Fighting for Copyright Protections  

Maya Women Face a Larger Struggle

Maya women are fighting to protect their long tradition of textile designs. In 2014, a group of Kaqchikel Maya women from the state of Sacatepéquez, which encompasses dozens of Indigenous-majority towns and hamlets, launched a political movement to regain control of the textile designs they create and produce. Their organization, the Asociación Femenina para el Desarrollo de Sacatepéquez (AFEDES, Women’s Association for the Development of Sacatepéquez), has since brought together 30 Indigenous organizations from across the country to form the Movimiento Nacional de Tejedoras Ruchajixik ri Qana’ojabäl (the National Movement of Maya Weavers: Guardians of Our Knowledge). The National Movement boasts members from 18 out of Guatemala’s 22 recognized Mayan language communities. Hundreds of women have participated in the Movement’s coordinated events, which range from protests outside government offices to hearings before the nation’s highest court.

Handwoven textiles are central to the lives of many Indigenous Maya people in Guatemala. Produced on backstrap looms, a technology that predates the Spanish invasion of Maya territories, the intricately-designed blouses (-pot in Kaqchikel Maya, or huipiles in Spanish) that many Maya women wear are potent cultural symbols of ethnicity and belonging. The figures, color combinations and weaving techniques used to create garments and accessories are often associated with a specific town. Maya textiles thus demonstrate the skill, creativity, and stylishness of a particular community of weavers and wearers.

Nearly twenty years ago, as a Harvard graduate student in social anthropology, I learned basic backstrap weaving techniques from Te Ix’ey, an experienced weaver and professional educator from San Antonio Aguas Calientes, a Kaqchikel Maya-majority town in Sacatepéquez. Maya weavers from San Antonio are well-known for the elaborate floral and faunal designs they render using a double-faced weaving technique. Our lessons included how to prepare the warp, maintain the right amount of tension in the loom, and execute simple designs. Alongside the technical aspects of weaving, Te Ix’ey emphasized the historical and cultural significance of each motif. Zig-zags with decorative borders, for instance, represent the feathered serpent that is an important deity in Maya and Aztec mythology.

Te Ix’ey, an elementary school teacher, Kaqchikel Mayan language instructor, and weaver from San Antonio Aguas Calientes, instructs the author on basic weaving techniques in July 2007. Photo credit: Kedron Thomas.

Maya textiles are not just representational. In the Kaqchikel Mayan language, the terminology surrounding the loom and weaving process reveals that weaving is an act of life-giving creation. For example, weft threads that pass through the warp to create a textile’s interlocking structure are wäy, the same word used for corn tortillas. In many Maya households, tortillas are considered a dietary staple because of their nutritional value and the spiritual link they generate with gods and ancestors, since Maya religion holds that humans were first formed from corn. Weavers are a creative and nourishing force in Maya communities, and textiles are living testaments to the wisdom, knowledge, and values passed down through generations.

The time I spent with Te Ix’ey helped to inspire my abiding interest in the changing fashions designed and produced by Indigenous Guatemalans. Over the last two decades, I have carried out extensive research on the production and circulation of traditional dress styles as well as the jeans, sweaters, and sweatshirts made and worn by Maya people. The production of Maya textiles requires immense creativity, time, and labor. Many weavers learn basic skills and techiniques at a young age. As their abilities improve through training, practice, and feedback from others, weavers tend to work within their town’s shared traditions to innovate new patterns and techniques. An accomplished weaver may spend three months or more on a single blouse.

Traditional textiles can have considerable economic value. Unfortunately, most of that value does not end up in the hands of Maya people. The Guatemalan government advertises to foreign tourists using photographs of Indigenouswomen adorned in brightly-colored blouses and skirts (-uq in Kaqchikel Maya, or cortes in Spanish). Owners of tourism and travel companies, textile exporters and online retailers, and designers in Paris and New York who incorporate the textiles into their fashion lines reap significant financial benefits from the appropriation of Maya women’s dress styles and creative work. Yet, Indigenous weavers are often paid little for their art and nothing at all for their images. Deeply entrenched racism and patriarchy in and beyond Guatemala mean that although traditional textiles are valuable commodities, the mostly women who produce them are treated as exploitable, with no regard for the rights they have to their own creations.  

Brands such as Anita Lara, based in Guatemala City, incorporate Maya textiles into their fashion lines without permission from the Indigenous weavers who collectively own the designs, according to leaders of the National Movement of Maya Weavers: Guardians of our Knowledge. Photo credit: anitalara.com.

Maya weavers have joined together to demand change on the basis of intellectual property (IP) protections. Guatemala participates in the system of IP rights that has been promoted and more or less standardized in recent decades through a series of international treaties and trade agreements. Intellectual property law protects certain interests of rights holders through mechanisms that include trademarks, patents and copyright. Copyright law is generally intended to protect authors from the unauthorized and unremunerated reproduction of their creative work. If the National Movement of Maya Weavers succeeds, Indigenous communities in Guatemala will be legally recognized as the collective authors of traditional textile designs and have the right to determine who is and is not permitted to produce and sell their work. This would be an important victory in the fight for Indigenous rights across Latin America.

In 2020, AFEDES published a book in Spanish titled, Nuestros tejidos son los libros que la colonia no pudo quemar (Our Weavings are the Books the Colonizers Could Not Burn). The book describes the history of the National Movement, the reasons for its struggle, and the group’s specific demands. The title captures much of what is at stake for Maya weavers. Copyright law in Guatemala already protects the authors of books from rights infringements. The denial of these rights to Indigenous authors of textile creations is part of a long history of non-Indigenous people enacting violence on Indigenous populations across the region.

In the 16th and 17th centuries, this violence included book burnings. Colonial authorities set fire to texts written by Indigenous inhabitants of present-day Mexico and Central America, including books of Maya history, genealogy, science and religion. Burning books was key to colonizers’ attempts to erase pre-colonial history and eradicate extant cultural and religious practices. Weaving is also a form of literacy. Textile designs powerfully communicate and, indeed, bring to life the culture and history of Maya people. Indigenous women have worked tirelessly to maintain these text-iles through centuries of violence, including the genocidal war of the 1970s and 80s, when women in traditional dress and their families were targeted for extermination by the Guatemalan military.

Today, the National Movement is using copyright law as a strategic tool to advance their struggle. The organization’s leadership filed a legal action with Guatemala’s highest court in 2016 challenging the constitutionality of the omission from national law of rules that would extend collective copyright protections to Maya textiles. A year later, following a public hearing attended by around 500 women weavers, the Constitutional Court issued a resolution recommending that the National Congress take action to rectify this injustice. The Court called on the legislature to protect the collective copyright of Indigenous Guatemalans by recognizing Maya communities as the authors of traditional textiles and related goods. Movement leaders, with support from the United Nations Human Rights Office in Guatemala and a team of legal and policy experts, had already sent a bill to the National Congress in November 2016 that would reform existing national law to include the necessary provisions. The bill establishes a definition and framework for collective IP rights in Guatemala and recognizes Indigenous communities as authors. If passed, the bill will institutionalize a system in which purveyors of Maya textiles will be required to pay royalties to Maya weaving collectives. Thus far, the bill remains stalled in the legislature.

The National Movement’s congressional supporters introduced a second bill in 2022 that takes a more focused approach. The legislation institutes collectively-held copyright protections specifically for Indigenous textiles and clothing. It prohibits importation of goods that imitate Maya textiles and bans the reproduction of textile designs without express consent of the Indigenous collectives that hold authorship rights over the designs. On April 26, 2022, World Intellectual Property Day, a delegation led by Angelina Aspuac, a Kaqchikel Maya woman from Santiago Sacatepéquez who co-founded AFEDES and coordinates the National Movement, met with the congressional Commission on Indigenous Peoples to ask for their official support. The Commission held a press conference to discuss the finalized bill on September 5, International Indigenous Women’s Day, and the bill was formally introduced in the National Congress on September 22, 2022. Movement leaders continue to advocate its passage.

Favorable resolutions issued by the Constitutional Court and shows of support from government agencies and commissions, including the national Intellectual Property Registry and office of the Human Rights Ombudsman, must be appreciated against the backdrop of the Guatemalan government’s own appropriations of Maya textile traditions. For example, during an official visit to Guatemala by the President of Mexico in May 2022, the Instituto Guatemalteco de Turismo (INGUAT, the Guatemalan Tourism Institute, a government agency) arranged a spectacular welcome at Guatemala City’s La Aurora International Airport. Along the hallways leading from the arrival gates to immigration control and customs, living dioramas featured men and women adorned in dress styles resembling those associated with several Indigenous-majority towns. A woman representing Santiago Atitlan, a favorite tourist destination on the shores of picturesque Lake Atitlan, carried a large ceramic pitcher on her head, resting above her colorful hair wrap. A string of gourds and bunches of carnations dressed the dugout canoe in which she stood. Typical of dress styles created and worn by many Tz’utujil Maya women in Santiago Atitlan, she wore a three-panel blouse featuring purple stripes and multicolor, embroidered birds, together with a red ikat skirt and woven belt.

On INGUAT’s Facebook page, these curated representations of Maya culture received mixed reviews. Alongside the “likes” and “loves,” there were several dozen angry emojis. Commenters pointed out that INGUAT had clearly failed to involve residents of the towns whose dress styles were on display. Clothing items and accessories were worn improperly by the models, whom one user noted were only “pretending to be Indigenous.” Dressing non-Indigenous women in traditional styles, surrounding them with artisanal and agricultural products, and staging them as a representation of Guatemala’s national identity—something that INGUAT has done repeatedly—was condemned by some commenters as offensive and distressing.

Guatemala’s National Tourism Institute (INGUAT) posed women in traditional Maya dress styles in the hallways of La Aurora International Airport to welcome Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador in May 2022. Photo credit: INGUAT.

In addition to promoting collective copyright protections for textile designs, the National Movement has taken legal action against INGUAT. Movement leaders filed an appeal for protection with the Constitutional Court in December 2017 on the grounds that INGUAT’s unauthorized use of images of Maya women for marketing purposes violates the rights of Maya people, who comprise more than half the population but face systematic marginalization at the hands of the country’s political and economic elite. To accompany the legal action and build public support, AFEDES organized a series of protests outside INGUAT’s headquarters and other government offices in Guatemala City. Protestors demanded that the government stop using Maya women’s images and Maya dress styles to promote the economic interests of a nation that refuses to address the needs and demands of Indigenous citizens. In November 2020, the Constitutional Court sided with the Movement. Since that time, AFEDES has held workshops across the highlands to inform Maya women about the court’s ruling and encourage continued pressure on the government to fully comply.

Intellectual property rights are gaining importance worldwide as fashion brands and retailers increasingly use copyright and trademark protections to ensure competitiveness and grow profitability. In fact, AFEDES leaders initiated their copyright fight in order to counter IP claims being made by non-Indigenous designers and retailers regarding Maya textile designs. In 2022, Angelina Aspuac recounted to Elsa Amanda Chiquitó, host of the Guatemala-based podcast No-Ficción, that the need for a national movement had emerged “when two designers threatened AFEDES weavers who were producing huipiles for them. … Those [blouses] contained ancestral symbols, they are huipiles that women weavers have made forever. The companies want exclusive rights to particular pieces, but along with their demands for exclusivity, there is the risk that weavers could go to jail if they weave that same huipil again.”

Aspuac and other AFEDES members were appalled that companies who were contracting with weavers to produce textiles for tourists and collectors would claim exclusive rights to the designs. As further explained in the book published by AFEDES in 2020, it was becoming commonplace for companies to request minor design changes and then claim that their employees were the real designers of the textiles. In other words, non-Indigenous businesses were using copyright law as a means of monopolizing control over lucrative commodities created and elaborated by Maya weavers. AFEDES members were concerned that Guatemalan law would legitimate those claims but delegitimize counterclaims by Maya weavers to collective authorship and ownership. This was precisely the legal imbalance that the Constitutional Court acknowledged when it issued its recommendation to the National Congress to formally recognize collectively-held copyright for Indigenous communities.

The National Movement’s struggle for copyright protections is a fight for recognition—as authors, creators and, indeed, as a vital and valued presence in Guatemalan society. Rather than wait for the National Congress to pass the proposed bills, the Movement is forging ahead by organizing Consejos de Tejedoras (Weaving Councils) in many Kaqchikel Maya-majority municipalities. These elected representatives are charged with administering and defending the community’s rights to their textile designs, with the hope that these rights will soon have official national standing.

Collective copyright protections should not be the Guatemalan government’s only answer to the conditions of racism and inequality that Maya women face. Nor should IP protections be the international community’s only answer to discrimination against Indigenous peoples in Latin America. Intellectual property rights are, in fact, only a small slice of AFEDES’s demands. It is crucial to understand their efforts concerning textile designs as just one part of the organization’s broader set of goals and strategies for improving Indigenous women’s lives.

AFEDES has been an active organization for more than 30 years. Its leaders have worked on various issues, including gender-based violence and chronic malnutrition, which disproportionately affect Indigenous women and children in Guatemala. In the 1990s and early 2000s, the organization provided small loans and technical training to support women’s entrepreneurship. In 2006, leaders reassessed the organization’s mission and activities in view of the systemic problems of racism, patriarchy and capitalist exploitation they faced. They reoriented the organization’s efforts toward programs that advance political autonomy, economic solidarity, and food sovereignty. On the AFEDES website, the group defines its core objective as the realization of Utz’ K’aslemal, a Kaqchikel Mayan phrase denoting “a life of abundance and happiness,” a good life. It is a life that builds on the wisdom and guidance of previous generations to shape a future determined by Indigenous people themselves.

AFEDES celebrates its landmark accomplishments in the struggle for collective copyright alongside other notable successes. The association has opened weaving schools in a number of Kaqchikel Maya-majority towns to foster a new generation of authors. The association sponsors workshops on agroecological knowledge and organic farming practices and hosts public conversations on anti-Indigenous racism. Its membership is working to provide clean water to Indigenous communities and address the environmental contamination resulting from plastic waste. AFEDES members are also front and center in national actions to free anti-mining protestors who have been unlawfully imprisoned, thwart corporate land grabs, and combat political corruption.

In 2024, Angelina Aspuac was appointed governor of the state of Sacatepéquez – the first Indigenous person to govern the region since the Spanish invasion. The appointment brings amplified attention to the work that Governor Aspuac has done as coordinator of the National Movement. It also signals a new level of support from Guatemala’s national government, led by President Bernardo Arévalo, who took office in January despite attempts by the previous administration and its political allies to invalidate his candidacy and block his election. Arévalo ran on an anti-corruption platform and has promised to advance equal access to education, healthcare, and social services for all Guatemalans. Arévalo appointed Aspuac as governor of Sacatepéquez after the state council, comprised solely of non-Indigenous men, failed to put forward the names of any Indigenous people or women, in spite of the fact that Aspuac was legally registered as a gubernatorial candidate.

The copyright fight draws more attention from national and international media than AFEDES’s other activities, perhaps due to the aesthetic richness of Maya textiles. Reporters tend to frame the National Movement as a story of Indigenous empowerment enabled by an international legal regime that guarantees their rights. A closer look reveals that the global expansion of IP law has produced the very conditions in which Indigenous women must now demand rights to their own ancestral knowledge and creative work. The need for Maya women to secure copyright protections for traditional textiles arises from a context in which Indigenous people’s creativity and labor has been systematically devalued for centuries, and in which copyright law poses one more potential threat against which Maya people must defend themselves. As AFEDES and National Movement leaders have stated, Utz K’aslemal requires the full restoration of Indigenous sovereignty and autonomy – not just authorization for Indigenous communities to participate in a legal system that is not of their own design.

Kedron Thomas is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Delaware. She is the author of Regulating Style: Intellectual Property Law and the Business of Fashion in Guatemala and co-editor of Securing the City: Space, Insecurity, and Neoliberalism in Postwar Guatemala.