Late one January evening in 1992 , I went to meet with a Kaq chikel
Maya woman from the area of Lake Atitlan, in Guatemala.^1 Vera had
been visiting the northern coast of California and teaching backstrap
weaving at an art center. I wound my way along the roads of the Cal-
ifornia coastal range to the house of her friend Alyssa, where, over
cups of tea and with much laughter, Vera plied words as deftly as her
fingers moved when they worked the warp threads of her loom; she
formed a portal through which we left the familiar world to enter an-
other reality.
Vera’s native tongue is Kaq chikel, lending cadence to the Span-
ish used as the lingua franca in market towns around Lake Atitlun,
where three different Mayan languages are spoken. I asked questions
in English, and Alyssa translated into Spanish. I sought to draw out the
story of her life that Vera had recounted a few days earlier at a small
grade school. There she had created a marketplace for the children,
evoking her pueblo where narrow streets lead down to Lake Atitlun,
suspended between volcanic cones. I had been so intrigued by Vera’s
aura of quiet confidence and the identity she established through her
traje (traditional dress) that I had sought this further meeting. As the
night went on, our conversation moved across a divide of difference,
working on the assumption that we held a common reality based on
experiences such as childbearing, familial interactions, and the dy-
namics of power between women and men. If I did not completely
understand her answers, Alyssa translated, but Vera understood Eng-
lish as well as I understood her Spanish, and she interjected explana-
- Clothing the Body in Otherness
janferie stone