Teotitlan del Valle

About 20 minutes southeast of town is the small village of Teotitlan del Valle, one of the weaving centers of the region. Seemed like it was about time to check it out, so we hopped a Tlacalula-bound bus, got off on the side of the highway, and then caught a colectivo the last two miles.

Teotitlan is one of the wealthier surrounding towns on account of its weaving products - they also have an interesting and apparently quite successful structure of communal land ownership - and it seemed like they were in the middle of some very tourist-targeted renovations of parts of the town square. All in all, very quaint, though, and filled to bursting with beautiful tapestries and rugs.

We wandered the streets a bit, looking at rugs in the temporary stalls that lined the major streets, and politely deferring purchases for the moment. (If you don't do this relatively soon in the discussion, the vendor, at the first sign of interest in any rug will immediately begin pulling and piling them by the dozens for your perusal. They're very friendly, but very persistent.) As we passed by the church and a disgorging tourist bus, a very short and very friendly woman in local clothes asked if we spoke Spanish and if we wanted to see a demonstration down the street. We said yes to the first, but no to the second, not wanting to follow the bus-load of people. This turned out to be a good move on our part, because she immediately invited us to her house to see the results of a recent session of wool dying. Her deeply blue-stained hands were proof enough of what she had been up to - she said that the blue dye in particular stays on you skin for a long time.

(Practically twins!)

It turns out her name was Eugenia and together with her husband Antonio, she runs a family weaving business. They are part of the older tradition, having learned the trade from their grandparents as teenagers, and continuing to use only manual processes and all-vegetable dyes.

Their home was a somewhat sprawling complex, with a spacious central courtyard full of plants and work-sheds, and an entire wall (at least) devoted to the weaving workshop. There were skeins of yarn hanging everywhere, in dozens of colors, as well as baskets of unprocessed wool, and the beginnings of several rugs.

Some of the plants growing in their courtyard were clearly food - for example, a vine of chayote had almost entirely covered one of the sheds - but others were for dye: the weavers simply boil the leaves in water to release their pigments, then combine the primary colors in as many ways as they can imagine. Eugenia talked later about how some of the plants were (at least locally) endangered and so she and Antonio had taken to growing them at their home to ensure a steady supply.

Here's Eugenia talking to Erica about some of the dyes. (She really was quite short...) Not surprisingly perhaps, the plants seen in the background here are used to dye the wool green. We also learned later - after traveling to their shop, where we were joined by a family from Guadalajara - how the red dye is made by grinding a type of fungus that grows on the surface of a certain cactus. Eugenia had just finished pulverizing the outwardly-white pellets on the flat pestle (which she said had been passed down through three generations), after which the powder was mixed with water and lime juice. The citric acid of the limes helps stabilize the color. That's Antonio on the stool, demonstrating the tedious process of combing the wool, before spinning it to make the yarn. They both agreed that combing wool was a great punishment for misbehaving children.

We also got to see a bit of the weaving technique, both at home, from Eugenia (below), and at the shop, where a young woman was also in the middle of a piece. Eugenia said that a rug with simpler patterns might require several days of weaving, while those with complicated designs - for example, animals, the tree of life, or copies of paintings by artists like Frida or Diego Rivera - might take months.

It was fun seeing pieces of the process from start to finish, and talking with the two weavers as well as the family from Guadalajara during the demonstrations. And once it was all done, we were excited to see more of the finished products. The colors and patterns are striking and if some seem reminiscent to you of Navajo works, well done! Antonio said that a lot of the patterns traditionally used are taken directly from those designs.

This is just the beginning of the rug display - there were probably thirty on the ground by the time we finished, and Eugenia only stopped pulling them out because we told her two or three times we had decided.

We ended up with a couple rugs - one big orange one and a smaller one with lots of blue - then thanked our hosts and caught a colectivo back to the highway so we could flag down a bus. Eugenia said that if want to come back and try our hand at dying we should just give her a call.

We're both very excited about this artwork that we've acquired, and Marta, the cat, was pretty excited too. For whatever reason - the smell of sheep or the dye, the color, who knows - she literally went crazy over the orange one. She was stretching and rolling, pouncing and scratching, flailing and biting, generally losing her mind over it. I eventually had to take it away because her frenzy, while not doing any damage to the rug, was starting to seriously threaten the couch. Her insanity instantly forgotten, she promptly fell asleep on an old blanket, under the table.