Mexico City, December 3 (teleSUR-RHC)-- Leaders from Tlahuitoltepec’s indigenous Mixe community in Mexico vowed Wednesday that they will continue to challenge a French designer for appropriating and trademarking their ancestral embroidery.

The traditional Tlahuitoltepec Mixe huipil blouse is part of the group’s "intangible cultural heritage," said Fidel Perez Diaz, the second councilor of educational and cultural affairs in the community. 

The embroidery is part of a  “particular cosmovision,” Perez added, in which the “tangible is reflected (in) the intangible.”

The community leader is responding to French company Antik Batik that claims to have a legal patent on the clothing, which would force the Mixe community to pay royalties on the very blouses they have been producing for the past 400 years.

"You must sell it, but the manufacturing, profits and recognition should go to the Mixe people, not another person, not to other companies,” Carmelite Vazquez, the community’s first councilor of  educational and cultural affairs, told Efe.
    
The Mayor of Oaxaca, Erasmo Diaz Gonzalez, said he learned about the issue only after the French government issued a request to ban the production and sale of the blouses until royalties are paid.

Antik Batik is also suing French fashion house Isabel Marant over infringement of the same Mixe blouse, after the designer initially claimed it was of its own making.

The indigenous community of Oaxaca aims to collect signatures to register the copyright in favor of the community. Mexican activists have joined in to support the community with a petition on www.change.org.  The on-line action has already garnered over 150,000 signatures.