Coca Leaf as Pigment
The color that comes from the earth
Before the advent of factories and synthetic dyes, color was already present everywhere: in roots, barks, leaves, and flowers. Ancient textile civilizations — from Egypt to India, from China to pre-Columbian South America — had developed extremely sophisticated dyeing systems based on plant pigments. Knowledge refined over time through observation and experience, preserved and passed down from generation to generation as precious wisdom.
With the advent of the Industrial Revolution, within a few decades, synthetic dyes had conquered the global textile market: they were cheaper, more stable, more uniform, and easier to produce. Botanical knowledge slowly began to fade, and dyeing recipes were lost along with the elders who carried them.
Why vegetable dyeing is irreplaceable
Synthetic dyeing offers uniformity and stability but produces flat colors, lacking the depth and variations characteristic of natural pigments. Vegetable colors, derived from materials rich in different compounds, instead generate vibrant shades that change with light, use, and time.
Vegetable dyeing depends on variables such as: the quality of the harvested plants, water hardness, bath temperature, and immersion time. Each piece is unique and unrepeatable. This variability, for the mass market, is a defect; for those seeking artisanal quality, it is its essence.
It is also a sustainable practice: it uses renewable resources and does not produce the toxic waste typical of the chemical industry. But its deepest value is cultural: it carries the knowledge of a territory, the plants used, the harvesting season, the processing technique, and the traditions handed down. Every color is an act of memory.
Textiles dyed with vegetable pigment don't just tell a color story. They tell a story of a landscape, a season, knowledge, and a chain of hands. It is an object that carries the world from which it comes.
Erythroxylum coca: the most misunderstood plant in the world
There is a plant whose name everyone knows, but few – outside Latin America – have actually seen. Cited in laboratories and political debates, its true form, a simple green leaf with two thin lines, remains hidden behind decades of distorted images and media narratives. It is called Erythroxylum coca: the coca plant.
A shrub that can reach two and a half meters in height, with small, delicate white flowers and bright green leaves. It grows luxuriantly between 600 and 2,000 meters above sea level in the Andean and Amazonian regions of Colombia, Peru, Bolivia, and Ecuador. It is a robust plant, suitable for difficult terrain, resistant to the climatic variations of the transition zones between the Andes and the Amazon. And it is, in every sense, a sacred plant.
Eight millennia of history
Archeobotanical studies have found evidence of coca leaf consumption dating back over 8,000 years ago, in the societies of the Ecuadorian coast. The Las Vegas civilization, among the oldest documented in the Americas, was already consuming coca in the fifth millennium BC. In pre-Inca cultures, the leaf appeared in burial goods, pottery, and ritual textiles.
It was during the Inca Empire, starting in the 13th century, that the coca leaf assumed its most complete role. The Incas considered it a gift from the sun – a sacred plant that connected the world of men to that of the gods. It was offered to deities: burned, blown towards the sun, laid on the earth as a sign of respect. Garcilaso Inca de la Vega, a 16th-century mestizo chronicler, wrote that for the Incas, coca was worth more than gold, more than silver, more than precious stones.
The distribution of coca was carefully regulated: baskets of leaves were allocated by the State as a reward for services to the Empire, given as gifts to soldiers after victories, and used as currency along the routes of the Qhapaq Ñan, the great imperial road. It was a precious and controlled commodity, whose cultivation took place in specific areas called cocales, on the warm and humid slopes of the eastern Andes.
The leaf in everyday life and in the sacred
For the peoples of the Andes and the Amazon, the coca leaf is not separated into “medicine” and “ritual” as in Western thought: it simply belongs to life. It accompanies work and celebration, fatigue and healing, without a clear distinction between the sacred and the everyday.
Acullico / akullikuy / mascada:
The most common practice is acullico (also chaccheo in Peru): the leaves are gathered into a wad that is held between the cheek and teeth. The result is a sustained sense of energy, reduced hunger and thirst, and an alleviation of physical fatigue. For those who work in high-altitude fields, the coca leaf is an indispensable ally. The miners of Potosí, in the colonial era, consumed large quantities to withstand the rigors of long working days in the tunnels. Even today, the coca leaf is the first thing guides offer visitors as a remedy for soroche, or altitude sickness.
The sacred: rituals, offerings, and cosmic connection
The coca leaf was and remains central to the most significant moments of Andean life. The oldest gesture is the k’intu: three carefully selected leaves, held together between the fingers and offered by blowing one's breath towards the sun, the mountains, the lagoons, the earth. It is a profound act that establishes a relationship of respect between humans and the forces of nature.
Pachamama — Mother Earth — receives coca leaf offerings during ceremonies. In funeral rites, the leaves accompany the deceased on their journey to the afterlife. Shamans, curanderos or yatiris, read coca leaves, interpreting the arrangement of fallen leaves to diagnose illnesses, predict the future, and mediate between the visible and invisible worlds.
An ancestral superfood: scientific properties
The properties of the coca leaf are documented by Western science. A 1975 Harvard University study highlighted an extraordinary nutritional composition: the leaf is rich in vitamins (B1, B2, B3, C, A, E), calcium, iron, zinc, potassium, sodium, phosphorus, protein, and fiber.
Its documented beneficial effects include: vasodilatory properties that improve oxygen absorption in the blood; stabilization of blood sugar and reduction of hyperglycemia risk; analgesic effect; digestive action; antibacterial properties, and muscle relaxation.
“Coca is a plant that nourishes, heals, speaks. It is the thread that connects to the earth, to ancestors, to the cosmos.”
The criminalized plant
The history of coca is not just about plants and peoples: it is also a history of power, economic interests, and narratives imposed from outside.
When the Spanish arrived in South America in the 16th century, they initially considered the coca leaf a "product of the devil" and attempted to ban it. But they quickly clashed with reality: indigenous populations would not work without coca. And the work in the silver mines of Potosí – the heart of the colonial economy – needed strong arms. Coca was therefore not only legalized but actively promoted by the colonizers as a tool for coercion into forced labor. It was no longer a sacred plant: it had become cheap human fuel.
The German Chemist and Big Industry
The turning point came in 1859, when German chemist Albert Niemann managed to isolate the main alkaloid from the coca leaf, naming it cocaine. From that moment, the history of coca transformed into that of cocaine, and the German pharmaceutical industry immediately seized upon the enormous commercial potential of the discovery.
In the following years, cocaine became one of the most widespread pharmaceutical products in the West. It was used as a local anesthetic in operating rooms, as a tonic against depression and fatigue, and as an ingredient in energy drinks. Vin Mariani, a coca wine appreciated by popes and intellectuals, was produced with Peruvian leaves. Even Coca-Cola, invented in Atlanta in 1886, initially contained coca extract, while Sigmund Freud promoted its use in an 1884 essay.
In just forty years, global cocaine production grew from a few kilograms to 10 tons per year. Profits went to European and North American laboratories, while Andean farmers, supplying the raw material, remained poor.
Criminalization and the Harm to People's Identity
In the 20th century, coca was included in List I of substances controlled by international conventions, equating it with heroin and opium. Thus, the leaf, consumed for millennia without addiction problems, became illegal in the same form in which it had always been used, while refined cocaine continued to be extracted and marketed by the pharmaceutical industry with regulation.
For decades, anti-drug campaigns and Western media portrayed Andean campesinos as responsible for the “drug problem.” The image of the drug trafficker overlapped with that of the farmer who cultivated coca for traditional use, erasing the distinction between coca leaf and cocaine and condemning an entire culture to judgments based on a product that someone else had decided to extract from its sacred plant.
The Leaf Returns: Spiritual, Symbolic, Creative Force
Today, something is changing. In Andean city markets, the coca leaf is sold freely as a superfood. Specialized restaurants and bars promote its culinary uses. The movement for the international recognition of the coca leaf in its traditional form is active and supported by governments.
But it is in the world of art, design, and craftsmanship that something particularly significant is happening: the coca leaf is returning to the hands of artisans as a raw material. As pigment. As dye.
In Colombian regions particularly affected by conflict and illicit coca cultivation, projects are underway to explore and adopt the leaf as a pigment for local crafts. Initially, some artisans who had directly experienced the stigma associated with coca, who had seen their crops destroyed, who had grown up with the phrase “la mata que mata” — the plant that kills — met the proposal with doubt, but the results are surprising.
The coca leaf, boiled in water and mixed with different interacting agents, releases unexpected pigments: soft, mossy greens, warm ochres, deep browns. Fabrics or fibers of wool, silk, fique, or cotton treated with coca-derived colors transform into surfaces that resemble the landscape of the Andes itself.
A Resource for Communities: Art, Dignity, and Future
These alternatives, besides their incomparable beauty, have an important economic and social dimension. For women artisans, transforming the coca leaf into a raw material means converting a plant linked to conflict into a source of legal and dignified income, while also telling a different story of their territory in the markets.
Colombian textile design has discovered in coca a material with strong narrative power. Every fabric dyed with coca leaves tells a story of resistance, identity recovery, and repair. It is a conscious and innovative choice that unites aesthetics, ethics, and economy.
At Chisakuï, we like to think of it as a “green thread” that connects our ancestral past, creative present, and a possible global future where the plant and its millennial guardians flourish with dignity and pride.
Coca is not cocaine. Coca is a color, a story, an act of care for the earth. Every fabric dyed with its leaves carries eight thousand years of knowledge, the scent of the Andes, the hands of those who have chosen to transform stigma into beauty.
Thank you Mama Coca ♥︎