We will spend 6 full days + one evening under the guidance of Doña Eustaquia Ruiz, who will lead our tours to the remote villages surrounding San Cristobal de las Casas. Please take the time to read her biography to better understand what a great honour this is. CENTRO DE TEXTILES DEL MUNDO MAYA Eustaquia Ruiz Gómez Master Weaver · Room Custodian · Cultural Educator ORIGINS & EARLY LIFE Eustaquia Ruiz Gómez was born in the late 1970s in the paraje of Oventic, in the municipality of San Andrés Larrainzar, Chiapas — a Tzotzil Maya highland community with a rich weaving tradition. She grew up surrounded by textiles, learning the art of weaving as a child through play at her mother's loom and by watching her grandmother work. This intergenerational transmission of knowledge — mother to daughter, grandmother to granddaughter — is the living foundation of Tzotzil textile culture, and it is precisely the tradition that Eustaquia embodies and carries forward. POLITICAL AWAKENING As a teenager, Eustaquia became part of the Zapatista movement — an experience that deeply shaped her political consciousness and her sense of Indigenous identity and rights. This participation placed her within one of the most significant social movements in modern Mexican history, one that has long advocated for the autonomy and dignity of Indigenous peoples in Chiapas. That early commitment to justice and community is woven into her approach to her work to this day. A LIVING ARCHIVE AT THE CENTRO DE TEXTILES Eustaquia has lived in San Cristóbal de las Casas for over a decade and has been a central presence at the Centro de Textiles del Mundo Maya, housed in the historic Ex Convent of Santo Domingo. Working as a room custodian and master weaving instructor, she became — in practice — an indispensable living archive of the collection. Her knowledge surpasses what any catalogue can capture. By simply observing a textile piece, she can identify whether threads were dyed with natural or industrial dyes, whether designs were formed with supplementary weft or embroidery, and distinguish hand-spun cotton from synthetic fibres. She knows the Tzotzil names of each type of weaving, and she carries the stories behind the historic pieces in the collection — textiles she encountered as a child in her community, long before they entered any museum. Perhaps most remarkably, Eustaquia can identify the authorship of a piece at a glance. When a ceremonial huipil from her home community arrived at the Centre — a winner of the FONART Prize 2013 — she looked at it and said simply: "Ah, that one is Andrea's." She explained that among weavers, they know how each one works. This capacity to read textiles as personal signatures reflects a depth of cultural literacy that no formal training can replicate. RECOGNITION & LEGACY Eustaquia is herself a winner of the FONART Prize, Mexico's national award for folk art and craftsmanship — a recognition of the exceptional quality of her own weaving. As the Centro grew, she became a teacher, passing her knowledge on to new generations of visitors, researchers, and fellow weavers. Her only daughter, Leticia, weaves and speaks Tzotzil despite having grown up in the city — a testament to Eustaquia's commitment to transmitting her culture beyond the boundaries of her original community. For Eustaquia, textiles are not objects. They are documents, written in a language she learned as a child playing beside her mother's loom, a language that Tzotzil women have used for centuries to tell a profound and feminine history. Source: Ojinaga Zapata, B.C. (2024). Oral history sessions at the Centro de Textiles del Mundo Maya.