“Our kind of work got branded as chicha, but it’s much bigger than that,” Mr. Castro, 34, said, referring to a pop culture fusion of urban and indigenous folkways that found expression in music, theater, dining and art. “Chicha is too easy because it’s based on this romantic picture of indigenous people — all chullos and mantas and polleras,” he added of the elements of traditional Andean dress. “But culture is not static, populations are not static and we found that we wanted to take on these issues and make that our art.”

Perhaps inevitably politics intrude on a market that generated an estimated $3.1 million this year and one that, for many participants, represents the bulk of their annual earnings. Navigating a maze of travel bans and visa restrictions. the organizers assembled artists from Kazakhstan to Haiti. And they welcomed back prized practitioners like Porfirio Gutierrez, 40, a weaver from Oaxaca, whose journey to Santa Fe was starkly different from the border crossing he made into the U.S. at 18. Speaking no English at first, Mr. Gutierrez spent the next decade working at fast food restaurants, scaling the social ladder until, by the time he was drawn back to Mexico in 2008, he had his green card and was managing a cement plant north of Los Angeles.

“You know, growing up, no one really told us we were artists,” said Mr. Gutierrez, who was accompanied to the market by his sister and collaborator, Juana. For a family of what Mr. Gutierrez’s father called “artisans and farmers,’‘’ the pursuit of art for its own sake was inconceivable.

The tapestries and rugs he now produces, while rooted in the traditions of his Zapotec culture, are liberated rather than bound by them, abstracting elements of life in Mexico’s high central valleys such as the mesh of a straw petate — that woven straw mat so much a constant of rural life.