ABSTRACT
The staccato clack-clacking of wood on wood bounces from one house to the next, echoes off the stone cliff across the valley and pummels me from all directions as I walk out of the village. This is the chorus of weavers whose farms trail a mile or two down the road away from town. Large wooden looms feature prominently on front porches of the houses that line the street. Morning is weaving time, before the heat of the day sets in. This rhythmic chatter of looms forms a background sound to the morning, commencing shortly after the first rooster crows, dying down as the sun hits the high point of its travel through the sky. This is the sound of Todos Santos Cuchumatán, Guatemala. It’s the fabric of connection among the weaving households of the village, uniting them in a common task every morning, a lively chatter of camaraderie for solitary work. The sound hugs the valley, trailing off from town like a low lying cloud, and surrounds all that happens in that neighborhood-people tending fields of corn, teaching at the school, selling oranges beside the road. All work to the rhythm of the weaving. As a tourist, here to learn Spanish for a month at a local language school, I wander through the sound. I climb the hill above it and feel it fade to a faint chatter of crickets. I am a visitor to this sound. This is not my hometown drone of planes from Boeing Field or cars on a freeway. It is the sound of the making of a fabric that binds these people to each other and to their history.
