Chichicastenango comes alive on market days. Every Thursday and Sunday, stalls of bright Mayan textiles, jewelry, and handicrafts line the mountainous town in northwest Guatemala. Inside the maze of trinkets and crafts is a 400-year-old church where Mayan priests perform rituals. The smell of their incense floats through the stalls.
This is where Rafaela Tecum Conoz, a 44-year-old indigenous Mayan woman, sells tablecloths, serving napkins, and huipiles, the traditional blouses with floral and geometric patterns in bright greens, blues, yellows, and pinks that embody Mayan culture.
“They come from our past,” she says of the textiles she designs and weaves herself. “I’m proud of wearing my huipil because it’s not easy to make and not just any person can do it.”
Tourists travel from around the world to buy textiles from Chichicastenango market. In recent years, the textiles have cropped up everywhere from boutiques in the capital Guatemala City to the websites of international fashion designers.
The textiles are raking in money — but not for the women making them.
Today, about half of the population in Guatemala identifies as indigenous Mayan, and indigenous women are more likely to be sick, illiterate, and poor than other Guatemalans. By the age of seven, 54 percent of indigenous girls attend school compared to 75 percent of non-indigenous girls (and to 71 percent of indigenous boys), according to a chapter on Guatemala in the book Exclusion, Gender and Schooling.
They often don’t have the connections or resources to break into international handicrafts markets. Non-indigenous designers — from Guatemala and around the world — step in, selling the textiles to international clients at a significant mark-up. Indigenous women say they’re not being compensated fairly, and, in some cases, deliberately cut out of the process.
It’s a problem that indigenous people face around the world. From Native Americans in the U.S. to the Maasai in East Africa, outsiders often co-opt designs and don’t necessarily share profits.
Conoz thinks that a growing international trend could change that: classifying indigenous handicrafts as intellectual property. A collection of indigenous rights groups in Guatemala are proposing a law that would bar non-indigenous people or companies from profiting off their designs without credit and compensation.
It would mean that Conoz, and thousands of women like her, would have the chance to earn a better living — no small feat for indigenous women in a country where the law has rarely protected them.
For 55-year old Gloria Estela García, weaving is deeply personal. During the country’s 36-year civil war, when indigenous people were systematically killed by the military, García never stopped wearing her huipil. The war ended in 1996 but before that, many indigenous Guatemalans changed their dress to avoid attention. During the war, García’s mother advised her to wear different clothes to try to get a job, but García, the rebellious one in her family, refused.
“If they want me like this, they can give me work,” she says. “If not, I’m not going to change.”
The patterns and colors of García’s huipil tell the story of her Mayan ancestors. “It expresses the time of the Spanish conquest and all of the sadness and sorrows that our ancestors went through,” García says, referring to the brutal colonization that started in the 16th century and lasted about 200 years. An estimated 90 percent of the native population in the Americas died during that period.
Weaving has also helped García through difficult times. At 17, her mom pressured her to get married to a man who turned out to be an abusive alcoholic. “I would start to weave and I would forget that he was drunk,” she says. “When I’m really sad and I want to forget all my troubles, what I do is weave. When I start to weave I forget everything. I believe that weaving can help us women as a form of psychological therapy.”
She left him after years of abuse and began supporting her six daughters on her own. It wasn’t always easy. “When you are poor, it limits you. As a mother, you want the best for your kids, but for economic reasons, you can’t give it to them,” she says.
García wants to pass weaving to her daughters, like her mother did, but it’s hard to make money weaving anymore. “If my daughters don’t weave, eventually no one is going to and little by little [the practice] is going to end,” García says.
WWomen like García usually charge around $135 for a new textile — one fully woven shirt or another piece of a similar size that requires months of work, and $5 to $7 if they resell it after it has already been worn. For years, that’s what their customers, mainly other indigenous women, have been able to pay.
But the designs are beautiful, and non-indigenous designers have taken them — to great success, for themselves.
One well-known example is Maria’s Bag, a company founded by Alida Boer, Miss Guatemala 2007, that sells Mayan-patterned bags for $495 to $1,345.
Boer says she pays a fair price to the 500 weavers she employs in a story for The Week, but does not specify their salaries. But the Women’s Association for the Development of Sacatepequez, the indigenous women’s rights organization known by the Spanish acronym AFEDES that is leading the intellectual property fight, is accusing the company of exploitation.
“We are considered second-class citizens and even the work we produce is considered less. When it passes through other hands, it is considered more valuable, but none of that returns to the community,” says Angelina Aspuac, the advocacy chair of AFEDES.
Maria’s Bag is not the only example. Ix Style sells sandals with indigenous textiles for $89. UNIK’ by Anita Lara sells high-end clothes and accessories made from Mayan textiles. Prices are not listed online. Each company claims to be supporting Mayan women in Guatemala, but AFEDES says this is not the case.
Some women say that non-indigenous designers aren’t just copying their designs, but trying to steal them permanently. García was proud when a designer from Guatemala City was so impressed with her handwoven tablecloth that she commissioned her to make another, but with a horizontal instead of vertical pattern. García was eager to bring her work to a larger audience, until she realized she had fallen into a trap.
“When I finished the design, she told me that I no longer had the right to produce it again. She said ‘You can’t make this tablecloth again because now it’s my design,’’ García says. “How is it your design if I did it? But she said that she told me how to do it.”
García believes the designer planned to replicate her work by machine at a lower cost, without sharing any of the profits with García. BRIGHT Magazine was unable to contact the designer.
“They just copy us, and it’s so easy for them,” García says of machine-made copies. “But for us, it’s much more difficult.”
If you ask around, these kinds of disputes are familiar to indigenous weavers. But indigenous women hope they are finally turning the tables.
AAFEDES has heard dozens of stories of exploitation over the years and by 2015, they decided they had had enough.
Seeking power in numbers, AFEDES banded together with other indigenous rights groups and started organizing for an intellectual property law. They were inspired by successful examples in Australia, New Zealand and South Africa.
The law would establish collective ownership of the designs, recognizing that ancestral knowledge, passed down for generations, can’t belong to a single person. It would require any person or brand to ask permission and agree on compensation with the original artist before using a design, spreading the profits through the community.
“With the law, business owners wouldn’t be able to take work away from me,” says García, who, along with Conoz, has been involved in developing and promoting the proposed law. “It would help to create a better economy for our kids so that they don’t have to find other work outside of our own customs and traditions.”
AFEDES proposes having a specialized council, led by indigenous people, to oversee these cases and determine the best way to distribute the funds.
But while the constitutional court voted for the law last November, obligating Congress to pass it, politicians have dragged their feet. Guatemalan Congress lacks the sense of urgency that women like García feel.
International human rights law is on the side of the weavers. In 2007, the United Nations published a Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, requiring the state to help indigenous people “maintain, control, protect, and develop their intellectual property over such cultural heritage, traditional knowledge, and traditional cultural expressions.”
This showed the magnitude of the issue around the world, says Mauro Barelli, a professor at City University of London who researches international human rights law. It also meant indigenous people had international support for momentum they had been building for years.
Indigenous Australians have successfully protected the intellectual property of artwork, music, and even medicine. In 2001, the country convicted the first person for Aboriginal art fraud, art dealer John O’Loughlin, for selling copied Aboriginal paintings. Aboriginal artists continue to use indigenous intellectual property laws to protect their culture through patents, trademarks, and court cases.
In 2001, the San, an indigenous group of 100,000 people across South Africa, Botswana, Namibia, and Angola brought a case against the South African Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) for patenting a plant called Hoodia, which the San have traditionally used to curb hunger. In 2003, CSIR and the San reached an agreement, which includes giving the indigenous group 6 percent of all royalties from medicines made with the plant.
In 2012, the Navajo tribe in the U.S. filed a case against Urban Outfitters for using their name to sell products including underwear, flasks, and jewelry. They argued that it violated the Indian Arts and Crafts Act, which prohibits false advertising of products claiming to be from Native American tribes. In 2016, they reached a settlement for an undisclosed amount.
International law is just a framework, explains Barelli. It’s these kinds of national cases that really have an impact.
LLegal victories, however, are hard — and the implementation even harder.
Mexican indigenous groups are still waiting for comprehensive legislation after a 2015 case in which the indigenous Mixe community of Oaxaca brought a case against a designer who used a traditional blouse pattern in her collection without crediting the community.
Many activists urged Mexico to update its intellectual property laws to offer better protection, but that has yet to happen.
A common issue when it comes to implementation of these laws is the difference between understanding of ownership under Western law, which focuses on the individual, versus many indigenous communities which emphasize collective ownership.
Countries such as Brazil have rewritten their laws to recognize the collective understanding of ownership in indigenous communities, but struggle when it comes time for a verdict in intellectual property cases. How does a judge determine collective ownership of a design, artwork, or medicine?
One way is for indigenous artists to present cases as a group. This worked well in Australia, including a 1993 case where a group of Aboriginal artists sued a company for selling carpets that stole their designs. They won and damages were paid to the group, similar to a class action lawsuit, but with more discretion given to the group to decide how to distribute the funds.
AFEDES hopes Guatemala will be added to the list of successful cases.
“The law would dignify the weavers through respect for their work. Plus, economically it would be an act of justice if the law recognizes the work of these weavers,” says Aspuac. “For the indigenous women who have been laboring and wearing these textiles for thousands of years, these textiles will continue to be a form of resistance.”
“Without the law, it will be how it’s always been,” says García. But with the law, “They won’t be able to take away our right to make our own designs.”
Like García, Conoz is also a single mother. Her husband went to the U.S. about a decade ago and stopped contacting the family shortly afterwards. She often has trouble putting food on her children’s table, and sending them to a good school is an expense she can’t afford.
Conoz thinks a law to protect her designs could help change that.
“With my kids, sometimes I feel ashamed. My youngest son told me, ‘Mom, I want to be an engineer.’ I had to tell him, ‘Son, I don’t have any money for you to keep studying,’” says Conoz.
The fact that Conoz can barely make ends meet makes it even harder to see other people profiting off the textiles she’s so proud of.
“Where I live, women don’t have many work opportunities. Most of us live off this type of work,” says Conoz. “If I could earn more money from my designs, it would be a huge step forward for my family.”
