Embroidery
Embroidery: Cartographies of Women’s Memories
The embroidery workshop arose when Museo de la Palabra y la Imagen [Museum of the Word and the Image] set out to locate the refugee embroiderers from Mesa Grande refugee camps in Honduras during the armed conflict of 1980s. Most of them were originally from Chalatenango and Cabañas and in 2022, the museum explored the history of embroidery in the communities of Arcatao, Nueva Trinidad, San Jose las Flores, Ignacio Ellacuría, Guarjila, San Antonio los Ranchos, La Ceiba, and Las Vueltas.
Embroidery artist, Teresa Cruz, led pilot workshops in Las Vueltas after locating some older embroiderers who taught the children in Mesa Grande. She also facilitated embroidery workshops with girls, boys, and adolescents from the Las Vueltas educational center, as well as with adult women. The workshops focused on historical memory, resulting an exhibition of embroideries that reflect on personal and community memories of the war era.
In 2023, within the framwork of the Surviving Memory in Postwar El Salvador initiative – and with support from Western University and SSHRC – the the historical embroidery workshop has continued with 22 women of different ages in Las Vueltas, women who are committed to continuing with the embroidery under the name of “Las Vueltas Women Embroidery Stories.” The objective is to keep the embroidery tradition alive, recover historical memory through embroidery, and create a space of trust and healing. The embroideries also contribute to local economic development – the women sell their products, creating a space to save a little bit of money for their activities they themselves, encouraging embroidering of new products, and continuing to raise awareness about the history of the war.
This process is developed together with women who lived through the armed conflict in its stages of violence, exile, and repatriation. With this participatory methodology, both old and young women in Chalatenango promote a process to rescue their history and a dignification of their leading role in Salvadoran history. The participants are also linked to the art of embroidery as a means of expression and denunciation of human rights violations during their stay in shelters in Mesa Grande.
Every Wednesday afternoon, the women meet to learn and share a topic of interest for personal growth, focus on taking care of themselves, and begin to heal in a community where they can learn from others. They also accompany other women in the process of recovering historical memory through embroidery in San José las Flores and Guarjila, where the group focuses on coexistence, sharing, and recovery of memory through art.
