Janferie Stoneof glorious color through a street or shopping mall. This teaching is
compounded when she travels with her daughter, as she conveys to
the next generation the need to proudly wear iconography and col-
ors that refer to her people and place, despite the blandishments of
other kinds of distinction deployed by global Western culture. While
American response to her being varies, factoring in the viewer’s class
and ethnicity, individuals do pay attention (if only through a momen-
tary glance) and many engage in exclamations of beauty, compliments,
and questions about Vera’s place of origin.
Ways of dressing are formative in bodily habits that are instilled
through repeated injunctions to children about their clothes and be-
havior. Young girls, as they are wrapped in their corte, are taught
how to fold the layers of cloth over the gathered huipil, and then to
align their fajas (belts), drawing the spine into an erect posture. The
female’s shoulders should be squared so that the entire design on the
huipil may be read. Correct performance is assessed in the eyes of
others, for there are few mirrors or large plates of glass in rural Gua-
temala to encourage the habitual self-evaluation in which members
of Western societies indulge. Marks of distinction scripted in bodily
coverings renew motifs and stake claims of belonging to families, or-
ganizations of people, and their places. While public schools may re-
quire uniforms for boys, many accept traje for girls. For women, wear-
ing traje while selling goods in the market is an essential part of the
display, read as carefully as a label upon their goods. Contemporary
local contests to choose the queens for processions extol traditional
dress and values for girls and are part of a secular process of defining
and displaying indigenous presence against Ladino institutions (Hen-
drickson 1995 , 92 – 94 , 116 ).
In sacred venues, dressing the saints or the Virgin is an act of de-
votion for the wives of the Cofradias. The process creates a path of
knowledge, power, and encoding that travels through the genera-
tions. First, a weaver may invest the piece through iconographic sig-
nifiers, as when Irma Otzoy traces, in the work of Asturias de Barrios
in Comolapa, the way in which weavers “transform objects of a rit-
ual character into woven motifs and are thus designing for survival”
(Otzoy 1996 a, 153 ). But the woven piece then carries instrumental