This paper will elucidate the resilience mechanism created by Mayan women's weaving and clothing from the sequence of events that led to the lion design that began to be woven in the fall of 1999 by the women of the Mayan village of Santa Catarina Ixtahuacán, in the central Guatemalan Highlands, being duplicated in the neighboring village of Nahualá in the summer of 2002. I focus on various designs of both villages with which decorate the woven cloth and a discourse about borrowing and lending the woven cloth, which is had in common between Santa Catarina Ixtahuacán and Nahualá.
The lion design was created in the midst of a land ownership dispute with Nahualá over the relocation destination of Santa Catarina to "Alaska" (the name given by locals to the new town) in November 1999 after a hurricane had caused major landslides in the original town. This design eventually started also being woven in the neighboring village of Nahualá.
The women of both villages use back strap looms to make cloth with a variety of designs, including that of the lion, and then use this cloth to make a type of tunic that they wear called a huipil. The reasons why the women of both villages while looking askance at the men in confrontation over a land ownership dispute weaved the lion design and wore the same huipil will be analyzed through the study that follows the changes in clothing between the late 1890s and the present, as well as ethnographic data.
By following the footsteps of the lion design's creation in Santa Catarina and its spread to Nahualá, quiet indications of a return to friendly relations through the sharing of the design between the women of the two villages can be seen. Through this process, which was neither intentional nor political, each village would make its own original clothes and, by continuing to wear them, each and every woman drew on this power of self-healing, which in turn was a form of resilience. This type of work, which continues to be done by women to this day, is supported by the looms that date back to the ancient Mayan civilization and the legendary "costumbre" ("customs") handed down by the ancestors of each village.
This resilience has progressed up to now in a unique way by containing the cultural continuity that links modern women with those of the time of the Mayan civilization through the use of the back strap loom, while also adding each era's changes to the woven fabrics and clothes.
It can therefore be said that there continues to be potential for collective representations of peace and coexistence to be nurtured by the hands of the Mayan women of the Guatemalan Highlands.
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