In the dry season of 2019, I climbed to 3,400 meters to find a woman named Juana Quispe sitting at a backstrap loom that had belonged to her grandmother. She was weaving a lliclla — a carrying cloth — in cochineal red and indigo blue. Every thread, she told me, had a name: the warp was the spine of the earth, the weft was the breath of the living. It took her four months to finish one cloth, and she sold it for less than the price of a dinner in Lima.
A Grammar Older Than the Wheel
The patterns Juana wove were not decorative. They were a writing system. Three zigzag lines meant a river; a diamond inside a diamond meant a seed inside the earth. These motifs had been passed down for at least two thousand years — longer than the Latin alphabet has existed. When I asked her daughter, a university student in Huamanga, whether she planned to learn the loom, she paused for a long time before answering.
If the young stop weaving, the mountain will forget how to speak.