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Clothing the Body in Otherness
the incident made me ask what it was that each of us had seen, and I
understood better how people come to believe in supernatural forces.
That Alyssa resorted to a narrative citing Maya metaphors and be-
liefs to ease the situation emphasized the instrumentality of tales in
human interaction. But perhaps most importantly, the dreamlike pace
of this small act of violence had induced the imagination that opens
understanding. The overlaid image of the terror of conquest evoked
the entrenched structural violence in Guatemala, forcing me to seek
deeper historical patterns. To ignore the currents of violence in Gua-
temala is to completely misrepresent the conditions of production of
the Maya self and culture. But equally, to do justice to Maya world-
views and their tenacity in the face of oppression, emphasis must be
laid on the positive aspects of Maya self-representations. Ultimately, I
needed to find ways to reconcile the contrast created between the en-
chantments of clothing and the magic of the tales and the undercur-
rents of violence that the same tales brought out.
Dressing in Alternate Skins
On the most recent visit, in May 2004 , I awaited Vera and little Alyssa
at the San Francisco airport until they appeared, exhausted by post
9 – 11 security woes, delayed five hours in immigration, but still up-
right and beautiful in their traje. Again I was struck by the central-
ity of the cloth to their very being and over the next weeks watched
them at two conferences for textile artists in the San Francisco Bay
area as they wove the magic of presence, productive on their looms
and through the weaving, in the world.
Guatemalan Maya women are expected to have command of the
idiom of clothing (Goffman 1959 , 74 ), and dressing is an “everyday
secular performance” to be judged for its “aptness, fitness, propriety,
and decorum” (Goffman 1959 , 55 ). As Vera’s nawal tale conveys, there
is a significant contrast between the valued performance of a woman
dressed in the hand-woven products of her labor, keeping still in her
house, and the ambiguous role that she occupies as the other, a trans-
forming wife. Such nawal figures have lost moral and social agency,
having chosen to move outside the sphere of the house, when the term
“house” encompasses both domestic space and lineage.
