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For years I’d been hearing edges of rumors based on third hand accounts of old stories. They said there was silk up in the Sierra Madre. Here, in Oaxaca, Mexico, where the backcountry and boondocks hold many secrets, I thought it might just be possible that silk existed in those misty crags. The tales most often evoked a village named San Pedro Cajonos, which I found on a map up a crooked, dashed line in the Sierra Zapoteca. One morning I decided that enough was enough and set out from Oaxaca city to see for myself.

A home in San Pedro Cajonos

That crooked, dashed line turned out to be a dirt road that took me from the arid central valley of Oaxaca 4,000 feet straight up to the cool, pine-clad ridges of the Sierra. Rain the night before had turned a steep section of the road into a slippery-slide. It took tire chains and determination to get beyond it. Fortunately I had the mud chains in the back, and like any explorer questing for great treasure, I had the determination as well. Past the high ridges the road leveled off and wandered through deep, cool, pine forests draped with gnomes-beard moss. The road started dropping and the descent took me into sunlight and open vistas as the forest was replaced by small cornfields planted on the steep mountainsides. With the open view I could see that I was in a fractured land of sharp ridges, crags and deep valleys. Hanging on the ridges, nestled in the valleys and gazing in awe at the crags were a scattering of jumbled villages. This was the heart of the Sierra Zapoteca. And that village falling over the ridge just ahead, I learned, was San Pedro Cajonos. With great anticipation I spurred my road weary old van forward, raising a plume of dust behind me, and rounded the last curve to San Pedro. Would there be truth behind those rumors?

The Spaniard, Hernan Cortez, who with sharp steel, armor and cunning destroyed the Aztec empire and set in motion the collapse of all Mesoamerican civilizations, was the first to cultivate silk worms in the New World. Or so he claims.  This would have been in 1523. Diego Delgadillo and Juan Marin, among others, also proudly made the claim of having been the first to cultivate silk worms in the New World. The reason for so many claims to being the first to grow these little worms in New Spain: the Spanish crown offered tempting rewards to those who established profitable industries in its colonies. Raising silk proved to be just that.

By the 1540’s, when all the riches had been looted from the peoples of central Mexico and the gold mines where already drying out, silk became the most lucrative enterprise in New Spain. With abundant labor to draw on in the native population, in ten years the industry went from nonexistent to producing tens of thousands of pounds of silk. Mulberry trees, the food of silk worms, where planted everywhere. In some places there were groves of 40,000 trees. In northwestern Oaxaca state, in a region called the Mixteca, where silk was produced in the greatest quantity in all of New Spain, more than 20,000 pounds of raw silk where produced a year.

The vast majority of all silk produced was sold to Spanish guilds in Mexico City, Puebla and Oaxaca where it was woven into satin, velvet and taffeta. The guilds also made sewing thread, damasks, lace, ribbons, caps and other articles in colors from black to deep cochineal red. To protect these guilds’ interests it was forbidden for Indians, who cultivated and reeled the silk, to weave.

However the great silk boom of the New World did not last. Just a few decades after becoming the greatest industry in New Spain it began quietly dying out.  By 1605 the Oaxacan Mixteca was only producing 1,500 pounds of silk a year and in much of the country silk cultivation had disappeared entirely.

What happened? A combination of factors seems to have brought it down. The steadiest of these factors was corruption. It was poor Indians who produced the valuable silk cocoons and thread. They were an easy target, and extortion by officials and priests was common. Local strongmen paid less than market value for the silk or forcefully seized crops. This abuse and robbery eventually led the indigenous producers to quiet and not so quiet rebellion. Village after village began to destroy the production equipment and mulberry groves. In one town the village went to the fields and cut down every mulberry tree in one night.

Then international competition began, infant globalization. In 1573 the first shipment of Chinese silks came to Mexico through the port of Acapulco on the rich  Manila galleons.  Although these silks weren’t as fine as the Mexican silks, their uniqueness and lower price caused them to be devoured by the New Spain market and the trade grew rapidly. In 1587 the legendary pirate, Cavendish, seized one of the galleons, so loaded with silks “that they were stacked like casks”.

The final straw was disease. Not of the silk worms, but of the indigenous population of the New World. Between 1520 and 1600 at least six large epidemics wasted the land as Old World diseases, such as small pox, spread like wildfire among the Native Americans. Texupa, for example, was an important Oaxacan silk cultivation village. It had a population of about 12,000 before the conquest. By 1579 the population was about 750. Another silk producing village, Ixcatlan, went from 8,000 to 300 in the same period. These numbers where similar all over the Mixtec region, and the New World in general.

These huge die offs severely altered Native American society and the world of silk production certainly felt the impact. In the proper environment two major factors limit silk production; the amount of Mulberry trees producing leaves for the worms to feed on and the number of people available to pick those leaves. This is especially important during the last phase of the silk worm’s life when it is insatiable and requires constant feeding. During this period, in most silk producing villages, every able-bodied person would be found harvesting the leaves and delivering them to the silk houses. The great plague of 1575-77 approximately halved the native population. This is, not coincidentally, when silk production began to fall. In the 1590’s another plague took half or more of the survivors. There was no one left to feed the worms.

With the incessant corruption and abuse of the indigenous population, competition from lower priced Chinese silk and horrific declines in the indigenous population the demise of sericulture in New Spain began and accelerated. The industry never recovered and by the mid 1600’s the silk industry was little more than a memory.
But silk in the New World did not entirely disappear. In the golden age of silk it was the indigenous population who raised the cocoons and reeled or spun the thread. While they were prohibited from weaving the silk, this prohibition focused only on the Spanish floor looms. The native, backstrap loom wasn’t even considered worthy of notice and so wasn’t mentioned in the prohibition. Given that the natives of Mexico where already superb weavers it is easy to assume that they wasted little time incorporating this fine, strong, shimmering new fiber into their weaving. And so, over the decades, the silk fiber became an important element in the rich clothing and regalia of the natives in certain regions.

It held that importance for some 400 years, or until the middle of the twentieth century and the “second conquest”: Westernization, industrialization and modernization, which brought inexpensive, manufactured goods and infrastructure improvements such as electricity, roads, radio and television. Old, rural Mexico suddenly came face to face with the rest of the world and its ways. Local fashion that had been in vogue for the last 500 years suddenly became old fashion, a badge of backwardness. As luck would have it though, with the new roads making transport easier, one could find more up-to-date clothing for sale in the weekly markets. Plastic shoes covered bare feet and inexpensive polyester dresses began replacing the laboriously made, ornate, homespun clothing. With this march of progress handmade clothing and regalia in Mexico began its irreversible decline.

In the valley of Oaxaca a variety of villages, such as Macuilxochitl and Teotitlan del Valle still cultivated silkworms until the 1950’s. The cocoons were traded up to more remote villages in the Sierra Zapoteca where they were then spun, dyed and woven into red cenidores or sashes that were worn in the region. Then, in the 50’s, there was a noble government campaign to eradicate mosquitoes carrying malaria. Insecticides were thoroughly sprayed in villages throughout the state. Among other things, these insecticides eradicated most of the old Spanish silkworms in Oaxaca. After this the majority of cultivators didn’t even bother trying to replace their lost stock. The use of silk sashes had been largely abandoned, and those that were still used were commonly woven with more affordable wool or synthetic yarn. There was so little demand for silk that it wasn’t worth getting the cultivation going again.

San Pedro Cajonos was a little town of tumbling narrow streets built on a steep mountainside with tremendous views across the valleys and ridges of the Sierra. I parked on one of these narrow streets and set out to strike up conversation with somebody. Good fortune soon put me in the path of Susana Ortega who told me that, indeed, silk was cultivated here. Not only that, but it was also spun and woven. She told me that she spun silk, but if I wanted to meet the best spinner and weaver in town then I had to meet her neighbor, Otilia Masa, who has been doing it forever.

So it was true! There was silk in the Sierra. With satisfaction I followed Susana as she lead me down the road. And just like that I was on my way to meet a woman acclaimed (at least by her neighbor) to be the best. It was a short walk to the small house of Otilia Masa, who turned out to be a gentle, sweet faced woman with deep wrinkles, a white ponytail and a crooked-tooth grin with a gap or two. She invited us in to sit down. There was a moment of silence once we had settled and I could hear a soft, rustling sound coming from somewhere. I glanced around and saw that her room was filled with boxes and trays piled with mulberry leaves and crawling with little, fat, white, leaf-crunching worms turning mulberry into silk.

Otilia Masa spins silk straight from the boiled cocoons using a support spindle

Otilia pulled from a bag what looked like a white dreadlock. It was a clump of silk cocoons that had been boiled with soap and ash to clean the oils from them. She also pulled out a support spindle, and as we talked she spun fine thread from that silky dreadlock. She rested the point of her spindle in a little bowl, which I saw was a soup ladle with the handle broken off. She opened up the dreadlock, one cocoon at a time, with deft fingers, cleaning out any debris and then spinning it as if she were spinning from a cotton ball. Otilia speaks only Zapotec, so I was fortunate to have Susana along to translate. I guessed Otilia to be 80 and learned that she had been spinning and weaving for about 60 years. In the old days, she said, many women spun and wove here and in adjacent villages and twice or three times that many people cultivated silk to sell to the spinners. Also, traders brought in cocoons from other villages (such as Macuilxochitl and Teotitlan down in the valley). The women of San Pedro wove red, silk sashes back then and traders would come and buy them. But through her lifetime she watched the trade dwindle. She remembered the government men coming and spraying long ago and said it killed her worms. But there were a few people who lived off in the hills and the sprayers never found those houses. From these people they got eggs to continue cultivating.  In 1990, Otilia told me, there where only four weavers left in the village.

It was then that government men came back, but this time as part of a state sponsored project with the goal of revitalizing the old industry. The concept was simple, adapt what the weavers where already doing to new items that were more saleable in the modern world, help them market those items and supply them with worms and mulberry starts. As with many government projects, it came together a lot better on paper than in practice, but ultimately it worked. The new item that proved to be most saleable was a shawl, which was only slightly different than the old sashes. It caught on and younger women, seeing that they could earn a little money, started learning to weave and spin. Now there are probably 40 women in the village active in the trade.

Adjusting the warp for a silk shawl

Otilia uses a backstrap loom to weave a silk shawl

Otilia unrolled her backstrap loom and set it up in front of her house. I admired her “machete” or beater bar, which was of heavy, dark wood, polished with years of use. I asked her how old it was. She thought for a moment, “250 years.”

It was months later, traveling along the coast of Oaxaca that I stumbled upon a rumor of the existence of another silk village. I was visiting weavers in the coastal Mixtec village of Pinotepa de Don Luis where women weave a sarong-like wrap of heavy cotton that are worn by coastal Mixtec women. These wraps, called pozahuancos, are decorated with horizontal stripes of color in black, burgundy and purple and are legendary among aficionados of Mexican textiles because of these stripes of color, the dyes for which are purported to come from very notable sources. The black comes from indigo dyed so heavily as to appear black. Certain men in the village do the dyeing and the process is a jealously guarded secret. The purple comes from the ocean, and is the renowned royal purple that comes from a humble sea snail named Purpura panza. Mixtec men from this village milk the shellfish for this dye along the coast and are the last traditional shell dyers on the planet. The red is said to come from the little prickly pear mite named cochineal, whose powerful red dyes once upon a time made many Oaxacan merchants rich men. What’s more, those red-dyed bands of color are silk. I met a weaver in Pinotepa who was also a textile trader and had traveled the old routes of Oaxaca buying and selling. She told me that the red silk came from up in the cold mountains and said that traders traveled down to the coast from those mountains to attend important fairs in coastal villages a couple times a year and sold spun silk to the coastal weavers. She also pulled out a huipil, or box dress, that was woven of white cotton and brocaded along the breastplate with figures of animals and people in burgundy thread. The dye that had been used on this thread was not fixed and most of the front of the huipil was stained by the running dye. “This,” she said “comes from Santiago Ixtayutla.” She told me that the village was twelve hours into the mountains, the road impassable in the rains and hardly anyone there spoke Spanish or wore shoes. “And this thread here in the brocade is silk,” she pointed at the blouse, “the same silk we use in our pozahuancos, but dyed differently.”  I asked her why they didn’t use something to fix their dyes. “No,” she said, “it is supposed to be that way. I’ve been to Santiago and I’ve been into their church and seen their patron saint. He is dressed in cloth with running colors, like running blood. I think this is why the people of Santiago want their red to run, because their god is dressed that way.” The trader told me how to get the silk village. It was 18 hours passed Santiago. When I came to the village called San Mateo Peñasco, under the great rock, I was there. “But that’s the old walking route,” she clarified, to my evident relief,  “you can get there a lot faster going on the highway.”

Mixtec woman wearing a pozahuanco and cleaning cotton prior to spinning

The nave of Yanhuitlan

And so it was that I began my second trek in search of a silk village. Driving north out of Oaxaca city I came to the upper Mixteca, a barren, eroded land that once was the center of silk production in New Spain. There was little evidence of that now, certainly no mulberry groves. But in Yanhuitlan I passed an enormous, abandoned Dominican church and convent that towered like a mountain over the small village. The church was 400 years old and had been built with silk money. The village, now almost a ghost town, once had a population of over 10,000.

Two hours later I came to the village under the rock. The rock, or peñasco, and namesake to the village, was a jutting outcrop 1,000 feet tall, even larger then the church of Yanhuitlan. Springs at its base fed San Mateo with water and the village was green with trees, many of them old mulberries. Here I met a woman named Evangelina and her 90-something-year-old mother, Delfina. From them I learned that cultivating and spinning silk was common in the village, though nobody here had ever woven. They confirmed what I had heard along the coast, that the silk was sold to the coastal weavers. Old Delfina told me she used to go to the coastal fairs and trade the silk for sugar, coffee and blouses. That was before there were buses and it was several days walking coming and going. I asked about the burgundy color and cochineal. Delfina said that when she was little she remembered her grandmother using cochineal to dye the silk, but no one knew how to dye with it anymore. Now they used a dye they called sulferina, which they purchased in Oaxaca city, to turn the silk the burgundy tone that the coastal weavers like. “What about Santiago Ixtayutla and the running dye?” I asked. It would seem that these women had a low opinion of the folks from Santiago, “They take the skein in their mouth and wet it with spit, then they rub it on their sleeve. If it doesn’t stain their sleeve they won’t by it. They are dirty people,” Delfina said, shaking her head.

98 year old Delfina talks about how they used to do things. In fact they haven't changed much

Apparently San Mateo’s silk tradition has never been on the brink of extinction like that of San Pedro Cajonos. I assumed that this was because there market was in the remotest stretch of the Oaxacan coast and mountains where weaving and traditional dress have not yet been lost to the second conquest. However a good highway was paved the whole length of the Oaxacan coast in the 1980s, and in Pinotepa de Don Luis, where the silk is woven into the pozahuancos, young woman no longer wear the old-style dress. Polyester skirts and jeans are much preferred. The spinners of San Mateo feel this change. Evangelina complained that she sold less and less silk all the time.

The same state funded silk program that got the industry back on its feet in San Pedro Cajonos has been giving hundreds of mulberry saplings and thousands of hybrid baby silk worms to the spinners of San Mateo Peñasco. The net result, as I saw it, was that the spinners had large sacks full of un-spun cocoons piled in their rooms. While silk production in Peñasco has increased as a result of the program, demand has decreased as a result of the inevitable march of progress. In Peñasco there is a silk glut.  This is not how it looked on paper.

I recently heard rumor of someone involved in a project to teach the spinners of San Mateo Peñasco how to weave on floor looms. It seems a good idea. Like the women of San Pedro Cajonos, they would then be able to sell a finished product from their silk that might hold appeal to the urban market. Perhaps shoulder bags or vests. And it would be wonderful if the silk, both from San Mateo Peñasco and San Pedro Cajonos, could be exported and sold in rich countries. However it seems that some things haven’t changed much in 400 years. Oriental silks are so inexpensive relative to Oaxacan silk that it’s hardly worth considering.
 Things change. Four hundred and eighty years ago silk was brought to Mexico and became a booming commercial industry. Ninety years later it disappeared but a folk tradition emerged and has survived four centuries in the remote nooks and crannies of Oaxaca. Now those nooks and crannies aren’t so remote and people’s tastes in clothing have changed. Those spinners and weavers of rural Oaxaca who can stretch and pull their traditions to accommodate the changing times will be the ones to carry the old silk trade into the next century. Their ancestors did it long ago when they adopted this exotic fiber into their familiar regalia. Let it be that their offspring do it again by adapting this now familiar fiber to the exotic regalia of the money bearing outside world.

Join Traditions Mexico in visiting the last Oaxacan silk villages . . .

For more images of the Oaxacan silk villages and weavers, see our slide show

For Further Reading.
Borah, Woodrow. Silk Raising in Colonial Mexico. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1943. Out of Print.
Klien, Kathryn. Editor. The Continuous Thread. Los Angeles: J Paul Getty Trust. 1997.