Isn't this just what I've been looking for?

A woman, her lower legs folded beneath her on a mat, has fastened the straps of a small loom around her lower back. She begins to weave, arranging and rearranging the fabric, tapping and tightening with her hand and the loom's wooden cross pieces. How did she learn the technique? From her grandmother, she tells me. How did her grandmother learn? From her grandmother. Back-strap looms like this have been used by granddaughters in the mountains of what is now Guatemala for perhaps fifteen hundred years.

And this weaver is dressed in a traditional, red, green, and blue, heavily embroidered blouse, or huipil. Her skirt alternates lines of green, black, and orange. Around her black hair is an even more colorful, woven headband. Each color has a meaning: Red, for example, stands for the east and the beginning of the day. Each design has a meaning: A zigzag pattern represents a serpent and wisdom.

A leisurely market decorates the plaza in front of the church that stands at the center of this village (the locals use the town's Mayan name, Zunil). All the women shopping or selling or chatting there wear versions of this same, traditional, multihued costume. You can tell, if you know this clothing, which town a woman is from by the particular pattern and colors of her skirt and huipil.

As they come or go, many of these women balance bundles, wrapped in similarly colorful fabrics, on their heads. Some use the cloth to secure young children to their backs. And I get a quick glimpse of two men -- this indeed is a rare sight in this part of the world today -- also wearing traditional outfits, including short woven kilts.

My translator and I leave the market and wander up narrow streets toward the house where a local deity -- I think it's fair to call it that -- currently resides. Saint Maximon sits on a chair in the middle of a dark room there. This figure has a white-skinned doll's face, wears a cowboy hat, cowboy boots, and an American-flag towel as a kind of shawl. His mouth holds a cigar, upon which, of course, he is unable to puff.

The faithful swarm around this revered and very well treated saint, crossing themselves and bringing children near for blessings. At one point, he is tipped back in his chair and rum is poured into his mouth. Different colored candles burn in front of this figure: White candles are lit to obtain health and security; red for romance; and black -- you place a black candle before Maximon, it is explained to me, "if it's not good you're asking for."

A fear is loose in the world today: the fear that venerable and established cultures are everywhere under attack, threatened, retreating; that Pizza Huts are, in essence, on the march. This anxiety is being expressed more or less everywhere. But on this trip I began to hear it with a special plaintiveness once I left a country that has relatively little attachment to traditional culture -- my own; once, in other words, I crossed my first border.

The thick-mustached owner of a small café in Oaxaca, in southern Mexico, provided an interesting example of the cultural imperialism that so many now fear: Santa Claus. "In this town," the café owner explained, "there's a tradition that when your neighbor asks for something -- two turkeys, for example -- you simply give it." The understanding is that your neighbor will be willing to give you a gift when you find yourself in need. But, this man said, that tradition is fading in favor of the heavily promoted "Santa Claus tradition" of simply giving presents, needed or not, once a year.

"Unfortunately," the café owner complained, "the former customs, the customs of the pueblo, are being erased. If we don't try to save them, they will be gone completely. And the main culprit is television."

A similar complaint, featuring the same villain, is currently being voiced by café owners and their patrons all over the more tradition-conscious parts of the world. But does life in that Mayan village provide hope that, in some areas at least, traditional culture remains strong?

I'm not sure it does. For it is also possible to walk through Zunil and collect evidence to support the opposite conclusion. Take, for an example, the thread that woman was using on her backstrap loom: the colors are acrylic. The old natural dyes would wash out too easily, she explains. In Solola, a nearby Mayan village, they've had some success lately weaving traditional tunics out of rayon.

And after she finishes demonstrating the back-strap loom to me, that Mayan woman moves over to a desk to work on the weaving collective's account books. Those books must be getting a bit more complicated. These Mayan weavers now have a side business: selling cell phones.

Cell phones are particularly important in Zunil, for this is a classic leap-technology village. Traditional telephone service was extremely difficult to obtain. One storekeeper estimates that there are only ten regular phones in this village of about six thousand people, but now "everyone" -- okay, "not everyone," he admits -- is going wireless.