500 years in the making
Arizona artists keep ancient weaving tradition alive
Standing near their loom Thursday, Mel and Lucy Mendez, both 43, pull samples from piles of brightly designed rugs and tend to their customers.
Their trip from Prescott, Arizona, to the Oklahoma City Festival of the Arts is one of only a handful of shows they will attend this year with their traditionally woven Zapotec rugs.
“My husband’s a fifthgeneration weaver,” said Lucy. “His tribe, the Zapotec, is based in Oaxaca, Mexico. In the Zapotec tradition, the men do the weaving and the women do the assisting. But I also do the weaving.”
Mel originally is from Teotitlan, Oaxaca, where highly trained weavers have been perfecting their craft for at least 500 years, according to the book “Zapotec Weavers of Teotitlan” by Andra Fischgrund Stanton.
The rugs “range from modernist motifs to
Navajo geometrics to ancient and historical patterns reprised in vivid and colorful contemporary designs. Zapotec weavers express their sense of well-being and belonging in what they weave, and the tapestries and rugs that are currently produced reconcile ancient history with the ways of the 21st-century marketplace,” Stanton wrote.
“That’s where he learned when he was a little boy. He learned from his father and his grandfather, so he’s been doing it more than 30 years,” Lucy said. “I learned from his family. I’ve been doing it about 15 years.”
Each summer they return to Teotitlan so that Lucy can continue her training.
An ancient craft
The loom is a simple design, created by colonial Spaniards in the 1500s.
“They came and said, ‘You’re weaving too slow,’ because the women used to weave on the waist and some women still do in Oaxaca,” Lucy said. “So they invented the loom for the Zapotec and most of them have been weaving on it for 500 or 600 years.”
The Mendezes build their own looms based on the size of a particular rug.
“We have about six looms right now. We have six at our house so we can do different sizes and different designs,” she said.
In the Zapotec tradition, the couple also dye their own wool, dry it and place it on bamboo spools.
“We dye our own wools because we use our own colors,” she said.
The brighter blues or reds reflect a more traditional rug, while the sages, siennas and teals suggest a more modern design.
“We’re always changing our colors depending on what our customers want,” she said.
Once the weaving begins, the size of the piece will dictate whether it can be done by a single person, or whether Mel and Lucy need to do the weaving together.
“For anything bigger than our 6-foot-by-10foot rug, it takes two of us to weave to get it done. We work side-by-side because you have more pedals on your loom,” she said.
Lucy said some of their rugs take six weeks to weave depending on the size and intricacy of the pattern while others take only a few days. Some of the rugs are Mel’s original designs while others bear the Zapotecs’ traditional symbology including “grecas” (Greek keys), diamonds, heaving waves, circles, dashes, stripes, and squares. Renditions of the ancient “tree of life” design represent some of the more complicated designs the Mendezes do.
Mel has designed rugs incorporating a modern twist on the Zapotec tradition, with elk, bears, mountains and cactus.
Finding a balance
The price for the Mendezes’ rugs varies from as high as $2,500 for a large rug with a complicated design to $350 for a small throw rug. They have a solid customer base, built primarily from the 15 or 16 art shows they attend each year.
“We only do art shows,” Lucy said. “It keeps our overhead down and our prices reasonable. We don’t have to pay workers or anything like that.”
During the summer months, they receive help from their two daughters, who are 18 and 23, and who love the travel, but are not as committed to the family trade.
“The trade doesn’t pay as much. It’s not as exciting. Parents say ‘Go to college; better yourself,’ but then the trade gets left behind,” she said. “My daughter is a teacher. She knows how to do a little bit but not a lot. Why? Because we pushed her to go to college and get an education. My other daughter, she actually likes it more. She takes a little bit more time to learn how to weave so we’re hoping she’ll take more of an interest.”
But for now, the Mendezes are content to weave the rugs themselves.
“We love doing the art shows and getting to meet people and seeing the United States,” she said.
For more information, visit www.MendezRug. com.