In the Guatemalan highlands, a woman sits at her backstrap loom at dawn. Their hands repeat a gesture that has crossed generations. Next to her, in a plastic box, she keeps pieces of old fabrics: fragments of inherited huipils, embroidery that she no longer uses, but refuses to throw away. “One girl told me that she could still feel her mother’s hands on hers when she knitted. That’s the spirituality behind knitting,” says Joyce Bennett, an American anthropologist she has interviewed, in an email exchange.
Huipiles are blouses woven on a backstrap loom that have been covering the torso of Mayan women for centuries. In each one, symbols are intertwined that tell who you are, where you come from, what community you belong to, what role you occupy or even what life stage you are going through. There are no two alike, because each one is loaded with identity, spirituality and memory. “It’s like our second skin,” explains Milvian Aspuac, director of the Women’s Association for the Development of Sacatepéquez (AFEDES) and coordinator of the National Movement of Weavers, in a video call.
Its threads sustain a collective history that today faces a global system that extracts symbols with the same ease with which it exports goods. In recent years, the National Weavers’ Movement has denounced that its traditional designs appear reproduced in international markets without recognition or benefit for the communities that create them.
Although the most high-profile cases have occurred in neighboring countries, the pattern is repeated. In recent years, on several occasions for using Mayan motifs on a blouse without mentioning its origin or asking permission from the communities. The gesture summarizes a logic that crosses borders, where ancestral designs become ornament and are stripped of context and meaning.
In Guatemala, this same inequality is aggravated by the lack of a legal framework that recognizes the collective ownership of fabrics. In June of this year, the organization , dedicated to the analysis of intellectual property and regulations in Latin America, reported that the National Movement of Weavers has taken an initiative to the Congressional Women’s Commission to recognize, after years in which, in the absence of legal protection, the unauthorized reproduction of their designs by global fashion brands, tourist companies and local businesses has become widespread.
Every time they cut our tissues, they mutilate us
Milvian Aspuac, director of the Women’s Association for the Development of Sacatepéquez (AFEDES) and coordinator of the National Movement of Weavers
This lack of protection explains why, for organizations like , cultural appropriation “is not an anecdote,” but rather the reflection of “a system that grants the Global North the right to take even that which it does not understand.” “It is power, domination and cultural erasure,” the entity denounces by email.
Deprotection
In Guatemala, weavers have documented for years situations of lack of protection and conflicts with designers and intermediaries who reproduce or claim rights to motifs that belong to the communities.
In 2017, the National Weavers’ Movement denounced the brand for marketing garments with Mayan designs without authorization and for the insulting nature of its name. “María” has been used derogatorily in Guatemala to refer to indigenous women, while “chula” reinforced the burden of mockery and exoticization. That same year, the Constitutional Court of Guatemala ruled in favor of the weavers in an unconstitutionality action filed by them and urged Congress to legislate to recognize collective intellectual property over their fabrics. “Every time they cut our tissues, they mutilate us,” explains Aspuac.
In 2020, the Constitutional Court also ruled against the Guatemalan Tourism Institute (INGUAT) for using the image of Mayan women weavers as in their campaigns, in a context in which they did not participate or benefit from the income generated by that promotion.
“Racism as an oppressive system has historically caused the dispossession of the cultural identity and livelihoods of indigenous peoples. In the name of civilization, nationalism, folklore, tourism and, more cynically, progress, they have commodified our lives, because they treat us as dispossessable beings and not as subjects of politics and rights,” he denounced in 2022.
“Global fashion wants inspiration,” says anthropologist Joyce Bennett, “but what it often does is extraction. They take designs that have been collectively protected for centuries and register them as their own. It is silent but devastating violence.”
In 2025, looting has become more sophisticated. The legal vacuum has opened the door to mass reproduction—from industrial machinery and mechanical production—of their traditional fabrics. According to them, they already face competition from industrial producers, power looms and brands that patent their designs.
The creators of the National Movement of Weavers emphasize that this process is usually justified “in the name of culture”, although for them it is not about respect or collaboration, but rather a form of plagiarism that directly competes with their work.
The anthropologist, who has studied for years how Mayan weavers navigate between legal systems that were not designed for them, points out in an email that, despite everything, they have been forced to resort to intellectual property, “although this framework responds to Western logics of individual authorship very different from Mayan collective practices.”
Faced with plagiarism, women have responded with organization. In 2014, AFEDES promoted the National Movement of Weavers, which today brings together 30 organizations from 18 Mayan linguistic communities and more than a thousand members.
That same year they promoted the legal path that would later lead to the unconstitutionality action resolved by the Court in 2017, when the court urged the Congress of Guatemala to recognize the collective intellectual property of Mayan textiles. Since then, they have promoted different legislative proposals – such as and another presented in 2022 – with the aim of communities being recognized as collective authors of their designs.
Eleven years after the start of that first action, Congress has still not approved a law that grants them legal protection. Faced with legislative inaction, the Movement has redoubled the pressure and, in , celebrated to demand real progress.
Weaving the future, teaching the past
Meanwhile, the weavers advance on their own. In several municipalities they have created Knitting Councils that register and defend their own patterns. They also open popular schools to recover lost techniques and transmit knowledge to young women. “We want to document and protect the designs in our own way, not under the logic of individual patents, but as collective heritage,” explains Milvian Aspuac.
A new generation is transforming the tradition. Young weavers use Instagram and TikTok to show their pieces, sell through community networks and organize workshops to teach their passion. In Santiago Atitlán, the artisans of Cojolya share their huipils woven on backstrap looms online and open the doors of their workshop to those who want to learn. In Quetzaltenango, the women of TRAMA Textiles teach, sell and narrate their craft on digital platforms.
If a brand wants to use a design, they should talk to the community, ask if they can do it, and give back fairly. It is not about prohibiting, but about deciding together how and what our fabrics are used for.
Milvian Aspuac, director of the Women’s Association for the Development of Sacatepéquez (AFEDES) and coordinator of the National Movement of Weavers
In parallel, the discussion is also taking place at the international level. The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), the specialized UN agency in charge of coordinating global intellectual property systems, adopted in May 2024 after more than two decades of negotiations.
The text requires for the first time that patent applications reveal the origin of genetic resources and associated traditional knowledge, a significant step towards the recognition of the collective rights of indigenous peoples at the international level, although it is not specifically focused on tissues.
For the weavers, the solution is through respect and dialogue. “If a brand wants to use a design, it must talk to the community, ask if it can do so and reward fairly. It is not about prohibiting, but about deciding together how and what our fabrics are used for,” emphasizes Milvian Aspuac. “We cannot talk about ethical fashion if we do not listen to those who have protected this knowledge for centuries,” recalls anthropologist Joyce Bennett.
In one of the community schools, a young woman proudly holds her first huipil. “I did this,” he says, with a mixture of amazement and strength. In that gesture there is a whole possibility: that the future is not imposed from outside, but is woven from within, strand by strand.
