The Rebozo – A Cloth Between Everyday Life, Transition, and Memory
On the history, symbolism, and transmission of a Mexican textile tradition
The rebozo brings together craftsmanship and tradition, everyday life and symbolism. It can warm and carry, protect and support, wrap and connect. It can be clothing, a carrying cloth, an everyday object, or a familiar companion. And it can accompany people through transitions in their lives.
Perhaps it is precisely this versatility that helps us understand why a rebozo can take on particular meaning during pregnancy, birth, and the postpartum period. It was never made for only one single purpose. Its meaning is not fixed. It changes with the person who wears it, holds it, passes it on, or leans into it.
There Is No One Rebozo
A rebozo is a long, rectangular cloth from Mexico. Yet even its history begins with complexity rather than a single origin.
Long before Spanish colonization, cotton and other fibers were spun and woven on backstrap looms throughout Mesoamerica. Rectangular textiles were used as clothing, to cover the body, to carry belongings, and to carry children. The form we recognize today as the rebozo, however, appears to have developed during the colonial period, as Indigenous textile knowledge encountered new garments, materials, techniques, and influences arriving through colonial trade routes.
Even the origins of characteristic techniques such as jaspe—the Mexican form of ikat—cannot be traced back to one simple, linear source. Contemporary accounts by Mexico’s Secretaría de Cultura therefore emphasize that the history of the rebozo must be reconstructed from a combination of material, written, and visual evidence.
I find this distinction important. Describing the rebozo simply as an “ancient Mexican birth cloth” makes its history both older and narrower than it actually is. Its textile roots reach far back, but the rebozo in the form recognizable today is the result of a long cultural development. What makes it particularly interesting is that it is not an unchanged relic of a single historical moment. It is a textile that has been taken up, transformed, adapted, and developed over generations.
By the nineteenth century, paintings and lithographs show women from different social classes wearing rebozos. Different regions developed their own materials, colors, patterns, weaving traditions, and forms of rapacejo—the intricate hand-knotted fringe. Tenancingo in the State of Mexico and Santa María del Río in San Luis Potosí remain well-known centers of rebozo production.
This is another reason why there is no single rebozo.
Some are woven from cotton, others from silk or wool. Some are understated; others are vivid. In many traditional rebozos, patterns are created through jaspe. Before the cloth itself is woven, sections of the warp threads are carefully bound, dyed, unbound, and arranged. Only during the weaving process does the pattern hidden within those prepared threads begin to appear.
One description of traditional rebozo production in Tenancingo identifies fourteen separate stages, which may involve several specialized people. Preparing the warp, binding, dyeing, weaving, and knotting the fringe all require different skills. A rebozo may therefore be not simply the work of one pair of hands, but the result of an entire network of knowledge and craftsmanship.
Perhaps its story already begins here:
A rebozo comes into being through connection. Eingefügtes Markdown
From Cradle to Shroud
n Mexico, there is a saying that carries the rebozo through three major moments of life:
“cuna, matrimonio y mortaja” — cradle, marriage, and shroud.
A few words hold an entire lifetime.
An ethnologist from Mexico’s Secretaría de Cultura has explained the saying by describing how, when a woman becomes a mother, she may traditionally receive a rebozo for carrying her baby and welcoming the child. The same cloth may later carry belongings, offer protection from sun, rain, or cold, and accompany its owner through many years of everyday life. Some people develop such a close emotional relationship with their rebozo that they express the wish to be buried in it or with it.
The saying should not be understood as a universal Mexican ritual sequence. Not every woman receives a rebozo during pregnancy, not every wedding involves one in the same way, and of course not every person is buried with a rebozo. What interests me is the image contained within those three words. A cloth that once held a newborn may still be present decades later. Perhaps its texture has changed. Perhaps it has softened or become thin in places. Someone may know its folds as intimately as they know their own hands. It may have been wrapped around shoulders, pulled over the head, used as a bag, tied around a child, worn at celebrations, lent to someone, or passed on.
The “cradle” and the “shroud” are therefore not simply opposites. They mark two ends of a life between which the same cloth can take on many different roles. This makes the rebozo something quite different from a specialized birth tool. Its significance lies partly in the fact that it does not belong to only one stage of life. A similar idea appears in accounts of traditional midwifery in the Mixteca region of Oaxaca. There, a mother is described as using her rebozo for many years, eventually becoming a grandmother herself; in the same context, the rebozo is spoken of as one of the things she may one day take with her into death.
Again, birth, transmission, and death do not appear as separate chapters. They belong to one arc of life.
The Hands of the Mother—and the Hands of the Grandmother
One of the images surrounding the rebozo that has touched me most comes from an ethnographic study of traditional midwifery in Morelos. Ester Botteri and Jacqueline Bochar Pizarro followed, among others, the traditional midwife Angelina Martínez Miranda and interviewed women who had given birth with traditional midwives. They describe the rebozo not only as a practical tool, but also through a symbolic understanding: as an extension of the mother’s hands that receive and protect the baby—and, after birth, as the hands of the grandmother, present in care and extending the protection of the family line.
I find this image remarkable because the cloth does not simply “symbolize protection.”
Instead, it suggests a movement from hands to hands.
The mother’s hands receive the child. Where her arms no longer reach, the cloth extends her holding. And behind those hands appear other hands: those of the grandmother, and with them the image of a line of people who have already held, birthed, carried, and cared.
The rebozo does not replace relationship. It makes relationship visible.
Perhaps this also explains why the image of extended hands fits so well with the practical function of the cloth. When a baby is carried in a rebozo, the fabric distributes weight across a larger surface. The hands do not have to bear the entire weight continuously, and yet the child remains close to the body. The cloth takes on part of the load without taking over the relationship.
It supports without taking the place of the person. This idea has become central to my own way of thinking about rebozo work. It also has another layer for me personally, because Angelina Martínez Miranda is one of the teachers from whom I was able to learn rebozo practice myself. The knowledge I write about is therefore not anonymous “traditional knowledge.” It has names, encounters, and pathways of transmission.
When a Rebozo Carries Grief
That the saying about cradle and shroud is more than a poetic image becomes particularly visible in a rare tradition from Tenancingo: the rebozo luto de aroma, a dark, fragrant mourning rebozo.
Mexico’s cultural authorities describe an elaborate process for producing the rebozo de aroma. Plant materials and iron are used to create an intense black, after which the textiles are treated with aromatic herbs. Historically, such a cloth could also be used to wrap the body of a deceased woman.
Mercedes Isabella Muratalla has devoted a study specifically to the luto de aroma. She describes it as a rare garment from Tenancingo shaped by both Indigenous and colonial influences. At the time of her research, the traditional form of production using the original fragrance recipe had almost disappeared; according to her account, only one workshop still preserved this way of making it.
Muratalla does not read the cloth simply as black mourning attire. She places it within distinctly Mexican understandings of femininity, death, grief, and wider cycles of life and return.
The combination of grief and scent alone makes this rebozo remarkable.
Mourning dress is often first understood through color: black makes loss visible. With the luto de aroma, another sensory dimension is added. The cloth is not only seen and felt against the skin.
It carries a scent.
It therefore becomes an object that addresses the whole body. Perhaps this helps us understand why a textile object can become so meaningful within a culture of mourning. A rebozo is not simply a symbol to be looked at. It can be wrapped around the body. Its weight can be felt. Its surface can be touched. A person can be enveloped by it. And in the case of the luto de aroma, its fragrance can also be perceived. It does not accompany loss from a distance.
It comes close to the body. Knowing that a rebozo may hold a newborn and may also wrap a body after death changes, for me, the meaning of “cuna, matrimonio y mortaja.”
The same basic gesture—a body being received, covered, and held—appears at the beginning and the end of life under entirely different circumstances. The cloth does not take vulnerability or loss away. But it gives them form.
“Cover Me with Your Rebozo”
The rebozo also appears in Mexican song traditions where pain and protection meet.
La Llorona is not a song with one single fixed set of lyrics. Numerous verses and versions have circulated and have repeatedly been combined in different ways. One verse, however, appears in many older and contemporary versions: the grieving voice asks to be covered with a rebozo because she is dying from the cold.
Again, the rebozo does not have to “solve” anything.
It appears in the middle of longing, grief, and cold as something elemental: Cover me. Give me warmth.
Perhaps this is part of what makes the image so powerful. It does not require the pain to disappear. It asks, first, only for a covering.
Frida Kahlo and the Magenta Rebozo
The rebozo gained another kind of visibility through Frida Kahlo.
Kahlo deliberately incorporated traditional Mexican clothing into her personal and public identity. The rebozo became a recurring part of her appearance. The Victoria and Albert Museum describes traditional and Indigenous textiles not simply as a fashion choice, but as part of the way Kahlo expressed cultural belonging and shaped her personal identity.
Particularly well known are Nickolas Muray’s color photographs from the late 1930s, in which Kahlo wears an intensely magenta rebozo. Interestingly, that very rebozo even appears in the correspondence between Kahlo and Muray. In 1939 she wrote to him:
“You will always be inside the magenta rebozo.”
The sentence almost turns the cloth into a relational space. Against the background of Kahlo’s severe accident, chronic pain, repeated medical treatments, and increasing physical limitations later in life, it is tempting to read the rebozo as a form of protection or support around a body that had endured so much.
We should be careful, however, not to retrospectively assign that meaning to Kahlo herself.
What can be documented is already powerful enough: clothing and textiles formed part of Kahlo’s identity, cultural positioning, and self-expression. The Victoria and Albert Museum even describes Indigenous textiles as something that gave her emotional strength. Perhaps, then, we can remain with the image and ask the question without answering it for her:
What might a familiar piece of clothing mean to someone whose body has so often become the object of medical treatment?
From Cultural Heritage to Play
And then there is a much lighter side of the rebozo.
In Carmen Tafolla’s children’s book What Can You Do with a Rebozo?, the cloth continually becomes something new through a child’s imagination. It can carry a baby, offer warmth, become part of dressing up, turn into a cape, or become an object of play.
The story brings its versatility and its place in everyday family life to the foreground. I like this perspective because it reveals something that can easily disappear when we look at the rebozo only through ritual:
A culturally meaningful object does not need to be solemn all the time.
It can be used.
It can develop folds.
A child can hide underneath it.
It can be part of a celebration and simply provide warmth again the next day.
It is precisely this permeability between the everyday and the meaningful that makes the rebozo so interesting to me.
Wissen, das von Menschen weitergegeben wird
For me, treating the rebozo respectfully therefore means more than knowing something about its history.
It also means asking: From whom do I actually know what I know?
Textile knowledge continues to be transmitted within families, workshops, and communities. Mexico’s Secretaría de Cultura describes rebozo production as a network of specialized activities and explicitly emphasizes the intergenerational and communal nature of this knowledge.
At the same time, traditions are not static. The communities and artisans themselves decide which elements are preserved, transmitted, adapted, or developed further. Something similar applies to the use of the rebozo within traditional midwifery. Much of this knowledge was not first written down in books or standardized courses.
It was shown.
One midwife showed another how she held the cloth.
A student watched.
Someone gave feedback.
Knowledge moved through relationship.
This helps me understand why traditional teachers may be sensitive when people who live far outside these cultural contexts encounter the rebozo briefly and then give the impression that they fully know the tradition—or even begin to represent and teach it as their own.
Learning from a tradition does not make us the owners of it.
I want to take this seriously in my own work as well. I have had the privilege of learning La Cerrada and different forms of rebozo work from several teachers, particularly Rocío Alarcón, Angelina Martínez Miranda, and Naolí Vinaver. Each of these encounters expanded my understanding. And it was precisely the differences between these teachers that showed me that there is no single sequence, one meaning, or one “correct” form of rebozo work. What I know about these traditions comes through transmission.
I did not invent them.
I do not speak for all Mexican midwives, families, or communities. And I would not claim, after participating in trainings, to “know the rebozo” in its entirety. What has developed from these experiences instead is a deep curiosity.
What happens when the distance between two people changes?
What does more or less tension do?
How does the experience change when someone holds the ends of the cloth themselves—and how does it change when another person takes them?
What happens in the transition from standing to lying down?
When does support emerge, and when does support become too much?
How can we notice that something is changing?
And how can the rebozo support relationship without becoming an instrument through which we try to make another body do something?
These questions are my own further exploration. They are inspired by what I have been allowed to learn, but they are not identical with the tradition from which that learning came. I do not experience this distinction as a limitation. On the contrary, it makes it possible to respect the origins of a practice while remaining curious enough to continue exploring.
A Cloth That Does Not Decide What Must Happen
And so we encounter the rebozo as clothing and everyday object, craftsmanship and cultural heritage, warming layer and carrying cloth, space for play and connection between generations.
It can welcome a child and accompany a person in farewell.
It can connect a mother and her baby while, in the image of the grandmother, also making visible a family line behind them.
It can carry grief without bringing grief to an end.
It can express cultural belonging and become part of a deeply personal identity.
It can support without taking on the entire weight.
Allow closeness without dissolving boundaries.
Honor a transition without defining what that transition must become.
Perhaps its particular quality lies precisely in the fact that it does not prescribe what has to happen. What a rebozo means in a particular moment is therefore determined neither by tradition nor by technique alone. Its meaning emerges in the encounter with the person who wears it, holds it, passes it on, or leans into it.
And perhaps that is why the most interesting question is not, first:
What can you do with a rebozo?
But rather: What becomes possible with this rebozo, between these people, in this moment?
References
Botteri, E., & Bochar Pizarro, J. E. (2019). Saberes que conectan con el poder durante el parto: la partería tradicional en Morelos (México). Alteridades, 29(57), 125–135.
Muratalla, M. I. (2026). Reframing Femininity and Grief: The Rebozo Luto de Aroma. Dress, 52(1), 71–81.
Secretaría de Cultura de México. Publications on the history, production, and cultural significance of the rebozo and on cuna, matrimonio y mortaja.
Victoria and Albert Museum. Traditional Mexican Dress; Photographing Frida Kahlo; and Unlocking Frida Kahlo’s Wardrobe.
Carrasco Camarón, M. E. La Llorona, de la leyenda a la canción: un análisis textual.
Tafolla, C. (2008). What Can You Do with a Rebozo? Illustrated by Amy Córdova. Tricycle Press.
