Maya women in Guatemala have decided to defend their traditional textiles, the huipiles, from the industry. A potential precedent for the protection of collective intellectual property rights.
In Guatemala an organisation bringing together more than a thousand women, predominantly Maya, has raised the alarm over how indigenous craft products, in particular textiles known as "huipiles", are being threatened by cut-price industrial fabrics that have appropriated indigenous designs and flooded the Guatemalan market, depriving native women of their main source of income.
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In May 2016 the Asociación Femenina para el Desarrollo de Sacatepéquez (Afedes), a grassroots movement against gender inequality in Guatemala, filed a motion with the Constitutional Court calling for indigenous textiles to be protected under the Constitution, which guarantees to "recognise, respect and promote the ways of life, customs and indigenous traditions".
To counter industrially produced textiles, in November 2016 Afedes proposed a legislative reform that would recognise the notion of collective intellectual property and indigenous peoples as the collective authors of their own cultural heritage. The bill would protect Maya weavers from the plagiarism of their designs — a widespread phenomenon in the fashion industry — and would result in the right to receive royalties for their commercial use. The bill (number 5247) has been officially accepted for discussion and is awaiting consideration by Congress.
Guatemala is a member of the World Intellectual Property Organisation (Wipo), a United Nations agency that protects intellectual property at the international level. The country has implemented a series of measures on the matter but has not regulated collective intellectual property, despite the fact that 51 per cent of the Guatemalan population belongs to the Maya group, whose vision of the universe is rooted in the idea of collectivity.
This is not the first time that indigenous groups have sought recognition of their collective intellectual property rights. In 1999, for example, the Union of yagé healers of the colombian Amazon requested that yagé, a traditional infusion used in spiritual rituals and medicine, be recognised as belonging to the traditional knowledge of indigenous peoples. These groups were driven primarily by the urgency of halting the devastating commercialisation of traditional plants that was desecrating their culture.
Similarly, Maya weavers emphasise that their textiles are an essential expression of their own cultural and spiritual identity, with patterns depicting spiritual elements such as the Maya calendar, and that their struggle represents the fight for indigenous empowerment. "Even if from a Western perspective the act of making one's own clothes is synonymous with backwardness or poverty, for us it is the path to the free self-determination of our communities," said Angelina Aspuac, an Afedes organiser, during a hearing before the Constitutional Court.
"We are daughters of the grandmothers who will not die, because they live in the universe of our textiles," Aspuac added, to emphasise the cultural continuity protected by the huipiles.
The Maya people were the principal victims of the civil war that devastated Guatemala between 1960 and 1996. Of the 200,000 people killed or disappeared during the conflict between the government and left-wing guerrilla groups, 83 per cent were of Maya origin. By intensifying their efforts to reclaim control over their own cultural heritage, indigenous people are not only making a symbolic claim to their cultural work and coming to terms with the past, but also waging a hard-earned battle for empowerment within the new social order.
Translated by Camilla Soldati