SPINNING & WEAVING
AMONGST THE HUICHOL:

The first written account of Huichol spinning and weaving of wool was made by Carl Lumholtz 100 years ago. He bought many examples of what they made at that time for museums and also took photographs. His records show a wide range of beautiful designs on pouches, belts, and shirts all made on 'back strap looms' with yarn spun with a spindle. He also obtained examples of wool dyed with a locally occurring form of indigo.

The back strap loom is an elemental form of loom, where one end of the warp is anchored to a tree or a stake, and the other is attached to the weaver with a belt. The tension in the warp is produced by the weight of the weaver leaning backwards.

Of all the various types of weaving, that Lumholtz collected the most outstanding was the double cloth. 'Double cloth' is a method of weaving intricate patterns in two colours that produces extremely firm hard wearing cloth. 'Double cloth' literally is two layers of cloth, one of each colour, woven simultaneously one above the other. Each time a colour change is required, the layer beneath is brought to the top. Thus the colours of a pattern on the reverse side of a piece of 'double cloth' are inverted. It is easy to understand that weaving double cloth is is very complicated and that there are few places in the world where people know how to do it.

The Huichol highly prize traditional patterns which are passed down from mother to daughter and vary over the different areas of the Sierra.


RECENT CHANGES:

Most of patterns woven today are the same as before, but using artificial wool or acrylic yarn. The same types of pouches and belts are made, only the shirts have almost disappeared, also nobody uses the indigo dye anymore although there are still a few women who remember how their parents used the dye. The use of real wool has almost completely disappeared from the Sierra. We have noted five principle reasons for this:

1) Now that there are roads up to the Sierra, the Huichol are much more mobile and integrated into the surrounding economy. They are much less self sufficient and more dependent on money than before. They buy cooking oil, soap, soft drinks and so on, and so they have begun to value their time in monetary terms like everyone else. Thus very slow activities like spinning and weaving wool tend to be left behind in favour of more remunative ones such as working on tobacco plantations outside of the Sierra.

2) Woollen yarn can no longer be bought in the shops. Acrylic yarn is ready spun, thereby almost halving the time required to make an article. This makes it possible to make some money using acrylic fibre, whereas with wool which has to spun from the fleece on a spindle it is not possible to make any money at all.

3) Acrylic fibre is readily available in a wide variety of bright colours which the Huichol like, whereas woollen fibre is restricted to the natural colours of sheep, that's to say tones of dark brown (almost black) to light 'cafe con leche', and then various tones of grey to white. Previously the Huichol used to dye wool a dark blue colour with an indigo dye plant that grows in the Barranca area of the Sierra, but this colour is not as attractive to them as the strong colours of acrylic fibres so the practice of dyeing wool has been dropped.

4) Sheep which were common in the Huichol Sierra have been largely displaced by goats partly because of the declining demand for wool, but also because goats give birth to twins more frequently than sheep, and are generally more hardy so that a flock of goats increases more rapidly than a flock of sheep. Also,in Mexico goats are always easy to sell for slaughter to make the sought after traditional goat meat stew called 'birria'.

5) The climate in the Sierra can be very extreme with frost and snow on the high land in winter. They used to make woollen blankets and shirts but now cheap acrylic blankets are available, and a lot of clothing is given away by aid programs. Thus there is less urgency for them to produce warm blankets and clothes for themselves. Unfortunately this type of western clothing starts to replace their own cultural expression.