Traje tipica de la mujer
Despite the dust and the somber Germanic architecture of the city, Xela is brightly and dramatically colorful. The landscape surrounding the city is largely undeveloped, which at least has one advantage: miles upon miles of forest, steep volcanoes and sweeping valleys so green it almost hurts your eyes to take it all in. Even the trash people toss into ditches from their houses or passing chicken buses has a certain vibrancy against the countryside. People are not afraid to paint their houses dubious colors of hot pink, coral, sky blue, or some combination of all the above (this comes in handy for postal delivery, as instead of giving your address as “29 Avenue A”, which no one will ever find, you can simply say, “the orange and green house next to Tienda Mary on Diagonal 11”).
This area of the country, the western highlands, is known for its chilly nights and sizable indigenous population. To my outsider’s eye, Mayan heritage is most visible when a woman is wearing the traje tipica of her region/village/department—very, very generally, this consists of a loose blouse over a long, colorful skirt with a cut and pattern specific to her area. At an event celebrating the academic achievements of primary school girls in Xela several months ago, each of the girls being honored wore (in addition to costume changes of “evening dress” and their school uniforms) a different Mayan outfit representative of the various traje in the highlands. I lost count of how many variations on the blouse-skirt-apron-hairstyle theme there were, but rest assured it was one shit-ton. Some of the blouses were fuller, most were lacy, some were white with intricate and colorful needlework depicting, ah, “women’s work”, some were more like tunics with sashes cinching them in at the waist, some were shockingly colored and paired with even more shockingly colored and patterned skirts. The skirts themselves are generally either a more form-fitting knit wraparound somehow fastened around the waist and falling to the ankles, or—as in the case of the department of Quetzaltenango—full and pleated, and so long they practically brush the ground when you walk.
In Quetzaltenango specifically, the blouse is called a guipil and is usually either a pastel color decorated with lace, sequins, and other patterning, or printed with representations of birds, water, and animals, to represent nature and the earth. The blouse is very full with a rounded neckline and elbow-length sleeves, tucked into a pleated skirt which is generally a dark blue or purple color. The skirt (corte) has 365 white vertical lines, like pinstripes, to represent 365 days of the year. Crisscrossing the fabric at the front and back, forming four squares in the material, is a thicker line knit with colorful stitching to represent all the colors of the Mayan people. The four squares formed by the cross represent the compass—north, south, east, west. However, usually this is all covered by an enormous frilly apron if the woman is working or selling produce in the market. Women are also generally never without their manta, a large cloak-like fabric which is used for everything from a headwrap to a shawl to an ingenious method of carrying children or buckets of oranges strapped to your back.
There are several different looks one can make with this type of traje—the everyday wear is the one I have just described; traje para fiestas involves a different kind of shawl, I believe, and perhaps a more elaborate hairstyle; and traje de luto, or funeral/grieving clothes, are much more muted colors—dark purple or black blouses and shawls. To construct these types of clothes, you can expect to pay between 2000 and 3000 quetzales for all the fabric, so most women only have one set of traje or upgrade solely for very special occasions. According to one of the Guatemalan teachers at the center, it’s becoming far more common for women to purchase ready-made fabric or used traje at shops that import cheapass material from other places (oh, Central American Free Trade Agreement, how we love you) in order to defray some these hefty costs and the labor associated with dyeing, weaving, stitching, and sewing by hand—skills that are mostly confined to the older generations at this point.
Women appear, at least on the surface, to uphold a lot of the more traditional Mayan practices—at least with regards to dress, speech and manners. I think in all the time I’ve been in Xela, I have only once seen a man dressed in traje tipica (an older guy in a village, wearing the traditional white tunic and pants with red sash, the mecapal—sort of headband you can strap heavy burdens to for ease of carriage—and a kind of straw hat). In the city, it’s very common to see a woman in full traje walking down the street with children in SpongeBob t-shirts, and her husband sporting gelled hair and baggy jeans next to her. On the outskirts of the city, on chicken buses and in smaller villages, the men’s Mayan heritage is more evident—but only because they dress like farmers, with heavy work boots and hats, distinguishing them from the Ladinos in the region who generally no longer practice subsistence farming. (“Rural” in the highlands connotes indigenous Mayan heritage, as far as I can tell.) The abandonment of traje tipica for men was, I gather, largely a survival response to the civil war that was especially fierce in the highlands from 1960-1996: traje identifies you immediately as indigenous and depending on what region your clothing represents, could have meant life or death at the hands of military, police, military police, death squads, or mercenaries. Beyond basic self-preservation, there was increasing societal pressure for Mayan men to “northernize” as well, leaving behind the farm and village for more industrial work in the cities or elsewhere (
Yet the “tradition” of traje tipica is somewhat convoluted as well. Another teacher at the center informed me that the different traje colors, patterns, and styles were originally introduced to the Mayans by Spanish and mestizo property owners in order to distinguish which laborers/slaves worked on which plantation. Currently, as was the case with the event honoring primary school girls that I talked about earlier where each of the girls—all presumably Ladina—donned a different type of traje to exhibit (literally flouncing down a runway to a loop of Celine Dion’s “My Heart Will Go On”)—many people of indigenous backgrounds feel that Guatemalan society in general continues to exclude and disenfranchise them, while using their specific culture (dress, speech, food, music, dance, farm and nature lore) whenever it is politically or socially expedient to do so, or whenever homage to indigenous culture is expected during visits from outside heads of state, etc. Mayan women can often feel as though they are being put on display—especially since it is usually a Ladina woman who is chosen to shuck her sequined jeans and hoop earrings for the charade.
I’ve often wondered what the little girls whose mothers dress them in traje tipica, then take them to the market where they may hawk North American clothes and shoes, will wear when they grow up. Will they marry a Mayan man who, no longer under pressure or stigma to wear a tunic and mecapal, refuses to extend this choice to his wife? Do they secretly want to wear cha cha heels and skinny jeans, or is that my own projection (probably)? As with everything in life, it’s complicated. I certainly don’t know enough about the history or Mayan culture here to make any kind of assumptions as to what the women here are thinking when they get dressed in the morning and then walk out the door to cell phones and McDonald’s, plopping down their hand-woven basket of hot tortillas next door to the internet café on that block.
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