Guatemala City, Museo Ixchel Indigenous Clothing and Popol Vuh
Guatemala City is a big surprise! It is clean, filled with great restaurants, excellent hotels, and glass buildings. It is definitely an international enclave. In the elevator of the Hyatt Centric where we are staying downtown, I met a young man from Japan and a local who both work for Honda motorcycles. Down the street […]
Chiapas in Pictures
Spaces open in Chiapas Textile Study Tour, February 2024. Click here for more! We will not be offering this tour in 2025. Come with us for an extraordinary textile adventure! Included: embroidery workshop with master Francesca, from Aguacatenango. We go deep into Maya culture, visiting remote villages in the Chiapas Highlands. Click here. Chiapas is […]
2024 Chiapas Textile Study Tour: Deep into the Maya World
At Oaxaca Cultural Navigator, we aim to give you an unparalleled and in-depth travel experience to participate and delve deeply into indigenous culture, folk art and celebrations. The Maya World of Chiapas, Mexico, spans centuries and borders. Maya people weave their complex universe into beautiful cloth. Symbols are part of an ancient pre-Hispanic animist belief system. […]
In San Pedro Chenalho, Chiapas, Women Unite By Weaving
In March 2022, I had the good fortune to meet the weavers of the Maya cooperative Tsobol Antsetik (Women United) where they live and work in the township of Chixilton, Chenalho, Chiapas, on International Women’s Day. The group was formed over two decades ago and has 25 members. They use the back strap loom to […]
Chiapas, Too: Round Two
We are mid-way through our second Chiapas tour. I always say, The right people always show up! and they do. We saw the same things, made the same stops, met the same people and each tour is different based on interests, questions, experience and personalities. We have four weavers and two three textile designers on […]
Second Section: Chiapas Textile Study Tour–Deep Into the Maya World, March 2022
March 8 -16, 2022 – 8 nights and 9 days, starting at $2,795 Email me to ask about registration. http://mail to:norma.schafer@icloud.com At Oaxaca Cultural Navigator, we aim to give you an unparalleled in-depth travel experience to participate and delve deeply into indigenous culture, folk art and celebrations. Our hope, too, is that we will all […]
Alberto Lopez Gomez: Mayan Chiapas Textiles Have Meaning
Here, I am sharing four short videos from our recent 2020 Chiapas Textile Study Tour. They each explain the symbols that women weave into their cloth. The first two videos introduce you to Albert Lopez Gomez and his reason for starting a cooperative to help his family and village of Magdalena Aldama. He wants to […]
Chiapas Boundaries, Borders and Cloth: Cultural Tourism
Long before the Spanish conquest of the Americas beginning with Mexico in 1521, Maya land was contiguous. Maya peoples spanned what we now know as Chiapas, the Yucatan Peninsula, Guatemala, Belize, Honduras and El Salvador. While spoken dialects differ, the language of cloth tells a similar and familiar story of the universe and creation: corn, […]
A Word About Chiapas From Trish Tieger
I want to share this with you. It came to me this week unsolicited from Trish Tieger who lives along the Hudson River Valley in New York State. She traveled with us to Chiapas in 2018 and wanted me to know about her experience. Dear Norma, So much time has passed since we returned from […]
2018 Chiapas Textile Study Tour: Deep Into the Maya World
We have THREE spaces open for February 13-22, 2018. We have ONE space open for February 27-March 8, 2018 for a shared room at $2,495. Send me an email. Here is the program description: Chiapas Textiles + Folk Art Study Tour: Deep Into the Maya World — 2018 We are based in the historic Chiapas […]
Chiapas Notebook: Maya Cemetery at Romerillo
The day is cloudy, overcast. A mist hangs on the hills like a coverlet. It’s late February, still chilly with winter in the Chiapas Highlands. Fuzzy wool cape weather, even in the early afternoon. After our visit to Tenejapa for the Thursday market, we make a stop at Romerillo before returning to San Cristobal de […]
Chiapas Notebook: Tenejapa Textiles and Thursday Market
Tenejapa, Chiapas is a regional center in the highlands of Chiapas about an hour- and-a-half beyond San Cristobal de las Casas. It’s a regional administrative center, about midway between the city and the remote village of Cancuc, past Romerillo. Most roads splay out from San Cristobal like spikes on a wheel hub, dead-ending down a canyon […]
Tonina, Hidden Chiapas Archeology Gem: The Road Less Traveled
Few people make Tonina, the classic Maya archeological site just beyond Ocosingo, Chiapas, a travel destination. Instead, they choose to go between San Cristobal de Las Casas and Palenque directly, bypassing the most vertical site of the ancient Maya world. It’s another three hours by road to reach Palenque, which demands at least one overnight […]
Chiapas Textile Museum: Maya Art on Cloth
The contemporary Maya world spans political boundaries and crosses southern Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, Belize and El Salvador. Here in Chiapas there is a rich textile tradition that endures as cultural identity and pride. The Centro de Textiles del Mundo Maya, The Textile Center of the Maya World, is the place to begin to see the […]
The Journey Begins: San Cristobal de Las Casas, Chiapas, Mexico
Most of our Penland School of Crafts travelers continued on with me from Oaxaca to explore Chiapas. Our journey began at the ADO bus station where we boarded an overnight luxury bus called the Platino with twenty-five reclining seats, leaving at 8:30 p.m. and arriving in San Cristobal de Las Casas at 7:30 a.m. the […]
Tonina, Chiapas: Atop the Mayan World
The Mayan archeological site of Tonina is breathtaking. The Moon Handbook on Chiapas says it is one of the best sites that no one seems to know about. In fact, there were only about ten people there when we visited. About midway between San Cristobal de las Casas and Palenque, and a few miles off […]
Selva Lacandon Territory: A Chance Meeting
My journey into the Lacandon jungle along the Usumacinta River that is the boundary between Mexico and Guatemala began simply with a top-of-the-list visit to Na Bolom (Jaguar House) in San Cristobal de las Casas. Here I was fascinated by Gertrude (Trudi) Duby-Blom’s descriptive black and white photos shot in the mid-1950’s of Lacondon people. […]
Palenque. Mayan Temples in the Chiapas Rainforest
They say there is more rain here in Palenque than anywhere else in Mexico. We are in the middle of a rainforest. It is a jungle of green, and with the shroud of fog, drizzle, and mist that hangs over us all day, the archeological site is a photograph of sepia and gray tones only […]