What Is a Tiliche?
One of Oaxaca's most famed folk figures, explained.
The men dance with abandon, their bodies clad loosely in old garments and their heads covered by massive, exaggerated sombreros. As they flail their arms, stamp their feet, and shake their bodies, hundreds of strips of rough, brightly colored cloth flutter in the air. They are tiliches, folk figures from a town in the western mountains of Oaxaca, and they are in the city as part of a wedding’s festivities.
Tiliches are famous in Oaxaca and portrayed by people wearing costumes, as statues, and even as handmade cloth and cardboard toys. But despite their prominence, you’ll find little information about them online. The Wikipedia page for the town they hail from doesn’t even mention them and and there’s no Wikipedia page at all dedicated just to tiliches. Most of the bloggers who have described them offer scant details, and the top hits on Google mostly lead to tiliche-related products that you can buy, including colorful shoes that invoke the movement of the strips of cloth that cover their bodies. So who are these mysterious-yet-popular figures, and why are they so common in Oaxaca?
What Is a Tiliche?
A tiliche is a man wearing a huge suit of tattered clothing covered in multi-colored strips of cloth. The tiliche’s mask is made up of animal skins, and their huge, exaggerated sombrero is made of woven palm fibers. Tiliches are associated specifically with the town of Putla Villa de Guerrero and are famously connected to the town’s huge and raucous Carnaval Putleco, which occurs just before the start of the Catholic ritual of Lent, which lasts for 40 days.
The History of the Tiliche
Beyond nowing the place of their creation, there’s little concrete information online about their origin. The most definitive story about the origins of the tiliche comes from a Facebook post from 2019 credited to “Professor Rodolfo Cruz Herrera,” but that author doesn’t seem to have any sort of identifiable online presence or bibliography. Every other source I could find also provided its information without any sort of real attribution; It seems that, at least as findable via Google, the origins of the tiliche are little more than a collection of oft-repeated factoids.
But, at least according to the supposed words of Cruz Herrera, tiliches were invented in the 1920s by Don Heziquio Pimentel Terrones and Don Julián Terrones. and that they represent elderly men—viejos. Their tattered appearance mimics the way that poor, older people’s clothing eventually could become little more than a collection of disparate patches, and by the 1930s the outfit of the tiliche had evolved to include hundreds of ribbons of cloth.
KQED says that the dance performed by tiliches is called the “danza de los viejos”—the dance of the old men—and that, at least in Healdsburg, California, the costumes have evolved to be a bit more modern.
The dance happening in the video below was at a wedding here in Oaxaca.
Where Can I See a Tiliche?
Because tiliches have become a very common folk character in Oaxaca, you see them in all sorts of contexts and settings. The most common, by far, a wedding. Oaxaca is a state where people like to go big with weddings, and as you might expect, that’s especially true for people who are wealthy. Oaxaca’s fanciest weddings are held at Santo Domingo, the enormous temple and former convent that was first constructed in 1551. We’ve been told that at Santo Domingo, even a ceremony of just a couple of hours can cost tens of thousands of dollars, an amount made even more meaningful considering the average on-the-books paycheck in Oaxaca is around $350 U.S. dollars a month.
The richer the couple getting married, the grander the celebration, but in Oaxaca, that doesn’t mean they just have a fancy private event. When the wedding ceremony is completed, the brides and/or grooms, their wedding parties and guests, and their many wedding planners and assistants spill out of the church into the wide, tourist-filled plaza. In that moment, the music begins to play, and assistants begin pouring mezcal for all of the people involved in the wedding as they begin a raucous, drunken parade through the city while surrounded by musicians, Indigenous dancers, and people sporting giant effigies of the married couple. Amongst those performers are the tiliches, performing la danza de los viejos. Less wealthy people also engage in the public display, but you’re less likely to find tiliches in those weddings, given the cost of hiring the performers.
Tiliches tend to appear all over the place, too. In the video below not only does this wedding celebration feature tiliches, you can see that because it happened during the time of Día de Muertos, there is a huge statue of a tiliche with the face of a skeleton in the middle of the pedestrian avenue.
Tiliches As Art
Tiliches have also been memorialized in art. In the town of Atzompa at Taller Artesanal Los Tepalcates you can purchase tiliches that are portrayed as playing musical instruments.
Andrea and I ran across these tiliche statues recently in a gallery in a town that wasn’t Atzompa, and I was immediately smitten by them. That fascination leads to an entirely different tiliche story that involves a politically-connected gallery owner selling drugs in her shop and giving her family credit for making these statues. That story will be published later this week!
Smitten by the clay tiliches too! I had never heard of these, despite having been to Oaxaca twice, how embarrassing... Thank you for helping educate me, Jacob!
Celebrations in foreign countries are culturally interesting! For years we traveled over ‘spring break’ which usually coincided with Holy Week or Semana Santa and we always found it interesting to go to church on Easter Sunday or see how other cultures celebrate. I would absolutely LOVE to see a wedding with the Tiliche and the dances sometime!