"Paisley" | The Pattern That Traveled from Kashmir, Asia, to Mexican Campesinos

In June of 2010, already living in Mexico, we joined a delegation of U.S. citizens sponsored by the NGO Witness for Peace traveling to Oaxaca in southern Mexico. The objective was to learn from leaders of migrant support organizations and migrants themselves about the economic dynamics pushing the migration and the challenges faced by migrants to the U.S. from that state and those who passed through there from Central America. We traveled to the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, a narrow, relatively flat region at Oaxaca's southern border with Chiapas — the narrow end of the funnel that migrants from Central America had to pass through to cross Mexico and try to reach the U.S.

Our host in the town of Matías Romero was a Catholic Church which sponsored a shelter for these migrants who passed through on "The Beast", a freight train that traversed the Isthmus. We were the guests of honor, placed in the front pews at a Sunday morning Mass. During the Mass, a group of preadolescent girls and boys, dressed in the traditional clothing of the Isthmus, acted out a New Testament parable of the rich helping the poor. They then performed a traditional dance.

When the dance was finished, they approached each of us in the delegation and gave us several small gifts of local, indigenous artisanry. This gesture of hospitality and good will towards "Americans" brought me to tears, for I was well aware of our country's government's hostility toward Mexican and Central American migrants and also of the severe damage that our "war against drugs" was doing to people of the country. Seeing my tears, the youth gathered around me and gave me abrazos, hugs, of comfort. That touched me even more.

One of the gifts given to us were bandanas, also called paliacates or pañoletas (from pañuelo, handkerchief). They were bright reds and oranges, covered with a design I knew as paisley. I wondered, at the time, how bandanas from southern Mexico came to bear a design I had always assumed came from Asia. I valued them as a touching gift, but having no use for them, kept them in a drawer at home. Recently, Jane and I were looking for small gifts from Mexico to take to our two grandchildren, Caroline and William,  in Chicago. The bandanas or kerchiefs struck me as perfect for this purpose.

In the process, the question of how an Asian design ended up on a Mexican bandana came back to my mind. So I began to research the history of what I knew as paisley. I knew it from paisley ties, which I loved in the 1970s. The short answer is that the pattern came originally from Persia where it appeared before the 6th century.

The following history comes from the article, "A History of Paisley", Slate magazine, Oct. 20, 2015, excerpted from Patternalia: An Unconventional History of Polka Dots, Stripes, Plaid, Camouflage, & Other Graphic Patterns by Jude Stewart, published by Bloomsbury Press.

The pattern was brought to the Indian province of Kashmir in the 15th century by Zain-ul-Abidin, who ruled Kashmir from 1459 to 1470. There the shawls (shal in Hindu) were handwoven out of cashmere wool, the finest of wool that came from the belly of wild sheep in the Himalayas. Grown in the winter, in the summer the animals scraped it off against rocks, where weavers collected it. It could take a year for one weaver to complete a shawl. Sometimes multiple weavers worked on sections of a shawl, which were then deftly sewn together, thus decreasing production time and increasing quantity (and profit).

The shawls' next champion was Akbar the Great, the third Mogul ruler of India (reigned 1556–1605), who made the shawls central to the Kashmiri practice of khil’at, “robes of honor”, ceremonially exchanged in political and religious contexts to establish a clear pecking order. Being on the receiving end made one indebted to, and therefore submissive to the giver.

Akbar the Great
Note the "paisley" teardrop set ruby,
called the jigha in Hindu, 
on his royal turban.
Wikipedia

Shawls given as khil’at were decorated with all sorts of patterns, but some scholars speculate that the paisley motif came to predominate because it resembled the jigha, a crown jewel pinned to the ruler's turban. The shape is called “boteh" in Persian, "buta" (bud) in Hindu and is variously seen as representing buds on a date palm, traditionally, the "Tree of Life", associated with fertility in general, including human sexual potency, or as the convergence of a stylized floral spray and a cypress tree: a Zoroastrian symbol of life and eternity.

The shawls became popular in Europe when trade by the British East India Company with India developed in the 16th century. Handwoven of cashmere wool, they were prohibitively expensive. Upper-class European women adopted these precious imported shawls as a fashion statement. A town named Paisley in Scotland adapted the Jacquard loom (invented in 1804 by Frenchman Joseph Marie Jaquard), one that used sets of punched cards to produce predesigned patterns (a predecessor of computers) and therefore replaced handlooms, thus enabling mass production. Thus, it became the center of shawl manufacturing in England and the source of its English name. In Spanish, the pattern is called cachemir(a) (cah-che-mír), i.e., from Kashmir.

Along with English and French, well-to-do Spanish women adopted these cachemir shawls for wearing to church in the 18th century. Evidently, some of these women brought them to Mexico.

In the meantime, a much cheaper version of the pattern printed on cotton became available, so any woman could wear paisley or cachemir. How it became the preferred if not the requisite pattern on Mexican campesino bandanas remains unknown. One possible link appears in a photo of the Mexican Revolutionary leader, Pancho Villa, himself from the peón, campesino class.

Mexican Revolutionary leader Pancho Villa
wearing a patterned bandanna,
possibly in a cachemir (paisley) pattern.
Wikipedia

In any case, it is clear that in Mexico, this once royal pattern from Kashmir and mark of upper-class Western Europeans is the sine qua non of identifying as or with the rural campesino class.  Perhaps, it is an identification with the populist portion of the Mexican Revolution or only something like the  "Western cowboy" dress of an urban aficionado in the U.S. We have come across the cachemir bandana in a number of fiestas in working-class pueblos and other events celebrating Mexico's rural and/or revolutionary past. Here are some examples:

Cuadrilla de Arrieros, team of mule drivers, participating in a religious fiesta. 

Arriero

Arriero

     

Arriero (left) and participant in Cinco de Mayo, May 5 
re-creation of the battle against the French in 1862

Participant in popular, "folk", festival
of  "son" [Sp. pronunced "sohn"], "sound"
in the sense of the
regional rural music styles
of Mexico in Mexico City

Participants in popular "son" festival. 
These are jóvenes, youth, from Mexico City.

Participants in popular "son" festival. 
More jóvenes, youth, from Mexico City.
He is a musician for a record company. 

The tradition of "son" country music
and the cachemir bandana 
being passed on to an urban youth.

Granddaughter Caroline...

...and Grandson William, "the pirate", 

with Oaxaca bandanas
in Chicago.

Original Villages | Mule Drivers of Santa Ursula Xitle and Tlapan

Encountering a New Form of Fiesta Dancers

Virtually every amble we have made to an original indigenous village in Mexico City has brought us surprises: some new experiences, something new learned about Mexican popular (the people's) culture, the culture of el pueblo mexicano.

When we saw an announcement of a fiesta in the Pueblo Santa Úrsula Xitle we were intrigued by two things. First, fulfilling one of our primary criteria, it was a pueblo we had not previously visited and, additionally, it was in Delegación/Alcaldía Tlalpan, the city's largest but one where we had explored only a few of its original pueblos.

Second, the announcement said cuadrillas (qua-DREE-yahs) of arrieros would be performing. In all of our many experiences of fiesta performers, we have seen many types of comparsas (dance troupes) representing various parts of Mexican identity, but never cuadrillas de arrieros. We had seen:

• Concheros (playing lutes) and Azteca (playing drums and rattles) dancers dressed in various styles of indigenous-based attire and celebrating their indigenous identity;

• Chinelos, dancers "disguised", as their name means in Nahuatl, usually wearing masks with blue eyes, pink skin and long, pointed beards, caricatures of colonial Spaniards! However, they are dressed in elaborately decorated, spacious velvet gowns and tall headdresses, and they dance a jumping, spinning, Sufi Muslim dervish-like dance, with their gowns ballooning around them. So, they strike us not just as a caricature of Spaniards, but more as an imaginative, orientalist representation of the Moors, i.e., the North African Muslims who occupied portions of the Iberian peninsula for seven hundred years. They were viewed by the Christian Spaniards as "pagans", and were slowly driven out in the centuries-long "Reconquista", which was completed only in the year 1492. The Spanish Conquista of Mexico and the subsequent "Spiritual Conquest" of its "pagans" began just thirty years later.

• Charros, dressed as Spanish hacendados (ah-cen-DAH-dos), wealthy hacienda (ah-cee-EN-dah, rural estate) owners. Like the chinelos, they are usually masked with Spanish faces that have long beards and dressed in fancy Spanish cowboy attire, elaborately embroidered in gold thread with a wide range of symbols on the fronts and backs of their jackets and pants;

• Caporales (herdsmen) or vaqueros (cowboys), in much simpler, working cowboy attire (think your old "Western" movie, with everyone dressed up for a square dance).

But we had never encountered a cuadrilla de arrieros. A quick consultation of our Spanish-English dictionary told us a cuadrilla was a work-crew or team and arrieros were mule drivers. Hence, a team of mule drivers. 

Thus, like charros, cuadrillas de arrieros--as participants in fiestas--are an incorporation of Spanish culture into Mexican popular culture, but they aren't like the elegant charros in their gold-embroidered jackets, tight pants and huge sombreros. They are something more like caporales, an organized group of working-class indigenous and mestizo (mixed indigenous and Spanish) people created to meet the needs of the Spanish ruling class in the Colonial period.

Arrieros: Key Links in a Global Trade Route

Before the Spanish Conquest, the indigenous had no beast of burden. Men, called tamemes in Nahuatl, carried everything, including members of the upper class, on their backs. After the Spanish took over, they introduced mules and horses — eliminating the need for human carriers. Mules became the "trucks" of cross-country commerce and those who gained the skills to manage mule trains during what could be long trips, called los arrieros, achieved a certain level of increased status.

During Colonial times, the Spanish, after they conquered what is now central Mexico, conquered the Philippines on the opposite side of the Pacific Ocean. In 1513, the Spanish explorer, Vasco Núñez Balboa discovered the Pacific from Panama and declared that it and all lands adjoining it were possessions of the Spanish crown. The Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan arrived in the Philippines in 1521, where he was killed in battle with the resident people. The Spanish explorer, Ruy López de Villalobos, landed there in 1543, and in 1565, the Spaniard Miguel López de Legazpi, sailing from Mexico, conquered the islands. Like Mexico, they became part of the globe-spanning Spanish Empire that endured for some 300 years.

Thereafter, each year, the Spanish sailed what they called the Manila Galleons across the Pacific, bringing goods from China and Japan to the port of Acapulco on the southwest coast of Mexico. From Acapulco, these luxury goods were then carried by mule trains, led by arrieros, 10,000 feet (3,000 meters) up to the pass in the Chichinautzin mountains that form the southern boundary of the Valley of Mexico, and down 3,000 ft. (915 meters) to Mexico City. (See our post Encountering Mexico City´s Many Volcanoes: Giants on All Sides.) From the city, other mule trains carried the goods on to Veracruz on the Gulf of Mexico, where they were shipped to Spain.

Santa Úrsula Xitle, like its neighbor, Chimalcoyotl, and others along the trails leading up the Chichinautzin mountains provided the mules and drivers needed for this arduous trip. Mule drivers worked for Spanish businessmen. So, we wonder why this manifestation of Spanish colonialism is, like charros and caporales, actively maintained and celebrated by the descendants of those who did the actual hard work, essentially as peons on haciendas or low-paid employees of the owners of mule trains.

Why maintain memories of a life of full of hard labor, repressive relationships and poverty? The answer, we surmise, lies in the fact of their awareness that they were an essential link in Spain's global trading network. Without them, that chain from the Philippines to Spain via Mexico would have been broken. So we were most curious to meet these arrieros in the fiesta at Santa Úrsula Xitle.

Fiesta at Santa Úrsula Xitle

The fiesta at Santa Úrsula Xitle was likely to be a modest one. It was not the pueblo's patron saint fiesta, which is held in October. It was a fiesta sponsored by a cofradía, a brotherhood of parishioners of the church dedicated to venerating la Virgen de San Juan de los Lagos. We had previously encountered this advocación of the Virgin Mary, that is, a manifestation of the Virgin, appearing at a particular time and place and serving as an advocate for the forgiveness of her followers, supplicating for them before her Son, the Christ, and his Father in Heaven. That had been last autumn at the Fiesta de San Francisco in the Quadrante de San Francisco in Delegación Coyoacán, where a conchero comparsa was dedicated to her.

Despite the fiesta's likely modest size, we set off on a Sunday morning in early February to the Pueblo de Santa Úrsula Xitle in Tlalpan, eager to become acquainted with a new pueblo and a new form of fiesta dancer. (The pueblo is the center of a group of colonias that identify themselves as part of the original indigenous village of Xitle. It was named after a nearby, small volcano whose eruption, about the year 100 A.D., destroyed nearby Cuicuilco, the first urban center in the Valley of Mexico.) 

Although the pueblo is some distance southwest of our base in Delegación Coyoacán, it isn´t difficult for our taxi driver to find. Santa Úrsula lies just south of Tlalpan Centro (the original capital of the altepetl (city-state) of Tlalpan and north of Pueblo Chimalcoyotl, whose fiesta of the Immaculate Conception we attended in December 2017. 

Its eastern border is the major Avenida Insurgentes, which crosses much of the city from north to south on its western side. Just south of Santa Úrsula, the avenue merges with the Calzada de Tlalpan to form the Expressway 95D. It follows the ancient trail that climbs over the mountains, and then descends 5,000 feet (1,524 meters) to the state of Morelos and its capital Cuernavaca, and then, more gradually, another 5,000 ft. (1,524 meters) to Acapulco, on the Pacific Ocean in the state of Guerrero. .

Reaching Avenida Insurgentes, we turn south and soon find Calle Santa Úrsula. Traveling into the pueblo some blocks, we come to where the road divides, one half turning left, the other to the right. There is no sign of a church. Facing us is a tall wall we cannot see over. Not sure which way to turn, we ask our driver to wait and we get out to ask some people on the street where the church is. They smile and point to the street going to the right and then left, around a corner. We thank them and then our driver, pay him and walk around the corner to the right. Immediately we see people gathered at an entrance in the wall. It is the wall of the church atrio (atrium).

The original, well-preserved 16th-century Franciscan chapel
sits at the far end of the spacious, tree-filled, tranquil, park-like atrio.

The blue and white papel picado, cut paper,
tell us this is a festival dedicated to the Virgin Mary.

The decoration of the small chapel also announces this is a fiesta for the Virgin.
Two small representations (called "demanditas", little petitions) of the Virgen de San Juan de los Lagos sit on the altar.
Santa Úrsula stands above and behind them.

Banner
of the Virgen de San Juan de los Lagos
of the cofradía (brotherhood) of the Colonia Pedegral de Santa Úrsula, Tlalpan.

Las Cuadrillas de Arrieros

Outside the chapel, we notice two gentlemen wearing cowboy-style sombreros. They appear to be in charge of the proceedings. They introduce themselves as the leaders of two cuadrillas de arrieros, one from Santa Úrsula, the other from Pueblo San Andrés Toltótepec, a short distance south of Pueblo Santa Úrsula and Pueblo Chimalcoyotl, where the climb up the mountains begins to be seriously steep.

Heads of the Arrieros of San Andrés Totóltepec (left) and Santa Úrsula (right).
They hold a standard representing Santa Úrsula.
The leader from San Andrés invites us to their patron saint fiesta in November.
Ojalá, hopefully, we will be able to attend.

We tell them that our purpose in being here is to get know the pueblo and to take photos to share their fiesta, including the dance of the cuadrillas de arrieros, on the internet via our blog, Mexico City Ambles. We tell them we consider it an honor to be able to witness and record the fiesta and their dance. They invite us to join in the meal being served to participants by a group of women at a table just inside the atrio entrance. We courteously and gratefully accept. It is a simple comida of beef boiled in a broth, accompanied by the indispensable corn tortillas.

When the meal is over, the men of the two cuadrillas line up for their dance. The majority are dressed in the white muslin shirts and pants, some with embroidery, and straw sombreros that were the standard dress for campesinos (rural Mexicans workers) beginning after the Spanish Conquest until the 20th century, that is, for over 400 years. U.S. style "Western cowboy" dress was not adopted until the latter half of the past century. 

La cuadrilla de arrieros de Santa Úrsula

La cuadrilla de arrieros de San Andrés Totóltepec.
Note: This cuadrilla includes one young woman.
Also, unlike those in traditional campesino dress,
the leader is attired as a gentleman cowboy, in a suit, dress shirt and tie, with a felt sombrero,
definitely a "step up" from the campesino class.

The dance, like those of most comparsas of charros and caporales, is a simple line dance to a basic four-beat rhythm. 

The Arrieros Closeup

At every fiesta, one of our passions is taking retratos, portraits, of the individuals who are participants and the people who make up the audience. Here are some of the arrieros and those attending the fiesta close up.

The embroidery says "Cuadrilla de Arrieros Águilas del Sur"
Mule Drivers Team Eagles of the South.

At the end of the dance, the leader of the Santa Úrsula Xitle arreiros introduces us to the mayordomo (chief caretaker) responsible for organizing the fiesta for la Cofradía de la Virgen de San Juan de los Lagos. He introduces himself simply as Fausto, with his wife, Tere. 

Tere and Fausto

We thank them profusely for the opportunity and privilege they have provided of being able to attend today's fiesta and photograph it. We tell them we will share our photos via the internet and give them the link to our Facebook page. 

As almost always in our ambles to pueblos and their fiestas, our desire to get to know Santa Úrsala Xitle and to meet and learn about a new group of fiesta dancers, las cuadrillas de los arrieros, has led to an experience full of Mexican ánimo (spirit) and alegría (joy).

And it has led to our learning about a key link, centered here in the pueblos of Tlalpan, in the global trade network that maintained the Spanish Empire for 300 years. The role of los arrieros in that network still gives their descendants mucho orgullo (much pride). It is the same pride we see daily that Mexicans take in mi trabajo, my work, no matter how humble in the economic system it may seem.

Post Script:

By pure chance, we encountered the Arrieros de San Andrés Totóltepec the very next day at the Fiesta of Candelaria in the pueblo of that name in Delegación/Alcaldía Coyoacán. After the main procession and Mass, they sang songs called mañanitas (morning songs, commonly sung on a patron saint's day or an individual's birthday), accompanied by a group of mariachis, to the Virgen de Candelaria in her church. Then they performed their dance outside the church.

Cuadrilla de arrieros from San Andrés Totóltepec
sing mañanitas in the Chruch of Candelaria, Coyoacán

          

Arrieros de San Andrés Totótepec (left) and
Arrieros of another pueblo we didn't manage to identify.

    

       

Clearly, we have only scraped the proverbial surface of cuadrillas de arrieros in Mexico City. We wonder where and when we will encounter them again.

Delegación Tlalpan (mustard yellow)
is at the southwest corner of Mexico City.
It is just south of Coyoacán (purple), our home,
and west of Xochimilco (pink),
and Milpa Alta (light yellow).

Pueblos of north-central Delegación/Alcaldia Tlalpan

Santa Úrsula Xitle is dark blue area marked by green/yellow star.
Tlalpan Centro is the green area to its northeast.
Chimalcoyotl is green area to its southeast.
San Andres Totoltepec is large yellow area to the south.