I used to think textiles were just, you know, fabric.
Then I spent three weeks in La Paz, sitting cross-legged on a concrete floor while a woman named Doña Marcela explained why the red in her aguayo—that’s the traditional Andean carrying cloth—came from cochineal insects crushed into paste, not synthetic dye. She was maybe seventy, hands moving so fast I could barely track the warp threads, and she kept pausing to correct my Spanish pronunciation of “ñawi” (eye) because apparently the patterns aren’t just decorative—they’re cosmological maps. The zigzags represent lightning, the diamonds are chakana (the Andean cross), and those little squares? Those are terraced fields seen from above, the kind the Inca engineered into mountainsides a thousand years ago, give or take. Turns out Bolivian interior design isn’t about matching your couch to your curtains—it’s about weaving the universe into your living room, one thread at a time. I didn’t get it then, not really, but I kept the aguayo she gave me, and now it’s draped over my desk chair in Brooklyn, collecting coffee stains and reminding me that some objects refuse to be just objects.
Here’s the thing: these textiles are everywhere in Bolivian homes, but they’re not treated like museum pieces. They’re used.
Aguayos carry babies, groceries, ceremonial offerings. The fajas—those woven belts, often three inches wide and impossibly intricate—hold up skirts and also, symbolically, hold together communities. I watched a teenager in Sucre wear one with ripped jeans and a K-pop T-shirt, and it didn’t look like appropriation or costume—it looked like inheritance. The Aymara and Quechua weavers (mostly women, though some men weave too, especially in rural areas) don’t separate “craft” from “life.” A well-made textile takes weeks, sometimes months, and the designs—passed down mother to daughter for generations—encode information about which community you belong to, your marital status, even regional climate patterns. The colors matter: indigo for the Altiplano sky, earth tones for the valleys, bright pinks and oranges introduced post-Spanish conquest but now reclaimed as distinctly indigenous.
Anyway, walk into a middle-class home in Cochabamba or Potosí, and you’ll see this hybrid aesthetic that feels uniquely Bolivian.
Colonial-era wooden furniture—heavy, dark, carved with Catholic saints—sits alongside woven wall hangings depicting Pachamama, the earth mother. Clay pots from local markets (some still made using pre-Columbian coiling techniques) share shelf space with plastic Tupperware. It’s not curated; it’s accumulated. I met an architect in Santa Cruz who told me she deliberately commissions textiles from specific villages because the patterns are copyrighted—not legally, but culturally. You don’t just replicate someone else’s design without permission; it’s considered theft of intellectual heritage, even if no lawyer would recognize it. She buys directly from cooperatives, pays what they ask (usually way more than tourist markets), and integrates the pieces into modernist interiors—concrete, glass, steel—and somehow it works. The textiles warm the space, literally and metaphorically. They insist on memory.
Wait—maybe “insist” is too strong. They whisper.
There’s also the ceramics, which I almost forgot to mention but probably shouldn’t have because they’re equally important. The Chulpa culture (pre-Inca, roughly 1000–1400 CE) left behind burial towers and pottery shards that contemporary artisans study and reinterpret. I saw a ceramic artist in Tarija—can’t remember her name, which bothers me—who makes these massive urns glazed in deep greens and browns, and she told me the clay comes from riverbeds near her grandmother’s village. She digs it herself, twice a year, and mixes it with ash from specific woods. The shapes echo ancient forms but aren’t replicas; she adds handles where there weren’t any, smooths curves that used to be angular. It’s conversation, not reproduction. Her pieces end up in living rooms, entryways, sometimes holding umbrellas or dried flowers, sometimes just existing. One collector I spoke to said owning Bolivian crafts feels like “housing stories,” which sounded pretentious until I realized he was right. Every object has a maker, a place, a technique that could vanish if nobody pays attention.
I guess what surprised me most was the refusal of nostalgia. These aren’t static traditions preserved in amber—they’re evolving, hybridizing, arguing with modernity. A weaver in El Alto told me she’s experimenting with synthetic fibers because wool is expensive and climate change is messing with llama herds, but she’s keeping the traditional patterns because “those are ours, and they don’t belong to the market.” Her daughter wants to study engineering, not weaving, and she’s fine with that, mostly, though you could hear the ambivalence in her voice. The textiles will outlast us all, probably. They’ve survived conquest, globalization, fast fashion. They’re still here, still being made, still turning houses into homes that smell like wool and wood smoke and time layered thick as mountain air.
