Huipil
The huipil is the loose cotton blouse woven and embroidered by Maya women of highland Guatemala, each town preserving its own colours, patterns and motifs that encode lineage, landscape and the sacred order. It is made on the backstrap loom, a pre-Columbian technology in which the weaver controls the tension with her own body, and the knowledge of patterns passes from mother to daughter. Motifs such as mountains, quetzal birds, suns and ancestors link the garment to Maya cosmology, and Ix Chel, the goddess of the moon and of weaving, is said to have taught the craft. Spanish colonial authoriti