The Carmine Age of Oaxaca July 28, 2023
My grandson Theo wakes up at dawn and is ready to eat, while his parents are more than ready to get outside for a walk. We take the early morning opportunity to trek northward over the cobblestones of the Alcala Andador, following the course of the famous Arcos, or aqueduct, to the outskirts of Xochimilco and the monument to Porfirio Diaz’s romanesque engineering.
The walled waterway that was once meant to harness the flowing mountain springs have dried up, all of its intended uses long exhausted. Now the neighborhood which once bustled with commerce is quiet, the textile mills from another time converted to comfortable housing for digital nomads seeking wifi connections in a colorfully painted colonial suburb.
Ancestral, a nouveau-country restaurant offering a taste of the old Xochimilco in a pleasant leafy courtyard, is ready to take our orders. I quickly begin my first cup of cafe de olla, unfortunately with cinnamon. However, restless Theo is much more interested in the activity taking place outside. Above a densely vegetated ravine, in a ramshackle cottage, an old man and his apprentice are operating a loom the size of an upright piano—thwack, pull, thwack, pull—like oarsmen on a galleon. The fabric they are slowly creating is as red as blood. It is reminiscent of another age.
First the Spaniards came for silver, and they were not disappointed. But the Bishop of Oaxaca noticed something else that would ultimately become far more valuable—a hemoglobin-like secretion from tiny larvae that grew on the fruit of the prickly pear, called Nochitzli by the Zapotec and Mixta. The Spaniards called the dye Cochinilla, a brilliant carmine pigment that became prized by the royal families of both Spain and China. By the 18th century, an export industry of Cochineal and Oaxaca textiles was already thriving.
In 1586, a Jesuit priest, Jose de Acosta, arrived from Lima to the port of Huatulco, where he was assigned to inventory the marketable resources of Oaxaca. He discovered Cochineal was already in popular circulation, as he described in his report to Mexico City:
“There are other tunales that, although they do not bear prickly pear fruit, do nevertheless give the benefit of scarlet. Because on the leaves of this tree, when it is well cultivated, some small worms are born attached to it and covered with a certain thin film, which they delicately catch and are the so famous cochineal of the Indies, with which they dye the fine scarlet; dry they bring them to Spain, which is a rich and thick merchandise; The arroba of this cochineal or grana is worth many ducats. In the fleet of the year of eighty-seven came… two hundred eighty-three thousand seven hundred and fifty pesos; and ordinarily such wealth comes every year.”
This “fine scarlet” was nothing new to the indigenous people. Pre-Columbian societies used the dried pigment to stain wood, feathers, wool, and, later, cotton. Moctezuma used it to adorn his palaces in Tenochtitlan. The same ink has been found on Maya codices as well. The broad appeal was obvious: This stuff looked exactly like oxygenated human blood, even when dry, unlike the real thing. The color of majesty derived from the poop of a tiny cactus worm.
In the latter decades of the colonial period, textile production boomed in the capital city of Antequera (“noble and loyal city”), as Oaxaca de Juarez was then called. In one census, conducted in 1792, when the population was 18,000, there were hundreds of cotton looms operating in the city, employing 360 tailors, 284 weavers, 114 hatters, and 50 button-makers. Production of Cochineal increased to more than a million pounds per year, just as Spanish trade restrictions were lifted and demand soared in France, England, and the Netherlands.
However, fortunes changed rapidly after independence. An enterprising Frenchman, Tierry de Menonville, managed to smuggle nopal cactuses with the Cochineal worms out of Oaxaca and introduced them to the Canary Islands and the French Antilles. Through this, Napoleon was able to paint his soldiers’ capes carmine. Meanwhile, export demand in Oaxaca declined sharply. The number of looms in the city fell to less than 50, even as the Catholic Church was raising its tithes. To mark its final days, a young Benito Juarez arrived in the city from tiny Guelatao to take his first job—in a Cochineal warehouse on the corner of Hidalgo and 20 de Noviembre.
For the last hundred years, the looms have mostly returned to the Zapotec and Mixta, producing textiles for the Mexican markets of Puebla, Guadalajara, and CDMX. If the Europeans want these, they will have to come here for them. The colors and designs are as unique and beautiful as ever, although, if it is genuine Cochineal they covet, they may have better luck in Peru. Or, perhaps, from one dedicated loom in a ravine up in Xochimilco, beneath a delicious hideaway called Ancestral. Hopefully, the poop from this establishment will not be red.