Cuerpo-Territorio, Clothing, and Cultural Appropriation in Zinacantán, Mexico
Cultural appropriation in fashion has been a buzzword for at least a decade and yet the fashion industry still perpetuates this act. Cultural appropriation can be defined as the taking of a cultural aspect, in this case a design or motif, from a non-dominant culture for the use by the dominant culture. This appropriation is thus a colonial act in the same way that European conquerors extracted rich natural resources from the territories they occupied over the past five hundred years. Just as colonization created national borders over land, it has also bounded current conceptualizations of the body and dress. This essay will explore the complex borders expressed in the clothing of the Tsotsil¹ Maya municipality of Zinacantán, Chiapas, Mexico. It will explore the ways in which clothing blurs the boundaries of body and land as well as show why cultural appropriation in fashion is a colonial act.
Zinacantec dress reveals a timeline of historic practices and individual preferences, allowing traje, or localized sets of dress, to be an expression of fashion. Zinacantán is located within the highlands of Chiapas, Mexico, where most of the population are Tsotsil Maya. Like other Mayan communities, in Mexico and Guatemala, Zinacantecs have their own traje linked to their hometowns. Each place has a unique recognizable style. The set of garments are a reference to the unique characteristics of the municipality. The way in which land is reflected in clothing can be considered an expression of cuerpo-territorio. Zaragocin and Caretta define cuerpo-territorio as the inseparable ontological relationship between the body and territory: "What is experienced by the body is simultaneously experienced by territory in a codependent relationship” (Zaragocin and Caretta 1504). A decolonized vision of fashion within Zinacantán will thus include its deep connection to the land.
Typically, women are responsible for making the traje, or the ensemble of garments that forms the base of Zinacantec fashion. They weave fabric on a backstrap loom, which has been used by Maya people for thousands of years. Sometimes, additional designs are incorporated using a brocade technique in which the weaver builds the designs as she weaves. Nowadays, it is more common for designs to be added after the fabric has been woven with either hand or machine embroidery. Women’s traje includes a skirt or nahua, an embroidered blouse or blusa, and a cape or mochebal. Men wear a poncho-like garment called pok’u’ul. Presently, men tend to wear the pok’u’ul over a dress shirt and slacks or black jeans for special occasions.
Fig 1. Poku’ul; Zinacantán, Chiapas, Mexico, c. 1970-1980; cotton, acrylic, handwoven on a backstrap loom with supplementary weft brocades at lower border and hand-embroidered flowers on the sides; Colección de Colectiva Malacate.
Zinacantec traje’s relation to land is first encoded into the form the set of garments. Zinacantán is the Nahuatl place name, which means “the place of the bats.” Women often describe their clothing as reflecting bat-like qualities through the deep black color of their skirts and the shape of their mochebales. The short cape mimics bat wings in the various forms the cape takes. Women wear it sometimes with the tasseled ties in the middle of their chest or they turn it so that it drapes asymmetrically over one shoulder. Babies are covered with the cape to hide them from the sun or to allow for privacy when breastfeeding. If it is especially sunny, some women will flip the cape over their head for shade. The cape most resembles bat wings as it changes positions according to the wearer’s desires.
Fig 2. Juana Bernarda Hernandez Gomez shows off her mochebal worn for the San Lorenzo celebration. August 10, 2023. Photo by author.
While the oldest examples of traje consisted of warp-based striped designs, the introduction of supplementary weft brocades added a new element for the expression of cuerpo-territorio. Geometric patterns that are formed by supplementary weft brocades are one such example of communal landscapes. Triangles, for instance, invoke the sacred mountains that surround the municipality.
During the 1970s, a resurgence of geometric brocades surfaced onto ceremonial belts and rectangular designs adorned the hem of men’s pok’u’ules (Morris and Karasik 184). This form of brocade was quite subtle, as the additional weft thread remained under the surface of the majority of the threads of these warp-faced textiles. Morris and Karasik speculate that the raised brocade commonly used today was introduced in the 1980s when more than 100,000 Guatemalan refugees arrived in the state of Chiapas to escape violent civil war. They believe that some Quiché women may have come to Zinacantán in their traditional huipiles with a brocade technique that uses two heddles. The weavers in Zinacantán began to use the same technique, but instead of the Quiché-style double-headed eagles and roses, the weavers turned to cross-stitch embroidery patterns to do something different (Morris and Karasik 186–87).
Today, the most distinct design demonstrating cuerpo-teritorrio within Zinacantec traje consist of highly visible flower motifs. Women began hand-embroidering flowers onto their clothing when flower cultivation in the municipality increased in the 1970s (Morris and Karasik 184; Molina Gómez et al. 586). The embroidered flowers are thus a visual demonstration of the changes to a landscape mapped onto the bodies of the municipality’s citizens through clothing.
Throughout, the 1980s and 1990s, Zinacantecs began traveling across Mexico to sell their flowers. Some of the trips to sell flowers were throughout the Yucatan. For Morris, “The floral designs and [machine embroidery] techniques are clearly derived from the Yucatecan Maya, who were using sewing machines to embellish their huipiles since the late nineteenth century” (Morris and Karasik 185). Embroidery machines began arriving in Zinacantán in the early 2000s. (Morris and Karasik 187–88, 191–92). While Zinacantecs may have taken initial inspiration from Yucatecan styles, machines allowed women to do more embroidery with more elaborate designs in the same amount of time they would have used for handwork.
I believe this shift in fashion coincides with the increase in floriculture as farmers could no longer earn a profit from growing corn with the advent of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) (Molina Gómez et al. 2017:586–87). The incorporation of agricultural technologies such as pesticides and herbicides also fueled the changes in agrarian production and transformed the landscape from milpa corn rows to flower fields. In a similar fashion, weavers continually use new craft-making technologies to demonstrate the environmental changes they witnessed.
The popularity of certain techniques, such as the use of an embroidery machine, has allowed women to express their styles in a different way. Fashion also looks for new forms belonging to the past. This was the case during the early years of the last decade, when cross-stitch embroidery resurfaced in 2010. During this same decade, some people experimented with different ways to cut the fabric when making their designs, which was a taboo act in the past (Morris and Karasik193). For example, women would cut part of the designs into the hem of their skirts and finish the raw edges with more embroidery. This past August in 2023, women at the San Lorenzo festival also showed off traje with crocheted flowers appliqued onto the fabric. To me this is also a localized interpretation of a trend that has been happening at a global level.
Zinacantán styles have also engaged with international fashion in other ways beyond an interest in crochet. In May 2023 when Dior released its 2024 Cruise collection by Italian designer Maria Grazia Chiuri. Inspired by Frida Kahlo. Look 71 (fig 3.) blatantly incorporated a pok’u’ul. While Dior and Chiuri claimed they worked in collaboration with communities (Sacal), Pedro Meza of Sna Jolobil, the collaborating cooperative, described the interaction as a transaction rather than a collaboration (Meza Meza). Many weavers within Zinacantán also expressed a feeling that this was not collaborative because Meza is from Tenejapa rather than Zinacantán and does not hold authority over Zinacantec traje. Sna Jolobil however, represents weavers from multiple regions and likely has collaborators in Zinacantán.
Fig 3. Look 71 in Christian Dior’s pre-summer 2024 collection; Mexico City. Maria Grazia Chiuri (n.d.)
The deceit of the two organizations is further demonstrated through a video on Dior’s website. In this video, a woman wearing traje from the town of San Juan Chamula is depicted doing the fine cross-stitch embroidery onto a pok’u’ul. Meza is the main speaker in the video with only a small portion spoken by an unnamed woman (Gaban-Mexican Excellence). Combined, these two elements make the labor, knowledge, and creative innovation of Zinacantec women weavers and embroidery-artists invisible. Zinacantecs have pointed out that the pok’u’ul looks like it was from 2018 because of the specific colors of the design and the type of cross stitch embroidery. The extra fine style shows the cross stitch was done on a new kind of embroidery machine, which came to Zinacantán around 2017-2018. Other weavers also felt frustrated by the use of man’s garment for women’s fashion as it disrespects local gender roles. Zinacantec weavers believe the design belongs to the individuals who made it. Weavers felt that the actual makers should be named rather than the co-operative that supported the transaction.
If traje is also an expression of cuerpo-territorio, the objects made by Zinacantec women are as much part of the land as the people. By taking the design of a pok’u’ul, Dior is literally engaging in a continued colonial extraction of materials and knowledge from colonized groups to feed a Euro-American desire for the “exotic” and “different.” This extraction is part of what has defined fashion as a phenomenon linked to colonization and capitalism. This is not an act of borrowing designs for inspiration to incorporate into another system of fashion. It is not a collaboration between an outside designer and local textile artists because it is not modified and is recognizable as a pok’u’ul. This is a form of violent looting. The relationship between the body and the land cannot be separated by a border in the case of Zinacantec fashion, and by extension the designs cannot be separated from the creators.
The concepts in this essay were formulated as part of the author’s fieldwork in Chiapas from June-November 2023. She would like to thank Cooperativa Mujeres Sembrando la Vida, Colectiva Malacate, and Nich Chiapas for their generosity and support of this research. She would also like to thank Juana Bernarda Hernandez Gómez, Victoria Gonzalez Hernandez, and Lucia Ruiz Perez for their invaluable work as co-researchers in this process. Thank you to Karla Perez Canovas, Daniela Brigida Lopéz Guitiérrez, and Dolores Maria Pérez Pérez for your astute insights and mentorship. Many thanks to all of the weavers who spent time talking to me about your lives sharing your opinions on cultural appropriation and protecting textiles designs.
¹Tsotsil is also commonly spelled as Tzotzil, however most speakers I have talked with indicate a preference for using an “s” rather than a “z”, so I will use the former in respect to my collaborators.
About the Author
Addison Nace is a PhD Candidate in Design Studies at the School of Human Ecology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is the vice president of the Board of Natik Esperanza, a nonprofit that supports grassroots organizations in Mexico and Guatemala. Nace’s research focuses on textile history, sustainable design, resistance, and repair across cultural boundaries. Her 2022 exhibition, Uncut Attire: How Weaving informs Wearables, which explores weaving as a primary design feature rather than silhouette in clothing around the globe, won the Costume Society of America’s Richard Martin Exhibition Award. Nace has also received a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship to research strategies of protection of the Indigenous knowledge embodied in Mayan textiles while they are also transformed into a tool for economic development. Her other projects include research on mending in the Anthropocene and alternative fashion systems.
Works Cited
Gaban-Mexican Excellence. Dior, 2023, https://www.dior.com/en_us/fashion/womens-fashion/ready-to-wear-shows/folder-defile-croisiere-2024/savoir-faire.
Meza Meza, Pedro. Personal Conversation. Interview by Addison Nace, 27 July 2023.
Molina Gómez, Hugo Josue, et al. “Producción de Flores y Uso de Recursos Naturales En Zinacantán, Chiapas.” Revista Mexicana de Ciencias Agrícolas, vol. 8, no. 3, May 2017, pp. 583–97.
Morris, Walter F., and Carol Karasik. Maya Threads: A Woven History of Chiapas. Thrums LLC, 2015.
Sacal, Andrea. “Dior Resort 2024 Was a Cornerstone for Mexican Fashion.” Hypebeast, 22 May 2023, https://hypebeast.com/2023/5/dior-resort-2024-womenswear-mexico-city-runway.
Zaragocin, Sofia, and Martina Angela Caretta. “Cuerpo-Territorio: A Decolonial Feminist Geographical Method for the Study of Embodiment.” Annals of the American Association of Geographers, vol. 111, no. 5, July 2021, pp. 1503–18. Taylor and Francis+NEJM, https://doi.org/10.1080/24694452.2020.1812370.