HOW PONCHOS GOT MORE AUTHENTIC AFTER COMMERCE CAME TO CHIAPAS.

• Author: Postrel, Virginia
• Position: HISTORY

IN 1969, THE Zinacantec Maya of Mexico's Nabenchauk Valley all wore essentially the same clothes: square ponchos and shawls over simple cotton shirts, shorts, and skirts.

Their outfits bore red and white stripes, with the proportions dictated by the type of garment. Ponchos and shawls had a lot of red and a little white, making them look pink from a distance, while women's blouses were mostly white with two narrow red stripes dividing them into thirds.

"All clothing, for toddlers up to adults, conformed to a closed stock of about four patterns," Patricia Marks Greenfield recalls in her book Weaving Generations Together: Evolving Creativity in the Maya of Chiapas. When she first came to the valley in the southern Mexican state that year, the clothes, like Zinacantec culture, had barely changed in decades.

The standard designs reflected the villagers'reverence for tradition, expressed in their Tzotzil language as baz'i, or the "true way." "To learn to weave," writes Green field, a University of California, Los Angeles developmental psychologist, "was to learn to reproduce those patterns." There was no room for self-expression or experimentation.

Greenfield lived in Nabenchauck in 1969 and 1970 while studying how girls there learned to weave. Zinacantec women used traditional backstrap looms, a simple but versatile technology in which warp threads wind back and forth around two parallel sticks, crossing in the middle. One stick is attached to a strap wrapped around a tree or post, the other to a strap around the weaver's waist, allowing her to adjust the tension by leaning forward or back.

Greenfield returned to Chiapas in 1991. In her absence, Zinacantec life had changed radically. Villagers had shifted from subsistence farming and weaving to commerce, leaving their homes in the isolated valley for contact with the larger world. They now grew flowers to sell in Mexico City and ran shops on the main road selling snacks and textiles to tourists.

Men wore store-bought shirts and work pants. Some owned vans and ran transit businesses connecting the village to larger towns. Women bought blouses imported from nearby Guatemala and furnished their own looms with acrylic yarns made in distant factories. Many had invested in sewing machines. When someone wanted an especially fancy blouse for a fiesta, she might hire another woman to make it for her. Specialization and trade had come to the valley.

In the well-established romantic narrative, all this...