The story of the Avendaño family has many elements of a good fairy tale: difficult journeys, arduous work, beauty, creatures that produce a substance more valuable than gold, threatening villains and rescuers.
The siblings Flora and Rafael Avendaño recently came from their town, Pinotepa de Don Luis, Oaxaca, to the Del Corazon de la Tierra gallery in Tlaquepaque to present their fabrics woven of purple cotton and explain their generations-long saga of procuring and protecting the snails traditionally used for purple dye.
There were several layers of drama behind the skein of lavender colored yarn that lay on a table in front of Rafael during his presentation.
The color purple was traditionally limited because it had to be extracted from the glands of certain sea snails. “Royal purple” was the term in the ancient Mediterranean area, where only emperors and nobility wore it. The Pacific coast of Mexico also has a purple-producing snail called caracol púrpura and Mixtec people in Oaxaca, such as the Avendaños, mastered the art of using them.
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