of picb’il, a white sheer fabric, incorporating traditional 
designs inlaid into the textile, which are folded over and stitched together with a space cut out 
for the collar.3 Picb’il huipils are visual markers of indigeneity, a signal to the women who 
                                                          
1The story of Ixb’alam was told to me by weavers in all the communities where I researched (field notes 2016). 
2A Guatemalan term to refer to Hispanic non-indigenous Guatemalans with Hispanic ancestry.  
3While many texts, particularly in the textile marketing world, refer to picb’il and similar textiles as ‘gauze’ 
these textiles are best classed as ‘open weave’ or ‘sheer.’ In this text these textiles, as well as archaeological 
samples or images where the weave structure is unclear, will be referred to as ‘open weave’ or ‘sheer.’ For a 
technical description of the structure of gauze textiles please see Irene Emery’s work The Primary Structure of 
Fabrics. An Illustrated Classification (1980 [1966]: 180-192).  
2 
 
wear them and the Ladino society they are surrounded by that Li Q’eqchi’, the Q’eqchi’ people, 
continue not only to exist but also to assert their identities in the Alta Verapaz of Guatemala.  
Picb’il textile production, once common across the Alta Verapaz, is today limited to a 
handful of communities and approximately two hundred and fifty weavers. Once disappearing, 
the tradition has experienced a series of mini-renaissances since the late 1970s. Today, the 
average age of a picb’il weaver is twenty-two and nearly two thirds of all remaining picb’il 
weavers live in three isolated communities near Cobán. Over fifty of these weavers can trace 
how they learned to weave back to a single woman who taught a large number of women to 
weave during the 1980s and 1990s. With the exceptions of her students, most women learn 
from relatives or in-laws. Weaving has been a part of her family’s economic income over 
generations. 
Through ethnographic and interview-based work this thesis examines, first the value of 
picb’il weaving as part of a Q’eqchi’ specific heritage in the Alta Verapaz, and secondly, the 
value that digitally or photographically repatriated museum textiles can have to contemporary 
weaving communities. It posits that during the time period of my field research picb’il weaving 
was experiencing a shift in local value due to the introduction of significant international 
markets, and that the heritage value of museum and contemporary textiles can be of enormous 
importance to communities re-establishing lost heritage in the wake of suppression or violence. 
As a part of this research, I carried out a photographic repatriation of picb’il textile patterns in 
these same communities and found great interest on the part of community members in 
increased access to museum textiles through a variety of venues. 
In a country where textiles have served, at least since the conquest, as markers of 
indigenous identity, this particular style of weaving is deeply connected to a pre-Hispanic past 
and culture, and greatly enmeshed with the economic futures of families where women weave 
it. For women picb’il serves as a connection between the past and present, and an anchor 
allowing weavers and indigenous women to philosophically and emotionally situate 
themselves in a tapestry of the history of not only Q’eqchi’ women, but Maya people as a 
whole.  
The Q’eqchi’ language, which originated sometime between 500 and 750 AD, is among 
the oldest of the living modern Maya dialects. Spoken by just under a million people living 
across the western highlands of Guatemala in the departments of Alta Verapaz, Baja Verapaz, 
Izabal, and Petén, along with regions of southern Belize and Chiapas México, Q’eqchi’ remains 
the third largest Maya language still spoken and has the largest group of monolingual 
indigenous speakers in Central America (Wichman & Hull 2009: 877). Cobán, the centre of 
3 
 
the Q’eqchi’ world, is a centre for indigenous identity, political activism, and a base for cultural 
activity.  
Politically, the Q’eqchi’ are one of the strongest Maya groups in Guatemala, and 
recognised as one of the most autonomous as well as, on and off, one of the most persecuted 
(Wichman & Hull 2009: 876). At the time of conquest, the Q’eqchi’ nation was described by 
a historian in the era as “...feroz y bárbara e imposible de domar y sujetar” (“ferocious and 
barbarous and impossible to pacify and subjugate”) (Remesal 1966[1619]: 311). The Spanish 
were less successful in subduing the Alta Verapaz compared to other regions of Guatemala, 
and eventually had to concede to local demands that priests and missionaries be the only 
outsiders allowed in the region. As a result, the Q’eqchi’ retained some semblance of autonomy 
for an extended period, including the instalment of the first indigenous governor for the Spanish 
crown in the Americas at the end of the 16th century in the figure of Don Juan Matalbatz (Aj 
po’op b’atz’) (Weeks 1997: 62; Kockelman 2003: 46). 
 Today the Q’eqchi’ conserve a rich cultural heritage and continue to make up a 
majority of the population within the department of the Alta Verapaz, thus ensuring that 
Q’eqchi’ remains the preferred daily language in Cobán, where Spanish is also widely spoken. 
In the outlying towns of San Pedro Carchá and San Juan Chamelco the vast majority of people 
speak Q’eqchi’ as their first, and often only, language. The Ladino population of the Alta 
Verapaz has grown exponentially since the end of Guatemala’s civil war in 1996, but despite 
this the Q’eqchi’ language remains an essential part of daily life, necessary for most 
professional positions and participation in local ceremonies and holidays. There is a strong 
sense in the local municipal centres that while the powerful elected positions are held by 
Ladinos, las comunidades, or ‘the communities’ voting power is considered significant and 
important. The Q’eqchi’, like most modern Maya groups today, feel a deep connection to the 
ancient Maya of the past. While many Ladinos refuse to recognise even genetic links between 
modern and ancient Maya,4 the Pan-Maya movement and many Maya communities publicly 
espouse this connection between themselves and the people they refer to as “nuestros 
antepasados,” or “those who came before us.” Contemporary Maya communities use cultural 
and spiritual traditions, shared with the ancient Maya, to authenticate claims to indigenous 
heritage, land rights and control of the commodification of Maya traditions, textiles crafts and 
other artefacts. 
                                                          
4One educated Ladino informant, when presented with an article on Maya linguistic links between proto-Maya 
and Q’eqchi’, responded by asking incredulously, “Do you really want me to believe that the great people who 
built those temples and those cities are the ancestors of people like Pedro Ca’al who sells corn down the street?”  
4 
 
The vast majority of Q’eqchi’ women in the region continue to wear traditional 
clothing, or traje, on a daily basis. This includes the heavy, sturdily woven cotton skirts (or 
cortes) belted with a braided cord, and loose lacy huipils designed in the style of picb’il, 
although often colourful and sewn from machine produced lace fabrics. For more formal events 
and special ceremonies (weddings, burial, etc.), women use more expensive traditional traje 
such as picb’il. The picb’il weavers of the Alta Verapaz make up a small, but significant, 
number of women whose skill as weavers situate them in the centres of both this cultural 
continuity through clothing, and an international textile market. At the core of this, are the 
weavers in Samac, Santo Domingo and Santa María; nearly all of whom have access to selling 
textiles in tourist markets in Antigua, and outside Guatemala at the International Folk Arts 
Market in Santa Fe, New Mexico. 
These weavers are connected to historic weavers through the traditional knowledge that 
they share. Historic textiles, some of which are owned and preserved by museums, can also 
provide a connection with the past. This thesis investigates both of these connections. It is 
driven by the voices of the women who shared their opinions, their histories, their houses, their 
language, their food, their chickens, and their time with me during both my first period in 
Guatemala in 2008-2009, and during my second year in 2016. During the fieldwork for my 
PhD I conducted semi-structured interviews with over ninety picb’il weavers in the Alta 
Verapaz and worked closely with master weavers and community leaders in four indigenous 
communities to conduct historical research and situate this textile tradition. For this research, I 
coordinated with FEDECOVERA,5 a ‘cooperative of cooperatives’ and local organisation 
representing indigenous rights. I interviewed winners and local participants in Guatemala’s 
indigenous beauty pageant, Rabin Ajaw and also attended the International Folk Arts Market 
(IFAM) in Santa Fe to learn more about the international market of picb’il textiles. Furthermore, 
I interned as a volunteer on a semi-weekly basis at the Museum of Archaeology and 
Anthropology (MAA) at Cambridge and travelled to Berkeley California to interview weaving 
experts and volunteers involved in the Hearst Museum.6 This research casts light on the value 
and importance of picb’il textiles and furthers understanding of the connections between 
museum objects and source communities. 
The first chapter of my thesis is a brief history of the Alta Verapaz. Guatemala, today 
home to over twenty-six indigenous groups as well as a large Ladino population which has a 
                                                          
5Federation of Cooperatives of the Verapaces. 
6Closed at the time of my visit for earthquake safety structural fittings. 
5 
 
complicated and difficult history—arguably, many disparate complicated and difficult 
histories. This chapter seeks to provide background information on the national and local 
environment for these weavers and their communities. It will elucidate the major changes that 
have impacted the community life of the weavers I work with and their ancestors. 
The second chapter includes an overview of my research methodology, including the 
photographic repatriation of historic textiles to the communities in which I worked. It traces 
the unexpected challenges I faced during my research as the project expanded from 
interviewing around two dozen weavers in one community to over ninety in eight communities. 
It is here that I establish ontological links between contemporary communities and historic 
textiles and begin to engage with digital repatriation. 
Chapters three and four come directly from the interview and participant observation 
stages of my fieldwork. They establish the importance of gender in Q’eqchi’ life and of picb’il 
in the Alta Verapaz. These chapters lay the groundwork for chapter five, which addresses 
current changes in textile production driven by international market demand, as well as 
engaging with the stresses that a significant international marketplace puts on tightly knit 
isolated communities in the region. 
The final chapter (six) looks at the role of museums and collectors in Guatemalan textile 
collections in the west today, and the theoretical arguments for museums continuing to engage 
in outreach work and in digital and virtual repatriations. It seeks to pair the lens of the museum 
with that of contemporary Q’eqchi’ weavers.  
The conclusion addresses the views of my informants on those museums and their 
desire to be more engaged with historic textiles held in museum collections. I also offer 
thoughts on strategies that museums could engage in for similar research in the future as well 
as reflecting on the tools already available to museums and communities pursuing digital or 
virtual repatriation projects. 
This thesis relies on extensive ethnographic research for its theoretical grounding. The 
value of both contemporary and historic picb’il textiles is rooted in the methodologies of value 
employed by weavers and their community members. To that end, as a researcher, I have sought 
to interweave the narratives shared with me, of community history and life, with those 
documented by other researchers and historians. I have aimed to honour the ways in which the 
weavers and communities that I have worked with understand and situate themselves within 
Guatemala and the world without losing sight of the standards set by the academic community. 
Many of the stories shared with me are deeply personal in nature, and I have honoured 
the requests of individuals to use pseudonyms when requested, as will be noted in the text. As 
6 
 
some of this thesis deals with community conflict around access to markets and international 
sales, including deep divisions within small and tight-knit families, I have sought to represent 
the situation as best I can and as needed for the clarity of this research, while honouring the 
privacy of my informants and respecting the sensitive nature of some of the information shared 
with me. 
While I was carrying out fieldwork, a member of one of the communities, and one of 
the informants I spent the most time with, was able to rebury the remains of her father which 
were identified five years after they were discovered in a mass grave on a nearby military base. 
During the days leading up to the ceremony and funeral, and in those after, several of my 
informants shared personal and graphic accounts of the community violence that they suffered 
during Guatemala’s genocide. I have chosen to leave these accounts out of my thesis as they 
are only peripherally related to my research and they were shared during community events to 
which I was invited as a friend and observer, rather than as a researcher. Other researchers, 
notably Daniel Wilkinson and Kristen Weld, have gained permission to share direct and 
detailed stories of the kind of violence evinced by the Civil War and genocide, and for a deeper 
understanding of the direct impact this period had on communities I cannot recommend their 
work highly enough.  
 Through this ethnography I also seek to contribute to the process of decolonisation of 
museums, and to follow in the footsteps of community involvement and participation as 
modelled by forward thinking institutions such as the Museum of Archaeology and 
Anthropology (MAA) at the University of Cambridge and the intellectual work done on the 
creation of knowledge through museum ethnographies by researchers such as Kavita Singh, 
Margot Blum Schevill, and Amiria Henare.  
Much of my research work has come to fall under the unintentional auspices of what 
R. Gross refers to as ‘intellectual activism’ (although I prefer the term ‘intellectual academic’) 
in The Independent Scholar’s Handbook (1995). Following in the model of Robert R. Janes, I 
seek to “…make existing knowledge more accessible, understandable and useful to others.” 
Janes justifies this work by stating that “…intellectual activism creates the conditions for fresh 
discoveries through the conjunction of challenging ideas, or stimulates others to discover” 
(2008: 23). As will be seen in my first chapter, my research did not at first set out to create 
spaces of encounter, but through the nature of the data collected, and the responses of my 
informants, it has done exactly that. 
This thesis establishes the value of digital or photographic repatriation of textile objects, 
sometimes too fragile to be moved, to source communities. It posits that museum objects 
7 
 
themselves can be central in the production of, or continuation of heritage. It establishes that 
for the weavers of the Alta Verapaz, the information contained within museum textiles is 
invaluable. That as a repository of lost history, these objects facilitate the connection which 
Maya people seek to have with long-dead ancestors and as such can authenticate the 
continuation or re-establishment of a disappearing heritage.  
8 
 
Chapter One: Land of True Peace: A Brief History of the Alta 
Verapaz 
 
The Sun was enchanted by Ixb’alam. She was a woman and she was a worker and a 
weaver. So he started passing by her house each day as he went to hunt. But Ixb’alam 
rarely looked up from her weaving. And the Sun became embarrassed. Some days he 
returned from his hunts with deer, or other animals and other days he walked by 
Ixb’alam’s house with nothing. His hunting bag empty. He was ashamed on those days. 
And so he filled the skin of a deer with ashes, so that every day he could pass by her 
house carrying back a trophy. 
 
But Ixb’alam was not fooled by the Sun.  
 
BUILT GEOGRAPHY 
 
To fully understand the decline and re-development of picb’il weaving in the Alta Verapaz, it 
is important to situate the textile historically before we situate it socio-culturally and 
economically. The communities in which I conducted interviews fall into three categories: 
Municipalidades, Aldeas, and Cooperativas, and are all in the department, or state, of the Alta 
Verapaz of Guatemala. Located at the northern end of the Guatemalan Highlands, the Alta 
Verapaz serves as a border between the more populous south of the country and the jungle 
lowlands of the Petén. The region is geographically isolated, the main road from Guatemala 
City finally being paved in the early 2000s. Economically it is the second poorest of 
Guatemala’s departments and one of the least developed areas in the Central American region. 
Travel from Guatemala City to Cobán, the regional capital can take anywhere from six to 18 
hours, depending on traffic, accidents, mudslides, etc. Roads are frequently blocked, and coach 
drivers are killed on a semi-regular basis by drug gangs who run extortion rings using the threat 
of violence to ensure regular payments of ‘safety fees.’ Between the high cost of travel, and 
the relative risk, travelling south out of the region is rare for most people living in the smaller 
villages. 
9 
 
 Well off the ‘beaten path’ of Guatemala’s tourist 
destinations, visiting the Alta Verapaz involves 
using local ‘chicken buses,’ or the Monja Blanca, 
a regional line which transits between Guatemala 
City and the Cobán area. It is unusual to encounter 
another gringa or gringo, particularly working in 
non-urban areas. While there has historically been 
a USAID and Peace Corps presence in the region, 
most foreign residents or visitors are missionaries 
or mission groups from Evangelical or Protestant 
churches. Within the Alta Verapaz, local regional 
and municipal governmental structures often have 
a more significant impact on the lives of 
communities than does the Guatemalan national 
government.  
 
REGIONAL GOVERNMENTAL STRUCTURES 
 
Municipalidades (Municipalities) are larger 
towns that serve as the civic and regional 
centres for sub-departments in the larger 
department of the Alta Verapaz. The four 
major Municipalities in which picb’il textiles 
are produced are: Cobán (urban pop. 94,300), 
Chisec (urban pop. 12,755), San Pedro 
Carchá (urban pop. 11,941), and San Juan 
Chamelco (urban pop. 11,944) (Cobán 
Municipal Office). 
These towns serve as markets and 
cultural centres for the outlying municipal 
areas and aldeas. People living in the 
Figure 1.1: Map of Guatemala with the Alta Verapaz 
highlighted. 
Source: Wikimedia Commons. 
 
Figure 1.2: Map of the municipalities within the Alta Verapaz. 
Source: gifex.com political maps. 
 
10 
 
municipal centres have access to electricity, trash service, running water,1 good cell service, 
and even the Internet. Most people living in the municipal centres are engaged in the wage 
economy, and many have better access to education than those living in the aldeas or outlying 
rural areas. As the urban centres are also the locations of most major markets, or kayill eb’, 
they serve as nexi at which the Q’eqchi’ communities interact. Q’eqchi’ remains the first 
language for all four municipalities. However, for individuals living in the municipal centres, 
a working command of the Spanish language has become increasingly important since the end 
of the civil war as a trade language.  
Aldeas (Villages) are semi-rural communities that usually comprise two hundred 
households or less, aldeas are the most traditional Q’eqchi’ community type still in existence. 
Most aldeas have access to communal running water, but very few have regular electricity or 
cell service, and almost none have paved access roads or internet service of any kind. Q’eqchi’ 
aldeas are primarily monolingual, and education is only provided up to the sixth grade. The 
aldeas make up the overall rural populations of the municipal areas: Cobán (rural pop. 
156,375), Chisec (rural pop. 56,550), San Pedro Carchá (rural pop. 136,393), and San Juan 
Chamelco (rural pop. unknown2) (Cobán Municipal Office). 
To this day, the community structure of the aldea is organised around a council of 
community elders, who act as leaders with responsibility for settling disputes, managing 
community issues, and liaising with outsiders (Guatemalteco or Gringo) about access to a 
community or community members. Aldea groups have their own spaces in the larger 
municipal markets where they vend together. Often a van or pickup truck is owned communally 
by the aldea or a handful of members provide transportation in areas where public transit is 
non-existent. All aldeas in the Alta Verapaz have Catholic churches (always painted white), 
while priests oversee between eight and ten congregations, placing daily services and weekly 
activities under the care of Cofradías and their members.3 More recently, evangelical churches 
have been making inroads to Q’eqchi’ communities, and their brightly coloured church 
buildings are beginning to appear throughout the Alta Verapaz. These evangelical churches are 
far less tolerant of Maya spiritual practice than the Catholic Church, and often the presence of 
                                                          
1Running water is disappearing throughout the Alta Verapaz because of the drought conditions. However, the 
infrastructure remains. 
2I was unable to find reputable data on the San Juan Chamelco municipal population, and the two census 
workers I spoke with in the Alta Verapaz commented on the ‘unfriendliness’ of Chamelco communities to 
government documentation and the municipal office in San Juan Chamelco did not have population statistics to 
hand during any of my repeated visits. 
3A Cofradía is a group of Catholic lay parishioners within a community who care for a church, its saints and the 
community’s celebrations and ceremonies. Local Cofradías use traditional ceremonial indigenous dress, or 
traje, and are often community leaders. Both men and women can be members of Cofradías.  
11 
 
an evangelical minister in a traditional community leads to extended conflict between 
evangelical congregations and local practitioners of Maya spirituality. Evangelisation is, in 
many ways, the new face of economic development and cultural repression.  
The aldeas of the Alta Verapaz are viewed with distrust by many Ladino elites in 
Guatemala City and even in the municipal centres because extrajudicial justice is not 
uncommon. Labelled as “lynchings” by outsiders and by the national press, these events are 
often referred to as “trials” within the communities and are highly structured processes of 
justice that occur outside the Guatemalan government’s purview. The “trials” often take several 
days to complete, involve many community witnesses giving either testimony or opinion, and 
conclude with some kind of punishment, usually corporal, for the “convicted.” On rare 
occasions, the “trials” end in extrajudicial executions (Sharp 2012). Communities have killed 
Ladinos from other regions of Guatemala, international tourists, and members of their own or 
neighbouring communities (Weston 2011: 79). Ongoing Maya spiritual practice and the 
existence of justice systems outside the state’s purview are evidence of spaces outside Ladino 
power and control that have been created in many Q’eqchi’ aldeas.4  
 Cooperativas (Cooperatives) are landowning communities that earn income using the 
land that they live on. In the early 1970s, two Guatemalan governments, under President 
Colonel Carlos Osorio and Brigadier General Kjell García, attempted minor land reform in 
some of the outlying departments of Guatemala as a response to ongoing civil unrest. As a part 
of this reform, unfarmed but fertile land owned by the Guatemalan government, particularly in 
the Alta Verapaz and Quetzaltenango regions, was given to indigenous communities living on 
that land to form agricultural cooperatives. Many of these tracts of land were former German 
plantations that had been confiscated in the early 1940s when US interests forced many German 
families to flee Central America (Kinzer & Schlesinger 2000: 39-42).5 The establishment of 
cooperatives was designed to pacify indigenous communities thought to be supporting the 
guerrilla movements throughout the western highlands and to serve as an unspoken form of 
grievance redress for communities who had lived in virtual slavery since the mid-nineteenth 
century. Communities were given hope for a future that was more secure than serving as 
                                                          
4A handful of aldeas (Campat and Chamil, notably) have grown into communities that better resemble towns than 
they do aldeas and, in the case of Chamil, have begun to agitate for their own political autonomy as a Municipality.  
5The US government was concerned about the presence of Nazi sympathisers on the North American continent 
and sought to force all German speaking and/or German allied people out of the region. These fears may not 
have been unfounded, as the largest Nazi party in the western hemisphere was in Guatemala (Friedman 2003). 
12 
 
migrant labourers picking coffee, sugar, or cardamom on large fincas (or farms) in the lowlands 
(Interview FEDECOVERA staff member June 2016).6  
Because of their differing histories and structures, weavers in municipalities, aldeas, 
and cooperatives have had varying levels of access to local and foreign markets, and 
Guatemala’s turbulent twentieth century has impacted each type of community differently. The 
three cooperatives which I worked with were located in a small geographic region outside 
Cobán, on land that once belonged to a single German finca owner, Gustav Helmreich, from 
the mid-1880s until his death in the early 1930s. As a result, much of their recent history is 
similar or shared.  
One of the cooperatives formed during this period in the Alta Verapaz was the 
community of Samac, which was granted ownership of large tracts of lands around the village 
to farm coffee and cardamom. By the 1980s, most of these communities, including Samac, had 
again been dispossessed as Guatemala's civil war escalated under the government of General 
Ríos Montt to an all-out war on indigenous individuals and communities. This war went far 
beyond simply stripping land ownership from these recently created cooperatives; in most 
cases, armed forces destroyed town centres and forced households and families to abandon the 
community, with members either spending the remainder of the 1980s in forced resettlement 
villages run by the Guatemalan military or surviving in the Guatemalan highlands (McClintock 
1985: 132-135; Interview Samac Community President Francisco Ca’al). 
As a part of the 1996 Peace Accords, communities that had been granted cooperative 
ownership of agricultural lands were allowed to return to their homes and to re-establish their 
cooperatives (FEDECOVERA Interview). Other communities were allowed to purchase land, or 
petition for land grants to form new cooperatives (Santo Domingo de las Cuevas and Santa 
María among them) (field notes 2010). The cooperative model in the Alta Verapaz is a 
structured and formalised version of the aldea community model. Individuals have access to, 
or ownership of, a small parcel of land where they live and grow milpa (a combination crop of 
corn and beans). The community as a whole takes turns sharing labour for cash crops, which 
are usually coffee and cardamom. Community councils are elected for periods of between one 
and three years. These councils, which include a president and secretary, not only oversee the 
financial functioning of the cooperative but also manage internal disputes and serve as 
gatekeepers or arbiters between the cooperatives and the outside world. While the offices are 
elected positions within the community, these elections are often simply a legitimisation for 
                                                          
6Many of my FEDECOVERA contacts requested anonymity. 
13 
 
government officials of an informal power-sharing governance model used by communities in 
which elders essentially take ‘turns’ in specific leadership roles.  
In the Alta Verapaz, most of the cooperatives are members of FEDECOVERA, a 
“cooperative of cooperatives” that serves as a liaison between cooperatives and the Guatemalan 
government, foreign investors, researchers, etc. FEDECOVERA is much hated by finca owners 
and the local elite within the Cobán region, as it is an organisation perceived as inflexible and 
blamed for driving wages up and encouraging worker agitation. FEDECOVERA employees and 
cooperative members were victims of targeted disappearances and massacres during the 
Guatemalan civil war (as were many organised labour groups). As a result, cooperative 
members appear more likely than individuals living in aldeas to have been victims of violence 
during the war (field notes 2016).  
 
SAMAC & THE Q’EQCHI’ COOPERATIVES 
 
Today the Q’eqchi’ of the Alta Verapaz are proud of their long history of resistance and have 
a reputation among the Ladino population for intractability. While San Juan Chamelco is the 
historic centre of the Q’eqchi’ region, Cobán was made the municipal seat by the earliest 
Spanish conquistadors and rulers and has remained so since. During fieldwork I conducted 
interviews with picb’il weavers in a variety of communities. In San Juan Chamelco and San 
Pedro Carchá municipalities, I interviewed weavers in their homes. In the Cobán municipality, 
the only places where there are women who still weave picb’il are three Q’eqchi’ cooperatives 
(Samac, Santa María & Santo Domingo) to the south of the city. I was able to conduct extensive 
interviews in all three cooperatives.  
Villagers in these cooperatives share a close and interlinked history. Samac, the largest 
and best organised of the three, is now a coffee cooperative. It first appears in historical records 
when the land (and its inhabitants) were granted to a German entrepreneur, Gustav Helmreich, 
in the late 1870s as a potential coffee plantation and cardamom farm. Helmreich was one of 
many Germans migrating to Guatemala during this era on the promise of cheap or free land 
and ‘affordable labour.’ By the beginning of WWII Guatemala’s Nazi Party was the largest in 
the western hemisphere and the German School in Cobán was one of the best in the region. 
Although details of Samac’s specific history during this era are scarce it is evident from historic 
photographs, and the ruins of a sprawling plantation house, a series of gravestones written in 
German dating from the 1880s to the 1930s, the remains of a nineteenth-century coffee mill, 
and a Catholic hermitage, that the Helmreich farm was extensive and productive. Local oral 
14 
 
tradition indicates that a majority of the current families living in the Samac Coffee 
Cooperative today believe that their grandparents or great grandparents “worked for the 
Germans,” and that their great-great-grandparents lived in the same region, but were not 
affiliated with los alemanes (the Germans). Land ownership reverted to the Guatemalan 
government sometime between the 1930s and 1950s with the death of the Helmreichs and the 
eviction of many other German residents of the Alta Verapaz to Europe during World War II 
(Friedman 2003: 115-120). It remains unclear how many, if any, of the residents of Samac, 
Santa María, or Santo Domingo were directly impacted by the Agrarian Reform Law of the 
1950s through the gifting of a land grant. 
In 1972 (or 1973) the coffee cooperative of Samac was officially formed. The 
Guatemalan government was under extreme pressure to re-engage the population after the 
bloodshed of the 1960s, and the formation of cooperatives in high-conflict areas was used as a 
strategy to pacify populations seen as volatile. The land was granted to a collective group of 
citizens who formed a cooperative board of directors to manage the development and 
agricultural production of coffee and cardamom. Those directors travelled regularly to 
Guatemala City for government training in agricultural practices—which they were required 
to complete before they could receive an official land grant (oral history Samac Community 
Council 2008). 
 
GENERAL HISTORY 
 
Prior to the 1520s, Q’eqchi’ speaking people were concentrated mostly in what is today the 
Alta and Baja Verapaz of Guatemala. There is evidence that the municipality of San Juan 
Chamelco served as the population epicentre and important trading town of the Q’eqchi’ region 
in the Post Classic era, prior to the conquest (Kistler 2013b: 285). After the 1519 arrival of the 
Spanish in what is present-day Guatemala, the Maya of the Baja and Alta Verapaz fought 
fiercely to protect their region. By the 1530s, the highland mountains of Central Guatemala 
had gained a violent reputation that led the governor of Guatemala, Alonso de Maldonado, to 
call the region “the land of war.” Governor de Maldonado all but gave up on traditional 
conquest of the region because of the high casualty rates he faced each time he sent soldiers 
into the mountains of the Alta and Baja Verapaz. Dominican friar and pacifist, San Bartolomé 
de las Casas, seeking a more peaceful form of conquest in regions known for their intractability, 
chose the Alta Verapaz of Guatemala for an experiment in colonisation through Catholic 
missions in the mid-1530s. Las Casas led a team of Dominican friars who established mission 
15 
 
centres and began converting indigenous people. This effort led to the construction of a series 
of churches (many still standing today) and a new nickname for the region: “eternal peace,” or 
Verapaz (Wagner 1967). 
 
HE OF THE FIVE THREADS: SAN JUAN CHAMELCO IN THE LATE SIXTEENTH AND EARLY 
SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
S. Ashley Kistler has done a great deal of work specifically on the San Juan Chamelco-centric, 
historical understanding of the conquest period (late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries), 
particularly examining the history and legends surrounding the life of the first indigenous 
governor of the Alta Verapaz, Aj Po’op Bat’z, known in Spanish as Don Juan Matalbatz. 
Kistler’s documentation of Q’eqchi’ understandings of this history through the legend of Aj 
Po’op B’atz, or the Leader of the Five Threads, provides a counter-narrative to the Spanish 
story of conquest. It is a story that local Chamelqueños are often eager to share when asked, as 
this particular narrative gives the Q’eqchi’ pueblo as a whole, and Chamelco specifically, a 
sense of agency and control over what surely must have been a harrowing time period. 
Aj Po’op B’atz was born in a cave after the tzuultaq’a (mountain spirits) of the 
Verapaces saw the death of Q’eqchi’ leader Tecun Uman. They realised that while the defeat 
of “li q’eqchi’,” or “the people,” was inevitable, it was necessary that the people should not 
forget who they were, or else cease to be in contact with the tzuultaq’a (mountain spirits). Aj 
Po’op B’atz was born to guide the Q’eqchi’ in such a way that their military defeat did not 
mean the end of their being Q’eqchi’. He was known as a man who meditated, often in caves, 
communicating regularly with the tzuultaq’a. When he was appointed the “chief of chieftains” 
of the Q’eqchi’, it was on the advice of the mountain spirits that he converted to Catholicism 
after convincing his fellow chieftains to allow the Dominicans into the Alta Verapaz (Kistler 
2013b). 
According to the story told within the communities, Aj Po’op B’atz was appointed 
governor of the Alta Verapaz as a Catholic and sent to Spain as a representative of the local 
Maya to meet the Spanish king. Mirroring other indigenous/European encounter-stories, Aj 
Po’op B’atz’ is said to have refused to kneel before the Spanish ruler, instead greeting him as 
one king to another. Rather than punishing him, the Spanish king gifted Aj Po’op B’atz with 
three bells, to be hung in the church in San Juan Chamelco. In a twist of magical realism,7 the 
                                                          
7Very much in the vein of Márquez, Esquivel, Allende, Borges and others. 
16 
 
Q’eqchi’ leader grew sick from the boat’s movements, and meditated. During his meditation, 
he asked the tzuultaq’a he knew in the spirit realm if he could travel through their world, under 
the earth, to return home. His request was granted. So Aj Po’op B’atz took the bells into the 
spirit world. Two of them he brought to San Juan Chamelco, the third he left under the ground, 
between the two worlds, in case one of the first two should ever break. It pushed up the earth 
above it into a bell shape with its impatience to ring, and now sits under the town of “Sa 
Campana” (within the bell). Aj Po’op B’atz did not die. He was instead re-absorbed into the 
earth while meditating in a cave outside of present-day Chamil, deep in the mountains, after 
the eb’tzuultaq’a were satisfied that the people (li Q’eqchi’) would not forget them and that 
while conquest had been inevitable, the destruction of the history and belief that made some 
people Q’eqchi’ would not be (Kistler 2013b; field interview Margarita Beb 2016).  
For many Chamelqueños, this alternative history of the conquest of the Alta Verapaz 
re-centres the Q’eqchi’ experience as the dominant narrative in a clash of cultures. It valorises 
Q’eqchi’ spirituality while providing Q’eqchi’ Catholics with an ontological and personal 
justification for engaging in a plurality of spiritual practices. This narrative also places the 
geography of the Alta Verapaz at the forefront of Q’eqchi’ survival. Li eb’tzuultaq’a, the 
mountain spirits, ensured the survival of the Q’eqchi’ way of life at the time of conquest by 
providing the Q’eqchi’ with a “third way.” Contemporary Q’eqchi’ people can then establish 
their indigenous identities by seeking out innovative and ever-evolving methods of cultural 
survival, which include the integration of external philosophies and lifestyles—not to the 
detriment of being Q’eqchi’, but as a tool to ensure the continuation of the culture.  
 
THE LIBERAL REVOLUTION & GERMAN SETTLERS OF COBÁN 
  
It was during President Barrios’ “Liberal Revolution” shortly after 1871, that the government 
opened Guatemalan land to external immigrants, specifically Germans, for settlement and 
cheap purchase. Upon arrival in the region, these immigrants could expect to become plantation 
owners in exchange for “developing” the regions in which they were granted land by the 
Guatemalan government. Much of the land that they were granted was inhabited. Communities 
and villages farmed and lived on land throughout Guatemala without land titles or recognition 
of ownership. This was especially true in the Verapaces.  
From the 1870s to the early twentieth century, German immigrants drove the production 
of a coffee industry in the highlands of Guatemala, concentrated in and around the Mam 
highland city of Quetzaltenango and the Q’eqchi’ city of Cobán. These immigrants included 
17 
 
not only Gustav Helmreich but also Rodolfo Dieseldorff, and the Reich family,8 all of whom, 
or their descendants, would directly play a role in the picb’il production of the Alta Verapaz 
(field notes 2010 & 2016). As one of the first German families in the region, the Dieseldorffs 
gained control of vast tracts of land around Cobán and Carchá, much of which they still own 
today. They have been particularly influential due to their financial capital and the land they 
own and control in the region (Falcón 1970).  
The presence of German landowners is remembered as a very distinctive time by 
community members across the Alta Verapaz. Elderly weavers in Samac reported that the local 
“patrón” would not allow women to weave as it took up too much working time. One weaver 
surmised (repeatedly) that perhaps the only reason women in Samac did not remember their 
grandmothers weaving was because of this ban on textile production. All the older interviewees 
in areas owned by German finca owners, have distinct memories of the presence of German 
plantation owners in the Alta Verapaz. Weavers’ grandmothers were born before the Germans 
came, and their grandchildren were born after the Germans left. Community members are 
acutely aware of the economic success that the fincas experienced, and of the fact that the 
workers were in no way beneficiaries.  
As an older weaver told me of her very young childhood:9 
 
I was nine before I had shoes, because the owner (el dueño) paid 
the men nothing. My mother and my father would both go pick 
coffee all day for him, and we could barely eat, let alone buy 
things like shoes or pay for a bus or pick-up truck to take us to 
the market. So we walked, with our bare feet.  
 
The presence of German landowners in the communities has left an indelible mark, and 
stands as a complicated layer of colonisation in the Alta Verapaz. As many German immigrants 
arrived in the 1880s and 1890s to take advantage of land grants, the relationship between 
coloniser and colonised was renegotiated around land ownership at the turn of the twentieth 
century. Some German landowners married or had children with indigenous women, and the 
presence of a German Mestizo community in the Alta Verapaz still exists today. Many older 
community members in the cooperatives where I worked are the children of people who lived 
and worked on the German plantations, often directly for Helmreich.  
                                                          
8About the latter I can find little data. 
9In an unrecorded personal conversation during which she did allow me to take notes. 
18 
 
The elders of Samac talk about their village having existed before the Germans arrived. 
One informant in Samac stated that her grandfather had been born “before el dueño” and that 
Samac had been a village before it became a German finca. When asked about the community 
history, members of the Poou family—the children and grandchildren of one of the current 
cooperatives founders—spoke first and foremost of how both men and women were forced to 
grow and harvest coffee for the “right” to stay in their houses and grow their own milpa. The 
community attitude towards los alemanes (the Germans) is however somewhat ambivalent.  
They tell stories of families who could not afford to buy food or fix broken houses; of 
men working long hours picking coffee and having their fingers chopped off if they were 
suspected of stealing. Women were not allowed to weave so that they would have more time 
to pick coffee and contribute to the finca’s economic production, and instead were forced to 
purchase imported huipils through the coffee finca itself. Stories of horrific punishments and 
evictions likely served to help keep local populations docile on individual fincas throughout 
this era.  
Everyone I spoke with agreed that living standards in the community as a whole had 
improved (“we have shoes now,” “we sell our own crops,” “we have a school”), but many 
remembered Helmreich and his wife almost fondly. Their graves, well cared for and recently 
re-entombed in concrete, still sit on a hill overlooking the long flat valley that the cooperative 
centre occupies next to the plantation house. This house, the visual epitome of the economic 
and power differential between los dueños y los mayas in the community is today crumbling to 
the ground. 
 
US ECONOMIC INTEREST 
 
The history of the communities does not exist in a vacuum, and much of the upheaval and 
violence suffered in Samac and Santa María can be traced to national conflicts in Guatemala, 
and international interference by the United States. Around the turn of the twentieth century, 
the United Fruit Company, along with the Standard Fruit Company (now Dole), had begun to 
wield major influence throughout Central America. As the Monroe Doctrine10 became 
entrenched in US political theory, these companies brought with them the might of the US 
military, as well as economic and governing force (Grandin 2000). 
                                                          
10A political ideal from the 1820s in which the United States laid out an interest in the politics of neighbouring 
countries on the American continent as direct interest to the United States, specifically outlining a moral obligation 
to intervene if any European nation became involved in Latin American politics (Sexton 2011). 
19 
 
During this time, Guatemala’s infrastructure was completely redeveloped. A railway 
system was created (with a huge push from the Germans in Cobán and Quetzaltenango)11 and 
telegraph lines were extended across the nation: many of these improvements were funded and 
owned by major US firms or German interests. During the Estrada presidency, crackdowns on 
indigenous peoples and communities were particularly harsh. If men failed to work their 
“allotted” time on private, usually foreign-owned fincas, they could be jailed or forced into 
labour with their families evicted from their homes. The legacy of this instability continues in 
land rights battles to this day, with communities continuing to fight to regain or maintain 
control of land on which they have lived for generations.  
In 1931 Jorge Ubico won the presidency in an uncontested election and began a fifteen-
year authoritarian rule. As one of the generals in Guatemala’s army, Ubico quickly conformed 
with his predecessors’ support of US corporate interests in Guatemala and further suppressed 
labour organisers and indigenous community leaders. Having cut his teeth in Guatemalan 
political leadership as the governor of the Alta Verapaz, by the time he took the presidency he 
already had a reputation for cracking down on crime, dealing ruthlessly with the Maya, and 
urbanising rural communities (De Los Rios 1948). 
Pledging a “march toward civilisation,” Ubico imagined himself as Napoleon and 
garnered the nickname “Little Napoleon of the Tropics” (De Los Ríos 1948). He routinely wore 
his general’s uniform and militarised Guatemala’s civil services. He sought to create an 
“efficient” government and ruthlessly pursued that goal. During Ubico’s fifteen-year tenure, 
the United Fruit Company became the most powerful company in Guatemala, and perhaps the 
most influential company in Central America. Import duties were dropped, and the Ubico 
government offered a variety of tax exemptions.  
By the early 1940s, Ubico’s policies had led to widespread unrest. Members of 
Guatemala’s growing middle class—made up of newly fledged intellectuals and 
professionals—formed a successful uprising that led to Ubico’s resignation from office. 
Eventually Guatemalan activists gathered enough support across the nation and from 
sympathetic groups in neighbouring Central American states to overthrow the government. Led 
by Jacobo Árbenz they assaulted the national palace. As a result, in 1944 Guatemala had its 
first truly democratic election. In October of that year a decade-long period known as 
Guatemala’s “Democratic Spring” began, as Juan José Arévalo won the presidential election 
                                                          
11To the extent that German descendants living in Cobán today take full responsibility for the building of a 
railroad and believe that their eviction from the region is the direct reason the railroad was dismantled. 
20 
 
(Kinzer & Schlesinger 2000: 29-32). Riding a wave of popular support, Arévalo immediately 
set out to institute major reforms in the minimum wage, education, suffrage, and labour. Before 
even reaching the mid-term of his presidency, Arévalo found himself at odds with the US 
government, the United Fruit Company, Guatemala’s old elite, and the Catholic Church due to 
massive land reforms (Kinzer & Schlesinger 2000: 32-40).  
By the time WWII was in full swing, the US had pressured Guatemala into deporting 
many of its German-Guatemalan citizens and freezing the accounts and lands of those 
remaining. While some Germans would return to Guatemala after the war and regain control 
of the land they had been granted, most would not. In the post-war years, the impact of the 
Germans in Guatemala was significantly limited in comparison to the past (Friedman 2003). 
Despite its populist undertones, many of Arévalo’s reforms did little to impact 
Guatemala’s agricultural labourers and indigenous peasantry, which made up the bulk of the 
population, especially in the Alta Verapaz. He was slapped with the label “communist” and 
faced over twenty-five attempted coups during his short term in office, many funded by the 
United States (Kinzer & Schlesinger 2000). That unrest, and the accompanying rhetoric thrown 
at the Arévalo government from US corporate and other international interests, was not enough 
to derail the course of Guatemala's future and, in 1951, Jacobo Árbenz—hero of the 
revolution—was elected to the presidency in a landslide. Árbenz did more than simply continue 
the reforms started by Arévalo in the 1940s. He set his sights higher and pushed through a piece 
of legislation designed to help bring Guatemala’s poor agricultural workers and indigenous 
people forward as equal members of the nation’s economy. He passed a law that would become 
known as Decree 900 (17 June 1952). This land reform act had the potential, or so he and his 
supporters believed, to change the landscape of Guatemala both literally and figuratively 
(Kinzer & Schlesinger 2000: 54-56). This law, despite its short-lived existence, is perceived 
locally as having had long-lasting impact on regions such as the Alta Verapaz, where a glimpse 
of the possibility of land ownership sparked a new cooperative movement later in the 1960s 
and 1970s. Margarita Poou, local weaver, daughter of a “cooperatavista,” and founding 
member of Samac, spoke frankly during interviews about the value of land ownership: 
 
[My father] went every month into Guatemala City with some of 
the other founding members. They had no money and all the 
families would help send them. They would not give us our land 
if they did not go to workshops and trainings. Sometimes they 
had to walk from here into Cobán during the night, before they 
could get to the city. Before this we worked the coffee, but 
earned nothing. But my father knew owning the land our parents 
21 
 
and grandparents had worked on would mean we would not be 
so poor. (Interview Margarita Poou June 2016)  
 
Decree 900 legislated that unused parcels of land sized two hundred and twenty-four 
acres or larger would be divvied up and redistributed to local agricultural workers—mostly 
indigenous peoples. Landowners were compensated the stated tax value of the land with 
government bonds, which could be exchanged for cash. Between 1,500 and 1,700 estates were 
divided among almost a half a million families, or about one-sixth of Guatemala's population 
at the time. In a nation where, at the time of Árbenz’s election, 2% of the population had control 
over 70% of the arable land, of which only 12% was being cultivated, agrarian reform had the 
potential to remake Guatemala as a nation. Árbenz and his liberal government saw a 
redistribution of wealth and capital as essential for moving Guatemala from a feudal economy 
to a capitalist economy, and in the brief eighteen months that the law was in effect, it 
revolutionised Guatemala and the lives of many Guatemalans. Called “one of the most 
potentially successful land reforms in history,” Decree 900 was the first major attempt in 
Central America to jumpstart an economy by re-enfranchising indigenous communities and 
families who had been deprived of land or autonomy since the Spanish conquest. In addition, 
Decree 900 had the potential to skyrocket Guatemala's agricultural output, since only unused 
land was to be redistributed (Kinzer & Schlesinger 2000: 52).  
With the advent of Decree 900 and the beginning of land transfers, the idea of land 
ownership as an achievable goal for campesinos living in villages across Guatemala began to 
be realised. For the first time, communities and individuals saw that it was possible to shift 
political will and government mechanism into land redistribution for indigenous peoples. The 
idea of land ownership paired with traditional cooperative lifestyles led small communities to 
begin pursuing the legal ownership of the land upon which they had lived for generations, and 
planted the seed of the idea that the aldeas and communities of the highlands were not 
inevitably shackled to an exploitative relationship with large landowners in order to continue 
living in their homes.  
The United Fruit Company, displeased with the loss of 600,000 acres in Guatemala’s 
Boca Costa region, brought a complaint home to the US Department of State, presenting Árbenz 
as a communist sympathiser and the land reforms as Soviet outreach into the Americas. The 
United Fruit Company was joined by other major corporate interests such as the Wm. Wrigley 
Jr. Company in boycotting certain Guatemala exports in protest of the land reform and lobbying 
the US government to intervene and bring “democracy” to Guatemala. In 1953, the Central 
22 
 
Intelligence Agency (CIA) began a steady, and powerful, campaign against the Guatemalan 
state. Enlisting Guatemalan military exiles and funnelling hundreds of thousands of dollars into 
smear campaigns against the Guatemalan government, the CIA established, bit by bit, the 
building blocks for a US-funded and -led coup (Cullather 2006). 
The CIA’s campaign, with covert support first from Truman’s White House, then 
Eisenhower’s, was a multi-tiered paramilitary operation aimed at ending Guatemala's 
“democratic spring” and reinstating a political structure that was friendly to US corporate 
interests in the region. An ex-military leader, Colonel Castillo, who was living in exile at the 
time of the uprising, was handpicked to lead the coup d’état, which resulted in the overthrow 
of Guatemala’s government. Facing increasing military threat in the early 1950s, and with 
nowhere to turn, the Guatemalan government purchased armaments from Czechoslovakia in 
1953, an act that was widely portrayed in western media and throughout Central America as 
proof that Guatemala was in league with the Soviet Union, thus planting Guatemala squarely 
opposite the United States in geopolitical terms (Cullather 2006: 77-82).12  
Lawmakers in the US pointed directly to the Monroe Doctrine as evidence that the CIA 
and US military actions in Central America were not only warranted, but also justified in the 
face of what they called a “communist revolution” in the “backyard” of the US. This in turn 
led to an increase in domestic support for US military involvement not just in Guatemala, but 
across Central America. As 1954 dawned, tensions between the United States, Guatemalan 
paramilitary groups, and the legitimate Guatemalan government worsened and, on May 20th 
of that year, the US Navy sent out regular air and sea patrols around Guatemala under the 
auspices of stopping the shipment of Soviet weapons, and to “protect” Honduras from a 
Guatemalan invasion. It wasn't long before these patrols turned into a blockade, and every ship 
entering or leaving Guatemalan ports were boarded and searched (Kinzer & Schlesinger 2000: 
160-164).  
Less than a month later, on June 18, 1954, Colonel Castillo led a military force into 
Guatemala, called the “Ejercito de Liberación,” four hundred and eighty right-wing military 
supporters and CIA-funded mercenaries entered Guatemala at five points between the 
Guatemala-Honduras border and the Guatemala-El Salvador border. Trained saboteurs targeted 
key bridges, telegraph lines, and points of communication ahead of the invading force, and 
throughout the invasion a US funded radio station, the Voice of Liberation, falsely reported the 
fall of the Guatemalan government and the size of the invading army. These reports blatantly 
                                                          
12This was in fact untrue, Guatemala had no alliances with the Soviets. 
23 
 
ignored the initial defeats of Colonel Castillo’s mercenary army in areas such as Zacapa and 
Puerto Barrios. Despite these initial defeats, Castillo had the might of the US military behind 
him, and an air raid began on June 27, 1954, which targeted military installations and cities, 
and even destroyed a British cargo ship in the process of loading Guatemalan coffee and cotton 
for sale in Europe. By this time, the Guatemalan air force had defected to join the CIA-led 
paramilitary. With the nation in turmoil and a military officer revolt beginning, President 
Árbenz resigned from his post and requested exile to Mexico (Kinzer & Schlesinger 2000: 199-
201).  
Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas rode into Guatemala City victorious and military 
government was reinstated in Guatemala, thus ending the “democratic spring” and land 
redistribution once and for all. Over the successive weeks, various local and military uprisings 
would appear and be subdued as five separate military juntas were created and dissolved, until 
finally Castillo gained the presidency of Guatemala and began reshaping the nation. The first 
of these acts was to purge many of the democratic reforms pushed through in the preceding 
decade, beginning with the agrarian reform. In tandem with this action, Castillo instituted a 
brutal suppression of agricultural workers and the nation’s poorest communities, including 
those of the Alta Verapaz, that contributed to an uprising in 1960 of Árbenz supporters hoping 
to bring back Guatemala’s decade of democracy. This sparked a thirty-six-year-long civil war 
which would be marked by genocide, brutal repression and the deaths or disappearance of over 
two hundred thousand people (Garrard-Burnett 2010: 6-9). 
On November 13, 1960, a concerted uprising against the Guatemalan government 
began, initiated by junior military officers sympathetic to the left-leaning aims of the deposed 
Árbenz government. The initial revolt was a failure, and the survivors fled into the mountains 
in Eastern Guatemala and renamed their movement “MR-13,” or “Movimiento Revolucionario 
13 Noviembre” (McClintock 1985).  
By 1965, the Guatemalan Armed Forces were engaging in targeted bombing campaigns 
across Eastern Guatemala, and the US military was offering assistance in the campaign to wipe 
out resistance across the country. This assistance included the presences of Green Berets and 
CIA advisors to provide training and military support in fighting the guerrilla insurgency. In 
1966—after yet another regime change in the presidency as President Julio César Méndez 
Montenegro assumed office—the first major military offensive against the insurgency was 
launched. Targeting militants in the department of Zacapa—closely affiliated with the Alta 
Verapaz—future president Colonel Carlos Arana Osorio employed a “scorched earth” policy 
for the first time in the fight against the uprising. His reasoning was that if the insurgency had 
24 
 
no civilian base from which to work, revolutionary groups could more easily be flushed out 
and destroyed. Therefore, civilians were targeted in the fight against the FAR, particularly 
indigenous civilians and communities, as they were viewed as supporting rebel groups. The 
same year, “Operation Clean-up” began targeting dissidents in urban areas, and for the first 
time in Guatemalan history abductions and secret executions entered the sphere of normalcy. 
In March of 1966, thirty individuals associated with the PGT were kidnapped and tortured. As 
far as their families were concerned, they had been “disappeared” by Guatemalan military 
security, marking one of the first occurrences of organised major mass disappearance in Central 
America, and signalling an escalation in state violence. 13 Before long, labour leaders, student 
activists, journalists who reported too widely, and academics were disappearing. No individual 
suspected of leftist sympathies was safe from either the urban disappearances (called White 
Terror) or the scorched earth policy being meted out against entire communities in rural 
regions. Death Squads, such as the Mano Blanca, became household names (McClintock 
1985). 
As the Guatemalan government cracked down, another military commander assumed 
the presidency. Colonel Carlos Arana Osorio began the domination of Guatemalan government 
by the forming of the Institutional Democratic Party, a military organisation. Prior to assuming 
the presidency, Osorio gave an infamous speech in which he stated, “If it is necessary to turn 
the country into a cemetery in order to pacify it, I will not hesitate to do so.” (Dunkerley 1988: 
425). The Osorio government continued the military persecution of indigenous communities 
and the disappearance of urban citizens suspected of leftist leanings; these killings marked a 
major turning point in the way in which the Guatemalan government dealt with opponents 
(McClintock 1985).  
In 1972 Amnesty International classified Guatemala as being in a state of “human rights 
emergency.” With fewer and fewer active insurgents or dissidents to target, many of the death 
squads that were operating in Guatemala's urban centres began targeting those suspected of 
crime. It is estimated that, by 1974, 20,000 individuals had been killed or disappeared by 
government or military death squads and violence had spread to communities across the 
highlands.14  
                                                          
13Disappearances were a common tactic used by military dictatorships in Latin America throughout the 
twentieth century. Individuals would be arrested, often at night on their way to or from home, and often 
violently, and then never seen again. Families were not informed of these arrests and individuals were rarely 
tried. Killed, they simply “disappeared” physically and bureaucratically, as their deaths were never recorded.  
14Amnesty International Annual Report 1971-1972. 
25 
 
In the aftermath of the complete suppression of MR-13 and PGT, the mid 1970s were 
relatively calm. Economic injustice persisted, and an election was held. This window of 
temporary peace opened a door for the development and redevelopment of major labour 
groups, including the Committee for Peasant Unity, which united indigenous and Ladino 
workers in fighting for better working conditions on plantations throughout Guatemala. Labour 
rights organisations, such as FEDECOVERA (officially founded in 1976), were coming into 
being, as Q’eqchi’ people continued to organise and agitate for agricultural worker’s rights in 
the Alta Verapaz. On February 4, 1976, Guatemala suffered a 7.5-magnitude earthquake that 
took the lives of almost 25,000 people and highlighted the government’s inability to function 
in the face of catastrophe. It became clear that thousands had died due to a lack of physical 
infrastructure, and thousands more suffered as Guatemala’s government ignored or was unable 
to provide relief to the poorer barrios in the major urban areas. The aftermath of the earthquake 
led to the organisation of local community groups who banded together to dig out the living 
and dead from the rubble, chase looters off, and rebuild their communities. Facing little to no 
repression, this solidarity emboldened Guatemalan citizens and citizen groups to strengthen, 
and to begin demanding for social reforms (Levenson-Estrada 1994). 
A new guerrilla front also appeared in the wake of the 1976 earthquake. EGP, or 
Guerrilla Army of the Poor, emerged from the Mayan regions in Northern Guatemala, and for 
the first time there was a group whose members and leadership came primarily from indigenous 
backgrounds. In 1975, a military commissioner was assassinated, and in retaliation the 
government kidnapped church and cooperative workers in the Q’eqchi’ department. Shortly 
before the election of Lucas García in March of 1978, President Jimmy Carter cut off much of 
the US military aid to Guatemala, citing the Foreign Assistance Act stating that aid could not 
be given to a nation that “engages in a consistent pattern of gross violations of internationally 
recognised human rights” (Cunliffe 1989: 121). That, coupled with the Sandinista Revolution 
unfolding in Nicaragua, motivated the Guatemalan military to push once again for repression 
of those seeking to foment change in Guatemala. The García government obliged, and in May 
of 1978 the bloodiest period of Guatemala’s civil war began with the Panzos Massacre in the 
Alta Verapaz, where 150 Q’eqchi’ individuals were gunned down by Guatemalan special 
forces.15 
In Guatemala City and other urban areas, disappearances once again became common 
and the death squads that had largely remained silent in the previous few years were suddenly 
                                                          
15International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs (1978). 
26 
 
dropping bodies off at morgues again. Reported disappearances between January and 
November of 1979 totalled almost 4,000 individuals. Violence escalated and on January 31, 
1980, Quiché and Ixil farmers stormed and occupied the Spanish Embassy in protest of the 
murders and disappearances of people in Uspantan. The Guatemalan government’s response 
was to attack the building with incendiary explosives and then to trap those trying to flee inside 
the building. Called the “defining event” of the Guatemalan civil war by some, this incident 
saw the death of thirty-six people, and as a result the Spanish government terminated 
diplomatic relations with the Guatemalan government, citing human rights concerns (Arias, 
2007).  
By 1980, thirty to forty Guatemalans were being killed daily by government forces. 
Trials were unheard of, and García’s Vice President Francisco Villagrán Kramer resigned to 
protest against the human rights abuses. The continuing violent crackdown on any and all 
dissidents radicalised portions of Guatemala’s resistance and increased public and local support 
for insurgent guerrilla forces (Kinzer & Schlesinger 2000). Despite initial success, the 
Guatemalan insurgency was vastly outgunned by the Guatemalan military, which organised a 
massive offensive in response to the uprising. With the Reagan Administration ramping up US 
support for the Guatemalan military government with over ten million dollars’ worth of 
military equipment and a newly funded CIA covert operation, an emboldened military began 
the mass killing of unarmed civilians. Villages were razed to the ground, crops and animals 
were destroyed, and a reign of terror in the highlands intensified. Slowly, the Guatemalan 
government lost internal support, and on March 23, 1982 a coup d’état occurred, and General 
Efraín Ríos Montt took over the presidency of Guatemala (Garrard-Burnett 2010: 53-55).  
Ríos Montt proved to be a ruthless and effective military leader. He “cleaned house” 
internally, suppressing supporters of General Lucas early on, intensified the “scorched earth” 
policies of the earlier regimes, and instituted “model villages” or “camps” where civilians 
displaced by the violence were rounded up and forced to settle. Civilians were conscripted into 
militias, and “food for work” programs were instituted across the nation.16  
Ríos Montt lost the presidency on August 8, 1983, when Minister of Defence Óscar 
Humberto Mejía Victores led a coup, claiming that Montt’s extreme devotion to protestant 
                                                          
16According to the Guatemalan human rights commission in 1984, Ríos Montt’s first month as president, was 
one of the Guatemala’s bloodiest. Documents show that 3,300 people died; however, it is estimated that several 
thousand more were probably disappeared and killed during this time period. Sexual violence was introduced as 
a military tactic, and there are hundreds of cases of death squads killing children in front of their parents or 
specifically targeting pregnant women. Bodies were interred in mass graves or left out in the open as warnings 
to supporters of the insurgency across the nation. 
27 
 
religion made him unfit to be president. By the time Mejía got hold of the reins of power, the 
Guatemalan military ruled the majority of the nation with an iron fist. Hundreds of thousands 
of indigenous people lived in refugee camps in Mexico, forced into “model villages” 
throughout the highlands, or hid in the mountains. As international attention focused more and 
more on the actions of Guatemala’s government and military, President Mejía agreed to form 
a constituent assembly to draft a new constitution for Guatemala. Despite this renewed focus 
on governmental reform, extrajudicial state violence continued throughout Guatemala (Jonas 
2000).  
In the late 1980s the Cerezo government publicly denounced political violence and 
endorsed a newfound urgency to re-establish the rule of law. A human rights committee was 
established, and the Office of Human Rights Ombudsman was formed: an office that would 
play a pivotal role in the documentation of human rights abuses and the prosecution of guilty 
parties. The legal system underwent a series of reforms. However, Cerezo faced at least two 
major coup attempts as the economy collapsed and Guatemala’s population once again began 
protesting against corruption and violence. In 1990, Jorge Antonio Serrano Elias was elected, 
marking the first election in Guatemala since the end of the Democratic Spring. Serrano further 
helped implement civilian control over the military and began rebuilding the Guatemalan 
economy. Serrano attempted to illegally dissolve Guatemala’s congress in 1993, but was forced 
to flee the country. The remainder of his term was carried out by the Human Rights 
Ombudsman, de Leon. De Leon used his time in office to tackle corruption and help foster the 
peace process being brokered by the United Nations between Guatemala’s government and the 
remaining insurgent forces (Jonas 2000). 
 
LOCAL EXPERIENCES 
 
The community of Santa María was founded sometime in the late 1880s or early 1890s. Based 
on a series of oral histories told to me in 2016, it appears that during between 1885 and 1895 a 
total of six young couples with children left Carchá and settled in Santa María, where their 
descendants have continued to live, with the exception of the period during the civil war when 
they were forcibly resettled to the “model village” of Samac. The community population has 
grown because of a rising birth rate and the relocation of members of smaller, more isolated 
communities following disruptions to local life such as floods and the Guatemalan genocide. 
Juanita Chen Coy, a weaver who is more than ninety years old, describes the settling of 
Santa María as occurring in response to “one of the violences” faced by the Q’eqchi’ people. 
28 
 
She classifies many events as “violences,” from the evictions in the 1980s to the act of conquest 
in the sixteenth century. For her, all of these events are linked and ongoing. It occurred during 
a period of unrest in the distant past in Carchá when the founding families of Santa María chose 
to leave Carchá (“and their brick houses”) to settle in the valley that is now Santa María. She 
thinks that there were five or six families and is insistent that when they found the valley in 
which Santa María now sits, it was “empty”—a place where they could create “un pueblo 
Q’eqchi.’” One weaver talks about her grandmother telling stories of entering the valley as a 
small child and being surrounded by “giant trees” and encountering “pumas” (cougars) and 
“venados grandes” (large deer).17  
Don Chus Macz, a former cooperative president, member of the REMHI18 team in Cobán, 
and the only survivor of the 1982 civil war disappearance in Samac, explained to me that it was 
not only the series of acts of violence that drove their ancestors from Carchá, but also the fact 
that the people in Carchá at that time were losing their language and identity. In his telling of 
the founding of Santa María, the “grandparents of [his] grandparents” were looking for a place 
where no one would care if they spoke only Q’eqchi’ and lived Q’eqchi’ lives. In exchange for 
being allowed to settle on the land, the early residents of Santa María did six months of 
agricultural labour every year for Gustav Helmreich.19 This was in stark comparison to other 
Q’eqchi’ villages, where work was imposed upon communities in order to forestall eviction 
and violence. Rosario Coy (a weaver to be discussed later) recalls the stories her mother told 
her of the community when she was young. With the valley full of trees, and nowhere to plant 
corn, her mother watched the trees come down and houses being built. When they first left 
Carchá, Rosario says that they were looking for an inaccessible place, far from a city and with 
at least one mountain inhabited by a tzuultaq’a, who would look after the community. 
Contemporary community members today talk about isolation as a form of cultural 
protection. Don Chus Macz reiterated to me through many conversations that: 
 
Here we are Q’eqchi’. Yes, there is no water and no electricity 
and life is hard, but we speak our language and remember our 
grandparents. Here our children do not forget who they are. We 
are building our community, and houses with pistos (floors). I 
                                                          
17In referring to the deer as “large,” this weaver is creating a distinction between this type of deer and the smaller, 
more common, non-native muntjac deer that inhabit the region today. This sets the story of her grandmother in 
the remote past and emphasises the “Maya-ness” of the experience, by situating it in a Maya ecological context 
prior to the disappearance of the native deer. 
18Recovery of Historical Memory Project carried out by the Archdiocese of Guatemala in the early 1990s 
resulting in a publication documenting Guatemala’s genocide. 
19Placing settlement of the valley around 1885. 
29 
 
have my house and a house for my daughter and her children. 
Because here we are un pueblo de los Q’eqchi’s (a community 
of Q’eqchi’ people). 
 
For many of my informants, the 1970s and the 1980s represent distinct phases in 
Guatemala’s period of violence. For the people living in cooperatives, the events of the 1970s 
represent a growing awareness of national and local threats paired with the excitement of 
opportunities made available through land grants to cooperatives. This was an era that, while 
rife with violence, seemed hopeful for many of the communities in the Alta Verapaz. The 
genocide that was to come seemed far from inevitable, and even as the government cracked 
down on movement between communities, the land grants and education programs provided 
hope that indigenous rights and community autonomy were still respected. While many of these 
events were national in nature, they were also harbingers of local violent incidents to come, 
and for many of my informants they served as reminders that the indigenous people of 
Guatemala were engaged in the same struggle, despite spiritual, language, and cultural 
differences.  
During this era the cooperative of Samac was disbanded and the area where the original 
cooperative had been headquartered was used as the centre of one of these ‘model villages.’ 
Members of the Samac cooperative were forced to relocate their houses to a small centralised 
area where the school yard stands today, and residents from outlying communities (such as 
Santa María) were forced to relocate to Samac where they were heavily guarded, their 
movements controlled and their activities monitored. Families saw their homes and milpa fields 
destroyed in this process. Many people spent over a decade living in the ‘model village’ and 
some never returned to their home communities. Their experience was not unique, as thousands 
of indigenous survivors of the genocide spent years or decades in displacement. 
 Many men in the communities outside Cobán were involved in local political 
organising, and massacres devastated almost all families. FEDECOVERA retains a great deal of 
respect locally for having survived the violence and continuing to represent Q’eqchi’ 
agricultural labour rights throughout that era and into the present. For my interviewees, this 
period seems disconnected from the eras directly preceding or following it. Weavers talk about 
la violencia (the violence), los dias duros (the hard days), and durante la guerra (during the 
war), universally. The experience is so consistent that the idea I might question what 
interviewees mean is almost ridiculous. To talk about a disappearance is to talk about the 1980s. 
To talk about a massacre, or a loved one dying violently, is to talk about the rule of Ríos Montt 
unless otherwise clarified. For weavers from abandoned communities, the assumption is simply 
30 
 
that they lived in their homes until 1981, and then did not. The question is not, “Was your 
family impacted?” but rather “Who did you lose?” or “Who disappeared?” 
The violence came to the region in a very personal way in early 1982, when a group of 
men returning from the coffee harvest in Samac were surrounded and killed, and then in 
September of the same year, a military unit burned the village to the ground and massacred just 
over a quarter of the residents. Rosario Coy’s oldest son was among those killed, and QanaDel 
(Adela Pop)’s middle son would be the only survivor of a group of men who were arrested and 
“disappeared” during that same time period. The survivors scattered, and a handful of them, 
including QanaRux (Rosario Coy), her surviving children, and her daughter-in-law, found 
themselves (along with most of their neighbours) forced into residency in the “model village” 
of Samac.  
The REMHI report, compiled and released by the archdiocese of Guatemala, has short, 
grim descriptions of the violence that occurred in the Alta Verapaz. Despite at least three 
community members working as translators for the nuns and priests compiling the report, and 
most of the weavers I interviewed mentioning providing testimony to REMHI, very few of my 
informants were interested in or willing to talk about their experiences during this time period, 
referring to it often as durante los ochentas (during the eighties), la violencia (the violence) or 
cuando eran los ejércitos (when the military was). What is clear from both the REMHI report 
and the limited oral history is that traditional day-to-day life in the region was all but 
obliterated. This hazy oral history is contrasted with the sharp memory and precise stories of 
the communities’ recoveries beginning in the early 1990s, with greater detail again from 1996 
when the peace accords were signed, giving them the power to begin campaigning for the right 
to own the land they and their ancestors had fought so hard to live on.  
 
POST-2000 
 
Since the early 2000s, the crime rate in Guatemala has skyrocketed, and the nation has become 
part of a major thoroughfare for drugs shipped by cartels from South America to the United 
States and Canada (Bunck 2012: 204-206). Conservative political parties, including that of 
Ríos Montt (with the political party Mano Duro), pushed for a return to Guatemala’s militaristic 
approach to crime. In the last few years, the government (headed by Alvaro Colom) re-
militarised many of Guatemala’s departments, including the Alta Verapaz, in an attempt to 
crack down on major drug gangs such as the Mexican cartel, Manos Blancos, who are exerting 
control along drug trade routes through the country. In 2003 Montt received 11% of the vote 
31 
 
in the presidential election.20 Many Q’eqchi’ regard the increased presence of the Guatemalan 
military with deep suspicion and consider the problems of the drug trade yet another import of 
the Ladino/colonising state. Similarly, many people in the Alta Verapaz are suspicious of the 
increased military presence of CREOMPAZ (the local military base). Although they are not 
current targets of violence, the communities of the Alta Verapaz suffer from a shared trauma 
which colours community and individual perception of state control and presence.  
 
RISE OF THE PAN-MAYA MOVEMENT 
 
Since 1996, indigenous activists across the country have united with academics and other urban 
activists in rediscovering Maya heritage, finding shared cultural and spiritual ground, and 
building a loosely organised and largely organic political movement called the pan-Maya 
movement (Arias 2006). The pan-Maya movement attempts to create a shared Maya identity 
through memory of oppression, ancient Maya sites and objects, and common political interests. 
The pan-Maya movement has in many cases relied on Maya cultural heritage as documented 
by western or local anthropologists and elites. To further the political power of the disparate 
Maya groups, the pan-Maya movement has sometimes had to “build” a heritage accessible to 
a more Ladinoised population. It has also meant finding ways to unite different Maya groups, 
who, while sharing an ancient heritage, have been distinct for generations and experienced the 
civil war and genocide very differently. The civil war united Maya groups in a shared 
experience, but also compounded their differences because in some regions (the Ixil triangle, 
Huehuetenango, and Cobán) the violence was far more immediate and severe, while in regions 
closer to Guatemala’s capital disappearances were more common (REMHI 1996). The narrative 
constructed to unite these diverse experiences is one that highlights the oppression of the 
indigenous people and the strength of their spirit in the face of oppression. 
Pan-Mayanism originated in both Mexico and Guatemala and was in many ways driven 
by the Guatemalan diaspora and refugee movement beginning in the late 1970s and culminating 
in the early 2000s. As communities were destroyed and individuals were forced to either live 
in urban centres, modern villages, or leave Guatemala entirely, ideas of what constituted the 
Maya world expanded. Refugees in Mexico and Belize found themselves living in communities 
of people who spoke Maya languages, wore Maya clothing, and engaged in Maya spiritual 
practices as they did in Guatemala. Languages were related and in many cases refugees fleeing 
                                                          
20Wire Staff, the CNN (December 20, 2010). "Guatemalan government declares siege to fend off drug gang." 
32 
 
the Guatemalan genocide had far more in common with Maya peoples in Mexico than they did 
with their Ladino compatriots in Guatemala.  
The pan-Maya movement is broadly understood as a reaction to the ongoing 
suppression of the indigenous Maya populations of the nations in Central America. It implies 
recognition on the part of indigenous groups that disparate political actors in the indigenous 
communities shared far more common goals than they do with Ladino or Latino government 
leaders. In the wake of the Guatemalan genocide, the pan-Maya Movement has been driven by 
a need to specifically recognise the repression of the rights of indigenous peoples (Arias 2006).  
 
THE COOPERATIVES TODAY 
 
The cooperative in Samac was disbanded and the community emptied in the fall of 1982 after 
a series of massacres and disappearances in Samac then in Chisec, Santa María, and other 
communities in and around Cobán. Under President Ríos Montt, military patrols in the Cobán 
area had increased. The military base in Cobán was restructured to serve as a centre for military 
activity and a prison for those that the Guatemalan military wished to detain and question. 
Between Samac and Santa María, over twenty individuals, who are listed on a monument to 
the dead and disappeared in Santa María, were killed or disappeared over a three-day period, 
with the military massacring most of the dead on the afternoon of September 7 or 8, 1982, in 
Santa María and on the road leading from Santa María to Samac. Although the vast majority 
of those disappeared were men between the ages of fifteen and forty-five, there was no 
differentiation between men, women or children during the massacre at Santa María. The 
community was abandoned, and while some residents fled into hiding in the mountains, many 
joined the residents of Samac and Chisec in two “model villages.” One was located near what 
is the centre of Samac today and the other established near the Cobán airport (Oral History 
Santa María Weavers Guild, 2010). 
As part of the 1996 Peace Accords, Samac and Santa María, like many other 
communities, were re-established as villages where residents were allowed to begin the slow 
process of rebuilding their lives. Long-time residents of Samac and Santa María began to trickle 
back to their communities. Samac successfully campaigned for their land ownership rights to 
be restored, while in Santa María residents began rebuilding their homes. Santa María 
petitioned the newly democratic Guatemalan government in the late 1990s to form a similar 
cooperative and was granted the rights to the land on which they lived. With no support for the 
development of infrastructure, the community banded together in 1993 to pipe in water and 
33 
 
carve a roughshod road out of the mountainside in a project completed entirely using hand tools 
and limited funding that, as far as I can tell, was financed via a loan from FEDECOVERA 
(Personal Interview 2009). 
Since then, a third community has been founded—Santo Domingo de las Cuevas. The 
residents of Santo Domingo de las Cuevas are members of the Sacrab family (by blood or 
marriage), who split from the Cooperative Samac after it was reformed post-Peace Accords in 
the late 1990s and purchased a tract of land where they engage in controlled logging and pine 
farming for a partial income. Many younger men in Santo Domingo earn extra income as day 
labourers for relatives in Samac, or travel to the Boca Costa to work seasonally on sugar 
plantations. The Sacrab family has a reputation in the Cobán region for being savvy, intelligent, 
and very capable of looking after all closely affiliated family members.  
In the mid-1990s, Samac petitioned USAID for a Peace Corps Volunteer. Since the early 
2000s Samac has hosted four Peace Corps volunteers and Santa María shared one of those 
Peace Corps volunteers with Samac between 2002 and 2010, when the Peace Corps program 
was discontinued in the Alta Verapaz for security reasons. Santa María has repeatedly 
petitioned the Guatemalan government for better infrastructure and services, and as a result the 
community road has been slowly rebuilt and reinforced starting in late 2014. Community 
leaders in Santa María have been involved in efforts across the Alta Verapaz to recognise and 
commemorate victims of la violencia and bring perpetrators to justice, including serving as 
translators for REMHI recorders and testifying on their own behalf to UN special rapporteurs and 
within the Guatemalan justice system. In recent years, these efforts have led to the exhumation 
and reclamation of over five hundred victims buried in and around the Guatemalan military 
base in Cobán. As of yet, only one of the men who disappeared from Samac and Santa María 
in the early 1980s has been exhumed and identified.21 
Starting in January of 2009, the Alta Verapaz of Guatemala became the site for conflict 
between the Guatemalan government and the Mexican drug cartel enforcement gang, Los 
Manos Blancos. In the five years since 2009, Cobán has been remilitarised, and the rate of 
violence in the Alta Verapaz has skyrocketed to levels similar to those experienced during the 
civil war and genocide.22 For many survivors of the genocide the presence of armed military 
teams in pick-up trucks patrolling the countryside is distressing, and reminiscent of the 1970s 
and 1980s.  
                                                          
21Henderson, E., Nolin, C., & Peccerelli, F. 2014. With updated info from a community contact whose father 
was identified in July of 2016. See introduction, pg. 6). 
22Wire Staff, the CNN (December 20, 2010). "Guatemalan government declares siege to fend off drug gang." 
34 
 
On May 5, 2017, the president of the Samac cooperative, Francisco Rafael Ca’al, was 
shot and killed at a small restaurant in Cobán while waiting for a bus to return to Samac with 
Q110,000 to pay all the families participating in the winter 2017 coffee harvest (personal 
correspondence 2017). His death marked at least the second murder of a business or 
cooperative officer outside the Banrural bank in Zone 12 of Cobán in the spring of 2017 (Cobán 
municipal office 2017). I anticipate that the murder and theft of what amounts to up to a third 
of the cooperative’s income for the year will have significant repercussions for the 
community’s well-being. Several of my local contacts blame a gang from Guatemala City that 
works up and down the Pan-American Highway from time to time, and anticipate that, after a 
few months, the gang will move into another region of Guatemala23 (field notes 2009, 2010, 
2016 & 2017). 
What this recent incident demonstrates is that reverberations of Guatemala’s violent 
past continue to have impact today. Whatever Guatemala’s future holds, and whatever future 
the Q’eqchi’ people have, the challenges currently present in Guatemala will make 
understanding that future, and surviving it, difficult. This also emphasises the ever-present role 
of violence in the formation of a Q’eqchi’ identity, and the continuation of the Q’eqchi’ people 
and community. Being Q’eqchi’ is, as seen through the myth/history of Aj Po’op B’atz’, a 
constant negotiation for survival. An ability to manage a plurality of identities, and to simply 
out-wait foreign intruders (the Germans, the Peace Corps, the drug lords) of Q’eqchi’ land have 
all proven essential to the survival of Q’eqchi’ culture and el pueblo Q’eqchi’. 
  
                                                          
23It is not unusual for the Alta Verapaz to experience spates of violence lasting a few months, while gangs move 
through the region.  
35 
 
Chapter Two: Engaging with the weavers: Methods & Field 
Research. 
 
One evening, tired of the Sun’s swaggering past her house, Ixb’alam sat ready, and as 
the Sun passed by the house she knocked over the nixtamal she kept for her weaving. 
As the sticky nixtamal spread across the road the Sun slipped and fell. As he fell, the 
deer he carried fell and opened up, spilling ashes across the road and onto the porch. 
“Ayayayayay!” shouted Ixb’alam and started laughing. For she had proof that the Sun 
was not truly hunting. He wanted to cheat so that she would admire him. So Ixb’alam 
gathered up her loom and went into her house. And the Sun was ashamed. 
 
In designing the research model for this PhD thesis, I originally focused on the rates of picb’il 
weaving reduction in the 1970s and its renewed expansion in two waves: the late 1980s and 
the early 2010s. Once common across the Alta Verapaz of Guatemala, picb’il weaving began 
to decline at the beginning of the 20th century with the introduction of cheap imported lace 
fabrics. By the early 1970s fewer than two dozen women were weaving picb’il in the Alta 
Verapaz (Interview Amalia Gue 2016). Then, in two waves, the first during the 1980s at the 
height of Guatemala’s genocide, and the second in the mid-2010s, picb’il weaving experienced 
mini-renaissances and today over two hundred and fifty women weave in the region.  
Building on prior research conducted in 2008 and 2009 on behalf of Endangered 
Threads Documentaries,1 my initial inquiry focussed on the role locally prominent individuals 
played in the development or redevelopment of cultural practices. My specific aim was to 
investigate the way in which the relationship between two people: Doña Leslie Hempstead and 
QanaRux Coy influenced the number of women who continued to weave picb’il textiles in the 
Cobán Municipality of the Alta Verapaz of Guatemala. Through a close examination of that 
process, I intended to contribute to the theoretical literature on cultural preservation and 
development by providing insights into the role of individuals, both insiders and outsiders, in 
cultural preservation. Specifically, I sought to examine the ways in which the introduction of 
external demand can create new value in local markets, and/or extend those markets.  
During the first year of my PhD I established the continued relevance of picb’il for the 
Q’eqchi’ Maya, as well as laying the groundwork for my eventual fieldwork. Studying picb’il 
as a single textile produced by a relatively small number of women weavers in a relatively 
remote geographic region through the recent turbulent history of Guatemala can provide a lens 
                                                          
1Conducting surveys of the number of weavers of picb’il in the region surrounding San Juan Chamelco.  
36 
 
to better understand the cultural significance of weaving in the re-invention of the Mayan 
heritage.2 
 Textiles in Guatemala have been extensively studied (Ardren 2006; O’Neale 1945; 
Osborne 1935, 1965; Rowe 1982; Schevill 2006; Start 1980 [1948]). Due to the existence of a 
rich textile tradition, in which textiles represent not only individual taste but also group and 
family cultural, religious, and linguistic identities, the collection of Maya traje (clothing) has 
played an important part in the formation of ethnographic museum collections. Ethnographers 
and archaeologists have collected textiles from Guatemala for museum collections across the 
United States and Europe. Although the roots of Maya traje differentiation are poorly 
documented due to the destruction of pre-colonial documents and art objects, since the early 
nineteenth century anthropologists have easily been able to link the Guatemalan Maya people 
with a region, specific community, and language simply by looking at the clothing they 
produced and wore.  
Replete with symbolic meaning communicated through the motifs inlaid into the fabric 
during weaving, these textiles serve as a gateway to understanding history, identity, and even 
life and work patterns (Arnold & Dransart 2014: 10-16). Additionally, many major museums 
in the west seeking a representative textile or ethnographic collection for the American regions 
have collected Maya textiles for their beauty and complexity.  
Museum textiles, specifically those held at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford and the 
Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (MAA) in Cambridge, provided me with ongoing 
physical access to woven picb’il objects prior to my fieldwork. The materiality of those textiles 
opened a door to thinking about the ways in which museum textiles could serve as a bridge 
between me, the western researcher, and the Q’eqchi’ communities in which I had worked in 
the past and hoped to work in the future. These textiles gave me the opportunity to research 
textile construction and patterns as well as textile evolution over time. By examining and 
photographing historic textiles collected from this isolated region prior to the decline in picb’il 
weaving, I built the foundation for my understanding of the techniques used in modern textile 
production and the continuity of pattern and technique transmission over the course of the last 
century.3 This engagement with museum textiles helped me develop an interest in exploring 
the links between past and present, and broadened my thinking regarding the involvement of 
agents in cultural production to include museums and collectors. 
                                                          
2Approximately two hundred and fifty. 
3My research, as it is based on the material presence of physical objects, is limited in this case study by the age of 
the textiles available in museum collections, with the oldest dating from the 1930s.  
37 
 
As I interacted with historic museum textiles, I decided to incorporate their use into my 
field research. I intended to bring photo booklets illustrating three historic picb’il textiles to the 
Alta Verapaz as interview aids and to learn what my intended informants understood or 
perceived about the changes in textile production in the Alta Verapaz over the last fifty years. 
I hoped to use those photograph booklets as tools to compare contemporary and historic textiles 
and textile motifs.  
 
MUSEUMS AND THEIR RELATIONSHIPS TO SOURCE COMMUNITIES 
 
In 1992 Eileen Hooper-Greenhill posited that the institution of museum served as a significant 
contributor to the shaping of knowledge and western academic discourse. Using frameworks 
of knowledge production through discourse, provided by Foucault, Hooper-Greenhill 
presented a compelling case for museums as the producers and co-producers of knowledge 
through their ability to structure and present images and narratives of the world through the 
management, display and study of objects (1992: 20, 64, 85, 121). For Hooper-Greenhill, and 
others after her since museums are spaces that not only have the power to produce knowledge, 
but that also have the power to preserve knowledge held in objects. The collectors who help 
build those collections then become gatekeepers, standing between source communities and 
the collective body of knowledge held in the Eurocentric world.  
As an ethnographer in this context, I was concerned with the production of textiles and 
the state of knowledge as ‘held’ within objects; working through the institution of the museum 
could illuminate my ethnographic research of weaving practices in the isolated communities of 
the Alta Verapaz. Including the textiles and institutions I was working with in the United 
Kingdom (UK) and in the United States (US) could shape my planned ethnographic study. 
In light of all this, I began to engage wtih the methodologies available to modern 
museum professionals and researchers working with museums and their collections. Mary 
Bouquet (2012) posits that the modern ethnographic museum is “...an essentially 19th century 
institution” (89) before going on to challenge researchers and museums to continue imagining 
new ways of working with and utilising the invaluable cultural and historical riches held in 
museum collections. A great deal of work has been done across the world building frameworks 
for ethical and cooperative engagement with indigvenous people and objects. Museums in the 
Pacific Northwest are noted for their work in this area.  In the basement of the Portland Art 
Museum in 1989 museum staff, anthropologists and Tlingit community representatives and 
elders met to discuss the museums Northwest Art Collection (Clifford 1997: 188). The 
38 
 
resulting event and discussion, while initially failing to result in any immediate changes in the 
handling or display of the collection (Bouquet 2012: 145) proved ground-breaking in that it 
was one of the first times in the United States that indigenous peoples, museum curators and 
research academics had gathered as equal guardians to discuss the role of the museum and the 
objects held in that museum. During the late 1980s and early 1990s museums across the world, 
but especially in Canada, began communicating more regularly with the communities from 
which objects had originated. In some cases, objects, like a Totem pole held in the Swedish 
Museum of Ethnography, objects were returned, replicas were created for display and museum 
professionals and indigenous groups were able to work together to meet the tangible and 
intangible needs of both groups (Bouquet 2012: 169-171). In other cases, such as the ‘Spirit 
Sings’ exhibition held by the Glenbow Museum in 1988 and protested heavily by the Lubicon 
Lake Cree of Northern Alberta proved points of contestation leading to dialogue (Clifford 
1997: 205-207).4  
Out of this era, and into contemporary work, come ideas such as the ‘right of portrayal’ 
(Griffin 1996), the ability to think of museums as active restorative agents (Herle 2008) as well 
as a series of practical guiding documents, such as the Task Force Report on Museums and 
First Peoples produced by the Assembly of First Nations and the Canadian Museums 
Association in 1994.  
As a part of dialogue with source communities most major museums and their curatorial 
teams have had to grapple with, and address issues related to repatriation and to the physical 
regeneration of objects that have remained in collections. The politicisation (necessary or 
otherwise) of the objects within their collections has become a factor to be considered. 
Furthermore, without the funding that would allow indigenous students to work directly with 
objects, or staff to evaluate the feasibility and desirability of the physical repatriation of 
indigenous objects, both museums and source communities have trouble communicating the 
role of museums and material culture in the decolonisation process and the reinstatement of 
justice-centred values in museum collections.5 Nevertheless, museums are continually 
developing better understandings of the challenges they face in engaging with source 
communities, ensuring that collections meet both social justice and research needs (see Chapter 
six). 
                                                          
4 More on Clifford & ‘contact zones’ in Chapter 6 
5Both individuals and institutions are facing ongoing budget shortages as governments turn to increasingly 
neoliberal policies that do not favour the funding of arts and humanities research that engages with indigenous 
communities. 
39 
 
 On March 28, 2017, shortly after I returned from field research, Professor Kavita Singh 
of Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, delivered the annual Von Hugel lecture at 
Cambridge, entitled “Museums, Heritage, Culture: Into the Conflict Zone.” In this lecture 
Singh addressed the increasingly complex role of the museum in the modern world, challenging 
her audience to engage with the need for museums to reinvent themselves so that they not only 
serve the institutions that created them as spaces for ethnographic and historic resources, but 
also respect the communities represented in those collections and tapped for those research 
opportunities (see more on contact Zones and Clifford’s work in Chapter 6). She then 
problematized this very outreach by presenting three case studies in which museum collections 
and objects were politicised using de-colonial and repatriation language—not for the purpose 
of cultural revitalisation or reclamation, but in order to use and weaponise heritage in broader 
political battles. Singh emphasised the complex role that museum objects can play in the 
imaginations of local and international communities. Any work around repatriation or 
reconnection must be done with a recognition of the objects’ past and the community’s present. 
The original stakeholders’ concerns may have been vastly different than those of contemporary 
stakeholders, and far fewer, or far more, people may be interested in a historic object than in a 
contemporary one. 
Singh’s lecture served to further emphasise the work done by the MAA in Cambridge 
in the development of exhibitions such as ‘Pasifika Styles’ (May 2006-February 2008) which 
were created in conjunction with contemporary indigenous artist’s work, and the input of 
community members from the places of origin for objects held in the collection and exhibited 
by the museum (Herle 2008). Much of the literature on museum studies over the last two 
decades (both curatorial and academic) focuses on the fact that repatriation and source 
community engagement efforts are governed by multiple factors in a variety of settings, and as 
such, engagement around ideas of connection and repatriation must also then include many 
stake-holders and be flexible in their approach. From this view, for my work, with fragile 
textiles whose ownership by the museum is uncontested, models of digital, virtual or visual 
repatriation provided opportunities to engage with research into picb’il textiles in museums 
that could illuminate my ethnographic research of weaving practices in the isolated 
communities of the Alta Verapaz. Including the textiles and institutions I was working with in 
the United Kingdom (UK) and in the United States (US) could shape my planned ethnographic 
study. 
 
 
40 
 
VISUAL REPATRIATION 
 
As I sought to draw from existing connections between weavers in the Alta Verapaz to museum 
textiles through a visual or virtual medium, I needed to ground my research in the unfamiliar 
field of museum studies and to approach museum objects and ethnography through a 
decolinising lens. As I understood from Clifford’s reflections on the encounter between 
museum professionals and Tlingit elders in the Portland Art Museum in 1989 (Clifford 1997) 
I knew that facilitating encounters between people on different sides of the colonial project 
exposes the role that knowledge plays in the production of power. Exploring the construction 
of western society, Foucault posited a direct link between the production of social knowledge 
and the exercise of social power: 
 
We should not be content to say that power has a need for such-
and-such a discovery, such-and-such a form of knowledge, but 
we should add that the exercise of power itself creates and causes 
to emerge new objects of knowledge and accumulates new 
bodies of information… The exercise of power perpetually 
creates knowledge and, conversely, knowledge constantly 
induces effects of power… It is not possible for power to be 
exercised without knowledge, it is impossible for knowledge not 
to engender power (Foucault, 1975: 51-52). 
 
 For Foucault, the production of power and the production of knowledge were linked in 
a dialectic of escalation. During the Victorian era, the act of colonisation itself established a 
growing need to categorise knowledge and information about the world. The act of “discovery” 
allowed for the knowledge of other peoples of the world to be codified into the European 
consciousness of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Universities and academic 
institutions not only created spaces for people to conduct research, but also came to play an 
integral role in the institutionalisation of what is “known” and “knowable.” These ideas are 
more thoroughly explored by academic such as Bennet, Dibley and Harrison (2014) who have 
grappled thoroughly with ideas of coloniality, objects power and museums. I also engaged with 
the work of Anne Fien-up Riordan (1996: 2005) around concepts of photographs as tools of 
repatriation (see page 148 for her influence on this work). Her engagement with community 
elders and use of photographs as vital parts of ethnography has helped develop the increasing 
importance of the idea of ‘photographic repatriation’ in my own work, and will be touched 
upon throughout this thesis. 
41 
 
As seen through the work of Bouquet (1992) the development of museum collections, 
as part of the colonisation process and in a post-colonial world, has very much been part and 
parcel of the production of a western identity that associates imperial expansion with human 
advancement. Documenting the “other” allows for the definition and placement of that other 
within a Eurocentric narrative of the world. That does not mean that museums today must be 
limited by this colonial mentality. Objects once collected as a part of the colonial process are 
regularly reimagined and repurposed by modern museums to serve other roles. My 
ethnographic research is based on the picb’il objects themselves; objects that have already 
physically traversed colonised and museum spaces. By conducting interviews about picb’il 
textiles and production history that were focused on physical museum objects, my research 
engages with contemporary changes in museum studies while connecting with local 
understandings of picb’il in the communities where it is produced and worn. 
Such object-centric research, as that carried out by Appadurai (1982), Miller (1987) 
and Hodder (2012) allows for a redefinition of the objects themselves in addition to engaging 
both museums and source communities in dialogues about the role of objects and the value of 
the knowledge contained within them. For this purpose, I have followed the path of the objects, 
from museum to source community and back again, adopting the same trajectory as previous 
researchers engaging with communities of weavers. 
 S. Ashley Kistler built her anthropology of Q’eqchi’ markets around the idea of 
cooperative anthropology. The model of cooperative anthropology that she relied on in the 
region focused first on building relationships within the market community, then on allowing 
local community leaders to guide her research. As an anthropologist, Kistler had to relinquish 
direct control of her project and allow for the community to define itself, at least in part, rather 
than being defined entirely by postcolonial powers or the only alternative, the Guatemalan 
Non-Maya Ladino gaze. In working closely with community leaders, Kistler supported 
Q’eqchi’ women in defining themselves, and at the same time occasionally allowed a non-
academically trained voice (2010a) to guide her research; a difficult but rewarding balance. 
Using Kistler’s research model, which she has successfully published in a variety of 
venues, as an inspiration, I built my own research model in such a way that I would be able to 
draw on the relationships I had already developed in the Alta Verapaz starting in 2008. Kistler 
successfully used participant observation to build a research network, and then worked as an 
anthropologist in an overt way with her gatekeepers to develop a research question that allowed 
her to conduct her study. She also provided the community with information that it considered 
valuable. Kistler, in some sense, sought to offer her skills as a researcher to the community in 
42 
 
exchange for access to community data. From her model, I borrowed the idea of allowing my 
informants to guide my research questions and model in a direct way.  
 I drew from the existing connections between communities in the Alta Verapaz rather 
than forging entirely new ones. In building my data collection in a collaborative way, my 
intention was to create a body of work that contributed not only to my study with the Q’eqchi’ 
Maya, but also to model ways in which other multidisciplinary researchers working with de-
colonial frameworks could think about methodologies. To this end, I decided to facilitate a 
visual encounter between informants and museum textiles through the use of printed photo 
booklets as a part of my interview methodology. 
 
SURVEY DESIGN 
 
Prior to the start of my fieldwork, I conducted a survey of picb’il textiles held in three museum 
collections in the United States and Europe in order to select three separate textiles to use in 
the photograph booklets (see Appendix C where I present one of the photo booklets as an 
example). I established the following criteria for the selection of those textiles:  
 
1) The textiles must have been collected as part of a research or collecting trip with 
the express intention to house the textile within a private or museum collection. 
2) The textile must have adequate documentation noting its collection date and 
location, as well as information on the textile collector and their time 
researching or travelling within Guatemala. 
3) The textile must have been produced in the Alta Verapaz of Guatemala prior to 
Guatemala’s period of civil unrest (1963-1996 approx.).  
4) It must be feasible for me to acquire adequate photos of the textile for use in 
photo booklets, and it must be possible for me to acquire the rights to use those 
photo booklets in field research. 
 
 After reviewing the collections of over thirty academic museums with significant Maya 
textile collections (including the Peabody Museum at Harvard, whose collection must be noted 
for its breadth and quality), I selected three textiles to use in my research.6 The following 
textiles were selected:  
                                                          
6I limited the number to three to ensure that my research project remained within a feasible sample size given 
the timeframe of the PhD. 
43 
 
1) University of Cambridge, MAA, accession number 1962.151 (textile predates 
1962, entered the museum's collection via the acquisition of another collection). 
This textile appears to have been collected new, potentially made to order by 
the buyer (possibly Elsie McDougall, who was noted for her collection of 
Guatemalan and Mexican textiles). It is in excellent condition, unstained, and 
the head space has not been cut out of the textile, indicating it has never been 
used 
 
 
Figure 2.1 Museum Object Accession number 1962.151, MAA, University of 
Cambridge.  
Photograph Callie Vandewiele  
Copyright held by the MAA. Cambridge. 
 
2) University of Oxford, Pitt Rivers Museum, accession number 1946.6.54. This 
textile appears to have been well worn. To judge by the fraying both within the 
textile and along the connecting seams, it was patched in the centre panel some 
time prior to collection using fragments from another well-worn textile. There 
is staining along the shoulders, the collar and the bottom back edging. The 
patched textile has (unusually) been placed parallel in orientation to the original 
textile. Limited collection notes include only ‘Cobán’ as the collection location. 
7  
 
 
Figure 2.2: Pitt Rivers Museum object accession number 1946.6.54 Picb’il Maya Textile.  
Photograph Callie Vandewiele  
Copyright held by the Pitt Rivers Museum. 
                                                          
7See Start (1980[1948]) page 39 for a technical description of this textile.  
44 
 
 
3) University of California, Berkeley, Phoebe Hearst Museum, Museum number 
3-29591. This textile was collected during the 1930s by the American 
anthropologist and historian of textiles, Lila O’Neale, who conducted extensive 
fieldwork in Guatemala. It is new, unused and embroidered in a style that 
remains popular today. It is unclear if this textile was documented as handwoven 
at the time of collection; however, the structure and form of the textile indicate 
that it is likely handwoven. Present-day weavers have been able to imitate the 
pattern closely. The textile is unusual in that the third panel is significantly 
smaller than the first two and is sewn on in a parallel pattern – almost as though 
the textile was once made for a smaller person and then expanded.  
 
 
 
All three textiles came from broader textile collections created by collectors during 
long research stays in Guatemala, either on their own part or when travelling with a 
researcher spouse. These textiles were purchased with the interests of museum or significant 
personal collections in mind and were intended as representative pieces of the textiles of the 
Alta Verapaz, both in quality and in form. As there was no direct information on the 
particular communities that museum textiles were collected from, aside from the municipal 
centres, I chose sites associated with contemporary rather than historic weaving. 
I was able to acquire high quality digital photographs of the textile held in California 
from the Hearst Museum’s publicly accessible object database, and to photograph the two 
textiles in Cambridge and Oxford myself. Using these photographs, I assembled the three 
booklets prior to fieldwork for use during my interviews; one per textile. They demonstrate the 
Figure 2.3: University of California, Berkeley, Phoebe Hearst Museum object, 
Museum number 3-29591. Sheer textile; Alta Verapaz. 
Source: Hearst Museum Online Database. Copyright held by the Hearst Museum. 
 
 
45 
 
front, back, seams and motifs on each textile. The photos selected were intended to emphasise 
the artistic, stylistic, design and construction elements in each textile.  
During my survey of textiles held in museum collections I noted that there was a great 
deal of diversity of motifs present on picb’il textiles. I identified twenty-nine disparate patterns 
or pattern combinations. While I did not at the time understand the ontological value of these 
patterns within Maya cosmovision, I was curious as whether or not these motifs were being 
used by contemporary weavers; if new motifs had been introduced and if these motifs had 
significance. To answer these questions, I produced a fourth textile photograph booklet 
intended to demonstrate each of these 29 motif or motif combinations.  
I hoped to use this fourth booklet to compare contemporary motif use with the motifs 
present on museum textiles in order to better understand the development, or loss, of motifs 
over time. Many of the photographs in this fourth booklet can be seen in tables 4.1 and 4.2, 
starting on page 102) where I present the pattern interpretation given to me by informants who 
viewed those images along with further patterns identified in the field but not represented in 
museum objects or collected textiles.  
 
INTERVIEW DESIGNS & MATERIALITY 
 
I designed interviews based on the fact that Q’eqchi’ culture—as has been documented by 
scholars of Maya culture and anthropologists working on materiality (Paul Kockelman (2011), 
Richard Wilson (1991, 1995) and Abigail Adams (1999, 2001)—allows for the intertwining of 
identities among people, objects, and geography. According to this broad understanding of 
materiality material objects and human beings are linked in spiritual and physical ways 
(Kockelman 2011: 440-442). Personhood, as I will discuss in chapter three, on gender, is tied 
inseparably to the social roles and activities an individual carries out. As many activities require 
the use of objects, from clothing to tools, a person’s identity and selves extend to those objects, 
which are essential to their performance of that self. For example, a man’s machete is a part of 
that man, as without it he is unable to plant maize, cut weeds, or otherwise fulfil his social roles 
as a Q’eqchi’ man. These connections spring from the original “first owner” or “maker” and 
serve to connect an object to all of the people or organisations that own it throughout its life. 
Clothing makes up a significant part of a small subset of Q’eqchi’ objects that are referred to 
as “inalienable possessions” (Weiner 1992) in the Q’eqchi’ language in the same way as body 
parts and immediate family members. The extension of personhood to what Paul Kockelman 
refers to as “objects essential to personhood” (Kockelman 2011) via the grammatical structure 
46 
 
of Q’eqchi’ stresses the importance of textiles and clothing as personal objects. These kinds of 
objects can become an actual extension of identity, affirming the full humanity of the wearer 
and situating them grammatically as a full person in the Q’eqchi’ world. Drawing from Gell’s 
work on distributed personhood, researcher Sophie Woodward argues that garments can, across 
many cultures, become integral to the production of an identity, stating that for many 
individuals, “...clothing becomes a means through which disparate facets of their selfhood are 
objectified” (Woodward 2005: 34-35). While Woodward’s arguments are broad and relate 
more to the idea of clothing generally as identity-producing objects, within Q’eqchi’ culture, 
the distinct gendered nature of who does, and who does not, continue to wear traje suggests 
that, for women in particular, wearing indigenous clothing is an act of both identity and 
resistance. Embracing a Q’eqchi’ identity is more than simply wearing Q’eqchi’ clothing—it 
is engaging in the continuation of Q’eqchi’ culture in the face of generations-long oppression. 
This extension of clothing as an act of individual identity within a kinship and 
community group structure is grounded in Gell’s work on the “extended person” (1998: 6). As 
I developed my methodology, I drew on the work of Daniel Miller’s exploration of material 
culture to include textile objects. Miller observed that “...cosmology, that is one’s 
understanding of the nature of the universe and one’s place within it, is often formulated 
through the making, displaying and destruction of fibres” (Miller 2005: 10). Garments serve to 
connect individuals to the wider world and to protect those persons from that world, including 
the formation and expression of identity. Textiles become the frontier through which we 
negotiate our experience on physical, emotional and psychological fronts that are beyond the 
bounds of the self. As such, clothing can take on public politicised roles as a part of identity. 
As such, clothing can take on public politicised roles and hold intimate personal meaning, much 
of which applies to the ways in which Q’eqchi’ women relate to, and think about, the textiles 
they weave and wear, and those their ancestors wove and wore. Indigeneity is linked to 
membership and residence in local communities labelled Q’eqchi’ Maya, and for my 
informants, the public presentation of a Q’eqchi’ identity through clothing served as an 
affirmation of their value as indigenous women, as one informant stated: 
 
From the huipils and the cortes you can see in the markets, we 
are all indígena, we come from the communities. You can see 
the women in their traje sitting in the section of the market for 
their aldea. The markets are indígena because the women in 
them are indígena. 
 
47 
 
 This particular cultural context could be assumed to throw light on the potential 
interactions between museums and source communities. Not only the point when a museum 
purchases an object, but also the ownership of this object becomes significant. The patterns 
and designs used in picb’il textiles by Q’eqchi’ weavers are deeply connected to Q’eqchi’ Maya 
cosmological beliefs, as well as to local regional identity (Vitale 2010). The ontological and 
undeniable social value of textiles in the Maya world allows for textiles to serve as a ground 
for cultural engagement around ideas of identity, heritage, and value. This general background 
allowed for a multifaceted approach to the value of both contemporary picb’il woven in the 
Alta Verapaz and heritage textiles stored in museum collections. 
 I used the following research questions to guide the development of my field research: 
 
1) Can picb’il textiles serve as conduits of ongoing connection between museums 
and source communities in the Alta Verapaz, and if so, in what ways? In the 
absence of any current connection, then what interest or roles do these museum 
objects hold for the source community or vice versa?  
2) Is there any evidence of the extent to which any of the relationships of picb’il 
textile weavers to picb’il textiles have changed over the last seventy years, are 
changing, or may change in the future? 
 
These research questions, paired with museum booklets, were the foundation from 
which I developed my initial set of interview questions (see Appendices A and B) which 
assumed that all the weavers I interviewed would have similar responses to each question; 
based on their similar backgrounds and life experiences. 
Initially, I had planned on working with picb’il weavers who were members of the 
Ixb’alam Ke weaving cooperative and living in the village (and coffee cooperative) of Samac. 
My plan was to use the cooperative structure to gain access to the community and as a space 
in which the weavers would be able to engage with and understand my work from a position 
of relative power. Since I approached and worked with the elected cooperative board as 
representatives of the community, I did not need to explain my research to each individual 
weaver, but the women still had the opportunity to give or deny me access. By the end of my 
fieldwork, I was working with three similarly structured cooperatives in three distinct 
communities.  
The interview questions regarding the ontological connections between individuals and 
objects were focused on definitions of individual roles within the weaving world, such as “Do 
48 
 
you consider yourself a weaver?” and “Why do you weave picb’il?” To build the history of the 
textile, I had to find out where the women learned to weave, and from whom, as well as whether 
or not they themselves were teaching other women to weave. I naively assumed that I would 
retain control of my textile booklets, and that I would be able to introduce those photographs 
at junctures of my choosing in the interview process. I also assumed that the cooperatives and 
organisations I had worked with on previous visits to the region would remain stable, and that 
I could rely on the gatekeepers I had used in the past to gain access to informants.  
Prior to the start of my fieldwork, I had planned to interview between twenty-five and 
thirty-eight weavers from the estimated seventy-five members of the Ixb’alam Ke weaving 
cooperative based out of the Samac Coffee Cooperative. I selected this cooperative in order to 
take advantage of the tight-knit communities in which the weavers live and work, with a view 
to exploring the historical evolution of gender relations within these communities. My previous 
work in the region8 allowed me to develop professional relationships with the current and past 
presidents of Ixb’alam Ke, which I believed would give me easier access to interview subjects. 
I planned to draw parallels between the site of the weaving cooperative and other weaving 
traditions and cooperatives across Guatemala. Fuelled by the pan-Maya revival around the turn 
of the twenty-first century, weaving cooperatives have played a vital role in supporting the use 
of Mayan textiles and traje within the pan-Maya movement (Vitale 2010), not only as an 
integral part of a modern pan-Mayan identity, but also in formalising a long-time women's 
economic practice (Kistler 2013a), as I will explore in later chapters. It was clear that textiles 
provided an income for local Maya communities in the Alta Verapaz during an era of violence 
when traditionally male-dominated sources of income (coffee farming, working on plantations, 
adjoining road construction teams, etc.) were unavailable (Ehlers 2000). In the post-war period, 
textiles continued to play an important role in connecting the community with external and 
international markets, bringing in researchers and tour groups as well as providing women with 
direct access to marketers, researchers, filmmakers and tourists, boosting their social value 
within their own communities (field notes 2016). Most importantly for my research, these 
cooperatives provided weavers with a structured way to interact with interlocutors, and me (as 
an interlocutor) with a clear and ethical way to gain access to communities and conduct 
interviews with individuals with the permission of the residents of that community. 
 
                                                          
82008-2009 and part of 2010 doing community health education and outreach. 
49 
 
FIELDWORK 
  
I arrived at the primary field site in the Cooperative Samac in mid-February of 2016. To my 
surprise I discovered that, in the six years since my last visit to the community, a series of 
personal and market disputes had split the weaving cooperative into three distinct organised 
groups. Ixb’alam Ke had collapsed as a cooperative but continued to operate under the 
leadership of Amalia Gue as a small business. The coffee cooperative (the official governing 
body of the community) had organised their own “women’s committee” to market textiles in 
response to Amalia’s perceived betrayal. Another family, the Sacrab family,9 had split off into 
a third group of weavers after falling out first with Amalia, then with the Samac Directiva.10 
By the end of July 2016, I would discover a fourth organised weaving textile cooperative 
forming within the community.11 
This division necessitated an immediate restructuring of my initial research plan. I 
concentrated on creating a network of connections within the various weaving communities of 
Cobán and Chamelco, expanding the networks in which I would be able to do interviews by 
identifying a broader community of picb’il weavers and community leaders. Refocusing my 
field research on a broader community also meant that I needed to re-evaluate my interview 
schedule to focus less on the weaving genealogy of Samac and Santa María and more on the 
process of visual repatriation itself, making it applicable to a wider number of communities 
and weavers. Furthermore, I would need to be more careful about negotiating my relationships 
within the community in order to retain access to women involved in all aspects of the schism.  
Facing this major hurdle necessitated revisiting my research design. To counter the 
limitation generated by the breakdown of the cooperative I chose to increase the number of 
weavers I interviewed and work across an additional set of communities outside San Juan 
Chamelco and San Pedro Carchá. To this end, to my original estimated population of eighty 
weavers, I added 150 to 170 potential picb’il weavers living in the outlying areas of the three 
major municipal centres of the Alta Verapaz: Cobán, San Pedro Carchá and San Juan 
Chamelco. Increasing the geographic and numerical scope of my research project meant that, 
before I could begin interviewing in earnest, I needed to conduct a survey of weavers to identify 
where weavers were living, and to form connections with potential gatekeepers in those 
                                                          
9A prominent family in the community with a reputation for being “difficult.” 
10A falling out I have come to believe was inevitable based on the history between the cooperative Samac, and the 
cooperative Santo Domingo (established circa 1999) where the majority of the members of the Sacrab family now 
live, see chapter 1. 
11Re-establishing and re-forming long lasting friendships proved tricky, as many of the people I had worked 
closely with in the past had fallen on opposite sides of the dispute.  
50 
 
communities. The increased workload and interview count meant that I had to balance 
interview data from communities outside the conflict zone and my original intended data set. I 
also needed to broaden my ability to engage with the relationships that weavers in different 
communities had with museum textiles.  
Over the course of my fieldwork, I was able to confirm the presence of at least two 
hundred and fifty picb’il weavers, with over two hundred identified by name, community, and 
family. This includes weavers who had moved from Samac, the initial community where I had 
intended to work, into local areas (primarily Santo Domingo de las Cuevas) and over twenty-
five picb’il weavers who were members of a weaving cooperative based in San Juan Chamelco 
called Hijas de Aj Po’op B’atz’, which once had strong ties to Ixb’alam Ke but severed those 
ties sometime in 2011 or 2012 in response to the dissolution of the larger weaving cooperative. 
These weavers, while affiliated with the Chamelco-based cooperative, lived in the following 
aldeas, Campat, Sebob, Sa Campana, Paapa, San Miguel Chamil, Santa Cecilia and Chamisun. 
By developing a database of weavers in different communities, I was able to map out 
the prevalence of picb’il production in the municipalities of San Juan Chamelco and Cobán. 
Through this process, I began to develop a sense of the ways in which picb’il weavers were 
organised in the different regions of the Alta Verapaz. This database enabled me to perceive 
the importance of junkab’al (family/kin group, discussed in chapter three) in Q’eqchi’ life and 
Figure 2.4: Rough Map of the communities in which I conducted my surveys and interviews. 
Source: Callie Vandewiele Field notes.  
51 
 
the role that it played not only in contemporary picb’il weaving, but also in the ways that 
weavers perceived and interacted with the visual repatriations of historic textiles.  
Having identified six distinct organised weaving groups that were either made up 
exclusively of picb’il weavers or had picb’il weavers as members, I reassessed my research 
plan. There was only one community in the outlying areas of Carchá where I would be able to 
safely conduct research (Chamisun de Carchá),12 I decided to use this community as a pilot 
field site, hoping to gauge the impact of recording and the ways in which my originally planned 
questions were received. With many women, the presence of the audio recorder on a first visit 
made a second visit impossible. Women did not wish to be interviewed, particularly if they had 
never spent time with me before. Once they had the opportunity both to fully interrogate me 
across the span of several visits about my work and to assess if I was genuinely interested in 
spending time with them and their families, they often allowed not only interviews but also 
audio recordings. Over the course of my fieldwork, a theme that would become increasingly 
apparent was the high value my Q’eqchi’ informants placed on my commitment to spending 
time with them in their communities and homes, and on my willingness and ability to travel to 
isolated communities and house groups to do so.  
As I worked through my first set of interviews in the field, it became clear that the 
interview schedule I had laid out in my preparation for research was not only flawed as a basis 
to provide me with a usable data set, but also might actually impede my ability to access the 
very communities and weavers I sought to interview. It became readily apparent within my 
first two weeks in the field that I would need to account for the relationship between geography 
and spirituality, complex personal dynamics between weavers as well as between communities. 
I also quickly realised that picb’il plays an essential role in the production of Q’eqchi’ culture. 
It became clear that my entire interview schedule had to be restructured. For example, in my 
original interview schedule I started with the question “Do you weave, or are you learning to 
weave?” This question, as I began meeting informants, was useless and seen as somewhat 
patronising by my informants, several of whom frankly informed me that I already knew they 
were weavers, or else they would not have been introduced to me as weavers. Instead, 
beginning an interview by asking a weaver how long she had been weaving, and if she was 
working on a current textile, proved both more respectful and elicited more conversant answers. 
                                                          
12I believe there to be more weavers outside of Carchá than I was able to identify or interview, but I chose not to 
work too closely in the region as during the period of my fieldwork a land dispute was occurring between local 
communities and a regional landowner that resulted in at least two separate killings and a deep mistrust on the 
part of many people in Chamisun towards my work, with the general suspicion being that I was somehow affiliated 
with the land-owning family and/or working on their behalf.  
52 
 
While I was re-establishing connections in Samac, my original planned fieldwork site, 
I did a series of early interviews in the aldeas outside Carchá. These interviews produced very 
little usable data, as weavers were suspicious, not only of my motives, but also of my 
connections with other communities. Nevertheless, these early interviews played an invaluable 
role in helping me reshape my interview schedule and learning how to work with my 
informants in a productive and respectful way. 
I worked with my Q’eqchi’ translator (Mary Elena Toj) after my time in Carchá to 
rephrase the order of my interview questions (see Appendix B). We started by introducing the 
photo booklet and explaining the presence of historic picb’il textiles in museums, then moved 
on to more every day questions about weaving itself, the economics of the family/region, and 
the role that textiles played in community life. In the restructured interview, I highlighted the 
importance of life roles by targeting different questions at young women, married mothers and 
older women; questions that highlighted their community roles in relation to picb’il weaving. 
I discovered that the photo booklets, which the women could pore over and ask questions about, 
proved to be a foot in the door, as they provided evidence to the fact that I was in fact working 
on textiles and not using them as a way to gain access to the communities for some other 
project.  
Many weavers who initially refused to do an interview, or to be audio-recorded during 
an interview, were willing to change their minds once I had visited a cousin or a close friend 
with the photo booklets, provided they could go through the booklets first. With the textile 
booklets foregrounded in the interview process, I was also able to address the fact that women 
would, inevitably, talk and share in-depth information about the content of the photo booklets 
during or between my interviews and visits. Presenting the booklets before requesting 
interviews also allowed me to use them as a tool to gain access to communities.  
The interviews allowed me to notice the important role that weaving cooperatives 
played in textile continuation and value. Chamisun, an aldea isolated from many of the market 
opportunities provided by the weaving or coffee cooperatives outside Chamelco and Cobán, 
had seen little growth and limited interest in textile production from younger weavers. They 
valued wearing the textiles but did not see any economic benefit in producing them in any great 
quantity, which further allowed me to shift the interview scheme to include questions about the 
specific role of women in cooperatives or other marketing organisations, and how that had 
impacted the increased (or decreased) production of picb’il. I included questions such as “Are 
you a member of a cooperative?” “Have you sat on the cooperative committee?” While many 
women had never participated in leadership roles in the cooperative officially, many informants 
53 
 
had well-informed and extensive opinions about the cooperatives’ operations. Community, 
family, and cooperative politics overlapped; asking about the cooperatives and the markets was 
another way of asking about the community.  
As I worked through my interviews, I situated myself within the political context of 
each weaving cooperative as well as the complex overlap of relationships between blood and 
kinship ties through the unit of the junkab’al (see chapter three). This proved essential to 
understanding why I was being guided in particular directions at particular times, as well as to 
situating each interview within the broader picture of family, kin, and social ties of each 
community and uncovering kin ties between communities and weavers. Positioning myself as 
a researcher, I picked apart these networks of kinship and family ties. It became progressively 
clearer that many of the schisms within the weaving cooperatives were extensions of ongoing 
schisms between competing junkab’al in the community as a whole. This meant that nearly 
every interaction I had during my time in the community illuminated my place in the 
cooperative structure and the community conflicts. 
Before re-approaching other weavers with the revised interview schedule, I approached 
the “comités” (leadership boards) of the cooperatives of Samac, Santa María and Santo 
Domingo to gain permission to connect with the weaving organisations within those 
communities. At this point I was able to approach Ixb’alam Ke, the women’s committee of the 
cooperative in Samac, the women’s committee of the cooperative in Santa María, and the 
leadership committee of Hijas de Aj Po’op B’atz’ with a presentation about my research, its 
goals, and the role I hoped that the women would play in this process. I recognised that 
communities would have had different levels of engagement through markets, the Peace Corps, 
or family connections, and with international networks. Weavers might or might not have 
encountered researchers in the past.  
 
ORGANISATION 
 
As I unpicked the depth and breadth of the international connections held by some of the 
weaving groups, I became curious as to whether the weavers involved in those groups would 
view the links between museums, textiles, and communities in a different light than would 
weavers in more isolated communities.13 I wanted to know what interest the ongoing or future 
                                                          
13At this juncture I did not know that Ixb’alam Ke had gained an international market with the help of a 
German-Guatemalan named Olga Reich. I was assuming that the marriage of Margarita Poou’s younger sister 
Concepción to a Peace Corps volunteer, Jonathan Tharin, would have been the strongest connection amongst the 
weaving communities to outside markets and opportunities. This is explored further in chapter five on markets. 
54 
 
roles of museums and museum objects hold for source communities as their continued 
involvement in the international sphere and market provide them with opportunities to imagine 
their own actual and ideal roles in those spaces. It also meant that the women working with 
Amalia Gue had very different ideas about museums and their roles than women without the 
same access to the outside world. Amalia’s visits to Santa Fe and her involvement with the 
Folk Art Museum in Santa Fe (sponsor of IFAM) had a ripple effect, impacting the 
understanding of museums across her community. 
I took the advice of the secretary of the weaving cooperative Hijas de Aj Po’op B’atz, 
one of the only weavers I encountered with any real fluency in Spanish, and concentrated on 
interviewing weavers who were considered to be community leaders, teachers or elders; in 
other words, women whose views and understanding of these textiles had or would have an 
impact on the way that other weavers think about picb’il. Margarita (the secretary) encouraged 
me to follow the model I used in Chamisun: assume that the first, second, or third visit to a 
weaver's community or house would not yield even a partial interview, but acknowledge that 
the visits were nevertheless a chance to better understand both the family life of the weaver 
and the role that weaving plays in her life. Visits could take anywhere from three hours to an 
entire day, with daily life occurring around me and often with my involvement. 
This approach, as prompted by my gatekeepers, added an essential element of 
participant observation to my research. As such, these visits became significant and contributed 
integrally to the ways in which I came to know communities and form friendships. They 
provided me with a context in which to place the data gathered during the “official” interviews 
and broadened the scope of my research. Weaving seemed to fill gaps in time rather than 
happen for hours at a time. Weavers were more comfortable allowing me into their homes and 
communities as a participant observer rather than as an interviewer. 
This added angle to my research meant that, while learning to make tortillas, I was able 
to broach sensitive topics and gain a window into the personal and community politics 
surrounding each weaving cooperative, particularly the dissolution of the original Ixb’alam Ke. 
The more time I spent with each household, the franker the weavers living in those households 
were with me. The daily conversations I had with families and weavers making tortillas, 
grinding corn, watching children, and otherwise going through the daily routine of the 
household provided me with a context that became essential for situating my research in the 
Q’eqchi’ world. 
This access allowed me to conduct a micro-ethnography. The community connections 
and the time I was spending in each community outside of the interviews proved to be as 
55 
 
valuable as the interviews themselves. Were it not for the disruption to my initial fieldwork 
plan, and the subsequent re-evaluation of my interview schedule and my research approach, I 
may never have had the opportunity to truly situate picb’il weaving within the broader tapestry 
of Q’eqchi’ life in the Alta Verapaz. I certainly would never have had the intimate window into 
community conflict and conflict resolution that I was ultimately exposed to during my 
fieldwork.14 
  
WORKING WITH TRANSLATORS 
 
With the help of my translator, Maria Elena Toj, I stumbled across another research aid: the 
credibility of my translators’ indigenous identity, or status as “puro Q’eqchi’” in the 
communities where I worked. All four of the translators I worked with over the course of my 
fieldwork had been winners of at least two stages of the Rabin Ajaw, the indigenous beauty 
contest held each year in Guatemala. Called “Reinas” or “Princesas Indígenas,” these women 
were considered by members of both the Ladino and Q’eqchi’ communities to be ambassadors 
of the Q’eqchi’. Through Rabin Ajaw, they all had access to collegiate-level education and 
extensive experience working with “gringos” or “extranjeros.” Once my translators were 
satisfied that my research was honest, worthwhile, and non-exploitative, they proved to be vital 
in my ability to conduct in-depth research in the Alta Verapaz, as they would vouch for me in 
each community where I worked, using their own hard-won reputations to help me gain access 
and trust. 
 
FIELDWORK CHANGES TO DATA CHALLENGES 
 
My revised data collection and interview methodology also meant that the data I gathered did 
not fit my initial research questions. Before I could begin to think about picb’il textiles as 
economic or social actors, or about the politicised role of the museum in source communities, 
I first had to grapple with the meaning and value of the picb’il textile itself, and to do that I had 
                                                          
14I became so enmeshed into community life in Samac that several of the women in the different weaving 
cooperatives incorporated attempts to manipulate me (some unsuccessful, others perhaps I was not aware of) 
into their ongoing feud. Amalia Gue sought out photographs of her enemies to use to cast a curse (then of me, 
for the same purpose) and the leader of another small cooperative routinely quizzed me about any information I 
might have on Ixb’alam Ke or the Pop family cooperative, going so far as to provide me on more than one 
occasion with a list of potential interview questions specifically about income that she believed only needed to 
be asked of a handful of specific weavers with market ties, hoping that if I conducted those interviews she could 
then glean information about markets from me.  
56 
 
to start exploring and understanding day-to-day life in the communities where I was living and 
working. This meant not only relying on the ethnographies I had used to build my research 
methodology and to situate my research in a broader context, but also using that data as a 
springboard for conducting my own textile-centric mini-ethnography. The reliance on the 
photo-booklets I had created narrowed the focus of my research from textile production in 
general, to the very specific role of picb’il textiles held in museum collections as tools for 
weavers to access their past. The booklets became ways not only for me to interrogate weavers; 
but for them to interrogate me to gain a better understanding about historic textiles, museums, 
and the value of picb’il outside of the Alta Verapaz. The pattern booklet became an essential 
tool for understanding the links between textile patterns produced and Q’eqchi’ spirituality and 
the representations of ancient Maya spirituality in contemporary textiles. This shift in the use 
of the photo-booklets, from interview aids to keys to my research pushed me to re-centre 
museum collections within my work and challenged me to engage with ideas of heritage 
creation and cultural continuity through what had organically become a photographic 
repatriation. 
By openly sharing with key informants (including my language teacher) the goals and 
process of my ethnographic data collection, I both gained and lost access to information. I lost 
the ability to simply observe people without engagement through interviews and as a result, 
the opportunity to act solely as an observer. What I gained was the creation of relationships 
with informants who actively sought to fill me in on what they perceived as important aspects 
of Q’eqchi’ culture that I might be missing out on. I gained guides who shared information 
with me such as dreams (and their value), religious practices, visits to sacred caves, and an 
explanation of how to make “boj”15 both poorly and correctly. It was from these conversations 
that I was able to ask people questions around identity, spirituality, immigration, language and 
history. These conversations in turn guided my recorded interviews. As I gained context, I also 
gained an ability to better follow trains of thought and to identify the points in interviews that 
were worth exploring further. 
 
CONCLUSIONS & DISCUSSION 
 
My research model builds upon the work of other anthropologists engaging in fieldwork in a 
cooperative way. It provides a further example of ethnographic data that was collected with the 
                                                          
15A local alcoholic beverage produced via the fermentation of sugarcane. 
57 
 
active participation of the informants. The participation of my informants problematises my 
research in some respects because the data collected was necessarily subject to the lenses 
applied by myself and by my informants and guides. From one perspective, this can “muddy 
the water” as it were, obscuring the data. From another, the active participation of informants 
expands the ways in which I was able to think about my subject through the data. In creating 
an environment where I was the learner, not the expert, I was actively inviting an encounter 
between an outsider understanding of picb’il textiles and an insider understanding of those 
same textiles. This allowed for a richer and more thorough theoretical grappling with the data 
and the way in which they fit into the growing outside understanding of the Maya, giving me 
the opportunity to take into account not only my own voice as researcher, but also that of my 
informants and friends as co-researchers. 
 The expansion of my research into museum ethnography and digital repatriation opened 
doors to engaging with picb’il textiles across temporal and geographic distances which were 
brought up by the objects themselves. My revised strategies, driven by these museum objects 
and my informants’ responses to them, allowed for a broader and more holistic understanding 
of Q’eqchi’ textiles, picb’il, and the communities in which I worked. This shift in my research 
model further pushed me to think not only about the role of picb’il textiles in the Alta Verapaz, 
but also at their role as museum objects in my own context. This came to light as I was returning 
to Cambridge in late September of 2016. I was presented with the task of collating the data 
collected, revisiting my initial research proposal, and bringing the two processes together to 
form a coherent understanding of the building blocks I had established before leaving for 
fieldwork and the reality of what that fieldwork became during my time in Guatemala.  
 It was during this collation process that I began to understand that photographic 
repatriation would become a central theme to my; albeit one that was at first unplanned, and 
one which was very much driven by my informants. In the following chapters, I address the 
results of this photographic repatriation research and I aim to bring together the data obtained 
to form a better understanding of picb’il weaving and the relationships that women have to 
weaving, historic textiles, museums and their own heritage through textile production. 
58 
 
Chapter Three: ‘li ixq ut li winq’: Gender in the Aldeas 
 
Embarrassed and contrite, the Sun thought and thought. He wanted to be with Ixb’alam. 
So he turned himself into a hummingbird and visited the garden around Ixb’alam’s 
house every day. He settled on tobacco flowers and the tobacco flourished. He sat 
among vegetable plants when they were young, and the vegetables grew and grew. 
Ixb’alam could not understand the power of this hummingbird, but she cherished it and 
she wanted it to weave into her loom so that she too could have its power of life.  
 
So she asked her father to kill the hummingbird with his dart gun. At first her father 
refused, telling her it was a waste to spend the shot of his blowgun on such a small 
animal. He was a hunter of deer. But she begged, and finally he captured the 
hummingbird for her in a napkin. And the Sun, as this hummingbird, pretended to be 
dead so that Ixb’alam would carry him into her room. Seeing the beautiful delicate bird 
dead, Ixb’alam cried, and wrapped him in her tecomat, which she placed under her 
pillow. 
  
It is possible to surmise from the remaining oral history, depictions on vases and murals, and 
the history translated from ancient Maya glyphs that remain on ruins across Central America, 
that within ancient Maya civilisations, gender (a constituent part of social hierarchies) was 
often perceived as a binary structure. Gendered roles in society fell into well defined, if not 
strict, categories (Cohadas 2002: 21-25; Haviland 1992; Joyce 1999).1  
The limited visual evidence we have of the pre-classic, classic and postclassic Maya 
societies comes from painted vases, murals in excavated temples, and the five remaining partial 
codices that were saved from destruction in the sixteenth century.2 The post-classic period was 
documented in a very limited fashion by the early Spanish conquistadors and monks. Gender 
becomes important when specific named individuals or individuals carrying out gendered tasks 
are depicted, and often in these cases the gender is subsumed to the person's place or role in 
society (Joyce 1992: 63).  
When dealing with a named or known individual, gender comes into play in a much 
more significant way in both their depiction on vases, carvings, or murals and the role that they 
held in society. This is true for both human historical figures and divine spiritual beings or 
gods. Male gods and their roles depicted on Maya vases, codices and murals are given a broader 
range of existence than female gods and roles. Female gods and individuals find their social 
                                                          
1See the work of K. Anne Pyburn (2004) for a further discussion regarding the difficulty of presenting firm 
conclusions in archaeological settings.  
2Maya written texts, known as codices, were burned by monks and priests during the conquest as they were viewed 
as antithetical to Christian teachings. At the time of the conquest early bishops such as Diego De Landa recorded 
the presences of “...a large number of books” (De Landa, translator Gates 1978: 82). 
59 
 
roles and power bifurcated by age and the differentiation between child, young woman, and 
old woman.3 Women’s power as creators, carers, and destroyers is rooted inherently in their 
reproductive life cycle, whereas the power of the male deities is much more deeply rooted in 
their social and economic role as part of a larger whole, rather than a generalised or gendered 
one (Devereux 1987; Hendon 2006: 80-82). 
Gender can be divorced from the individual or channelled to enhance the power of the 
opposite gender social role; for example, warrior queens being depicted as particularly 
bloodthirsty or effective as they are able to channel the destructive power available to women 
as life-bearers. Women are depicted as rulers in sites from Palenque in Mexico to Tikal in the 
Petén of Guatemala. Women who rose to prominence in the era of the classic Maya were, like 
their male counterparts, heirs of previous rulers, or regents to rulers too young to take power 
on their own behalf (Normark 2012; Bruhns & Stothert 1999: 227-230). It appears to have been 
crucial for ruling families to keep the power within the family, devaluing the role of gender in 
comparison to the ability to ensure that specific heir, regents, or even rulers themselves were 
drawn from within family groups, so much so that the term ajaw or “leader” is genderless in 
most Maya languages. Lady Six Sky, of Naranjo, demonstrated that women could establish 
dynasties in their own right. She rose to political prominence and reformed the political 
landscape after her arranged marriage to an unnamed prince of Naranjo, whose role in history 
is vastly outshone by hers (Normark 2012). Lady Six Sky is depicted as a conqueror on multiple 
carvings, including one (see below) that demonstrates her standing over the body of a prisoner 
of war. Other significant female Maya rulers include Lady Eveningstar, Muwaan Mat, Lady 
Yohl’ik’nal, and the Lady of Tikal (Martin & Grube 2000).  
Maya warrior queens shared in many rituals conducted by their male predecessors or 
counterparts, including bloodletting, leading warriors to battle, and sacrificial offerings to the 
gods. The symbolic importance and mythology tied to the ability to create human life was 
highly valued among ancient Maya, leading some archaeologists to believe that the piercing of 
male genitalia as an act of bloodletting was done in order to create the new via a symbolic 
menstruation. This imitation of the menses was seen as necessary for the “birthing” of new eras 
or successes of the kingdom as a whole (Gustafson 2002: 162). Gendered social roles are more 
                                                          
3If it were not for the negative connotation in modern language practice to use the term “hag” it might be 
appropriate here in the sense that hags have been perceived to hold social and spiritual power, wisdom and 
knowledge. 
60 
 
a result of gendered social profession and depiction rather 
than servitude of that profession (Gustafson 2002).  
Within the ancient Maya pantheon of gods, female 
gods, male gods, supernatural beings, spirits, and deities 
without clear or solid gendered identities are responsible for 
specific aspects of human life and the natural world; thus, 
when ceremonies were carried out, they too incorporated 
(and continue to incorporate) specific practices targeted at 
those gods, and have been historically carried out by 
individuals who would have a reason to pray to or 
communicate with a particular deity, often along gendered 
lines (Bernal-Garcia 2002). Since the fall of the Classic 
Maya civilisation, Maya language and cultural groups have 
splintered into individual histories of experience. Maya 
spirituality, too, has fractured, with some groups focused 
more on ancient Maya practices of timekeeping (Quiché) or 
similarly ancient landscape-centred worship (Q’eqchi’) 
(field notes 2017). 
Gendered roles in ancient Maya societies seem to 
have been imagined as complementary to one another. 
Men and women fulfilled unique but interdependent roles 
within any given community, which could not then function if one set of gendered roles were 
to disappear. An example of the gender binary in ancient Maya depictions can be found in the 
raising and hunting the deer. Depictions of deer,4 both as living wild animals and as food, show 
that while deer were hunted exclusively by men, women are depicted as raising deer, providing 
them with food and ensuring deer populations remained plentiful. In some cases, deer are 
depicted as domesticated or semi-tamed. In depictions relating to deer, both men and women 
are portrayed as vital to the life of the community, with tasks being complementary but 
specifically gendered in nature. Women, as creators, provide deer with sustenance, but in their 
dual role as destroyer, also create a situation in which the deer are inevitably the victims of a 
violent death. Today, the deer depicted in picb’il textiles are one of the images most deeply 
                                                          
4A powerful and common symbol in ancient Maya mythology. Kej (“deer” in Q’eqchi’) are considered to be 
spiritually significant animals for contemporary Q’eqchi’ people, and encountering one is both a sign of good 
luck, and that you are in good standing with the eb’tzuultaq’a, or mountain spirits.  
Figure 3.1: Lady Six Sky of Naranjo 
depicted on stela 24. 
Source: L. Schele and D. Freidel, A Forest 
of Kings: The Untold Story Of The Ancient 
Maya 1990:190, Fig. 5:15b 
61 
 
associated with an ancient Maya past by contemporary weavers—an extension of a gendered 
relationship with deer from the past into the present. (White 2005: 373). 
 
CONTEMPORARY Q’EQCHI’ 
 
At the turn of the twenty first century there were approximately 6 million Maya people living 
in Central American and Mexico, who shared more than a geographic space and lineage with 
their ancient Maya ancestors (Ochoa & Martel 2002). Despite colonisation and hundreds of 
years of cultural change, the modern and ancient Maya share some spiritual practice and 
potential cultural continuity in concepts such as family, community, and social roles. Even as 
Guatemala’s Ladino5 population continues to adopt westernised understandings and lifestyles, 
including an ever-shifting understanding of gender and the role of gender in the life of the 
individual, family, and society, many rural Maya groups continue to live deeply traditional, 
gendered lives. For the Q’eqchi’, gender is simply one of many important traits that help define 
an individual’s role within the family and community (Wilson 1995: 40-42).  
Many Q’eqchi’ express and understand gender through the binary lens that we 
understand may have existed in a pre-colonial Mesoamerican world, and some pre-colonial 
gender norms remain evident in gender relations and conceptions today.6 The presence of 
machismo, defined by R.W. Connell as “...a masculine ideal stressing domination of women, 
competition between men, aggressive display, predatory sexuality and a double standard...” 
(Connell 2005: 31) continues to influence modern Central American gender norms. Connell 
stresses that we understand the “gender consequences” of colonisation and the blending of 
conquistador and local cultures, stating that:  
 
It is a familiar suggestion that Latin American machismo was a 
product of the interplay of cultures under colonialism The 
conquistadors provided both provocation and model. Spanish 
Catholicism provided the ideology of female abnegation, and 
economic oppression blocked other sources of authority for 
men...This has influenced contemporary expressions of 
Masculinity (Connell 2005: 198). 
 
                                                          
5According to the Guatemalan Department of Education: "The Ladino population has been characterised as a 
heterogeneous population which expresses itself in the Spanish language as a maternal language, which possesses 
specific cultural traits of Hispanic origin mixed with indigenous cultural elements, and dresses in a style 
commonly considered as western." 
6This is not to dismiss the hierarchical aspects of social relations, which will be discussed shortly.   
62 
 
 Evidence of a strong gender hierarchy adopted from Spanish and Ladino cultures is 
present and influential, as is evidence that, underneath the veneer of that machismo, a subverted 
and indigenous understanding of gender identities and relationships exist. The presence of an 
imported hegemonic masculinity does not exclude or override the value of non-hegemonic 
indigenous masculinities, or other blended Ladino/Maya masculinities. In the town of San Juan 
Chamelco, local protestant ministers continually preach against the evils of homosexuality, 
going so far in 2016 as to celebrate a massacre at a gay nightclub in Florida as God’s “reward” 
for sin (field notes 2016). Meanwhile, an indigenous Q’eqchi’ trans-woman is well known and 
tolerated, if not accepted, in the Q’eqchi’ Catholic community of the town. She regularly 
attends church using Q’eqchi’ women’s traje instead of men’s clothing and often shops in the 
local market or participates in community activities in either women’s traje or western 
feminine garb. Conversations about her with Ladino contacts were met with phrases such as 
“the devil,” “he will go to hell” or “how strange...there must be something wrong,” while my 
Q’eqchi’ contacts just shrugged their shoulders and said “así es así.” “It is what it is,” almost 
without exception.7  
 Neither the Ladino/Protestant community nor the Q’eqchi’/Catholic community 
provided much support for this woman during her frequent arrests and harassment by the 
police—mostly non-Mayans from Guatemala City. The Protestantism that is spreading through 
the Alta Verapaz often utilises traditional gender roles as another tactic for differentiating 
themselves from the Catholics or even non-Christian practising Maya. The tolerance in 
Catholic communities for individuals such as trans-women and couples living together 
extensively before marriage is used as a dividing point (as is language: Q’eqchi’ vs. Spanish) 
by Protestant congregations and preachers. Being Protestant means being more Ladino, and 
that means rejecting aspects of male and female identities that do not mesh with the overt 
machismo ideals (field notes 2016). This layering and blending of different masculinities 
between communities is emblematic of the layering and blending of Q’eqchi’, Ladino, and 
western culture in the Alta Verapaz throughout the centuries since colonisation. 
Within contemporary Q’eqchi’ society, gender roles are closely linked to kinship ties, 
the social roles within kinship groups, and the roles that smaller kinship groups play within 
communities. Q’eqchi’ men and women occupy specific places in the Q’eqchi’ ‘junkab’al’, or 
family—both of which are important, and neither of which can function without the other, thus 
                                                          
7The only exception was a woman who was concerned that the trans woman had stolen a corte from a drying line, 
but her concern was not with the trans woman living as a woman, but rather with theft in general.  
63 
 
giving women more social power and status than machismo affords. The subtle de-emphasis 
of machismo in Q’eqchi’ culture does not mean that Q’eqchi’ culture represents a space in 
which women are not dominated. It is possible that gender relations within communities are 
complicated by an overt machismo being subverted by a more flexible understanding of the 
relations between genders. This may explain the powerful role that women have played in 
helping resist the Ladinoisation of the Alta Verapaz as indigenous gendered roles and norms 
are less overtly oppressive or violent towards them. The junkab’al, as we shall see, is the core 
of Q’eqchi’ community life and identity.  
Further to understanding this complex interplay is the relationship between identity, 
weaving and personhood in the Alta Verapaz. For the purposes of this work, the term ‘identity’ 
is used in reference to social categories that differentiate groups of individuals. Building from 
the work of Charles Hale (1997), within the Latin American context social identities are 
complex, multi-layered and vital to understanding complex relations between individuals and 
the state. Personhood is (for the purposes of this work) considered to be those internal 
characteristics which endow a human being with the essential characteristics necessary for 
being a ‘person.’ In this context not all people share all aspects of personhood, but all 
individuals have some aspects of personhood. These aspects can be internal or relate to one’s 
social and community roles.  
To better understand personhood in Q’eqchi’ society it is necessary to understand the 
base unit of Q’eqchi’ life: the junkab’al. The term junkab’al, literally “one house” (jun = one, 
kab’ = house) can also be understood to represent the unit as a shared identity. For Q’eqchi’ 
families, this junkab’al includes not only current living members, but also ancestors and 
descendants; all the individuals who have participated in building, and will one-day benefit 
from, the junkab’al. Through the junkab’al, individuals share a very real connection with 
people they will never meet. The junkab’al itself is dependent on the ability of each individual 
member to carry out their expected role, which is defined by gender, age and social status. 
Throughout life, people will move from one set of responsibilities to another. These transitions 
are more emphasised for women as they transition from child, to young woman, to wife, to 
mother and/or aunt, and then to grandmother, with clear social roles tied to biological fertility; 
however, men have complementary roles from child to father to grandfather (field notes & 
interviews 2016). 
The Q’eqchi’ extension of the personhood of the individual into care and work objects 
(Kockelman 2011: 440) can be understood on the macro level as well, whereby individuals are 
then part of the larger kinship identity group established by the junkab’al. Just as objects are 
64 
 
smaller parts of greater wholes, individuals are smaller parts of kinship or family groups, which 
are themselves smaller parts of pueblos or communities. Within the junkab’al, individuals play 
specific and important roles, and the success or failure of an individual is then the success or 
failure of the junkab’al as a whole. Without the sum total of the working parts, the whole could 
not function; conversely, any individual part outside the structure provided by the whole would 
be lost.  
The roles of men and women within a junkab’al are of equal importance, as the kinship 
unit could not exist or function without a variety of both masculine and feminine roles. The 
fulfilment of these gendered roles is essential to the personhood of individuals. Although sons 
are preferred to daughters because8 men are responsible for the economic wellbeing of the 
junkab’al by working outside the home or community, either as labourers, store owners, or 
employees, daughters play an important role in the life of the junkab’al. Men have the 
responsibility to provide spiritual leadership, and to represent the family as a unit at religious 
events during the course of the year. Women within Q’eqchi’ families are responsible for the 
home from the point of its construction within a family grouping of houses until their deaths. 
This extends from meal preparation to the purchase, care, and washing of clothing to garden 
management to child rearing. Women, too, can engage in economic labour, but rarely migrate 
or work outside their local communities or nearby towns. Women are responsible for stalls in 
the kayajil (market) and often vend food and snacks from their home. Women with the requisite 
skill-set weave or tailor.  
With the exception of immigration to Guatemala City, or the United States for work,9 
Q’eqchi’ young adults do not leave their parents homes until they marry, if they do at all, and 
even then, daughters go to live in the same home as their in-laws, or in houses very near their 
in-laws’ house, while sons stay with their original junkab’als (or family units). In either case, 
it is considered the social responsibility of the young men and their wives to care for the young 
men’s parents. This holds true whether there is only one son, or many. 
                                                          
8In a Q’eqchi’ village midwives can be paid double or even triple for the delivery of a boy baby than they are for 
a girl baby. Average rates in the aldeas of Cobán range from two hundred to three hundred Quetzales (twenty to 
thirty pounds) for a girl, and six hundred to nine hundred Quetzales (sixty to ninety pounds) for a boy. Hospital 
births cost the same regardless of gender; however, families are hesitant to attend hospitals for births because of 
the high incidence of unnecessary caesarean sections, with some local health workers estimating that over 60% 
of women they send to hospitals receive caesarean sections (field notes 2017). 
9Both of which are considered very temporary states, and usually undertaken in such a way to better the financial 
situation of the entire family. A Q’eqchi’ immigrant does not establish themself in the new geographic space, 
rather they work for six months to two years, and then return to the community, having accomplished a goal: 
financing the building a new house, saving up enough for children to attend private schools, paying for a medical 
expense, buying a truck. 
65 
 
Young people, usually teenagers, who have the opportunity to pursue middle or high 
school education will stay with relatives or close family friends outside their own 
communities—or, as a last resort, school-provided housing. It is exceptionally rare for 
individuals to willingly live outside of the network provided by their junkab’al, and even those 
living away will return whenever possible for weekend or holiday visits. 
It is exceptionally unusual for an individual to live alone, or even to “rent” a room from 
a family. Employees might live with employers, but even then the relationship developed is far 
stronger than that of landlord and tenant, employee and employer. Living with non-blood 
relatives means incorporating yourself as an “adoptee” into their junkab’al. With that unofficial 
adoption, the roles that you play in that family unit extend far beyond what a tenant or employee 
would take on and may include childcare, family celebrations, being cared for yourself when 
ill, and marking major holidays or ceremonies with the family you live with rather than with 
your blood family. While there are hierarchical differences between blood family members 
who live together, and employees who live with employers, those differences seem to fade over 
time, and the longer someone has been living within a junkab’al, the more likely they are to be 
considered an invaluable member of their family. During the course of my fieldwork, 
establishing blood ties between individuals proved difficult as interviewees would refer to 
individuals they identified as being a part of their current established junkab’al as “my sister,” 
“my mother,” “my cousin,” or “my daughter,” when in fact there was no blood or marriage tie. 
Q’eqchi’ communities were based on kinship as ‘relational,’ an idea Janet Carsten used to 
expand our understandings of kinship beyond ties derived from common ancestry. For Carsten, 
kinship can be a connection forged by action (Carsten 2000: 150). In the Q’eqchi’ world it 
manifests as shared living space, labour, and memory. The interchangeable use of familial tie 
terms to describe kinship ties speaks to the degree of importance that members of a junkab’al 
share in each other's lives. 
What might be called as “new” junkab’als are not regularly established, as it takes years 
and even decades for a household to become a full part of a community, just as it takes decades 
for an individual to become a full adult. People simply move from one established household 
to another, or their roles within that established household shift and change as they age. Should 
a family with many sons establish a series of households, they are not truly independent 
households or junkab’al until well into the adulthood of these sons. Once the younger 
generation have established families of their own capable of fulfilling all the roles necessary to 
live as a unit within the community, they can be considered a junkab’al. Without all the 
66 
 
requisite social roles—grandfather, grandmother, fathers, mothers, aunts, uncles, children, 
animals, etc.—the junkab’al cannot exist. 
 
CORN PLANTING 
 
The strictest gendered activity in contemporary Q’eqchi’ life is the planting of milpa, or corn. 
During the annual corn planting, it is only men who may plant corn, and the oldest male 
member of the household is responsible for inviting friends, neighbours and relatives to 
participate in the planting of his milpa patch. The planting of corn is an important ceremonial, 
spiritual, and economic event for the family, as corn and its production are deeply tied to the 
identity of the modern Maya as ‘children of the corn.’ Corn makes up the staple in most 
Q’eqchi’ diets, so a good milpa crop can mean the difference between economic success and 
starvation. Corn planting and harvest also feature heavily in the understanding of and keeping 
of time, and the relationship between time and the natural world by marking out the phases of 
the agricultural year. During the corn planting it is the mature women of the household who 
prepare a ceremonial dinner, set up an altar and offerings, burn incense, and serve the food 
when the corn planters arrive home after the day of work. In the week10 leading up to corn 
planting, men will have travelled into the mountains and petitioned the tzuultaq’a through 
special ceremonies.  
All family members, and male volunteers, will eat simple diets of tortillas, corn meal, 
and beans in preparation for the planting of the corn. Abstaining from sex, alcohol, as well as 
meat and other rich foods, men and women sleep in different rooms, as a successful planting 
requires men to be “pure.”11 Many comparisons are drawn between the corn planting 
ceremonies and sexual relationships (Wilson 1995: 152). The Maya were created by the gods 
from maize, and are sustained by it, hence the growth of maize is the creation of life. In the act 
of corn planting, the earth supplants the role of women. Planting corn becomes an act of 
insemination, and all of the actions carried out by communities for the preparation, planting, 
and celebration of corn are then seen as male-acts, including the activities carried out by 
women.  
A family, or junkab’al, as a whole becomes male in response to the female nature of 
the earth. The role required by humankind in order to facilitate a successful corn harvest, upon 
                                                          
10Or weeks, my informants were vague on the amount of time necessary to prepare for the corn planting. 
11A term I suspect is borrowed from the Catholic Spanish, as within an indigenous sense and in the Q’eqchi’ 
language, terms applied more to a “fullness of vitality” or a “preparedness” rather than a “purity.” 
67 
 
which all family members depend for life, wellbeing, and food, is a male one. This transition 
into a gendered identity, by the junkab’al, speaks to the fluidity of gender itself in theorised 
conceptions and the rigidity of gendered roles in day-to-day life. What is not important is the 
gender of the junkab’al in general; what is important is that the junkab’al perform as a male 
gender when engaging in a male gendered act: the planting of the corn. After the corn planting, 
it is men who conduct the actual planting; although, without the entire household participating 
in the preparation, celebration, and care of the crops, the corn planting loses its value as a 
spiritual as well as sustenance act. 
The success of the corn crop is never dependent upon the earth, which is viewed as 
always fertile, but rather on the actions of the community and the corn planters themselves. If 
the corn is planted and it does not germinate, or if there is a drought or a flood which kills the 
seedlings, or the rain ends early and the corn ends up small and dry, the failure is seen as the 
fault of the men in the community, because they failed to properly honour the tzuultaq’a or did 
not adequately prepare themselves for planting. This could also be because they lied in their 
ceremonial practices, offerings, and prayers, or failed to recognise the gifts of the tzuultaq’a 
and the earth in the preceding corn plant and harvest, or were too greedy and prideful of a good 
harvest—taking credit for something that they did not create. The earth, and by extension the 
fertility of the woman, is viewed as substantially more powerful than the fickle virility of the 
man, and by extension far more stable and rooted in existence.12  
 
GENDER AND THE LIFE CYCLE 
 
Women within a junkab’al are responsible for the identity, care, spirituality, and language of 
the home. Moving into a new community, a woman and her family will hire a Maya priest to 
bless the room or home in which she and her new husband will reside. (Such spaces often 
remain empty and unused for weeks or months after construction, until they are blessed in a 
ceremony and considered suitable for human habitation). Women conduct ceremonies to 
protect the home and to ensure the health of individuals within it. Women’s lives revolve 
around the creation of the space, which fosters the creation and sustainment of the family and 
of the Q’eqchi’ Maya community. Without the space provided in the home, sustaining an 
                                                          
12This belief can in turn have very difficult consequences for women who are unable to conceive and labelled 
infertile by western-educated doctors, as it is a failure of their very gendered identity rather than simply an illness 
or medical condition. It also leaves these women with limited roles in their communities, where their power as 
“creators of life” and “nurturers” are what set them apart from male gender norms and afford them the limited 
recognition and freedoms that they do have. 
68 
 
identity as a Q’eqchi’ Maya becomes impossible, as the Q’eqchi’ do not exist as isolated 
individuals, but rather as members of the complex social structure of the junkab’al and the 
communities formed by the eb’junkab’al.13 The home as an explicitly Q’eqchi’ space serves as 
a political tool to continue the political existence of the Q’eqchi’ in the face of ongoing 
colonisation, racism, Ladinoisation, and globalisation. As Q’eqchi’ communities are 
encroached upon by the outside world, the ability of a woman to maintain a space in which 
Q’eqchi’ language, belief, culture, and religion remain central becomes essential to the 
continuance of Q’eqchi’ communities and Q’eqchi’ political power. The more “puro Q’eqchi’” 
a woman is, the more “puro Q’eqchi’” (pure Q’eqchi’) her husband and children are able to be. 
Throughout a woman’s life, she will fulfil a series of roles, as the gendered places of 
both women and men in Q’eqchi’ communities shift as they age. As young children, both boys 
and girls spend most of their time at home with their mothers, grandmothers, and aunts. 
Childcare in Q’eqchi’ communities—especially small aldeas—is very much a community 
affair. Women going to market to vend vegetables, fruits, and other agricultural products will 
often take an older child along with them14 while leaving the younger siblings at home with 
another relative. While small children under the age of three or four are rarely outside of 
physical contact with their mothers, slightly older children roam freely within communities 
between the houses of close relatives. During the course of my fieldwork, it became obvious 
that children more or less ate meals at whichever home they were in when food was being 
prepared, provided the parents were relatives or members of what could be considered one 
junkab’al. By the age of ten to twelve, boys start going to clear fields or pick coffee with their 
fathers, and girls make tortillas and take care of younger siblings at home. Despite recent 
increased efforts by the Guatemalan government to provide a grade school education in more 
Maya communities, it is unusual for a boy to stay in school past the age of fourteen (grade 
nine), and for a girl to stay in school past the age of twelve (grade six). Even for children who 
are in school, attendance is sporadic. Families frequently pull children out of school to assist 
with economic activities such as coffee harvest and community social and cultural events such 
as corn planting or religious holidays, or even because they disagree with something a teacher 
has said or done. While boys will be allowed to travel to neighbouring communities to attend 
middle or high school, it is considered very dangerous for girls to do so. Unless there are family 
                                                          
13Plural for junkab’al. 
14Both as a helper, and as a witness should a jealous husband accuse her of cheating on him. 
69 
 
members that they can board with near the school, it is essentially impossible for young women 
to get an education outside their own small village. 
As young women mature, they take on more responsibilities in their houses. This can 
include learning to weave if they are a part of weaving family or taking over in market spots 
and engaging in more external economic activity as they demonstrate their ability to contribute 
to their own family, and to their future in-laws. The concept of an inherited social role is key, 
with women following directly in the footsteps of their mothers, grandmothers or, more often, 
mothers-in-law.15 Inheritance, as a theme, came up over and over and over again during my 
interviews. Parents provide for their children through the use of physical, ontological, and 
cultural inheritances. Just as people could physically pass on a piece of land to their children, 
they were also capable of passing on an identity. This lifestyle fosters a special relationship 
between women and their mothers-in-law. Prior to the birth of a woman’s first child, she is still 
very much considered a child in her mother-in-law’s home; full adulthood is not granted to 
young wives until they themselves are mothers. It is the responsibility of the mother-in-law to 
ensure that a young woman is able to fulfil her social duties within the junkab’al and the 
responsibility of the young woman to care for and assist her mother-in-law as she manages the 
parental household. Market stalls, in both indoor markets and outdoor street markets, are 
inherited matrilineally, and occupations such as weaving, tailoring, or baking are taught within 
the family. Women inherit as much of their social and labour capital from their in-laws as they 
do from their own parents. Many women who did not learn to weave from their mother, instead 
learned to weave from mothers-in-law, as social and economic skills are transmitted both to 
your own children and to new members of your junkab’al. 
                                                          
15This happens particularly in families where women had no daughters of their own—the daughter-in-law will 
then take the place of the daughter. 
70 
 
While 
marriage 
proposals are 
usually driven by 
romantic love, for 
a proposal to be 
accepted, both 
families must be 
in agreement that 
the young man is 
able to 
economically 
support his family 
in the event of an 
addition of 
another mouth to 
feed, and the 
young woman 
must be able to 
demonstrate to 
her mother-in-law 
that she is capable 
of providing a 
Q’eqchi’ home 
for her new 
husband. Young 
women go from 
being the “helpers” in their homes of origin to being the helpers of their new mother-in-laws, 
who are expected to educate their new daughters-in-law on the ways in which their family runs 
a home. The youngest daughter or the newest daughter-in-law in any family carries the brunt 
of the physical labour in the feminine sphere. With no children of her own, she will wash 
clothing, make tortillas, and maintain the house so that her more senior female relatives have 
time to vend at the market, tend to children, weave, or engage in other economic activities. 
New daughters-in-law may apprentice at market stalls or even in a new agricultural pursuit the 
Figure 3.3: Breakdown of weavers ages in Santa María 
 Figure 3.2: Breakdown of weavers ages across all communities 
71 
 
family is engaging in, 
but only once her 
other household duties 
have been fulfilled.  
Transitioning into 
young motherhood is 
the first step that a 
woman takes towards 
holding a senior 
position in her new 
family, and the first 
sign that she is able to 
hold authority. Mothers, 
even if grandmothers are present, are the ultimate authorities in the lives of their children. 
Young women are expected to heed the advice of older women and other mothers as they care 
for their children, and their position as a mother, and a holder of motherhood, provides them 
with a degree of authority not only in their own home, but also in the community at large. The 
transition into motherhood is not a transition from childhood into adulthood, as women are 
considered more or less to be adult around the age of seventeen to eighteen, but rather an 
assumption of further responsibility, and a step into a fuller adulthood, that in turn gives her 
more authority within the community at large. Many young women of this age who have not 
learned to weave from mothers or grandmothers will learn to weave from neighbours or more 
distant relatives during this transition. 
The chart in figure 3.2 demonstrates the total numbers of weavers interviewed or 
encountered sorted by their specific age. My interview data demonstrates that the vast majority 
of women who currently weave picb’il are in their early twenties and are either recently married 
or planning on marriage. These women have both the time (as they have few or no children) to 
weave, and a vested interest in developing the skills that will give them financial stability 
moving forward. The prevalence of weavers of different ages in each of the communities where 
I worked was slightly different. In the charts shown in figures 3.3 & 3.4 I demonstrate a 
breakdown of age range by community, using the two communities in which I conducted the 
majority of my interviews, Santa María and Samac.  
 
   Figure 3.4: Breakdown of weavers ages in Samac 
72 
 
GENDER, FAMILY, LANGUAGE AND IDENTITY 
 
The act of bearing and raising children remains an essential aspect of all Mayan societies, 
including that of the Q’eqchi’. A Q’eqchi’ identity is not simply a blood relation or ancestral 
tie to people from the past; it is an active understanding of and engagement with Q’eqchi’ 
communities and ways of being and living, which are rooted in the experience of being raised 
in a “Q’eqchi’ home” by a Q’eqchi’ mother. Many of my informants identified people as “being 
Q’eqchi’” based on whether or not their mother was Q’eqchi’. One informant outside of San 
Juan Chamelco told me repeatedly, “My children’ are Q’eqchi’ because I am Q’eqchi’.” 
 Women, and the ways in which they express or think about their identities as Q’eqchi’, 
are essential to the production of this identity in children. It is through their mothers and 
grandmothers that children learn language, and via their mothers that boys in particular 
continue to use the Q’eqchi’ language in their adult lives despite their formal education in 
Spanish. In most Q’eqchi’ communities of the Alta Verapaz, women over the age of thirty 
have, at best, the ability to understand some Spanish, but very few speak any. Adults whose 
mothers spoke Q’eqchi’ at home will consider themselves to be Q’eqchi’ to an extent, 
regardless of the degree to which they then speak Q’eqchi’ in their adult lives or the degree to 
which they have entered Ladino culture (e.g., speaking more Spanish than Q’eqchi’, or 
abandoning indigenous traje). Conversely, individuals raised by Ladino mothers may never be 
considered full members of Q’eqchi’ communities despite any fluency in Q’eqchi’ obtained 
because, while the language holds a great deal of cultural power to construct identity, unless it 
is literally one’s mother tongue, that power holds little meaning. 
 
THROUGHOUT LIFE 
 
As women age, their importance, authority, and respect in Q’eqchi’ community’s increases. 16 
Older women are not only respected for their experience, but also credited with being the literal 
source of life for every child, grandchild, and great-grandchild that they have. Grandparents, 
and grandmothers in particular, are viewed as holding more of a connection to ancient Maya 
knowledge, and a Maya past, than younger individuals. This affords them a level of respect in 
the community due to a sense of a more complete “Q’eqchi’-ness.” Living a long life in and of 
                                                          
16The term “grandmother” in the Q’eqchi’ language both refers to someone who physically has grandchildren and 
is also a term of respect for an older woman in a community who is perceived to have contributed a great deal 
during her life and to hold a significant amount of knowledge. 
73 
 
itself provides grandparents with a connection with a Q’eqchi’ past that younger individuals 
are simply incapable of having or understanding. Grandmothers within houses are the 
authorities not only on household matters, but also on economic and spiritual ones. Older 
women may choose not to carry out ceremonial practices or visit the remote mountain caves 
where the tzuultaq’a can be reached via prayer, but they remind younger male and female 
members of their households to complete these rituals.  
Grandmothers, and in their absence older aunts, are also considered the experts on 
illness, injuries, and the differences between a physical ailment that requires a visit to the doctor 
and a spiritual one. In some communities of San Juan Chamelco, grandmothers are considered 
so connected with the spiritual realm that they can foresee their own deaths and will request a 
special huipil to be woven in the style of tzot17 that they will wear from its completion to their 
own deaths, and as funerary garments. Only women have access to this information; men, who 
are unable to give life, are thought to be unable to sense when their own life is running out. 
Entering motherhood impacts a woman’s weaving only in that she will have less time 
to weave as the responsibilities of parenting come into being. Many women weave through 
pregnancy and will even nurse while weaving. The communal nature of Q’eqchi’ life allows 
for mothers to rely on the help and support of sisters, grandmothers, and older daughters in the 
raising of children. 
Older women who no longer weave are still considered weavers in the same way that 
all old women are considered “grandmothers,” independent of whether they had children. Old 
men are treated with the same respect and given the same food upon return from the corn 
planting as young men, even if they did nothing but nap at the house in a chair. With age comes 
a transition from needing to engage in the active daily life of a community to contributing just 
by being present as an anciano, or old one. For the Q’eqchi’, the state of being old is in and of 
itself an important part of the life cycle, and “grandparents” are viewed as not only good 
sources of advice, but also people who have a more authentic and deeper connection to the 
Q’eqchi’ past, and thus to the Q’eqchi’ identity.  
In this sense, Rosario Coy, a weaving teacher to many women in Samac and Santa 
María is known as Grandmother Rosario (QanaRux). The recognition of her as a grandmother, 
through the title Qana, is not based simply on her age, as many other women of comparable or 
older age are not referred to as Qana outside their immediate families, but rather a recognition 
                                                          
17Another style of white on white sheer weave, associated with the ancient past. Tzot huipils in museum 
collections hold less value than picb’il textiles do to local communities because the textile production is much 
simpler, does not include ontologically significant designs and has not been ‘lost’ in part in the same way.  
74 
 
of the role she has played for so many women in the community, quite literally that of their 
grandmother, at least as far as textile production is concerned 
Q’eqchi’ women express Maya or indigenous identity, not only through their 
commitment to serving as mothers, aunts, daughters, and grandmothers within the traditional 
structure of the junkab’al, but also overtly within and outside of their Q’eqchi’ communities 
through the utilisation of the traditional Q’eqchi’ blouses (huipils, which are exclusively woven 
by women) and skirts (cortes, which are woven by men on floor looms). With the use of male 
indigenous dress having all but disappeared in the aftermath of the Guatemalan Civil War 
(1963-1996), it can be seen that the indigenous dress of Maya women from all language groups 
has come to symbolise a commitment to Maya culture and a resistance to the ongoing process 
of Ladinoisation and, by proxy, colonisation. As the pan-Maya movement has gained some 
traction, it has become more and more common for women to wear not only their own trajes, 
but to seek out and wear trajes from other regions both as stylistic choices and as a way to 
express an identity that is more “Maya” than, for example, Mam, Quiché or Pocomam. 
 
GENDERED IDENTITY AND POLITICAL EXPRESSION 
 
In the past fifty years, the role of women as the “bearers of culture” has come to particular 
prominence as Guatemala’s violent civil war limited the ability of men to wear indigenous 
traje, speak indigenous languages, or engage in Maya spiritual practices.18 In the past twenty-
five years, as men immigrated to Guatemala City, Canada, and the United States for work 
(sometimes returning, sometimes not), women have become the pillars of a continuous 
Q’eqchi’ presence and identity in the Alta Verapaz. 
 Unlike their husbands, brothers, and fathers whose indigeneity is only recognisable 
when it is openly claimed, Q’eqchi’ and other Maya women declare their indigeneity via their 
clothing. Literally wearing their identities on their bodies, women are unable to escape the 
rampant racism against the indigenous that exists in Guatemalan society and are a visible 
reminder to the world that the Maya people remain, in some sense, unconquered still. In 
wearing traje they are not simply Maya, but Maya women. Looking back on Judith Butler’s 
work around embodied identity (Butler 1999: 137), the use of Maya traje symbolises the 
                                                          
18Common before the start of the civil war, today men only continue to wear indigenous traje, or clothing, in a 
handful of Tzutujil, Mam, and Kaqchikel communities. Indigenous clothing was used by the Guatemalan military 
to isolate and identify suspected “guerrillas,” and men facing violent repression and death began wearing western 
clothing to hide indigenous affiliation and identity. 
75 
 
intentional adoption of two politicised and repressed identities in Guatemala; that of woman 
and that of Maya, as well as a subvert third identity specifying where they sit in the Maya 
world. Early on in my field research an interviewee pointed at her daughter, wearing sports 
clothing and making tortillas on the comal and said:  
 
We are indígena. She is indígena. But if she wears her traje to 
school they call her ‘indio’ and ‘estupido’ so she doesn’t want to 
wear it. She doesn’t understand that her traje and corte and 
trienas are who she is, if she doesn’t wear them no one knows 
that she is Q’eqchi’. She will forget that she is Q’eqchi’. And she 
should not, I am proud to wear my traje, people need to know I 
am indígena. (field notes 2017) 
  
The importance of women to the Q’eqchi’ ability to retain cultural autonomy and an 
independent identity cannot be understated. Silvia Federici has emphasised over and over again 
the value that women play in the expression of dissent, in large part enabled by their separation 
from the wage economy (Federici 2012). Whether by design or accident, the gendered division 
of labour that provides for a male and female sphere of dissent also provides indigenous women 
with the ability to create Q’eqchi’ spaces separate from Ladino spaces. The eb’kayajil (town 
markets) are formalised and organised by women who do so in the Q’eqchi’ language using 
Q’eqchi’ social norms. The Q’eqchi’ control of local markets extends the influence of Q’eqchi’ 
villages into the larger mixed towns and municipal centres, as we will see in chapter five on 
Markets. Federici’s work focuses far more on the role of global capital in breaking down 
traditional gendered spaces and forcing women into wage markets, but the basis of her analysis 
gives grounding to the informal and unrecognised role that women, and female-gendered 
spaces, have in the creation and sustenance of resistance. Her work also gave credence to the 
idea that as colonisation ignored the spheres of women, it inadvertently left pockets of space 
that were never directly colonised, and perhaps to this day remain only partially colonised—
spaces in which Q’eqchi’ identity, culture, and heritage survive. 
The use of Maya traje has given women a public platform from which to silently voice 
political dissent through identity. By publicly wearing their identities on their bodies, Q’eqchi’ 
and other Maya women are not only rejecting westernised ideals of femininity, but also 
embracing and asserting Q’eqchi’ and a Maya femininity tied into personal and community 
histories. During interviews, many women talked about weaving as a part of a longer tradition 
of women’s work and women’s identities. One informant stated: 
 
76 
 
We do not know very much about the grandmothers of our 
grandmothers. What they say is that all the grandmothers used to 
weave. My grandmother was older then, when I was born, but it 
was not long before I saw her weave, and she told me that 
weaving is what all women used to do. For their huipils and traje.  
 
For this informant, and others, the role of weaver is an identity that they have 
maintained control over to some extent specifically because of their exclusion from the 
capitalist market economy and as a part of creating identity through activity and clothing. 
Building from Simone de Beauvoir’s famous “one is not born, but rather, becomes a woman,” 
(de Beauvoir 1949: 267; Butler 1994) Judith Butler insists that we cannot understand gender 
in a space or time or society without acknowledging that gender itself is an active and political 
state. The production of a gendered identity is an ever-fluid “repetition of acts,” and “...the 
personal becomes an expansive category, one which accommodates, if only implicitly, political 
structures usually viewed as public. Indeed, the very meaning of the political expands as well” 
(Butler 1988: 523). For Q’eqchi’ people, this expansion becomes temporal as well: gendered 
identities are rooted in not only the “repetition of acts” within one individual’s lifetime, but 
also the manufactured belief that these acts are a shared part of Q’eqchi’ experience across 
time. 
The very act of being Maya can be an act of political resistance. Maya women, wearing 
Maya clothing, are demonstrating to a non-Maya government and a world distinctly unfriendly 
to the Maya that their people still exist through the very gendered nature of their performed 
and internal identities. Rigoberta Menchu Tum is, perhaps, the most well-known Maya woman 
outside of Guatemala; and throughout much of her activist and political life has relied on the 
use of indigenous traje as an overt political statement regarding body politics and the 
production or ownership of a feminine Maya identity (Ehlers 2000: 19. Nelson 1994, 1999).19 
Writing first in 1981, and cited here in the new 2015 edition, bell hooks20 challenged western, 
white feminists to extend their understanding of what constituted “feminist” ideas, and the 
ways in which repression could be expressed by the eradication of suppressed groups’ internal 
understandings of themselves and their own identities in favour of a western, white feminist 
ideal (hooks 2015: 121-124). hooks asserts that while feminism is centred in a white, western 
                                                          
19While appropriate to mention Menchu Tum, this thesis limits engagement with her work as the women with 
whom I worked had limited awareness of Menchu and regarded much of her work as unrelated to their own 
work and struggle around identity as they come from distinct regions of Guatemala which have had disparate 
experiences of colonialism from conquest through to the modern era.  
20bell hooks intentionally chooses not to capitalise the first letter of either her forename or her surname in her 
publications, I am choosing to cite her as she prefers her name to be used in professional contexts.  
77 
 
experience, it cannot claim to represent the liberation of all women. To seek liberation for all 
women, feminism must accept an intersectional understanding of the intersections of gender, 
race, class and nationality (hooks 1981: 157). Today it is Q’eqchi’ women who visually 
represent Q’eqchi’ culture in public spaces in the Ladino world, and women whose daily lives 
in the community define the life cycle and work cycle of the junkab’al and through that it is 
women whose daily action becomes resistance; whose very identities become radical.  
Butler states, “The body is not passively scripted with cultural codes, as if it were a 
lifeless recipient of wholly pre-given cultural relations. But neither do embodied selves pre-
exist the cultural conventions which essentially signify bodies” (Butler 1988: 526). If this is 
true, then we cannot deny the power and meaning present in the production and use of clothing 
which publicly proclaims a Maya identity, and we cannot uproot that identity from a web of 
ancestors stretching back into pre-Hispanic times. Referring to the production and wearing of 
traje, one interviewee emphasised the importance of both in Q’eqchi’ life, saying, “Because 
this way we will not lose what our ancestors left us, and if we stop weaving, we will lose what 
our grandmothers taught us.” Another interviewee, an older woman, said, “You used to go to 
market and look out and know who the women from the aldeas were. All in white.” The same 
woman emphasised that the integration of machine-woven huipils into common use limited her 
ability to identify with other rural women visually. The loss of her ability to integrate with a 
visible public identity impacted her deeply.  
Thinkers such as Gayatri Spivak further challenge the way that we (western academics) 
think about the voices of those living on the periphery of our world. Spivak expands our 
definition of the non-western as “other” and the assumptions that westernised understandings 
of identity, value and rights were understandings that should be embraced across the world 
(Spivak 1988). Spivak pushes those who think about gender to engage not simply with the 
western academic history of gender studies, but also with individual people and their personal 
understandings of who they are--what sits at the core of their identities (Spivak 1988).  
 Kistler’s work in San Juan Chamelco, referred to earlier, provides a basis for 
understanding gendered roles in Q’eqchi’ society as integral to the functioning of communities 
as units made up of junkab’al’eb’. Q’eqchi’ families and towns are integrated communities, in 
which the actions of each individual are essential to the continuation of the communities’ 
identity and future (Kistler 2010a: 412). In this context, women’s role as “bearers of the 
culture” places in their hands a responsibility to their entire communities to carry forward their 
unique identity as Q’eqchi’ Maya.  
78 
 
In the face of ongoing suppression—violent, economic, and social—this role becomes 
deeply politicised, and the ways in which women view themselves and their lives has the 
potential to impact the future of the Q’eqchi’. We cannot ignore how Q’eqchi’ individuals, 
families, and communities situate themselves in a tapestry of Q’eqchi’ identity and history. For 
the Q’eqchi’ people and women, the link to a shared Q’eqchi’ past and ancestors is integral to 
their identity today. People are not simply living out their own lives; they are becoming a part 
of a culture and network that extends into the distant past and future.   
 
RABIN AJAW 
 
Guatemala’s indigenous beauty pageant, Rabin Ajaw, held every year since 1971, ostensibly 
celebrates the beauty and cultural diversity of Maya women across Guatemala. Founded during 
the civil war and titled “Reina Indígena Nacional,” the competition was modelled after a 
tradition of the Cobán annual fair, which began in 1936 to model indigenous clothing to a 
majority Ladino and Guatemalan-German audience. In 1960, the first “India Bonita Cobanera” 
was crowned, and the tradition began its imitation of western beauty pageants blended with 
indigenous tradition and values that continues today. Called at the time “Rabin Cobán,” or 
“Daughter of Cobán,” the title coexisted with “Princesa Tezulutlan,” which was a beauty 
competition including all communities in the Alta Verapaz—not just Cobán or Q’eqchi’, but 
Poqomchi and even Quiché women. In 1969, local teacher and organiser Marco Aurelio Alonso 
invited women from across Guatemala to compete, turning a local beauty pageant into Rabin 
Ajaw: daughter of the ruler. In its early years Rabin Ajaw was heavily supported and even 
funded by the Guatemalan government, which sought to use the nationalisation of the regional 
pageant as a demonstration of their commitment to indigenous rights,21 and was very quickly 
co-opted by indigenous groups themselves. Early Rabin Ajaw title holders used the position to 
call out the human rights abuses committed by the Guatemalan government and to take public 
stands when other women and communities could not (Field interviews Rabin Ajaw 
competitors Elena Toj, Margarita Beb, Yolanda Tul, August 2016). 
 Since then, Rabin Ajaw has evolved into a pageant that includes activities designed to 
prove linguistic, cultural, and historical knowledge, and today serves an important role in 
formalising and publicising Maya identity both internally to Guatemala and in an international 
                                                          
21A false commitment, as the pageant was used as a ruse to cover ongoing human rights abuses against the 
indigenous peoples of Guatemala. 
79 
 
sphere. The women who advance through the pageant system to Rabin Ajaw are considered 
exemplary Maya women. Each of Guatemala’s twenty-two departments has the right to send 
an indigenous woman, who is selected in a series of internal pageants, as a representative to 
compete. Each major town or municipality holds a pageant and selects a winner and runner-
up. Those “princesses” then compete in a departmental pageant, and the winner then travels to 
Cobán to compete for the title of Rabin Ajaw. Competing in the local township competitions, 
and the state or department level, and in Rabin Ajaw itself, is considered a great honour for 
both the women and their communities. The women, their families, and their communities are 
responsible for the expense of the traje from her language group for ceremonial and daily 
wear.22 This can include jewellery, fireworks, candles, and offerings. Communities are also 
responsible for her travel and accommodation while she is competing, and to support her in 
person should she advance, meaning that the more successful a candidate is, the more a 
community invests in her success. To win, the women must demonstrate an ability to function 
in the Ladino/Spanish world while understanding Maya identity and demonstrating their own 
identities via traje, dancing, history, and advocacy. 
When one attends the local Cobán, Chamelco, and Carchá competitions (as well as 
other pageants such as Princesa Tezulutlan, to select the representative from Alta Verapaz to 
Rabin Ajaw) the value that communities place on their representatives becomes clear. At the 
Cobán competition in 2016, over forty people travelled in a bus hired by one community to 
support their candidate by lighting ceremonial candles and standing as she performed a ritual 
on stage. Another community had printed a seven-foot tall portrait of their contestant and 
dutifully held it high above their seats for the entirety of the competition (field notes 2016). 
CREOMPAZ, Cobán’s military base, sponsors a contestant each year—with young men 
contributing portions of their annual military salary to demonstrate the base’s commitment to 
the local community.23 
The contestants and winners of each of these pageants, up to and including the newly 
elected Rabin Ajaw each year, are seen as representatives not only of themselves and their 
language communities, but also of their entire linguistic groups within and outside the Maya 
world. Their gendered performance as Maya women of different heritages reflect the strength 
                                                          
22The San Juan Chamelco, Carchá and Cobán contestants all wear picb’il.  
23The tension in this action is evident, as the CREOMPAZ base is the subject of frequent protests in Cobán as the 
identity of 513 people found in mass graves in 2014 are slowly uncovered, and survivors of torture on the base 
have claimed several other mass grave sites remain buried under newly constructed concrete homes which the 
military claims cannot be torn down or removed at this juncture because of the cost of construction (Henderson, 
Nolin and Peccerelli 2014). 
80 
 
of the Mayan identity of the entire department. In a very overt sense, Rabin Ajaw is a 
demonstration of the strength of the link between a gendered feminine identity and the Maya 
communities in Guatemala. The winners of each pageant, particularly the departmental 
pageants and Rabin Ajaw, become, by default, experts on and representatives of indigeneity in 
Guatemala. During my fieldwork three of my translators and two of my interviewees were 
current or former contestants. On two occasions, when community members learned of my 
translators’ success in Rabin Ajaw to the title of Princesa Tezulutlan, our access to the 
communities suddenly widened. My translators’ acceptance of my work was viewed as 
authoritative by community leaders. Success in the pageant can be life-changing, as former 
winners often become the first people in their families to attend university, travel abroad, and 
work routinely with international aid and development organisations. Winning a departmental 
pageant, or even a larger municipal city pageant, is considered sufficient proof of a woman’s 
knowledge of indigenous language and culture to take jobs in the cultural ministry of the 
Guatemalan government, or even the indigenous language academies (field notes 2016). 
Former contestants I encountered held leadership positions in FEDECOVERA, had worked with 
USAID, and led local protest movements for water rights—roles inaccessible to most women. 
Having a representative from a community win a municipal or departmental pageant is 
a sign to the broader Maya community of the strength of Maya values and heritage in that 
community. Although the woman herself is the representative, winning the pageant is 
indicative of the environment in which she grew and learned how to be a Maya woman. 
Communities with large Ladino populations are rarely represented in the pageant, and 
contestants from Ladino or blended communities such as San Bartolomé de Fray are widely 
considered to be at a disadvantage since they will have “memorised” rather than “grown” with 
the values they have to represent.24 Having a representative win Rabin Ajaw empowers the 
community from which she comes to publicly embrace an identity as “pure” Q’eqchi’, Mam, 
or Kaqchikel, etc., Maya town. For communities facing influxes of Ladino immigration, or 
dealing with external economic forces such as palm oil production or open pit mining, having 
a woman win Rabin Ajaw also means gaining a voice on both the national and international 
stage, as Rabin Ajaw and the runners-up are invited to speak with Guatemala’s president, and 
often travel to represent Guatemala’s indigenous peoples across both North and South America 
and even to Europe. Rabin Ajaw thus becomes an amplifier for the voices of those whom 
Spivak would consider “subaltern” in the Guatemalan context and allows women to co-opt 
                                                          
24Interview with Elena Toj June 2016. She is the 2002 winner of Rabin Cobán. 
81 
 
spaces and ideas once owned by non-indigenous people. The winner of Rabin Ajaw is given 
this access expressly as an indigenous woman, and it is through the power her gender affords 
her as a representative of “Mayaness” that she can expand that representation onto an 
international stage.  
Winning Rabin Ajaw can have a positive impact on a family and community for 
decades, as it is a title a woman carries for life. Many winners of the different pageants leading 
up to Rabin Ajaw, and the Rabin Ajaw herself, are afforded lifelong opportunities. These 
include university scholarships and easier access to paid work outside of their community, than 
other women typically have. Winners are often invited back to participate in Rabin Ajaw as 
honoured guests or judges, and are seen as experts on their history, culture and people 
throughout their lives. The most recent winner from San Juan Chamelco was gifted a house by 
the community and is often called upon to represent San Juan Chamelco at national events 
(field notes July 2016 Rabin Ajaw competition). 
The Rabin Ajaw, and conglomerate pageants, also act as a space in which community 
rivalries play out. Amalia Gue financed her youngest sister, Carmela, to compete in Rabin Ajaw 
twice. This involved using income from IFAM to outfit and train Carmela, as well as hiring a 
bus from Samac to bring supporters of her family into Cobán for the Rabin Cobán evening.  
The respect and space that the Rabin Ajaw pageant is given in Guatemala, and in Cobán 
as an outgrowth of Cobanero traditions, is a demonstration of the value that Q’eqchi’ people, 
and other Maya people, place on women as the source or root of the ability to perpetuate and 
understand Maya traditions. Although men participate in Rabin Ajaw as organisers and judges 
on panels, they do not and cannot hold the same power and authority as the women on judging 
panels who were once successful competitors themselves. Men may evaluate the cultural 
traditions that the women represent; however, they are not viewed as able to represent those 
values in the same ways that women can both within the public and the private spheres. 
Rabin Ajaw thus plays both a macro and a micro role in delineating who is and is not 
“Maya,” within Guatemala at large, and within the communities themselves, including who 
does and does not have the right to Maya history, culture, and identity, and to what degree. 
  
CONCLUSIONS & DISCUSSION 
 
Gender in this context, and the gendered identities of Q’eqchi’ Maya women, become innately 
politicised. Women as the public representatives of indigenous culture, the physical mothers of 
those born into the culture, and the bearers of the culture’s values, meaning, and language into 
82 
 
the next generation become the front line in fighting the process of colonisation. This 
conceptualisation of women as those who are most responsible for the continuation of Q’eqchi’ 
culture from one generation to the next adds a layer of complexity to the governmental and 
NGO campaigns throughout Guatemala’s highlands for girls to attend Spanish-language school. 
The academic and economic independence of women becomes a threat to not only the male 
identity (Ladino or Q’eqchi’) but also the identity of the Q’eqchi’ politic as a whole. For women 
to enter Ladino life is for them to complicate their indigenous identities, and for women to lose 
their indigenous identities is for a community to lose its indigenous identity. For many women 
with university-level education or professional jobs, the daily use of Q’eqchi’ traje then 
becomes a form of coded communication that they are able to both engage in the western world, 
achieve a Spanish language education, and still identify publicly as Maya women. Wearing 
handmade rather than machine-woven traje is particularly important for women who are 
intentionally living in the border space between Ladino/Q’eqchi’, Mayan/Spanish, 
Catholic/Protestant, or Indigenous/Hispanic worlds. Indigenous women who enter professional 
spaces will almost exclusively wear traje, and Ladino women working in indigenous spaces 
will often wear traje at important events as a sign of respect.  
  This creates an interesting juxtaposition of power, as men hold the economic and 
political power in Q’eqchi’ communities, but the identities, histories, and heritages that drive 
political representation and the creation of communities, are held exclusively by women. In 
many senses men and women come to agreements as groups as to how and why communities 
should or should not take action or engage in specific activities. As one of my interviewees 
stated regarding the resettlement of a community after the civil war: 
 
When we decided to come back, a meeting was held of everyone. 
Men and women agreed and then we decided that we wanted to 
be here, and to come back to our homes. We all wanted to be 
here, men and women, and that’s how the community rose a 
second time. 
 
Without men, women would have no access to traditional Ladino power structures such 
as cooperative councils, mayorships, and government measures, and without women, 
indigenous men would lose access to the public, visibility of indigeneity that exists through 
women’s traje. It is women who create and protect—generation to generation—a connection 
between a modern Q’eqchi’ individual and a Mayan heritage, ancestry, and tradition that 
differentiates them from the urban and rural poor in the southern half of Guatemala and across 
83 
 
the rest of Central America. For the Q’eqchi’, this link across time with their Q’eqchi’ ancestors 
serve as a defining pillar of identity, not only separating the Q’eqchi’ from other Maya groups, 
but also creating a sense of unity, both geographically and temporally, in the face of oppression 
and attempted cultural extermination. The complete domination of the Q’eqchi’ and other 
Maya cultures becomes a process of dominating, or co-opting, Q’eqchi’ and other Maya 
women.  
Both the weaving (production) and wearing (use) of the huipils are feminine acts. 
Beyond this, the very act of weaving is an extension and expression of cultural femininity, just 
as corn planting is an extension of cultural masculinity. Weaving is an act that in its very doing 
further feminises the individual engaging in the act, as does giving birth, and such can become 
essential to the personhood of the woman involved. Denise Arnold provides an excellent 
example of this in her work on the Qaqachaka weavers of Bolivia, where she argues that skill 
in textile production is associated with the life stages of young women; and even more 
importantly; that the textiles produced are themselves closely linked to the biological lived 
realities of the women who weave them (Arnold 1997; 113-118). In the Alta Verapaz this 
correlates with the fact that for a woman to be truly considered a master weaver or proper 
teacher, she had to be an older woman, of an age at which she could be expected to have 
grandchildren.  
 Another factor is that for women weaving can also, depending on the era and quality 
of the textiles, symbolise a level of economic independence from the coffee cooperative and 
male relatives. Many of the unmarried and non-mother women living in Samac are master 
weavers and rely on the textiles they produce and sell for an income. The older a woman weaver 
is, and the longer she has woven, the more “expert” her opinion on matters of weaving 
becomes.  
The impact that textile production and the use of traje has on power relations between 
genders in Q’eqchi’ culture cannot be dismissed. The public nature of women’s lived 
indigenous identities is exemplified in the ways that winners of Rabin Ajaw can serve as 
ambassadors of their communities to Guatemala and the wider world; for women an identity 
often repressed can in a small number of cases become an identity that provides power and 
access. Through textile production individual Q’eqchi’ women can gain access to economic 
income and even international markets (see chapter five) in a way that men rarely can. In the 
hands of women indigeneity can open doors rather than close them.  
 Every woman I was introduced to as an expert on Q’eqchi’ tradition was either a master 
weaver who had taught a large number of other women to weave, or a winning participant at 
84 
 
some level of the Rabin Ajaw pageant series. Whether or not women interested in Q’eqchi’ 
heritage were more likely to learn to weave than other women, and whether or not women 
weavers were simply exposed to more Q’eqchi’ heritage through the process of learning to 
weave, remains unclear. However, during the vast majority of my interviews, older weavers 
were often referred to as “grandmothers,” or “teachers.” When I asked questions that the 
women interviewed did not know answers to, they would recommend that I talk with a master 
weaver, grandmother, or teacher. 
As representatives of femininity and guardians of Q’eqchi’ identity, women—
particularly weavers—are valued voices in understanding the important role that digital and 
photographic repatriation can play in the Q’eqchi’ and pan-Maya movement of recovering lost 
heritage and history. The connections that women understand, or perceive, between themselves 
and weavers from previous generations through museum textiles or images thereof become 
links that the Q’eqchi’ pueblo (or community) as a whole understands as existing between 
themselves and ancestors. 
85 
 
Chapter Four: “Nuestro Traje:” Picb’il textiles of the Q’eqchi’ 
 
When midnight came, the Sun could bear the darkness no more and he began to move. 
Ixb’alam woke, and as he spoke, he became a man. He told Ixb’alam what he felt for 
her, and why he had lied about the hunting and how he had helped her garden flourish. 
The sun begged Ixb’alam to escape with him, but she paused. “My father has only one 
daughter. Who will care for him? He will not let me go.” 
The Sun begged. But Ixb’alam told him, “my father is a great hunter.” 
“He will not know where to look for you,” insisted the sun. “I will be day, and you will 
be night. He will not know to look into the stars for you after the sun has set.” 
But Ixb’alam was nervous. So she crept into the main part of the house and found her 
father’s blowgun. Taking it, she gathered up the chili powder sitting by the fire, and 
she ruined the lens of her father’s blowgun with chili powder. Which is why women love 
to eat so much chili today. 
 
Guatemalan traje, or indigenous Maya dress, continues to be an important part of contemporary 
Maya culture and pan-Maya activism. Traje is most commonly worn by women, as men’s use 
of traje has been in decline since the nineteenth century.1 While there is limited evidence 
regarding textile production, use, and wear in the pre-Hispanic period, we do know that the 
ancient Maya used back strap looms as women weaving are depicted in figures and on vases 
(Halperin 2008: 112). While textiles themselves do not preserve well in the hot, wet climate of 
the region, impressions of textiles have been found in archaeological digs, including at major 
sites such as Rio Azul and Chichin Itza (Carlsen 1986: 147 and 1987: Lothrop 1992). We do 
know that indigenous traje has played a significant role in the production and continuation of 
indigenous identity in Guatemala since at least the seventeenth century and can posit that 
textiles and textile production played an important role in pre-classic, classic and post classic 
Maya society (Shapiro & Lieb 2010).2 
Today in Guatemala, as throughout much of Guatemala’s post-colonial history, 
weaving practices and traje can be used to identify a woman’s linguistic, cultural, and even 
geographic background. Huipils, cortes (blouses and skirts), belts, and headdresses are 
                                                          
1See the first chapter on the history in the region for more details. 
2For a more in-depth discussion of pre-hispanic textiles (especially sheer textiles) refer to Joy Mahler Lothrop’s 
work on the finds from the Cenote of Sacrifice at Chichin Itza (1992) and Domenici and Sanchez Valenzuela’s 
2017 work Archaeological context and conservation issues. In PreColumbian Textile Conference VII. L. 
Bjerregaard and A. Peters (eds).  
86 
 
produced by or for women, and 
worn by women (and in some 
communities; men)3 from 
specific cultural backgrounds in 
Guatemala. Clothing and textile 
production make up an important 
part of cultural, social, and 
political dialogue in one of 
Central America’s most diverse 
nations. 
While most cortes are 
woven on floor looms by men 
(field notes 2016, Dickson & 
Littrel 1998: 74)4 huipils (also 
known as p’ot in many Maya 
languages, including Q’eqchi’) 
are either produced on back 
strap looms, or made of 
imported fabric from China and 
Taiwan.5 As we have seen, 
while it is becoming somewhat 
fashionable for women to wear 
huipils from outside their 
linguistic or geographic region, 
both as a stylistic choice and as a 
Pan-Mayan political statement, 
most huipils are still produced, marketed, and worn in their regions of origin by women for 
whom those garments hold significance as (what I refer to as) “identity-sharing garments.” 
                                                          
3Notably communities in the Lake Atitlan area. 
4Through interviews with a variety of local corte vendors I learned that more and more cortes are being imported. 
However, there remain a few men in the Alta Verapaz who weave cortes. They primarily live in San Cristobal, 
but there is at least one weaver in San Juan Chamelco, although at the time of my fieldwork he was not weaving 
because of a broken leg sustained in a motorcycle accident. 
5This fact is well documented, although I independently confirmed it by interviewing a variety of shop owners 
and markets stall vendors of the imported huipil fabric, most of whom purchased textiles from Taiwan. During 
these conversations, I found a number of shop owners who either knew or were learning Chinese in order to better 
communicate with their own vendors in Taiwan and mainland China. 
Figure 4.1: Ixil Huipil from the Cotzal region near the Baja Verapaz.  
Source: Callie Vandewiele photo 2018. Huipil purchased in Nebaj in May 
2016. 
Photo credit Callie Vandewiele 2018. 
Figure 4.2: Poqomchi Huipil from the Tactic Municipality. 
Neighbouring municipality to Cobán.  
Source Callie Vandewiele photo 2018. Huipil purchased in San Juan 
Chamelco in 2017. 
87 
 
Each huipil style is able to 
communicate not only the 
geographic region to which it 
belongs, but also the language most 
likely spoken by the woman who 
wove it and one who wears it. For 
many different Maya groups, the 
figures woven into the pattern of the 
huipils hold an ontological, 
mythical, or spiritual significance. 
As identity garments, these huipils 
can speak in one way to the 
members of the community from 
which they originate, in another to 
other Guatemalans, and in a third to 
an international audience. The 
diverse style and range of huipils 
include the thick, sometimes wool 
huipils from Cotzal in the Ixil-
speaking region to the heavily 
brocaded rayon and cotton huipils 
woven by Poqomchi speaking 
people from Tactic, among dozens 
of other styles.  
Picb'il is one of the 
traditional huipils of the Q’eqchi’ speaking municipal centres of the Alta Verapaz: Cobán, San 
Pedro Carchá, and San Juan Chamelco. All of the traditional textiles associated with this region 
are sheer or gauze weaves and include picb'il, tzot (both sheer textiles woven with the same 
thread), and between three and four “calada” styles (some partial gauze, some sheer) woven 
with what many weavers in the region call “grueso,” or fat thread.6 White is the traditional 
colour of the regional huipils, but in the last seventy-five years, with the introduction of colour-
                                                          
6The term ‘fat’ is used here specifically as the weavers also use Q’eqchi’ and Spanish terms for ‘wide’ ‘big’ 
‘broad’ and ‘large’. Within the academic canon ‘course’ is more likely to be used.  
Figure 4.3: Manufactured lace huipil in the style of the Alta 
Verapaz circa 2016. Huipil purchased in San Juan Chamelco. 
Unaccessioned property of the MAA.  
Photograph: Callie Vandewiele 2018  
Figure 4.4: Handwoven Calada Huipil in the style of the Alta 
Verapaz. 
Source Callie Vandewiele photograph 2018. Huipil purchased in 
San Juan Chamelco 2017. 
88 
 
fast chemical dyes as well as the 
importation of mass-produced 
lace-style fabrics from China and 
Taiwan for textile production, 
many women have been weaving 
and wearing calada huipils in 
multiple colours. Coloured 
embroidery on the sleeves and 
collars of the huipils have also 
become increasingly popular, 
particularly in the communities 
surrounding the municipality of 
San Juan Chamelco. The women of the highland communities are more likely to wear 
handwoven textiles than the women of the low-lying regions surrounding the centre of the 
Q’eqchi’ world.  
 While there are a variety of traditional huipil styles, picb’il is considered the most 
traditional of the huipils for the region. Many people identify tzot as being an older style than 
picb’il, worn for important events: weddings, baptisms, christenings, funerals, burials,7 etc. 
Picb’il is considered not only the most traditional of garments, but also the most desirable and 
of the highest value. This is intriguing, as often the way women voiced the value of picb’il as 
a traditional textile was the recognition or endorsement of picb’il as a garment rooted in 
Q’eqchi’ tradition through its age and the number of years that it has been woven and used, 
while tzot (despite being an older tradition) was less valued than picb’il.  
 Placing picb’il textiles in the context of the Cobán region, I draw upon both the interviews 
completed for my fieldwork and the national indigenous beauty pageant Rabin Ajaw, which, 
as already discussed, is widely considered to be a space in which the most authentic indigenous 
dress of each region is used and represented. In my interview data, almost all of the women in 
the Cobán and Carchá regions identified picb’il as “lo más tradicional” (“the most traditional”) 
of the Cobanero textiles, with only women from San Juan Chamelco calling tzot the oldest 
traditional textile and picb’il the most recent traditional textile. Because San Juan Chamelco, 
or even the nearby village Chamil, appears to have been the seat of local power prior to the 
arrival of the Spanish in the region, people living in this area believe themselves to be the most 
                                                          
7In some isolated communities tzot is still used as a burial garment, but it has become increasingly rare. 
Figure 4.5: Handwoven Picb’il Huipil produced by Margarita Poou 
in 2016.  
Source: Callie Vandewiele photograph 2017. 
89 
 
authentic by virtue of living in the oldest Q’eqchi’ communities today often considered the 
spiritual centre of Q’eqchi’ life. Cobán, a centre established by the Spanish, is considered the 
current and colonial seat of power in the region and the centre of modern Q’eqchi’ life. 
According to local lore, the communities above San Juan Chamelco and Chamil firmly believe 
that they were among the last of the Q’eqchi’, and indeed 
the entire Maya world, to be conquered.  
During the course of my interviews, I discovered that the weavers were quite discerning 
when it came to identifying which textiles from my photo booklets were picb’il, as the 27th, 
28th and 29th photos in my pattern booklet were universally described to me as not being of 
picb’il textiles, despite being identified using the same terminology as picb’il textiles by the 
museums where they held. These textiles were of far less interest to the women than the picb’il 
textiles. This is not because they were less historic than the picb’il ones, but because they were 
perceived as being less historically significant in constructing a narrative about weaving and 
Q’eqchi’ identity, which has the perception of picb’il as “the traditional textile” at its hub.  
Picb’il textiles are the only huipils woven by the women who compete to represent 
Cobán, San Juan Chamelco, and San Pedro Carchá. Picb’il huipils are those worn in the local 
beauty pageants in which representatives for each municipality to go take part in the Rabin 
Ajaw pageant (as discussed in chapter three) are selected. One of the criteria for winning any 
of the beauty pageants within the Rabin Ajaw group is the perception that the women competing 
represents the most authentic version of their indigenous people. For representatives competing 
in Rabin Ajaw at Cobán, the ability of a woman to state that she wove her huipil as a part of 
her traje has (in at least one instance) proved very helpful to that competitor (Field notes July 
2016 Rabin Ajaw competition). Conversely, wearing machine-woven traje or bringing in 
modern accessories are predictable ways for a woman to put herself at a disadvantage. It 
remains unclear where this emphasis on hand woven textiles comes from—whether it be Maya 
groups, local German elites or the Guatemalan government. What is clear today being that, 
since the 1980s, the Q’eqchi’ have co-opted the standard, internalised it, and melded it to a 
Q’eqchi’ and Maya understanding of the world, and as a tool for expressing Maya identity 
within local, national and international spaces.  
The original purpose of the focus on authenticity may be lost, but its modern usage 
within Rabin Ajaw is maintaining and saving traditional practices and knowledge in the face 
of “development.” The fact that Rabin Ajaw has been held in Cobán since its inception, and as 
a result controlled to a significant extent by the Q’eqchi’ people, adds to the authority that the 
90 
 
pageant claims to have in stating what is and is not traditional Q’eqchi’ Maya clothing, 
ceremony, etc. 
 
PICB’IL, THE COBANERA AND THE PROCESS OF WEAVING 
 
Picb’il is identifiable from a distance, allowing 
anyone to identify a Q’eqchi’ woman as such 
upon sight if she is wearing her traje. The huipil 
falls outside the corte, meaning that the visual 
outline of a Q’eqchi’ woman includes a triangular 
skirt, with a gauzy blouse falling in such a way 
that it appears longer around the arms than 
around the centre of the waist. Most women sew 
the sleeves quite tightly, so that the blouse clings 
at the elbow despite being a rectangular, 
unshaped textile. The silhouette is, locally, quite 
identifiable as that of a Maya woman, and 
uniquely that of a Cobanera. When being 
photographed for Rabin Ajaw, contestants from 
the Alta Verapaz almost always pose in a partial 
silhouette, ensuring that the images of the 
Q’eqchi’ woman includes her “shape” in traje. 
Dolls of these women are often either grinding corn for tortillas or weaving, indicating that, 
while many Q’eqchi’ women do not weave, “Q’eqchi’ woman” is still synonymous with 
“weaver.” Huipils are sized according to height, with longer panels woven for taller women. 
The openness of the garment allows women to wear the same huipils throughout her life, 
including periods of pregnancy and breastfeeding, without needing to resize. 
Defined by its construction, picb’il is a single heddle woven textile produced on a back 
strap loom, with cotton thread number 21 or 22, the smallest thread available on the market in 
the region. They are a plain weave textile with widely spaced warp and weft and the design is 
laid in using a supplementary weft thread. The small gauge of the thread necessitates that 
production follow a specific process, unique to picb’il. In picb’il weaving the loom is loaded, 
and the weaving process is similar to many other single-weft back strap weaving techniques. 
However, in order to ensure that the threads do not snap during production, weavers process 
Figure 4.6: Cristina Macz, a Q’eqchi’ woman, 
wearing her traditional picb’il huipil.  
Source: Callie Vandewiele, field photographs 2017. 
91 
 
the thread prior to setting up their looms by creating a nixtamal, or tortilla dough, specifically 
for the thread and soaking or coating the threads in this mixture prior to setting up the loom. 
Nixtamal is a substance that plays an important role in the Q’eqchi’ telling of the legend of the 
Moon and the Sun. Generally, in the legend Ixb’alam ke, the Moon, trips the Sun by throwing 
nixtamal onto his path and making the ground sticky (as can be seen in the chapter headings). 
For other Maya groups, the nixtamal comes from the cooking space, but for the Q’eqchi’ it is 
further proof of the Moon’s role as a Maya woman and weaver; she has the nixtamal at hand 
as she sits outside her house weaving by the path because she is a picb’il weaver. This not only 
further embeds her identity into her weaving, but also roots the practice of picb’il as a textile 
into the distant past of the Maya. Some weavers simply water down nixtamal they have made 
to cook tortillas, others soak old tortillas that did not get eaten in water before grinding them 
back into dough and mixing that with water, but for all weavers the process of making nixtamal 
for a loom mirrors the process of making nixtamal for tortillas. One weaver described the 
process as “feeding the loom,” going on to point out to me that I would not leave a child or a 
chicken hungry if I wanted them to “grow well.” 
During the weaving process a picb’il loom cannot be used if it is too damp or too warm 
outside, lest the fine threads break. One part of mastering the process of weaving picb’il is 
learning to tell if and when a loom needs to be “re-fed,” with the nixtamal mixture painted 
across the threads of the loom to strengthen them. This ongoing bath in corn or tortilla dough, 
makes picb’il looms extremely susceptible to being destroyed by insects or animals, which are 
attracted to the corn, and then chew through the threads.8 It also means that when a huipil is 
finished it has a very stiff, almost starched quality to it until it has been thoroughly washed by 
the weaver. One informant outside of San Pedro Carchá explained that the textile is not finished 
until it has been cleaned, because as long as the fibre maintains the stiffness of the corn mixture, 
it is still in many ways “on the loom,” even if the sticks that make up the loom itself have been 
removed and are being used to make a second or third panel for the garment. Most weavers do 
not wash panels of fabric until the entire garment is complete.  
Some weavers, if pressed for time to finish a garment, may weave on cold or wet days 
by lining embers up from the fire underneath the length of the threads of the loom to keep them 
from getting too wet to weave—although this practice is risky and often leads to threads 
                                                          
8One of the reasons that animals might chew through threads could be a “bad heart” or failure to negotiate with 
the tzuultaq’a in your region (who then sends insects as punishment). Picb’il weaving can be particularly prone 
to potential negative encounters in the spiritual realm, since the threads are far more likely to be damaged by 
animals or insects than other threads. The reverse of this is that a successful garment production means that you 
are in good standing spiritually within your geographic space and sense. 
92 
 
breaking because they are too dry. Picb’il huipils take, on average, five to eight weeks to 
complete, depending on the length of the huipil panels requested and the density of the 
patterning. None of the women I spoke to were willing to weave at night. Even with the 
introduction of relatively reliable electric lighting in all but one of the communities where I 
worked, women referred to weaving in the evening as being “unlucky.” It was because she 
wove at night that the maiden who became the moon was spirited away, and weavers will joke 
that if you weave at night then the sun might come by and steal you, or the moon might see and 
become jealous. On a more practical front, the evening is the only portion of the day when men 
and women interact in the same space. Weaving is a distinctly female activity, and as men do 
not bring male labour to the home, women do not engage in female labour in a shared gender 
space either. 
 The production of one average-sized huipil takes one pound of the number 21 or 22 
cotton thread, which can be purchased locally from one of two shops owned by members of 
the same family: one in San Juan Chamelco and one in Tactic.9 The thread costs 25 Quetzales, 
or $3.25 per pound. While that sum seems insignificant, for a family whose annual income (on 
average) sits between $168 per year to $350 per year,10 that cost can be prohibitive. Many 
                                                          
9San Juan Chamelco and Tactic are both major market towns for Q’eqchi’ and Pocomchi speaking people.  
10Oxfam 2015. 
Figure 4.7: Picb’il loom in process.  
Source: Photograph Callie Vandewiele, Illustration of photograph Cornelis Drost. 2018. Copyright held by 
Callie Vandewiele 
93 
 
weavers are only able to purchase thread for a new huipil or textile project once they have sold 
the last huipil they produced. Women who purchase textiles regularly often buy the thread up 
front, as they know it is a significant cost to their weavers. 
All of the textiles woven traditionally in the Alta Verapaz are produced on single, 
double or triple heddle back strap looms. The double and triple heddle textiles are the calada 
or basket-style weaves, some plain and others with patterns woven into them. The single heddle 
back strap loom is used to weave picb’il and is one of the simplest looms still used today. 
Above (fig 4.7) is an image of a complete picb’il single heddle loom demonstrating the setup 
and construction of the loom. 
As one of the simplest forms of back strap weaving, it is likely that the textiles produced 
on these looms, particularly cotton textiles, share some characteristics with the sheer textiles 
produced and used by the ancient Maya. None of the components of these particular looms 
were introduced by the Spanish, meaning that, while we have no evidence as to what patterns 
or designs ancient Maya peoples preferred, the garments produced on these looms 
technologically match the garments they would have been able to produce. As of yet 
unpublished research conducted by Dr Cara Tremain at the University of Illinois identifying 
sheer textiles depicted on pre-classic and classic Maya vases, demonstrates that, whether or not 
the Maya wove picb’il specifically, the use of sheer textiles does indeed extend into an ancient 
Mayan past, in the form of garments worn by both women and men.11 
  
Figure 4.8: Maya 
Vase illustrating 
sheer textile.  
Source: Photo: 
American Museum of 
Natural History 
(AMNH) online 
catalogue  
Photo Illustration: 
Callie Vandewiele 
2018 
 
 
 
 
                                                          
11Her analysis using UV and microscope analysis of paint degradation and application indicates that the textile 
on this, and a handful of other vase images, were intentionally painted to appear sheer (personal correspondence 
2018).  
94 
 
 This connection to ancient sheer textiles adds weight to the widely held belief among 
weavers of picb’il that this tradition is something that they share with both recent and distant 
ancestors. As per the discussion on kinship groups being formed through shared labour and life 
in Q’eqchi’ regions, the shared physical experience of weaving is part of what ties Q’eqchi’ 
women to their ancestors. The physical 
experience of weaving is particularly 
visceral and present.  
Back strap looms require the 
weaver to be not only the person 
weaving, but also a part of the loom 
itself, providing the tension necessary 
to produce a textile. The weaver adds 
tension to the warp threads by putting 
pressure on the loom using her hips 
and back. As seen in the photo to the 
right, Maya weavers sit low to the 
ground, on a stool or small mat, with 
the loom belt wrapped around their 
lower backs. In the Alta Verapaz, most 
women sit on small stools while they weave, which relieves some of the pressure from the legs, 
but still places the textile at, more or less, a forty-five-degree angle to the floor. 
Work on the biomechanics of activity and the study of archaeological remains suggest 
that an activity that involves repetition and pressure, such as weaving using a back strap loom, 
has a physiological impact on the body of the weaver. It is almost certain that women who 
weave regularly develop muscle and posture changes related to their weaving activity, and 
quite likely that the markers of those changes remain in the skeletal structure of the body long 
after death. Many weavers talk about experiencing back pain after using a loom for too long. 
This means that a weaver uses the entirety of her body in the weaving process to a degree that 
results in semi-permanent or permanent physiological changes. The importance of the physical 
aspect of weaving became apparently early on, during my fieldwork. In identifying weavers, I 
learned to ask if women had ever woven, rather than if they knew how to weave, as unless a 
woman was actively a weaver, or had stopped weaving very late in life due to old age, she 
would not be identified to me as a weaver, but rather as someone who used to know how to 
weave. 
Figure 4.9: Kaqchikel woman weaving in San Antonios Aguas 
Calientes August 2016. 
Source: Callie Vandewiele field photograph 2016. 
95 
 
That the physical experience of weaving extends to a change in the body emboldens the 
argument that weaving is an innately embodied practice. Judith Butler, when talking about 
embodied identities, discusses the ability of engaging the body in certain activities and 
presentations that enmesh the individual within a specific expected social role (1999). The 
embodiment of weaving in turn permanently impacts the physiology of the weaver. She 
becomes a part of her loom not just while she is weaving, but in every aspect of her life. 
Ontologically, this blends with the Q’eqchi’ understanding of individual beings that includes 
work and care objects as a part of the individual. If a loom, and the textiles produced on that 
loom, become (even temporarily) a part of the weaver or creator, it makes perfect sense within 
a Q’eqchi’ context that the body of the weaver would change physiologically in response to 
the activity of weaving and the objects being produced, at the same time that the spiritual being 
is changed by and connected to the object on another plane. 
 
LEARNING TO WEAVE 
 
As a part of my fieldwork, I accepted an offer from Margarita Poou to learn how to weave 
alongside her seventeen-year-old niece, Ana.12 Although the offer was potentially made in jest, 
once it became clear that I was earnest in my acceptance of it, Margarita set a date for us to go 
and get the necessary components for a loom in the market town of Tactic. I purchased all the 
supplies for my loom with Margarita’s help from a vendor she knew well in the market, and 
then arranged to buy thread for my various projects directly from Margarita herself.13 Learning 
to weave, particularly doing so alongside Ana, gave me a window into the ways in which 
women learn and teach weaving, as well as a better understanding of the personal relationships 
between students and teachers. 
While most women reported learning to weave from a direct family member or in-law, 
there are a small number of women who serve as “hubs” for communities of weavers. These 
women teach a large number of non-relative women to weave. Usually, these women have a 
direct market connection, or are the daughters or granddaughters of women who served as hubs 
in previous generations. Three of the four women “hubs” whom I interviewed talked about 
textile production in a much more ontologically complex way than the average picb’il weaver 
in the Alta Verapaz. These women all lived in Q’eqchi’ monolingual communities and were 
                                                          
12Pseudonym used Ana is under 18. 
13It is not uncommon for one woman with the ability to travel to a market town and the capital to purchase thread 
for herself and to sell to other women in her community. 
96 
 
far more likely than other weavers to talk about the spiritual aspects of weaving, such as having 
your “heart right” to keep insects from destroying your work. These weavers were also more 
likely to use terms such as “feed the thread” to describe the nixtamal process and, when asked, 
to tell me the story of the moon and sun: all four women I identified as hubs gave exceptionally 
detailed renditions that included lists of the figures that Ixb’alam Ke wove into her textiles. 
These women were also far more likely to be repositories of knowledge and information about 
the histories of their own communities than other women of similar ages. 
During the course of my fieldwork, I conducted a mini survey asking each interviewee 
who taught her how to weave, and what their relationship to that teacher was. I found that, 
while most weavers learned to weave from their mothers (46.9%), most of the women who had 
learned from unrelated weavers (23.8%) had learned from Rosario Coy, and that many women 
with older sisters learned not from their mother directly but from a sister who had (8.1%). With 
a few exceptions, weavers learned to weave within their own junkab’als--women they lived in 
close conjunction with and with whom they shared close kinship ties through shared living or 
through marriage. 
Learning to weave is a process that can take anywhere from weeks to years. Both Ana 
and I started our first looms using industrially spun cotton thread commonly used for calada 
huipils in the Alta Verapaz called alemán (German) locally. It is sturdy, difficult to break, and 
comparatively thick. Learning to weave, like weaving itself, is an activity that fits into a day in 
Figure 4.10: Bar graph indicating relationships between weavers and their teachers.  
97 
 
the spaces left unfilled by other activities. While learning to weave, we were also critiqued on 
our ability to make tortillas, given children to babysit, asked to help out with household chores, 
shelling corn, or picking coffee. In other words, we were also learning the norms of how 
Margarita kept and managed her household.  
Weaving students, in some respects, have a similar, if less intense, relationship with 
their weaving teacher as young women do with their mothers-in-law. A young woman will 
have been taught how to manage a household, cook, clean, what objects are taken to market, 
where and when etc., but is expected to re-learn to do these things in the way that her mother-
in-law does. When she is older, and has children of her own, she can blend both systems, but 
not in the early days of a marriage. In the same way, a weaving student learns a great deal more 
from her weaving teacher than simply how to weave. For women learning to weave from in-
laws, weaving then becomes one of the many skills they expect to learn, or relearn, as they 
move from one household, or junkab’al, to another.  
“Weaver” is a role that spans a woman’s entire life. Whether young and unmarried, 
married with children, never married, an old grandmother, or a widow, weavers share an 
identity predicated on the possession and use of the knowledge inherent in weaving, but deeply 
rooted into the physical aspect of weaving itself. 
Weaving provides younger women with a way to tap into social networks outside of 
blood or kinship ties. Although many women learn to weave or teach weaving within the 
network of their junkab’al or the eb’junkab’al of their blood relatives, weaving does provide 
an opportunity for women to approach a neighbour or distant relative and create a relationship 
that in some ways mimics that of the bond between mother-in-law and daughter-in-law. While 
learning to weave, women are expected to spend a great deal of time with their teacher to help 
prepare food, clean, and generally be a part of the household during the hours that they are 
there. Very few weavers will weave all day long, or even in long blocks of time. Instead, 
weaving is interspersed throughout the day, filling otherwise idle gaps of time. As kinship 
relationships in Q’eqchi’ society are centred on time spent living and working together, women 
who teach and learn to weave develop close quasi-kinship bonds.  
 As Q’eqchi’ kinship units (the eb’junkab’al) are established through shared work and 
action, in sharing the work of a weaving teacher’s junkab’al, the weaving student integrates 
into that kinship unit. While the integration is temporary and almost superficial, the lasting 
impact on personal relationships and community politics runs deep. Rosario Coy (QanaRux) is 
referred to as many women in her village, with whom she shares no biological or kinship ties 
apart from having taught those women to weave, as “our grandmother.” 
98 
 
Her granddaughter, Marta,14 who has carried on Rosario’s commitment to teaching any 
woman interested to weave, is referred to as an aunt, or a sister, by all her former students and 
some of their children. It is not typical to refer to women who fall outside of one’s own 
junkab’al with familial terms so this is a unique extension between weavers and their students, 
and the relationships between non-relative teachers and weaving students creates unique ties 
between kinship groups who are otherwise unrelated (see weaving genealogy chart in chapter 
five on page 119). 
During the interviews, I discovered that the terminology women use to talk about the 
value of picb’il and weaving is shared by teachers and students, if two sisters learn from two 
different teachers, they will talk about the value of weaving in different ways. Picb’il enhances 
community bonds, and allows women to build shared identities, form community alliances, 
and reinforce ideas of traditional and economic value around textiles.  
One of the values transferred between weaving teacher and student are the ways in 
which weavers think about the various values associated with the different patterns woven into 
textiles during construction. Picb’il weavers learn patterns through rote memorisation, 
reproducing the same pattern with the guidance of their teacher, over and over until they can 
reproduce it themselves. The patterns are taught using a counting system, and the numbers five, 
eight, and thirteen15 were (in my limited observations) used repeatedly when odd or even 
numbers were required. While I was working with Margarita, the first pattern that Ana and I 
learned was the puntito, which we reproduced on scarves several times before moving onto 
pato (duck), a slightly modified version of puntito, but with a neck and head. Ana progressed 
much more quickly than I did, as she essentially moved into Margarita’s house for days at a 
time, whereas I was still completing interviews in two other communities and could only spend 
between two and three days per week at the house, and of course, even on those days, weaving 
was an intermittent activity.  
Ana had the added advantage of having grown up around weavers. Similarly, the four-
year-old niece of Margarita, Rosie, was always underfoot and often imitated weaving or helped 
wind thread (usually ruining it) whenever the opportunity presented itself. Often Margarita 
would let Rosie stand next to her, or even sit on her lap while she was weaving non-picb’il 
garments,16 and play with the threads. Growing up with that access to weaving means that 
                                                          
14Pseudonym used at her request. 
15Ontologically important numbers to the Q’eqchi’. 
16The picb’il was too delicate. 
99 
 
Rosie will approach learning to weave with the nearly innate knowledge of how something 
works that comes with lifelong exposure. 
Upon completion, most weavers take their first woven object, under the guidance of 
their weaving teacher, to the Calvary Church in Cobán or Chamelco and leave it as an offering 
to a saint of their choosing. The saint is then meant to bless them with the ability to weave well 
and the opportunity to sell what they weave in markets for good prices. It is not a dissimilar 
process to the offerings of maize, cacao, and other food objects to the tzuultaq’a before a corn 
planting ceremony. 
 
TEXTILE PATTERNS  
 
In this section I present pattern identification images that were taken from the museum textiles 
and contemporary textiles in the field and in personal collections17 of Guatemalan textiles, 
many of which were used in the textile patterns booklet (as shown in Appendix C) and used 
during field interviews. The encounters between weavers and these images constituted a part 
of the digital repatriation project that I carried out. The data presented in this section, and in 
tables 4.1 and 4.2 comes directly from the transcriptions of my taped interviews and interview 
notes as weavers encountered the textile pattern booklet. For weavers the range of images 
present on picb’il textiles was significant, and while most weavers did not spontaneously 
comment on the ontological nature of each design, a handful of my informants (mostly 
Rosario’s students) went to great lengths to ensure that I understood not only the names and 
identifications of each pattern but also their individual significance. 
I worked with weavers in all three municipal areas—Cobán, San Juan Chamelco, and 
San Pedro Carchá—to identify each of the textile patterns and the meaning behind them. Most 
of the women I interviewed were able to weave between six and ten patterns and identify by 
name and with confidence around twelve patterns. The women who had learned through 
Rosario Coy were most able to talk about the significance behind the patterns that they wove 
and the meaning conveyed by those patterns in the textiles. 
Picb’il patterns were identified by interviewees as belonging to the specific region 
within the Alta Verapaz (Cobán, Carchá, or Chamelco) based not on the specific patterns 
woven, but on the style in which the patterns were woven into the textile. The weavers in and 
around Cobán weave very small figures in tight rows; those in San Pedro Carchá weave very 
                                                          
17Textiles owned by individuals who are collectors not affiliated with museums, most notably those of Kathleen 
Vitale and Seth Hempstead. 
100 
 
tall figures, so that a huipil only has space for three or four rows of pattern across each side of 
the garment. The figures coming from San Juan Chamelco are between Cobán and Carchá in 
size, and more likely to be surrounded by what I refer to as “filling” figures, points, lines or 
rings—sitting between more complex figures and used to balance the tension in the weft. There 
is no specialist terminology for the idea of a filling figure in local discourse on textiles. Women 
simply commonly blend patterns: always putting a star on a deer’s back for example or placing 
a puntito between figures with upraised arms. While the figure serves an important purpose in 
the structure of the textile, it is talked about as a traditional part of the patterning by local 
weavers. 
The designs themselves proved to be recognisable across the three geographic regions, 
and weavers within each region are capable of imitating the stylistic choices of the other 
regions. Style imitation occurs across the Pan-Maya world, but also locally as a result of 
broader fashion themes and a desire to diversify a wardrobe while continuing to wear traje on 
a daily basis.  
 
ONTOLOGICAL SIGNIFICANCE  
 
Within Q’eqchi’ ontology, that objects, people, animals, and the supernatural bleed back and 
forth into one another (and away from one another) over the course of a lifetime lends special 
relevance to objects used heavily in life. As the objects depicted on picb’il textiles exist in 
museum collections and market spaces, this means that the women themselves are also present 
to some degree with the object throughout its life. These textiles are inherently a part of the 
woman who created them, and thus inherently Q’eqchi’ themselves. This “Q’eqchi’ness” is an 
aspect of the object that does not fade or disappear over time, meaning that the object itself is 
a part of the Q’eqchi’ collective on both the physical and supernatural plane. 
It is not surprising, then, that the patterns woven onto Q’eqchi’ textiles are also of 
ontological significance. The phrase that all weavers interviewed used (in Spanish) to refer to 
the process of in-laying designs was plasmar, “to shape.” Pairing this with how weavers refer 
to textiles “growing” as they are woven, we can see that weavers think of the patterns they 
weave into textiles as designs that they shape through the process of growth. The language 
roots the textile production process within an organic framework; as the textile will have a kind 
of life when it is complete, it makes sense to understand its creation as an organic process 
101 
 
governed by women, the sources of life (see also Drasart 2007 for comparative work on Andean 
weavers ‘breathing life’ into textiles).18 
This understanding of a process of ‘making’ as being similar to or even organic in its 
own nature is supported by theoretical work done by Tim Ingold in 2000. Ingold asks 
researchers to see the ‘…movement as truly generative of the object rather than merely 
revelatory of an object that is already present,’ (2000; 346). Ingold posits then that 
understanding the creation of objects as an act of growth allows for a better understanding of 
material culture and material production. In the case of Q’eqchi’ Maya weavers this narrative 
of growth, and the underlying assumption that the loom and textile objects have forms of 
‘selves’ can be compared with the Kuna woodcarvers of Panama, where the same verb (sopet) 
is used for the production of wooden figures, canoes and other carved objects as is used for 
‘growth’ or ‘gestation’, implying a link between the process of ‘growing’ and ‘making.’ 
(Hallam & Ingold 2014; 92-93).  
It makes sense then that the patterns that the women shape into the ‘growing’ textiles 
are, for the most part, images that master weaver Rosario Coy refers to as los eternos (the 
eternals), which she identifies as objects or animals that make up universal, or eternal, aspects 
of Q’eqchi’ life. In Rosario’s mind, eternal aspects were experienced by Q’eqchi’ ancestors a 
thousand years ago and will be experienced by Q'eqchi’ descendants a thousand years from 
now and non-eternal patterns as being only a part of the experience of some but not all Q’eqchi’ 
people. Rosario understands that many aspects of Q’eqchi’ life are “not eternal” by her 
definition. Eternal objects include ducks, but do not include chickens, for example; deer but 
not horses. For her, non-eternal things are only experienced by certain generations based on 
the exact point in time in which they live. The vast majority of the weavers referred to these 
patterns (eternal and non-eternal) in both the Q’eqchi’ and the Spanish language, and many of 
the objects shaped into textiles have their own ontological and spiritual significance for the 
Q’eqchi’ people. The more “eternal” an object (e.g., corn, butterfly, hummingbird) the deeper 
its ontological significance (see meaning chart beginning on page 102) and the more concrete 
the spiritual life of the object.  
Nearly all the weavers grouped the textiles into two categories: “known” and “lost.” 
Many historical textiles fell into the category of “known,” as the weavers still held the 
                                                          
18Although I have limited fluency in Q’eqchi’, it is clear that there is importance in language shifts between 
Q’eqchi’ and Spanish in weaving practice. I can state that, during my fieldwork, it became clear that the Q’eqchi’ 
words used for weaving and weaving processes are more organic in nature than the Spanish equivalents. The more 
direct the translation, the more likely the word is to be organic in nature. “To feed” versus “to paint” for the 
Nixtamal coating, “to shape” as the descriptive term of the pattern work, “hungry” versus “dry,” etc. 
102 
 
knowledge needed to produce these textiles, and a few contemporary textiles were identified 
as “lost” in communities where those patterns were no longer woven, even if they were woven 
by picb’il weavers in nearby towns. 
Below is the table of the textile patterns by the picb’il weavers I interviewed using my 
photo booklets. Many of these patterns can appear alone or with other patterns, and some (like 
the hummingbird/colibri/tz’unun) never appear unless present with another specific pattern, for 
example corn plant/milpa/k’al: the hummingbird on the corn/el colibrí sobre la milpa/tz’unun 
chi ru li k’al, which will be elucidated in a second table. The remainder of patterns are as likely 
to appear in conjunction with other patterns as they are independently.  
None of these definitions or histories can be considered exhaustive of Q’eqchi’ culture; 
however, they can be considered representative of the ways in which women who weave think 
and talk about the patterns that they produce. I have ordered the textiles in these tables in the 
same order that my weaving teacher, Margarita Poou, informed me she would teach beginning 
weavers each one. As a result, the textiles are ordered (with a few exceptions) by degree of 
complexity of construction while honouring the rationale of my informants in their 
presentation. Contemporary and historic patterns are mixed in this ordering, as that was not of 
import to my interviewees when discussing textile pattern meaning: rather they focused on the 
ontological significance of these patterns and their root in the Maya cosmovision.  
 
TEXTILE PATTERNS WOVEN ALONE: 
 
Name of Pattern 
(English/Spanish/Q’eqchi’) 
Significance 
Point/puntito/ru’uj 
 
(Contemporary textile) 
 
 
 
This is the first pattern that many women learned to weave 
(followed by “duck,” the second most common first pattern) 
and serves as filler pattern, which reset the weft around 
figures, such as deer, that may offset it. In some textiles, this 
can be used to represent smoke, sometimes called “seed,” 
although most weavers identified the two patterns as being 
distinct. 
There are a series of variations on ‘point’ the most significant 
being “Planet/planeta/ruuchich’och” Planet is occasionally 
affiliated with “star,” but most often referred to as simply 
“planet” with no other significance given. Structurally, the 
planet is the same pattern as the point, but a little bit larger. Photo Callie Vandewiele 2018 
103 
 
Seed/semilla/iyaj 
 
(Contemporary textile) 
 
Compared most often to the calabaza seed, which is used to 
make pepita (ground roasted pumpkin seeds) and affiliated 
with women’s gardens rather than men’s milpa plots. This 
pattern is very similar to puntito, except that seeds are often 
connected to one another or laid out in a diamond pattern 
rather than in a simple row. 
Ring/anillo/matq’ab’ 
 
(Historic textile Pitt Rivers Object 
1946.6.54) 
 
 
 
A handful of women associated the ring with marriage, but 
most simply noted that rings were “pretty.” Two weavers 
associated the ring with the idea of eternity, but no other 
weavers did. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
8 
 
(Contemporary textile) 
 
Symbolises the number eight (8) and the idea of eternity. 
Eight as a number has no specific significance to the 
Q’eqchi’ (five and thirteen are very important), but eternity 
as a measure of time represents an interconnectedness of 
being from beginning to end. 
X or Four cardinal points/puntos 
cardinales/xkaxakuutil li 
ruuchich’och’ 
 
(Historic textile Pitt Rivers Object 
1946.6.54) 
 
 
 
The four cardinal points are important in Q’eqchi’ spiritual 
practice and belief. Five is a significant number, as it 
includes North, South, East, West and the Heart—or centre. 
In representing the cardinal points, women are representing 
this partially incomplete figure, as well as laying out a pattern 
that is used ceremonially with coloured sawdust or candles 
to bless new homes or ask for the permission of a tzuultaq’a 
for corn planting or to ask for a blessing for a new venture or 
textile. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Photo Callie Vandewiele 2018 
Photo Callie Vandewiele 2018 
Photo Callie Vandewiele 2016. 
Copyright Pitt Rivers Museum 
 
Photo Callie Vandewiele 2016.  
Copyright Pitt Rivers Museum 
 
104 
 
Dog footprint/pato de 
perro/ruq’tzi’ 
 
(Contemporary textile) 
 
Women identified dog footprints as being signs that dogs 
were present in a household. Dogs, like chickens and ducks, 
occupy a place in Q’eqchi’ language grammar that ties them 
into concepts of personhood, as the conjugation for 
possession is the same as the one for bodily parts or 
immediate family members such as parents or children. 
Kockelman (2003) argues that the construction of language 
around individual and community allows for us to 
understand specific household essentials in Q’eqchi’ life as 
essential to the production of a fully human Q’eqchi’ 
individual. Within the weaving communities, I did not 
encounter a single home with fewer than two or three dogs,19 
which were viewed as very much essential to the home and 
family. 
Woman/mujer/ixq 
 
(Contemporary textile) 
 
 
Represents Q’eqchi’ women in traje. For a subset of 
weavers, it represents the self: A Q’eqchi’ weaver and 
mother. Often depicted in conjunction with the symbol for 
men. 
Man/hombre/winq 
 
(Historic textile Pitt Rivers Object 
1946.6.54) 
 
 
 
Represents Q’eqchi’ men. Men play an important role as 
members of Q’eqchi’ families (junkab’al) and for many 
women these figures symbolise their husbands, brothers and 
sons. This figure is often depicted in conjunction with the 
symbol for women. 
                                                          
19Every woman with social status or in a leadership role had a few dogs, and at least one special or favoured dog. 
These were either specific breeds purchased from vendors in Cobán, or clearly well trained dogs. Amalia kept a 
German Shepherd mix which she tied inside the garden to ensure no one would steal and Margarita Poou had a 
mutt she had taught to beg, sit, lie down, roll over, and fetch. 
Photo Callie Vandewiele 2018 
Photo Callie Vandewiele 2018 
Photo Callie Vandewiele 2016.  
Copyright Pitt Rivers Museum 
 
105 
 
Star/estrella/chahim 
 
(Contemporary textile) 
 
 
 
Stars were identified by several women as being an 
important part of Q’eqchi’ personal life, with one weaver 
noting that “...every person has a star when they are born. 
There are as many stars as people.” All weavers talked about 
the movement of the stars, and the connection between the 
stars and the earth (which was vague), and the impact of the 
movement of the stars on people and animals—although this 
idea may have been imported from Spanish concepts of 
astrology. 
 
 
 
 
Pacaya/hoja de pacaya/k’ib  
 
(Contemporary textile) 
 
 
The pacaya leaf (Chamaedorea tepejilote), like the harp 
pattern, was deeply affiliated with the Q’eqchi’ past and 
celebrations. Today, pacaya leaves and fruit are linked to 
celebrations of saints’ days, festivals, and Easter. The bitter 
flavour of the pacaya (usually consumed by being fried in 
egg) is considered to be a treat, and the food is connected to 
the Q’eqchi’ people. Almost all the weavers explained to me 
that pacaya leaves used to be the only decoration materials 
available for their ancestors, and that today the most 
important local celebrations utilise pacaya leaves as the main 
form of decoration. 
Corn plant/milpa/k’al  
 
(Historic textile: Museum Object 
number 3-28120 Hearst Museum) 
 
Source Phoebe Hearst Museum. 
The corn plant is the most important plant in both Q’eqchi’ 
daily life and ontology. Human being are, according to 
myth, made from corn, corn makes up the bulk sustenance 
food and the annual rotational planting, and care for and 
harvest of the milpa, or cornfield, is the central identifying 
activity of male life in Q’eqchi’ communities. Corn plants 
are the only full plants exhibited on picb’il textiles, and 
whenever weavers would identify corn plants, they would 
ensure that I understood the importance and value of li k’al. 
Corn and its cultivation tie directly into the value 
communities place on having enough land to farm 
adequately, and the connection between success for a 
Q’eqchi’ man and the ability to rent or own a patch of land 
to cultivate corn, even if he lives in Guatemala City or 
further away. 
Rooster/gallo/tzo’xul 
 
(Contemporary textile) 
 
 
Identified as an important part of a household, but not as 
important as a hen or duck. Seen walking in a milpa field in 
this example. 
 
 
 
 
Photo Callie Vandewiele 2018 
Photo Callie Vandewiele 2018 
Photo Callie Vandewiele 218 
106 
 
Big eyed bird/pájaro caminando 
con ojo 
 
(Contemporary textile) 
 
 
 
Unidentified bird, but with a wide-open eye. 
Duck/pato/patux 
 
(Contemporary textile) 
 
 
 
The duck is identified as a part of a household, something 
living near the house that women own and care for. QanaRux 
included the duck when she listed the “universal things” that 
defined Q’eqchi’ experience. 
Incense burner/incensario/sensaar 
Or 
Pineapple/piña/ch’op 
 
(Historic textile: Museum Object 
number 3-28122 Hearst Museum) 
 
Source Phoebe Hearst Museum.  
This pattern was identified by different weavers in different 
communities as either an incense burner or a pineapple. 
 
The incense burner is like the traditional clay incense burners 
used in Catholic and Mayan ceremonies and sold in the 
Cobán market for between ten and thirty Quetzales ($1.10-
$3.30). 
 
The pineapple is a fruit affiliated very loosely with the 
warmer “summer” months of March and April. 
Photo Callie Vandewiele 2018 
Photo Callie Vandewiele 2018 
107 
 
Butterfly/mariposa/peepem 
 
(Contemporary textile) 
 
 
Butterflies, like hummingbirds, can cross lines between 
different planes of existence, and are sometimes seen as 
harbingers of the supernatural, if not direct messengers 
themselves. Santa María in particular is filled with 
butterflies, something several weavers informed me was 
proof of how close to the monte, or natural world, the 
community remained.  
Deer/venado/kej  
 
(Contemporary textile) 
 
 
 
Deer, like butterflies, serve as evidence of the life tied into 
the natural world around communities. There are very few 
deer remaining in the Alta Verapaz of Guatemala, and seeing 
a deer is a significant event in a day,20 indicative of good 
luck. Deer were portrayed as having once been plentiful in el 
tiempo de los antepasados and were regarded in the same 
temporal sense as harps and pacaya leaves; importantly 
associated with people living in pre-Hispanic times. The deer 
plays an important role in the myth of Ixb’alam ke. 
Harp/harpa/arp 
 
(Contemporary textile) 
 
 
The harp was perceived by many weavers as representing 
Q’eqchi’ celebrations of the past. Most weavers compared 
the harp to the marimba and told me that today the marimba 
is used in traditional celebrations, but that in the past it would 
have been the harp and harp players. Many women equated 
the presence of the harp on a textile as a specific reference to 
ancestors: antepasados or abuelos de los abuelos 
(grandparents of grandparents). 
Comb/peine/xiyab’ 
 
(Contemporary textile) 
 
 
An object used by all Q’eqchi’ women in their daily lives. 
This object had no specific ontological significance 
according to the weavers but was identified universally as a 
part of everyday life. 
                                                          
20There was one day in Santa María when we saw a deer, which was hugely exciting to both the informant we 
were with and my translator, as they considered a deer sighting to be good luck. My translator proceeded to tell 
every other person we encountered that day about seeing the deer, which was viewed more or less universally as 
a very rare and lucky event. 
Photo Callie Vandewiele 2018 
Photo Callie Vandewiele 2018 
Photo Callie Vandewiele 2018 
Photo Callie Vandewiele 2018 
108 
 
Spider/aranya/am 
 
(Contemporary textile) 
 
 
Spiders are associated with weavers, because they also 
weave, but do not seem to hold any other significant role. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Crab/cangrejo/tap 
 
(Contemporary textile) 
 
 
Crabs, as the one water-dwelling animal used in picb'il 
textile design, represent both the ocean, and for women in 
the more rural communities, the animals of the sea who 
gathered together Ixb’alam ke’s blood after her father 
accidentally killed her over the sea They were unable to find 
all of her blood, so some remained in the sea, which is why 
the sea moves with the moon. The placement of crabs 
signifies all marine animals, which are a good food item that 
is no longer really available, and the connection between 
modern weavers and the mythical Ixb’alam.  
Corral/corral/koral 
 
(Contemporary textile) 
 
 
 
A design that turns the style of the huipil from horizontal 
rows of patterns into diagonal ones. Represents the fencing 
around a Q’eqchi’ house or houses, in which chickens, ducks 
and other household animals are contained and where 
children play. 
 
This corral pattern encloses crabs. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Photo Callie Vandewiele 2018. 
Photo Callie Vandewiele 2018. 
Photo Callie Vandewiele 2018 
109 
 
Arc/arco/jutz’il eetalil  
 
(Contemporary textile) 
 
 
An arc can be construed as representing a river, road, or 
mountain, although the vast majority of women most often 
linked it with the mountains in and around their 
communities. Mountains serve as the geographic roots of 
Q’eqchi’ memory and identity and are also the home of the 
Q’eqchi’ tzuulta’qa, who connect the modern Q’eqchi’ to 
both the spiritual realms and the non-temporally synced pasts 
and futures that they have access too. It was the tzuultaq’a 
that led Aj Po’op B’atz to lead the Q’eqchi’ during the 
sixteenth century and avoid bloody conquest and helped the 
Q’eqchi’ keep the Alta Verapaz independent until more or 
less the nineteenth century. Mountains surround and ground 
Q’eqchi’ people both physically and spiritually. In placing 
the arc on textiles, Q’eqchi’ weavers are re-enacting the 
physical and spiritual grounding in the geography that 
surrounds them. 
Coffee/cafe/kape 
 
(Contemporary textile) 
 
 
 
This pattern, again, depicts an object introduced in the 
colonial period, meaning that it cannot be an object 
experienced by all Q’eqchi’ people across time. I have only 
encountered this pattern in one community, a coffee 
cooperative in the Cobán region, where coffee and 
cardamom make up the cash crops that provide the 
community with income and livelihood. The pattern is used 
as a corral, surrounding other patterns or filling spaces in an 
empty garment. In this example, the coffee pattern surrounds 
a star motif. 
 
 Other terms, for example, animalito or xul, (animal), were used to describe groups of 
figures or figures that women could not quite identify specifically but knew were animals of 
some kind. For xul this included horses, deer, spiders, and crabs. In this sense when women 
were identifying patterns as animals, despite having limited specificity, they retained 
ontological significance as animals are seen as affiliated with or belonging to tzuultaq’a, the 
mountain spirits, capable of doing the spirits’ bidding as well as acting independently. If, for 
example, someone does not properly recognise the contribution of the mountain spirit to the 
process of planting corn, bugs will consume their corn. The term animalitos carries a lot of 
emotional weight; it can be seen as either exceptionally positive or exceptionally negative, and 
the way one uses it can identify it both within and outside of the community as affiliated to a 
greater or lesser degree with the Q’eqchi’ community and spiritual life.21 Interestingly, while 
                                                          
21See Richard Wilson’s work (Wilson, R. 1991 & 1995) for confirmation of this spiritual practice. 
Photo Callie Vandewiele 2018 
Photo Callie Vandewiele 2018. 
110 
 
the Spanish term animalito is a diminutive, the Q’eqchi’ term (and the English translation 
thereof) is simply xul (animal), rather than china xul (little animal). 
 
TEXTILE PATTERNS WOVEN IN CONJUNCTION: 
 
While many patterns can be mixed, the selection below are patterns that weavers differentiated 
as either being significant in their being woven together, or (as in the case of the man on the 
horse) only ever appearing jointly.  
 
Man and woman holding hands/ 
hombre y mujer/li winq ut li ixq 
 
(Contemporary textile) 
 
When men and women were depicted hand in hand (rather 
than in single rows of each gender), weavers consistently 
pointed to this as an example of a unit working together for 
the betterment of both, and an image of a more idealised 
community where each “does their part.” No historic textiles 
demonstrate men and women in conjunction; however, the 
stylistic choice is quite common now. 
Hummingbird on corn plant  
/el colibrí sobre la milpa/ 
tz’unun chi ru li k’al 
 
(Contemporary textile) 
 
 
The hummingbird on the corn plant represents the 
supernatural world (as represented by the hummingbird) 
joining the essence of the human world (as represented by the 
corn). This pattern is popular in both historic museum textiles 
and contemporary textiles. Hummingbirds are capable of 
accessing both the human world and the spirit world. In Maya 
and Q’eqchi’-specific legends, they communicate and travel 
between the worlds, aid human protagonists facing 
supernatural challenges, and are associated strongly with 
planes of existence not accessible to humans. The presence of 
hummingbirds is seen as portentous of both good and bad 
supernatural guidance or interference. 
Photo Callie Vandewiele 2018 
Photo Callie Vandewiele 2018 
111 
 
Man on horse/caballero/li winq ut li 
kawaay 
 
(Contemporary textile) 
 
 
Usually described simply as a man on a horse, although some 
of the older women in Samac and Santa María identified this 
figure as an Aleman, or German, and affiliated it with the 
German plantation owners of Samac from the 1880s-1930s, 
using the image as a segue into a conversation about the 
history of the cooperative. Weavers always informed me that 
horses were used before cars for transportation, but that the 
people in las comunidades usually did not have access to 
horses. This is an interesting deviation from the group of 
“eternals” Rosario Coy identified as being the images used by 
weavers.22  
 
 There were a handful of instances when particular interviewees, or their family 
members, would pick out a particular set or combination of patterns in a textile and explain the 
characters, as well as their placement and groupings; however, I was unable to confirm broader 
agreement on interpretations of specific combinations of meanings and patterns, and therefore 
unable to include them in the overview of pattern symbols.  
It should be noted that a few weavers are now using printed patterns to produce objects 
intended for sale at the International Folk Arts Market in Santa Fe (to be discussed in chapter 
five). Although no weavers produce these printed patterns—they are instead produced by Olga 
Reich, who primarily uses them as designs to ensure that the products delivered to IFAM each 
year fit the specifications that she advertises (see chapter five).  
Many of the women who weave exclusively for IFAM can only list three to six patterns 
that they weave regularly or know how to weave without guidance from a more skilled weaver. 
In comparison, older weavers and weavers in communities where IFAM has not had an impact 
can weave on average eight to twelve patterns and recognise over fifteen by name. The patterns 
preferred by IFAM weavers are star, duck, arc, triangle, circle, and corral. These patterns are all 
heavily requested by Amalia when she is placing orders for the following year’s IFAM, and 
appear in textile plans or mock-ups produced by Olga Reich and used as guides for weavers 
producing objects (Interview Amalia Gue June 2016). 
 
 
                                                          
22There is potential work to be done exploring the introduction of post-Spanish arrival objects in textile patterning 
(notably the horse, coffee plant, and the chicken), and looking at what they may represent in the textiles. The horse 
in particular served as a symbol of power from the time of conquest, but my interviewees heavily equated it with 
German finca owners and a close sense of the personal past oppression of their families on those fincas. 
Photo Callie Vandewiele 2018 
112 
 
TEXTILES TELLING STORIES  
 
During one of my very early meetings with Don Francisco Ca’al,23 the president of the Samac 
Coffee Cooperative, as we went through the textile pattern booklet I explained to him my aim 
to present to the comité de la cooperativa (governing board of the cooperative) my research 
project and talked him through the materials I had available and the structure of the interviews. 
Don Ca’al, was mostly unimpressed by the images of historic textiles but latched onto the 
following image:  
 
 
Figure 4.11: Textile illustration of patterns translated and recreated digitally from a photocopy annotated and 
returned to me by Don Ca’al. 
Source: Photograph: Hearst Museum Online Database 
Museum Textile: Hearst Museum Object Number 3-28122  
Illustration recreated by Callie Vandewiele 2018. 
 
Don Ca’al, considered locally to be a community authority due to his position as 
cooperativa president despite being only thirty-six years old, explained in great detail that this 
textile was depicting a Maya sacrificial offering. The figures on the bottom row are incense 
burners; the dots rising from them are smoke. Above them are “rings,” and above them are 
larger incense burners sending even more smoke higher up. These images of smoke then went 
                                                          
23Don Ca’al has since died in a robbery in the city, which occurred in early spring 2017. 
113 
 
through another set of rings, which he identified as cave openings, as they were directly 
underneath arco, which can signify either mountains or rivers. He specifically identified them 
as mountains with springs or streams and informed me that this meant they were ixq tzuultaq’a, 
or female mountain spirits. Above the mountain is the image of a hummingbird, often 
associated with spirituality and the realms inaccessible to people. For him, the presence of the 
hummingbird atop the mountain was what made the patterns on this particular textile 
inarguably a representation of a specific spiritual act, and an important part of Q’eqchi’ life.  
My own experiences as an observer to Q’eqchi’ spiritual practice confirm this. As a 
part of my fieldwork I was honoured to witness a series of ceremonies in and around funerals 
in which Catholic and Q’eqchi’ spiritual practices were mixed. These included the use of 
incense, the four cardinal points, consumption of cacao and in one case the ritual slaughter of 
a chicken. Furthermore, informants detailed to me on many occasions the importance of caves 
and mountain crevices to access the tzuultaq’a and to carry out day to day and annual 
ceremonies involving incense, candles and prayer.  
The ways in which community and cultural leaders, such as Don Ca’al, view and 
interpret museum textiles is another way in which communities (beyond weavers) can think 
about their importance. The textiles themselves were significant to Don Ca’al in ways they 
were not to the weavers. For weavers, textiles are direct avenues for learning from 
grandmothers and great-grandmothers. But Don Ca’al read the textile as one might read a text. 
Don Ca’al demonstrated that for men textiles hold significant value, if in slightly different ways 
than for women and that male elders too can access some of the information contained in 
textiles, although they cannot renew that knowledge. For him, the textile was an avenue for 
connecting his spirituality with the spirituality of Q’eqchi’ people who had lived generations 
ago, and a confirmation that, in continuing to practice his Q’eqchi’ spirituality, he was part of 
a larger tapestry of political resistance; more precisely, through the refusal to conform to 
Spanish and Guatemalan government cultural norms. 
Don Ca’al’s strong emotional reaction to this textile is an indication of the ways in 
which other Q’eqchi’ people may think about and connect to the ontological significance of 
the symbols in picb’il textiles. As garments which are closely linked to identity, picb’il textiles 
are significant to the communities as garments in and of themselves. The designs in the textiles 
add another layer of symbolism to these garments, and another layer of meaning to the people 
who wear them and to the people outside of the communities who see these garments.  
  
 
114 
 
PATTERNS, TEXTILES, AND IDENTITY 
 
That significance also allows garments to be interpreted by Q’eqchi’ people, as well as by other 
Maya people, as telling a particular story about Mayan history and identity. Having that history 
told in a textile, which Don Ca’al read and identified as a historic document, adds veracity to 
it; as he repeatedly told me, “Our grandparents practiced these ceremonies, that is why we 
practice them.” Using the textile photograph I had brought to the community as evidence in a 
narrative about a personal, communal, and national past, Don Ca’al filled in the gaps he 
perceived to connect that textile and what was depicted on it to the life of his own community. 
The museum textile, imbued with identity and authority, gave him the authority to claim a 
particular heritage in a particular way. It is that power, and that construction of heritage, that 
gives Maya textiles in museums immense potential for community use in creating heritage, 
asserting identity, and fomenting political will.  
QanaRux (Grandmother Rosario) embodies the innate sense, in the Q’eqchi’ world, that 
textiles are more than simply objects created by a cottage industry. Picb’il production and use 
is rooted in a Q’eqchi’ way of living, it is integral to the production of new kinship ties, and 
furthermore has ontological value. The patterns woven into the fabric are spiritually significant 
and tie modern Q’eqchi’ women to the ancient Maya through Maya stories and legends that 
have survived over hundreds of years.  
Picb’il weaving is an integral way in which Q’eqchi’ women participate in the 
production of an identity that foregrounds the Q’eqchi’ experience as the central experience in 
the Q’eqchi’ world, and not simply an addendum to the Spanish and Ladino experience of 
conquest. The use of images that form an integral part of Q’eqchi’ cosmovision within textiles 
not only endows the textiles with spiritual meaning, but it grounds the weaving practice into a 
cultural tradition understood by those who practice it to be pre-Hispanic in nature. The 
endurance of these patterns and their spiritual meanings serve as an anchor in the minds of 
weavers and community elders affirming the power of textiles to reinvigorate cultural and 
ontological knowledge. 
 
 
115 
 
Chapter Five: Expansions and Contractions: International 
Textile Markets and the Cooperatives of the Alta Verapaz. 
 
With the blowgun ruined, Ixb’alam and The Sun set out, running quietly through the 
night towards the sea. The Sun promised Ixb’alam that once they reached the ocean 
they could fly across the waves, and they would be safe. But Ixb’alam worried, and kept 
looking over her shoulder into the night.  
Thinking her father’s blowgun was ruined, they ran away. But her father awoke. Seeing 
that his lens was ruined, he called across to his brother’s house, as they lived nearby. 
They were junkab’al. And he asked his brother to help him find his daughter. The moon 
and the sun ran and ran and ran, but her father caught them as they were starting to 
cross the sea. And he shot his daughter from far away--but he was a great hunter and 
did not miss. As she died, her blood fell into the waves and the sun wept and wept as he 
watched her blood disappear into the sea.  
 
One of the most striking aspects of picb’il textile weaving today, in comparison to other 
traditional Maya textiles from Guatemala, is the very recent breadth and impact of an 
international market on textile production. A combination of the limited number of picb’il 
weavers, the isolation of the Alta Verapaz, and the unusual style of the textile has not only 
opened the door for weavers to market picb’il garments in the same way as traditional huipils 
elsewhere in Guatemala, Mexico and Belize, but also created a lucrative and often problematic 
doorway for intermediaries marketing of picb’il textiles in the United States and Japan1 These 
markets produce a minimum of forty thousand US dollars2 in gross total sales each year that I 
am able to identify and confirm, although the figure may be much higher. In a region where an 
average family of more than six members, with access to land and either a cardamom or coffee 
crop, typically earns under two thousand US dollars per year,3 the potential income from sales 
of textiles on international textile markets is significant. 
 In this chapter I look at the history and development of the local and international 
markets for picb’il textiles through the 20th century. I begin with local production for local 
                                                          
1In comparison to other traditional Maya textiles, it is simple in colour scheme and often advertised by English 
language sellers as “elegant.” 
2Calculating the potential income from textiles per year was tricky. I was able to acquire sales sheets from the 
booth that Olga Reich runs at the International Folk Arts Market in Santa Fe as well as detailed sales records from 
the cooperative, Hijas de Aj Po’op B’atz. Pairing this data with the estimates that women gave me on the number 
of textiles they sold to outside buyers and average prices, I am confident that this is the minimum sale total for 
textiles going into international markets. 
3https://gain.fas.usda.gov/Recent%20GAIN%20Publications/Cardamom%20-%20The%203Gs%20--
%20Green%20Gold%20of%20Guatemala_Guatemala_Guatemala_7-11-2014.pdf  
116 
 
consumption in the pre-1950 era, when weaving production dropped off due to the introduction 
of machine woven lace huipils. During this era, women that did weave produced picb’il huipils 
primarily for their own use, although they did occasionally sell these textiles to specialised 
collectors including academics and museum collectors. Next, I will look at the impact of 
Guatemala’s civil war (1963-1996) on picb’il production, carefully detailing the period from 
1980 to 1984 when the primary picb’il weaving communities of the Alta Verapaz faced direct 
genocidal violence and textile production became a lifeline and a form of resistance through 
the development of a small relationship based market between a particularly influential weaver 
and a local aristocrat. 
 In the period after Guatemala’s peace accords were signed, I look at the increasing 
presence of international buyers not only in the Alta Verapaz, but through direct access that 
several community members have to a major international market. It is here that I address 
questions of the agency of cooperatives versus that of individuals and the role that ‘western’ 
intermediaries continue to play in picb’il production in the Alta Verapaz. Finally, the chapter 
addresses how this transformation is changing the relationship between weavers and textile 
production, and how these changes may filter out into changes in the ways that women interact 
with or think about museum textiles.  
 
HOME PRODUCTION AND IMPORTED TEXTILES 1930-1950 
 
Prior to the mid-1940s, there is very little evidence that a textile market existed for the 
traditional picb’il huipils of the Alta Verapaz outside the communities in which the textiles 
were woven and worn. Far more women would have woven their own huipils during this period 
than today, as attested both by ethnographic observers (O’Neale 1947) and the oral history of 
today’s community. Most of my informants—interviewees as well local Cobaneros and 
Chamelqueños—shared the statement that “all the women would weave their huipils.” One 
interviewee from the community of Campat told me repeatedly, “All our grandmothers were 
weavers, they all wove their huipils for their families. No one needed to buy huipils.” For her, 
weaving served as a connection between herself and more traditional Q’eqchi’ women of an 
imagined past; however, it also served to cement a community and regional narrative according 
to which textile production was once a household act, and textile products were not perceived 
to be a part of a household’s capital-based income production as they are today. Juanita Chen’s 
understanding of picb’il outside the monetary sphere places a tension around the growing 
narrative among younger weavers of textile production as a tool for economic empowerment 
117 
 
and the bolstering of family income. Combined, they demonstrate the community’s ability to 
imagine and reimagine the role of textile production as it changes in relation to each new 
generation of weavers. In an interview with ninety-one-year-old weaver Juanita Chen,4 I asked 
where her mother and grandmother sold the textiles they wove when she was a child, and she 
repeatedly stated that they did not sell the textiles:  
 
We wove for ourselves. All the women wore the white picb’il, 
everyone. With our cortes. And we braided ribbons into our hair. 
You could go to the market in Cobán and see all the women of 
the pueblo5 because they all had white huipils, blue cortes, and a 
ribbon in their braided hair.  
 
Both informants delineated the distinct difference between themselves and historic 
textile producers via the development of textile production from a household staple for personal 
clothing to a small cottage industry whose role is more economic than cultural, while 
emphasising a shared identity as Q’eqchi’ women through their roles as weavers.  
Juanita’s recollection is backed up by the memories of Isabella and Rosalia Xol (names 
used with permission), both in their mid-eighties living outside Cobán, who spoke about “los 
huipils de los chinos” (“the huipils of the Chinese”) that they started wearing in their teens, and 
how it became harder to pick out the women of the village because everyone began to wear 
coloured lace rather than the traditional white. From the early 20th century, imported textiles 
from Chinese textile mills gradually pervaded the Guatemalan textile markets, beginning in 
urban centres and moving out to smaller and smaller communities over time. The Xol sisters 
recall that these machine-made fabrics were favoured by women living in the cities, becoming 
a staple in the Alta Verapaz only around the 1940s, as also documented by O’Neale (1947). 
With the introduction of imported textiles and the production of huipils across Guatemala, 
O’Neale also noted a decreased availability of thread available for purchase across the 
highlands (not simply in the Cobán region), as well as a decrease in the number of women 
weaving and selling traditional huipils in the local markets during this time period. 
Whereas in the cities the adoption of imported fabrics may have reflected benign 
‘fashion trends,’ in the highlands this transformation in the textile industry was part of a broader 
suppression of Maya autonomy and included textiles as a political medium for domination and 
conscious resistance for generations to come. Several of my interviewees in the cooperative of 
                                                          
4Named with her permission 
5Many informants used the term pueblo or pueblo Q’eqchi to speak about the Q’eqchi’ “community” or “people.” 
118 
 
Samac told stories of their grandmothers being forced to buy imported textiles for huipils as 
the German landowner, Gustav Helmreich (who owned and controlled the farm on which the 
community resided from approximately 1890-1935), viewed home textile production through 
weaving as the theft of productive hours that could be spent working on projects and crops for 
the plantation. The Poou Coy family talked about how their great-grandmother had been 
punished for weaving, and that one of the reasons that the current matriarch learned to weave 
in middle age, during the Guatemalan Civil War, was to regain what had been taken from her 
maternal grandmother by the Germans. She then taught her daughters to weave in order to 
reclaim a part of her Q’eqchi’ identity and own an intangible part of her heritage. 
 
THE COLLECTORS’ MARKET, GENOCIDE AND RESISTANCE 1950-1980: DOÑA LESLIE 
HEMPSTEAD & QANA ROSARIO COY 
 
Guatemalan textile production in the Alta Verapaz as a whole saw a slow but marked decline 
between the 1950s and 1970s. Textiles continued to be valued within communities and used in 
daily, ceremonial, and religious dress. Throughout some regions, including the Alta Verapaz, 
small artisan markets encouraged the sale and regional export of a limited number of textiles. 
It was at one such market that Doña Leslie Hempstead first met QanaRux (Doña Rosario Coy)6 
in the 1970s. The wife of a British soldier she met shortly after WWII, and a member of Cobán’s 
German/Guatemalan elite through marriage,7 Leslie was known locally for her appreciation of 
art, culture, and textiles, and had (according to Rosario) never seen any huipils like those 
Rosario was vending. Leslie stopped and said hello and mentioned to Rosario that if she were 
ever coming into Cobán to sell textiles again, she should stop at the family house and let Leslie 
have the first opportunity to buy. Over the course of the next six or seven years, the women 
developed a friendship through this market-based relationship, which would reshape the nature 
of weaving and community in the Alta Verapaz. 
Doña Leslie Hempstead was a discerning and selective textile buyer. She was 
knowledgeable about many of the textile traditions in Guatemala and had grown up with textile 
collecting as her mother (born in 1880, half-German, half-Irish) was one of the first serious 
textile collectors in Guatemala, and the first in the Alta Verapaz. Remembering her mother in 
a recorded interview in 2009, Leslie noted that her mother “...loved the Indian things,” a 
                                                          
6Most Q’eqchi’ people have a Q’eqchi’ name, but use the ‘Spanish version’ of that name when interacting with 
Spanish speakers: Rosario -- Rux, Adela -- Del, Jesus -- Chus, etc. 
7Leslie’s mother married into a prominent German-Guatemalan coffee producing family. 
119 
 
perhaps subconscious nod to the difficult relationships between textile collectors and textile 
producers in a complex colonial space such as Guatemala in the 1900s (Endangered Threads 
Documentaries: Interview 2006, Published 2016). When Hempstead started purchasing 
Rosario’s huipils, she did so out of both interest in the textile style and recognition that the 
Santa María textiles were among the finest examples of picb’il that she had encountered.  
During the 1970s, a few years after Doña Leslie moved to Cobán permanently, 
development of the textile market and arts in Guatemala was deeply impacted by the increasing 
presence of a military dictatorship, which would continue until the mid-1990s. As the concept 
of women-driven artisan, or artist co-ops were gaining traction throughout other portions of the 
developed world, weavers in Guatemala were continuing to see their trade deeply impacted by 
a civil war in which all signs of indigenous identity faced suppression (Kinzer & Schlesinger 
2000). 
As seen in the first chapter, in the early 1980s, the civil war took a dark turn when 
targeted, ethnic violence erupted into full-blown genocide. The increasing levels of violence 
left large swathes of the country extremely isolated. Entire communities were devastated by 
massacres or physically destroyed with the residents left as refugees, hiding in the mountains, 
or emigrating to Mexico. Many Maya found themselves the unwilling residents of internment 
camps labelled “model villages.” This cultural devastation was occurring at the same historical 
juncture that saw the advent of microloans, community cooperatives, and indigenous arts and 
folk crafts in the international market.  
NGOs working in Guatemala focused on ongoing violence instead of economic 
development or outreach for women (Interview CEDEPCA historian Guatemala City). Although 
local communities were forced to focus on survival, they continued to preserve cultural 
heritage. Decades were lost, however in the development of an international market for 
Guatemalan indigenous arts. By the height of the civil war, the majority of aid organisations 
and NGOs operating in Guatemala were protestant religious organisations (especially 
Presbyterian organisations) permitted there because of President Ríos Montt’s evangelical 
roots and beliefs. Very few of these organisers focused on more than basic aid or human rights 
watch activities (Interview CEDEPCA historian April 2016).  
It was during this period that the genocide most acutely affected the weaving 
communities outside of Cobán, as seen in chapter two of this thesis. Importantly, when the 
residents of Santa María were living in the “model village” of Samac, Rosario continued her 
friendship with Leslie, who bought more and more textiles each year. The more isolated the 
community became, the more textiles Leslie purchased, and the more textiles Leslie purchased, 
120 
 
the more women Rosario taught to weave. By the mid-1980s, Rosario was teaching weaving 
to her daughters, daughters-in-law, cousins, neighbours, and any woman who came to her and 
asked. She was not only selling her and her family’s huipils to Leslie, but also bringing textiles 
that were produced by all of her students. Between them, Rosario and Leslie created a market 
for picb’il huipils, and also for curtains, table runners, and tablecloths; objects that had not 
existed—at least not to that extent—in the years prior to the genocide or any time in recent 
Mayan history. 
A large number of weavers can trace how they learned to weave back to Rosario Coy. 
Paired with the women who learned from other teachers, but also with access to Leslie’s 
market, over sixty women who otherwise would likely not have become picb’il textile weavers 
did so because of the introduction of a textile market outside Cobán in the 1980s. The chart in 
figures 5.1 (fold out) and 5.2) demonstrate a weaving heritage tree, tying together weavers in 
the textile communities outside Cobán based on who taught them to weave, and thus 
demonstrating the extraordinary impact of Rosario Coy’s relationship with Leslie.  
There is no doubt, particularly in the mind of Rosario—who regarded Doña Leslie as a 
good and genuine friend up to the point of Leslie’s death—that the support Leslie provided not 
only allowed Rosario’s family to survive the genocide, but also gave Rosario the power to 
financially support other women in the continuation of a cultural tradition at a time when Maya 
women were devalued to the point of being slaughtered.  
 
The following figure on the insert (5.1) provides a tree of ‘weaving genealogy’ demonstrating the origin of 
weaving in the community of Santa María, and the pathway through which each of the women represented 
learned to weave. This chart demonstrates the impact that a few influential weaving teachers can have on the 
spread of the acquisition of picb’il weaving within a community. Notably this chart demonstrates the number 
of women who learned to weave from Rosario or one of her first or second-generation students (a total of at 
least 31.8%, or around one third, of current picb’il weavers); thus showing her impact on picb’il in the region. 
Figure 5.2 provides a timeline demonstrating that Rosario was most active as a direct-teacher during the 
height of Guatemala’s Civil War, when Doña Leslie was purchasing picb’il exclusively from Rosario Coy 
and providing a market for women in the communities to supplement their income. Paired, the two provide a 
visual demonstration of the impact that Rosario and Leslie’s friendship had on picb’il production in the Alta 
Verapaz during the 1980s and into the present day. 
*Some pseudonyms used.  
.  
122 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
There is also no doubt that Leslie Hempstead, as a relative of the Dieseldorff family, 
gained her wealth, position in Guatemalan society, and influence through the direct and 
generations-long exploitation of Q’eqchi’ people by German and Hispanic-descendant 
Guatemalans. Leslie’s family, still living in Cobán today, remains in contact with Rosario and 
her family. The friendship and memories shared by Leslie and Rosario bridged a social, 
linguistic, and economic gap not normally crossed in Guatemala, and highlights the complexity 
of individual relationships in colonial and postcolonial spaces. 
It is clear from the later interviews, and conversations with her family in 2016, that 
Leslie was very aware that her involvement in the textile market and the local politics had 
ramifications within weaving communities. However, her loyalty to Rosario—based on 
friendship—fell squarely into the model of junkab’al within the Alta Verapaz. It also 
Figure 5.2 Scatter plot of weaving knowledge acquisition from 1950-present day. 
123 
 
sufficiently mirrored other German/Ladino/Maya interactions such that, while she had a 
significant impact on the production of picb’il, her impact seems to have strengthened 
Rosario’s position within her own community, rather than fracturing it. As seen below, whether 
this is due to luck, timing, intent, or the nature of the relationship itself and its close mirroring 
to kinship relationships in Q’eqchi culture, I cannot say. What is clear is that Leslie’s fondness 
for Santa María and her connection to Rosario was in fact rooted in genuine friendship and that 
in being relationship-driven, the increased market opportunity strengthened, rather than 
weakened, community ties. 
  
THE COLLECTORS’ MARKET 
 
After the women of Santa María were allowed to resettle their community QanaRux and Doña 
Leslie slowly lost contact, and as the cooperative was re-established, Leslie’s textile purchases 
tapered off and eventually stopped. Talking with Rosario, and listening to old recorded 
interviews from Leslie, it is unclear why. Leslie claims Rosario simply stopped visiting, and 
Rosario claims that Leslie was no longer interested in textile purchases. The women retained a 
high level of respect for and interest in each other, but neither was quite able to articulate how 
and why they fell out of touch.1 From an outsider’s perspective, age and health seem to have 
played a significant role, with Doña Leslie never travelling to Santa María, as Rosario slowly 
cut back on her visits to Cobán as she cared for her ill husband after a serious stroke until his 
death, and then struggled with the long walk out of Santa María to the nearest minibus in and 
out of Cobán. Rosario, when asked about Leslie, always remembered her fondly; in a 2007 
interview, Leslie joked with the interviewer that Rosario had abandoned her, before going on 
to indicate that she is the godmother of at least one of Rosario’s grandchildren 
At the time of her death in 2009, Doña Leslie had amassed perhaps the largest single 
collection of contemporary picb’il textiles anywhere in the world, a collection her son (and 
heir) has been working to find a home. Referring to the Q’eqchi’ people she lived among and 
around repeatedly as “Indians,” Doña Leslie documented the history of each textile she 
collected fastidiously, noting the weaver’s name and age, price paid for it and patterns woven 
into the textile. This paradoxical juxtaposition highlights, in many ways, the impossibility of 
                                                          
1In a 2008 interview with Leslie, she asked me to inquire as to Rosario’s health and family and to stop in later that 
month to let her know how Rosario was and that I had passed on greetings to her. That same year, Rosario was 
surprised but pleased to learn Leslie was still alive and responded to the news by informing me that Leslie was a 
“buena persona”: high praise in the Alta Verapaz, where encountering a good and genuine person outside of your 
own community is considered somewhat rare. 
124 
 
removing ourselves from our social context of origin in any complete way. Leslie cared a great 
deal for Rosario and her family yet continued to exist in a stratified society where Rosario’s 
poverty and status as an indigenous person remained a defining characteristic in the world in 
which Doña Leslie lived.  
While an attempt at the impossible—setting aside the enormous social, political, and 
cultural implications of modern Guatemala and acknowledging the complicated web of 
German/Guatemalan/Ladino/Q’eqchi’ relationships of twentieth-century Cobán—Leslie and 
Rosario’s relationship seems to have been fundamentally a friendship. Their relationship, 
paired with the relationship between Amalia Gue and Olga Reich,2 can be viewed as 
microcosms for the complex social dynamics of the German migration to the Alta Verapaz. 
This can include the dynamics between the illegitimate children of German settlers, their 
“legitimate” German children, the indigenous people who have served as near-slaves on the 
German plantations, and the Ladino Guatemalan government which, for much of that historical 
period, was happy to ignore the Alta Verapaz whenever possible. 
Doña Leslie’s impact on the community remains clear through her engendering of a 
market that drove textile production to new heights and possibly played a significant role in 
the survival of this tradition in the outlying communities of Cobán. Despite this clear economic 
motivator, interviews and conversations with Rosario indicate that picb’il weaving is, for her, 
far more than simply an economic activity. Rosario talks about weaving as though it is a part 
of not only her individual identity, but also the identity of all women in the Q’eqchi’ world. 
Rosario refers to looms as having life and the patterns she “shapes” into textiles as representing 
“the internal” consistency in Q’eqchi’ life. 
   
Santa María is where the weaving comes from. When I was 
young my grandmother grew cotton in the valley where it is flat, 
and the ancestors came here because it was a place where the 
cotton grew and they felled the forest when they came here to 
build our aldea where we could be Q’eqchi’. Santa María is 
where the looms are, where all the women weave. 
 
 Rosario enmeshes the ontological value of the community’s location with the 
reputation that the community has for textile production. This reputation was one it earned in 
large part because of the sheer number of women whom Rosario taught to weave. By tying the 
                                                          
2The German-Guatemalan textile marketer who introduced the cooperative to the International Folk Arts Market 
in Santa Fe and sells picb’il garments in a high-end fashion shop in Antigua Guatemala. To be explained in the 
forthcoming section “IFAM.” 
125 
 
strong sense of identity that Rosario feels in respect to weaving as a part of her Q’eqchi 
personhood to the clear and undeniable role that textile production as a cottage industry played 
in her family’s economic and financial survival during the war years she emphasises the 
important role of textile production in the past and the present. For the women in these 
communities, where weaving was first actively suppressed by German plantation owners 
beginning in the late 1880s and then again (albeit less directly during the genocide of the 
1980s), a renewed sense of Q’eqchi’ identity was consolidated through re-enacting weaving as 
a path to feminine Q’eqchi’ personhood. This led to a conflation of personhood and identity 
through the act of weaving.  
 
1990 - 2015 
 
In the mid-1990s, during and shortly after the signing of Guatemala’s peace accords, the market 
for picb’il textiles outside of the Q’eqchi’ region appears to have been limited. Tomoko 
Ishikawa, a Japanese textile expert and long-time Guatemalan resident, recalls finding picb’il 
textiles as far south as the market town of Chichicastenango, and even occasionally in 
Guatemala City, but also recounting the process of slowly seeing fewer and fewer and fewer 
of the Cobanero blancos in the larger market towns. By the end of the decade, Ishikawa was 
travelling to and from the Alta Verapaz, looking to identify textile weavers who wove picb’il, 
as she was unable to find the textile further south and was curious as to whether the decline 
was due to a lack of market or fewer women weaving. During this time, Leslie was no longer 
regularly purchasing textiles, and while weavers were selling locally to women in Cobán, there 
was not yet even a limited export market. With fewer textiles being produced at this time, fewer 
were sold, and as fewer were sold, buyers like Ishikawa were forced either to abandon the 
textile or seek out their own connections and relationships with weavers. 
Since then, as will be discussed later, significant changes have occurred in the textile 
market and in the communities due to the introduction of this market. In the late 1990s, the 
cooperative of Samac applied for the first of four Peace Corps volunteers, whom they would 
host from 2002 until 2010.3 Peace Corps projects included the installation of solar panels, 
development of an ecotourism project, and the foundation of the first picb’il weaving 
cooperative in the Alta Verapaz: Ixb’alam Ke, in 2004. Originally made up of twenty six 
women from both Samac and Santa María, Concepción Coy was the first president and co-
                                                          
3Of these I have been able to talk extensively with two: Jonathan Tharin, who married Concepción Coy, and 
Andrew McAfee. The other two I have been unable to contact. 
126 
 
organiser along with Peace Corps volunteer Jonathan Tharin.4 The foundation of this 
cooperative was one of the goals listed in the community’s application for a long-term Peace 
Corps presence, and one of the first major successes of that post. With the assistance of the 
Peace Corps, the community was able to secure a grant of approximately five thousand US 
dollars, which was used to purchase loom supplies and seek out market opportunities in 
Guatemala City and Antigua (field notes 2009). Concepción and Jonathan did most of the initial 
research work in Guatemala City and Cobán and were able to establish working relationships 
with a series of tourist shops in Antigua Guatemala, notably in well-established venues such as 
El Colibri (focused on providing income for war widows through weaving) and Casa de Los 
Gigantes (owned by a long-time resident and artisanal vendor originally from the United 
States). After Tharin’s stint in the Peace Corps ended, Ixb’alam Ke continued to receive support 
from two Peace Corps successors, including Andrew McAfee, who introduced me to the 
community in 2008.  
At the time of my first introduction to Ixb’alam Ke and the coffee cooperative in Samac 
in 2008, followed by my own extensive visits in 2009, the weaving cooperative was still run 
communally, and Amalia Gue, the matriarch of a local weaving family and community leader, 
had just been elected its third president. The cooperative was receiving some outside 
recognition for the textiles produced, including a short documentary film produced by Kathleen 
Vitale, a featured mini chapter in a book eventually published in 2015 by Deborah Chandler, 
who also featured the group on her website, Cloth Roads.5 “Textile tours” organised at Amalia 
Gue’s house for visitors from the United States coming to tour textile production sites, purchase 
textiles, and learn about Guatemala’s rich textile tradition provided another source of income. 
This increased publicity coincided with market-driven innovation in the products of 
weavers in the Alta Verapaz, and slowly opened the textile market to outside buyers. Although 
traditional huipils sold less well than napkins, table runners, shawls, and scarves, all of which 
were more versatile for buyers and less time-intensive for weavers, with the support of 
Chandler, some of these objects began to pop up on websites affiliated with organisations 
supporting Guatemalan weavers and to trickle into the international market. Weavers who had 
once only woven for themselves, or to sell locally within kinship networks, were able to gain 
access to a wider market. My field research suggests that, as individual weavers gained access 
to outside markets, they introduced members of their own junkab’aleb’ to outside buyers, or 
                                                          
4The two married in 2007 and now live in Florida. 
5Original article to be found at: https://www.clothroads.com/one-strong-woman-heads-weaving-coop-in-
guatemala/.  
127 
 
purchased objects from friends and neighbours to sell to those buyers later. Increased prices, 
such as scarves listed online at between $60 and $80 per scarf (as compared to $15-$20 in the 
community), did not necessarily lead to an increased economic return per object for weavers, 
who reported being able to sell scarves for only Q125-Q150 (or approximately $20-$28), 
depending on the buyer, barely more than the cost of a single huipil panel in the local market. 
In terms of a real wage, a huipil sells for around Q350 (or $45) and takes between four and six 
weeks to produce if a woman weaves five or more hours per day, meaning that these weavers 
are earning less than one US Dollar per day of labour, not including the cost of the thread 
(approximately Q20 or $2.20 per huipil). It was during this time period that weavers in San 
Juan Chamelco, connected to Ixb’alam Ke through a community health worker named 
Margarita Beb, began founding Hijas de Aj Po’op B’atz, an independent weaving cooperative 
for picb’il and calada-style weavers of the San Juan Chamelco region that was fully established 
by 2012. 
By my return to Guatemala in the spring of 2016, the original weaving cooperative of 
Ixb’alam Ke had dissolved and been rebuilt as a small business run by weaver and community 
leader Amalia Gue. In the wake of this fracturing several other local cooperatives had been set 
up, some successfully, others not, to fill the gap as not all of the weavers I interviewed were 
willing to work with Amalia or associate themselves with Ixb’alam Ke. While women were 
hesitant to state the reason why Ixb’alam Ke has fractured and increasingly fewer women are 
willing to work with Amalia, many of the weavers I interviewed in Santa María implied that 
Amalia had commissioned textiles or taken textiles to vend at an international arts market and 
promised to pay them upon her return. As many women do not read or write, and Amalia tracks 
purchases, sales, and debts in a single lined notebook, it is difficult to resolve debts and 
payments. It is worth noting that none of the women who claim Amalia owes them money are 
members of her junkab’al. The more vulnerable and disconnected women in Samac are 
particularly likely to claim Amalia owes them money; specifically, widows or women without 
the security of a cooperative membership or social standing.6 Amalia does work with a local 
Q’eqchi’ accountant in the municipal centre who was somewhat unforthcoming during our 
meeting but insinuated that many of the conflicts Amalia has with local weavers in Samac and 
outstanding balances may have more to do with her lack of a formal education and limited 
mathematical skills than with any intention to specifically cheat her neighbours or fellow 
                                                          
6Formalised membership into La Cooperativa Samac brings with it not only social status and security, but also 
the ability to help make collective decisions.  
128 
 
weavers. The relationship between Amalia and IFAM (as established via a local 
German/Guatemalan woman named Olga Reich) is a more business focused relationship than 
that between QanaRux and Doña Leslie. Weavers working with Rosario to vend to Leslie could 
rely on a relationship-based model of sales which meshed well with the structure of a junkab’al. 
The relationship that Amalia has with Olga relies on a capitalistic business model, and as a 
result is less trusted by community members, lacks the stability that social ties provided 
between Rosario and Leslie, and has become divisive rather than sustainable.  
Throughout this period, weavers remained in contact with Tomoko Ishikawa (see page 
122) who has learned to weave a style of picb’il in an aldea of San Pedro Carchá. Ishikawa 
continues to try to locate markets for cooperatives in Japan, but her work has failed to secure a 
regular space in which picb’il can be sold, although she has managed several exhibitions of 
picb’il in Tokyo (most recently in October 2017). Ishikawa introduced the weavers in San Juan 
Chamelco to Aiko Gray, a Japanese-American textile expert who leads annual “textile treks” 
through Guatemala with a two-day stop in Cobán. Ishikawa, like many of the weavers I worked 
with and the foreigners living and working long-term in Guatemala, was suspicious of the 
motives of interlopers and nervous of the impact that other foreigners she had seen come and 
go over the years might have on the community. 
 
INDIGENOUS ARTS IN SANTA FE: THE INTERNATIONAL FOLK ARTS MARKET (IFAM) 
 
The International Folk Arts Market (IFAM) in Santa Fe New Mexico, is an outdoor market for 
indigenous craftspeople that hosts between one hundred and fifty and one hundred and eighty 
artists each year. Approximately one-third of the artists each year are new artists. On average, 
the fair brings in just under twenty thousand visitors and is held on the plazas between the 
major museums in New Mexico, at a site known as “Museum Hill.” All the museums, including 
the New Mexico Folk Art Museum, are open for the duration of the event. Artists are invited 
to attend a special reception and early booth opening the Friday evening before the fair. Tickets 
for supporters of the market are US $275.00 per person, and the event offers “meet and greets” 
with “your favourite artists,” as well as the opportunity to participate in an auction of specially 
produced items and shop the IFAM stalls, before the event opens to the general public with 
tickets costing $15.00 per person, including a park and ride service to the site. As a part of my 
field research, I spent two days at IFAM, primarily with the Guatemalan Weavers in the 
129 
 
Ixb’alam Ke booth: Amalia Gue from Samac, and Maria,7 a representative from FEDECOVERA 
sent on behalf of the weavers in Santa María. I did not attend the opening evening event due to 
the high cost/low trade off in terms of data that could be collected. Amalia was unwilling to 
talk about booth sales with me during or after the event, even in spaces where Olga was not 
present; Maria, however, told me that the majority of their sales during IFAM occurred during 
this “pre-event” opening.8 
 IFAM makes it expressly clear in the application process that vendors may not sell 
objects that have not been previously approved by the fair committee, and that vendors are not 
allowed to renegotiate prices once the fair has begun until after three in the afternoon on the 
Sunday the fair ends. Despite this, most of the vendors I observed were willing to barter back 
and forth over the cost of items, and many were selling personal items, jewellery, hats, etc. 
upon request that were clearly not a part of their advertised booth fare. Both Amalia and Maria 
participated in a long standing IFAM tradition and “swapped” items they had brought to the fair 
in exchange for items from other vendors. 
Cobán weavers first attended IFAM after Olga Reich met Amalia Gue and the women 
of Samac in 2009 through the marketing work done on behalf of Ixb’alam Ke by Jonathan 
Tharin and the documentary produced by Endangered Threads. By 2010 Reich had leveraged 
a booth for the cooperative at the International Folk Art Market.9 IFAM brings in gross total 
sales of between two and a half and three million US dollars per year. They boast nearly twenty 
thousand ticketed visitors to the folk arts market each year and mobilise an army of over two 
thousand volunteers to run the event. It is estimated that the event brings in over ten million US 
dollars in local business to the Santa Fe area each year and produces nearly a quarter of a 
million dollars in sales taxes for the state of New Mexico from booth sales alone. In 2015, the 
most recent year for which data is available, 173 artists from fifty-seven countries attended 
IFAM, each earning a take-home cheque averaging twenty thousand dollars per booth–an 
amount above and beyond their cost of attendance, which includes transportation, room and 
board, a small booth fee, and ten percent of their sales. The organisers of IFAM also claim that 
the event is structured to allow artists to take home ninety percent of the money that their 
                                                          
7Pseudonym selected by her and used at her request, “Maria” was an employee of FEDECOVERA sent to represent 
weavers from the cooperatives and better understand Olga’s impact on the access to IFAM.  
8In addition to visiting the booths multiple times each day of the fair, I also arranged a meal with both Amalia and 
Maria after the fair before they travelled back to Guatemala in order to have informal conversations about their 
experience at the Folk Art Market. 
9 https://www.folkartalliance.org/artist/amalia-gue/.  
130 
 
individual sales generate each year.10 Both Amalia and Olga have attended under the banner of 
Ixb’alam Ke, ostensibly as representatives of the community each year between 2010 and 2017.  
Picb’il objects (purchased from women in the communities for between Q100 and 
Q350 (US $12-$45)11 were selling at IFAM for between US $50 and US $450. Amalia and Olga 
both had personal items in addition to the picb’il for sale, ranging from small handmade dolls 
wearing traditional traje to large sections of the traditional Cobanero skirt, or corte. The most 
expensive object for sale was a long lace-like nightgown made from picb’il Olga was vending 
for $850. Maria, having noticed by late afternoon Saturday that, in her estimation, Amalia and 
Olga were both concentrating on selling objects from their respective markets and communities 
(Olga from her personal shop in Antigua and Amalia from Samac), changed from her corte to 
jeans, cut the corte into four sections, stitched them into skirts overnight, and then sold those 
skirts to offset the costs accrued by the cooperative in Santa María to send her to Santa Fe.12 
Between 2010 and 2016 (I suspect mid-2012 based on personal accounts), a conflict 
around access to markets, misuse of grant funds, and control of the Ixb’alam Ke dissolved the 
original cooperative. Amalia Gue retains control of the new cooperative (formed after the 
collapse of the original Ixb’alam Ke) and continues to work closely with Olga Reich to attend 
IFAM each year. Cooperative elections are no longer held as Ixb’alam Ke functions more as a 
family business with cooperative elements than a true cooperative. As has already been 
indicated in chapter two, many ex-members of the original weaving cooperative are now 
members of two other groups. The first is an auxiliary cooperative to the coffee and land 
cooperative, Samac, and the other another business-style group, run by Margarita Poou,13 a 
cousin of Amalia with whom she had a significant falling out in 2015. In the same year, the 
weaving community in Santa María sought to cut ties with Amalia and build a direct 
relationship with Olga Reich in order to sell their products directly to Reich, and to sidestep 
Gue and her mini cooperative. A variety of cooperative members in Santa María reported that 
they had never received payment for products they sent to be sold in Santa Fe in 2014, and the 
local assumption was that the products had been sold, and Amalia had simply taken the money. 
This claim is difficult to verify.  
                                                          
10https://www.folkartalliance.org/events-programs/international-folk-art-market-santa-fe/what-is-the-market/#  
11US $8.50 & US $47.00. 
12The conflict between the two representatives, Amalia and Maria, was palpable throughout the course of the 
event.  
13There are three Margarita Poou’s in the community. Fifty-four-year-old Margarita Poou, a master weaver and 
daughter of Clara Coy, and thirty-six-year-old Margarita Poou, founder of the second business style cooperative 
who is Amalia’s cousin, and a Margarita Poou who does not weave and married into the community sometime in 
the mid-2010s. 
131 
 
Olga continues to bring Amalia to IFAM each year, as well as to market her own indigo-
dyed textiles and textiles produced by Santa María weavers, which she purchases at a bulk rate 
and sells at market prices as products of Amalia’s cooperative both at IFAM in Santa Fe and in 
a personal shop she owns and runs in Antigua, Guatemala. As an intermediary Olga provides 
an important link between the weavers in the Alta Verapaz, and a major international market 
which accounts for the vast majority of their non-local sales. As are many intermediary 
relationships, this one is complicated. Olga relies on Amalia for access to the community, and 
Amalia relies on Olga for access to international markets. The balance between fair trade, 
ensuring that all parties earn an income and avoiding exploitation is a difficult and contentious 
one which the community struggles with. Olga’s role as a vendor for textiles fits less neatly 
into the Q’eqchi’ kinship structure of the junkab’al than did Doña Leslie’s relationship with 
QanaRux. Olga views herself as a business woman and Amalia as a gatekeeper to picb’il 
producers. There is less space in her understanding of the relationship for community inclusion 
than in previous examples. 
On July 9, 2016, I arrived in Santa Fe to attend the thirteenth annual IFAM, hosted and 
run that year by the International Folk Art Alliance in conjunction with the New Mexico Folk 
Art Museum. Since 2010, when Olga first brought Amalia to IFAM, weavers who have vended 
through Olga and Amalia earn an average of between $12 and $40 per object sold. As stated, 
the booth as a whole brings in, on average, somewhere between US $19,000 and US $25,000 in 
sales each year to the community, with most annual sales exceeding US $30,000. Ten percent 
of that figure is paid directly out to the International Folk Art Alliance (IFAA) as a fee for the 
hiring of the booth at the fair. Olga Reich takes another 20%, plus the cost of all her travel and 
accommodation. Amalia’s travel and accommodation expenses are also covered from the net 
sales.14 During repeated home visits and interviews, I was unable to garner from Amalia as to 
what happened with any overage; whether she paid it out to weavers (highly unlikely according 
to other sources in the community) or, more likely—given that Amalia embarks on an 
expansion of her home upon each return—if it was money she kept more or less as “payment” 
for maintaining her relationship with Olga and attending IFAM each year. 
 
 
 
                                                          
14Conversations with Amalia Gue, Margarita Ca’al, & two other weavers who do not wish to be identified by 
name. 
132 
 
COMMUNITY DIVISIONS 
 
The impact that IFAM has had both on the continuation and development of weaving in the 
communities of Samac and Santa María has been profound. In addition to being credited by 
the weaving communities as the reason that the Ixb’alam Ke cooperative dissolved, nearly 
twenty women—particularly women under the age of twenty-five—have learned to weave over 
the last six years expressly to vend at the market in Santa Fe. A handful of these women cannot 
and do not weave traditional textiles such as huipils, but instead specialise in western garments, 
napkins, table runners, etc.  
The degree to which picb’il patterns (see chapter four) are impacted by Olga’s design 
work is unclear. Many of them (duck, star, arc) appear in traditional huipils across the Alta 
Verapaz. The difference in pattern placement, size, and style between the objects produced for 
IFAM and those produced to sell locally is, however, significant (Field notes 2009, 2016 & 
2017). Since Olga began working with the women in Samac in 2010, picb’il weavers have 
simultaneously increased the number of objects that they produce for sale, while decreasing 
the number of patterns utilised, but have also expanded the variety of lengths and widths of 
textiles produced (Interview, Amalia Gue, June 2016. Interview Margarita Xol, April 2016). 
Members of Amalia’s family are currently able to weave textiles up to six metres in length, 
which are sold in bulk to Olga for garment production. While women did historically produce 
tablecloths for Leslie Hempstead, Leslie stated in a 2007 interview with Kathleen Vitale that 
she was “quite sure” that, prior to her ordering tablecloths from Rosario Coy, women weaving 
picb’il textiles had produced only huipils. Textiles measuring six metres in length have required 
a significant re-thinking of the structure of the textile, the setup of the loom, and the dynamics 
involved in producing them without breaking the thread or losing the tension during the 
process.  
Women weaving textiles for IFAM follow the pattern guides produced and distributed 
by Olga.15 This is in stark contrast to traditional textile weaving, where women memorise 
designs as they learn them, and measurements are calculations based on the length of a woman's 
loom or a huipil that she already owns. While the membership of the cooperative, Ixb’alam Ke, 
comprises women of a variety of ages and skill levels, Amalia’s current weaving group consists 
of mostly women, aged twenty-five and younger, who learned to weave specifically to vend at 
                                                          
15I have, to date, been unable to acquire copies of these patterns. A few weavers have shown me copies, but all 
have been both very possessive of the guides, afraid I will sell or give them to other weaving groups, or worried 
that if Olga finds out they are sharing information they will be cut out of the market and lose the source of income. 
133 
 
IFAM. They are members of Amalia’s direct family or have close kinship ties to Amalia or her 
sisters. While Amalia will buy textiles from women outside this group if she comes up short 
for IFAM at the end of June, she exclusively gives commissioned work to those she considers 
loyal to her, and purchases textiles from weavers outside San Juan Chamelco who have no 
connection to Samac, without indicating that she is purchasing textiles primarily to vend in the 
United States (Interview, Amalia Gue, June 2016. Interview Margarita Xol, April 2016). 
This loyalty to kinship or teaching lines feeds into the ongoing conflict in and around 
textile markets in Samac and Santa María. Access to the textile market has become part of pre-
existing feuds between families or community groups.16 Despite being exacerbated by the 
presence of the textile market in IFAM, the textile market and Olga Reich are not wholly 
responsible for the divisions in the community. However, it does appear that Reich uses those 
divisions to her advantage, maintaining a tight control over the textile sales and working hard 
to keep her sources secret as she sells in Antigua, Guatemala City, and outside the country. 
Simultaneously, she pits textile groups against each other to provide lower costs on bulk textile 
materials and to ensure that the narrative of a single, organised cooperative does not fade or 
fall apart in the international spotlight provided by IFAM (Interview, Amalia Gue, June 2016. 
Interview Margarita Xol, April 2016). As all the weavers who have access to IFAM through 
Reich, there is a vested interest among the less advantaged groups to still retain a “public” 
image of cooperation rather than to lose the little access to the market that they already have. 
Amalia Gue in particular demonstrated a savvy understanding of the importance of images in 
marketing, as she allowed me only to take photographs of her in traditional clothing, 
handwoven by herself, and refused to allow me to photograph her in a newly constructed 
concrete home, instead moving our meeting to a wooden shack, with a packed earth floor used 
for corn drying and storage.  
In 2015 the women’s committee in Santa María approached FEDECOVERA, which 
advises and represents cooperatives through the Alta Verapaz, and asked them to contact Olga 
and work with the cooperative on building a relationship between Santa María and Olga, to 
help Santa María continue sending textiles to Santa Fe, but independently. Olga agreed to take 
a representative from Santa María to IFAM, but made it clear that she would continue to work 
directly with Amalia on bringing products to vend, and that the women in Santa María would 
be responsible for deciding what to produce, bring, and vend without her guidance (personal 
                                                          
16Within the small tightly-woven communities there are a series of long-standing family feuds; the Sacrab family 
(closely allied with Amalia) has a well-known disagreement with the Ca’al family. Weavers affiliated with the 
Sacrab family will have little to do with weavers affiliated with the Ca’al family, and vice versa. 
134 
 
interview FEDECOVERA staff member ‘Maria’17 July 2016). Santa María was unable to secure 
a visa for any cooperative members, so a staff member from FEDECOVERA, Maria, attended the 
fair as a representative of the Santa María Cooperative.  
 It became obvious during the IFAM event that Olga’s involvement in coordinating the 
presence of the Samac/Santa María weavers in Santa Fe extended to the application process, 
and to her role as a translator (Amalia does not speak English) in the booth during the two days 
of the fair; serving as a gatekeeper to the event for the women in the communities, but leaving 
much of the actual work of the fair to Amalia. This is in sharp contrast with what women in the 
communities believe occurs, which is that Olga essentially runs the booth and manages the 
sales. 
 The main long-term advantage that IFAM seems to provide to vendors is the opportunity 
for vendors to network directly with bulk buyers, something that neither Maria nor Amalia 
have access to, as Olga still serves as the contact point through which all potential connections 
passed. As the sole English speaker at the booth, and the sole fluent Spanish speaker, her 
presence allowed Amalia and Maria better access to vendors and visitors--but that access came 
at the price of control. I observed Maria secretly slipping the Santa María cooperative phone 
number to a few wholesalers to whom Olga had given a direct email address and stressed that 
she (Olga) was the best and only contact for anyone wanting to buy picb’il textiles. 
The difference between the relationship Leslie Hempstead had with the community of 
weavers and that which Olga is developing is that Leslie simply purchased textiles for her 
personal collection, or to give as gifts. She was not, according to her son Seth, involved in the 
textile trade or market. Olga, on the other hand, runs a business based on the sale of picb’il 
textiles in Antigua, at IFAM and through a variety of “fair trade” textile markets such as Cloth 
Roads. Leslie’s relationship with Rosario was rooted in both a personal interest in the textiles 
and the strong personal connection between the women. What Olga and Amalia seem to share 
is a business relationship. Olga shares more direct heritage with the weavers than Leslie: Leslie 
was of European heritage whereas Olga has at least one Q’eqchi’ grandmother, although she 
never identifies herself as Q’eqchi’ in any way. Leslie also lived out the majority of her life in 
Cobán and spoke Q’eqchi’ to at least a conversational degree, while Olga travels to Cobán a 
few times a year and has never made an effort to learn Q’eqchi’, although she speaks English 
and Spanish fluently and German passably. Reich may share more direct ancestry with the 
weavers of the Alta Verapaz, but Hempstead purchased textiles and formed friendships more 
                                                          
17Pseudonym used at request. 
135 
 
in line with the Q’eqchi’ values of junkab’al: creating a community and then supporting the 
women she knew well in a way that allowed them to then support their own families and 
eb’junkab’al.  
It is likely that many of the community divisions currently experienced around access 
to international markets are divisions that may have been avoided in the past when weavers 
better understood their social obligations and expectations within the kinship model, one that 
no longer serves to govern community access to markets or resources through Olga.  
  
NETWORKS 
 
After the end of IFAM 2016, I arranged to meet independently with both Amalia and Maria. 
Olga declined a conversation with me. Amalia and I had dinner with the family of her youngest 
son’s godmother, Alicia Castro Chicol. Amalia had given birth to her youngest son (Francis) 
while attending IFAM in 2013 after obscuring her pregnancy from Olga and US border control. 
A long-time fair volunteer, Alicia, and her family fundraised for the hospital costs of the birth, 
cared for Amalia, and got the baby a US passport. Alicia is a US citizen married to a Guatemalan 
and has fostered a close relationship with Amalia over the course of the last four years. She 
and her family have helped Amalia develop connections with a variety of stores in the 
downtown Santa Fe area and host her for a few days after each IFAM so that she can drop off 
consignment items at each of the stores as well as collect payments from the previous year. 
Amalia did not share the fact of this relationship with Maria and refused to take any of Maria’s 
textiles to the vendors and stores in Santa Fe. 
 Upon their return to Guatemala, it became apparent that Amalia was willing to do 
whatever was necessary to undermine FEDECOVERA’s involvement in IFAM and even 
campaigned successfully to have Maria fired from her position at FEDECOVERA While the 
details of personal and community politics are difficult to parse, this demonstrates Amalia’s 
ability to navigate and manipulate people in a variety of contexts. Olga and Amalia have been 
accepted to attend IFAM 2018 but had lower booth sales in 2017 than at any point in the last 
few years. This was countered by Amalia being featured as one of the long-standing venders 
in much of the marketing that the fair has introduced in 2017. The complicated relationship 
between Amalia, Olga, and IFAM provides a window into not only the developing textile 
community in the Alta Verapaz of Guatemala, but also the developing awareness that Amalia 
and other women have of the platform that serves as a gateway between their culture and the 
global market. 
136 
 
On more than one occasion, when I was taking photographs, Amalia, and the women 
she worked with insured that my photographs featured older, wood board houses with thatched 
roofs and packed dirt floors rather than the new cement block houses with cement floors that 
many of the families in Samac and Santa María are building. Amalia was also very cautious 
about the interview that she (eventually) agreed to give on tape, focusing on the narrative of 
the cooperative that Olga has curated with IFAM and her own identity as a weaver within the 
context of IFAM and the global market. 
Amalia’s savvy understanding of not only the value of picb’il as an art form and identity 
garment but also the interplay between the wealth in the west, and the very real poverty of 
Guatemala being presented in a way that was acceptable to purchasers, was evident. Her ability 
to control her image, both oral and visual, as a part of a marketing strategy has remained evident 
in all the interactions I have had with Amalia in which she perceived herself to being recorded 
in any way. 
Since the end of my fieldwork in September of 2016, Amalia Gue was invited (along 
with Maryland resident Pamela Deakin Kirlin)18 to market textiles at an artist’s market in Peru 
called Tinkuy in November 2017, but I have been unable to confirm if Amalia attended or not. 
Kirlin is working with her sister and a church group in the US to further open up market 
connections in the United States for weavers in both Samac and San Juan Chamelco. The 
degree to which Kirlin’s market opportunities are fair trade, or Kirlin understands the complex 
relationships between weavers and the conflicts that have occurred in the Alta Verapaz over 
textile weaving in the last decade, remains unclear.  
 
TEXTILE MARKET TODAY 
 
During a short trip back to the field in the summer of 2017, I was able to observe first-hand the 
impact of increased economic instability on textile weaving in the Alta Verapaz. The president 
of the Coffee Cooperative in Samac was murdered in an armed robbery in March of 2017, and 
in the upheaval that followed the coffee cooperative produced a bad batch of coffee, as it was 
not harvested in time. This bad crop led to the dissolution of a long-standing coffee buying 
contract that the community held with an Italian buyer. Following the loss of the contract, the 
price of coffee families were then able to gain for their crop dropped, and with it the anticipated 
annual income of all the families who were members of the cooperative. With increased 
                                                          
18A textile enthusiast and missionary. Attempts to contact her have as of yet been fruitless. 
137 
 
financial instability, there was a marked increase in the number of young women learning to 
weave, so that the cooperative itself organised a class and bought loom parts for twenty-two 
young women who had previously been uninterested in textile production as an economic 
activity.  
One of my informants sheepishly told me that when her husband broke his ankle and 
could not work, he had learned to weave so that they could bring in a little more money to 
supplement the lost income while they waited for his ankle to heal so that he could go back to 
work on the coffee harvest. Both the increase in weaving during times of economic instability 
and the ability and willingness of men to participate in a traditionally female-gendered task 
demonstrate the value that textile production has as an income generator for families and 
communities.  
One cannot argue, by any stretch of the imagination, that the Q’eqchi’ weavers of the 
Alta Verapaz have more economic and political power than the tourists and visitors who 
purchase the textiles that they weave, but pretending that the lack of a western education and 
the insistence on an identity that predisposes them to monolingualism in Q’eqchi’ means that 
they are in any way naïve is equally a mistake. The market space made available by IFAM 
expands the border-space between the Q’eqchi’ world and the western world. It opens up new 
venues and ways in which individuals can interact and provides new benefits and challenges 
to Q’eqchi’ women navigating the ever-present battle between what is labelled by outsiders as 
“modernity” and “development” and a culture and history that they have protected while 
fighting to modernise on their own terms for, quite literally, generations. Western 
exceptionalism, particularly European and American exceptionalism, predispose the 
westerners in the border-space of interaction with the Q’eqchi’ world to view and treat the 
Q’eqchi’ people as being on a path to modernisation, and to assume that the eventual goal of 
Q’eqchi’ society is economic, linguistic, and social integration with the global north. As many 
authors have pointed out, indigeneity serves a limited purpose in terms of allowing for 
“accepted diversity” in a global capitalist society, but only within the confines that indigenous 
identity does not challenge the core tenets of global capitalism (see Federici 2012). 
 
IMPACT OF INCOME 
 
One of the challenges for people like Amalia and Olga, and one of the questions that researchers 
may pursue further, is the impact of the influx of capital from spaces like IFAM into 
communities. This includes the ways in which indigenous groups, like the Q’eqchi’, respond 
138 
 
to increasingly diverse attempts to “modernise” (for lack of a better word) those groups and 
peoples whose existence and ontologies do not mesh with the ongoing goals of capital 
development and wealth concentration. This forces us to challenge our own preconceptions of 
what resistance looks like and what its successful outcome is.  
Many of Rosario’s granddaughters, particularly Josefina Quiix de Coy, use the same 
words and terms to talk about textiles and weaving as Rosario--words that tie textile production 
tightly to an identity rooted in a Maya past, while simultaneously relying on textile production 
as an income supplement and source of independence. In contrast, few of the women 
interviewed who were neither blood relatives of Rosario nor members of her extended 
junkab’al would refer to textiles or looms as directly holding life, or as defining characteristics 
of the community. Other women talked about the textiles, upon completion, as having specific 
value in the ways in which Q’eqchi’ people identified themselves. But more often, they talked 
about the economic benefits of weaving, the struggle to find a market for the textiles, and the 
difficulty of managing relationships between their cooperative, the Samac Cooperative, 
Ixb’alam Ke, and FEDECOVERA, the cost of thread, etc. This distinct difference, including in 
many cases an ambivalence, in the ways in which women spoke about picb’il textiles and 
picb’il weaving indicates that there is a strong link between the ability to market the textile and 
the economic independence weaving can bring, and as a new and evolving ontological 
connection to the practice of weaving. For some women weaving is integrally connected to 
their identities as Q’eqchi’ women. To other women it is simply one of many ways they are 
able to generate small amounts of family income, and to many women it is both.  
 It is undeniable that the additional family income provided by textile sales in the  
international market has a significant impact on the lives of the weavers who produce those 
textiles and on the communities in which they are woven as an added source of economic power 
and independence. For many of my informants, income from textile production was the only 
family income over which they had power or control. Women reported using this income to 
improve the quality of their weaving products with the purchase of new loom parts or better 
quality thread, to subsidise family expenses such as food and clothing and their own 
participation in community education projects for women, and (above all) to provide their 
children with access to education. 
 While public education is provided in Guatemala by the central government, many rural 
schools lack supplies, classrooms, and even teachers. For students aiming to get an education 
beyond the sixth grade, it is almost necessary to enrol in a private (usually religious) institution 
or to earn a scholarship at government-funded specialised school. For weavers the added 
139 
 
income from textile production often makes the difference between a child being able to attend 
a public school or a private school. For many families, sending more than one child to a private 
school is impossible, and several women will chip in to pay for the education of an oldest son 
or daughter, who is then expected to use that education to the benefit of the junkab’al.  
 This use of weaving funds to help a child better incorporate into the non-Q’eqchi’ 
Ladino world through Ladino, western, education is, for many Q’eqchi’ women, simply an 
extension of what the Q’eqchi’ people have done for centuries: using integration into the 
external culture where necessary as a way to continue supporting el pueblo Q’eqchi’. For 
indigenous women, their culture is far from static and unchanging. In contrast to the elite ideal 
of indigenous Guatemalan culture, the integration of non-Mayan ideas and things into a Maya 
way of life does not decrease the “Mayan-ness” of the people—it simply increases the “Mayan-
ness” of the ideas or objects—new or old. As long as the community keeps its identity separate 
from the outside world, and young people continue to speak Q’eqchi,’ the pueblo simply 
evolves. What is important is that these changes are driven internally rather than externally, as 
what “is Q’eqchi’” must be defined by people who are themselves Q’eqchi’. 
 Therefore, the arrival of an international market and the shift of textile production from 
a sustenance act to a cottage industry does not reduce the authenticity of the objects as Q’eqchi’ 
objects, it simply means that the Q’eqchi’ weavers of today have expanded or changed the 
ways in which they live and identify as weavers compared to their grandmothers or ancestors.  
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
140 
 
Chapter Six: Our Grandmothers’ Huipils: Museums as Time 
Capsules. 
 
The sun sat by the sea and wept. He could not live without the moon. So he asked the 
dragonflies and the hummingbirds and the crabs and all the animals to help him find 
the blood of the moon. And so they did. Bringing it from all across the sea, and it filled 
thirteen jars. The sun found a man living near the sea and begged him to keep the jars 
for two weeks. He promised to return for them. But while he was away the jars began 
to shake and to move and to make noise and the man and his wife were afraid. When 
the sun returned they told him he could not keep his jars by their home, and they asked 
him what was in the jars. The Sun told them there was nothing--and began throwing 
the jars one by one, into the sea. 
  
On June 18th of 2016 Margarita Beb, a weaver and community leader in San Juan Chamelco, 
accompanied me to the Ixchel Museum in Guatemala City—the premier textile museum in the 
nation. When we entered the gallery on contemporary Maya textiles, she stopped in front of a 
loom set up with a mannequin in traditional traje from Totonicapán and exclaimed: “The 
threads! They have them wrong. It’s tangled—no weaver would leave it like that!” 
We spent the next three hours exhaustively going through each and every textile and 
loom display in the museum. Margarita was enthralled, excited and disappointed all at once. 
For her, the potential of the museum was evident, as were its shortcomings. In the Ixchel 
Museum Margarita encountered indigenous traje and tradition on display in (quite literally) 
vaulted halls. She also experienced first-hand racism.19 What drew her attention most of all 
was a collection of clay whorls and spinning apparatuses. Pulling me physically to the display 
case and pointing at the signage, Margarita said: 
  
My mother remembered her grandmother spinning. But in a little 
bowl, she would pick the cotton from the trees and pull it till it 
was thin and fine, my mother would sometimes pick it clean for 
her before she sat and twisted it. But I never knew how, as she 
died before I was born and my mother was too young to learn. 
Do women do this? Are there women who can spin? Or is this 
all old? From before? 
  
         For Margarita the Ixchel Museum did not only have the potential to display Guatemalan 
textiles to a wide audience, it also held clues to a past that she craved a connection with, and to 
skills whose loss she actively mourned. Although she would not state it in these terms due to 
lack of access to academic education, she understood that the museum was a space of 
                                                          
19We were interrupted once by a museum staffer who believed Margarita did not have a ticket for entrance due 
to her indigenous dress. 
141 
 
knowledge retention and production. Margarita’s encounter can be compared to the 1989 
encounter of the Tlingit Elders with patrimonial objects at the Portland Art Museum. Writing 
about the elder’s response to objects, Clifford states “...they seemed only to see them as aides-
memoires, occasions for the telling of stories and the singing of songs” (1997: 189). While 
Margarita did not ‘sing songs’ her encounter with objects in the Ixchel Museum served as an 
opportunity to engage with her own past as a Maya woman; and to imagine the past lives of 
her grandmother and great-grandmother.  
         Margarita’s encounter with the Ixchel museum also shifted the way that she spoke 
about, and engaged with, the photographs of museum textiles in my booklets. The encounter 
cemented her desire to gain better access to museum textiles in Guatemala and beyond, as she 
expressed during our long-ride back to Cobán: 
  
Yes, the textile belongs to the museum, but it is our traje. People 
pay and the museum earns money off  the traje of the indigenous. 
We don’t have los huipils de nuestras abuelas (the huipils of our 
grandmothers’) because our houses are very poor, nothing lasts 
when the women work and work and wear things out and the rain 
gets in. It’s not that we don’t want them. We cannot keep such 
things and the museum can, in their grand building in la 
ciudad.20 There should be some benefit to the communities. To 
the weavers. We should at least know where our traje is. 
  
Other instances of visual repatriation also demonstrate the sense of loss a community 
can feel regarding not only historical objects, but ways of life defined by those objects.  Notably 
the visual repatriation of fifty-eight photographs taken by Alfred Haddon in the Purari Delta 
area of Gulf Province, Papua New Guinea, by Joshua Bell in the late 1990s. Bell noted that 
community members encountering these photographs incorporated them into their personal 
histories, vocally distanced themselves from an indigenous past or even cried at the encounter 
between themselves and these lost ancestors (Bouquet 2008; Bell 2003). Margarita’s encounter 
with actual objects strengthened her emotional connection to the photographs and the visual 
repatriation process. 
Technology, in some cases however, provides not only alternatives to repatriation, but 
also increases access to these kinds of encounters and can give museums that are navigating 
complex politicised issues a venue for engaging with communities. Museums, long accustomed 
to engagement with indigenous source communities must also remember that there are 
                                                          
20La ciudad’ is a common term in the highlands for Guatemala City and carries a great deal of meaning about 
the disparate lives of Ladino urbanites and Indigenous rural peoples. In using the term ‘la ciudad’ instead of 
Guatemala City, Margarita is making a statement about income, access and opportunity. 
142 
 
communities such as Margarita’s, who are only now becoming aware of their historical 
contributions to museum collections. In these instances, it serves both museums and 
communities well to be able to draw from the long history of museums and communities 
engaging in productive dialogue with results ranging from small repatriations (see the Glasgow 
Ghost Dance Shirt (O’Neill 2006; 112) to major changes in national laws such as the 1990 
passing of The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) or 
Australia’s Previous Possessions, New Obligations policy, enacted in 1993.  
This awareness of the successful history between museums and source communities is 
integral to continuing the process of decolonising museum spaces and honouring the mission 
and history of the museum as institution. In my own fieldwork the use of photos in facilitating 
encounters between weavers and textiles proved valuable; with one weaver stating: 
  
Tell the museums that we are glad that our grandmothers’ huipils 
are there. That they have not been lost. That our traje is 
important and that our communities have not been forgotten. Tell 
them that, but I am a little sad. My mother was a weaver and she 
never knew her traje was being seen by people so far away. That 
they knew who the Q’eqchi’ were. 
  
 Throughout this, and other conversations, I was reminded that repatriation practices 
such as physical encounters, virtual repatriation, and recognition of expertise continue to hold 
a great deal of value for local communities Although the three practices may overlap, there is 
value in understanding the process and benefits of each practice individually as relates to my 
fieldwork. My own fieldwork bridged two of the three: 
Physical encounters occur when interactions between members of a source community 
and an object are facilitated. Physical encounters include museum visits, funding and resources 
dedicated to research, exchanges between museums and source communities, educational 
outreach with youth (including access to objects and relevant knowledge), and the loaning of 
objects to museums in indigenous or local communities. They can also include the use of 
museum objects in the ceremonies for which they were originally intended, and the blessing 
of, or communication with, objects for the first time since collection. At the MAA some 
members of Blackfoot communities have been able to ceremonially "smudge" when viewing 
culturally-significant objects. The smoke from tobacco or sweet grass is used to purify the 
space and maintain the life of the object, which then remains in the museum’s collection.    
Recognition of expertise occurs when museums and academics hand over the ability 
to serve as an expert on objects and histories to the communities from which the objects 
143 
 
originate. This can be facilitated through cooperative research that relies on the expertise of 
locals, incorporating their knowledge into the institutional recognition of the development and 
politicisation of regimes of knowledge. While not particularly effective if practice on its own, 
acknowledgement of other spheres of knowled and the fallibility of western academia can 
provide grounding for indigenous and local communities to reclaim expertise and knowledge 
production power that has been stripped from them. A more effective strategy can include co-
publications with members of source communities and museums proactively approaching 
community experts during the development of educational museum displays. 
Virtual/Visual repatriation relies on technological advances that allow for access to 
objects and knowledge contained within objects if the actual object itself cannot be moved or 
repatriated. Methodologies for engaging in virtual repatriation include moulding and recasting 
objects, 3D printing of objects, and video and photographs. It can include both direct delivery 
of such virtual or visual representations to communities (as in my case) and/or their 
presentation on a public or password-accessible web page. Visual or virtual repatriation is most 
effective in situations where the object itself is not the source of value for the community, but 
rather serves as an important example or representation of the past, or tool for education about 
the past. 
         These three strategies can overlap, playing off each other. For example, both 
visual/virtual repatriation and physical encounters can facilitate a recognition of expertise 
between the researcher and the community member. The institution benefits the institution 
encounters knowledge and histories of objects it might previously been unaware of. This is 
seen in the second chapter on methodology. My own field research (as previously stated) relied 
on both visual repatriation and recognition of community expertise. I used museum objects 
through photographs to create a research environment dependent on encounters between 
community members and objects produced by similar or the same communities in the past, and 
found great interest and value in facilitating such encounters. 
WEAVERS ENCOUNTERING MUSEUM TEXTILES 
  
The photographic repatriation I engaged in emerged organically from my field research. As 
detailed in chapter two, I had planned on using photographs of historic picb’il textiles as 
interview aids in understanding the evolution of the textile tradition over the last century; but 
found that these photograph booklets (see Appendix C for an example) soon shifted from 
144 
 
interview aids to being core elements in my research. Weavers encountering the historic textile 
photographs engaged directly with the photographs as time capsules connecting them in a direct 
way to past weavers, with whom they shared a cultural and even kinship heritage. 
         Despite the fact that there is a local history museum inside of Cobán’s city hall, only 
around half of my informants were aware of what museums were or might be as institutions. 
Most of these informants categorised museums as places which “kept history.” These 
informants were aware that museums existed in Guatemala City and internationally but had no 
personal experience of museums. Only four of my informants had ever been inside a museum; 
Amalia Gue, Clara Coy (mother of Concepcion who lives in Florida), Rosy Sacrab (who had 
won a scholarship to attend an indigenous youth leadership programme in Spain), and Amalia’s 
oldest daughter; Delia Gue who had been to the Ixchel Museum with Olga and Amalia as part 
of an exhibition. Other informant’s were aware of the existence of museums, yet more as an 
ill-defined concept than as an actual institution. 
         The words of one weaver in Samac echo many of the responses I received when I asked 
weavers “Did you know that there are Picb’il textiles in museums?” as she highlighted the 
value of the textiles to her as a confirmation that past-weavers wove and wore similar traje to 
contemporary ones, and as inspiration for her own weaving practice. 
          
I did not know that old huipils were stored anywhere until now 
that you are showing me, and I am learning. I like the old huipils 
and this one (indicates pattern image) catches my attention and I 
know that I could weave these patterns this way because they are 
joined together here. It is important and I am happy that you have 
shown us what our grandmothers did, what they wove. 
  
When asked “What do you think about them (picb’il textiles) being in a museum?” weavers 
emphasised several things: first the value of the telling of the Q’eqchi’ history to the outside 
world using textiles 
  
It is important to have a space where they are real, and not 
forgotten. In the same way it is important to be able to have 
another place where you can see all the weaving and thus you do 
not lose the essence of the tejidos. A place where people know 
who we are because of our traje. 
  
            And another informant: 
  
Well for me it tells me the information that is in the museum is 
very necessary for example maybe another person from 
somewhere else can go there—in the museums to see our traje 
145 
 
and to read our story of the Q'eqchi ', what it says and not lose 
the knowledge of who we are and that we are still here 
. 
  
Secondly interviewees focused on the ability of Q’eqchi’ community members to gain 
access to their own histories and cultural identities. Women who emphasised this engaged 
particularly with the perception of ongoing cultural loss and the role that museums could play 
in reconnecting future generations with the tools necessary to rebuild their heritage: 
  
It's good that the huipils are there. For me it's important because 
we have lost so much of what it means to be Q’eqchi’ and we 
lose more every time a grandmother or grandfather dies and our 
children are going to need to know more about who the Q’eqchi 
‘are someday 
  
            And another informant: 
  
I think it is very important that this story, these huipils, stay in 
the museum because maybe someone from the community can 
go and find a story we have forgotten there and can bring the 
history back to the community and tell other people so that they 
can continue to live our culture. For me, maybe, I think that we 
cannot lose weaving because it is very important to me because 
in that sense I'm valuing myself. 
  
            Finally, weavers looked at the potential that ongoing access to museum textiles had to 
allow them to regain lost knowledge of textile production and to reacquire historic textile 
patterns that had disappeared from the communities over the course of the second half of the 
twentieth century: 
  
We know how to weave, but for example if there are some 
patterns that I do not know in these pictures, I can learn them 
because the work they did is good. I am glad that they saved the 
huipils and if I knew the people in the museums, I could go up 
to them and ask them to give me a copy of all the pictures, so 
that I could learn them so more people can also learn. It's nice 
because if they had not saved it now it would be lost, but they 
still are very far away and we did not know about them, but they 
have it (the huipils) saved and that's nice even if it is far away 
and we did not know. 
  
            And another informant: 
  
I do not know what to think for sure since until now we had only 
heard that many years ago they made these huipils finer than the 
ones we weave today. I did not think that we could see their old 
146 
 
huipils, I thought that they were gone long ago. But if there are 
more pictures like these, ones we can hold in our hands, we can 
learn. Maybe getting thread this fine will be hard, since our 
thread is thicker, but what we weave is not very different than 
what our grandmothers’ wove and we can learn again. 
 
 
 For many of the weavers to whom I 
showed historic textile photographs their interest 
in historic textiles, and relearning historic 
patterns was far from merely academic. With the 
permission of curators and museum staff, I left 
high quality photographs of those textiles 
included in my photo booklets in the 
communities where I conducted interviews. The 
weavers were thrilled to have seen patterns and 
textile forms that were new to them or of which 
they had vague memories, but even more so to 
own physical copies of those photographs, which 
they then used to recreate museum textiles or to 
integrate the patterns on museum textiles into 
contemporary pieces (as seen in figures 6.1 and 
6.2).  
The patterns, once re-learned, I discovered on my 
visit to Guatemala in 2017, were treated as any 
other pattern known to the weaver. Weavers 
integrated historic patterns into contemporary 
weaving by imitating them exactly—creating a 
garment that mirrored the original (as can be seen 
in the example on the upper right). Weavers even 
incorporated patterns into other textile styles, as 
can be seen in the example in figure 6.1, where a 
weaver has incorporated the corn plant from a 
historic picb’il textile featuring corn plants, 
puntitos, and strutting roosters into a blue calada 
textile featuring simply the corn plants, a ring pattern, and the calada styling. The blending of 
Figure 6.2: Historic picb’il pattern Museum object 
number 3-28126 at the Hearst Museum contrasted 
with contemporary textile woven using a 
photograph of the museum textile as a guide. 
 
Figure 6.1: Historic picb’il pattern Museum Object 
number 3-28120 Hearst Museum contrasted with 
contemporary textile woven using a photograph of 
the museum textile as a guide.  
 
 
Figure 0.1.1: Historic picb’il pattern (MUSEUM 
OBJECT NUMBER) contrasted with contemporary 
textile woven using this photograph as a guide.  
 
147 
 
styles and patterns (all within the Q’eqchi’ tradition of weaving) emphasised the flexibility 
that weavers displayed in accessing the heritage inherent in the historic textiles. Heritage 
textiles and historic patterns became part and parcel of ongoing textile innovation. This 
blending demonstrated evolution and change although many weavers talked about cultural 
traditions as being “eternal” and “unchanging”. 
This emphasis on the value of textiles as tools used to access intangible heritage via 
preserved knowledge points to the dual role of textiles as tangible heritage in the form of day-
to-day clothing and intangible heritage in the form of knowledge and highlighted the practical 
value of my photographic repatriation to community members. 
         As one weaver stated during my follow up visit when I returned to visit Santa María 
one year after I had initially left: 
  
Yes, QanaRux always commented on the people buying our 
textiles, she said that they kept huipils in other places, and that 
these old huipils were like gold since they are our work. The 
weaving lives in the women, and what is life for us if one day we 
stop doing what lives within us? It is like ceasing to exist. She 
always said that because our tejido is life for us, the huipils have 
great value and we cannot lose them or forget them. 
  
         The relationships that weavers have with museum textiles is therefore complicated; 
extending from a lack of access even to information or knowledge about them all the way to 
highly valuing those collections and experiencing intense frustration at a lack of access 
highlights the value and potential in digital and virtual repatriation as new tools for museums 
to engage with local communities. The quotes cited above reflect the experience of Yup’ik 
elders encountering objects and photographs at the former Berlin Museum fur Volkerkunde 
with researcher Ann Fienup-Riordan, with one participant stating ‘If pictures of the things we 
saw here were seen by our descendants, it might help to reunite the people. And our descendants 
might begin to believe in themselves and their culture’ (Fienup-Riordan 2003: 37). Fienup-
Riordan’s work when compared to mine demonstrate the wealth of potential avenues for visual 
or virtual repatriation both in and outside of the physical space of the museum and their value 
to disparate cultures facing disparate challenges.  
         From my own perspective as an ‘activist researcher’ (see Chapter two), the facilitation 
of these encounters and the knowledge both discovered and produced through that facilitation 
creates value in the research work. In addition to contributing to the canon of acadmic 
knowledge, enhancing access to that canon has in and of itself been the catalyst for the most 
148 
 
exciting elements of my own research. It also encouraged me to reflect on my own 
participation as a researcher and collector as a bridge between museums and communities, 
placing myself inside the tradition I was engaging with through study. As an activist 
researcher I also served to extend Clifford’s ‘Contact Zone’ (1997). By bringing photographs 
of museum objects into communities I created an enmeshment of spaces and allowed for 
dialogue between the museum and the source community; with myself as the initiator in both 
spaces..  
 
EARLY COLLECTORS OF PICB’IL TEXTILES 
 
Judging by the Peabody Museum at Harvard and the Universities of Cambridge and Oxford, 
collection of Mayan textiles appears to have begun in the mid-1880s and continued in earnest 
throughout the 1920s as attested orally to me during research conducted with museums 
containing major Maya Textile Collections (research notes 2009-2014). While contemporary 
collections have been maintained, the pace at which textiles are added to museum collections 
has slowed considerably since the 1960s. Many museum collections seem to coincide with or 
rely on the work of individual researchers or academics who conducted fieldwork or travelled 
throughout Central America, whether these researchers were anthropologists or not. Museum 
catalogue tags across the United States from the turn of the twentieth century list names of 
collectors who may have been ornithologists or archaeologists and, as an auxiliary to their own 
academic work, collected anthropologic or ethnographic objects for their universities and 
museums while travelling (Ibid). 
The Phoebe Hearst Museum at the University of Berkeley contains a collection of 
Guatemalan textiles gathered between the turn of the nineteenth century up to the to the present 
day. This collection contains prime examples of this early collection method, as the bulk of the 
museum’s earlier Mayan textiles were collected by Lila M. O’Neale and Gustav Eisen 
(Personal research Hearst Museum 2009, Hearst Museum database 2016).  
Born in 1847, Eisen had an academic career that spanned over a half a century, and 
almost as many subjects. At varying points in his career, he studied malaria, winemaking, and 
the Holy Grail, and he even corresponded with Charles Darwin, publishing a book on the 
growth and development of vegetable mould (Radcliff & Fidler 2000: 1). Eisen’s travels 
focused on the Americas, and over the course of his career he spent almost two full years in 
Guatemala (Radcliff & Fidler 2000: 1; Eisen 1903, 231). A large number of the nineteenth 
century Central American artefacts at the Hearst Museum are tagged as having been collected 
149 
 
by Eisen. In 1993 “Maya Textiles of Guatemala: The Gustavus A. Eisen Collection 1902” was 
written by Margot Blum Schevill and published by University of Texas Press, detailing the 
work Eisen did in Guatemala and the textile collection he helped establish (Schevill 1993: 19-
21).  
However, the publications that originally came out of Eisen’s work in Central America, 
and Guatemala, rarely mention people, culture, or the production of the artefacts he was so 
fastidiously purchasing and shipping back to California. Writing in 1903 for the Bulletin of the 
American Geographical Society—in the only article he published on his travels in 
Guatemala—Eisen describes the local geography and weather patterns in great detail, but only 
mentions the population in passing, as a reference to the ongoing deforestation of the cloud 
forests of the Alta Verapaz (Eisen 1903: 241-246).  
Eisen was the quintessential nineteenth-century explorer-academic, venturing forth 
from the safe confines of “home” within “society” to the wild, where he collected and brought 
back information and objects. The presence, let alone agency, of the people who inhabited the 
land where he travelled is so minimised in the documentation of his experience as to seem non-
existent. Erased by virtue of not being documented, their presence is felt only through the 
objects that Eisen collected and then donated to various museums. The huipils, cortes, pots, 
and figurines tell the neglected story of not only the objects’ purchase, but also their careful 
and expert production. Museum curators, working with the Eisen objects, can tell the stories of 
the people Eisen neglected better than he ever thought to, by situating the objects 
geographically in their home regions and piecing together narratives to guide museum visitors 
and researchers. 
Little is known about Lila O’Neale’s life relative to Eisen’s, which is typical for women 
researchers of the time. Long fascinated by textile arts, she taught secondary school until 1926, 
when she enrolled at University of California, Berkeley to pursue graduate work in “household 
arts” at the age of forty. From there, she began a career as an anthropologist studying the textile 
arts of Native American peoples from Peru to Arizona. O’Neale published her thesis in 1929, 
and the collection tags in the Hearst Museum, as well as her own publication of a monograph 
in 1947, tell us that she then spent another fifteen to twenty years travelling, collecting, and 
conducting research throughout Central and South America (personal interview, Vital 2011). 
O’Neale, too, played the role of intrepid observer, coming from outside of the communities to 
verify and codify information; however, travelling and researching independently in the 1920s 
and 1930s, her status as a woman and near-outsider in the academic community would have 
influenced her research practices and experience. Working at a time when women in her field 
150 
 
were rare, O’Neale demonstrated an ability to think beyond the narrow confines of what was 
expected for her gender, and her success ostensibly provided her with access to female spaces 
in Maya contexts that male anthropologists would struggle to gain even today. 
Unlike the work of Eisen and other early collectors and researchers, O’Neale’s 
published monograph of her time in Central America openly relies on the work she did with 
individuals and communities. O’Neale’s documentation of textile production is detailed, 
extensive, and unrivalled even today. Despite this commitment to textiles, there is a stark 
absence in her writing of personal details about the individuals she worked with. Despite this, 
the work-centric nature of her research indicates a shift from the viewpoint of researchers like 
Eisen. Eisen wrote directly about the potential benefit of Guatemala to western exploitation 
while O’Neale concentrated on local work and culture.  
 The story told by those objects she collected demonstrates the gap between research 
and museum processes at the time from accession to storage to display and interpretation. Even 
as museums enhanced the documentation Eisen provided, and opened a greater window into 
the lives of the Maya in Guatemala in the late nineteenth century, those same mechanical 
processes, the ‘museuming’ of the objects, if you will, replete with limitations shrouded much 
of O’Neale’s work.21 A huipil collected in the Cobán area by O’Neale in the mid-1930s and 
still in the museum’s collection today is accompanied by a catalogue card that can only be 
described as typical by the museum standards at the time.22 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Figure 6.3 Museum catalogue card for museum object 3-28126 at the Hearst 
Museum at the University of California Berkeley. 
Source: Hearst Museum Database. Copyright held by the Hearst Museum. 
 
                                                          
21The discrepancy between O’Neal’s monograph and the museum tags on the objects she collected present the 
interesting potential of reconstructing the data she collected using her monograph to re-describe the textile objects 
she collected.  
22Personal notes from researching the collections of the Hearst Museum in 2009 and 2010. 
151 
 
Having examined this particular textile, I can state with confidence that the method of 
collection and categorisation of objects created a framework that both expanded and limited 
the value of the information gathered. While O’Neale provides far more information than her 
predecessors. Eisen included, the museum card describes this object as “factory woven.” Based 
on an inspection of the garment, and documentation found in the monograph, I believe it 
resembles the work and patterns of master weavers of picb’il in the Alta Verapaz (including 
descriptions of those textiles written by O’Neale) more than it does any machine-woven textiles 
of the era. An image of the item in question (as drawn from the museum catalogue) is provided 
below.  
 
Figure 6.4: Museum object number 3-28126 at the Hearst Museum at the 
University of California Berkeley. 
Source: Hearst Museum Database. Copyright held by the Hearst Museum 
To use the Hearst Museum in California as an example of the evolution from this early 
collection and documentation to integrated community driven collection and object display I 
can compare O’Neale’s textile collection in the museum’s storage in to their 2008 exhibition 
“Traje de la Vida: Mayan Textiles of Guatemala.” 
When curator Margot Blum Schevill organised a display of Guatemalan Textiles in 
2008, the emphasis was on creating an exhibition that demonstrated the importance of these 
textiles and exploring the cultures that created them. Documentary filmmakers shot hours of 
footage throughout the highlands; mini bios and photographs were collected for the weavers of 
each of the modern textiles on display, and while a nod was given to early Hearst collectors 
such as O’Neale and Eisen, it was made clear to visitors of this new exhibit that the museum 
sought to build connections and understanding with source communities. What was on display 
was far more than a collection—it was a bridge between the museum and the spaces from which 
152 
 
the museum objects originated. Nowhere was this more clearly demonstrated than in the 
extensive community outreach done over the course of several years in Guatemala with Maya 
weavers23 as groundwork for the exhibit itself.24 With this exhibit the Hearst not only opened 
historical collections to contemporary weavers, but invited those weavers to contribute to the 
museum’s new collections and knowledge base—and in doing so opening the door a little wider 
between museum and source community.  
MUSEUM OBJECTS AND THEIR HOMES: TRACING CHANGE 
  
During the early nineteenth century, when museums were becoming institutionalised in 
universities and public spaces as venues for public education (Bouquet 1992), James Smithson 
(whose bequest funded the Smithsonian Institution in the United States) said that his goal was 
to create an institution “...for the increase and diffusion of knowledge...” (Smithson 1826: 4). 
In stating this, he was one of the first to publicly articulate the idea of the museum as an 
intermediary space between the academic elite and the general public, the goal of which was 
not only to collect, categorise, and classify the world, but to present that compilation to the 
European and American peoples as an accurate representation of the world. As education 
became more accessible, museums indeed became a front-of-house, showcasing the academy 
to the public. They served as spaces where academic knowledge, objects of research, and the 
general public could interact (Hooper-Greenwell; 1992 185). Inherently politicised, Hooper-
Greenwell argues that museums played a pivotal role in the institutionalisation and presentation 
of knowledge from a particular worldview, one that has historically centred European and 
American narratives of the world (1992; 100-110).   
The heroisation of the “explorer” and “gentlemen scientists” who were travelling the 
world to document and manage it found a ready outlet in the museum. In romanticising, 
heroising and masculinising science, archaeology, geography, etc., museums and their objects 
were situated in a specific colonised telling of the way that the world worked, as well as offering 
a gendered telling of that world. “Other” people were consistently understood according to a 
European and patriarchal framework (Hooper-Greenwell 1992; 193). 
Museum collectors, curators, and managers produced a narrative of European 
modernity equalling global modernity with the objects they collected and displayed. Cultural 
                                                          
23None of the textiles featured in the exhibit were from the Alta Verapaz, and none of the communities in which 
I work had been involved in this museum exhibition.  
24 Personal notes from researching the collections of the Hearst Museum in 2009 and 2010. 
153 
 
development meant, in the minds of many during the Victorian era and well into the twentieth 
century, “cultural evolution”: a temporal and inexorable move towards European culture and 
lifestyle. To this end, documenting “disappearing” cultures was simply the act of preserving 
the present as history for future generations who would be more “civilised” than their ancestors 
had once been. The act of creating museums with the objects from other cultures could, in this 
context, even be viewed as an act of charity carried out for the benefit of “lesser” peoples, 
documenting what they had been so that when they arrived at what was perceived as the 
inevitable end point of westernised lifestyle, they could appreciate what they were in 
comparison (Hooper-Greenwell 1992). This philosophical ideal was, despite its problematic 
roots, a double-edged resource; because in preserving the objects of other cultures in a colonial 
way, these early collections laid groundwork for future museums and museum ethnographers 
to engage with source communities around decolonisation and the opening of resource rich 
collections to people seeking to bolster their own community heritage. Museums, precisely 
because of the wealth of resource they hold in the form of objects, can become ‘restorative 
agents’ in the decolonization process as seen in the ‘Pasifika Styles’ exhibition at the 
Cambridge MAA (Herle 2008). 
As seen from the work of researchers such as Clifford, Henare and others, today 
museums provide spaces to reflect on academic practice itself and on the production of 
knowledge through material culture and history and can prove to be productive and important 
spaces of encounter. Museums and their objects thus become ripe for troubling ideas about 
knowledge ownership, as well as places rich with opportunities for cross-cultural learning. 
Material culture, when used as a bridge between museum and source communities, allows for 
“one-off” cultural encounters to become ongoing ones. 
As producers of knowledge (Hooper-Greenwell 1992) museums can endow non-
academic experts or indigenous peoples with the ability to share knowledge in the academic 
sphere by inviting them as participants and knowledge creators (Clifford 1997) in into a space 
designed for research. By inviting individuals from source communities to museums as expert 
researchers, or repatriating objects to those communities, museums can begin to decolonise the 
Academy. Decentralising expertise allows for a broader engagement with museum objects and 
the creation of the museum as a more cooperative cultural education space. In this way my 
research builds directly on the research of others by continuing this process in a small sense, 
by connecting indigenous Q’eqchi’ weavers with Q’eqchi’ textiles held in museum collections. 
 
 
154 
 
MUSEUM OBJECTS ACROSS TEMPORAL DISTANCE 
 
The process of opening museum collections via the Internet, outreach, or research is a process 
of troubling traditional conceptions of museum objects and their roles. With the inclusion of 
indigenous voices in the display of indigenous objects, there are inherent ontological concerns 
with the continued use of museums as institutions for the collection and perpetuation of 
knowledge. “Truth,” in a Foucauldian sense, is produced, not discovered. Information and its 
collection, understanding, and distribution becomes a highly institutionalised process governed 
by whichever social groups happen to be dominant as that sphere of knowledge is being 
constructed. Thus, as seen in Hooper-Greenhill’s work referenced in chapter two, museums, 
universities, schools, newspapers, etc., participate as institutions in this process, and the 
collectors and codifiers of those objects are in turn producing the knowledge they claim to have 
“learned” (Foucault 1972; Hooper-Greenhill 1992). Furthermore, those objects create a 
metaphorical space in which source communities and museum ethnographers are able to 
trouble ideas of ownership, knowledge, and history through actual, or visual/virtual encounters 
with objects (Clifford 1997). The ownership of Q’eqchi’ textiles as a part of Q’eqchi’ culture 
becomes a politicised practice of knowledge production.  
Researchers such as Amiria Henare (2009) have grappled with this evolution of the 
museum and opened windows into new ways of thinking about museum projects. Henare 
conducted research on Maori artefacts that had been collected around the turn of the nineteenth 
century by Scottish settlers or visitors and ended up in academic museums in Scotland. She 
also looked, more briefly, at Scottish artefacts in historical museums in New Zealand, and how 
the two sets of objects served as an established connection between Scotland and New Zealand. 
Basing her theoretical grounding in the work of Arjun Appadurai (1986), Henare places the 
value of objects in the social environments in which they exist and between the people 
negotiating their value at very specific intersections of time, place, and social structures. 
Henare posits that museum objects have a particular value insofar as they serve as a bridge 
across spatial and temporal distance. These objects—Scottish and Maori in Scotland and New 
Zealand respectively—not only tell a story of migration and colonisation, but also create a 
sense of realism about ancestors, real or perceived. The descendants of the individuals involved 
in those initial cultural encounters can re-experience them in small ways via those objects. For 
example, holding a spoon from Angus, or handling a bark cloth skirt from what is now 
Christchurch, can connect people in real ways to the past. In this way, museum collections can 
illustrate historical and contemporary links binding two communities or locations together 
155 
 
(Henare 2009). On a more powerful note, these objects can facilitate action by bringing 
together people whose families have not interacted for generations, and by creating a space in 
which the typical narratives of conquest are challenged. 
Using Gadamer’s work on time and hermeneutics, we can understand that our own 
conceptions of history in the west need to be fluid and dynamic. To understand the present, one 
must understand the past; “Time is no longer primarily a gulf to be bridged because it separates; 
it is actually the supportive ground of the course of events in which the present is rooted.” 
(Gadamer 2006: 297). The further step of ontologically believing that the past can actively (and 
with agency) change the present is not, then, a great leap. If we broaden our perception of time, 
we are able to begin to think about museums not only as time capsules; but rather as dynamic 
spaces in which objects are able to actively shrink the passage of time allowing for 
communication to occur across what are, in other spaces, great distances. Pairing this with an 
understanding of objects as being integrally part of their owner/makers as posited by Q’eqchi’ 
ontology; then museums do indeed have a pivotal role to play in the redevelopment of heritage 
through encounter. 
 
MUSEUMS AS BORDER SPACES WITHIN TIME 
 
Today, many researchers and museums are themselves problematizing and addressing the 
history of the museum as an institution, as they move forward. Museums have become time 
capsules which serve as physical reminders that the colonial project is far from over. 
Researchers and curators are challenged to find new ways to think about the museum-as-project 
and museum-as-research-space, which are cognisant of social responsibility to create a more 
just world, without losing the opportunity for research and knowledge production that museums 
hold as, literally, warehouses of the past (Fromm 2016). The collection and historic 
management of objects can tell as much of a story as the object itself. Repatriation, re-
appropriation and re-education become contentious political battlefields for both the 
communities from which museum objects have been collected and the academic communities 
of the West where these museums (for the most part) exist. 
As henare pointed out (2009: 14) museums and their objects provide a window into the 
creation of a particular narrative of history, one which can in turn be understood from the 
diverse perspective of the creators of the museum, the museum as an institution, individuals 
outside of the culture that created the museum, the objects themselves, and the descendants of 
those who originally created the object (Ibid: 7). Henare notes that “[m]ateriality is integral to 
156 
 
human existence” (Ibid: 6) and justifies connections between the past and contemporary 
communities through the idea that the material objects are integral to how we are and who we 
are. We as a species and as individuals cannot and would not exist without material culture, 
and that material culture can tell the story of human interactions and vice versa. For the 
Q’eqchi’ weavers of the Alta Verapaz that material culture can take on meaning far beyond 
that of simply objects. It becomes a bridge to the past, and the presence of a physical heritage 
allows for the reproduction of a lost metaphysical heritage.  
In this thesis the connection that Henare posits is grounded in the ontology of the 
Q’eqchi’ people with whom I worked. As noted by Kockelman (2011: 440), Q’eqchi’ 
ontological understandings of both human and object existence point to an intermingling of 
owner, maker, and object. Objects, in the same way as people, can exist within one or more 
spiritual realms at any given time, and the relationships that people have to objects (and vice 
versa)25 in each of these varying realms are important. This blending of selfhood, existence, 
and spirituality allows contemporary weavers to form what they understand not as tenuous 
potential links to the past, but as real connections across time with dead weavers who lived 
years or even generations before them. The shared experience of being Q’eqchi’, and existence 
within the Q’eqchi’ understanding of the world, gives these weavers and experts, such as Don 
Ca’al, particular access to a connection with their ancestors and allows knowledge or 
information to be passed through time. 
For many of the weavers I interviewed, objects in museums belonged to the entity or 
individual who had purchased the textile, even if it were an overseas institution. However, the 
process of creating the textile is knowledge that is owned, collectively, by the community of 
Q’eqchi’ weavers. Ownership of knowledge, for the weavers, is in the collective sense. 
Weavers spoke of teaching their daughters to weave as a part of a very-real ‘inheritance’. The 
lodging of this concept of ownership with the community of artisans ensures both the continuity 
of the art form, as it cannot be curtailed, but also gives individual women the agency to claim 
partial intellectual ownership in their own craft through the right not only of production, but 
via heritage as a weaver. 
For the Q’eqchi’, Henare’s concept of “temporal collapse,” where individuals can 
interact with one another across time through objects (2009: 8-10) makes perfect sense. For her 
it is only natural to assume that the “strings” she uses to trace objects from one owner to 
another, and to tie those owners, creators, collectors and museums together, exist (Ibid: 9). In 
                                                          
25Including the geographic relationship of both the person and the object. 
157 
 
fact, from a less Eurocentric and a more Q’eqchi’-centric understanding of time and objects, 
the connections between these objects are in fact far more than simple strings. A part of the 
object itself, which exists outside our very limited understanding of time, is simultaneously in 
the past, present, and future. Objects, from this perspective, remain active agents even in 
inactive settings such as museum collections. They can be used not only to tell a story about 
the past, but also to quite literally connect to and learn from individuals whose temporal 
existence does not directly coincide with those living today. As my weaving teacher, stated: 
 
I can learn from my grandmothers’ grandmother if I have her 
huipil. Because if I have her huipil I can see how she wove and 
I can weave in the same way as she is teaching me.  
 
From a museological perspective, this presents a variety of challenges. By blending the 
contemporary and the historic, the message that an object can tell a western audience, whose 
conceptions of objects and time will remain rooted in western thought, can be problematised. 
The object extends the didactic encounter from the place where the textile was purchased into 
the present, forcing the curator, community, and weaver to engage with not only the day-to-
day experience of people from the time and place at which the textile was collected, but also 
the continuing experience of the Q’eqchi’ people. In this sense, the museum can be imagined 
almost as a “border space.” Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson, writing in 1992, push 
anthropologists and other researchers to expand and soften our understanding of what defines 
the end of one space and the beginning of another. By “fragmenting” space, they claim that we 
have “...enabled the power of topography to conceal successfully the topography of power” 
(Gupta & Ferguson 1992: 8) In order to move beyond that, we need to think more broadly 
about how spaces are formed, disappear, and made fluid. This concept draws heavily on 
Clifford’s identification of the museum as a ‘contact zone’ (1997; 192) Clifford notes that 
“…centers become borders crossed by objects and makers…” (204) before engaging with the 
fact that museums must navigate not only their histories, but also their expected and anticipated 
audiences. I prefer the term ‘border space’ as I believe museums to be not only contact zones 
where objects and people encounter one another, but rather as active and continuously present 
spaces of encounter.  
Allowing a border space to expand beyond the simple definition of a line between “self” 
and “other,” “one” and “two,” makes it a space of encounter. Museums, as spaces of encounter 
between the colonised other, the academic institution, and the general public are border spaces. 
From a decolonising perspective, border spaces can serve both to prop up and enforce the 
158 
 
existing power structure. As spaces of encounter, they can also become spaces in which the 
hegemonic worldview is challenged. In pursuit of authenticity, museums-as-border-spaces then 
provide renewed authority and power to the voices of source communities.  
Expanding our understanding of what a border space is, and acknowledging the 
fracturing of clear geographic lines, opens our eyes to a world where borders are continuously 
shifting. When dealing with museum objects––particularly the Q’eqchi’ textiles I have worked 
with––adding a temporal angle to the concept of border space can enhance our understanding 
of the way that border spaces exist to people whose ontological understandings of the world 
does not mirror our own. For many Q’eqchi’, the encounter we call colonisation is not isolated 
to a specific series of moments in time, but ongoing. It also allows us to think of objects as 
being able to tie disparate moments in time together in a very real and visceral way.  
 
Q’EQCHI’ CONCEPTIONS OF TIME 
 
Q’eqchi’ understandings of time and existence force us, as researchers, to expand the horizons 
of our theoretical understanding of museums and their role and to broaden what we think of as 
the border space created in the museum. The story that museum objects tell extends beyond the 
simple (or complex) life of the object itself on the neat and tidy timeline that we have created, 
and into the production and trade of objects at every point of their existence. Henare 
demonstrates, with careful archival research, that the production of knowledge through the 
collection of objects was for her an intense didactic process involving individuals both on the 
side of the coloniser (European) and colonised (in her case, Maori). Individuals on both sides 
of the initial encounter between Maori and Europeans would have been selecting which objects 
they brought to trade to match their expectations of what the other was seeking out (Henare 
2009: 34). If, in fact, the objects in question retain a part of the creator of the object, there is 
potential for that didactic process to continue into the present.  
The decisions made by these early collectors has shaped not only the way these 
collectors and curators understood their initial encounters, but also how future generations 
(including our own) experience them. This means that our modern understanding of historic 
cultural artefacts continues to be formed by interactions between individuals and groups around 
the time of colonisation, further compounding the post-colonial space in which objects are 
framed and understood (Ibid: 37). From a Q’eqchi’ perspective, my research shows that these 
objects become reflections of the tastes of people who have lived before and vessels that hold 
some small part of that person. As a result, when contemporary Q’eqchi’ weavers interact with 
159 
 
historic Q’eqchi’ objects, they are directly or indirectly interacting with historic Q’eqchi’ 
weavers. Both the object and the weavers are engaged in the interaction, thus extending the 
didactic process into the present. 
Time from a Maya perspective is, as Barbara Tedlock argues in her seminal work “Time 
and the Highland Maya” (1992), a construct that serves as a both physical and spiritual space 
for Maya peoples. The interaction between spiritual leaders and time as a metaphysical 
presence serves as the grounding space for human beings in time (Tedlock 1992). While time 
exists independently from human experience, it is the human interaction with time that 
“completes” it (McLeod 2017: 21). Time, while continuous, is cyclical in nature. The cyclical 
nature of time is dependent on human ritual interaction with and tracking of time. That ritual 
interaction and tracking in turn, governs our awareness of our place within time across 
generations; “There is a relationship between humanity and nature at the core of Maya thought, 
in which humanity completes the raw material provided by nature, following the patterns given 
by this same nature” (McLeod 2017: 21). The tracking of time becomes a powerful act of 
cooperation between the human and natural realms. This tracking of cycles situates us within 
time; however, that specific way of being within time—what MacLeod refers to as the “now 
moment” (Ibid: 21)—holds limited value in a cyclical understanding of time without being 
connected to or rooted in the experiences of other individuals in other time spaces.  
“Today” is experienced by the modern Maya as a space in time held in relation to the 
spaces in time held by their ancestors and their descendants. Colonial rule, as an epoch, cannot 
be viewed as having come to an end until the experience of Q’eqchi’ people shifts dramatically 
in comparison to the experience of Q’eqchi’ people under direct colonial rule. As time both 
exists outside of human experience, but is completed by human interaction with time, it then 
makes sense that our understanding and experience of time is governed by our ritual 
interactions with and tracking of time. It follows then that other beings (eb’tzultaq’a for 
example) might experience time differently than we do, as their experience of time will be 
governed by their interaction with time.  
Our experience of time roots us in specific segments of time, binding us to a temporally 
bound experience, held in place not only by our own experience, but by the experiences of our 
ancestors and descendants. Within that space, the echoes of colonisation continue to have a 
present and contemporary impact on the lives of the Q’eqchi’ as a whole across both geography 
and time through the network of kinship ties Q’eqchi’ people share with their ancestors and 
descendants. Not only has the act of colonisation not yet ended in our particular section of time, 
but also its impact continues to move from the past and into the present via nonhuman beings 
160 
 
or objects who are less “stuck” in time than we are and through the connections between 
individuals across time, per Henare’s temporal collapse. 
When weavers encounter museum textiles that border space across time comes alive. 
Moving into an active, rather than observational, space, museums can establish a dialectic of 
critique with source communities. This gives source communities better access to objects and 
museums a broader contextualisation of those objects. Weavers are also able to consciously 
create heritage through the interaction with historic textiles. As they perceive themselves to be 
learning directly from long-dead weavers this production of heritage is not seen as the 
‘imagination’ of new heritage; but rather the re-learning and re-creation of what was once lost.  
It is important to remember that since the advent of anthropological museums, both 
within and outside the university system, Mayan textiles have featured heavily both as museum 
artefacts and as prize possessions of textiles collectors. The juxtaposition of these textiles as 
valued artefacts with the violent history of repression against the Mayan people in Guatemala 
over the last century has provided us with a stark contrast in which objects and knowledge were 
(and may continue to be) more highly valued to institutional guardians of history than to the 
individuals and cultures creating these objects. Mayan textiles have historically had more 
access to the western halls of power than the Maya themselves have had. 
This is due to both ongoing experiences of violence and oppression directly rooted into 
colonial and post-colonial systems of power and racism, and economic exploitation and the 
presence of boundaries (intentional or not) between people with limited access to western 
education and academic spaces, such as museums. If those boundaries are breached, or bridged 
through the use of technology, we are then able to widen our understandings of knowledge 
production through objects. In this case study, that is particularly relevant through the use of 
distinct understandings of temporality.  
As the flip side of this identity, with a new understanding of objects as producers of 
knowledge comes the opportunity for curators and museums today to use those objects, their 
ownership of those objects, and the resources they have on hand to engage in a decolonisation 
of the museum. All of the above become the drivers in how museums and their staff can 
reinvent their role informed by and informing anthropology and ethnolography. Border spaces 
represent not only a break in the hard walls between two defined spaces, but also an encounter 
between spaces. These spaces create room not only in our ability to understand and connect 
with cultures across the world, but also in our ability to think about power structures, 
knowledge production and justice.  
 
161 
 
MUSEUMS & REPATRIATION MOVING FORWARD 
  
The objects in any collection have a long-term impact on future academic research work 
(Bouquet 2012; 72). The selection of specific objects for preservation is the selection (in part) 
of the way that that culture will be viewed by future researchers who do not have access to the 
full range of objects the acquiring collector did at the time of collection, and have to rely on 
photographs, a few museum objects, and contemporary objects. 
Brian Spooner challenges concepts of “authenticity” in museum objects by reminding 
us that object authentication is often carried out by western experts, and not through 
cooperative or community-driven work. By placing the burden of proof for authenticity on an 
outsider, this then denies source communities the authority to define the value and meaning of 
their own cultural artefacts. Objects can lose or gain authenticity while being completely 
“divorced” from their original contexts. It also reinforces the narrative of European or 
American academic superiority and the role of their institutions in the creation of knowledge 
through the notion of authenticity. This can be so overwhelming that in some cases 
communities lose all ownership of the knowledge about these objects. Citing the example of 
Turkish carpets, Spooner says: 
  
The Western interest in Turkmen carpets has had the effect of 
alienating the Turkman from their own forms of artistic 
expression. Before they worked with designs, embodying 
symbols that were for them extensions of their own social 
identity. They did not understand these symbols or need to know 
their origins. Now these symbols have become the property of 
others. To repossess them they must now find out from others 
what they mean. They are concerned only with how they will 
look to others. In the words of another branch of the literature, 
on nationalism, the Turkmen have chosen epochalism and lost 
essentialism, they have taken universalism and abandoned 
nationalism. (Spooner 1986: 230) 
  
         In my case (and also as explored by researchers working in other parts of the world; see 
Fienup-Riordan 2003; Herle 2008 and Bouquet 2012), the presence of picb’il textiles in 
museum collections had the opposite effect, adding authority to the community claims of 
authenticity in the region and allowing weavers to reaffirm their belief that textile production 
is an integral and historic part of Q’eqchi’ identity. It could be argued that given the chance to 
have a dialogue with museum professionals, weavers would have the agency to co-opt the 
162 
 
purpose of the museum collections and refocus them towards the continuation and valuation of 
Q’eqchi’ culture and history. As, Appadurai states, the value of objects and things can be 
negotiated reciprocally (1986: 13). Building again on the work of Fienup-Riordan (2003) it is 
clear from past examples of visual/photographic repatriation that both communities and 
museum professionals can benefit hugely from these kinds of encounters.  
In the specific case of Q’eqchi’ objects, both Kistler and Kockelman present 
ethnographies of the Q’eqchi’ which link objects directly to their makers, users, and owners in 
a metaphysical sense. It can then be posited that for Q’eqchi’ objects or textiles value is 
negotiated and renegotiated each time the object interacts with different individuals. Its 
physical and metaphysical value was negotiated at the point of purchase and can be 
renegotiated at its re-encounter with the community. Links between the social environments in 
which the objects exist and the people negotiating the value of the objects in very specific 
intersections of time, place, and social structure change and impact the meaning and value of 
the object (Appadurai 1986: 12-16). 
For museums that renegotiation may be of significant value, since encountering new 
regimes of value and worldviews enhances the role that museums seek to play as spaces for 
cross-cultural encounters and education. As documented extensively in the Task Force Report 
on Museums and First Peoples, published in Ottawa in 1994, many museums have already 
benefited enormously from similar encounters with source communities.   
In the case of nineteenth century ethnographic museums, originally, in the collection 
process, communities may have engaged in what Appadurai refers to as “silent trade,” where 
communities or individuals (not including producers) share only the “most minimal 
understanding about the objects in question, and agree only about the terms of trade,” 
(Appadurai: 15). However, in expanding the role of the museum and engaging actively with 
power structures and cross-cultural dialogue, that understanding of objects in question need not 
remain “silent.” Museums, in a postcolonial context, have the obligation to re-understand their 
role in the world and the objects in their possession. 
As storehouses for objects, museums serve as the repositories for the last physical 
elements of the conquest and pre-conquest world, which includes archaeological objects from 
the ancient Maya past, the four surviving Maya books or codices, and a plethora of Maya 
textiles, pottery, and household goods that span the years around and after the conquest. 
Through object ownership museums serve as not only producers of knowledge through objects, 
but also as gatekeepers to the objects whose history and authenticity underpins that knowledge. 
As indigenous activists and academics challenge the narrative of colonisation and regimes of 
163 
 
ownerships, museums have and will (in many ways) continue to bear the brunt of these 
challenges, but also as as sites of great potential. Museums can, as demonstrated by my field 
research, serve as spaces of encounter for the production of new knowledge or the rediscovery 
of lost knowledge by community experts and craftspeople. 
DIGITAL REPATRIATION IN THE ALTA VERAPAZ 
  
I initially envisioned the role of my photo booklets to be one of historical documentation of the 
changing nature of picb’il weaving over the course of the last century. It turned into much more 
than I had anticipated or imagined as my informants co-opted my research tools as aids for 
their own heritage revival. The ability of Q’eqchi’ weavers to re-centre my own western centric 
work within the Q’eqchi’ world and cosmovision demonstrates the quiet, consistent, resilience 
of the Q’eqchi’ people and culture. As Clifford documented in the basement of the Portland 
Art Museum in 1989, members of the source community used the objects as launching pads 
into an extensive exploration of and engagement with their own history and past (Clifford 
1997).  
         In adapting to their requests (as informants) and following the research where it led me, 
I was able to encounter new possibilities for the museum textiles which with I had worked prior 
to my field research. In every single interview I conducted the weavers requested photo copies 
of at least portions of my photo booklets. With the permission of the museums involved I was 
able to leave photographs of historic textiles with over one hundred weavers; at least nine of 
whom used those photos between 2016 and 2017 to reproduce once-lost-to-them motifs on 
contemporary textiles. 
         For my interviewees (as in many other past cases), the digital repatriation was a success. 
Weavers regained patterns they had lost through the direct use of objects intimately connected 
with, or part of, long-dead ancestors. Weaving cooperatives and community organisations 
gained knowledge of the presence of Q’eqchi’ objects in museums in the west. A foreign 
researcher was useful to the communities in question; whether or not she originally intended 
to be. For me, that foreign researcher, the digital repatriation was successful in that it opened 
new windows into heritage revival and the value of material objects in the creation of intangible 
heritages. It demonstrated the potential for museums to work in partnership with local 
communities to further the knowledge they hold.  
 
164 
 
CONCLUSIONS & DISCUSSION 
 
Within my own research, weavers and other community members exposed to historic textiles 
via the digital repatriation I carried out (see chapter two on methodology) were acutely aware 
of the loss of textile patterns as well as the ongoing threat of loss posed by environmental 
degradation, lack of economic access and opportunity, loss of language, and loss of cultural 
practice. When asked what she thought about museums, one interviewee stated: 
   
Pues, if the museums do have our huipils then they need to tell 
people who we are: that we are weavers. Not just that it is traje 
from Guatemala, but that it is Cobanara, that women still weave 
and we still sell textiles. It is important that they show not only 
traje but that they tell people where it is from, that li tenamit (the 
community) of Q’eqchi’s are still here in Cobán and we still 
weave. We are not gone. 
     
This sense that it was important not to divorce textiles from their origins and that weavers 
wanted an active story told of their communities was pervasive and linked to an expression of 
identity rooted in survival. Geographic and economic instability during the period of the 
Guatemalan genocide disrupted patterns of life essential to what women referred to as “being 
Q’eqchi’.” One elderly weaver explained to me (repeatedly) that the most recent Guatemalan 
genocide was, for the Q’eqchi’, simply an extension of ongoing violence that they could date 
back to “before the time of our grandmothers’ grandmothers.” For her, Q’eqchi’ life, history, 
and heritage have always been threatened, and the Q’eqchi’ have always fought not only for 
their present, but also for their past to not be forgotten.  
Engaging intentionally with the processes of knowledge creation, and taking ownership 
of processes that are already occurring, places museums in the position of being able to address 
past wrongs while defining knowledge and social values such as justice, equity and truth. 
Museums become active participants in processes of heritage re-discovery and the 
politicisation or de-politicisation of objects. This opens the door to imagining or understanding 
the museum itself as a revolutionary site for the decolonisation of the academic sphere, and a 
space in which ideas of ownership, heritage, and value can be questioned and re-grounded. As 
we re-evaluate the role that the museum-as-storehouse can play in knowledge creation (and 
excavation), we are challenged to rethink the content and ownership of knowledge, and the 
ways in which communities, academics, and individuals can utilise the resources available to 
rebuild, relearn, or reshape lost heritages (Kopytoff 1986: 108). 
165 
 
 Digital, virtual and photographic repatriation techniques present opportunities for 
researchers and museums to reach out to source communities in increasingly cost-effective 
ways. My research demonstrates that when the value of the repatriation is found in the 
intangible heritage contained within objects, and not within the tangible object itself, these 
methods may prove as impactful and valuable as actual repatriations can be for communities 
who seek to reclaim ownership of physical objects.  
With the increasing accessibility of online catalogues museums can easily give source 
communities the tools to learn about and digitally access their heritage objects in museum 
collections. One San Juan Chamelco based weaver and a member of Hijas de Aj Po’op B’atz 
asked me midway through my fieldwork to show her the museum catalogues where I had found 
some of the textile images I was using. We spent an afternoon walking through the use of the 
Hearst Museum Online Database with Google Translate as a tool for working with/in English 
for her as a non-English speaker. With a little coaching on search terms and the structure of the 
database she was soon able to navigate it proficiently and had located several textiles I had 
chosen not to use in my photo booklets due to poor image quality. The database itself proved 
a useful and helpful tool for her as a weaver; and as the aldeas in Guatemala gain better 
infrastructure it is very likely that many more weavers or their family members would be able 
to access museum databases independently in the future. 
 What is missing in the use of databases and the style of photographic repatriation I 
engaged in, is a true two-way exchange between source communities and museums. One 
informant reiterated the importance of this exchange of knowledge becoming a true exchange 
by stating in June of 2016:  
 
I think it is very good, bringing us these photographs. I also hope 
that you tell other people, where they came from, that weavers 
still exist. We still live here. I imagine that there are a few who 
know but tell the others. We Q’eqchi’ still live. 
 
 For her, and for other weavers the importance of museums and academic institutions 
revisiting the idea of repatriation, not only as a physical project focused on objects and direct 
ownership thereof, but also as an intellectual and educational project in which individuals 
from communities are able to access their heritage through the collections’ resources while 
simultaneously being recognised by those institutions is vital. In this way, communities may 
be able to utilise and repurpose the products of colonisation through the use of the museum as 
166 
 
border space in order to rebuild or enrich lost, damaged, or destroyed heritage while being 
allowed to use the institution of museum to tell their own stories.  
 
 
167 
 
Conclusion 
  
Each jar broke open as it entered the waves. And in each jar, there were different kinds of 
animals. There were fish and frogs and ducks and deer and birds. All of the animals Ixb’alam 
wove into her huipils. Her blood gave them life. With each jar that the sun threw into the sea, 
he grew sadder and sadder. Finally, he threw the last jar into the sea, and as it broke open he 
heard a woman shout “ayayayayaya” and it made him smile--that woman was Ixb’alam, his 
moon. 
 
The story of Ixb’alam as told to me by the women weaving picb’il is emblematic not only of 
their relationship to weaving, but demonstrative of the connection between textile production 
and the personhood of the women who weave as being Q’eqchi’ people. The story illustrates 
the ontological ability of the self to transcend physical boundaries; further emphasises views, 
such as those held by QanaRux, that there is a universality to Q’eqchi’ life which both defines 
what it is to be li q’eqchi’; and serves to distinguish the Q'eqchi’ people from the 
Conquistadores and their descendants and also from other Maya peoples in the region. 
Ixb’alam’s ability to infuse her own life spirit into the physical world in which we exist, and to 
do so by bringing life to the textile patterns she wove, is a reminder that weaving is, for many 
women, much more than an act of economic sustenance. The production of textiles on a back 
strap loom is an act of creation and of connection. It is a statement of particular feminine power 
to give life, not only as mothers, but as creative beings in whose hands fibres become textiles 
imbued with a particular life of their own. Life is given to them by the weaver who first created 
them and sustained by the woman who wears them. This sense of life can continue to survive 
years after the women who wove and wore the garments have died, thus disconnecting them, 
in a sense, from the era in which those women lived and instead connecting them to future 
women; in some cases, women yet to be born. 
There is great value in finding the ways in which anthropological ethnography holds 
relevance for academic researchers and to those for whom its findings have more practical 
implications. The present research does, I believe, have practical implications for the 
communities of informants who have shared their time, lives and knowledges with me over the 
time I have lived and worked in the Alta Verapaz. To that end I demonstrably show that, for 
QanaRux and the weavers of picb’il in the Alta Verapaz, textile production continues to occupy 
two important roles in daily life. Culturally, the production and use of the picb’il huipil is a 
way to assert an identity and to claim indigeneity and space in a non-indigenous nation. 
Economically, it provides women who live in poverty with the ability to earn an income that is 
168 
 
unconnected to their family or spouse’s incomes. Moreover, I contribute to the field of museum 
literature in demonstrating the value of facilitating cross-cultural encounters with and around 
museum objects as pathways to decolonisation and greater understanding.  
 
PICB’IL AS HERITAGE AND Q’EQCHI’ RESISTANCE 
  
For many of the weavers I interviewed, cultural survival has been a process not of protest but 
simply of patience. Juanita Chen, one of the oldest weavers I was able to interview, spoke of 
difficult times encountered by her community as waves. She described the violence inflicted 
by German settlers on indigenous peoples in the region in the same breath that she did the 
Guatemalan genocide of the 1980s and even hurricane Mitch in 1998. For her, the only constant 
in this history was the survival of the Q’eqchi’ people. Suffering and struggle were inevitable, 
as was survival. Over the course of my fieldwork I was able to observe a number of interactions 
between community members and international NGOS. In almost all cases, Q’eqchi’ 
communities and individuals were amicable and cooperative during the course of projects--but 
only until the volunteers and staff returned home, at which point any aspect of the project not 
independently seen as valuable to the community within their own context was discarded. 
Cultural continuity for these communities takes the form of patience. The presence of outside 
groups is permitted, but amiability and malleability are strategies to simply wait-out the ideas 
of non-Q’eqchi’ people, who are known to inevitably leave the region. The is a substantial 
distinction made locally between internal and external actors and organisations in Q’eqchi’ 
region. 
Within the Q’eqchi’ world the word for ‘outsider,’ ‘kaxlan’ quite literally means 
‘strange’ as both a noun and a verb. References to non-Q’eqchi’ peoples, places and cultures 
include the moniker kaxlan as a necessary way to understand and engage with a non-Q’eqchi’ 
person. While this can be interpreted as simply the result of an isolated community having little 
opportunity to engage with the wider world, I argue that it is far more than that. Embedded in 
Q’eqchi’ language and culture is a distinct understanding that the Q’eqchi’ experience of the 
world is unique. This extends to the insistence of Q’eqchi’ people and Q’eqchi’ communities 
of centring the world in the Alta Verapaz, the traditional urban centre of the Q’eqchi’ world. 
Li tenamit, el pueblo in Spanish, or ‘your community’ in English, is grammatically the 
foundational structure within the Q’eqchi’ culture for situating self in relation to other. Through 
language Q’eqchi’ people belong to an ever-expanding circle of communities, from the aldea 
169 
 
to the municipal centre, to Cobán – the heart of the Q’eqchi’ world – and the term ‘li tenamit’ 
for Q’eqchi’ people, does not extend beyond that. 
         By defining the hub at the centre of economic, cultural and community life through 
language as Cobán, the Q’eqchi’ have actively resisted the centring of their political world in 
Guatemala City. The political and economic repression that the Q’eqchi’ have faced from a 
national government which has not historically recognised the political or cultural autonomy 
of the various Maya groups has not yet forced the Q’eqchi’ to resituate their political lives or 
identities. This assumption that the centre of the politically relevant world is Cobán functions 
to protect local heritage and identity. It gives individual Q’eqchi’ people the agency to assert 
their identity as legitimate despite a history of violence acted upon them as an indigenous 
‘other’ in Guatemalan society. 
Judith Butler offers a framework for understanding the valuation of pain and suffering 
in human lives through her conception of ‘grieveability’ (2009: 14-15). For Butler, who and 
what is ‘grieveable’ can be defined through proximity; social, personal, political, to the self in 
question. Working from there, we can expand both our ability to humanise the ‘other’ and 
widen our own framework for understanding value by re-centring our dialogue outside of the 
monolith of the west. Understanding that we, in the west, can occupy the space of ‘other’ in 
non-western ontological models can allow us to use that framework as a lens to more 
effectively engage with non-western ontologies and non-western systems of value. By 
inverting the ‘othering’ of mainstream Guatemalan society, the Q’eqchi’ have created space in 
which their identity and heritage can thrive--and in which their lives and experiences have great 
value despite the deep racism they face in their national context. They redefine who (& what) 
is ‘grieveable’ (Butler 2009) by simply refusing to concede the centring of the world outside 
of the Q’eqchi’ geographic cosmovision. This re-centring of the dialogue can then be expanded 
to the ways in which my informants thought about and engaged with museum objects; viewing 
them first and foremost as helpful/useful to the Q’eqchi’ and only secondarily as useful to the 
museum--all without feeling the need to challenge the ownership of the objects themselves. 
My work, as presented in this thesis, pivots around that inversion of the anticipated ‘self’ 
encountering the textile and as such provides new access to otherwise forgotten voices in the 
context of picb’il textiles held in museum collections.  
 
170 
 
HERITAGE AND MUSEUMS: BRIDGING THE PAST AND PRESENT 
 
Western museums have long known that to remain relevant to increasingly diverse 
communities they needed to continue to broaden the acceptance of knowledges and ontologies 
originating outside of the western world, and to foster an ability and willingness to decentre 
their own power in those interactions. From the basement of the Portland Art Museum in 1989 
(Clifford 1997) and onwards many in the museum world have revamped the way that museums 
not only manage objects; but how those objects are considered and thought about. Museums, 
such as the MAA at Cambridge and the Hearst museum at the University of California Berkeley 
continue to lead the way, with innovative and community-centric approaches to handling 
contentious objects, or relationships with source communities across the world. In 2008 the 
Hearst museum exhibition of Guatemalan textiles (see Chapter six) relied heavily on the 
consultation with local weaving communities. Furthermore (as seen in chapters two and six) 
many museums (including the MAA in Cambridge) have fostered direct and ongoing 
relationships with artists, community leaders and local educators in object collection, display 
and storage.  
This research adds to the collective demonstration that the use of visual reproduction is 
a way in which museums such as the MAA and Hearst, seeking to reimagine their own role in 
decentralising knowledge and power, can move forward cooperatively with researchers and 
communities. It is further evidence that work can be done to decolonise museum spaces both 
in large institutions with substantial budgets, as well as in smaller institutions with limited 
funds, as visual and virtual repatriations can be significantly less costly than physical 
encounters with objects. Most importantly, this type of research can do so in an object focused 
way, with the presence of the museum object facilitating the encounter and the production of 
new knowledge or the rediscovery of old knowledge--thus honouring the purpose of museums 
as the homes of objects and the spaces of research themselves. 
My research contributes to the canon by demonstrating that contemporary photographs 
can be used to facilitate historic object encounters. Using Fienup-Riordan’s work in 2003 
where individuals were given direct access to museum objects themselves, and the Luo Visual 
History project’s repatriation of historic images to their communities (Bouquet 2012; 175) I 
demonstrated that a blending of these strategies can provide great value to both the museum 
and the community. The continued diversification of approaches to community connections 
only widens the already rich realm of community engagement for museums. My informants 
171 
 
directly benefited from interaction with historic museum objects through contemporary 
photographs which allowed them to bridge both geographic and temporal distances in 
interacting with historic Q’eqchi’ knowledge.   
The visual repatriation of textiles to weaving communities in the Alta Verapaz through 
photographs demonstrates a local interest in engagement with and reclamation of museum 
objects. The reframing of my original intended research into a repatriation by my informants 
emphasised the need for further examples of the way in which cooperative anthropology can 
create research outcomes which are beneficial to both researcher and the community in which 
research is conducted. It also demonstrates the potential for positive and mutually beneficial 
relationships between museums and source communities leading to the continued production 
of rare cultural heritage. 
Weavers, and other community members, are acutely aware of the loss of textile 
patterns as a part of lost heritage, and the ongoing threat of loss posed by environmental 
degradation, lack of economic access and opportunity, loss of language, and loss of cultural 
practice. Geographic and economic instability during the period of the Guatemalan genocide 
disrupted patterns of life essential to what women referred to as “being Q’eqchi’”. The loss of 
intangible heritage such as knowledge was tied directly to the difficulty of being Q’eqchi’ in 
the face of ongoing conquests; simply one aspect of an institutional assault on the existence of 
the Q’eqchi’. The opportunity to relearn, or reclaim, lost textile patterns was a chance to reverse 
some of the damage done over the centuries to the collective body of knowledge owned by the 
Q’eqchi and an opportunity re-learn physical aspects of that disappearing skill and re-weave 
forgotten patterns. This was uniquely valuable to the Q’eqchi’ through a direct connection 
between themselves and non-contemporary Q’eqchi’ individuals. 
With a Q’eqchi’ ontological perspective to guide us in rethinking concepts of conquest, 
ownership, objects and repatriation through the ideas of lost tangible and intangible heritage, 
this study of the picb’il textile as heritage object and museum object presents a compelling 
argument for museums and academic institutions regarding the need to continue to expand the 
ways in which objects are encountered or repatriated digitally. It also further supports the trend 
within and around museums to develop stronger policies and even take legislative action 
around museum object management and ownership.        
  
 
 
172 
 
WEAVING WITH OUR GRANDMOTHERS’: Q’EQCHI’ RESILIENCE, DIGITAL REPATRIATION 
AND THE RECLAMATION OF HERITAGE 
  
In 2003 UNESCO held a conference in Paris leading to the adoption of the Convention for the 
Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage (CFICH) as an international treaty going into 
effect on April 30, 2006. This was spurred in large part by demands from indigenous groups, 
beginning in Mexico City in 1982 during the World Conference on Cultural Policies, for 
recognition of non-structural heritage. The convention defined intangible heritage as: 
  
...the practices, representations, expressions, knowledge, and 
skills – as well as the instruments, objects, artefacts and cultural 
spaces associated therewith – that communities, groups and, in 
some cases, individuals recognize as part of their cultural 
heritage. This intangible cultural heritage, transmitted from 
generation to generation, is constantly recreated by communities 
and groups in response to their environment, their interaction 
with nature and their history, and provides them with a sense of 
identity and continuity, thus promoting respect for cultural 
diversity and human creativity... (CFICH 2003) 
  
The Convention followed in the footsteps of other regional, national and bi-national bodies 
(especially in New Zealand, Australia and Canada) to potentially place the definition of cultural 
heritage, and intangible heritage, into the hands of individual indigenous communities, but 
represented the first time that the UN or similar body had followed suit.  
Henrietta Marrie, an indigenous rights activist, argued in 2008 that this convention 
could not represent actual change in the understanding and protection of heritage if it did not 
increase the value placed on indigenous knowledge in the establishment of definitions for 
heritage and valuation of that heritage (Marrie 2008: 174-175). Within Guatemala, where only 
one cultural tradition (a dance in the west of Guatemala) has been declared a UNESCO world 
heritage practice, the idea of protected cultural heritage is more a dream than a reality. When 
laws are passed to define local traje as regional dress they are driven more by the desire to 
protect Guatemalan craft markets from foreign exploitation than they are to protect indigenous 
identities. Margarita’s experience with the Ixchel Museum in Guatemala City is a far cry from 
the experiences of indigenous peoples working with museums and lawmakers in Canada to 
craft documents and guidelines such as the Canadian government’s ‘Caring for Sacred and 
Culturally Sensitive Objects’ or the Reciprocal Research Network at the University of British 
173 
 
Columbia. This does not, however, mean that Guatemalan weavers themselves are not finding 
ways to assert their agency in owning the reproduction of their heritage. 
 Q’eqchi’ people have spent five hundred years navigating a broader society seemingly 
intent on their eventual submission but have yet to lose their sense of identity or their sense of 
value. While access to a westernised market will change Q’eqchi’ weavers, there is no reason 
to doubt that change will occur with their own intentional and powerful agency. The ongoing 
role of German-Guatemalan women in the propagation of picb’il weaving and its valuation as 
an “indigenous garment” speak to the interconnected nature of cultures in the context of 
Guatemala, and to the ability of Q’eqchi’ people to co-opt the aspects of colonisation and 
domination that continue Q’eqchi’ culture and life, while ignoring, to the extent possible, those 
that do not. If we think about picb’il huipils and other picb’il textiles as these tangible forms 
of heritage, via the object itself, and as intangible forms of heritage via knowledge recreation 
and generation, it allows for these objects to serve as physical conduits through which an 
intangible heritage and identity is shared and expressed, both internal and external actors. 
To that end, I recognise that my presence as a researcher will impact the tradition of 
picb’il weaving in the Alta Verapaz of Guatemala. The interactions, interviews and 
conversations I have had with my informants will change the way they think about picb’il as a 
bridge to the external world, as theirs have informed and changed my thinking. The 
photographically repatriated textiles have already had an impact, as historic patterns and 
designs are being re-woven by contemporary women in contemporary ways. Moreover, the 
women who re-weave those patterns view that act as a direct taking of ownership of their own 
lost heritage; and a reclaiming of an awareness to their own heritage and history as Q’eqchi’ 
weavers in the Alta Verapaz. My research also resulted in conversations with weavers about 
their own goals and ideas around the roles that museums and museum textiles could play in 
their lives. As one weaver in Samac stated in an interview shortly before I left Guatemala in 
2016: 
  
If the museum respects and appreciates our work--the picb’il--
then with God’s guidance they will want to work with us. They 
will want to know more about the huipil and the picb’il and if 
they respect us we will agree to teach them. The patterns they 
have are ours, and if they respect the patterns and the huipils and 
our work, then good--I do not know how to say it, but they need 
to understand los q’eqchi’s. 
  
Another weaver, in Santa María said, during a farewell gathering as I was leaving the 
174 
 
community with a loom produced for the MAA: 
  
We did not know that our traje was in so many places so far 
away. Thank God that we do, and that we have seen what our 
grandmothers’ wore. Maybe the museums can tell people about 
us: that there are still women who weave in Santa María --the 
place of the cotton trees. Los q’eqchi’s have not forgotten. And 
maybe they can tell the people who see our loom in their museum 
that we are looking for a market. That we want to weave to 
improve our lives. Our threads are not forgotten; our daughters 
and granddaughters are weavers. 
  
Ultimately, picb’il weaving is a mechanism through which women who are easily 
understood to be powerless can express their agencies and identities. It is a complex form of 
art interwoven with a history thousands of years old, owned and possessed by indigenous 
women. For these women, and other weavers I interviewed, the presence of picb’il textiles in 
museums was unknown, but once introduced to the idea it became a significant one in terms of 
the reclamation of Q’eqchi’ heritage and the promotion of a narrative of Q’eqchi’ communities 
centred around their cultural vibrancy and extensive history as a people. The immediacy with 
which weavers were reproducing museum textiles I had shown them is evidence to this end. 
And perhaps it is also evidence of the life that weavers see and understand in each textile. Each 
textile embodies the voice, and agency, of a weaver whose life existed (or exists) in a space 
within time we cannot reach, asking her granddaughters and great granddaughters not to forget 
who they are, and in doing so uses us--researchers and museums--as her bridge.  
 
INTERNATIONAL MARKETS: MOULDING THE FUTURE OR MIRRORING THE PAST? 
  
In July of 2018 Ixb’alam Ke was nominated for the award of best artist of the year at the 
International Folk Art Market in Santa Fe. A local volunteer and long-time supporter of Amalia 
Gue posted on Facebook: 
  
Cooperative Ixbalamke, represented by Amalia Gue - Gauze 
weaving on a back strap loom-nominated best artist of the year 
at the 2018 folk art market. Come see their amazing work this 
weekend- BOOTH F 120. Come support a female Guatemalan 
cooperative create a sustainable way of life. 
#SantafeInternationalFolkArtMarket2018 #Guatemalatextiles 
#Womencooperative #asustainableCentralAmerica 
175 
 
  
Within a few hours the post had received nearly two dozen ‘likes’ and a string of supportive 
comments from local IFAM volunteers and international textile aficionados. Over the next few 
days Amalia would go on to have a successful run at the fair, selling (according to a source 
within IFAM who requested anonymity) most of what she had brought along from Guatemala, 
but ultimately not winning the award for which her booth had been nominated. Amalia returned 
to Samac and Guatemala at the end of July, starting another cycle of what has become an annual 
pattern of production and sale for many of the women weaving in Samac and the surrounding 
area. 
This cycle of access to markets through intermediaries with German-Guatemalan 
heritage began with the relationship between QanaRux and Doña Leslie Hempstead in the late 
1970s and early 1980s. Through Doña Leslie, QanaRux gained access to a market which 
allowed her to not only support her own family through the violence of the 1980s, but to teach 
other women to weave through the creation of an external economic demand for picb’il. This 
marketisation of picb’il textiles allowed QanaRux to mobilise the same identity (Q’eqchi’) that 
was being used to oppress her community as an identity that provided an income. Through that 
initial boom (and then bust) of textile production QanaRux laid the groundwork for what has 
evolved into a connection between Maya weavers in an isolated community and the machine 
of global capital through the International Folk Arts Market held in Santa Fe, New Mexico, 
each year. More directly, the International Folk Arts Market is a contemporary example of a 
museum (or museum connected institution) directly driving change in a source community.  
Amalia and her relationship with Olga Reich (post 2008) represent another iteration of 
this pattern in access to external market, the need for or use of an internal intermediary (Amalia) 
and an external intermediary (Olga). Amalia serves as a gatekeeper between international 
markets and weavers; Olga serves as the gatekeeper between weavers and the international 
market. Their relationship as intermediaries; and the resulting presence of Ixb’alam Ke at IFAM 
each year have created a significant new market for picb’il textiles which in turn has created a 
boom in the number of women learning to weave. 
These relationships are examples of the complex and difficult interactions between 
textile producers and buyers in the region. The breakdown of community ties and the conflict 
around access to markets demonstrates the fragile nature of market relationships in resource-
poor regions. With limited access to resources outside of their own community, or in any 
language other than their own, weavers are reliant either on these outside buyers or community 
representatives to expand the market for their textiles. It is easy for community members to 
176 
 
feel as though they are being taken advantage of, and it is a situation where it is not difficult 
for outside buyers to buy and sell at rates which advantage themselves. The juxtaposition of 
these relationships within the Guatemalan context is striking and emblematic of the difficulties 
that exist for scholars and individuals grappling with questions of justice and history in many 
conflict-ridden regions, including the Alta Verapaz, where craftspeople interact with 
international markets. 
The relationship between booms in picb’il production and the presence of a significant 
market for picb’il textiles cannot be discounted. The tricky relationship between heritage 
practices and economic activity is one that critics of UNESCO’s increasing championing of 
intangible heritages discuss--these practices have led, in some cases, to a commodification of 
those heritages. This commodification runs the risk of separating textile production from the 
production of culture and from the role of weaving in identity construction. This is further 
complicated by the question of power in defining what is and is not significant cultural heritage. 
In Guatemala there is increasing conflict between the use of Maya heritage by the Guatemalan 
government to foment a national identity and promote tourism and the treatment of indigenous 
Maya by the government. This may have long-lasting implications regarding local funding for 
heritage projects such as weaving or for the ongoing dialogue between indigenous peoples and 
ladino peoples regarding Guatemala’s national identity and the racial politics surrounding that 
identity.  
  
PICB’IL MOVING FORWARD: THE FUTURE OF WEAVING PRODUCTION IN THE ALTA VERAPAZ 
  
Despite the recent boom/bust cycle of weaving, the precarity of picb’il weaving as a cultural 
practice in the communities where it continues to thrive should not be understated. Having 
nearly disappeared in the 1980s it is not unforeseeable that the tradition might dwindle again. 
While more and more women are currently learning to weave, the economic and geographic 
barriers to textile production are high. Outside vendors and buyers impact the ways that picb’il 
textiles and styles change and there is now a concentration of younger weavers who know only 
how to reproduce those patterns popular on items meant for international sale. As the picb’il 
textile is unique, even among back strap weaving practices, when it disappears from a 
community it is all but impossible to re-establish. 
More fragile still are the ontological roots of what picb’il textile weaving means to some 
weavers and to some families. The presence of an international market may ensure the 
continuation of weaving; what it does not ensure is the continuation of women’s connectivity 
177 
 
to weaving as a spiritual and cultural practice whose value, while in part economic, is more 
fundamentally rooted in their identities as Q’eqchi’ women and their place in a tapestry of 
Q’eqchi’ history. 
         The complex production process of picb’il textiles, along with the fragility of the 
finished garments, limits the scope of any international market. The production of textiles that 
can take up to several months to complete cannot continue to be economically viable for a 
large-scale market as the standard of living (and minimum wage) in Guatemala increase. As 
the Q’eqchi’ communities of the Alta Verapaz gain more economic stability, any large-scale 
picb’il production will either be forced from an admittedly already boutique market into one 
that is truly high-end, or fade as weavers no longer have an economic incentive to produce for 
outside-markets. 
         Alternatively, the increase in the textile market may itself prove less impactful on the 
ongoing production of picb’il huipils than the rise of the pan-Maya movement. As more and 
more indigenous peoples in Central America begin to imagine an indigenous future and connect 
themselves to an imagined united past, the more the local market for textiles (such as picb’il 
specifically, which are seen as coming from the truly ancient past) may grow. It may also be 
that the primary motivations for textile production change as women have more and more 
access to economic capital. 
         For current weavers of picb’il the value that others are beginning to ascribe to the 
textiles they produce seems only natural. In a conversation in late August 2017, Candelaria, 
one of Amalia’s sisters, explained to me why picb’il sales were so successful at IFAM each year. 
Picb’il textiles serve as a link between tangible and intangible heritage through their unique 
construction. 
  
Of course people want to buy it. The picbi’l is the finest fabric 
of any huipil in Guatemala. And only the women of our pueblo 
know how to weave it. It has to be expensive; because it takes so 
long to learn to weave; and we spend so many hours sitting under 
our roofs weaving until our eyes ache and our backs are sore. But 
it is the most beautiful and the most delicate. No other huipils 
are woven like ours from picb’il. (field notes 2017) 
 
The setup and operation of any back strap loom is an intense, time-consuming, and 
knowledge-heavy practice. During the weaving process of picb’il textiles, a series of extra steps 
are needed to protect the delicate threads.  
178 
 
If we think about picb’il huipils and other picb’il textiles as these tangible forms of 
heritage, via the object itself, and as intangible forms of heritage via knowledge recreation and 
generation, it allows for these objects to serve as physical conduits through which an intangible 
heritage and identity is shared and expressed. The dialectic between the fixed components of 
intangible heritage (e.g., the process of learning to weave picb’il specifically with all the unique 
intricacies required) and the unfixed components (e.g., individual creativity and style change) 
allows for innovation and a shifting in the meaning of the heritage practice and heritage objects. 
Moreover, as the process of textile weaving is, as we have seen, an intensely physical one, there 
is an intangible heritage expressed in the very act of being a weaver through the embodiment 
of the practice. 
This embodied experience of the physicality of weaving contributes to the weavers’ 
ability to use the practice of textile production as one that can bridge temporal gaps. Regardless 
of when a weaver lived or worked, her experience of producing picb’il is likely to be similar 
to those of women living generations before or after her, as she shares a lived-experience with 
other women whom she will never encounter; precisely because of the unique nature of the 
picb’il textile it is an experience of being Q’eqchi,’.  An informant near the end of my fieldwork 
in 2016 explained how: 
  
Before then there were many, many weavers. All the women 
wove. My grandmother’s grandmother, the sisters of my 
grandfather, the sisters of my father. They were all weavers, they 
all had looms and cotton thread. They are all dead now, but we 
still weave. My daughters weave and my granddaughter weaves. 
It’s not like before the war, but this is where the cotton plants 
once grew, and we are still tejedoras (weavers). 
  
The sense of picb’il weaving as a local heritage paired with the belief held by the majority of 
my informants (weavers and not) that picb’il was an especially ancient form of textile weaving. 
The understanding that the Maya used sheer textiles before the arrival of the Spanish further 
cements the value of picb’il specifically as a heritage object. This connection with the imagined 
past gives picb’il textiles and picb’il weavers increased status within the pan-Maya movement 
as representatives of what is seen as ‘pure’ Maya. 
Indeed, the ability of the Q’eqchi’ to assert their cultural and historical identity as a 
communal ‘self’, from which the world can be understood and viewed, provides Q’eqchi’ 
weavers fertile intellectual space for a re-imagination of the conqueror/conquered relationship 
and ample room to engage in resistance to challenge the seats of political and economic power 
179 
 
in Guatemala through the physical act of weaving. Furthermore, this means that as these 
weavers are encountering museum textiles through photographs they have their own 
ontological intellectual frameworks for understanding those textiles in museums. These 
frameworks do not rely on situating the museum (or the collectors, etc.) as the ‘self’ in the 
narrative of the textile object’s history despite the comparative power of the museum or 
collector. Rather the museum, and the non-Q’eqchi’ people involved in the textiles history, 
occupy a well-defined verbalised space of the ‘other.’ For these weavers the subaltern voice 
that Spivak refers to in her work (1988) (is only subaltern from a non-Q’eqchi’ perspective, 
and while the value of the textile to the museum may be acknowledged, it is comparatively 
unimportant when juxtaposed with the value of the textile patterns and lost knowledge held 
within the textile itself to Q’eqchi’ weavers and communities.  
Through expanded access, communities may be able to utilise and repurpose the 
products of an act of colonisation in order to rebuild or enrich lost, damaged or destroyed 
heritages. For objects representing tangible and intangible heritages jointly, such as picb’il 
textiles, this is contingent upon the survival of craftspeople capable of being able to understand 
the construction of those objects and to recreate them. In some cases, that may mean that the 
window of opportunity for the rediscovery of intangible heritages is limited. In the case of 
picb’il textiles it is evident that while the textiles are culturally valuable to many Q’eqchi’ 
people, their specific value as agents of knowledge exists only for a small subset of Q’eqchi’ 
women--those who know how to weave, and it is this subset of people for whom museum 
textiles hold the most value as tools for reclaiming visible and yet intangible cultural heritage 
that they once believed had disappeared.  
 
PICB’IL WEAVING AND THE VISIBILITY OF THE Q’EQCHI’ 
  
It is women through the production and use of traditional traje who have created a visible, 
public, Q’eqchi’ identity that has remained stalwart in Q’eqchi’ imaginations. Picb’il textiles, 
as both a part of that visual image of a Q’eqchi’ woman, and as the product of specialised local 
knowledge rooted in Q’eqchi’ traditions, serve as intangible and tangible forms of cultural 
heritage helping represent and cement the resilience of the Q’eqchi’ people. 
In the years since the advent of the pan-Maya movement, the idiomatic insistence of 
defining the ‘self’ as the indigenous and the ‘other’ as the foreigner in a visible way has allowed 
Q’eqchi’ people and communities to create an overt sense of self in the world through language 
180 
 
and ontology. That insistence on maintaining not simply an internal, but an external and voiced 
way of being centred in the universe allows Q’eqchi’ people, and picb’il weavers to centre 
themselves, and not the other (as perceived by them) in their understanding of Maya textiles in 
museums. 
The co-optation of Guatemala’s indigenous beauty pageant, Rabin Ajaw, is emblematic 
of this ability to centre the world they experience around the Q’eqchi’ perspective. In claiming 
Rabin Ajaw as an indigenous space (although it was not founded as such) and particularly as 
an event held annually in Cobán, Q’eqchi’ communities have not only re-asserted their control 
over indigeneity on display in Guatemala but asserted Cobán as the heartland of the Maya 
world in Guatemala and the pan-Maya world in Central America. Key to this is the international 
public stage that Rabin Ajaw provides for the display of Maya textiles as national treasures and 
works of art in Guatemala. This act of co-optation, revolution and reclaiming ownership is 
centred around women’s performance during the competition, and women’s skilled work as 
integral to the production of Maya identities. In the Alta Verapaz this means, very specifically, 
that the production and use of picb’il as a textile is integral to a continuing cultural identity. 
 This framework gives us the intellectual space to understand the survival of the 
Q’eqchi’ culture not simply as resistance, but as resilience. This distinction is important as is 
the resilience of Q’eqchi’ culture which allows it to not only persist but thrive despite 
oppression. This resilience is integrally tied to the production of Q’eqchi’ identities by the 
women who maintain the eb’junkab’al and serve as the anchors for communities throughout 
their lives. It is women who have maintained community and local life despite upheaval as 
economic impoverishment has historically pushed men into migrant work, and throughout 
episodes of violence men were targeted during massacres and disappearances,  
 
IXB’ALAM: THE MOON AND OUR GRANDMOTHER 
  
The story of Ixb’alam, the moon and the first weaver is one that was told to me over and over. 
In each field site that I visited I could be assured that as long as I spent enough time drinking 
li kape (coffee) or helping la’at xorok (making tortillas) someone would at some point ask if I 
had heard the story of the moon, Ixb’alam. Regardless of my answer, I would be told the story 
again. One hot afternoon in Campat outside of San Juan Chamelco, Rosa Mes Che, the daughter 
of weavers and the grandmother of weavers, ended it like this: 
  
181 
 
That is why women shout very loudly. Because the moon shouted 
so loudly. And that is why we bleed--because the moon bled. And 
we weave because the Moon, our grandmother, taught Qana 
Itza’m to weave. But that is another story, and it is one my 
mother did not know. It is one I have lost. 
  
 For her and for other Q’eqchi’ weavers of the Alta Verapaz, the story of Ixb’alam is 
more than the story of a young woman weaver’s adventure and misadventure. It is a link to an 
identity formed in the distant past, before the intrusion of the Spanish into their world, and it is 
an image and idea of womanhood (including weaving) that transcends temporal boundaries. 
The animals women rely on for daily sustenance were brought into the world by Ixb’alam’s 
death and return to life. Through this and her weaving she forever connected her own life spirit 
to the livelihoods of her descendants--the Maya women of Central America. More importantly, 
the story is an integral part of the production of their indigenous identities against a backdrop 
of oppression, and for Rosa Mes Che, it contains a reminder that much of the Q’eqchi’ body of 
knowledge has been lost. 
In de-emphasising the romance between the Sun and the Moon and focusing on the 
gifts that women received because of Ixb’alam’s death and rebirth, Rosa Mes Che reminded 
me over and over that the story of Ixb’alam, and indeed the story of weaving in the Alta 
Verapaz, is a story of women and their importance to their communities and histories. As 
Ixb’alam is a Q’eqchi’ woman, Rosa, and other weavers who told me this story, are direct 
ancestors in the sense that weaving, mythologically, came from her into the Q’eqchi’ world. 
But Rosa’s story does not end, or even begin there. For Rosa, the story hinges on what she 
believes the Q’eqchi’ have lost in terms of cultural heritage: the story of QanaItza’m. And it is 
for women like Rosa, and her daughters, that the recovery of lost heritage traditions is of most 
value. For Rosa, replacing her link to the body of knowledge held by the Q’eqchi’ people is 
one step in a long process of repatriation and decolonisation. For me, and indeed for many 
researchers working between museums and source communities, it is a reminder that individual 
researchers and community members can work with institutions to continue to build new and 
more constructive ways to engage with our histories and our futures. It is also a reminder that 
the role which museums have to play in the decolonisation process is not a small one, and that 
researchers and curators can continue to lead the way in building new and better regimes of 
knowledge production and (re)circulation. 
  
182 
 
POSTLUDE 
  
It is the end of August 2017. I am sitting on a wooden bench balanced on a concrete floor. The 
thousands of raindrops pelting onto the tin roof above us sound like as many tiny rocks being 
thrown from the mountains behind San Juan Chamelco. We can hear the water rushing down 
the gutter outside the house. Margarita, a weaver and local environmental activist, is looking 
across the table at me intently as she talks; 
  
We are los hijas de Aj Po’op B’atz because we are indígena, we are 
Q’eqchi’. If you go to Chamil you can see the cave where he mediated and the 
tzuultaq’a took him into the earth. Aj Po’op B’atz is our grandfather and he 
protected li q’eqchi.’ We do not live as Ladinas; we live as Q’eqchi’s. We are 
his granddaughters and Chamelco is a Q’eqchi’ pueblo. We cannot forget our 
grandmothers and we cannot forget that they are the ones who taught us to 
weave.
183 
 
Bibliography 
 
Adams, A.E., 1998. Gringas, Ghouls and Guatemala: The 1994 Attacks on North American Women 
Accused Of Body Organ Trafficking. Journal of Latin American Anthropology 4, 112–133. 
doi:10.1525/jlca.1998.4.1.112 
Adams, A.E., 1999. Word, work and worship: engendering evangelical culture between Highland 
Guatemala and the United States. University of Virginia. 
Adams, A.E., 2001. The Transformation of the Tzuultaq’a: Jorge Ubico, Protestants and other Verapaz 
Maya at the Crossroads of Community, State and Transnational Interests. Journal of Latin American 
Anthropology 6, 198–233. doi:10.1525/jlca.2001.6.2.198 
Alberti, S., 2011. Medical Museums Past, Present and Future. Bulletin 93, 56–58. 
doi:10.1308/147363511X552548 
Amnesty International Annual Report 1971-1972, 1972. Amnesty International, London. 
Appadurai, A., 1988. The social life of things: Commodities in cultural perspective. Cambridge University 
Press. 
Ardren, T., Foxx, J.J., Few, M., Lowe Art Museum, 2006. Flowers for the Earth Lord: Guatemalan textiles 
from the permanent collection. Lowe Art Museum, University of Miami, Coral Gables, Fla. 
Arias, A., 2006. The Maya movement, postcolonialism and cultural agency. Journal of Latin American 
Cultural Studies 15, 251–262. 
Arias, A., 2007. Taking their word: Literature and the signs of Central America. University of Minnesota 
Press. 
Arnold, D.Y., 1997. Making men in her own image: Gender, text, and textile in Qaqachaka, in: Howard-
Malverde, R. (Ed.), Creating Context in Andean Cultures. New York: Oxford University Press. 
Arnold, D.Y., 2018. Making textiles into persons: Gestural sequences and relationality in communities of 
weaving practice of the South-Central Andes. Journal of Material Culture 23, 239–260. 
doi:10.1177/1359183517750007 
Arnold, D.Y., Dransart, P.Z., 2014. Textiles, Technical Practice, and Power in the Andes. Archetype 
publications. 
Arvanitis, K., Tythacott, L., 2014. Museums and Restitution: New Practices, New Approaches. Ashgate 
Publishing, Ltd. 
Assembly of First Nations, Canadian Museums Association Joint Report, 1994. Turning the page: Forging 
new partnerships between museums and first peoples. Task Force on Museums and First Peoples= 
Groupe de Travail sur les musées etc. 
Barker, A.W., 2015. Museums and Restitution: New Practices, New Approaches (Tythacott and Arvanitis, 
eds.). Museum Anthropology Review 9, 117. doi:10.14434/mar.v9i1-2.19070 
Beauvoir, S. de, Parshley, H.M., 1949. The second sex. Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, Middlesex, U.K. 
Becker, S.K., 2016. Skeletal evidence of craft production from the Ch’iji Jawira site in Tiwanaku, Bolivia. 
Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports 9, 405–415. 
184 
 
Benjamin, T., 2000. A time of reconquest: History, the Maya revival, and the Zapatista rebellion in 
Chiapas. The American Historical Review 105, 417–450. 
Bennett, T., Dibley, B., Harrison, R., 2014. Introduction: Anthropology, Collecting and Colonial 
Governmentalities. History and Anthropology 25, 137–149. doi:10.1080/02757206.2014.882838 
Boivin, N., 2008. Material cultures, material minds: The impact of things on human thought, society, and 
evolution. Cambridge University Press Cambridge. 
Bouquet, M., 2012. Museums: a visual anthropology, English edition. ed. London New York Berg. 
Bruhns, K.O., Stothert, K.E., 1999. Women in ancient America. University of Oklahoma Press. 
Brumfiel, E.M., 2006. Cloth, gender, continuity, and change: Fabricating unity in anthropology. American 
Anthropologist 108, 862–877. 
Bunck, J.M., Fowler, M.R., 2012. Bribes, Bullets, and Intimidation: Drug Trafficking and the Law in 
Central America. Penn State Press. 
Butler, J., 1988. Performative acts and gender constitution: An essay in phenomenology and feminist 
theory. Theatre journal 40, 519–531. 
Butler, J., 1994. Against proper objects. Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 6, 1–27. 
Butler, J., 1999. Gender Trouble: Tenth Anniversary Edition, 2nd Edition. Routledge. 
Butler, J., 2010. Performative agency. Journal of cultural economy 3, 147–161. 
Butler, J., 2011. Bodies that matter: On the discursive limits of sex. Routledge. 
Butler, J., 2016. Frames of war: When is life grievable? Verso Books. 
Calvert, P., 1985. Guatemala: a nation in turmoil. Westview Press. 
Carbonell, B.M., 2012. Museum studies: An anthology of contexts. John Wiley & Sons. 
Carlsen, R.S., 1987. Analysis of the Early Classic Period Textile Remains from Tomb 23, Rio Azul, 
Guatemala. Rio Azul Reports Numer 3, The 1985 Season R. E. W. 
Carsten, J., 2000. Cultures of relatedness: New approaches to the study of kinship. Cambridge University 
Press. 
Catholic Institute for International Relations, Latin America Bureau, Proyecto Interdiocesano Recuperación 
de la Memoria Histórica (REMHI), 1999. The official report of the Human Rights Office, Archdiocese 
of Guatamala, in: Guatemala, Never Again! Maryknoll, N.Y. : Orbis Books ; London : CIIR : Latin 
America Bureau. 
Chandler, D., Cordón, T., 2015. Traditional Weavers of Guatemala: Their Stories, Their Lives. Thrums 
Books. 
Chaplin, S., 2008. Nature dissected, or dissection naturalized? The case of John Hunter’s museum. Museum 
and Society 6, 135–151. 
Clifford, J., 1997. Museums as Contact Zones, in: Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth 
Century. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., pp. 188–219. 
CNN, 2010. Guatemalan government declares siege to fend off drug gang - CNN.com. 
http://edition.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/americas/12/20/guatemala.siege/index.html (accessed 1.30.19). 
Coe, M.D., 1980. The Maya, Rev. ed. ed. London: Thames and Hudson. 
185 
 
 
Coe, M.D., 2012. Breaking the Maya Code, Third edition. ed. Thames & Hudson, London. 
Cohodas, M., 2002. Multiplicity and discourse in Maya gender relations, in: Gustafson, L.S., Trevelyan, 
A.M. (Eds.), Maya Gender Identity and Relations, Gustafson, L.S. and Trevelyan, A.M. (Eds.). 
Bergin & Garvey, Westport (Conn.), pp. 11–54. 
Colloredo-Mansfeld, R.J., 2009. Fighting like a community: Andean civil society in an era of Indian 
uprisings. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 
Connell, R.W., 2005. Masculinities. Polity. 
Cullather, N., 2006. Secret History, Second Edition: The CIA’s Classified Account of Its Operations in 
Guatemala, 1952-1954, 2 edition. ed. Stanford University Press, Stanford, Calif. 
Cunliffe, S.A., 1989. Economic aid as an instrument for the promotion of international human rights, in: 
Hill, D.M. (Ed.), Human Rights and Foreign Policy. Springer, pp. 115–129. 
De Landa, D. 1978 [1566]. Yucatan before and after the Conquest. Dover Publications, New York. 
Devereux, L., 1987. Gender difference and the relations of inequality in Zinacantan. Dealing with 
inequality: Analyzing gender relations in Melanesia and beyond 89–111. 
Dickson, M.A., Littrell, M.A., 1998. Organizational culture for small textile and apparel businesses in 
Guatemala. Clothing and Textiles Research Journal 16, 68–78. 
Domenici, D., Sánchez Valenzuela, G.M., 2017. Classic textiles from Cueva del Lazo (Chiapas, Mexico). 
Archaeological context and conservation issues, in: Bjerregaard, L., Peters, A. (Eds.), Archaeological 
Context and Conservation Issues, Pre-Columbian Textile Conference VII / Jornadas de Textiles Pre-
Colombinos VII. Zea Books, Lincoln, Nebraska, pp. 68–103. 
Dudley, S.H., 2012. Museum objects: Experiencing the properties of things. Routledge. 
Dunkerley, J., 1988. Power in the isthmus: A political history of modern Central America. Verso Books. 
Edmonson, M.S., 1993. The Mayan Faith, in: Gossen, G.H., Portilla, M.L. (Eds.), South and Meso-
American Native Spirituality: From the Cult of the Feathered Serpent to the Theology of Liberation. 
Ehlers, T.B., 1990. Silent looms: women and production in a Guatemalan town. Boulder: Westview Press. 
Ehlers, T.B., 2000. Silent looms: women and production in a Guatemalan town, Rev. ed. ed. Austin, Tex.: 
University of Texas Press. 
Ehlers, T.B., 2010. Silent looms: Women and production in a Guatemalan town. University of Texas Press. 
Eisen, G., 1903. Notes during a journey in Guatemala, March to December, 1902. Bulletin of the American 
Geographical Society 35, 231–252. 
Emery, I., 1980 [1966]. The primary structures of fabrics: an illustrated classification. Washington, D.C.: 
Textile Museum. 
Falcón, G.N., 1970. Erwin Paul Dieseldorff, German Entrepreneur in the Alta Verapaz of Guatemala, 1889-
1937. Tulane University of Louisiana. 
Farnan, R., 2017. Evaluating Replica Costume Interactives as Learning & Engagement Resources. 
Presented at the Museum Ethnographers Group Conference, University of Glasgow. 
Federici, S., 2012. Revolution at point zero: Housework, reproduction, and feminist struggle. PM Press. 
186 
 
Fienup-Riordan, A., 1996. The living tradition of Yup’ik masks: agayuliyararput (our way of making 
prayer). University of Washington Press, Seattle. 
Fienup-Riordan, A., 2005. Yup’ik elders at the Ethnologisches Museum Berlin: fieldwork turned on its 
head. Seattle: University of Washington Press in association with Calista Elders Council, Bethel, 
Alaska. 
Forster, C., 1994. The Time of “Freedom”: San Marcos Coffee Workers and the Radicalization of the 
Guatemalan National Revolution, 1944–1954. Radical History Review 1994, 35–78. 
Foucault, M., 1975. Prison Talk: An Interview, in: Gordon, C. (Ed.), Power/Knowledge: Selected 
Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977. Pantheon, New York, pp. 10–15. 
Friedman, M.P., 2003. Nazis and good neighbors : the United States campaign against the Germans of 
Latin America inWorld War II. Cambridge, UK; New York : Cambridge University Press. 
Fromm, A.B., 2016. Ethnographic museums and Intangible Cultural Heritage return to our roots. Journal of 
Marine and Island Cultures 5, 89–94. doi:10.1016/j.imic.2016.10.001 
Gadamer, H.G., 2016. Truth and method 2nd ed., in: Geertz, C. (Ed.), The Interpretation of Cultures: 
Selected Essays. New York BasicBooks. 
García, B., Elena, M., 2002. A Divine Couple’s Gender Roles in the Setting of the Earth at Palenque. 
Ancient Maya Gender Identity and Relations 227–280. 
Garrard-Burnett, V., 2010. Terror in the Land of the Holy Spirit: Guatemala Under General Efrain Rios 
Montt, 1982-1983, Religion and Global Politics. Oxford University Press, Oxford, New York. 
Geertz, C., 1977. The Interpretation of Cultures, New Ed edition. ed. Basic Books, New York. 
Geismar, H., 2013. Treasured possessions: indigenous interventions into cultural and intellectual property. 
Duke University Press, Durham and London. 
Gell, A., 1998. Art and agency an anthropological theory. Oxford Clarendon Press. 
Goertzen, C., 2010. Made in Mexico tradition, tourism, and political ferment in Oaxaca. Jackson University 
Press of Mississippi. 
Grandin, G., 2000. The Blood of Guatemala: A History of Race and Nation. Duke University Press Books, 
Durham, NC. 
Gross, R., 1982. The independent scholar’s handbook. Reading, Mass. : Addison-Wesley Pub. 
Gupta, A., Ferguson, J., 1992. Beyond “culture”: Space, identity, and the politics of difference. Cultural 
anthropology 7, 6–23. 
Gustafson, L.S., Trevelyan, A.M., 2002. Ancient Maya gender identity and relations. Bergin & Garvey, 
Westport, Conn. 
Hale, C.R., 1997. Cultural Politics of Identity in Latin America. Annual Review of Anthropology 26, 567–
590. doi:10.1146/annurev.anthro.26.1.567 
Hallam, E., Ingold, T., 2014. Making and growing: anthropological studies of organisms and artefacts. 
Surrey, England; Burlington, Vermont: Ashgate. 
Halperin, C.T., 2008. Classic Maya Textile Production: Insights from Motul De San José, Peten, 
Guatemala. Ancient Mesoamerica 19, 111–125. doi:10.1017/S0956536108000230 
187 
 
Haviland, W., 1992. From double Bird to Ah Cacao: dynastic troubles and the cycle of  katuns at Tikal, 
Guatemala, in: Danien, E.C., Sharer, R.J. (Eds.), New Theories on the Ancient Maya / Elin C. Danien, 
Robert J. Sharer, Editors. - Version Details. University Museum, University of Pennyselvania, 
Philadelphia. 
Hempstead, L., 2009. Unpublished interview from Endangered Threads Documentaries. 
Henare, A.J.M., 2005. Museums, Anthropology and Imperial Exchange. Cambridge University Press, 
Cambridge. 
Henderson, E., Nolin, C., Peccerelli, F., 2014. Dignifying a Bare Life and Making Place through 
Exhumation: Cobán CREOMPAZ Former Military Garrison, Guatemala. Journal of Latin American 
Geography 13, 97–116. doi:10.1353/lag.2014.0027 
Hendon, J.A., 2006. Textile production as craft in Mesoamerica: Time, labor and knowledge. Journal of 
Social Archaeology 6, 354–378. doi:10.1177/1469605306067841 
Herle, A., 2008. Relational Objects: Connecting People and Things Through Pasifika Styles. International 
Journal of Cultural Property 15, 159–179. doi:10.1017/S0940739108080090 
Herle, A., 2018. Museums and Source Communities, in: Callan, editor., Hilar (Ed.), The International 
Encyclopaedia of Anthropology. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley Blackwell. 
Hodder, I., 2012. Entangled: An Archaeology of the Relationships between Humans and Things. John 
Wiley & Sons, Malden. 
hooks, b., 2015. Ain’t I a woman: Black women and feminism. New York, NY: Routledge. 
Hooper-Greenhill, E., 1992. Museums and the shaping of knowledge. London ; New York : Routledge. 
Ingold, T., 2000. On weaving a basket, in: The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, 
Dwelling and Skill. London; New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group. 
International Work Group of Indigenous Affairs, 1978. The Massacre at Panzos, Guatemala 1978. 
International Work Group of Indigenous Affairs, Copenhagen. 
Janes, R.R., 2009. Museums in a troubled world: Renewal, irrelevance or collapse? Routledge. 
Jonas, S., 2000. Democratization Through Peace: The Difficult Case of Guatemala. Journal of 
Interamerican Studies and World Affairs 42, 9–38. doi:10.2307/166340 
Joyce, R.A., 1992. Images of gender and labor organization in Classic Maya society, in: Claassen, C. (Ed.), 
Exploring Gender through Archaeology: Selected Papers from the 1991 Boone Conference. 
Monographs in World Archaeology. pp. 63–70. 
Joyce, R.A., 1999. Symbolic dimensions of costume in Classic Maya monuments: The construction of 
gender through dress. Mayan Clothing and Weaving Through the Ages, Museo Ixchel del Traje 
Indıgena, Guatemala City 29–38. 
Karp, I., Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Kreamer, C.M., Lavine, S., 1992. Museums 
and communities: the politics of public culture. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press. 
Kistler, S.A., 2010a. Discovering Aj Pop B’atz’: Collaborative Ethnography and the Exploration of 
Q’eqchi’Personhood. The Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology 15, 411–433. 
Kistler, S.A., 2010b. The House in the Market: How Q’eqchi’ Market Women Convert Money and 
Commodities into Persons and Personhood. Faculty Publications. doi:10.2979/GSO.2010.4.1.48 
188 
 
Kistler, S.A., 2013a. All in the Junkab’al: The House in Q’eqchi’ Society. The Latin Americanist 57, 85–
110. doi:10.1111/j.1557-203X.2013.01194.x 
Kistler, S.A., 2013b. The Original Ancestor: Aj Pop B’atz’ as a Model of Q’eqchi’ Kinship. Journal of 
Family History 38, 284–300. doi:10.1177/0363199013484713 
Kistler, S.A., 2014. Maya Market Women: Power and Tradition in San Juan Chamelco, Guatemala. 
University of Illinois Press, Urbana, IL. 
Kistler, S.A., 2015. Meaningful Relationships: Collaborative Anthropology and Mentors from the Field. 
Collaborative Anthropologies 7, 1–24. doi:10.1353/cla.2015.0005 
Kit, W., 1990. The Fall of Guatemalan Dictator, Manuel Estrada Cabrera: U.s. Pressure or National 
Opposition? Canadian Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Studies / Revue canadienne des 
études latino-américaines et caraïbes 15, 105–127. 
Kockelman, P., 2003. The interclausal relations hierarchy in Q’eqchi maya. International Journal of 
American Linguistics 69, 25–48. doi:10.1086/376484 
Kockelman, P., 2011. A Mayan ontology of poultry: Selfhood, affect, animals, and ethnography. Language 
in Society 40, 427–454. 
Kockelman, P., 2016. The chicken and the quetzal: incommensurate ontologies and portable values in 
Guatemala’s cloud forest. Durham Duke University Press. 
Kopytoff, I., 1986. The cultural biography of things: commoditization as process, in: Appadurai, A. (Ed.), 
The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective. Cambridge University Press, 
Cambridge; New York, pp. 70–73. 
Krmpotich, C.A., Peers, L.L., 2013. This is our life: Haida material heritage and changing museum 
practice. Vancouver, BC; Toronto : UBC Press. 
Küchler, S. 2005. Clothing as material culture. Edited by D. Miller. Oxford: Oxford : Berg,  
Levenson-Estrada, D., 2014. Trade Unionists Against Terror: Guatemala City, 1954-1985. The University 
of North Carolina Press. 
Little, W. E. 2010. ‘Made in Mexico: Zapotec Weavers and the Global Ethnic Art Market’,  
Journal of Latin American Studies. Cambridge University Press, 42(4), pp. 889–890. 
 
Little, W.E., McAnany, P.A., 2011. Textile Economies: Power and Value from the Local to the 
Transnational. Lanham: AltaMira Press. 
Lothrop, M., 1992. Textiles, in: Coggins, C. (Ed.), Artifacts from the Cenote of Sacrifice, Chichen Itza, 
Yucatan: Textiles, Basketry, Stone, Bone, Shell, Ceramics, Wood, Copal, Rubber, Other Organic 
Materials, and Mammalian Remains. Cambridge, Mass.: Peabody Museum of Archaeology & 
Ethnology, Harvard University: Distributed by Harvard University Press. 
Lovell, W.G., 1988. Surviving Conquest: The Maya of Guatemala in Historical Perspective. Latin 
American Research Review 23, 25–57. 
Lowenthal, D., 1985. The past is a foreign country. Cambridge [Cambridgeshire]; New York : Cambridge 
University Press. 
Lowenthal, D., 1998. The heritage crusade and the spoils of history, 1st pbk. ed. ed. Cambridge, U.K.; New 
York: Cambridge University Press. 
189 
 
Lubar, S.D., Kingery, W.D., 1993. History from things: essays on material culture. Washington: 
Smithsonian Institution Press. 
Marrie, H., 2008. The UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage and 
the protection and maintenance of the intangible cultural heritage of indigenous peoples, in: Smith, L., 
Akagawa, N. (Eds.), Intangible Heritage. Routledge, New York, pp. 174–175. 
Martin, S., Grube, N., Wilkinson, T., 2000. Chronicle of the Maya kings and queens: Deciphering the 
dynasties of the ancient Maya. Thames & Hudson London. 
Mays, S., 2001. Effects of age and occupation on cortical bone in a group of 18th–19th century British 
men. American Journal of Physical Anthropology. 116, 34–44. 
McClintock, M., 1985. The American Connection. Zed Books London. 
McLeod, A., 2018. Philosophy of the ancient Maya: lords of time. Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books. 
Miller, D., 1987. Material culture and mass consumption. Oxford; New York, N.Y.: B. Blackwell. 
Museums Australia, 1996. Previous Possessions, New Obligations: A Commitment by Australian 
Museums. Curator: The Museum Journal 39, 45–62. doi:10.1111/j.2151-6952.1996.tb01074.x 
Nelson, D.M., 1994. Gendering the Ethnic-National Question: Rigoberta Menchú Jokes and the Out-Skirts 
of Fashioning Identity. Anthropology Today 10, 3–7. doi:10.2307/2783154 
Nelson, D.M., 1999. A finger in the wound: body politics in quincentennial Guatemala. Berkeley: 
University of California Press. 
Nomark, J., 2012. The Road of Life. Body-politic in the Maya Area, in: Back Danielsson, I.-M., Thedéen, 
S. (Eds.), To Tender Gender: The Pasts and Futures of Gender Research in Archaeology, Stockholm 
Studies in Archaeology. Stockholm University, Stockholm. 
Ochoa, L., Martel, P., Congreso Internacional de Mayistas 4th ed: 2000 : Antigua, G., 2002. Lengua y 
cultura mayas, 1. ed. ed. Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Instituto de Investigaciones 
Antropológicas, México. 
Odland, J. C. and History, F. M. of N. 2006. Fashioning Tradition: Maya Huipiles in the  
Field Museum Collections. Field Museum of Natural History (Fashioning Tradition:  
Maya Huipiles in the Field Museum Collections).  
O’Neale, L.M., 1945. Textiles of highland Guatemala. Washington: Carnegie Institution of Washington. 
Osborne, L. de J., 1935. Guatemala textiles. New Orleans: Dept. of Middle American Research, the Tulane 
University of Louisiana. 
Osborne, L. de J., 1965. Indian crafts of Guatemala and El Salvador, [1st ed.]. ed. Norman [Okla.]: 
Univerasity of Oklahoma Press. 
Peers, L.L., Brown, A.K., 2003. Museums and source communities: a Routledge reader. London: 
Routledge. 
Phillips, R.B., 2011. Museum pieces: toward the indigenization of Canadian museums. Montreal; Ithaca: 
McGill-Queen’s University Press. 
Pyburn, K.A., 2004. Ungendering the Maya, in: Ungendering Civilization. London Routledge. 
190 
 
Radcliffe, J., Fidler, C.V., 2010. Gustav Eisen (1847-1947) Biographical Sketch. California Academy of 
Sciences. 
Remesal, A. de, Sáenz de Santa María, C., 1964. Historia general de las Indias occidentales y particular de 
la gobernacion de Chiapa y Guatemala. Madrid: Ediciones Atlas. 
Rice, P.M., ProQuest (Firm), 2007. Maya calendar origins: monuments, mythistory, and the materialization 
of time, 1st ed. ed. Austin: University of Texas Press. 
Ríos, E. de los, 1948. Ombres contra hombres. Guatemala City: Tipografía Nacional. 
Robson, E., Treadwell, L., Gosden, C., Oxford), A.S.C., Oxford), S.C.C., Series, S.C.-A.S.S., Workshop 
(1st: 2004: Oxford, england), 2006. Who owns objects?: the ethics and politics of collecting cultural 
artefacts : proceedings of the first St. Cross-All Souls seminar series and workshop, Oxford, October-
December 2004. Oxford: Oxbow Books. 
Ronald, G., 1982. The Independent Scholar’s Handbook. Addison Wesley Publishing Company, Reading, 
Mass. 
Rowe, A.P., Center for Inter-American Relations, 1981. A century of change in Guatemalan textiles. New 
York: Center for Inter-American Relations; Seattle : Distributed by University of Washington Press. 
Rowley, S., 2013. The Reciprocal Research Network: The Development Process. 1 7, 22–43. 
Schele, L., Freidel, D.A., 1992. A forest of kings: the untold story of the ancient Maya. New York: 
Quill/W. Morrow. 
Schevill, M., 2006. Use of Older Collections in Museum Research, in: Ardren, T., Few, M., Foxx, J.J., 
Museum, L.A. (Eds.), Flowers for the Earth Lord: Guatemalan Textiles from the Permanent 
Collection. Coral Gables, Fla.: Lowe Art Museum, University of Miami. 
Schevill, M., Lutz, C., Anthropology, P.A.H.M. of, 1993. Maya textiles of Guatemala: the Gustavus A. 
Eisen collection, 1902, the Hearst Museum of Anthropology, the University of California at Berkeley, 
1st ed. ed. Austin: University of Texas Press. 
Schlesinger, S., Kinzer, S., 1982. Bitter fruit: the untold story of the American coup in Guatemala. London: 
Sinclair Browne. 
Schouten, F.F.J., 1995. Heritage as historical reality, in: Herbert, D.T. (Ed.), Heritage, Tourism and 
Society. London, England; New York, NY, USA: Mansell. 
Sexton, J., 2011. The Monroe Doctrine: empire and nation in nineteenth-century America, First edition. ed. 
New York Hill and Wang. 
Shapiro, M., Lieb, K., 2010. Guatemala: A Journey Through the Land of the Maya. Purple Moon 
Publications. 
Sharer, R.J., Traxler, L.P. 2006. The ancient Maya, 6th ed. ed. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press. 
Sharp, E., 2012. Between Justice and Vigilantism: Organizing to Confront Crime in Post-War Guatemala. 
Grassroots Development: Journal of the Inter-American Foundation 33, 53–57. 
Singh, K., 2017. Museums, Heritage, Culture: Into the Conflict Zone. 
Smith, D.E., 1987. The everyday world as problematic: a feminist sociology. Boston, [Massachusetts]: 
Northeastern University Press. 
Smith, T.J., Adams, A.E., 2011. After the coup: an ethnographic reframing of Guatemala, 1954. Urbana: 
University of Illinois Press. 
191 
 
Smithson, J., 1897. Personal Will. (1826), in: Goode, G.B. (Ed.), The Smithsonian Institution, 1846-1896 
the History of Its First Half Century. Washington [De Vinne Press], pp. 19–21. 
Spencer-Ahrens, K., Wren, L.H., 2002. Religion, Cosmology, and Art, in: Foster, L.V. (Ed.), Handbook to 
Life in the Ancient Maya World. Facts on File, New York. 
Spivak, G.C., 1988. Can the subaltern speak?, in: Grossberg, L., Nelson, C. (Eds.), Marxism and the 
Interpretation of Culture. Macmillan Education, Basingstoke. 
Spooner, B., 1986. Weavers and Dealers: the Authenticity of an Oriental Carpet, in: Appadurai, A. (Ed.), 
The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective. Cambridge University Press, 
Cambridge, pp. 195–235. 
Stanton, J.E., 2011. Ethnographic museums and collections: from the past into the future, in: Griffin, D., 
Paroissien, L. (Eds.), Understanding Museums: Australian Museums and Museology. Canberra 
National Museum of Australia. 
Start, L.E., 1948. The McDougall collection of Indian textiles from Guatemala and Mexico, Occasional 
Papers on Technology. Oxford University Press, Oxford. 
Tedlock, B., 1982. Time and the highland Maya, 1st ed. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. 
United Nations Educational Scientific Cultural Organization, 2003. Convention for the safeguarding of the 
intangible cultural heritage. UNESCO Paris. 
Van Beurden, S., 2015. The art of (re) possession: heritage and the cultural politics of Congo’s 
decolonization. The Journal of African History 56, 143–164. 
Venkatesan, S., 2010. Learning to weave; weaving to learn ... what? Journal of the Royal Anthropological 
Institute 16, S158–S175. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9655.2010.01615. 
Vitale, K.M., 2018. Sheer Elegance: Surviving Strands of Ancient Maya Weaving. Endangered Threads 
Documentaries, Vallejo. 
Vitale, K.M., 2010. Personal interviews, Vallejo California. 
Wagner, H.R., Parish, H.R., 1967. The life and writings of Bartolome de las Casas, 1st ed. ed. 
Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. 
Walsh, A.M.S., 2012. Terror in the Land of the Holy Spirit: Guatemala Under General Efraín Ríos Montt, 
1982–1983. By Virginia Garrard-Burnett. Oxford University Press, 2010. Church History 81, 515–
517. doi:10.1017/S0009640712001199 
Weeks, J., 1997. Subregional organization of the Sixteenth-century Q’eqchi’Maya, Alta Verapaz, 
Guatemala. Revista española de antropología americana 59–94. 
WEINER, A. B. (1992). Inalienable possessions: the paradox of keeping-while-giving. Berkeley, 
University of California Press. 
Weld, K., 2014. Paper cadavers: the archives of dictatorship in Guatemala, American encounters/global 
interactions. Durham: Duke University Press. 
Werner, L., 2003. A Scent of Heaven and Earth: From Pre-Columbian Times to Today, Copal Has Been 
Burned for a Wide Variety of Religious and Secular Purposes. Americas 55, 20–27. 
Weston, G., 2011. (Un)imagining the State: Guatemalan Lynchings and the Erosion of the State’s 
Monopoly of Violence. Etnofoor 23, 79–98. 
192 
 
White, C.D., 2005. Gendered food behaviour among the Maya: Time, place, status and ritual. Journal of 
Social Archaeology 5, 356–382. doi:10.1177/1469605305057572 
Wichmann, S., Hull, K., 2009. Loanwords in Q’eqchi’, a Mayan language of Guatemala, in: Haspelmath, 
M., Tadmor, U. (Eds.), Loanwords in the World’s Languages. De Gruyter Mouton, Berlin/New York, 
pp. 873–896. 
Wilkinson, D., Australian National Centre for Latin American Studies, 2004. Silence on the mountain: 
stories of terror, betrayal, and forgetting in Guatemala, American encounters/global interactions. 
Durham: Duke University Press. 
Wilson, R., 1991. Machine Guns and Mountain Spirits: The cultural effects of state repression among the 
Q’eqchi’ of Guatemala. Critique of Anthropology 11, 33–61. doi:10.1177/0308275X9101100103 
Wilson, R., 1995. Maya resurgence in Guatemala: Qʼeqchiʼ experiences. Norman: University of Oklahoma 
Press. 
Wood, W.W., 2008. Made in Mexico: Zapotec weavers and the global ethnic art market. Bloomington: 
Indiana University Press. 
Woodward, S., 2005. Looking Good: Feeling Right: Aesthetics of the Self, in: Küchler, S., Miller, D., 
Küchler, S. (Eds.), Clothing as Material Culture. Berg, Oxford, UK; New York. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
193 
 
Appendix A 
 
Sample of interview schedule designed before arrival in Guatemala February of 2016. This 
sample includes the reasoning behind each question and the introduction of a textile booklet. 
This questionnaire is targeted at women between the ages of 25 and 45, married with 
children, who weave the textile ‘Picb’il’ in the Alta Verapaz of Guatemala. Many, if not 
all, women interviewed will be Q’eqchi’ speakers in aldeas of the Alta Verapaz. 
 
Overview questions (Pre booklet) (9 questions) 
 
1,  Do you weave or are you learning to weave? 
 
(Many women throughout the Alta Verapaz weave a variety of style of textiles. While I am 
hoping to primarily interview women who weave Picb’il, due to the nature of community life 
in Q’eqchi’ regions, and knowing that I will be introduced to new respondents by contacts I 
already have, not all the women I encounter or have the chance to interview may weave any 
type of textiles, let alone Picb’il) 
 
2. Would you consider yourself a weaver? 
 
(All the anthropological material I have read on the Q’eqchi’, along with my own experiences 
in the Alta Verapaz, suggest that there is a distinction between women who are learning to 
weave, women who know how to weave but only weave occasionally, and women who consider 
themselves weavers. While I am interested in interviewing both women who weave picb’il, and 
women who identify themselves as weavers, I am curious as to what differences (if any) there 
are between the views of women who consider themselves weavers and those who do not.)  
 
3. How long have you woven picb’il? 
 
(With this question I am hoping to both establish the length of time that women weave, learn 
what ages (more or less) women learn to weave at and start a comfortable dialogue. From my 
time working in the Alta Verapaz, asking how long someone has done something/been 
somewhere/known someone, seemed to serve an introductory role in social relationships.) 
 
4. Who taught you to weave? 
 
(With this question I am hoping to construct a genealogy of who has taught women to 
weave. The data I already have suggests that most living weavers today can trace how they 
learned to weave back to Rosario Coy. I would like to verify this if possible.) 
 
5. Do you know where/when they learned to weave? 
 
(This question will help me continue to construct the weaving genealogy. It will also allow me 
to see how accurate women’s’ understanding of who learned to weave where, as I will be able 
to compare this question with the answers of who directly taught women to weave that I get 
from each respondent. It will also help me understand if there are overlaps between teachers 
and learners. For example, do weavers have only one teacher, or many?) 
194 
 
 
6. Are you weaving anything right now? Can you show me? 
 
(With this question I am hoping to be able to start looking at or photographing (with 
permission) current textile projects. I am also hoping to figure out how many of the women 
who say they weave, or identify as weavers, have current weaving projects). 
 
a. Follow up question: what patterns are these? 
b. Do you know any other patterns? 
c. Which is your favourite? 
 
(From my past experience most women identify patterns with similar names or stories. I am 
hoping to get documentation of these names/stories and to better understand the use of patterns 
or any meaning behind various patterns. I am also hoping to compare contemporary patterns 
with historical patterns in museum textiles.) 
 
7. Do you wear picb’il? Can you show me? 
a. Follow up question: what patterns are these? 
b. Do you weave these patterns? 
c. Which is your favourite? 
 
(I suspect from my experience in the Alta Verapaz that most women who weave picb’il, or who 
know someone who weaves picb’il, will wear the textile to special occasions, religious festivals 
etc. Cobán’s annual contestant in Guatemala’s indigenous beauty pageant, always wears 
picb’il, and the textile is used extensively by local municipalities at events and to showcase 
Cobán Mayan heritage. I am also curious as to if there is a difference between the patterns 
women prefer to weave and those patterns they prefer to wear.) 
 
8. What do you do with the textiles you weave/what are they? 
 
(With this question I am hoping to understand what women are primarily weaving. Picb’il 
huipils for sale? picb’il huipils for their own use, or as gifts? Do they weave it for daughters, 
nieces, family members? Do they sell napkins or other small items for market? My guess is that 
most women weave huipils to wear and sell, along with a few smaller ‘practice’ items that are 
sold in tourist markets. Due to the energy and complexity of picb’il weaving, not many items 
end up in tourist markets) 
 
9. Why do you weave picb’il? 
 
(With this question I am hoping to follow up on conversations I had with some of the women in 
2009 and 2010. Many women see weaving as primarily an economic activity; something that 
they can do on the side which allows them to add to their family’s income. Other women 
(particularly the daughters and granddaughters of Rosario) seemed to connect picb’il weaving 
to an integral part of their identities as Q’eqchi’ women. I am curious to see what different 
women are thinking now about these textiles and whether or not there is a correlation between 
women who view themselves as ‘Weavers’ also see weaving as being a solid part of their 
identities) 
 
195 
 
Booklet Questions (These questions will be asked after I have introduced the booklet to 
the weavers---knowing the communities I am working with, I imagine that once I 
complete one or two initial interviews, women will be anticipating the booklets and 
already heard about them from other community members. That said, I think it is 
important to start the interviews with the textiles the women are currently weaving or 
wearing). (10). 
 
1. Have you ever travelled? 
a. If so, where? 
b. Have you been to Guatemala City? 
c. Have you ever been to a museum? 
 
(With this question I am hoping to understand the ways in which respondents think about active 
connections between museums and source communities.) 
 
2.  Have you heard of museums? Do you know anyone who has ever been to a museum? 
 
(As Amalia Coy, the last president of the weaving cooperative, has been to the Ixchel museum 
in Guatemala City as a representative of the weavers, I expect that most of the women will have 
heard about the Ixchel museum from her.) 
 
3. Can you describe a museum to me? 
 
(I am curious about when and how museum staff interact with source communities or their 
members. Is it limited to a particular group? Are the relationships positive experiences for the 
members of museum staff? Or for the weavers?) 
 
4. Did you know that there are picb’il textiles in museums? 
a. What museums/where? 
b. Do you know how long those textiles have been in museums? 
 
(I suspect that the women involved in Ixb’alam Ke are aware of picb’il textiles held in the 
Ixchel Museum in Guatemala City, whether or not they are aware of textiles held in other 
museums, or of the age of textiles in those museums.) 
 
At this juncture I hope to introduce the photo booklets to the women I am interviewing. I will 
have an introduction to each booklet written in the first page of the booklet, describing the 
textile, where it is held today, where it is collected and as much information as we know about 
when/where the textile was collected and who may have woven those textiles. 
 
5. Have you ever seen or woven any textiles/patterns like these? 
 
(With this question I am hoping to see if the weavers draw any connections between the textiles 
in the booklets, and the textiles that they weave. I am hoping that they may draw connections 
between the patterns/styles/manufacture of those textiles and the ones that they weave.) 
 
6. Do you know any women who weave textiles/patterns like these? 
a. Do you recognise these patterns? 
b. Which ones/what are they? 
 
196 
 
(Here I am hoping to build off the last question to get more information about each pattern, 
and what the weavers know about them.) 
 
7. Do you know who might have woven these textiles? 
a. If so, what makes you think of that person? 
 
(Based on my previous work in Guatemala I believe that as women learn patterns from the 
weavers around them, there may be a genealogy of patterns. A woman who learnt to weave 
from a particular line of weavers may have more knowledge of and even practice patterns 
similar to those in the museum textiles. How different women respond to different patterns 
might give me more information about whether or not particular women feel ownership or 
connection to a textile due to a personal or kinship connection she may share, or believe she 
shares with the weaver of the museum textile.) 
 
8. What do you think about them being in a museum? 
 
 
9. What do you think about people seeing picb’il textiles in museums? 
 
10. Do you feel connected to these picb’il textiles? 
 
Age Group Specific Questions (These questions are placed after the introduction of the 
booklet so that all weavers in all age groups are answering them at the same time during 
the interview process.) (10). 
 
1. Are you teaching anyone to weave? 
 
(I suspect that women only begin teaching others to weave after they are considered to be of a 
particular skill level or status within the community. This means that many of the younger 
women I interview may not be teaching anyone to weave. I also suspect that weaving 
instruction will occur along kinship lines, which in turn sheds light on the unique situation of 
the 1980s where most women who learnt to weave were learning from a non-kin person, 
Rosario.) 
 
2. If not, do you intend to teach anyone to weave? 
 
(Women who do not currently teach others to weave may become weaving teachers if requested 
by a blood relative, or if they have a daughter old enough to begin weaving. I am hoping to 
ascertain how many younger women are involved in the passing of weaving knowledge on, or 
how many intend to be involved
197 
 
 
Appendix B 
 
Sample of interview schedule designed after my arrival in Guatemala with the assistance of my 
translator Maria Elena Toj between March and April of 2016. This new approach included 
allowing weavers to have access to the photo booklet prior to the beginning of an interview 
and relied on a (sometimes extensive) conversation between myself and interviewees regarding 
the museum textiles prior to the start of the interview. I came to expect, quite early on in this 
process, that in order to have good interviews, I would need to be open to more organic 
conversations in which these questions served more as guideposts than as data collection 
points.  
 
1.  Do you weave or are you learning to weave? 
 
2. How long have you woven picb’il? 
 
3. Who taught you to weave? 
 
4. Do you know where/when they learned to weave? 
 
5. Are you teaching anyone to weave? 
 
6. Do you wear picb’il? Can you show me? 
 
7. How many patterns do you weave?  
1. Follow up questions: What are they called/where & when did you 
learn them? 
 
8. What do you do with the textiles you weave/what are they? 
 
9. Why do you weave picb’il? 
 
10. Have you heard of museums? Do you know anyone who has ever been to a  
museum? 
 
11. Did you know that there are picb’il textiles in museums? 
 
12. What do you think about them being in a museum? 
 
13. What do you think about people seeing picb’il textiles outside of Guatemala? 
 
14. Do you feel connected to these picb’il textiles?
198 
 
 
Appendix C 
 
The following is one of the photo booklets I brought to communities as interview aids. It has 
been reformatted to fit onto fewer pages to meet the criteria for the length of this thesis. In the 
original textile booklets the pages were printed one sided, with each photograph taking up 
one full page on the right, balanced by a blank page on the left.
199 
 
 
 
 
Pitt Rivers Museum 
University of Oxford 
 
Textile Collected in 1929 by Mrs. Elsie McDougal 
Donated the Pitt Rivers Museum in 1946 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Whole Textile Front 
 
200 
 
 
Whole Textile Back 
 
 
 
 
 
Sleeve 
 
 
 
 
201 
 
 
Pattern 1 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Pattern 2 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
202 
 
 
Pattern 3 Front 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Pattern 3 Back 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
203 
 
 
Pattern 4 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Pattern 5 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
204 
 
 
Edging 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Stitching 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
205 
 
Collar Front 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Collar Back