Slow Bus to Teotitlán

Two hours for thirty kilometers. The bus stops whenever someone raises a hand by the roadside, which is often. By the time we reached Teotitlán the bus had gained and lost about twenty people since the terminal.

A man napped against my shoulder for the last forty minutes and woke up before his stop like he had an internal alarm. I've noticed that people who spend a lot of time on buses develop this. Some people carry the road lightly.

Teotitlán is the textile village, famous for its woven rugs. The best weavers here still use natural dyes — cochineal for the reds and pinks, indigo for blue, pomegranate rind for yellow — and the patterns are based on Zapotec cosmology from before the Spanish arrived. The designs have been in continuous use for five hundred years.

I bought a small piece, maybe 30x20cm, in a pattern the weaver told me represents the four directions meeting at a center point. She drew the symbol in the air with her finger first, tracing each line carefully, which felt like being given something beyond the cloth.