A festival of indigo in Oaxaca

Anna Bruce

10 November 2025

Anna Bruce. Stirring the indigo bath. Niltepec. September 2025

Anna Bruce traces the history and spiritual significance of indigo in Oaxaca, Mexico, detailing the traditional production process in Santiago de Niltepec and the contemporary artistic practice of artist Natalia Munro.

Indigo is a rich blue, symbolic of wisdom, intuition, and spirituality, representing the link between the physical and spiritual worlds. It is a natural dye obtained from the leaves of plants from the Indigofera genus. Dye-bearing Indigofera plants were once common throughout the world.

Across different cultures, its deep blue hue symbolises integrity, sincerity, devotion, creativity, and nobility, and it is also associated with status and power. Indigo was also a valuable commodity, traded across the globe, earning it the name “Blue Gold.”

In Mexico, indigo has been used for thousands of years. The Mayans used it to paint frescoes, while in Oaxaca, the Zapotec people wove tapestries with threads dyed a rich blue with locally grown indigo. Both artisans working with traditional design and contemporary textile artists are using indigo to ground their work in nature and historical symbolism.

The first time I witnessed the use of this vivid blue dye was with Rosario and Ernesto, who run a workshop called Tono de la Cochinilla in Teotitlan del Valle, a Oaxacan community known for its use of natural dyes in wool-woven tapestries.

During this first meeting, Rosario took a coal-like lump of blue and ground it to powder. This was then added to a bath of ash and water and left to steep. When the white threads were submerged, they became an unexpected acid yellow colour. As Rosario pulled them out of the liquid, the colour changed in front of my eyes. Reacting to oxygen, the liquid turned a deep blue as the air touched the fibres.

Intrigued, I began to look into the production of this rich blue dye, and received an invitation to Oaxaca’s annual Indigo festival. The festival takes place in a humid haze, at the end of September, in the coastal town of Santiago de Niltepec.

Indigo in Spanish is “anil”, and Niltepec means “place of the anil”. The community has been processing the plant to make indigo dye for hundreds of years. The variety of indigo plant growing around Niltepec is known as jiquilite. The word comes from the Nahuatl word xiuhquilitl, which means “herb that gives the colour blue.”

Jiquilite only grows in the rainy season, typically between June and September. The bushy plant has leaves rich with indigo, the chemical compound needed to make the blue dye. As the summer rains come to an end, the plants are harvested, loaded into ox-drawn carts and brought to large concrete vats (called pilas), ready to be fermented.

To launch the annual indigo festival, we were invited to join indigo producer Manuel Valencia at dawn, as he arrived at his family’s pila with fresh jiquilite.

We walked for about fifteen minutes from the town centre to the river. The rising sun was pouring through the trees, illuminating steam sifting off used-up bundles of jiquilite from the previous day’s harvest. Manuel had just arrived with a large cart piled high with the plant, ready to pile into the pila.

The pilas are divided into two sections. The first section is where the fresh leaves are thrown into a water bath. The leaves are pressed down with a wooden lattice so they don’t float to the surface. Gradually, the leaves began to ferment, breaking down the indican compound within the leaves. (The precursor to indigo is an amino acid derivative called indican. The plants can contain as much as 0.8% of this compound. To extract the indican, the leaves are soaked and fermented.)

In Niltepec, producers add seeds of a plant called gulabere. This is used to help settle the indigo sediment to the bottom of the pila so that it can drain off the excess water after oxygenation. Typically, the vats are built beneath the gulabere tree.

After several hours, this thick blue mud is taken from the vats to the producer’s home. Manuel’s wife, Maestra Lola, takes charge of this step of the process. She uses cheesecloth to sieve the mixture, removing as much excess liquid as possible. The thick mix is scooped into old terracotta roofing tiles, chosen for their absorbent properties, and left in the sun to dry out. What remains is the coal-like material I had first seen in Teotitlan.

Back in the town centre, the square is decorated for the festival, with flags guiding you from the square into the town hall. Inside, there were stalls to buy indigo and other local crafts. The indigo was being sold at around 4000 pesos per kilo, approximately 165 pounds sterling.

Historically, they only process the dye in Niltepec, but in recent years, the annual festival has become an opportunity for indigo artists to come and share their practice. Over the weekend, there were numerous workshops. These included mural painting and Japanese shibori dying techniques. There was also discussion about the spiritual properties of blue and traditional dances from Niltepec.

Following the festival, I returned to Oaxaca City and met with Natalia Munro, an artist who has made indigo the central focus of their practice. She makes large-scale textile pieces dyed with indigo. In 2019, Natalia began working with natural dyes, gradually becoming immersed in the blue world of indigo, which is now the cornerstone of her art. She uses indigo to merge Japanese techniques (like katazome and shibori) with Mexican indigo.

She maintains a vat that is nine months old (as of the conversation), holds 700 litres, and contains two kilos of indigo. She claims to have the largest indigo vat in North America. To keep the vat healthy and rested, she works one day on and one day off.

Natalia is drawn to the meditative nature of indigo dyeing. Because the dyer’s hands must be in the vat, the process requires constant focus and presence. She believes indigo vats are highly sensitive and “in tune with people’s emotions”. She observes that children create “insane blues,” while adults who approach the work with doubt or high expectations produce inferior results.

And even though you will reach that location, you will never actually touch that blue.

Natalia describes how she inspired by the atmospheric quality of indigo blue: “When I say atmospheric, I also mean the color of the atmosphere.” referring to The Field Guide to Getting Lost (Rebecca Solnit), “when you’re looking or you’re just traveling and you’re going towards the horizon, going to the mountains, they look blue, yet, when you reach those mountains, the blue gets furthers and further away. In that blue, there’s the colour of hope. It’s the colour of the distance you will travel. And even though you will reach that location, you will never actually touch that blue.”

Speaking with Natalia, she echoed my first experience with indigo, which “felt like witnessing a magical transformation reminiscent of alchemy.” Discussing the way the dye evolves from an “atomic” green to serene blue, she explains, “I think it’s so beautiful not to ever get that green permanently. It’s such a perfect symbolism of life in general. The impermanence of things.”

Artists have been inspired by the transcendent blue from indigo for thousands of years. Despite a chemically complex process, the magical way in which the colour evolves has given it a timeless quality. I hope the festival in Niltepec continues to grow, drawing attention to the craft that has sustained the community through conquest, industrialisation, and modernisation.

About Anna Bruce

I am a British photojournalist based in Oaxaca City. My photos can be found in publications including: Suitcase, Hemisphere, Food and Wine, Sunset, Dazed, Forbes, and the FT. I regularly write for Mezcalistas and Mexico News Daily. I also have a book called Tequila, Mezcal and More, published by Hachette.

Tags

G41 | indigo | Mexico | natural dyes | Oaxaca

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