A Poetics of Weaving in the Work of Humberto Ak’abal

This paper examines the work of the K’iche’ poet, Humberto Ak’abal, a discussion framed by traje típico, the Maya traditional dress that official and unofficial discourses designate as the quintessential expression of a national Guatemalan identity founded in Indigeneity. The study argues that Ak’abal reappropriates the traje to invalidate its function as a marker of gender and ethnic differences, and imbues it with a renewed Maya epistemology informed by a poetics of weaving.