The Ladies of Chichicastenango

Maya Ladies Chichi
Originally uploaded by thegreatplotnik.

The K'iche Maya at the Sunday Market in Chichicastenango are short, and the tourists are tall. It is very crowded. The Great Plotnik took this photo holding his camera over his head as he inched forward.

Each K'iche, Mam, Kakichel or other Maya village has its own colors, woven by women in exact patterns and seen on clothing and on cloth. As Plotnik passed from one village through the next, on the drive up to Chichi, he could easily see where one village's women stopped and the next village's women began.

In the market in Antigua, Plotnik saw one very old woman carrying a bag of avocadoes on her gray head that must have weighed a hundred pounds. The bag rested on a red cloth the exact color of her blouse.

In the photo, Chicastenango's colors are worn by the woman at the left, carrying a red mantel around her shoulders, probably with a baby inside. Plotnik saw the colors worn by the woman in the front of the photo in villages closer to Lake Atitlan.

The men wear blue jeans or blousy work pants, and black t-shirts or blue work shirts, and sandals. Colors seem to apply only to women.

At one shop, a young teenage girl with a baby sleeping against her back wrapped in her cloth, asked Ducknik how long babies nurse in Ducknik's country. Ducknik said 'it depends, not too long.' The girl's eyes got very big.

Old men sell limestone rocks. He weighs out a customer's order, breaks a rock against another until the larger rocks have become small pebbles. Then he grinds the pebbles to a powder in a mortar, using another rock as a pestle. The women use the limestone powder as an abrasive to remove the outer layers from their corn, before they grind it into masa for tortillas.

Guatemalan tortillas are twice as thick as Mexican tortillas, but smaller. The best ones are charred, so that they almost crunch when you fold them in half, fill them with avocado, cheese and salsa and take a big bite.