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E.M. Forster once wrote that art makes us feel small in the right way, and anyone who has ever studied the dazzling hues and intricate patterns of a Mayan textile surely knows what he meant. Even the simplest designs pulsate, the colors are so intensely rich, and the more complicated patterns featuring animals and plants truly thrill the eye. For Chico State art professor Matthew Looper, in 1993 a young graduate student newly arrived in Guatemala to document carved monuments, the textiles were a revelation. "I was totally amazed by them," he said, "and began collecting them immediately."

Looper came to this passion by a rather circuitous route. "My dad and my brothers were all scientists," he said, "and I assumed I'd be a scientist, too. At Duke, my specialty was molecular biology. But my sister was interested in French and took art history classes, and to be able to talk to her I took some humanities and art classes." Once the art door opened for him, however, it never closed. Though he graduated Phi Beta Kappa in botany, it was course work in pre-Columbian art, begun at Duke, that drew him to the University of Texas at Austin for graduate studies. There he came under the compelling influence of the well-known Mayanist Linda Schele, one of the first researchers to launch a serious investigation of Mayan glyphs and what they revealed about the culture and history of the people who carved and painted them. Looper was awarded a Fulbright, as well as a National Science Foundation grant, to travel to Quirigua, Guatemala, to document monuments and write a comprehensive political history of the site, but his attraction to indigenous textiles, kindled as soon as he arrived, meant that he began investigating their origins and history as well.

San Martin Sacapequez

At first it was an informal undertaking, but Looper soon discovered that many local textile arts in Guatemala were in danger of disappearing altogether. After finishing his dissertation and post-doctoral work in 1996, he was invited by the director of a foundation devoted to cultural rescue and preservation, Fundacion Viva, to document indigenous textiles and their traditions. "So I jumped at it," Looper said. "During the rest of '96 and '97, I did field work in several towns of western Guatemala." There he found "many distinctive traditional costumes, each of which is associated with a particular village. They function as local identifiers, telling people from outside the community that they're members of a particular town." However, the weavers of these communities, women working at backstrap looms, also interact and influence each other's styles, he explained, pointing out that extremely proficient weavers enjoy greater status within their communities. "Certain towns have more dominant textile traditions, and they'll create things that are sought after by women from other communities."

For women, the huipil, or tunic, is usually backstrap woven, and it is this stand-out piece of clothing that we tend to visualize when we think of Guatemalan textiles. Employing "a technique called brocading, in which extra threads are inserted into the warp during the process of weaving," women display their artistic gifts when they make their huipils. It's a gift with a body toll, particularly on the lower back and the eyes. "The thing about backstrap is, you have the best control," Looper said. "You're adjusting the tension constantly on threads that are very, very close together." Because weaving is so bound up with personal identity, women are willing to trade personal comfort for the beauty of their raiment.

Looper, who has learned enough Mam, the second most widely spoken language in Guatemala, to talk about textiles with nearly anyone who weaves, cautions against the tendency of Western scholars to read textiles as written scripts. "If I don't hear a concept expressed in Indian voices, I don't believe it," he said. Likewise, he is wary of the notion that older designs are somehow more authentic. He sees the weavers' use of new motifs as an assertion of the vitality of the tradition. "It represents a kind of symbolic control of the world." A weaver who takes a design from a cross-stitch pamphlet, say a flower, and then executes it in a thread that changes hue every inch or so produces something quite different from the illustration. The flower looks new each time it is woven, and the weaver, he suggested, is not allowing her art to be easily objectified. He noted that elephants and other exotic animals are beginning to show up in designs nowadays and that weavers of all ages love the new variegated thread. Most research on Guatemalan textiles up to this point, he said, has focused on the "one costume, one village" stereotype and overlooked much of the underlying complexity of the tradition. "A lot of it just is not well understood."

	A Guatemalan woman models a huipil, or tunic, made on a backstrap loom.

And a lot of it is vanishing. The civil war in Guatemala has taken its toll, particularly on native peoples, but other forces have contributed to the art's demise as well. "There is incredible pressure, especially on the men, from the national culture and Western culture to lose the indigenous identifying features [of their clothing]." Referring to traditional men's dress, Looper said, "It's something that may totally be gone in the next twenty years." When the men leave their villages to work in the larger cities or come to the United States, they find it easier to conform to the majority culture. Add the influence of evangelical sects to the war and economic pressures and what results is a recipe for cultural annihilation. San Martin Sacatepequez, one of the villages Looper has studied most extensively, "has been very heavily beset by evangelicals in the last ten to twenty years. A lot of the shrines have been destroyed." Along with the shrines has gone much of the traditional dress.

The changes in San Martin have prompted Looper to undertake an oral history of Concepcion Chiquirichapa, a major backstrap weaving center four kilometers from San Martin whose women are proficient in complicated loom configurations. Concepcion is largely Catholic and fairly intolerant of Protestants and evangelicals. Many of the people still practice the traditional indigenous religion, which can be combined with Catholicism in interesting ways. For instance, shamans of the old religion are Catholics too, and brotherhood societies known as cofradias care for the statues of the saints, which are often dressed in indigenous costumes. With the support of Fundacion Viva, Looper brought tape recorders to several of the women there, who interviewed their grandmothers and other elders about their particular weaving histories. "It's great when elders in consensus talk about design," he said, adding that he hopes to learn how design interpretations change through time. That he has mastered nearly all the weaving techniques of San Martin (he may be the only outsider who has) makes him uniquely qualified to interpret the data yielded by the project. Looper has just finished writing Ceremonial Huipil Designs of the Ancient Maya, to be published by the San Diego Museum of Man, and is at work on another book about contemporary textiles.

The Quiche Mayan book of creation, the Popul Vuh, opens with a reference to weaving, to "halving the cord, stretching the cord in the sky, on the earth, the four sides, the four corners." According to Looper, "the phrase jalaj k'ojb'a is used in several Classic Maya texts to describe the creation of the universe. "K'ojb'a is 'image,' which refers to a constellation that rose to zenith when the cosmos was born," he said. "Jalaj means 'is woven,' but also 'is manifested' or 'is made known.' Thus the sky is 'woven into existence' or made manifest through a primal act of speech by gods." To weave, then, is to carry on the work of gods. Small wonder these textiles leave us awed.