"Su Yao's Dazzling Counterattack Chapter 44"
The sun blazed over the valleys of Oaxaca, Mexico, where terraced fields climbed the mountains like green staircases and adobe villages nestled between cypress trees. Su Yao's car bumped along a dirt road, passing women in embroidered huipiles (blouses) carrying baskets of corn on their heads, until it reached a Zapotec community dominated by a 16th-century church with a stone courtyard. In the shade of a giant mesquite tree, a group of weavers sat at wooden backstrap looms, their bodies swaying in rhythm as threads of indigo and crimson intertwined. Their leader, a woman with silver braids and a red quechquemitl (shawl) named Doña Lupe, looked up as they approached, her hands pausing on a loom strung with intricate patterns. "You've come for the telar," she said, her Zapotec language soft but firm, gesturing to the textiles that hung like rainbows from nearby lines.
The Zapotec people of Oaxaca have woven textiles for over 2,500 years, their craft encoded with a cosmology that maps the universe: the vertical threads represent the pila (sacred mountain), the horizontal threads the yagul (underworld), and the patterns—geometric shapes, animals, and celestial bodies—tell stories of creation. Each village has its signature design: Teotitlán del Valle is famous for bold diamonds, Mitla for feathered serpents that symbolize Quetzalcoatl, the god of wisdom. Weaving is a ritual act, performed at dawn when the "spirits are awake," with offerings of atole (corn drink) left by the loom to honor the textile goddess Tlazolteotl. Su Yao's team had traveled here to merge this sacred craft with their seaweed-metal blend, hoping to create a textile that honored Zapotec cosmovisión (worldview) while adding durability to the cotton and wool fibers. But from the first conversation, it was clear that their understanding of "symbolism" and "innovation" was as different as the arid mountains and the ocean depths.
Doña Lupe's granddaughter, Ximena, a 26-year-old weaver who also ran a community museum, held up a huipil with a pattern of stars and lightning bolts in indigo and gold. "This is from my abuela (grandmother)," she said, tracing a zigzag line that split into seven branches. "The lightning is Coatlicue, the earth mother, giving life to the corn. The seven stars are the Pleiades, which tell us when to plant. You don't just weave these patterns—you pray them into being."
Su Yao's team had brought computer-aided design software and synthetic dyes, intending to digitize Zapotec patterns and mass-produce them using their seaweed-metal blend for a "global indigenous art" collection. When Lin displayed a digital mock-up of the Pleiades pattern printed on a scarf, the weavers stopped working, their looms silent. Doña Lupe's brother, Don Ignacio, a curandero (healer) with a necklace of jade and obsidian, stood and shook his head. "You think you can capture our gods in a machine?" he said, his voice rising with anger. "These threads carry the breath of Tlazolteotl. Your metal has no breath—it's a corpse."
Cultural friction deepened over materials and rituals. Zapotec weavers use cotton grown in the valley's fertile soil and wool from local sheep, dyed with plants harvested according to the lunar calendar: indigo in the waxing moon for deep blue, cochineal (a red insect) in the full moon for vibrant crimson, and marigolds in the waning moon for gold. The dyeing process includes limpias (cleansing rituals) where Don Ignacio waves sage over the vats to "drive away bad energy." The seaweed-metal blend, despite its organic origins, was viewed as spiritually inert. "Your thread comes from the salt sea," Doña Lupe said, feeling a sample between her fingers. "Our dyes come from our mountains. They don't speak the same language."
A practical crisis emerged when the metal threads reacted with the cochineal dye, turning it a murky purple and causing the cotton fibers to weaken. "It kills the color," Ximena said, holding up a ruined swatch where the lightning bolts had blurred. "Our huipiles should last a lifetime, getting brighter with each wash. This fades like a memory."
Then disaster struck: heavy rains triggered a mudslide that swept through the village's dye gardens, uprooting indigo plants and burying cochineal nests under tons of earth. The weavers' looms, stored in a stone hut at the base of the mountain, were crushed, and their collection of antique telar tools—bone shuttles and wooden combs passed down for generations—was destroyed. Don Ignacio, performing a ritual to calm the mountain spirit by burning copal incense, blamed the team for disturbing the natural balance. "You brought something cold from the sea to our hot land," he said, as smoke curled toward the clouds. "The mountain is angry, and it's taking back what we stole."
That night, Su Yao sat with Doña Lupe in her adobe house, where a clay stove simmered with mole (chocolate sauce), filling the air with the scent of cinnamon and chili. The walls were hung with woven rugs, and a small altar to Tlazolteotl held corn ears and a tiny loom. "I'm sorry," Su Yao said, sipping tejate (a frothy corn drink). "We came here thinking we could celebrate your art, but we've only shown we don't understand its soul."
Doña Lupe smiled, passing Su Yao a tlayuda (crisp tortilla with beans). "The mudslide is not your fault," she said. "The mountain gives and takes—always has. My grandmother used to say that loss teaches us to weave tighter, like the threads after a storm. But your thread—maybe it's a gift, if we learn to wrap it in our ways. The young people leave for the city. We need to show them our weaving can walk in both worlds."
Su Yao nodded, hope blooming like corn in the rainy season. "What if we start over? We'll help you replant the dye gardens and dig out the tools. We'll learn to weave on backstrap looms, by hand. We won't use your sacred patterns. Instead, we'll create new ones together—designs that merge your mountain stars with our ocean waves, honoring both your cosmovisión and the sea. And we'll treat the metal thread with your limpias, so it carries good energy."
Ximena, who had been listening from the doorway, stepped inside, her huipil rustling. "You'd really learn to weave with a backstrap? It takes months to get the rhythm—your back will ache, your hands will blister."
"However long it takes," Su Yao said. "And we'll learn the stories behind each stitch. Respect means knowing why they matter."
Over the next two months, the team immersed themselves in Zapotec life. They helped build stone retaining walls to protect the new dye gardens from future mudslides, their hands calloused from mixing mortar. They trekked into the mountains with Don Ignacio to collect wild cochineal, learning to identify the cacti where the insects thrive and to leave offerings of cornmeal. They sat under the mesquite tree, tying themselves to backstrap looms and swaying in rhythm with the weavers, their bodies sore as Doña Lupe corrected their posture. "The loom is an extension of your spine," she said, adjusting Su Yao's strap. "You don't fight it—you dance with it."
They learned to dye fibers in clay pots, their fingers stained blue and red as Ximena taught them to stir counterclockwise for "moon energy" and clockwise for "sun energy." "Indigo needs to 'breathe'—you can't rush the fermentation," she said, skimming foam from a vat of deep blue liquid. "It's like waiting for corn to ripen—patience makes it sweet." They practiced the tecua stitch, a complex technique that creates floating threads resembling falling stars, their progress slow but steady as Doña Lupe's sister, Antonia, a master weaver of 70, guided their hands. "The stitch should look effortless, like the wind moving through corn," she said, her own hands moving as if the threads obeyed her thoughts.
To solve the reaction between the metal threads and cochineal, Lin experimented with coating the metal in a solution of agave nectar and epazote (a sacred herb), a mixture Zapotecs use to preserve food. The nectar sealed the metal, preventing discoloration, while the epazote infused it with a subtle scent that Don Ignacio declared "pleasing to Tlazolteotl." "It's like giving the thread a Zapotec heart," she said, showing Doña Lupe a swatch where the crimson now glowed against the metal's shimmer.
Fiona, inspired by the way Oaxaca's rivers flow to the Pacific, designed a new pattern called Agua de Dos Mundos (Water of Two Worlds), which merged Zapotec star motifs with ocean waves in seaweed-metal thread. The stars gradually transform into waves, symbolizing the connection between mountain and sea. "It honors your pila and our ocean," she said, and Don Ignacio nodded, running his hand over the design. "The gods walk in both places," he said. "This cloth lets them meet."
As the dye gardens began to flourish and the weavers repaired their looms, the village held a fiesta for the Day of the Dead, decorating altars with marigolds and woven textiles. They unveiled their first collaborative piece: a quechquemitl with the Agua de Dos Mundos pattern, its cotton fibers strengthened by seaweed-metal thread that caught the candlelight like bioluminescent waves, and traditional indigo borders that glowed against the night.
Doña Lupe draped the shawl over Su Yao's shoulders during the celebration, as mariachis played and children danced. "This cloth has two voices," she said, her eyes shining. "One from our mountains, one from your sea. But they sing the same song—of life, and how it weaves us all together."
As the team's car drove away from Oaxaca, Ximena ran along the road, waving a small package. Su Yao rolled down the window, and she tossed it in: a corner of a huipil, woven with a tiny star and a wave in seaweed-metal, tucked inside a leather pouch. "To remember us by," read a note in Zapotec and Spanish. "Remember that the stars above and the waves below are both made of light."
Su Yao clutched the package as the mountains of Oaxaca faded into the distance, their peaks glowing pink in the sunset. She thought of the hours spent swaying at the backstrap loom, the limpias performed with Don Ignacio, the way the metal thread had finally learned to dance with the cotton. The Zapotecs had taught her that tradition isn't a cage—it's a living language, one that can learn new words without losing its meaning.
Her phone buzzed with a message from the Basque team: photos of Ane holding their collaborative pañuelo at a village festival. Su Yao smiled, typing back: "We've added a new stitch—Zapotec mountains and your sea, woven as one."
Somewhere in the distance, a rooster crowed, its call echoing across the valley like a benediction. Su Yao knew their journey was far from over. There were still countless cultures to learn from, countless threads to weave into the tapestry of their work. And as long as they approached each new place with humility—listening more than speaking, learning more than teaching—the tapestry would only grow more vibrant, a testament to the beauty of human connection across every landscape and language.