As part of the Harvard Chiapas Project, UCLA Professor, Patricia Marks Greenfield, first visited the village of Nabenchauk in Chiapas Mexico in 1969 and 1970. Her return in 1991 and regular visits ever since have enabled her to write Weaving Generations Together: Evolving Creativity in the Maya of Chiapas. The book combines a scholarly study of the impact of commercialization and globalization on textile design and sales, creativity, acculturation, and female socialization with poignant personal reflections on mother-daughter relationships, social change, and collaboration.

The book includes more than two hundred striking and detailed color photographs to provide a history of Zinacantec textiles, their makers, and the life of women and children. The unique field photographs were taken by acclaimed photographer, Lauren Greenfield.

This award-winning book provides a rare long-term examination of the cognitive and socialization process involved in transmitting weaving knowledge across three generations, with each generation learning under very different economic and social circumstances. Author Greenfield also analyzes the changes in textile design brought about by social change, as the community moved from a subsistence economy to a commercial economy.