Life Scan Retrospective: Purposeful, Meaningful, Compassionate Travel

As I organize the Guatemala Embroidery Workshop Tour, I’m scanning and reflecting on past experiences leading enthusiasts to meet artists, artisans, and creatives in remote places around the world where makers live and work. I’ve always wanted to go beyond the superficial and dig deeper rather than skimming the surface on a bus that makes stops where all the other tourists go. We travel in small groups to keep our footprint small. We don’t want to overwhelm. We want a meaningful, intimately personal connection.

Most importantly, we travel to learn, appreciate, and make an impact. My desire is to always make a difference by uplifting the lives of indigenous people and artisans who often speak only their native language and struggle to bring glorious handmade clothing and wares to market. For women, this is especially meaningful since they are acculturated to stay within the confines of their villages where it is safe and they do not face discrimination.

Often, it takes hours to ride long distances to the cities, where they lack contacts and the language skills or savvy to set a price and sell directly. Then there are the costs of transport, food, and hotels. This is usually why they sell at bargain prices to middlemen who make big profits reselling to shop owners in the cities, who then mark up again.

I bring people to far-reaching places to buy directly so 100% of sales go into artisans’ pockets to pay for food they do not grow, health care, books, tuition, and uniforms for children enrolled in school. Because families live in multi-generational units, these funds can help aging parents, infants, and close relatives. It gives the men the opportunity to buy seeds to grow corn, beans, and squash – the Three Sisters – that have sustained rural communities in Guatemala and Mexico for millennia. Funds help women purchase raw materials to make the garments we love.

I’ve always been committed to asking questions and hearing stories about continuing the culture through exploring textiles, interwoven symbols, folk art, daily life, the role of women, how they survive and thrive, and how they support families. I first started doing this in 1986, when I led a very small group of travelers to Lyon to meet the Great Chefs of France: Paul Bocuse, Georges Blanc, and Alain Chapel. We visited them in their auberges and kitchens, reveling in the personal experience.

When I started Oaxaca Cultural Navigator LLC in 2007, I was committed to these intentions. As I expanded workshops and tours throughout Oaxaca State, Mexico, Guatemala, and Japan, I created itineraries that took us deep into the hinterlands, beyond where others go. We sat in circles with our hosts to listen, share, explore, understand, appreciate, and empathize.

Now, I continue this through Threads Afar Textiles + Tours that I launched in early 2026.

This isn’t missionary work, although I guess it could be considered a form of it. We bring reading and magnifying glasses to make work easier for weavers, embroiderers, and dyers. This helps with close-up work, especially for aging masters who don’t have access to convenient eye care. We bring crayons and coloring books, good used infant and toddler clothes, scissors, and embroidery hooks. The family circle is wide; brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, and cousins always value this support because the need is so great.

If we shop, we never bargain. We emphasize connection rather than consumption.

Sometimes, travelers ask, If I buy and wear this, isn’t that considered cultural appropriation?

They may also say, I admire these people; their lives are so simple.

We riff into a discussion about cultural appropriation vs. cultural appreciation. Artisans want and need us to support them by purchasing and wearing (or using) what they make. They have told me this repeatedly over the years. They explain how important it is to understand that it may take three to six months (or even longer) to make a garment. If we appreciate the technique and grasp the meaning and symbols embedded in the cloth or painted on pottery, they consider this appreciation. If we know them and their work, we have a connection, and this is what makes the difference between appropriation and appreciation. If we do not purchase and wear it, the art form will disappear, and the culture will be lost.

Cultural appropriation also refers to cases where foreign designers enter an indigenous village, replicate garments, reproduce them on runways, and market them as their original designs. A case in point is what happened in the remote Oaxaca village of Santa Maria Tlahuitoltepec. The French designer Isabel Marant visited, took the village’s ancient design, and claimed it as her own, selling clothing in Paris at prices that would make your eyes pop out, with no attribution of provenance.

As for admiring the simple life, comparing it to our own high-tech, frenetic-paced intensity, we miss the point. Rural, subsistence life is not simple. I have asked women artisans over the years, Do you consider yours a simple life? No, they answer without hesitation. Women cook, tend to children and grandchildren, clean, accompany the elders to the doctor, find a few hours a day to weave, sew, or embroider. They have no time for self-nurturing. They may live in small cinderblock or wood houses with dirt floors and use outhouses. Most live in poverty.

This is a life filled with anxiety. Will the harvest yield enough for the winter? Will enough visitors come to buy what we make? Will we have enough money to buy medicine, pay doctors, and buy a new pair of huaraches to replace the ones worn out, straps broken? Walking is the primary mode of transportation.

As I organize the Guatemala Embroidery Workshop Tour (4 openings available) from February 6-13, 2027, in Panajachel on the shores of Lake Atitlan in partnership with the NGO Multicolores, I think of all the Maya women and their families we will impact. It isn’t only about learning a new technique or refining one we might have already mastered; it is about the experience of connection. It’s about understanding and appreciating Mayan cosmology, a spiritual belief system translated into an embroidered Nahual spirit animal; it’s about expanding our cultural understanding, knowing that the government’s 30-year war that decimated the Mayan people accused of insurgency still has an impact today; that people suffered, family members died or disappeared, were traumatized. Guatemalan Mayas now reclaim their identity with pride.

This is why I do this work. To keep opening our hearts to others and create the world we want to live in through our actions, as we move forward with humanity, consideration, and care.