Human Flower Project
Fresh as a Flowered Huipile
The huipiles (blouses) of the Yucatan, an enduring wearable art, feature many radiant floral designs. Across Mexico and in Guatemala, they are one ongoing form of Mayan textile artistry that dates back to the 5th Century. Really. (Check this story on a recent discovery at Copán in Honduras.)
Designs differ from one village to the next and serve as regional identifiers – a sort of uniform. Ironically, they have functioned as both a badge of local honor and, especially for the repressive regimes in Guatemala, a convenient, self-administered system of public surveillance.
Angela Allen of Portland, Oregon, took this picture on a recent trip to the Yucatan: a woman in a floral huipile offering embroidered napkins for sale among the ruins at Chichen Itza.
“She is wearing the traditional dress, not as fancy as some,” Angela writes. A journalist, poet and photographer (as well as a dear friend since skip-rope days), Angela reports on the arts, fashion and food. See more of her pictures from Mexico here.
Mayan historian John Eric Sidney Thompson writes, “Fine brocades textiles of Yucatan were famed all over Middle America, being one of the most important items of tribute paid in early Colonial times.” He cites the account of Las Casas, a contemporary of Christopher Columbus, describing textile cargo spotted in the Bay Islands off Honduras: “Many cotton mantles, much decorated with diverse colors and designs, and short sleeve-less shirts, also colored with designs.”
Angela writes ”There is a huge government supported crafts industry” in the Yucatan today—major markets in Merida and Valladolid, and many freelancers, like this elderly vendor. Angela purchased an embroidered tortilla wrapper for 10 pesos, about a dollar.
For lots more examples of Mexican embroidery, some made by hand and some with machinery, see Karen Elwell’s flickr site. If something here doesn’t take your breath away, you’re not breathing.
Selling embroidered napkins at Chichen Itza
Photo: Angela Allen