One of the true beauties of Oaxaca is not the city itself, but the ring of villages that surround it. Many of these villages are focal points for specific art forms. In San Bartolo Coyotepec you’ll find a cluster of artisans creating traditional pottery from the local black clay. San Martín Tilcajete is where alebrijes are carved from copal wood and painted in psychedelic colors and patterns. In Ocotlán de Morelos, smiths forge toledanos steel into knives, swords, and letter openers.

We visited Teotitlán del Valle, the center of traditional Zapotec rug weaving, about a fifty minute drive east of Oaxaca . We had found a little shop tucked away near the Jardín Etnobotánico in Oaxaca that sold rugs made by the shopkeeper’s family in Teotitlán, and fell in love with both the quality of the weaving and the fascinating intersection of traditional and modern designs. It took very little arm twisting to sign up for a studio tour.

Fe y Lola Weaving Studio

Fe (Federico) and Lola are the third generation of weavers in their family. We were met at the studio by their son, Omar, who, like his parents, is a passionate defender of tradition and a committed modernist in both method and design. Omar was able to eloquently communicate the elements that had drawn us to the work in the first place.

Omar explained that weaving as an art from went back generations in Teotitlán, but that it had traditionally been the weaving of fabric for garments, both for personal wear and trade around the region. Then in the 60s, rugs had taken off, and many of the local artisans switched towards producing rugs primarily for commercial consumption. That transition unsurprisingly led to a focus on speed and margin. Traditional dyes were replaced by chemical dyes, which produced more consistent results with less effort. Production was broken down into specializations. Designs focussed on what was selling best at any given time. The market, as it will, trumped the artisan.

But there will always be holdouts, like Fe and Lola. Their studio isn’t vertical from a materials standpoint (they don’t raise sheep, spin wool, or harvest their own cochineal), but they are vertical in process and production. They create their own dyes, grinding the cochineal and the indigo, and mixing in other natural ingredients such as pomegranate and wild marigold. Most importantly, Fe, Lola, and Omar each design and weave their own patterns, and each dyes their own wool, so the colors are precisely what each piece requires.

Other than creating his own rugs, Omar’s focus is bridging traditional and scientific methods. He explained that Zapotec is a spoken, not written language, so recipes and methods have never been documented. Knowledge was passed down within families from generation to generation the old fashioned way: watch and learn.

But that’s a fragile way to retain knowledge. It’s like learning to cook a family dish from your abuela. A pinch of this, some of that, and you’ll know when it’s done. That chain is very easy to break if every generation isn’t fully bought in, and at some point all you have left is the memory of the taste, as no one can actually create the dish anymore.

To preserve the knowledge, Omar has set about to create recipes that can be accurately reproduced, and has worked to share that knowledge outside the family, so the traditions can continue to live and prosper. He has followed Fe and Lola around with thermometers and stopwatches, recording the delicate interactions across time, temperature, and stubborn materials until he could consistently reproduce their effects. Fe and Lola themselves have no need of Omar’s recipes. A pinch of this, some of that, and they know when it’s done.

The Tour

Omar walked us though the process from start to finish, from creating the dyes to dying the wool to weaving the rugs.

It starts with creating the dyes. Reds are created by grinding cochineal insects, blues from indigo.

Of course, the point of all of this chemical trickery is to create beautiful rugs. Fe, Lola, and Omar all have very particular visions of the kinds of rugs they want to make. They’re all built at some level on traditional motifs, and they definitely steal ideas from one another. But they also have recognizable esthetics.

Fe is the master craftsman and technician, weaving complicated shapes and outlines with astonishing precision. Lola is the aesthete, working with a more natural color palette and organic color transitions, with freeform takes on traditional shapes. Omar is the unabashed modernist. The traditional motifs are still a starting point, and peek out from beneath his designs, but he’s intent on pushing the boundaries of the art form.

Choosing just one rug to take home with us seemed both daunting and mean. Daunting because of the insane variety and ridiculous beauty of each piece, and mean because choosing a rug by one of them meant rejecting the work of the other two.

We wound up getting one of Fe’s pieces. Despite the attraction of their dyeing process, none of the wool in this piece has been dyed. The color variation is based on the wool’s natural color from different breeds of sheep. What spoke to us about this piece was the interaction between the traditional designs and the clean, modern graphic presentation. The stripes of traditional motifs (you can see it particularly well in the third photo) are practically needlepoint in their scale and precision, yet they were produced on a wooden shuttle loom. Watching Fe at the loom and then seeing this was mind boggling. It seemed impossible.

Seeing Fe, Lola, and Omar work felt like stepping back in time, to an older, slower tradition. Yet their collective creative output makes it clear that this is not just a rote recreation of the work of their forebears, but an active, engaged, modern art form, in dialog with the world around it, full of life and hope. And fire.

“Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire.”

― Gustav Mahler