I grew up measuring time by the rhythm of a loom. I was familiar with the creak of wooden pedals under my grandmother’s bare feet, the tension of yarn stretched tight between her fingers, the sharp crack of the beater securing each thread in its place, before I knew how to read time on a clock. That sound filled the adobe walls of our family’s loom house in Oaxaca like a heartbeat.
Every morning, the sunrise inched its way through the slim windows and struck the yarn taut on the loom, turning it into rivers of shimmering red, blue, and gold. My grandmother would hum quietly as she stirred vats of indigo and cochineal dye over the fire. There was always the damp scent of wood smoke mixed with the bitter sweetness of the dye. This was not just craft to me. It was life itself, textured in designs older than remembrance.
When I sat with my grandmother, she did not lecture or scold. She led by example. She’d tilt her head toward the skeins of yarn, and I knew it was my turn to wind them into tight balls. She’d pause and let me pull the beater, clumsy at first, until I fell into the rhythm of thread crossing thread.
Her classes were never only weaving. “Patience,” she’d say when I tangled the warp. “Strength,” when I pedalled too lightly. “Pride,” when a design finally emerged: diamonds, zigzags, and spirals that echoed the mountains which circled our Zapotec village.
What I learned alongside her loom was not just how to weave cloth, but how to weave myself into a lineage of women who carry memory in their hands.
To outsiders, perhaps an Oaxacan woven rug is a souvenir, a bit of colour to put on the floor or on the wall. But textiles are history in our village. Each design is a tale: a prayer for harvest, a spirit of the mountains, a recollection of rain. Each strand of wool has passed through calloused hands, spun with labour, coloured with time, and blended with dozens of others into designs that take weeks, sometimes months, to complete.
When visitors come, I catch myself watching them stare at my grandmother’s hands in quiet amazement. She doesn’t speak English, but her weaving speaks. Buying directly from her and the other village artisans doesn’t just put food on our tables; it enables the craft to survive, whole, pure, unadulterated. The loom house is small, a simple one-room affair with an earthen floor. But sitting inside, I feel it is vast, like a cathedral of thread and wood.
The morning begins with the soft scouring of wool, the crackle of the fire under dye pots, and the smell of wet skeins hung out in the sun to dry.
Later in the day, the loom commandeers the room with its rhythm. The wooden frames groan, the wool whines through the shuttle, and my grandmother’s voice rises in song, now and then an ancient folk tune, now and then a hum. Visitors who sit with us will close their eyes to listen, as if they’ve joined a ritual. And they have.
By nightfall, when the sky outside is orange, the cloth has lengthened enough that its story is taking shape. My grandmother strokes it the way that some people pet the back of a cherished animal: tender, proud, grateful.
I write this not only as a granddaughter, but as a person who has seen what occurs when traditions are boiled down to commodities. Too often, middlemen and mass markets drain meaning from the weaving, reducing sacred patterns down to inexpensive reproductions. What’s lost is not only beauty, but dignity as well.
That’s why I invite travellers to come to us in Oaxaca, to step into the loom house, to sit with artisans, to watch the process from raw wool to finished rug. To buy directly from the people whose stories are woven into each strand. This is not charity. This is reciprocity, a dignified exchange in which guests leave not only with something beautiful, but with a piece of our shared humanity.
My grandmother’s loom is not merely a tool. It is a bridge between past and future. When I put my own feet onto the pedals, I feel her presence, but also the presence of all of the ancestors who have woven before us. Each thread that I weave is a vow to keep this tradition alive, to honour the patience that it requires, to never allow the thread to break.
Weaving in our Zapotec village is not a performance staged for tourists. It is a living practice, threaded into the routine of daily existence. To me, it is also a love letter to the woman who taught me that beauty is a product of discipline, that quiet is a form of strength, and that heritage is something you give life to, row by row.
And so, when I look at a finished cloth alive with colour, throbbing with pattern, I don’t just see cloth. I see the shadow of her hands, the shadow of our country, the shadow of time itself.
