Threads of Hope: Mending the Social Fabric in Mexico

• In Event: The Subject of Wrongs: The Politics of Victimhood in Latin America, Part 2

Abstract

Textiles, needles and thread have long been at the heart of political struggles in Latin America. White handkerchiefs provided a powerful symbol for the Madres of the Plaza de Mayo to unite in search of their disappeared children in Argentina. Carefully and laboriously crafted arpilleras documented the silenced events taking place in Chile under Pinochet. Sometime in 2012, peace activists and family members of the missing in Mexico began to embroider white handkerchiefs with the names of those killed in the “war on drugs” in red and those who have gone missing in green. The practice was picked up by women and men in more than twenty cities across Mexico, and abroad, routinely gathering in public to embroider hundreds of victim names and their stories. That is, in the midst of rampant drug and related forms of violence, there are some threads of hope. This paper draws on two years of ethnographic fieldwork in Monterrey, Mexico (2011-2013) to examine the growing practice of bordando por la paz giving legibility to the less visible victims of this ongoing conflict. 

Author

• Ana Villarreal, University of California/Berkeley