Going to Market
Guatemala, 1999
Hélène Lawler

Each Mayan village has its own colours and patterns, woven into the shirts and dresses of its inhabitants. While this produces stunning visual effects today, these patterns were used to identify people, to define where they came from. Each shirt is made by hand and takes over six weeks to produce, making it difficult to obtain for disguise should one try and move between villages. The government used to employ this as a method of control over its indigenous population.
 

© 2002 The Fletcher School, Tufts University