Artisans by Trade: Working as Weavers and Embroiderers in the Chiapas Highlands
Abstract
Textile work has traditionally been part of Tsotsil and Tseltal women’s domestic duties in the Highlands of Chiapas, Mexico. However, recent national and foreign interest in artisanal handiwork has led women from the region to start selling their work. In this commercial foray, artisanal work emerges as a trade, one that entails accommodations between women’s economic activities and their home life. While most women carry out their artisanal work at home alongside family members, the way in which they define the nature of their work and its relation to their other domestic activities varies considerably. The following video and text profile three textile artisans from the Highlands region, highlighting the distinct ways in which they organize their work and fit it together with their family life and social relations in their communities.
Textiles made by the artisans featured in the video can be purchased directly from them at the following websites: Rosa’s cooperative J’pas Joloviletik; Juana Victoria’s group X-Chilul Pak. Angela and Ceci do not have a website but can be reached through the author.
Citation: Barber, Rachel. “Artisans by Trade: Working as Weavers and Embroiderers in the Chiapas Highlands” The Jugaad Project, Vol. 5, No. 2, 2023, www.thejugaadproject.pub/artisans-by-trade [date of access]
In the Highlands of Chiapas, Mexico, Tsotsil- and Tseltal-speaking weavers and embroiderers use the term ‘artisan’, artesana in Spanish, in a particular sense. It is used to refer not to any woman who knows how to weave or embroider, but rather to describe a woman who sells the textiles she makes by hand. It is a term that describes a line of work, a trade. In the Tsotsil and Tseltal communities of the Highlands, weaving and embroidering are techniques traditionally considered part of women’s domestic work in their communities. However, it is only within the past 40 years that national and foreign interest in artisanal handiwork has led women from these communities to turn to these techniques as a means for maintaining themselves and their families economically.
Artisanal work is thus not a simple continuation of what Tsotsil and Tseltal women have done in the past. The transition from making clothes for oneself and one’s family members to selling textile products to outside buyers represents a fundamental shift in how and why women choose to weave and embroider that affects distinct areas of artisans’ lives. It is, as women’s use of the word ‘artisan’ reveals, the emergence of a new trade and with it, adaptations in artisans’ home lives and the formation of a new work identity. While the granddaughters of the first artisans to take up this trade are now working in their own right, they are still in the process of forging this identity and defining the contours of what their work entails. What is more, artisans today are working in a commercial landscape that has changed radically over the past two generations.
In the 1980s, artisans first began forming collectives and large, region-wide cooperatives with government funding and some independent financing. They would sell principally to tourists in the commercial center of San Cristóbal de Las Casas, to government agencies that promoted and commercialized artisanal work, to a handful of stores located in other states in Mexico, and through a few nonprofit solidarity networks abroad. Within the past 15 years, however, a new set of commercial actors have come to the Highlands. Various national and international NGOs set up shop in San Cristóbal in the mid-2010s. With millions of dollars in funding from organizations like the Kellogg Foundation, who specifically targeted the Highlands region as a focus area for their grants, these organizations have since given production workshops and connected thousands of artisans to national and foreign stores and designers. Artisans now speak to clients on their cell phones, organize FedEx shipments across the country and fill orders following the production schedule of national and international stores’ new lines and collections[1].
The current commercial panorama for handmade textiles in the Chiapas Highlands is composed of the sedimented layers of these production configurations, with new forms of organization and commercial routes being traced over former arrangements. Some artisans, like Rosa, may belong to cooperatives that their grandmothers helped co-found and, at the same time, sell clothing locally to women in their community. Or instead, like Juana Victoria, they may have worked with an NGO that gave them courses on product development and connected them with clients and have gone on to form their own successful production groups that sell to dozens of stores all across Mexico.
Entering into this new commercial arena, artisans are not following a defined work path, but are forging their own way. Since artisanal work continues to be based in the home and is largely organized around a core group of women family members, the definition of artisanal work—what work-related activities women do and when and where they do them—is formed around a basic tension between traditional roles that women have played in their families and the new demands and expectations outside clients have for them as artisans.
In the video Artisans by Trade, shot in the artisans’ homes in various visits over the course of 2023, I want to offer a glimpse into what this new work looks like and how varied it can be. Here we see the daily work of three different artisans: Juana Victoria, from the Tseltal community of San Juan Cancuc, is in her 30s and the leader of a large group of weavers that sells their work to clients throughout Mexico; Rosa from the Tsotsil town of Nachig in Zinacantán, who is in her 40s, embroiders the regional dress of her community to sell locally and is also part of an artisanal cooperative with a store in San Cristóbal; and Angela and Ceci, two sisters in their 40s from the Tsotsil town of Pantelhó, who compete in textile competitions in Mexico and sell their work with a small group of weavers in fairs and to occasional buyers.
Rosa’s story reflects the enduring tension between women’s traditional place as homemakers and caretakers in the Highlands and the newfound economic independence that comes with their artisanal work. Since women artisans began joining cooperatives in the 1980s, there has been pushback from husbands, fathers, brothers and other authority figures, such as local politicians, in their communities. Maruch, one of the co-founders of the cooperative that Rosa is part of, describes how some men in her community “don’t want their wives to make money. They take their work and throw it into the fire or they drag it in the mud or stain it with dirt” (Gomes 2016, 104). As Rosa mentions, her sisters’ husbands “don’t allow” them to join the cooperative, since it entails traveling to meetings outside of the community and, in addition to the potential dangers of this independence, means less complete dedication to their household duties. Rosa herself had left the cooperative because of her own childcare duties, showing the ongoing give-and-take between work and family life that occurs as women negotiate their new roles as artisans. It was, interestingly enough, this same need to take care of her children—this time economically, after her husband left her—that led her to embark on a new line of artisanal work embroidering clothing to sell to women in her community. Her daily work continues to be structured around her domestic tasks—grinding corn, preparing tortillas, washing clothes, cleaning the house— and is punctuated by the rhythms of her children’s activities in the house, visits from neighbors’ kids and the telenovela playing in the background. Rosa’s artisanal work does not conform to the romanticized vision of artisans as engaging in an unchanging, homogenous craft (cf Bowie 1992; Nash 2001; Escalona 2016). Nor does it fit the mold of work as it is institutionalized in capitalist society, where life is severed from work and social reproduction is thus presented as a distinct sphere from economic production (Fraser and Jaeggi 2021). While artisanal work and domestic life are not seamlessly integrated, they certainly are not rigidly separated and, in Rosa’s case, the balance between the two tends to subordinate work to the pattern of her life at home and her community, rather than the other way around.
In the case of the sisters Angela and Ceci, artisanal work and family life are tightly entwined. Both sisters’ trajectories as weavers have been profoundly marked by their mother, who was a prize-winning weaver in the community and who Angela has proudly described as always dressing her and her sisters in woven cloth, never “bought” fabric. Following in the footsteps of their mother, who was winning awards for her textile pieces since the early 1990s, both sisters compete in state and national textile prize contests. These competitions, which award cash prizes that range from around $1,000 to $3,000 dollars, punctuate the rhythm of their weaving, since they start preparing the items to be submitted for judging over six months in advance. In addition to these larger, more time-intensive pieces, Angela and Ceci work in a group composed almost entirely of family members—their nieces and sisters-in-laws—to make pieces to sell in fairs and to occasional clients.
However, weaving is not the only work they do. As the video shows, they divide their time and take turns weaving, preparing food for themselves and their father, and tending the shop in the front of their house. Weaving only makes up about half of their income, the other half coming from what they sell in the shop as well in addition to coffee they cultivate with their father and cattle that they raise in a cooperative with their father and brothers. There is no clear hierarchy among these different work activities. Preparing mole[2] for breakfast, attending to women from their community who buy thread in their shop, helping their niece weave clothing for the statue of Saint Judas, picking coffee beans and preparing their submissions for competitions all exist in rotation. While some take precedence depending on the time of day, the date of submission for textile competitions, the harvest season, the celebration of the saint day, etc., no single activity is considered to have some fundamental importance over the other.
Juana Victoria, in contrast, is a weaver who has a very different trajectory and organization of her artisanal work. While she continues to work with a core production group of women family members—her mother, her two sisters-in-law who live in the same building complex, and her sister who lives in a nearby town—she hardly has any time to attend to domestic chores, not to mention weaving itself. The success she has attained in the national market for artisanal textiles has required her to dedicate time to logistics and “checking everything”, as she puts it. Her day is taken up with the tasks of attending to clients, organizing the distribution of orders among the members of her group and looking over their work. The demands of a thriving business have transformed her home and her relationships: various rooms in the family home have been converted into stockrooms for materials and finished clothing items and her sisters-in-law have been conscripted into helping her mail orders and pick up materials from San Cristóbal. Her communication with clients via cell phone also shows the ways in which technology allows commercial relations to exert a degree of control over her daily activities in spite of the great distances that separate her community of San Juan Cancuc from the cities where she sends her products.
While these work demands at times seem an inexorable force that structures Juana Victoria’s work, she has made, and continues to make, choices that define the nature of her work and her control over it. Ten years ago, Juana Victoria was actively seeking out ways to sell her products to an outside market. Through workshops with the NGO Impacto, she learned how to adapt the design and color palette of her products to suit outside tastes. However, the organization of her group has always been entirely autonomous. The weavers take on the work they are able to and there is no outside entity telling them how work should be distributed or when and where it should be done. The group’s success has also put them in a position to reject work that is poorly paid; in the past, Juana Victoria had sold to a boutique store in San Cristóbal that paid prices that covered little more than the cost of the thread that was used to make the clothing items.
As her group’s leader as well as the prime breadwinner in her family, Juana Victoria’s artisanal work represents a major deviation from the traditional domestic work women in Cancuc are still generally expected to do. Her desire to gain “experience” and work independently before she marries has enabled her to work in this manner. However, like Rosa, Angela and Ceci’s decisions about work, Juana Victoria’s choices are not just a question of personal fulfillment or attaining an ideal of individual independence. In spite of the very different forms in which these three artisans organize artisanal work, none of them see it as individually driven. Far from the idea that “working is part of what is supposed to transform subjects into the independent individuals of the liberal imaginary” (Weeks 2011, 8), Rosa, Juana Victoria and Angela and Ceci all recognize artisanal work as bound up in their social and family relations. Rosa works to support her children and organizes her work following rhythms of caring for her family and socializing with her family and neighbors. Juana Victoria’s artisanal work, in spite of taking precedence over her domestic activities, is based in her home and is organized through and around her family and her neighbors. Angela and Ceci, as sisters who live and work together, have thoroughly integrated their work and family relationship in their artisanal activities as well as in various other economic pursuits. As these women chart their paths as artisans, the ways in which they work both depend on and transform these relationships.
References
Bowie, Katherine A. 1992. “Unraveling the Myth of the Subsistence Economy: Textile Production in Nineteenth- Century Northern Thailand,” Journal of Asian Studies 51, no. 4 (November): 797–823.
Escalona, José Luis. 2016. Etnomercancía y sobrefetichización. Ensayo de mirada estereográfica. Relaciones. Estudios de Historia y Sociedad, 37(148), 259-288.
Fraser, Nancy and Rahel Jaeggi. 2018. Capitalism: A Conversation in Critical Theory. Medford: Polity.
Gomes, Maruch. 2016. Ta jlok’ta chobtik ta k’u’il / Bordando milpas. In El Taller Tzotzil 1985-2002: un proyecto colaborativo de investigación y publicación en los Altos de Chiapas, coordinated by Jan Rus, Diane L. Rus, and Salvador Guzmán Bakbolom, 87-118. Tuxtla Gutiérrez, Chiapas: UNICACH.
Nash, June. 2001. Mayan Visions: The Quest for Autonomy in an Age of Globalization. New York: Routledge.
Weeks, Kathi. 2011. The Problem with Work. Durham: Duke University Press.
Endnotes
[1] Some examples of clients that place large orders with artisans in the Highlands, and whom I came across in my own fieldwork in 2022-2023, include the Dallas-based store Mi Golondrina, the online platform Ensamble Artesano and hotel chains in Cancun or Playa del Carmen that decorate their rooms with artisanal textiles.
[2] A traditional Mexican sauce made from a mix of ground chocolate, chilis, seeds, nuts and spices.
