By Nancy Reyes—

When travelers talk about Mexican art, conversations often turn to gallery walls, museum displays, or colorful market souvenirs. Yet across Mexico, art is much more than a decorative object. It is a living dialogue—a continuous thread connecting ancestral knowledge with contemporary cultural identity. Long before European artistic traditions reached the Americas, Indigenous weavers across Mesoamerica transformed cotton and maguey fibers into intricate textiles on backstrap looms, or telares de cintura. Their work brought together practical skill, aesthetic expression, and understandings of the world passed down through generations.

As The Eye Mexico explores art this November, we turn our attention to three Oaxacan communities where textile traditions preserve living history. In these towns, thread is not merely material: it is memory held in cloth, an expression of collective identity, and an art form continually renewed by the hands that practice it.

Teotitlán del Valle:

Nestled in Oaxaca’s Central Valleys, Teotitlán del Valle is a Zapotec community with a long-standing weaving tradition. Following Spanish contact in the sixteenth century, local artisans incorporated sheep’s wool and European treadle looms, or telares de pedal, into their textile production. Over time, these materials and tools became integral to a distinctive weaving practice that continues to evolve.

Although synthetic dyes became widespread during the twentieth century, artisan families and workshops in Teotitlán continue to preserve and develop natural dyeing techniques. Cochineal, or grana cochinilla—an insect cultivated on prickly pear cacti—produces brilliant reds. Indigo, or añil, yields deep blues, while walnut hulls and marigold flowers can provide earthy browns and golden yellows. The resulting palette reflects both the surrounding environment and the knowledge required to transform natural materials into lasting color.

The geometric motifs woven into Teotitlán’s textiles draw on a rich visual repertoire. Stepped patterns, diamonds, and grecas, or geometric fretwork, connect contemporary designs with forms found in Zapotec architecture and other cultural expressions. Their meanings may vary among weavers, families, and individual works; they should not be reduced to a single, fixed symbolic code.

Today, weavers combine inherited patterns with contemporary abstraction and personal experimentation. Their work demonstrates that preserving a textile tradition does not mean leaving it unchanged. It means sustaining the knowledge that allows it to grow.

San Antonino Castillo Velasco:

Located in the Ocotlán Valley, south of Oaxaca City, San Antonino Castillo Velasco is a Zapotec community celebrated for its intricate embroidery. Passed down through generations, this work transforms garments into richly detailed compositions of flowers, foliage, and other decorative motifs inspired by the surrounding landscape.

Two techniques contribute to the distinctive character of San Antonino’s garments: deshilado and hazme si puedes. Although they may appear together on the same blouse, they involve different processes. Deshilado, or drawn-thread work, requires the embroiderer to remove selected threads from the fabric and work the remaining threads into delicate, lacelike patterns.

The technique known as hazme si puedes—“make me if you can”—combines fine pleating with embroidery to create tiny figures across a gathered section of fabric. These figures, often described as little people, lend the garment a remarkable sense of detail and rhythm.

A blouse combining floral embroidery, drawn-thread borders, and hazme si puedes can require months of careful work, depending on its complexity and the time the embroiderer can devote to it. Its value lies not only in the finished garment but also in the practiced hands, concentration, and accumulated knowledge behind every stitch.

As embroiderers adapt their work to contemporary garments and changing markets, they continue to affirm the importance of recognizing the people and communities responsible for these designs. Innovation and continuity meet in each piece: new forms emerge without erasing the skills that make them possible.

Santa María Tlahuitoltepec:

High in Oaxaca’s Sierra Norte, Santa María Tlahuitoltepec is an Ayuujk (Mixe) community where Indigenous autonomy, language, and artistic expression remain closely intertwined. The phrase los nunca conquistados—“the never conquered”—is often associated with Mixe identity and expresses a powerful tradition of cultural resilience.
Tlahuitoltepec’s embroidered blouse is recognizable for its contrasting colors and distinctive arrangements of geometric and stylized motifs. Far from being merely decorative, these designs express relationships among the community, its environment, and its worldview.

Motifs associated with mountains, plants, water, and other elements of the landscape connect the garment to the place where it is made. Rather than assigning a universal meaning to every curve or line, the embroidery is better understood as a living visual language whose significance emerges through community knowledge, practice, and interpretation.

In 2015, this textile tradition became the focus of an international debate on cultural appropriation when community members accused French fashion designer Isabel Marant of reproducing elements of their blouse in her Étoile spring/summer collection without acknowledgment or consent. Local authorities and community representatives publicly defended the design as collective cultural heritage, challenging its use for commercial purposes without recognition of its origins.

The controversy highlighted a question that extends well beyond a single garment: who has the right to reproduce, market, and profit from a community’s cultural expressions? For Tlahuitoltepec, defending the blouse also meant defending the knowledge, identity, and collective history embodied in its embroidery.

The garment thus carries significance beyond its aesthetic qualities. It is an expression of belonging and a visible affirmation that Ayuujk culture is not confined to the past. It continues to be worn, interpreted, and renewed in the present.

In Mexico, an old saying reminds us that recordar es volver a vivir—“to remember is to live again.” Textile art gives tangible form to that remembrance. Through the woven patterns of Teotitlán, the delicate pleats of San Antonino, and the distinctive embroidery of Tlahuitoltepec, memory becomes something we can see, touch, and carry.

These traditions connect past and present not because they remain unchanged, but because each generation finds ways to sustain and reinterpret them. Their continuity depends on artists whose work deserves recognition, respect, and fair compensation.

As you explore Oaxaca’s cultural landscapes this November, look closely at the garments and woven pieces around you. Behind every thread are an artist’s skill, a community’s knowledge, and a living heritage that continues to shape the world.

Nancy Reyes, a native of Mexicali with a PhD in Language Sciences, combines teaching and storytelling to explore Mexico’s layered cultural heritage.